Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism 9780823298501

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TECHNO -MAGISM

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and abroad. At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism. Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of romanticism. In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of romanticism, team-taught a course called Literature Z that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’ conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force.

TECHNO-MAGISM

Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism

Orrin N. C. Wang

Fordham University Press New York

2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wang, Orrin N. C., 1957– author. Title: Techno-magism : media, mediation, and the cut of Romanticism / Orrin N. C. Wang. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2022. | Series: Lit Z | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021047124 | ISBN 9780823298488 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823298471 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823298495 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Romanticism—Great Britain. | English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Mass media and literature—Great Britain—18th century—History and criticism. | Mass media and literature—Great Britain—19th century—History and criticism. | Communication and culture—Great Britain—18th century—History and criticism. | Communication and culture—Great Britain—19th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR468.R65 W36 2022 | DDC 820.9/007—dc23/eng/20211025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047124 Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 First edition

5 4 3 2 1

for Marianne and Maggie

Contents

Introduction

1

Constellations Techno- Magism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image 2. Two Pipers and the Cliché of Romanticism 3. The Gothic Zany 4. Prometheus Unbound and Commemorative Thought 5. After Life: Byron’s Manfred and the Umwelt 1.

33 53 78 102 123

Cuts 6. Play Time: Austen, Byron, and Mary Shelley 7. Chthonic Michael: Smithson, Lévi- Strauss, Freud, Wordsworth 8. Dream Animals

149

Acknowledgments Index

223 225

175 196

TECHNO -MAGISM

Introduction

Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism explores how British Romantic literature abuts against and is organized around a topos of both print and nonprint media. These themes and motifs involve not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, either during the Victorian age or sometime during the twentieth century, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. The awareness in Techno-Magism of this proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. What follows elaborates the implications of this historical positioning of Romanticism in media studies, one that then goes beyond, as Romanticism always does, whatever historical ground is assumed by that role. I then expand on the proposition of Romanticism’s exceptionality for media studies by foregrounding the aporetic qualities of any Romantic understanding of a term also necessary for an approach to media, mediation. In a word, both that concept and the idea of media studies in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, a consequence I found unavoidable when thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media in the essays collected here. Expanding on this premise, the Introduction considers how much of this book coalesces around the idea of techno-magism as well as another principle further organizing its essays, the cut. This involves first engaging with John Guillory’s account of the media concept and then considering a key scene from James Whale’s 1931 film adaption of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. I conclude with some final observations about the shape and character of this collection, coalescing around the ideas of techno-magism and the cut, as well as a third also organizing these essays, the constellation.

Pre-, Proto-, and Avant la Lettre In Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s influential argument, the Enlightenment is itself synonymous with a new understanding of what media

2

Introduction

means, with Romanticism then simply a more compressed and intense bandwidth of forces starting earlier in the eighteenth century.1 As compelling as that claim might be, Techno-Magism actively wonders whether the convergence of Romantic and media studies constitutes a distinct event. We can start this inquiry by lingering over Romanticism’s position as that social and cultural portion of the nineteenth century that immediately exists before such mediums as film, photography, and the typewriter. And we can elaborate this moment in terms of a story about disciplinary fields, one whose purchase is precisely what the work of Siskin and Warner and others studying the media culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and before disrupt. I refer to how, for quite some time, and perhaps still even now, one can recount and expect others to understand the following: that before the end of the nineteenth century, which means until Romanticism, there was the book and thus book history; and then starting with the late nineteenth century, after Romanticism, advanced forms of media technology explode and media studies begins.2 This is a crude formulation, certainly, but any qualification one might like to make about it—and there are many—depends nevertheless on the basic intelligibility of its claim. Romanticism is the site of a pivot where something changes with regard to the history and theory of media. That dyad is important because how that pivot occurs is itself an opening for further thought. Most immediately, the explanation might be historical in the way that Friedrich Kittler once argued that the emergence of the phonograph, typewriter, and film signaled a change in modernity’s episteme in some fundamental way. Kittler’s place in current media studies is of course a complicated one, but this early argument is still pertinent for our concerns about Romanticism and media, insofar as the historical question following this paradigm would then be, how much did the earlier nineteenth 1. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–33; and Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “If This Is Enlightenment, What Is Romanticism?” European Romantic Review 22, no. 3 (2011): 281–91. 2. I’m grateful to Matthew Kirschenbaum for pointing me toward this formulation, though its inelegant deployment in what follows is all my own. The hypothesis about Romanticism’s distinct relation to media doesn’t obviate or lessen, of course, the burgeoning critical movement to think earlier cultural practices in and before the eighteenth century through media theory. See, for example, Scott Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Introduction

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century—the Romantic period—in print or beyond print anticipate the mediatized episteme of the end of that century, as well as the twentieth century’s and ours? Andrew Burkett gets at something like this when he perspicaciously notes how the Romantics were the last generation of English writers and artists not to be photographed.3 This material fact lends a particularly intense, historical force to the question of the Romantic culture abutting against a later century informed by new technologies such as the photograph and gramophone. If Kittler’s 1800/1900 insists on stressing the epistemological break between the beginning and end of that century, we might wonder if other material and intellectual genealogies of the Romantic period exist, ones in which the pivot is not as clearly defined as Kittler might like, where one can see that break already happening in Romanticism or the long eighteenth century.4 3. Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 4. Along with Burkett’s adroit work, studies relevant for a discussion about Romantic mediation and media would include Mike Goode, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Kevis Goodman, Georgic Poetry and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019); and Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an important earlier exploration of analogous issues on the relationships among Romanticism, techné, and aesthetics, see Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). This introduction’s reading of mediation through techno-magism and the cut will show my own contribution to this conversation. See also notes 4, 5, and 6. 4. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 25–123, 206–64. Kittler’s argument suggestively contrasts with Jonathan’s Crary’s in the well-known Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), which locates its subjective and epistemic transformation earlier between the Renaissance and Enlightenment on one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other, though much of its studied visual technology also seems to be part of the later part of that century. A partial list of works considering a more complicated historical landscape for media than Kittler’s might include, along with Burkett, Igarashi, Goode, Goodman, Otto, and Siskin and Warner, James K. Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Angela Esterhammer, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Alexandra Neel, ‘“A Something-Nothing Out of Its Very Contrary’: The Photography of Coleridge,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 2

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Introduction

The situation, however, is more complicated than that, as my initial observation about the Romantic pivot was also explicitly disciplinary. It was also about how, if media studies attaches itself to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, and book studies begins before that, we are not simply talking about the past but our present modes of knowing and being that then view the past. To even note the difference between media studies and book history is to accede in some way to how the study of one is different from the other—to how, then, approaching books as media will inflect their examination in a changed way. For one thing, studying media inevitably means theorizing media. One can theorize the book, but, whether by degree or kind, that is not quite the same as theorizing media. How media studies involves media theory while the study of the book goes by book history speaks to the disciplinary distinction I’m signaling here. Understanding further how that distinction until recently enables a linear intellectual history—we study the history of the book until the end of Romanticism and then we study media and media theory—gets at both the pertinent status of Romanticism in this history as well as the larger conceptual issues behind that history. It makes the pivot of Romanticism toward media studies, like media studies itself, not simply a historical but also a theoretical question. When Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane cannily argue for the convergence of Romantic and media studies by noting how late eighteenthcentury English print culture reflexively emerges by narrativizing the transformation of nonurban oral culture into print literature, they’re accomplishing something aside from making a historical argument—though it is certainly that, one that resonates in its own way with the claims for the historical exceptionality of a Romanticism bookended by this transformation and by the explosion of media forms that follows during the Victorian era.5 They are also theorizing media as an event, practice, or encounter (2007): 208–17; and Orrin N. C. Wang, “Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation,” in Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 250–80. See also the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, Multi-Media Romanticisms, ed. Andrew Burkett and James BrookeSmith (November 2016), https://romantic- circles.org/praxis/multi-media, as well as previous studies on the visual culture of the British Romanticism that would include William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 5. Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James K. Chandler and

Introduction

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that either exists with or subsumes the history of the book during the Romantic period. They are reconceptualizing Romanticism through media theory, which is to say that the explanation for Romanticism as a pivot between book history and media studies is not only historical but also theoretical. Even more radical is the possibility that the cause of this pivot might not be primarily historical but instead theoretical, in that evidence for this pivot, for the place of Romanticism as this change, might not be found simply in Romantic history but in a Romantic topos of theory exceeding the historical, anticipating and perhaps even grounding the concerns of contemporary media theory. Unmoored from any reified anchoring in their period history, Romanticism’s texts—like Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, say—might explain contemporary media theory because of their prior existence, avant la lettre, as that theory, or theoretical practice.6 From a number of different angles the essays in Techno Magism are guided by the provocation of this claim. The assertion sounds excessively ambitious, though perhaps not so much to those familiar with a Romanticism defined by an exorbitance synonymous with theory’s disciplinary study in the humanities (as Theory with a capital T) that some argue reaches its apotheosis at the end of the last century. I would also note that this claim never quite leaves the historical behind. For if one can historicize theory, one also theorizes history—its possibility and what kind of history one is arguing for in the first place. And whether one is arguing for history or theory or both, one is also contending over the nature of that argument—how much it should be historical or theoretical. Foucault called this evidentiary bifurcation the predicament of the empirico-transcendental doublet, a condition he believed the end of man as well as his own categories of historicist thought would resolve.7 Yet any Romanticist worth their salt will recognize this doublet, the volatile relation between history and theory, as one stubbornly, perhaps obsessively, organizing their field of study since the Cold War in a manner unlike any other Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239–22. For an intriguing account of the fabulist nature of oral society underwriting 18th- century print culture, see Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 6. Scott’s work is the central focus of Celeste Langan’s pathbreaking piece on Romantic writing and media, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (2001): 49–70. Whether Langan’s study argues for this more volatile relation between theory and history, the piece does show how much Scott’s novel proleptically theorizes its role in the larger medial ecology it inhabits. 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1994), 317.

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Introduction

literary period’s, including the eighteenth century’s and the Victorian era’s.8 To say then explicitly what I’ve implied so far: A similarly intense, reflexive sense of this relation of the historical-empirical and theoretical-transcendental also structures media studies. This is not to say that both fields do not have their own attempts to resolve this dichotomy—in media studies, the Foucauldian inspired notion of media archaeology immediately comes to mind. Yet it is to suggest how much the tension between history and theory still underwrites—and, for some, might energize—both fields. This metadisciplinary correspondence by itself speaks to another way that Romantic and media studies could be drawn productively together. The essays in Techno-Magism explore in a number of different ways, some perhaps contradictory, the consequences and possibilities of this mutual envelopment. We can elaborate this shared attraction even more pointedly, in a way that once again realizes Romanticism as both a historical identity and a theoretical event. To theorize media means theorizing what media does. It means encountering the question of media as that which carries out the act of mediation, a nonlocal condition beyond the historical parameters of any one technical medium or object, a term that is unintelligible without either Romanticism’s history or topos.

Media, Mediation, Figure Inaugurating the first issue of Media Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell suggested that there “are two basic ways of positioning—or, more precisely, of prepositioning—media: ‘in’ and ‘through.’ ”9 Succinctly, Mitchell demonstrates why media must be theorized—why, as the prepositional enactment of media, mediation invites an approach that goes beyond the historical particularity of each media artifact. Mediation mediates the betweenness that inevitably arises out of the positional occurrence of either “in” or “through,” a dynamic that is not simply historical insofar as the choice between the historical and the transhistorical rests on investigating the regulatory meanings of being “in” or going “through” history in the first place. In the same manner that Althusser argues that ideology has no history, one might say

8. Orrin N. C. Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–11. 9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Counting Media,” Media Theory (August 3, 2017), http://media theoryjournal.org/wjt-mitchell-counting-media/.

Introduction

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the same of these terms.10 Media theory, then, theorizes in a noticeably disjunctive manner not only the particular operations of the media object, but also mediation as an overarching term for what occurs always, in, through, and beyond. Siskin and Warner claim that mediating sense of betweenness for their own reading of media-as-Enlightenment (6). The essays in Techno-Magism, however, examine how a number of Romantic texts tackle this issue through a metaconceptual vocabulary long associated with the Romantic topos. I specifically refer to how Romanticism has long been studied (in an almost hoary manner) as the dilemma of what resides separately in the mind and then in nature, and how Romanticism as a less than fifty-year historical identity also models the equally vehement problem of historical periodization, of what lies between one era, period, age, or century, and another.11 Romanticism thus defines its own reflexive nature as inevitably about mediation-as-an-event: the historical predicament of Romanticism as his-

10. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 159–62. One could say the same about images, of course, which is precisely why Mitchell has described himself as something besides a historicist—see his interview in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, The Last Formalist or W. J. T. Mitchell as Romantic Dinosaur, ed. Orrin N. C. Wang (August 1997), https://romantic- circles.org/praxis/mitchell/index.html. See also Mitchell’s own work on the dialectic between definitions of the image and ideology in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 151–208. See also, however, Cynthia Wall’s historicist argument for a late- eighteenth- century mental and artistic shift toward “the prepositional—the within and in-between,” in her Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1–10, 221. 11. Romanticist studies on the mind and nature are legion, though a quick snapshot of such works might include such founding postwar works as M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); and Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970). It would also include such recent work as Richard Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); and Romanticism and Speculative Realism, ed. Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). For a discussion of the question of Romantic periodization, see Wang, Romantic, 38–44. As Burkett notes, an awareness of the relation of Romanticism and mediation in contemporary criticism goes back to a postwar generation’s desire to do away with that association through a poetics of immediacy (47); see Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

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torical mediation, where it is stalked equally by its belated nature to the early modern period and antiquity and by its role as the harbinger of modernity, and the philosophical dilemma it tries to resolve or mediate, the relation between mind and nature. If Romantic literature is littered with figures that enact various forms of media and mediation, especially those that come after it, that is because of its own awareness of the two problems—mediating the past and future and mediating the mind and world—that comes to occupy its writings and other cultural creations. Schematically, we might say that Romanticism has extensively been read, studied, and taught as the question of what exists in the mind as opposed to in nature, and as the question of what exactly history goes through (revolution, empire, or industrialization, for example) for historical change to occur. Romanticism mediates the difference between mind and world; it also mediates historical difference.12 Other literary fields contain authors and texts equally invested in these questions, of course. But few seem so compulsively shaped by these scholarly-critical fixations as Romanticism. Indeed, getting a fix on Romanticism often means obsessing over one or both of these two predicaments. If, as I have suggested elsewhere, Romanticism is distinguished by the metacritical question of its own legitimation (Romantic, 17), the archive of its study is equally notable for the number of works that respond to that question through these two concerns. The essays in Techno-Magism are no exceptions, though each hopefully does so with alertness to the conceptual implications of these two inquiries, now envisioned through the language of specific media and the question of mediation. Indeed, noting the historical and theoretical particularity of Romanticism as the pivot between the book and media studies is itself the latest iteration of Romanticism as a necessary index of historical difference—as the philosophical, artistic, or political (self-) representation of a rupture that ushers in modernity. That this sense of a historical break—of history as this break—can be traced back to reflexively periodizing works like Hazlitt’s 1825 The Spirit of the Age simply reinforces the braiding of Romanticism and media studies as the mediation of historical difference that supports many of the studies in this present book. With regard to the old chestnut of Romanticism as the mediation of mind (or imagination) and nature, Techno-Magism reflects on this dynamic in ways that most explicitly speak to current preoccupations in the 12. For one significant consideration of Romantic media and the mediation of mind and world, through the idea of the virtual, see Otto, 1–81; for one focusing on the Romantic mediation of the past, see Goodman, 1–37.

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humanities. I refer to the contemporary topos for which previous critical and literary language about “Nature” can be considered a placeholder: thinking through the ecological and social devastation of the anthropocene as well as arguing for what has been dubbed the New Materialism in all its permutations, including Object Oriented Ontology. Insofar as proponents of the New Materialism want to rid us of the distinction between mind and nature, of toppling the existential sovereignty of the subject over the object, or internal, human mental ideation over an outer nonhuman realm, they are engaging with Romanticism, which through the writings of Kant and others has been routinely perceived (and criticized) for installing the subject-object divide as the primal scene of our philosophic modernity. Techno-Magism complicates this scenario in two ways. First, it questions the viability of any object qua object that willfully ignores its existence within the commodity form and its heteronomous relation to exchange value. Second, it resists calls to erase the subject- object divide not to rescue the subject but to insist on the primordial notion of a divide, break, or split—différance, if you will—that inflects the radical notion of figure bequeathed to us by deconstructive thought. With regard to the first formulation, if the critique of the commodity form necessarily refers us to Marx, Techno-Magism assumes its Marx to be in continuity with the Romantic works it studies, which in many cases convey how intensely the problem of commodity reification characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life. Much of my previous work has dwelt on juxtaposing how Romanticism and Marxism each negotiate the question of commodification’s relation to other notions of historical narrativization, first and foremost the possibility of radical historical change, or revolution. Techno-Magism continues this trajectory, using its own critiques of New Materialism and its language of commodification and revolution to formulate the uneven imbrication of Romantic and Marxist attempts to mediate both mind and nature and historical difference. Several of the essays in this present collection also conceptually deploy another coordinate, one that grimly reworks the question of scale already informing our “parallax view,” as Žižek put its, of commodification and revolution.13 I mean the world-ending question of the effects of the anthropocene that increasingly informs everything we think and do, and don’t do. Certainly that is the implicit truth of the academic labor in the

13. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4–13.

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humanities, and Techno-Magism is no different, with several of its essays engaging with this new forbidding horizon in an explicit manner. To question, however, the “newness” of this horizon, as well understanding exactly what “world-ending” might mean—to understand our contemporary task not as world-making, for example—involves a critical attention consciously underwritten by the braiding of Romanticism with Marxism but also, as vigorously, with deconstructive thought.14 This is another premise of Techno-Magism, one that finds its works quite comfortably operating within the zone of aporias and radical indeterminacies that is the legacy of theory as Theory from the last century, one prominently caught up in deconstruction’s own allegories of Romanticism. It also speaks to the second way that Techno-Magism demurs from New Materialist desires to do away with the subject and object divide and to realize in some radically pure, immanent form only the latter side of that dyad. This does not mean investing in something like Badiou’s project to understand how a new political subject might materialize during our times, though the catachrestic undertones of that emergence does resonate with the critical impulses of this book.15 I refer instead to how over forty years ago Derridean écriture and de Manian allegory (very much enabled, as any Romanticist might assert, through readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts) reworked the subject/object split into a radical problem of language emphatically delinked from (subjective) consciousness as the origin of linguistic meaning. Far from either accessing the object or recovering the subject, then, Techno-Magism more pointedly stresses the impossibility of erasing the divide between subject and object, or the divide between anything else, as the staging of a structural incommensurability that repudiates the seamlessly transparent ontology of any identity, immanent or transcendent. Moreover, in the wake of deconstruction’s understanding of this predicament as a fundamentally linguistic one, Techno-Magism 14. On a recent deconstructive treatment of “the end of the very concept of the world” within the context of Romantic permanent war, see David L. Clark, “Goya’s Scarcity,” in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 86–121. See also Sean Gaston, The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2013). 15. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009), 1–99. This is not to assume, however, any explicit affinity in Badiou’s model for the critical language that Techno-Magism employs; for one attempt to associate his concept of the “supernumerary” to the figural language of catachresis, see Wang, Romantic, 175, 188.

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understands that staging as the far-reaching operation of figure.16 Both these interlocking moves—attending to this radical division or cut, and to its consequences as figural ones—inform Techno-Magism. As an overarching theoretical disposition, a deconstructive awareness of figure means understanding the “in” and “between” pre-positioning of media as not simply phenomenal quandaries, but more exactingly as tropes—not hopelessly beholden to such categories as time and space but aboriginally inciting them. The aporias and complexities of such categories speak then to the intransigent nature of figure rather than to any facile notion of sweeping figure away once we become aware of its existence. Troping “in” as what Derrida terms “the prosthetic of the inside” both enables us to understand media as a storage system even as it also aggressively resists the promise of some media to externalize all knowledge, to make the real transparently visible and identifiable in some nonspeculative, absolute manner.17 Conversely, exteriorization as the ubiquity of the prosthetic—the supplementary tool, the script, the screen—is equally something that a deconstructive approach figures, or insists upon—the troping of trope, as it were. This is a through line of Techno-Magism, where from a number of angles its essays test the axiom that mediation is not about overcoming or sublating the tropic pre-positioning of in, through, or between, but rather about exploring the implications of their catachrestic asymmetries in Romanticism’s works.18 The tropic drift of such asymmetries also characterizes one way that Techno-Magism understands how the works it studies might constitute a prehistory abutting technologies not invented until later in the century, and centuries after that. If such pre- or protohistories have any viability, they must necessarily reflect how much their figures slide imprecisely from one to another, where, for instance, the creature’s spying on 16. Readers of deconstruction will no doubt recognize the de Manian resonances of the way figure and its relation to the literal is applied in this Introduction and elsewhere in Techno-Magism. For one energetic use of the term figure more beholden to Deleuze and Badiou, see Mauro Resmini, “The Worker as Figure: On Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven,” Diacritics 46, no. 4 (2019): 72–95. 17. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. 18. For a discussion of how a condition akin to the split or cut leaves us always “in the middle,” a medium understood not “as [the Aristotelian] vantage point or secure ground above everything else” but as a conceptual predicament that “offers neither a promise of beginning nor the redemption of an end,” see Sean Gaston’s Derridean inspired “In the Middle,” Parrhesia, no. 6 (2009): 63. See also note 24.

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the De Laceys in Shelley’s Frankenstein can be allegorized as both theatrical and screen viewing at the same time. The status of the Romantic topos as exactly that, rather than as a reified set of straightforward, stadial genealogies leading to the invention of this or that technical device, enhances how and when this tropic drift occurs, and the essays in Techno-Magism are characterized by seizing such occasions opportunistically to empower its own conceptualizing heft. Conversely, such drift does have its own profile, as conflicted and doubled as it may be, with the works in this book concentrating on how various intellectual histories and an ever rapidly emerging capitalist modernity articulate that shape. That this concatenation of social and philosophical nodal points— from the Coleridge-like transformation in Eisenstein’s editing philosophy to the always, ever on character of capital saturating the televisual, gothic Lebenswelt of Wordsworth—might emit a logic at once surprising, uncanny, and compelling is one wager spurring on all the essays in this book. This dynamic intermixing of social shaping and tropic drift explains why none of the essays turns to one methodological concept prominent in media studies at the start of the century, Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s notion of remediation.19 Insofar as that idea assumes one historically stable medium whose readily identifiable practices and procedures then reappear (changed and constant) in another, the figural volatility inherent in the way that Romanticism addresses its pre-positioning techné of “in” and “through” makes remediation a limited notion, if not a conceptual redundancy. At the same time the instinct in Techno-Magism, proleptic and otherwise, has been to recognize traits of certain media not simply or even in any technical ideal notion of a medium but in the accelerating social relations of capitalist modernity, captured in all their unevenness in the period writings of Romanticism itself. One might assume from such a description that the twin vocabularies of Marxist and deconstructive thought mobilized here—of commodification, revolution, figure, and the cut—converge consistently in a mutually clarifying manner. To the contrary, following my previous work, TechnoMagism is energized as much by the volatile nature of their relationship as the echoes and family resemblances between them. If this book insists on 19. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 22–50. For one thoughtful application of this idea to Romantic writing and culture, see Burkett, 8–11. See also Grusin’s extensive reworking of his and Bolter’s formulations, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48.

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the continuing relevance of these two great modes of critique, much of that adamancy is based on a commitment to search out the generative nature of that theoretical precariousness, cathected here in the entangled relations among media, mediation, and Romanticism. That said, the theoretical probings in Techno-Magism do bear the historical moment of their writing, the second decade of this millennium, where it seems self-evident to me how much thought and planetary existence labors under the horizon of the latest phase of late capitalism, oligarchic or plutocratic capital. My analyses of commodification, revolution, and the anthropocene all explicitly allude to this fact. The deconstructive character of many of these essays, its delineation of the incommensurate, incalculable, and the inevitable force of figuration, often confronts as directly its inscription within this horizon. If there is a way that this present collection does not dissolve into the “occasionalism” that Carl Schmitt criticizes Romanticism for embodying, the awareness of this horizon as one constant referent in Techno-Magism, whatever its ultimate ontological status, would be one notable brake against this happening.20 However, insofar as Schmitt’s charge of occasionalism targets the very exaltation of the subject proponents of the New Materialism also chafe at, the deconstructive disposition of this book accepts the risk of this charge, if only to clarify the unsteady way subject and objective world (as Nature or history) naively face off one another, without any closer inspection of what precisely this confrontation entails. Since Romanticism especially, the most enduring systematic accounts of this encounter in fact narrate the transformation of that face-off as, ultimately, mediation. Hence the centrality of mediation for this book’s tackling of the question of Romanticism and media, not only as the object of study but as the very way critique is deployed throughout this collection. I am not the first to argue the necessity of including a theoretical and philosophical account of mediation in media studies; a 2010 essay by John

20. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 17. Compare these sentiments to the startling, and as rigorous, assertion of Ernesto Laclau regarding the nondeterministic status of capital in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 202–3. For my part, I’m tempted to call the invocations of late capital in this book a trope, not only to stress the volatility of the empirico-transcendental doublet characterizing my assertion of the “self- evident” nature of our historical moment, but to double down on my claim of figure as something more than an ancillary effect of language.

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Guillory was especially important for my own thoughts on this matter.21 A reading of the piece’s treatment of a famous exchange between Adorno and Benjamin appears in the last essay of this collection. For now, I want simply to stress what I found most helpful in this essay, the way it forcefully clarified for me how Guillory and I diverge. In Guillory, the philosophical understanding of mediation formulated by Hegel is transmuted into the Marxist study of dialectical materialism, a distinct mode of engagement with the social that is taken up by the likes of Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno in the twentieth century. Guillory thus gives us a template by which a distinct relationship between Romanticism and media can be known as following through the implications of a dialectical mediation, originating in Hegel and then Marx, that enables the media object—and media studies, consequently—to participate necessarily in the most ambitious form of social critique. Aside from his discussion of John Stuart Mill, however, Guillory does not mention Romanticism by name, even with his focus on Hegel. This is telling, insofar as it ignores how much Hegel and other writers of that period have been a notable resource for the likes of Derrida and de Man, who read in these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers not the simple triumph of dialectical thought but its radical blockage.22 Guillory’s recovery of that century’s philosophical history of mediation is thus incomplete, insofar as that remembrance does not reflect on how much it rests on the idea of a Romantic commitment to the dialectic that was far from assured— whose power comes in fact from the degree to which that avowal was radically problematized even as it was insisted upon. From this perspective, Guillory’s rehabilitation of mediation for media studies is not Romantic enough. To assert the exceptional character of Romanticism’s encounter with media and media theory means noting how the dialectical idea of mediation itself necessarily calls forth its own relation to Romanticism, one that 21. John Guillory, “The Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 321–62. 22. With regard to some key deconstructive works specifically dealing with Hegel, see Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 91–118; and Andrzej Warminski, “Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life,” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (New York: Routledge, 1998), 171–93. See also the contrasting treatments of Hegel in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, with Laclau’s and Žižek’s differing views, especially speaking to the question of the dialectic posed here.

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arguably reaches its philosophical apotheosis in the writings of Hegel, but that is also explicitly staged in the works of a host of other thinkers and artists in the first part of the Anglo-European nineteenth century. And to do that means not only proleptically referring to the particular philosophical force of mediation in Marxism but also acknowledging, and deploying, the critique of that intensity in deconstruction (though Marxism contains its own critiques as well). It means risking Schmitt’s charge of occasionalism, though now not in the service of any reified subject, but in recognition of the more difficult a priori status of the divide, break, or gap that both enables and disables the separate autarchy of mind and world. The fact that any mediation remains a face-off defined not by the dialectical realization of subsuming identity but by the off of that phrase, an impenetrability or resistance that necessarily exists in asymmetric fashion with the in and through of Mitchell’s thoughts on media—that is as much the theoretical instance of this collection on Romanticism and media, as much the arc between the Romantic era and the late capitalist planet we inhabit.

Techno- Magism, Figure, and the Media Concept The key term in the title of this book and of its first essay points to this more complicated—Romantic—understanding of mediation, with techno-magism alluding to the effects of media, technology, and techné beholden to an epistemé built around the inexplicability of catachreses rather than the certitude of any economic distribution and regulation of forces associated with a more properly dialectical approach. Techno-magism refers to how both the imposition of meaning and identity and their dissolution do not exist in any dialectically guaranteed balance of cause and effect—where something is generated by, or is, its lack, for example—in the media forms explored in this book. Techno-Magism understands mediation—and its inextricable relation to Romanticism’s works—not simply as an account of the dialectic, but also as the staging of its distance from the dialectic. If techno-magism is a telling of mediation, it is as an allegory of the dialectic, with allegory carrying the full, self-corrosive force attributed to the term by de Man.23 To return for the moment to Guillory, his footnote estimation of Derrida speaks to this very dynamic. The context for Guillory’s reference is his prizing of a reinvigorated, theorized sense of mediation for media studies over the theoretical forays of related terms, such as representation and reflection 23. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–208.

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in Marxist and left-inspired cultural criticism and signification in structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language. He thus eschews the possibility that, aside from C. S. Peirce, past critical work on linguistic signification might anticipate what he wants the media concept to do. Consequently, Guillory’s footnote is adamant about how much Derrida’s critique of Saussure in Of Grammatology is only “tangentially relevant” to his own concerns (“Genesis,” 349). In relation to the weighty summaries of other thinkers informing Guillory’s essay the moment is a fleeting one, though striking for three reasons. First, the main focus of Of Grammatology is of course Rousseau, another avatar of Romanticism that deconstructive thinkers were drawn to as much as Hegel—a fact that underscores the way Guillory’s essay unknowingly shadowboxes with the archive that is the main theoretical spur for TechnoMagism. Second, and more immediately, while acknowledging the “primal deconstructive force” of the critique of Saussure in Derrida’s study, Guillory does not specify the obvious need motivating the footnote—that for many readers his earlier observation about how a medium becomes apparent at the moment when communication fails reduplicates, partially at least, the substitutive, secondary logic of the supplement at the heart of the “philosophical agenda” of Derrida’s study (“Genesis,” 338, 349). Third, Guillory elaborates the difference between his critique and Derrida’s of Saussure, where he wants to retain a sense of the particular effects of writing as a distinct medium, whereas Derrida considers all language to be écriture. This appeal to medium specificity might make sense in terms of Guillory’s immediate argument, but it is a curious move in light of the overall trajectory of his essay, the calling for renewed attention to the relation between technical mediums and mediation as a central event or process not contained by one particular medium or set of media. The question that Guillory’s footnote attempts to contain is thus not how much Derrida’s concept of writing might be a model for all language. More pertinently the question unasked by Guillory is how much the “philosophic agenda” of deconstruction—in Derrida but also in a larger, unwieldy collection of texts—informs, obstructs, converges with, or is mediation.24 24. The nonlocal, arché condition described here is exactly what informs Grusin’s notion of “radical mediation” in his own engagement with Guillory, to the point that Grusin defines mediation as “a fundamental process of human and non-human existence” (Grusin, “Radical,” 125). That this statement strongly echoes Paul de Man’s once controversial statement about the “inhuman” character of language and likewise that the final words of Grusin’s essay—how “we find ourselves inescapably and

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This possibility haunts Guillory’s argument for the need for a “general theory of mediation” for the media concept, insofar as that his vision rests on resolving how much noncommunication complicates the commonplace definition of media as a mode of communication, a fundamental trait of the contemporary medium object and our mediatized world that Guillory wants to retain.25 As he admits, however, Hegel hardly ever refers to communication in his thoughts about mediation, an obvious issue if media and media systems are supposedly all about communication. Indeed, the mediation of social relations is not primarily a moment of communication, insofar as no one, much less two parties, is necessary for (the) mediation to occur—a point that Derrida made about language and signification in his debate with John Searle forty years ago.26 The significance of a convergence among a noncommunicative model for mediation, language, and, paradoxically enough, communicative media, seems, however, to be precisely not what Guillory wants to entertain. How then to resolve the non-adequation between mediation’s non-interest in communication (gleaned in Hegel) and the supposedly intrinsic communicative properties of media? Guillory’s solution is a provocative one. Speaking to Raymond Williams’s fear that mediation is merely a form of representation, Guillory pointedly reiterates his view that mediation is also not signification, especially not in any manner that poststructuralism has explored: Let us refrain from the temptation . . . [to reduce] mediation to the process of signification, conceived yet again as the undoing of representation or reference. Grasping the nature of mediation depends in my view rather on affirming the communicative function in social relations, that is, the unavoidably in the middle”—allude to Derrida’s own prior language of the middle make it all the more noticeable that, aside from one reference to Derrida’s notion of economimesis, Grusin’s sweeping theory of mediation—which can be compared to Guillory’s intellectual history of the same term—elides any of deconstruction’s particular intuitions about language (Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 87, 94–97, 99–102; Grusin, “Radical,” 26; Gaston, “In,” 62–63). This section and what follows set out to see what happens when one inflection of those intuitions—the cut of Romanticism—is explicitly made part of our understanding of media and mediation. 25. See, for example, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s 1949 diagram of “The Communication System” in their The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 7. 26. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff and trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 29–110.

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possibility of communication. The assertion of the possible rejects its alternative, the actual, in recognition of the inherent difficulty of communication and the diversity of its strategies and modes. The proper theoretical context for conceptualizing mediation is therefore the process of communication. In that context, the enabling condition of mediation is the interposition of distance (spatial, temporal, or even notional) between the terminal poles of the communication process (these can be persons but also now machines, even persons and machines). (“Genesis,” 357)

The end of this passage conveys a propositional awareness of what specific media can do, an assertion of medium reflexivity as opposed to medium specificity that several of the pieces in Techno-Magism also ascribe to and whose implications in the works of writers such as Keats and Blake the essays explore. This awareness is significant, however, precisely because of its propositional nature, a predicament that underwrites Guillory’s remarkable understanding of mediation as an affirmation of “the communicative function in social relations, that is, the possibility of communication.” Mediation is intrinsically related to communication because of the possibility, not because of the actuality, of communication. For Guillory, communication does not literally have to occur for it to exist in some kind of anticipatory or reflexive mode, for it to define and contextualize mediation. It exists as a trope—a figure. This leads to the tautological dynamic of the rest of the passage our quote is from, where Guillory at once describes how the possibility (“the process”) of communication contextualizes mediation while “the interposition of distance” is the “enabling condition of mediation” (“Genesis,” 357). If there is a temptation to get caught up in the circular conundrum of what is more primary in characterizing mediation, context or enabling condition, that is because Guillory seems to imply that the prolepsis of communication is based on the fact of distance, or vice versa. But vice versa indicates how much Guillory’s language also intuits a possibility that is one theoretical coordinate for my own investigations into media and mediation in Techno-Magism: the unavoidable tropological character of distance as well—what we extrapolated from Mitchell’s own primordial prepositioning of “in” and “through.”27 The figural status of both “the possibility of communication” and “the 27. Bernard Stiegler’s Derridean inspired study of Rousseau and the anthropologist André Leroi- Gourhan makes this very point, that the technological object—the prosthetic tool—initiates our sense of spatial and temporal distance. See his Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 82–179.

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interposition of distance”—the catachresis or imposition of distance in deconstructive language—founds the entire passage, so much so that it is difficult not to wonder if it is that status, of figure qua figure, and not simply the figure of communication, that mediation and media studies must encounter for Guillory’s “general theory of mediation” to occur.28 If the law against incest in Derrida is based on the literal absence of incest, its existence as only a trace structure or figure in Lévi-Strauss’s and Rousseau’s aboriginal societies, the same can be said for the argument for communication as a definitional property of mediation in Guillory.29 If communication is intrinsic to mediation, it is only as a trace structure for communication’s absence, or, I want to suggest, for that trace structure itself: as a figure for figure as figure. The catachresis of figure and figure as catachresis—these constitute the nondialectical imposition, or force, that the techno-magism of Romanticism records.

The Cut of Romanticism Elaborated most fully in the first essay of this collection, how in the montage poetics of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner something comes from nothing, the catachrestic effects of techno-magism underwrite many of the converging meanings of techné, figure, media, and mediation explored in this work. Accompanying this dynamic is a related notion organizing a number of the chapters, so much so that it becomes an explicit conceptual reference for the last section of the book. I refer to the image or figure of a cut that realizes the in, through, and off of media and mediation, the intractable inbetween, that (de-)structures the articulatory practice of media as mediation. If techno-magism names the catachresis of identity or meaning delinked 28. Guillory appears at some level to be cognizant of what he has unleashed and is trying to manage, noting that the “assertion of the possible [act of communication] rejects its alternative, the actual, in recognition of the inherent difficulty of communication and the diversity of its strategies and modes” (“Genesis,” 357). The ontological vagueness, however, of the phrase “inherent difficulty”—is it empirical or transcendental in the unresolved manner that we’ve already discussed characterizes both Romantic and media studies?—is exactly what Techno-Magism sets out to explore. 29. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 255–68. This trace structure would then resonate with what Igarashi explores as the Romantic investment in “the dream of communication . . . the powerful fantasy . . . of a transfer of thoughts, feelings, and information” that the period’s authors simultaneously desired and recognized as impossible (Connected Condition, 4).

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from a view of mediation as simply the successful venture of the dialectic, the cut expresses the aboriginal character of parataxis fissuring any identity or meaning, dialectically arrived at or otherwise. The techné of technomagism may be understood as the operation of the cut, the parataxic character of any inscription, projection, illumination, or recording that media enacts when confronting what is troped as either time or space. And insofar as we have previously associated Romanticism with a cathected investment in historical difference and the scissions between mind and nature (or subject or object), the status of this parataxis in the works studied here is a Romantic one, evidenced as the cut of Romanticism.30 How then to express or image this cut, the intransigent blockage to at least one understanding of dialectical thought-as-mediation, the idea of dialectical progress? A specific example would help. My reference to image is intentional, moreover, as it emphasizes how much the assumed literariness of deconstruction—already deracinated for any attentive reader during Derrida’s turn toward the issue of ethics in the ’90s—can still inflect a mediatized culture not simply organized around the scripted, printed, or electronic word.31 Quite simply, that literariness does so figuratively, not literally. Thus my example is a filmic episode from the early 1930s. The example acknowledges the way that encounters with specific mediums and medium practices—viewing instead of reading, say—invite different critical languages, each with distinct trajectories of thought. But the example also understands media’s relation to mediation as not simply or best clarified by the historical boundaries of the particular medium. Insofar as I’m suggesting what follows is part of the Romantic topos, one occasioned but not determined by the film’s identity as an adaptation of a famous Romantic novel, I’m also flagging an organizing theme elaborated further in the next, final section of the Introduction: a defamilarization of period boundaries that suggests that the template of history is not to be any assured ontological ground for inquiry, but a much more violently ongoing (and to my mind 30. The divergence between my use of parataxis from Jacques Rancière’s “law of the great parataxis” will be explored in the next chapter, as well as in Chapter 6. 31. Before and after that turn, of course, deconstruction has had its own relation to the image and other practices not simply defined by their literariness. See, for example, Derrida’s treatment of Leroi- Gourhan and cybernetic programs in Of Grammatology, 83–84, and his The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Essays in Art and Culture) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Redfield, Politics of Aesthetics; Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Stiegler.

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valuable) proposition for thought and critique. That this proposition in each instance invites discovering a different strategy in order to gain any critical traction is one question motivating many of the essays in Techno-Magism. (Indeed, what follows can be profitably read in tandem with the question of filmic montage explored in the first essay’s meditation on Coleridge and techno-magism.) My example refers to the close-up scene in James Whale’s movie Frankenstein when the audience is introduced to a full frontal shot of the creature, especially his face. It is a portentous moment, as we wait in suspense to see what Frankenstein and Frankenstein the film have invented. As Marc Redfield has argued, this knowingness of the movie’s involvement in the power of its cinematic attraction is deeply woven into its narrative and mise-enscènes, such as the manner in which the creation of the creature, combining electricity, light, and shadow, stages film’s own birth.32 And as Redfield also deftly asserts, this reflexivity is intrinsically linked to the question of what it means to see (both cinematically and noncinematically), something the film announces almost immediately through its opening credits’ panoply of gazing eyes, and punctuates throughout its screening, from one of the movie’s actors stepping out of a set of curtains to warn us about the theological scandal we’re about to view, to the trio of film characters who act as an audience for the spectacle of the creature’s animating creation, and finally to the flickering fight between Frankenstein and his creation in an abandoned windmill, where the play of their faces through the mill’s wheel evokes “the moving celluloid strip that allows cinema to animate bodies, which is to say, to be cinema per se” (“Dream,” para. 5). None of these episodes appear in Shelley’s novel, of course, though many have seen this obsession with the visual already operating in her work, something my essay on her, Austen, and Byron will deploy for its own meditation on daemonic, revolutionary, and consumer-obsessed youth. As Redfield also notes, a pervasive sense of how problematic the novel renders the question of optics is crystallized in how difficult it is for Victor to look truly at his creature’s face—how in a number of different ways its visage and body, for all its murderous, physically felt presence, remains indescribable. Shuffling into sight in the wake of all these cues and themes in both novel and film, the creature’s coming into view for Whale’s movie audience becomes all that more weighty and fraught. 32. Marc Redfield, “Frankenstein’s Cinematic Dream,” in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, Frankenstein’s Dream, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle ( June 2003), https:// romantic- circles.org/praxis/frankenstein/hogle/hogle.html.

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Given how ubiquitously iconic the creature’s face has become over the last century of filmic and pop cultural viewing, one might assume its original cinematic depiction would fundamentally contrast with the always partial, shadowy, or incoherent description of its mien in Shelley’s work. Whale’s staging of that moment, however, is more complicated than that. The scene is composed of four shots (Figure 1), with the first a medium shot of the creature opening a door in the middle of the frame, shuffling out of the shadows into view in Frankenstein’s laboratory, the space neatly composed with shadows and stone masonry on the left side of the frame and heavy machinery and lab equipment on the right. The shot announces the scene’s singularity with the creature entering the room backward, an odd mix of maladroitness and suspense that coordinates well with Boris Karloff’s iconic bodily performance in this and later Frankenstein films. The creature’s backside enters the room, with the next shot showing him slowly turning around at a closer distance, framing the creature from his chest to his head. Karloff appears to linger for a split instant with the creature’s profile facing the camera, his eyes still moving, where a glint of awareness of Frankenstein and the audience viewing him seems to motivate the creature to continue to turn around until he fully faces the camera. At which point the next shot moves closer to show the creature’s face and shoulders taking up most of the frame. The effect is jarring, as the full visage of the creature conveys a dead mask level of nonexpression, vacant of any sense of awareness glimpsed in the preceding shot. The scene then jumps to another shot of the creature’s face, even closer, from the chin to upper forehead, with no change in affect in the creature from the previous shot—we more exactly have no chance to wonder and then discern if there is a change, as this concluding shot lasts no more than a second before returning to the original establishing shot of the creature standing fully inside the laboratory, though now completely introduced to us with his front facing the camera and Frankenstein’s foregrounded back framing him on the image’s left side, stressing how much the drama of this scene is about encountering the creature visually. That said, the running theme of the scene seems to be one of perceptual dissonance, flagged by the creature’s backward entrance, and amplified by the temporal disjunction between the creature’s slow bodily movement and the clipped briskness of the montage. This sense of discord reaches its height in the second cut to the larger image of the creature’s face, a shot whose fleeting existence makes it act as an interruption into what it is supposedly helping to convey, a close-up of the creature’s face. This moment is a literal face-to-face with the consequences of not only Frankenstein’s desire but our own, our yearning to have revealed to us in

Introduction

figure 1. The film sequence from Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931), featuring the creature’s entrance, his profile, a cut to his face, and a second cut to his face.

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toto the cinematic being defining this moment of cinema, the creature of Frankenstein that movie audiences have so avidly wanted to gaze on, so much so that the history of viewing has dubbed this being the titular character of the film in our collective popular unconscious. Because of how this moment is staged, however, its singularity does not reside in an encounter with the creature’s face, but in the jarring rhythm of the edited shots, cathected in that final cut to the creature’s enlarged visage, a formal interruption both leading to and coinciding with this last shot-as-an-interruption, a cut whose continuity with what precedes it—the same image of the creature’s face, though smaller—becomes secondary to the cut or interruption itself. Whale’s scene reveals the creature to us, even as it does not, insofar as what is more primordially exposed is the unavoidable structural incommensurability of the cut between the two (same) faces, a cut, screen, or gap that necessarily disrupts what it might mean to look unwaveringly at the face of Frankenstein’s creature. What that face might express—sexual difference, the techno-administrative visage of modernity, death reanimated, the nightmares of history (the Middle Passage, World War I), the noumenal real—coincides with what we might see, precisely what is also blocked or disrupted by the second cut to its face. Seeing Seeing—closely, totally, and completely—is optically announced as an impossibility. Up close what we see instead is the disruptive, awkward, nonseamless moment of the suture, before, in, and through a creature and filmic creation composed of such articulations. Up close we encounter composition itself as a series of cuts—as a cut.33 Zoom lens technology started to appear in movies in the late ’20s, and there are moments in Frankenstein that show Whale’s skills with both tracking shots and continuity editing. Regardless of whether such film technique and technology might have informed Whale’s early ’30s filmmaking close-up imagination—whether he could have chosen to have the shot close in upon 33. Arguably the first cut from the creature’s profile to his face is a less visually noisy but still emphatic assertion of this (dis-) articulation, not only because of the change in facial affectation but also because critics have long claimed that the close-up asserts its own filmic world separate from what precedes and follows it. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87–101; Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 53; and Mary Ann Doane. “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–111. I’m grateful to Luka Arsenjuk for pointing this out to me.

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the creature’s face in another way—the scene stands out for the idiosyncratic use of its final cut to stage our first time face-to-face with the creature, so much so that this cut is as memorable as the face in this scene. As much about the cut as the face, the scene replaces the face with the cut. This formal action is not simply something the movie subscribes to, however. Redfield has his own elegant formulation for the film’s opposing desire to avoid or repress this cut, its aspiration still to see Seeing: “Even as [Whale’s Frankenstein] records its world as saturated with technology, the film dreams of a monstrous moment in which it could expose itself to itself, capture and possess itself for itself, and thus ward off the shock of its own self-replication, its mechanical self-differentiation and dissemination—in a word, its mediation” (“Dream,” para. 7). Trying to realize the immediacy of seeing Seeing—visuality as self-immediacy—the entrance of the creature encapsulates a dynamic that resonates with what Redfield describes, with the scene’s formal composition instead conveying the unavoidable fact of mediation as a formal incommensurability or cut that precedes any cognitive or emotive content—empirical, transcendental, literal, figural, or otherwise—that any synonymous expression of mediation as the dialectic might enable. If for Guillory the failure of communication allows communicative mediums to come into view, in this scene from Whale’s film the failure of the medium to view enables the medium as mediation, as the cut, to emerge. This is not to dispute that we could profitably apply to Whale’s film a sense of the correlating dynamic between media and mediation that hews more closely to Guillory’s recovery of the mediation of social relations inherent in all media. That approach might link such historical registers as the rise of Hollywood horror films, the interwar period, and the transition from classical to Keynesian capitalism to a number of distinct communicative technologies, including different types of script and print (books, magazines, and newspapers) and film and radio. Yet the essays that follow also pursue a Romantic sense of the dialectic and mediation more violent and less assured in their ability to ground or enable themselves, either existentially or socially. It is precisely the possibility of thinking through the meanings of that vehement self-complication, the cut of mediation-not-asimmediacy, which motivates many of the essays in Techno-Magism, even as they also take as their spur and horizon an accelerating capitalist modernity knowable to us through the combinatory understanding of mediation and media that Guillory suggests. Staging this cut, in and through the drifting Romantic topos of medium reflexivity, as the historical and theoretical aporia of Romanticism, is one underlying goal of this book.

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Constellations and Cuts As both figure and image, the cut shapes much of the critical disposition of Techno-Magism, so explicitly for its last three essays that those are grouped under the very heading of “Cuts,” whose implications for a range of topoi, from play and mimesis to land art and big data to abstraction and social antagonism, are explored in works of both the Romantic period and contemporary writers and artists. These concerns cohere around the critical language of media, mediation, figure, revolution, and commodification previously announced in this Introduction. The essays’ concatenation of medium forms—theater, print, film, photography, digital technology, painting—and works—from those of Austen, Byron, Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, and John Martin to those of Kant, Hegel, Freud, Lévi- Strauss, the Norton publishing company, and Robert Smithson— speak to one other guiding principle of Techno-Magism. My Introduction has already modeled this theme by abutting the interface of contemporary media and mediation with a Romantic tropology consisting of those same notions, and by invoking Whale’s 1931 film as a Romantic example of the cut. In a word, the hypothesis or wager of this archive is that Romanticism’s social, philosophical, and artistic contemporaneity fundamentally coincides with our own. Working off of the critical impulses of my previous work, then, TechnoMagism commits itself to the uncanny prospect of a rigorous, not facile, presentism, whose political and aesthetic possibilities are in this instance occasioned by the initial proposition of reading Romanticism and media together. Whether the theoretical character of this potentiality alights upon a transhistorical or historical formulation for its presentism is something neither consistently nor ultimately resolved in this collection of essays. To the contrary, Techno-Magism explores what kind and how much critical energy can be generated by keeping this question both ongoing and irresolute. It should be said too that the choice studied here isn’t simply between a transhistorical or transcendental Romanticism and an empirical, historical Romanticism. Crucially, Techno-Magism wonders what kind of more speculative history might support a shared archive of works from the Romantic period and our own twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To that end, Walter Benjamin’s notion of the constellation as a figure for historical identity helps clarify the searching, nonstadial, and nonreified historical instincts animating Techno-Magism. This concept underlies the recent critical collection edited by Jacques Khalip and Forrest Pyle, Constellations of a

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Contemporary Romanticism, in which Chapter 1 of this present work first appeared. As Khalip and Pyle write, For Benjamin, the constellation as image served less as a temporal measure for the difference between the past and present (and, as a consequence, of their inextricable relationship) and more as a structure for interpreting the “now” as the event of a seizure, a grasping of the past as if for an emergent thought. . . . Benjamin implicitly conceives such a now in terms of strange adjacencies, arrays, and possible connections that strike one as outside the rules of causality, or in terms of a historicism whose interpretations depend on the present as the revelatory instance of past occurrences. If one were to forecast such occurrences, one might say they are analogous in the register of cultural history to the meteorological phenomenon of reverse lightning.34

Flagging the intent of the present collection to explore this dynamic, “Constellations” is the heading grouping together my first five essays, which are then followed by the three in “Cuts.” As I’ve indicated, those last three pieces also have as one of their critical motivations the search for how a wide range of works from the Romantic period and our near past might espouse an uncanny logic linking them together. (Indeed, the last essay will take up how much Benjamin’s and Adorno’s use of the constellation speaks to the dynamic of a post-Waterloo abstraction of history in Keats and others.) Conversely, the essays under “Constellations” stage a series of technomagistic confrontations with nondialectical catachreses and systemic nonadequation that converge with a Romantic realization of media and mediation as the epistemic violence of a cut, split, or gap. Like the essays that follow them, these studies track the consequences of such encounters along a spectrum of concerns, including the question of filmic montage in Coleridge, the animal and posthuman in Byron, and the technics of commemorative thought and revolutionary pleasure in Percy Shelley. Yet as or more emphatic in these studies is the proposition of how these writers and others—not only Keats and Wordsworth but also Walpole and Radcliffe and Eisenstein, Jacques Rancière, Alexander Calder, Lucille Ball, and Andy Warhol—might exist alongside each other, along with the mélange of media and genres invoked, including song, film, print, the televisual, the gothic, and the lyric drama. What set of relations or cultural logics bind the 34. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, “Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism,” in Khalip and Pyle, 1–2.

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assemblages in each chapter? That is the goal each of my critical readings tries to unearth and examine. The reader will see how the book’s chapters accomplish this wager in ways that overlap but also contrast with one another. For example, in two of the essays in “Constellations,” on the gothic zany in Walpole and Wordsworth and on the cliché in Keats, Sianne Ngai’s vocabulary for the lived experience of our capitalist Lebenswelt provides both a notable tool and critical foil that ties Romantic media to a mediation of social relations recognizable in our own time. In the other essays in that section, the answers stress more the tropological as a place of its own disjunction and dissolution. In those cases, the emphasis is on how specific mediums of capitalist modernity are enfolded into the aporetic globality of mediation radiating out of the topos of Romanticism. It should be iterated that not all instances of media troped in the texts read are proleptic, moreover, with the essays on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Manfred each in its own way exploiting as well as defamiliarizing the idea of the Romantic period closet drama. (Both performance and mimesis as the playtime of early nineteenth- century theater also very much inform the triptych of Austen, Byron, and Mary Shelley in the first of the pieces that appear under “Cuts.”) Given how much my description of the essays in Techno-Magism has veered toward conveying more their individual, nominalist character and less the overall identity of this collection, it seems appropriate to state now one of two last observations about this book. Techno-Magism is indeed a collection of essays, intentionally conceived and written in that manner. I hope that this Introduction has revealed a number of through lines that do bind the provocations of each piece with the others and enable more readily a viewpoint from which their individual concerns resonate with and amplify one another in a conceptual call and response. Such an assortment risks a certain level of both dissonance and redundancy, as well again the charge of occasionalism made by Schmitt, this time as an evasion of a more complete history or theory that might more neatly lock each essay into place as the necessary component or chapter for a seamless argument about Romanticism, media, and mediation. That is a gamble Techno-Magism willingly takes, as over the years I have found my critical desires best expressed in the intensity and particularity most effectively afforded by the critical essay. In a work often attentive to the ways that form, genre, and medium intersect, admitting this knowingness seems an appropriate enough gesture to make.

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I’m tempted to invite the reader to think of each essay as an example of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, the distinct phenomenal world each living creature inhabits, an idea that plays a large role in my essay that upends the mental theater associated with Byron’s Manfred. Any critical grandiosity conveyed by that self- description is immediately blunted, of course, not so much by the cinematic traits associated with Uexküll’s idea but by its commitment to a nonhierarchical phenomenality of nonhuman animality. The theoretical tenor of the times might actually make this a pleasing prospect, but at a more practical level that analogy is still apt, as a way to stress how much each essay awaits to be encountered on its own critical terms, regardless of the larger conceptual frameworks and conversations housing it and the other pieces in this collection. The generic wagers of the critical essay accept, indeed exploit, the possibility that this is how it might be engaged, and that is also true of what is gathered here in Techno-Magism. Consequently several of the pieces here retain references to their initial moment of writing for a particular panel or symposium—how by and large academic writing and thought are first realized today. It was not uppermost in my mind to record this history, one that in its own way follows Benjamin’s admonishment to Adorno (considered more fully in the last chapter’s engagement with Guillory) to incorporate into one’s thought a sociological awareness of the material means and conditions by which one’s critical writing comes to be. It is not an unwelcome addition, however, if for no other reason than to gesture toward other larger institutional and professional frameworks that haunt this work, even as those might appear only as a fleeting observation in one or more of the essays: the ongoing extinction of the academic vocation of the Romanticist in academia, for example, even as the works gathered in Techno-Romanticism hyperbolically insist on the relevance of Romanticism for our contemporary social, aesthetic, and cultural practices. As for the choice of writing “hyperbolically,” this Introduction to TechnoMagism makes no apologies. This leads to my final observation about the book. If there is indeed a time for or realm of the postcritique, Techno-Magism does not inhabit it, something I hope the critical language of this Introduction has made clear. Given what every day we must continue to think through and confront, a call for the virtues of critical modesty on behalf of postcritique strikes me as timorous and disingenuous at best, and fatalistic and policing at that injunction’s worst. It is not a disposition I associate with Romanticist writing either in its sublime or recessive modalities. The degree

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to which one might fail at critique—how one might risk self-indulgence, militant naïvety, conceptual tiredness, or rote enthusiasm—does not seem to me a reason to lessen the commitment to, or necessity of, critique. Writing these words in the first part of 2020, I feel only an intensification of that commitment. At any rate, this is immodestly the critical imaginary of all the essays in Techno-Magism. In that one pertinent sense, the criticism written here is both Romanticist and Romantic.

1.

Techno- Magism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image

This piece gathers some thoughts I’ve had on the relation of Romanticism to something I’m calling techno-magism. My intent is first to give an overview of what I mean by that term and its connection to Romanticism, and then move on to the particular example of a moment of techno-magism in a passage from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The essay concludes with a speculation on what a Romanticism built on techno-magism might mean for our own present collective moment of global, environmental precarity. As one might readily guess, techno-magism has to do with the relationship between technology, or techné, and magic. Heidegger and others have written quite a bit on the question of techné, and literary studies as a whole is at the moment quite caught up with a term intimately linked to technology, science. There’s also a storied line of interesting writing that has to do with the relation between science and magic. (For those of us who study Romanticism our own particular literary point of reference might be Victor Frankenstein’s education, which involves both the natural science of electricity and the occult thought of Cornelius Agrippa and others.) So let me sharpen the focus of my own approach by saying what I mean by techno-magism, which has to do with two basic concepts: first, the distinction between a user, or operator, and a technician; and second, the proposal of making something out of nothing. My basic thesis is that both these concepts say a lot about what we’re doing right now in the world we live in and that they also have a lot to do with the tropes and strategies that characterize Romanticism. The first idea, the distinction between a user and a technician, is one that I resort to all the time to understand my own predicament as the editor of the electronic Romantic Circles Praxis Series, where I’m definitely an operator of digital media, someone who knows a little about the procedures by which I can make my computer do things, while I’m most certainly

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surrounded by technicians, people on our crack production crew who understand how computers work. Confounding, if not quite dishonoring, the previous Wang generation of Asian American chemical engineers, I treat digital media like appliances, and my production editors treat them like machines. A post–World War II, post-Fordist analogy might say that I’m in marketing and they’re in development. As the digital media scholar Matthew G. Kirschenbaum might say, I know what’s on the screen and they know what’s in the box.1 So: my relationship with computer technology or techné definitely becomes at some point magical. I can talk semi-intelligently about my computer and I can do things with it, but my relation to it is as a semicompetent driver, not as a mechanic. This situation can certainly be understood in generational terms, though I suspect a number of users who have grown up with social media and apps would still readily admit to being simply drivers instead of mechanics; at any rate I’m not a Luddite (though I’ve had my moments of techno-rage), but I’m also not someone who can confidently explain how or why my computer works, even though I might at times be able to navigate it very well—I (and I don’t think I’m the only one) exist in a gray zone where my knowledge as a user, my techné knowledge, exists always beside a keen sense of my nonknowledge of how things work. Techno-magism in this sense functions a bit like a catachresis at the heart of my technical knowledge, the magic moment of opacity or nonknowing that actually underwrites my user intelligence, and perhaps, even more hyperbolically, my relation to the world. The ambition of that formulation points to what I want to explore some more, how this gray zone of knowing not knowing might actually say something about the nature of knowledge or thought itself, or at least various forms of knowledge that we as literary critics confront all the time. In that 1. See Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). In many ways this distinction can be understood as one between software and hardware, with Kirschenbaum persuasively making the case that issues such as hard drive storage are essential to understanding new media. For my purposes this distinction is more mobile, insofar as it already exists on this side of the software divide, between those who might know, say, some commands on their laptop and those who know code. For one discussion of the commonly wished-for trope of the computer as appliance, see Farhad Manjoo, “Computers Should Be More Like Toasters,” Slate.com ( January 25, 2010); that the confusion some of us might have with our smart phones complicates Manjoo’s own example of the first computer as appliance—the iPhone—speaks to the mobility of the distinction that I’m exploring here.

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sense, with all due respect to my crack production crew at Praxis, I want to consider the degree to which, with regards to techné, we’re all in some basic way simply drivers or users in this world. This is a claim, moreover, that goes beyond medium specificity; it’s an interrogation into the concept of media itself. It’s the suggestion that we are all in some sense the Nambikwara Amazon Indian chief famously described in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s memoir, Triste Tropiques, who confidently scrawls designs in the dirt, believing he has mastered the technology, the magic, of writing. Lévi-Strauss’s point is, of course, that he has not.2 My counterintuitive interest lies in considering whether in some way he has; or, perhaps more exactly, whether the distinction between his nonmastery and our mastery is more friable, and more volatile, than we might wish. Hopefully, the invocation of the Nambikwara Indian chief helps us with two differing critiques of the term techno-magism: that, on the one hand, such magism implies the auratic power of a divine event and that, on the other, the same word is associated with the demystifying action of a sleightof-hand.3 My spin on Lévi-Strauss’s story is one in which those two senses are invariably mixed, much in the same way that W. J. T. Mitchell uses Bruno Latour to get at our premodern, unenlightened experience of the image.4 With techno-magism techné loses it auratic quality, but in a way that doesn’t allow for the critical distance that would allow any simple progressive telos toward demystification to occur, insofar as demystification shares with the aura it attacks the same constative certitude that the knowing not knowing of techno-magism undermines. Techno-magism does have an epistemological register, but that event is an encounter not with the truth

2. Claude Lévi- Strauss, Triste Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 294–304. 3. I thank Forrest Pyle and Sonia Hof kosh for pointing out each of these critiques to me. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25–26. Referring specifically to the animistic nature of new media Mitchell writes, “Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also (as we know equally well) mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life-forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own” (26). Interestingly, Bruno Latour has described a state of technological knowing not knowing similar to techno-magism, one that he associates with the modern, and thus one that he believes, unlike me, we can supersede; see his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 207–32.

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but with, quite literally, nothing at all. The difficulty of that proposition informs the rest of this essay’s arc. Lévi-Strauss’s study comes to most of us, of course, embedded in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, whose own multi- and metamedia study of writing and the deconstruction of speech rehearses in its own way much of what I’m discussing here. And more to the point, both Derrida and Lévi-Strauss are braided together by the figure of Rousseau, Derrida by his explicit reading of the French writer in Of Grammatology and Lévi-Strauss more implicitly by the origins of modern anthropology (French and otherwise) in Rousseau and other eighteenth-century thinkers concerned with the interstices of language, nature, and culture—a point of intellectual reference also very much in play in Derrida’s book.5 This present essay isn’t specifically about Rousseau, but I trust my suggestion is clear, how the issues I’m dealing with inevitably lead to a consideration of the intellectual and literary topos of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to, in a word, that period, event, or identity we call Romanticism. Some might hear in this claim an approach that bears at least a family resemblance to the polemic developed in Clifford Siskin and Bill Warner’s collection, This Is Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment is indeed, in Andrew Burkett’s account, the “event stage” when (new) media takes over our lives and configures our new episteˉ meˉ .6 For Siskin and Warner, this event is more than simply a key moment in history, insofar as the Enlightenment as a historical phenomenon becomes intelligible only through the fact of mediation; thus, their approach “radicalizes the intimacy of Enlightenment and mediation, so as to catch their möbius- strip-like co-implication.” 7 Similarly, while I’m trying to identify something that certainly has to do with Romanticism, what that is might not be simply beholden to or defined by the procedures of a historicist argument. Indeed, a historicist argument might be beholden to it. Further, if Siskin and Warner see in Romanticism a “saturation point” in the history of what This Is Enlightenment calls “Enlightenment mediations” (Burkett, 145; Siskin and Warner, 20–21), the rest 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 101–41. 6. Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 145. 7. Clifford Siskin and Bill Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and Bill Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 22.

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of this present essay takes seriously the question of what such a saturation might mean, interrogating how much Romanticism is also the name by which what is bound within the shape of Siskin and Warner’s “möbiusstrip” is also simultaneously unbound, emphatically. This possibility can be more readily accessed by the second trait I associate with techno-magism, the question of making something out of nothing. One can think of this issue historically as one way to understand modernity, especially in its relation to Romanticism, as the problem, burden, or opportunity, of making something out of nothing. Certainly, the secular modernity of M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism can be approached this way, as can a number of other Romantic, or Romanticist, plots that revolve around the attempt of the Romantic imagination to revivify or make anew a world increasingly characterized by a corrosion of the legitimating institutions and authorities of the past. These plots might seem charmingly dated, though Charles Taylor has arguably been reworking them; part of my interest is to return to them also, not to reinstall them but to think about them specifically through the idea of techno-magism to see if they’re truly exhausted. A more relevant way to consider this, perhaps, is to observe the intimate relation between Romanticism and the dialectic, the procedure in Romanticism by which something is made out of nothing, as Shelley so stunningly put it in Prometheus Unbound: “To hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck what it contemplates.” In our own twenty-first- century moment the dialectic is making a noticeable comeback, with such thinkers as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou in their different ways using the dialectic to make something out of nothing, with the stakes being quite high—the making of a prospect, of a future, for instance. If we phrase it that way, it doesn’t become difficult to see Žižek and Badiou as the heirs of one basic Romantic genealogy committed to the dialectic as the project of making something out of nothing. And it is here that the historical context of these formulations becomes more vexed, or at least more complicated, since one thing dialectical thought attempts to make out of nothing is history itself. In this essay, however, my engagement with this issue occurs in an oblique manner, insofar as I’m more interested in a related matter, another implicit complication that Romanticism brings to the table: that there might also be an uncompromising dimension to Romanticism that stages the making of something out of nothing in a way neither immediately nor fundamentally about the dialectic. Or to ask this in a different way: To what degree is the making of something out of nothing a question of techno-magism, a moment

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of magic structuring a technology of instantiation, ultimately and radically nonhuman, insofar as it is always, finally, beyond our explanation, reach, or control?8 We can make some headway with this question by looking at a Romantic text famous for its instructional format as a technology of reading, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I refer especially of course to the poem’s gloss, highlighted by its addition by Coleridge to the 1817 version of the work, a seemingly literal tool for the unlocking of the hermeneutic riddles of the poem. How and what we read is thus famously thematized through the formal structure of Coleridge’s text, a move further enhanced, as Jerome McGann has argued, by a recognition of the tradition of eighteenth-century biblical and secular hermeneutics to which the Mariner immediately refers.9 Of course, Coleridge’s poem also thematizes the question of interpretation through its content, through the work’s status as, for many, one of the bestknown shaggy dog stories in Romantic literature, a view not lost on many of Coleridge’s contemporaries from Southey to Barbauld, who famously, according to Coleridge, wondered in front of him what the moral of the poem was. Coleridge, of course, tartly replied that the poem had too much of a moral, and, if anything, needed to be less apodictic. However, the fact that the most obvious candidate for the moral of the Mariner’s story, “He prayeth best who lovest best / All things both great and small,” has been found by many to be trite and unsatisfying merely underscores the predicament of reading that the poem presents. The genealogy of Mariner criticism in many ways revolves around this fact. Interestingly, as Anne-Lise François has suggested, in our own age of unprecedented ecological catastrophe, one strikingly anticipated by the dead zone of sea that the Mariner’s ship inhabits, that moral might not seem that trivial after all. Timothy Morton has also recognized the relevance of the Mariner for ecological issues today, identifying in the poem a “kitsch” relationship with the nonhuman world. Morton’s characterization has to do with what he approvingly argues is the poem’s improper, compulsive

8. For one edifying response to this question, see Andrzej Warminski’s detailed reading of how in the Phenomenology of Spirit consciousness doesn’t come out of life through the dialectical movement of a determinate negation but through the catachrestic intervention of the word “to point” (verwissen) in his “Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life,” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (New York: Routledge, 1998), 171–93. 9. Jerome J. McGann, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (1981): 35–67.

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attraction to an oleaginous materiality, but his use of the term “kitsch” also points to the long tradition of wondering how much of the poem is, to put it gently, a put-on.10 Arguably, this hermeneutic uncertainty haunts all our attempts to unlock Coleridge’s text, including the very able and in many ways convincing historicist arguments that link the poem to the French Revolution, the slave trade, and (going all the way back to William Empson and then forward to David Simpson) European colonialist expansion.11 Within the Mariner’s account the issue of interpretation is certainly relevant to his poor crewmates, who desperately switch their interpretations of the albatross’s functionalist meaning as either curse, omen, blessing, or, as Empson wonders, food to replace the sailors’ worm-ridden sea biscuits (35–36). (As Frances Ferguson notes, whether the reader can successfully determine the consequence of the crew’s changing hermeneutic is another matter entirely.)12 Outside the Mariner’s narrative framework the question of a put-on is even more of an issue for the poor Wedding Guest, who might wake up “sadder and wiser” precisely because he’s realized that the hypnotic power of the Mariner’s narrative comes from the hallucination of a homeless man, a quintessential example of Foucault’s Renaissance mad person roaming the countryside before the Classical Age’s Great Confinement.13 And in that same vein it’s also an issue for the Mariner himself, who within his own recollection interprets the Hermit’s question, “What manner of man art thou?” to be the instructions of a severe Christian universe describing his form of penance, while what he might have done is simply 10. Anne-Lise François, ‘“Things violently destroyed or silently gone out of mind’: Slow Death and Naturalist Time Keeping,” unpublished; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 150–58. Arguably, for Morton the Mariner is kitsch—and not camp— precisely to the degree its embrace of the slimy real is not a put- on. 11. William Empson, Introduction to Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (New York: Schocken, 1973), 28–31; and David Simpson, “How Marxism Reads ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H. Fry (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999), 148–67. See also Peter Kitson, “Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 197–207; and Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 47–65. 12. Frances Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” in Poststructuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 257. 13. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 3–77.

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internalize a question anyone might ask when confronted by the Mariner, even someone blessing him, and externalized it as the authoritative injunction of Žižek’s Lacanian Big Other. For the Mariner, the Hermit’s words are performative, commanding him as penance to tell his story over and over again throughout the land. But for the Wedding Guest and the poem’s readers, the Hermit’s question might be simply that, a query transformed through the Mariner’s madness of interpretation into the external command, felt internally, of a moral universe demanding reparation: “Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched / With a woeful agony, / Which forced me to begin my tale” (lines 578–80).14 The scene between the Hermit and the Mariner becomes a mordant comedy of misrecognition, at once instantiating the moral universe and catalyzing the Mariner’s punishment by it and the Hermit as the subject supposed to know. Such scenarios reproduce the question of Coleridge’s unreliability and various inconsistencies of the text within the very figure of the Mariner himself. If skeptical readings of Coleridge’s poem don’t always grapple with this especially radical conclusion, if we don’t dismiss outright the story that the Mariner tells, one could say that, at least for modern readings of the poem, the gloss is largely responsible for keeping such views at bay. Channeling Foucault once more, we could in fact view the gloss as the way in which the Mariner’s madness is confined, delimited, or interred. For the gloss, if no one else, does seem to take the Mariner’s story seriously, as an intelligible constative event. Of course, as Ferguson emphatically demonstrated in her well-known essay on the Mariner, aptly titled in part, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,” the gloss actually creates as many problems as solutions for someone looking for guidance when reading Coleridge’s text; it doesn’t so much resolve interpretation as incite it: “The Gloss, in assuming that things must be significant and interpretable, finds significance and interpretability, but only by reading ahead of—or beyond— the main text” (253).15 The gloss then is a technical aid, an app, literally applied to the rest of the poem, a model for or technique of reading that fails as much as it succeeds, or succeeds despite failing. As Ferguson’s title warns, anyone confident about the success of her reading practice who bases 14. All quotations from Coleridge’s poem are from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 46–65. 15. See also Steven E. Jones’s comments on the gloss in his “ ‘Supernatural or at Least Romantic’: The Ancient Mariner and Parody,” Romanticism and the Net, no. 15 (1998), https://ronjournal.org/articles/n15/.

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her assuredness on something like the gloss, or thinks the point of her reading practice is to emulate or become a gloss, is acting like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara Indian chief, especially if like the chief we confidently risk all our cultural capital, if not our tribal standing, on the success of our reading attempt. Ferguson’s argument already signals the concerns I address: “Reading as a techné and morals as techniques of behavior thus become suspect for Coleridge because they imply that experience—and one’s interpretation of it—are both stable and repetitive—that one can learn what one needs to know” (256).16 Let me then formulate a more fine-grained sense of the techno-magism that I see specifically operating in the gloss and the rest of Coleridge’s poem, in order to advance my present analysis. My thesis is that something is indeed made from nothing in Coleridge’s poem—let’s call it meaning—and that it can be seen in the relationship between gloss and poem, but that that connection is itself an allegory of what happens inside the poem, without the gloss, at sentence level, or between sentences, where disparate semes are juxtaposed together to become, seemingly, sequential narrative meaning. Thematized in the formal use of the gloss is how much the interpretive wages of the Mariner, its social or ethical relevance, for example, depend on achieving this basic sequencing act. A parataxis, or discontinuity, that resolves itself into the hypotaxis of linear intelligibility: ever since Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 study of Charles Dickens we have understood this technique not simply in terms of linguistic grammar but more readily in terms of the more dynamic imagist vocabulary of cinematic montage.17 Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image, however, has taken the idea of the montage and reunited it with the grammatical functioning of the sentence, through his concept of the sentence image, with the word “sentence” in that phrase now more capaciously referring to any relational modality, this time either sequential or simultaneous, a “new common term of measurement” or “rhythm” whose paradoxical point of departure is precisely the “law of the great parataxis,” the recognition that there is no real universal measurement for art today, only chaos.18 For Rancière the sentence image, operating either in pictorial, cinematic, or print form, 16. For Ferguson, Coleridge is specifically targeting Barbauld’s belief that moral experience can be realized as a technology of moral instruction (254–56). 17. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1979), 195–255. 18. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 44–45.

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seems both to acknowledge and dispute that fact. One might go further and say that the sentence image, in line with Rancière’s political vision, asserts an overcoming of parataxis without the subordinate relations that structure the hypotactic clause. (It is, of course, the very fact of the “great parataxis” that enables Rancière to argue that anything might be connected to anything today.) Hence Rancière’s interest in montage. As my reference to Eisenstein and Dickens indicates, we have for some time creatively mixed the critical language by which we approach images and texts, and we can say that that theoretical strategy is precisely what Rancière opportunistically exploits, in order to describe as acutely as possible the regime of visibility that he elsewhere claims we’ve inhabited since Schiller.19 In what follows I’ll be reworking the formal apparatus of Rancière’s sentence image in order to emphasize different features of it than he does (though it should be stressed that the sentence image is already a highly versatile concept, replete with a number of different meanings, in Rancière’s formidable hands). In doing so I’ll be making an argument about Coleridge and by extension Romanticism, though one that doesn’t necessarily choose between the historical and the transhistorical, insofar as my main focus will be on trying to see whether something like the sentence image structures the techno-magism of reading in the Mariner in a way that exceeds, or at least problematizes, the assurances of dialectical thought. Although Rancière in The Future of the Image does not champion the dialectic quite as explicitly or polemically as the theories of Žižek and Badiou do, it’s difficult not to experience the knotty, elegant precision of his writings as anything other than the operation of an able dialectical thinker. The cinematic montage, with its juxtaposition of seemingly disparate visual elements, would appear ready-made for the kind of dialectical investigation that Rancière employs. Indeed, Rancière actually refers to two kinds of montage in his thoughts about the sentence image, the “dialectical montage” and the “symbolic montage.” However, the “dialectical montage” is arguably the less interesting of the two, as it describes a predictable though highly effective use of montage, where, as in the example of Martha Rosler’s photomontages, social meaning, the “secret of the world,” is revealed by the explicit clashing of a set of obviously contrasting figures, images of the Vietnam War and “adverts for American domestic bliss” 19. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 (March 2002): 133–51; see also his Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

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(56). In comparison, the “symbolic montage” gets at a much more uncanny, more difficult sense of montage, and the dialectic, in large part because it delves into a relational structure made up of heterogeneous elements that establishes a “familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging. . . . If the dialectical way aims, through the clash of different elements, at the secret of an heterogeneous order, the symbolist way assembles elements in the form of a mystery” (57). The symbolic montage, then, emphasizes the “sentence” in the sentence image: If, as Rancière puts it, the image “separates,” the sentence strives for “continuous phrasing,” the “ ‘dark fold that restrains the infinite’ ” (58–59). The critical effect is an extraordinary one of the most nimble dialectical balance, whereby the sentence as linguistic meaning is paradoxically distilled into a nonsemantic, formal shaping of the nonlinguistic, paratactic quality of the image, which is only able to be recognized or organized by the phrasing or rhythm of the sentence: hence the ineffable quality—the “mystery”— of the symbolic montage’s ability to parse familiarity, the “fraternity of a new metaphor” out of discontinuous elements (57). The symbolic montage is thus very much in line with Rancière’s sense of the French symbolist tradition, where the “mystery” of the montage connections, its testimony of a fundamental “co-belonging,” does “not mean enigma or mysticism. Mystery is an aesthetic category, developed by Mallarmé and later explicitly adopted by Godard. The mystery is a little theatrical machine that manufactures analogy,” one that Rancière finds operating equally in the video art of Bill Viola and the North American Pop art of Ken Lum (57). The aesthetic mystery of how montage connects is thus itself an app for Rancière’s ultimate argument about the potentially “neo-symbolist and neo-humanist tendency of contemporary art” (67). We might, however, ask: How exactly does mystery as a “little theatrical machine . . . manufactur[e] analogy”? How does the symbolic montage connect? The answer is, precisely, a mystery. As an app mystery could function as a catachresis; it would do so, moreover, for what is in effect a catachresis or imposed action, the connection between, the “continuous phrasing” of heterogeneous elements—of images that, if we take Rancière’s description of them seriously, as entities that counter the meaning or shape of a sentence, also function like the punctum in Roland Barthes’s photograph—like catachreses.20 The symbolic montage would then be the filmic stutter of a catachresis that describes the catachresis between two catachreses, 20. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 26–27.

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or, in Paul de Man’s terms, the allegory of montage. The “little theatrical machine” would signal an automaticity not immediately recoverable as a functioning app for a “neo-humanist art.” What might occur, then, if we apply this more volatile sense of montage to the sequencing of elements in a passage from the Mariner—in a passage, moreover, that seems to function in a much more smooth, prosaic, and obvious way than the symbolic montage in Rancière? And, when we do so, what might be the consequences of nevertheless discovering in that passage this more radically problematic sense of connection or shape that his symbolic montage identifies but does not quite resolve? The passage in Coleridge that I want to look at is the famous one with the sea snakes, and the Mariner’s blessing of them: Their beauty and their happiness. He blesseth them in his heart.

The spell begins to break.

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare. A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self- same moment I could pray: And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off and sank Like lead into the sea. (lines 282–91)

Claims for the intelligibility of what the Mariner wants to say may vary in terms of their ethical, psychological, and religious register, but most if not all arguably depend on assuming that this particular passage transparently links together its different elements in a montage of specifically causeand-effect relationships, so much so that Robert Penn Warren in 1946 could begin his famous essay by taking as a given that the Mariner, “upon recognizing the beauty of the foul sea snakes, experiences a gush of love for them and is able to pray.”21 Within those terms we really haven’t advanced 21. Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination,” Kenyon Review 8, no. 3 (1946): 392. Conversely, the overarching problem of cause and effect in the Mariner is a staple in many readings of the work. See, for example, not only Ferguson but also Jonathan Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), 275—Warren is in fact responding to

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much past Warren, who arguably still has one of the most sophisticated interpretations of a cause-and-effect sequence, locating that structure within a change in the Mariner’s interiority brought on by his blessing of the snakes that is a genetic moment of the Romantic imagination, “the case of a man who saves his own soul by composing a poem” (422). Let me offer my own boilerplate summary of what happens to the Mariner here, one that perhaps also reads the passage through our own contemporary ecological concerns. Up until that point, the relation of the Mariner and his shipmates to the natural world has been instrumental. The interpretation of the albatross, whether it was a good or evil sign, for example, depended on the crew’s perception of how that reading affected the fate of their ship. The Mariner, however, “bless[es]” the water snakes “unaware”; he does so not out of any self-interest or for any recognizable end; he sees the water snakes as creatures of value in and for themselves, not because of their relation to or signification for his human reality.22 (In perhaps more rarefied, Kantian terms, he sees them as pure beauty, an action not so distant from Warren’s description.) Neither iconoclastic aggression nor submissive idolatry informs his response, as it did with the crew’s reaction to the albatross. (One might think of Mitchell here, who would argue that the crew’s problem with the bird is that they don’t treat the albatross like a totem, or “friend” [184].) And precisely because the Mariner’s encounter with the water snakes is not built upon any self-interest, the cosmos rewards him: that “self- same moment” the albatross falls from his neck and, as the gloss says, the “spell begins to break,” with the poem’s narrative coming out of its stasis, gathering the momentum that will eventually lead the Mariner back to the shore away from the sea, to spread the word about loving all creatures great and small. Lowes’s impatience with the poem. Perhaps the reading most anticipating my own is Anne Williams’s Kristevan argument about how Coleridge’s poem dislodges any easy assumption of a masculine symbolic epitomized by the clarity of cause and effect; see her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 182–99. Although Williams doesn’t focus on this particular passage the way I do, a perhaps more pertinent divergence can be seen in how her use of the Lacanian real has been here reoriented around an encounter with nothing instead. 22. Both Morton and Williams play off the slimy corporeality of the snakes, though Morton does so in the service of his argument about the kitschy quality of the poem, where the Mariner’s blessing moves away in a positive manner from abjecting the snakes (157–58), whereas for Williams the blessing of the snakes functions more as a repression of the material abject, where the Mariner “escapes into the Symbolic” (194).

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Of course, given the oft-noted repetition compulsion that comes to organize the Mariner’s life on land, not to mention the dire quality of the life he eventually lives for blessing the snakes “unaware,” we might wonder how lasting or crucial a change has really occurred in this scene. More to the point, we might wonder whether change, as an intelligible event of cause and effect, has really occurred at all. For of course, the language of the poem makes no literal reference to the reward I inferred from my reading: the Mariner blesses the snake and then the albatross falls from his neck, but the main text does not explicitly connect those two events, aside from noting their immediacy, the fact that they inhabit the “self- same moment.” What makes that moment same to itself, however, is not explained. It could be cause and effect (blessing causes albatross to fall off ) or it could be something else: the contingency or sign of Rancière’s great parataxis, the arbitrary discontinuity rather than causal connection between events, a motif figured in many other places in Coleridge’s poem, from the game of chance, dice, played between Death and Life-In-Death to the choice of the Wedding Guest as the listener of the Mariner’s tale, a seemingly determinate moment (of the this-tale-is-only-for-thee type) that, however, could just as easily be an emblem of the arbitrary way that any text might be waiting for any reader in this world. (We feel that a book has chosen us but anyone with a certain amount of cultural capital could just as well have read that book.) Indeed, as Empson cheekily considers, the albatross should be the “smaller darker” breed “mentioned in Shelvock” as opposed to the “huge white” kind, since the smaller bird would be a tastier alternative to the wormridden sea biscuits (35). But more rides on this choice, since a “huge white albatross,” while suggesting the self-parodying, Monty Pythonesque dimensions of Coleridge’s tale, would make its falling off of the Mariner’s neck a more likely prospect of heavy weight, salt spray, sun, and gravity rather than the divine intervention of a moral universe. Alexander Calder’s drawing of the Mariner, which accompanied Warren’s 1946 essay in the Kenyon Review (Figure 2), certainly plays up this sense of the albatross as an ungainly, heavy weight.23 The water snakes scene, in other words, might be a montage in a more problematic sense, insofar as it can quite easily be 23. Much more can obviously be said about Calder’s image, one of a set of drawings that appears with Warren’s essay, and that, if not self-parodying, defamiliarizes the relationship between the ludic and serious in consistent fashion. For my purposes I would especially note the Mariner’s eyes, which seem to constitute less the hypnotic “glittering” stare that captivates the Wedding Guest at the beginning of the poem (line 13) and more so the hypnotized gaze of an individual caught in his own interpretative

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figure 2. The Ancient Mariner, by Alexander Calder. (The Kenyon Review 8 [1946]). Courtesy of The Kenyon Review and © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

read seamlessly, when it might in fact be composed of two elements—the act of blessing unaware and the albatross falling off the neck—that are radically incommensurate. Grammatically, read on the page, separated by a stanza break, nothing connects these two elements, except a “self-same moment” that might actually be the sameness of discontinuity. That we

madness—the Mariner quite literally has the strained look of someone compulsively overreading.

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measure them together as a sentence image would be an act of technomagism, of making something out of nothing. This predicament is personified in these lines through the figure of the “kind saint” who the Mariner believes takes pity on him, and who we might believe overcomes the gap between blessing and falling albatross— who hears the Mariner’s blessing, takes pity on him, and makes the albatross fall off his neck. But that belief is itself a moment of techno-magism, as that connection actually doesn’t appear in any literal way within the text: The kind saint pities the Mariner and does nothing more. Figuratively, the kind saint might be the sign of the connection between blessing and falling bird, but that is simply another way of admitting him to be the animating figure of an imposition, a personification of an action that isn’t there. Instead of overcoming the problem of the gap between blessing and albatross the saint simply reproduces it, becoming yet another relay among a set of elements— blessing, saint, and falling bird—whose grammatical connection is far from clear. That the saint’s pity could also be instead what enables the mariner to bless the snakes simply enforces the sense of this “self- same moment” as a montage of radical incommensurability rather than a set of clearly identifiable causes and effects. Of course, one might respond that neither the saint nor we have to do anything since we have the app of the gloss, which does the connecting. So perhaps this scene can’t be read so seamlessly, or perhaps that’s at least what the version with the gloss is admitting or telling us, that we need the app to make the connection for us. (Teaching this poem to students, I’ve certainly found this passage to be more difficult and less transparent than I assumed it to be.) More problematically, and more interestingly, however, is the fact that the gloss itself doesn’t quite solve or do away with the predicament of discontinuity. One can indeed argue the opposite, that the gloss in fact repeats it, since the gloss does not go into any involved interpretation of what’s happening with the Mariner but instead again gives us two denotative statements—“He blesseth them in his heart” and “The spell begins to break”—that might or might not be tied together as a moment of cause and effect. The two statements form their own montage sequence, which means that, extending but also complicating Rancière’s sense of the sentence image, their relation together could just as much be built on their discontinuity rather than on any intrinsic connection; or, more precisely, the intrinsic quality of that connection is a “mystery,” of a kind imposed, catachrestic in nature, unmoored from any representational intelligibility like the causal consequence of a moral act.

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Indeed, if we are able to use the gloss to help us make sense of what’s occurring to the Mariner, that moment would occur through the echoing relation between the rope around the Mariner’s neck implicitly snapping and the spell beginning to “break.” From that echo we might discern that the falling off of the albatross “so free” is the breaking up of a spell, that there was a spell occurring in the main text in the first place. But of course that echo doesn’t have to be metaphoric—in what way is a spell breaking exactly like a rope snapping? It could much more persuasively be metonymic, a pair of snaps or breaks happening arbitrarily in the same vicinity, much like blessing water snakes unaware and albatrosses suddenly falling into the sea. In that sense, the spell being broken could very well be the end of our delusion as readers or competent users, unaware techno-mages who would read cause and effect, narrative coherence, and ethical intelligibility into the disparate elements of this scene, with or without the gloss. But that end would not be a real end in the teleological sense, but instead just one more punctuation, one more snap, fall, or break, one more repetition of the rime of the Ancient Mariner, the rime or rhythm that makes up the Mariner, that involve something else besides the generic conventions of the ballad, that the Mariner’s own repetition compulsion on land as a constituted narratable subject simply repeats. In the passage we’ve looked at there are a number of other structural repetitions taking place, from the “gush[ing]” of love “spring[ing]” from the Mariner’s heart to the double “blessing” to the rapid sinking of the bird into the sea after its falling from the Mariner’s neck; these metonymically extend throughout the poem, including a moment much later when the spell actually, or one might argue arbitrarily, becomes “snapt,” an achievement less beholden to any overarching continuity of guilt and redemption than a combinatory automaticity more akin to Life-In-Death and Death’s game of dice. (What were the chances?) Such punctuations function much like the punctum of Barthes’s photograph, a wound or difference, somethings made out of nothing, gathered into a sequence of parataxis, the common measure of the sentence image, or “self- same moment” that marks a regime absent of common measure. Reversing Barthes’s formulation for the photograph (a “message without a code”), we could call this sequence a code without a message, the multiple gushing or springing of an imposition instead of a meaning.24 And, in the case of Romanticism, this condition might be a subtending 24. Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 19.

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dimension to any narrative we might conjure, as opposed to simply the symptom of one relatable historical récit. Put another way, the rime, or rhythm, of such metonymic punctuations, of such mechanical breaks, does not cohere into a sequence of dialectical progress or relationality but instead accentuates a conceptual stutter. (One might include here, contrary to Warren, the self-same repetition of loving best and praying best.) This aphasia suggests that the significance of Romanticism might not lie only in its association with the operations of the dialectic but also with its relation to a techno-magism operating around catachresis and imposition, as well as the open question of the relation between these two forms of constative realization. As Rancière’s own dating of his regime of visibility to Schiller indicates, Romanticism does seem to be a crucial place where these options and contestations emerge.25 This is also true for an understanding of the idea of montage itself, especially in its cinematic form. Ever since David Bordwell’s seminal 1974 essay, film studies has worked to understand the specific genealogies behind the relationship of Eisenstein, one of the avatars of cinematic montage, to this filmic technique. Bordwell suggested understanding Eisenstein’s relationship in two parts: an early stage based on a Pavlovian constructivism and a later Romantic stage consisting of both associationist British empiricism and German idealism. Since then, film scholars, including Bordwell himself, have complicated this formulation, suggesting, for example, a more synchronic relationship in Eisenstein’s oeuvre between these two phases. 26 Luka Arsenjuk has most recently suggested how this first phase or tendency of Pavlovian constructivism more accurately traces its empirical genealogy to British associationism, whereby the split in Eisenstein between British associationism and the second phase or tendency of German idealism presents two contrasting views of montage, the former underwritten by an empiricist tradition that can only a posteriori construct relationships among the features of a montage (cause and effect, for instance) and the latter subtended by a German idealist philosophy that

25. Specifically, Schiller marks for Rancière a break in Romanticism from the “representational” to the “aesthetic” regime of art (“Aesthetic,” 135). 26. See Bordwell’s “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15, no. 4 (1974–75): 29–46, and his “Eisenstein’s Epistemology: A Response,” Screen 16, no. 1 (1975): 142–43. See also Bordwell’s The Cinema of Eisenstein (New York: Routledge, 2005), and François Albera, “Eisenstein’s Theory of the Photogram,” in Eisenstein Rediscovered, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206. I’m indebted to Luka Arsenjuk for bringing this debate to my attention.

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assumes an a priori connection among all those elements.27 A struggle over understanding cause and effect as a metaphysical given or as a retroactive projection (or as we might put it here an interpretation), underwritten by two contending philosophical traditions; a question of how to narrativize the relation between these specific traditions, between British associationism and German idealism, as the coherent intellectual biography of an individual figure—these récits not only set the terms for this essay’s handling of the Mariner but more importantly should sound strikingly familiar to any working Romanticist from this last half century. They speak emphatically to montage and the great parataxis as constituting a problem not only distinctly Romantic but also quintessentially Coleridgean in scope.28 And this is perhaps where we can turn to the question of environmental precarity anticipated in Coleridge’s poem, to the various ecological catastrophes that increasingly come to define our relation to this world, one that might very well end because of its constant, oppressive transformation into “something” for the human species. For one way to understand the relationship of nothing made into something in the dialectic is arguably that of identity and its determinate negation, or nonidentity. However, within the other form of techno-magism I’ve outlined here there’s something more obdurate, more difficult about the nothing that recognizes the 27. Luka Arsenjuk, “The Subject of Montage,” unpublished. 28. For the most extensive treatment of the deconstructive qualities of Coleridge’s encounter with David Hartley and associationism, see Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); for an argument about the ontological change in movement brought on by cinema that includes an in- depth analysis of the various schools of cinematic montage, including Eisenstein’s Soviet school, and that arguably in many ways sets up Rancière’s conception of the sentence image, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 29–55; for the most complete historical argument about montage’s relation to the literary techniques of eighteenth- century and Romantic writings, see James K. Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For Deleuze, cinematic movement doesn’t occur simply through the moving camera or moving objects in a shot but crucially through the assemblage of shots—through montage (24–55). We could thus counterpose our reading with one that sees the montage effects of lines 282–91 as allegorizing the successful generation of movement itself, emblematized by the start of the ship’s own unearthly, speedy transit and the crew’s reanimation in the next part of the poem (“The ship moved on” [line 335]). We might then ask what would be the montage affect of this juxtaposition between movement and aphasic rime—movement or aphasic rime?

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imposition of catachresis, something more nonrecuperative about its relation to the something made out of it. If, as in Rancière’s sentence image, the stress seems to be on how something can come out of nothing, how a common measure can paradoxically straddle the great parataxis, in the montage of Coleridge’s gloss we instead confront an app that inevitably turns back toward its encounter with nothing, toward the attempt of expressing such an encounter without the strategy, or prospect, of an identity coming out of nonidentity. To put this another way: In a poem so wrought up with the question of hospitality and the inhospitable, what might it mean to respond to that dilemma of host and guest without giving up on the fact that we, the Mariner, and albatross inhabit not simply Rancière’s mystery, but, even more emphatically, nothing? Another name for that attempt might be a Romanticism that a number of scholars are intent on exploring today. It is a poetics and it might very well be a politics and an ethics, even an ecopolitics or eco-ethics, or simply an allegory of reading. It is with us, at any rate, all of us at the “self-same moment” here at sea, Coleridge’s dead zone as a repeat of Kant’s sublime ocean, the nonrelatable point or punctuation of our nonhuman, inhuman, nonhome.

2.

Two Pipers and the Cliché of Romanticism

Anachronism and Event In what follows I first link the troping of what I call medium reflexivity in Blake and Keats to a problem of taste—the cliché—especially registered in a famous poem by Keats, a quandary that has wide-ranging implications, both threatening and defining, for the poetic and critical writing coming afterward in that work’s wake. Employing but also countering Daniel Tiffany’s dexterous “secret history” of kitsch, this explanation of the cliché reasserts Baudelaire’s sense of poetry as one of the most forceful registers of the burgeoning horizons of capitalistic life in and beyond the nineteenth century. The Romantic cliché thus converges with Sianne Ngai’s formulation of the gimmick as an especially sensitive diagnostic of the market realm, though its energies also point toward a dimension of language and techné that demands an approach by which the cliché, like the technomagism of the preceding chapter, cannot simply be historicized but must also be considered as the unreliable basis of history itself, one allegory very much associated with the Romantic literature of which Keats and Blake are considered part. Far from disabling, this predicament sheds light on such persistent, yet by no means unproblematic, categories as poetic style and critical thought that still inform today’s cultural terrain. I conclude with a thought experiment about how the ontological negativity of Keats’s Romantic cliché might then still alight upon the historical, through two candidates depicting the cultural logic underlying our present contemporary moment, the planetary devastation caused by the anthropocene and the ongoing transition from neoliberalism to state sanctioned, oligarchic capital. The analysis begins simply enough as the comparison of two pipers in a pair of well-known Romantic texts, the first by William Blake.

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Two Pipers Music is no laughing matter, to say the least. —Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More I would like to make a further motion: let us dispense with the flute girl . . . let her play for herself or if she prefers, for the women in the house. Let us instead spend our evening in conversation. —Plato, Symposium

Readers will immediately recognize my first piper, the shepherd narrator of the “Introduction” to Blake’s 1789 Songs of Innocence, who begins the author’s collection with the origin myth of poetry. Indeed, because of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, and most recently Maureen McLane, we know how to describe Blake’s myth as a passage out of piped tune into poetry that resonates with a number of other transformations: nature into civilization, speech into writing, rural into urban life, and oral into print culture.1 And we know that at one level this origin myth is not a primal scene, in the Freudian sense, insofar as it appears to be a story of generation structured by neither trauma nor antagonism. Written poetry has the plenitude of piped melody; the transformation of nature into culture is not degradation; the natural purity of song transcends the different media, pipe or hollow reed, which express it. At another level, of course, things are not so straightforward. The act of writing poetry “stain[s] the water clear” (line 18), which, aside from referring to Blake’s watercolors, also ties together images of purity and pollution, innocence and experience, into an excruciatingly indeterminate knot.2 The shepherd turned poet writes down his poem so that “Every child may joy to hear” (line 20), which can also mean that every child may not joy to hear; that and the disappearance of the child on the cloud anxiously hint at the creation of not simply poetry but a mass print audience characterized by the capriciousness of market desire. And the binary between speech and writing is itself destabilized by a slew of intermediating stages—melody, sung ballad, cursive poem, and print poem—that resist the notion of any

1. Claude Lévi- Strauss, Triste Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 294–304; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); and Maureen McLane, “Ballads and Bards: British Romantic Orality,” Modern Philology 98 (2001): 423–43. 2. All quotations from Blake’s poem are from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 7.

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pure moment of nonmediated expression. As with other songs in Innocence, Blake’s “Introduction” captivates by showing how innocence is always already structured by experience. That said, in this myth of origins sound does appear to occupy the slot of that mystified ontological starting point. The aural, what the shepherd pipes, is this song’s originating instant, its assertion, no matter how vexed, of phenomenal plenitude. Given that the piped song is about a lamb even before the shepherd sings anything, one could argue that sound in the “Introduction” never really avoids being contaminated by mimetic reference. Even more obviously, we could complicate the assertion of aural purity by noting the illuminated nature of this and other works of Blake’s creations—how the thematized question of the aural in the “Introduction” is also offset by an axis of image versus text that structures Blake’s prints, and that has been the occasion for some of the most storied work in Blake scholarship. Sound, image, and text: It’s not much of a stretch to say that this poem about the creation of poetry is, like much of Blake’s work, a mixed-media event, both literally and figuratively. Insofar as this origin of poetry mixes media associated to different degrees with a recuperation of seemingly archaic, preindustrial forms of expression, such as the ballad and its revival in the early and mid- eighteenth century, one might also see in this particular Song of Innocence an example of the flirtatious but also highly ambivalent relation between elite and vernacular poetries that Daniel Tiffany has defined as the origin story of kitsch—an appropriate enough predicament as Tiffany’s zero-sum suggestion is how much the history of kitsch is, secretly, the history of poetry.3 It’s not that difficult, however, to think of a number of examples of Romantic writings 3. Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 1–17. Much of the conceptual energy of this version of the essay comes from an engagement with Tiffany’s claims and categories. Readers will see where our studies especially converge and diverge; one small demurral perhaps useful to make immediately has to do with Tiffany’s equation of the verbal cliché finding its aesthetic counterpart in poetic kitsch; I would argue that in Tiffany’s canny history the two often function in a more free-floating relationship, sometimes as a homological dyad and other times as genus (kitsch) and species (cliché). My own tracing of the nonpoetic history of the cliché in printing fits this more free-floating sense of their relationship, as well as with others terms such as Ngai’s gimmick. For the argument that the history of the cliché is marked especially by an early twentiethcentury convergence of elite conservative dismissal and leftist, psychoanalytic suspicion, see C. Namwali Serpell, “A Heap of Cliché,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 154–57.

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aside from Blake’s poem, perhaps even in the Songs, that can much more easily be recognized as kitsch or its more reflexively ironic cousin, camp. This then is exactly where I want to shift my focus to another even more famous member of the Romantic canon, John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and to discuss this work also as a mixed-media event, one whose elevation into the poetic pantheon simultaneously occurs alongside its expression of one of the most infamous moments of, if not poetic kitsch, perhaps even more problematically, the poetic cliché.4 The multimedia dimensions of Keats’s poem might not be as foregrounded as in Blake’s work, though they’re not that difficult to notice. If not literally, the question of the image is obviously thematized in the “Urn,” as it stands as one of the most well-known examples of ekphrastic poetry in English literature. As others have observed, the poem’s title lets us know that the ode is on, not to or about, the Grecian urn, which invites us to think about a surface either to be read or seen. A gender dynamic is also clearly at play in the visual ravishment of a feminized object by an ostensibly male poet narrator.5 Sound too, is also signaled as a point of interest in the poem, through the paradoxical interplay of the muteness of the urn and “those unheard” melodies that are sweeter than heard ones (line 11).6 Sound seems then to exist figuratively, or hypothetically, in the “Urn,” as opposed to the more decisive depiction of sound as an originary source in Blake’s “Introduction.” More precisely, sound reflexively exists in the “Urn” as a figure for the past phenomenal plenitude of an antiquity now emphatically lost to present ears. Understanding the narrator’s mission to be the imaginative recovery of that experience would highlight the familiarity of what I’ve outlined about the “Urn” so far. More pertinent for this present study, with the troping of sound in Keats’s poem we have gotten to my second piper, the figure (or figures) on the Urn that incites (or incite) the narrator’s language of “pipes 4. Two studies remind me that my reading of both Blake’s and Keats’s poems as multimedia events takes place against a larger backdrop of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century transmediation of Romantic and Victorian works: Mike Goode’s Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020). 5. For one adamant reading of how the poem exposes the masculinist, predatory nature of its narration, see Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 41–57. 6. All quotations from this and other poems of Keats are from John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

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and timbrels” and “spirit ditties of no tone” that runs through the beginning and middle of Keats’s work (lines 10, 14). I’m especially interested in the “happy melodist, unwearied” of stanza 3, “For ever piping songs for ever new,” who could just as well be the urn itself as a figure painted on it (lines 23, 24). Even more exactly, I’m interested in the content of those “piping songs”; determining that might be as ultimately speculative as deciding who the “melodist” really is, but I’d like to suggest one particular reading option, that the piping songs play for us the line that immediately follows them in Keats’s poem, which happens to be one of the most notorious lines in English poetry: More happy love! more happy, happy love! (line 25)

What does it mean to understand this line, whose routine excoriation provocatively matches in reverse mirror terms the canonization of Keats’s poem, as the piped song of the urn or the urn’s figures? How might, more generally, we understand the question of the piped song as clarifying the aggressively contrary but unavoidable point of contact by which Keats and his figuratively sung, or written, Romanticism both defines the idea of elite poetry and enables critics as vocal as Clement Greenberg to see Keats as the “progenitor of modern kitsch”?7 I have two responses to these questions. The first is to note how, unlike in Blake’s “Introduction,” the piped song would not simply be the sign of phenomenal plenitude but its exact opposite: sound as mechanical white noise, the meaningless repetition of a mindless phrase. In the vigor of its exclamatory expression the line is certainly unwearied, but to call it “for ever new” is not so much to assert anything like the profundity of an origin as the painful assertion of an endless present enabled by an idiot amnesia that finds freshness in the repetitive, in “more happy, happy love!” Indeed, that aural stupidity explains why the melodist can be playing this line, without putting his pipe down the way the shepherd does in Blake’s “Introduction.” It isn’t simply, as with that other tune’s invocation of a lamb, a case of referential contamination, of this song already being about happy love before speech or language is introduced. Rather, it is about the emptiness of language as meaning, the assertion of “more happy, happy love!” as sheer abstract form that structures the song’s idiocy, its literal senselessness. 7. Tiffany, 18. Tiffany is referring to Greenberg’s famous piece, first published in 1939 in Partisan Review. See Clement Greenberg, “Avant- Garde and Kitsch,” in his Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–22.

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Devoid of semantic sense, “more happy, happy love!” can be piped like any wordless tune. If Tiffany’s argument about kitsch suggestively worries poetry’s reliance on repetition, both textual and musical, Keats’s line places the semantically derealizing tendencies of that dynamic into overdrive, exposing its rote “childish decadence” in a manner as painfully naked or exhibitionist as Tiffany’s history has been secretive, at least to the critically aware twentieth- and early twenty-first-century reader (Tiffany, 30, 72). Anton Zijderfeld describes the repetitive use of clichés as a “substitute for stuttering,” and that very much seems to be the operative action of Keats’s line, so much so that its semantic evacuation becomes a stuttering of substitution: if the song does refer to happy love, it’s love as a formal but empty cry or mark, so routine and mechanical it operates as a catachresis or an abundance of catachreses, similar to the techno-magistic aphasia we saw in Coleridge’s Mariner; “more happy, happy love!” troped as repetition, as unwearied, mindless melody.8 My second point has to do with what this sonic idiocy then does to our understanding of piped sound in the “Urn” as the poignant sign of a lost plenitude. One tactic to deal with the embarrassment of “happy love” is to see it as reflexively ironic, satirizing the charge of Cockney sentimentality that critics hurled at Keats during and after his lifetime. The poem’s descriptive “spirit ditties of no tone” would then not refer to silence but wirily acknowledge the tonally deaf egregiousness of “more happy, happy love!” We can extend this tactic further to see “happy love” virally infecting the elevated Eros for a transcendent, eternal aesthetics that would somehow recover the lost meaning of past song. If we can’t read “happy, happy love” with a straight face, we also can’t read the well-known alchemic blend of eternal desire and aesthetics in the “Urn” as anything besides adolescent gush—in that sense, the fact that “happy, happy love” is “panted” as well as piped is entirely appropriate.9 Rather than simply expressing a desire for elevated, aesthetic permanence, Keats’s poem exposes this libidinal impulse as something altogether more lowbrow and inane, something that will seamlessly integrate itself into a burgeoning market of getting and spending,

8. Anton Zijderfeld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (London: Routledge, 1979), 18. The connection in Zijderfeld’s title between the cliché and an instrumental modernity will be one through line in what follows; for an application of Zijderfeld’s stress on the repetitive nature of the cliché to the possibilities of (post-) critical reading, see Serpell, 170–77. 9. I’m grateful to James K. Chandler for pointing out to me the connection between “piping songs” and “panted.”

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“happy, happy love” as idiot consumer joy. Piped song in the “Urn,” “happy, happy love” could just as well be the future piped in pop music of a world increasingly lost in the supermarket.10 If this seems a curmudgeonly take on the lowbrow, the point that once again needs to be stressed is that the highbrow, a category like the lowbrow that Keats participated in and also unsettled, doesn’t really exist in the “Urn,” not even in the afterlife of misreading the poem the last two hundred years as one quintessential emblem of aesthetic ideology. The apotheosis of that ideology is arguably conveyed in the poem’s most famous last lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (49–50). If “more happy, happy love” celebrates an endless expenditure, a ridiculous kind of exorbitance, “Beauty is truth” asserts an aesthetic self-sufficiency, appropriately statute-like in its pithiness and selfcontainment. The poem’s last lines would thus align the urn and its piped nattering with the actions of Johnny in Avital Ronell’s reading of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy,” where in a similar narrative of exorbitance, emptiness, and plentitude, the titular character “functions as the refusal of loss, as the very opposite of the experience of deprivation for which he has been made to stand.”11 Without even entering the question of who or what speaks Keats’s poem’s last lines and how sincere they are, the history of those last lines upsets any distinction we might like to enforce between them and “more happy, happy love.” For if we want to consider a phrase repeated ad infinitum from the “Urn,” one that has been routinized as a dictum to the point of being evacuated of meaning, that exists rather as a literal sound bite than as genuine aesthetic experience, as the sign of the literary pedant (you and me) before anything else, that would not be “happy love” but instead “Beauty is truth.” The dynamic of the former has become the fate of the latter. “Beauty is truth” has become, if it wasn’t already, what “happy love” always was, a cliché.

10. For one discussion about the relation of the “Urn” to the commodity object, see David Collings, “Suspended Satisfaction: ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and the Construction of Art,” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. James O’Rourke (October 2003), https://romanticcircles.org/ praxis/grecianurn/index.html. For one elaboration of Keats’s relation to commodification and some of the scholarship studying this link, see Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 180–86, 250–80. 11. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 276.

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Beauty Gimmicks He went so far as to proclaim as his goal, “the creation of a cliché [poncif ].” He saw in this the condition for any future lyric poetry, and had a low opinion of those poets who were not equal to the task. —Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

A linguistic event characterized by the evacuation of meaning through mechanical repetition or emblematized by that repetition; a dynamic where that evacuation inserts itself into issues of distinction and taste; a predicament where that dynamic seems to register a historical narrative of increasingly complex cultural production in both its putatively commercial and noncommercial forms—that would be the realm of the cliché. The origins of the word elaborate its significance as an organizing structure and motif in Keats’s poem, as well as its further meanings in our cultural history since his time. Its modern usage appearing at the end of the nineteenth century, the cliché referred earlier to a technical term in French printing, to phrases so routinely used that they were cast as a single slug of metal, ready-made for printing. (In French clicher means “to print from a stereotype”; Benjamin’s translation of poncif in Baudelaire as cliché seems rooted in this same material history, insofar as one other meaning of poncif is “stencil.”)12 Exemplifying the collapse of truth into contentless form, if not beauty, of abstraction into meaninglessness, functionalism into uselessness, convention into calcification, and type into stereotype (in both senses of the word), the cliché literally begins as part of print modernity.13 12. So too would the hybrid pictorial photographic creation, cliché-verre, developed also during the nineteenth century; Barthes’s evaluation of the results of this artistic technique as an “inanity” might very well speak to what we are exploring here. See his Le Neutre: Notes de cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Thomas Clerc and trans. Horst Brühmann (Frankfurt: Eric Marty, 2005) 33. Insofar as poncif comes from poncer, however, such stencil-making refers to creating an image from the rubbing of a ponce or pumice stone, which also would link the cliché in Baudelaire to handcrafted technologies in place before the nineteenth-century capitalist modernity of France (and England)—exactly the point that my engagement with Ngai and the gimmick takes up. I’m grateful to Marc Redfield for pointing out to me these further meanings of poncif. 13. The contemporary meanings of cliché and stereotype also appear to result from parallel developments coming from French printing terminology. If the modern French and English use of the cliché starts at the end of the nineteenth century, the English use of stereotyping someone or something begins in the early twentieth century, with Walter Lippmann credited with using this formulation in 1922 (Milton Kleg, Hate Prejudice and Racism [Albany: SUNY Press, 1993], 135–37). Regardless of their more

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As Blake’s “Introduction” dramatizes, another name for this print modernity could be Romantic poetry; as Keats’s “Urn” shows, the question of Bourdieuan distinction that this poetry finds itself entangled with is also fundamentally the question of the cliché. Several points already made about the “Urn” reinforce these facts. The first has to do with the repetition of the penultimate line ad infinitum, until it too has attained the status of a meaningless collection of words, a condition already earnestly exemplified by the sonically repetitive idiocy of its overtly clichéd counterpart, “more happy, happy love!” Yet as Tiffany points out, beauty as a trope and as an affective and aesthetic idea is especially vulnerable to the predations of kitsch; in that sense the historical transformation of “Beauty is truth” into a cliché through its many repetitions in and beyond the classroom signals a potentiality already within the line’s statement about the beautiful. The repetitive evacuation of meaning in “more happy, happy love!” is thus a condition already there in any poetic attempt to access beauty. A similar fate occurs to another well-known, often quoted line from Keats’s Endymion, a poem whose critical reception by John Lockhart and others inaugurates the way that Keats the author function becomes an allegory for the problem of literary taste onward. I refer to “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” whose clichéd condition is vividly demonstrated in 1857 by the line becoming the motto of the Manchester Palace of Art, wrought as an arch above the Palace’s entrance window. A thing of beauty always seems that close in its cultural mediation to becoming simply a thing, physically wrought in an emphatic, triumphant manner, and thus in substance not unlike the metal slugs of the cliché in nineteenth-century printing. The comment is unfair, of course, to the degree that it overlooks how much this line from Endymion does announce a number of “joys for ever” (though certainly not all still exist): over 16,000 works of art and craft, from works of antiquity to those of Old Masters to photography and glasswork, attractions that the National Magazine pointedly contrasts with the other more omnipresent products of one of the epicenters of England’s industrialized north, and thus of the world.14 Yet the sheer number of works on display undercuts the attempt at aesthetic distinction, and elevation, that pernicious meanings—one can also refer to a harmful cliché—both seem based on the evacuation of substantial meaning whose effects might not immediately be one of explicit violence or aggression. Indeed, if anything, the effect might be more of a dulling kind; thus one can also have, simply, a stereotypical day. 14. The National Magazine, June, 1857, 119–20. I am grateful to both Nancy Yousef and Jason Rudy for bringing this reference to my attention.

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appears to motivate the notice in the The National Magazine. Instead of that one unique work of art, similar to what Keats’s poem houses, that single piece of art within its confines, the Palace presents an overwhelming abundance of art, a pleasure of partaking in huge quantities of beauty, of beauty as something that could be had in such large amounts that it coincides with the more familiar surfeit of productions of Manchester’s cotton mills and warehouses.15 Contrarily affiliated with such multiplying joys, “A thing of beauty” becomes kitsch in the way that it was formulated by critics thoroughly antagonistic to kitsch’s rise in the twentieth century, as the unfortunate effect of mass culture and industrialization that the early twentieth-century artistic avant-garde was enjoined to contest, and which made Warhol’s pivot toward kitsch in the 1960s the major intervention in the art world that it was.16 If Tiffany’s salutary secret history sees the origins of kitsch instead in earlier eighteenth-century exchanges between poetic and vernacular forms of expression, ones in their own way arguably about the confusing status of beauty in our popular and philosophic imaginations, our recuperation of the printing history of the cliché and the arch over the Palace of Art signals how much by Keats’s time this collision of the poetic and vernacular can only be made intelligible, as Benjamin’s Baudelaire will even more overtly do later in the century, as and through allegories of capitalism—industrialized and postindustrialized, separate and all at once together. The thing of beauty is the commodity qua commodity forever. Said differently, it’s not too difficult to see the two main traditions of reading Keats throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one exemplified by the Harvard Keatsians and Helen Vendler, and the other by Greenberg, Christopher Ricks, and others, as reading Keats as a poet of both the beautiful and the sublime or a poet of just the beautiful, or beauty.17 15. The notion of the “Urn” as a museum with one work inside comes from Philip Fisher, “A Museum with One Work Inside: Keats and the Finality of Art,” Keats-Shelley Journal 33 (1984): 85–102. See also Orrin N. C Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 13–25. 16. For an account of such Modernist rebukes, see Tiffany, 1–17, and Serpell, 154–57. 17. See Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), and Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). For studies that follow in Ricks’s wake with regard to the embarrassment that reading Keats incites, but with a commitment to exploring the social dimensions to that affect, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford:

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That since Marjorie Levinson this second line has attached its appreciation of Keats to an image of his poetry deftly attuned to the class, social, and material antagonisms of his day (as well as ours) would indicate how differently the critical apparatuses deployed in each genealogy deal with what the “Urn” literarily thematizes, the role of the cliché in the Keatsian museum of poetic writing. This claim returns us to another point that I’ve made about Keats’s poem, the role of repetition in effacing significance—meaning and value—from the written line, transforming it into a cliché. Given our observation about the relations among Keats, the cliché, and the ever- growing world of nineteenth-century, or “long twentieth-century,” capital, it’s not hard to view the painfully repetitive rhythm and semantics of “More happy, happy love!” proleptically, as both the capitalist fantasy of overabundant consumer plentitude and the emotive drumbeat of what Siegfried Kracauer will see in early twentieth-century cinematic spectacles, the Fordist mass assembly line of capitalist production.18 The cliché of the “Urn” would then very much also be in line with Sianne Ngai’s recent adumbration of the gimmick in capitalist culture, where in comedic texts such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Helen de Witt’s Lighting Rods (2011) the gimmick functions as the poetic, critical, social, or aesthetic device par excellence, haunting all such categories in contemporary capitalist culture by inviting the ubiquitous possibility that, like Tiffany’s kitsch, all our practices, literary and nonliterary, might depend on gimmicks.19 Like the cliché printing slug, gimmicks and their repetitive, formulaic use, their use as a formulaic practice, make, define, the subject under (post-) modern capital. Blackwell, 1985); Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Wang, Romantic Sobriety, 175–80, 250–80. Arguably, in the uncompromising sense of the negative that underscores Forest Pyle’s assertion of the radical aestheticism in Keats, we might see the first tradition of reading Keats now arriving in a place not dissimilar from the second, with Keats as the avatar of not any stable aesthetic elevation, but first and foremost as a poet of negative critique. See Pyle’s Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 18. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–86. The phrase “long twentieth century” comes from Giovanni Arrighi’s history of capital; see his The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994). 19. Sianne Ngai, “Theory of the Gimmick,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2017): 466–505.

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They are for Ngai emblematic as a “specifically aesthetic capitalist phenomenon” (468). Another way of expressing this would be to see the gimmick as undergirding capital’s apparent, historical drive toward efficiency, the well-known dream, if not cliché, of frictionless capital. How to achieve this dream? We do so through the shortcut of the gimmick as “Labor-Saving Device” (Ngai, 466), those mechanisms, now silicon and previously iron like the cliché printing block, that make our communications, our language, our productivity, that much quicker and immediate, that much closer to an instantaneous end with its means becoming ever more brief and minimal. The recognition by David L. Clark and Jacques Khalip, then, of a “minimal Romanticism” that exists alongside and in tension with more conventional notions of a Romanticism unbound and infinite, would speak to this historical moment when through such gimmicks as the clichéd printing block the idea of an instantaneous communicative system of world capital becomes increasingly literalized.20 But we might then also ask: How to register the degree to which this same dream fails, stammers, or goes wrong? We do so when some tipping point is reached—which itself might simply be a narrative figure for a condition always already happening—and the gimmick exposes itself as just that, a gimmick, where the ends—of aesthetic elevation as well as social, material, or linguistic plentitude—disappear and all we are left with is the device or gimmick itself, a functionless means insofar as its only function is to function, or in the case of the printing cliché a means so overused and repeated ad infinitum that its meaning, instrumental or otherwise, is expunged completely. The lived experience of frictionless capitalism becomes the interminable friction of all the gimmicks in our lives—that constitute our lives as such. For Ngai, the historically lived experience of the gimmick is tied even more exactingly to capitalist life, as the “objective correlative” of the experience of modern labor’s inevitable exploitation and expropriation, where the term itself that “consolidates this not so marvelous marvel does not 20. David L. Clark and Jacques Khalip, “Introduction: Too Much, Too Little: Of Brevity,” in Romantic Minimalism, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. David L. Clark and Jacques Khalip (May 2016), https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/brevity. The realization of such communicative networks and their underwriting of the Romantic era’s “fantasy of perfectible contact” is the subject of Yohei Igarashi’s The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). Readers will see a number of resonances between what follows and the observations that Igarashi garners from his own study of the Romantic “desire for [that fantasy] and its frustration” (5).

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appear in print until the late 1920s, a moment of both euphoria and radical disenchantment with a host of capitalist techniques” (471, 468). Yet her notion of the capitalist gimmick helps us also see a prehistory of both it and the cliché, so much so that the dynamic of gimmickry before the nineteenth century challenges us to consider whether we are studying a history as much as a condition: the repetitive, stuttering form or technology of techné itself. As the technique of technique, its techno-magism, this dynamic can never catch up with itself, producing the very gap between effort and effortlessness that techné is supposed to overcome. William Keach’s contribution to Clark and Khalip’s collection is telling here, insofar as his engrossing study of the “hermeneutics of abbreviation” in Percy Bysshe Shelley has as one of its orienting figures the engraved figure of Hermes as the frontispiece to John Horne Tooke’s 1789 unfinished book on language (a work that Shelley ordered from his bookseller in 1812).21 Abbreviation as the winged Hermes is thus a means to diminish or make as brief as possible the spatiotemporal gap that structures communicative language, the gap that language itself is meant to bridge but also always incites. Abbreviation as Hermes is thus language in its most effective, purest form; yet as abbreviation, that form also exposes its maladroitness, insofar as too much brevity, too much abbreviation “can produce obscurity,” exposing a god like Hermes as a failed device or gimmick (Keach).22 Tooke’s Hermes—much like Burke’s fear of French Revolutionary pamphlets, Wordsworth’s distaste for the daily communications of urban life, and Rousseau’s preference for face-to-face speech over the alienating effects of

21. William Keach, “Shelley and the Hermeneutics of Abbreviation,” in Clark and Khalip. 22. See also how Ngai calls attention to Ivor Brown’s suspicion of abbreviation as a gimmick, how as a gimmick it “irritates because it ‘abbreviates’ space and time” (Ngai, 467; Ivor Brown, Words in Our Time (London: Jonathan Cape Press, 1958), 48. Ngai further argues that the temporal experience of this enforced brevity under capitalism is a “bad contemporaneity,” a static present that expresses the paradoxical way that capital radically transforms social life while also creating the unchanging “abstract time involved in the labor-based production of value (Marx’s socially necessary labor time)” (483, 487). Hence her interest in the comedic and comic timing as a privileged way this and other contradictions under capital are especially felt and expressed (482–97). For an extensive exploration of the specific capitalist contradiction of time that Ngai deploys, one with suggestive ramifications for both Tiffany’s argument about kitsch “arresting poetry” (13) and the well-known feverish yet frozen mise- en- scène of the “Urn,” see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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script and print communication—makes the question of the instrumental gimmickry of language a central facet of the Romantic topos. The question then becomes whether that topos indicates first and foremost a period of historical chronology or an event beyond such easily identifiable parameters. The fact that the Hermes engraving in Tooke’s work has in its background an image of pyramids that Keach asserts is associated with Thoth, the Egyptian God of writing, who is one of the key players in Derrida’s well-known account of the supplementary gimmickry of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, suggests that Romanticism itself functions as a gimmick or means, a mediating prosthetic by which a more wideranging predicament—of language, media, or literature—might be known.23 That Romanticism itself, because of Keats and various twentiethcentury readers such as Greenberg (though he is only one among many) is often known as clichéd writing, or simply sentimental gimmickry, seems in this light an overdetermined judgment whose evaluation registers something that critics delivering such opprobrium are only partially aware of, if at all.24 That “something,” the capturing and conveying of essence as erasure, would involve the modernity of the cliché as the dead language of metonymy in Proust’s Swann’s Way that de Man famously examines but also the operation in antiquity of hyperbole in Longinus that Neil Hertz investigates. 25 To see these analyses exemplifying what we are discussing points to their viral, contaminating nature, insofar as the example itself increasingly begins to resemble a device, or gimmick, deployed as a scaffold for thought. (Indeed, what gimmick doesn’t point, always?) The attendant zero- sum aspects of a semantically denuding repetition, what we have associated with the cliché, highlight another pre-Romantic instance of the gimmick, the 23. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84–94. 24. That this view of Keats perhaps reaches its historical apotheosis in modernism, as evinced by Greenberg, could, however, also speak to the historically specific sense of lived critique motivating Ngai’s study. Curiously, in her own reading of the cliché of noir, Sewell makes no mention of the fact that in the Jim Thompson work she reads the key cliché repeated by a character (activating for Sewell in a manner similar to this study the cliché as the “repetition of repetition itself ”) is a variation of a line from Wordsworth, “The boy is father to the man” (172–74). 25. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 58–67; and Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 19–20.

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list of sayings written down in a commonplace book, sententiae, the pedagogical tool that becomes associated in the Renaissance with the clueless pedant, witnessed by audiences perhaps most vividly when Hamlet scornfully dismisses Polonius’s own penchant for bureaucratic speech, when the latter asks Hamlet what he is reading: “Words, words, words.”26 One of many mnemonic tools employed to instruct the mind as effectively and efficiently as possible, sententiae not only risk demonstrating, as Derrida does with Plato, how much the machinery of the mnemonic might be as or more real than the supposedly more profound category of mind and consciousness (Derrida, 108–9); through their mindless, rote repetition, the phrase “Words, words, words” also erases the meaning and value of the mnemonic itself as an intentional device. In form and effect “Words, words, words” is “more happy, happy love!”—the techno-magism of the cliché.

Back to the Present Do, then, such references historically before and after Keats’s “Happy love!” strengthen or weaken the historical argument about capitalism and the cliché as a metastructure in our ongoing encounter with the “Urn”? Actively recognizing rather than simply answering that question drives what follows in this section, insomuch as the query’s historical indeterminacy incites a set of increasingly sharp observations about our particular contemporary moment.27 To elaborate first an observation made only obliquely so far: The cliché is a printing tool, mechanism, or gimmick deployed not simply for interpersonal communication (as if any medium is only that) but as both support and evidence of the ever- expanding system of capitalist networks that exponentially begin to penetrate, cover, and literally layer the globe during the nineteenth century. The line from Keats’s cliché to Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack, if not straight, is still there. Keats’s cliché thus functions much like the category of the interesting in Ngai’s innovative study, Our Aesthetic

26. I’m grateful to Scott Trudell for bringing the notion of sententiae in Hamlet to my attention. For a discussion of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” being composed of sententiae and clichés, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87, 92; and Tiffany, 52–53. 27. For the reminder that references to the “contemporary” do not in any simple way confirm access to historical knowledge or feeling, see Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2015), 1–13.

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Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, insofar as our encounter with the cliché, like the contemporary experience of the interesting in elite and popular culture, affords an affective, conceptual glimpse of the encroachment by capitalist world systems upon communicative language otherwise too abstract and enormous to grasp.28 Like all three of Ngai’s categories, our response to the cliché and its relation to expressions on or about the beautiful also challenge Fredric Jameson’s assumption that it is only through a postmodern version of the Burkean and Kantian sublime that the overwhelming convolutions of late capitalism can be intuited (Aesthetic, 18–23).29 Through the inevitably clumsy, rote expression of the beautiful, through the twin actions of Romanticism and poetry as clichéd, rote cultural articulation, the simplistic becomes the analytic tool of something far more difficult and complex. What, however, is exactly the conscious experience of the cliché? Is it simply one of distaste, blared in the supermarket or, as in Tiffany’s account of the pop attractions of kitsch, also that which structures Warhol’s Silver Factory, the more affectively indeterminate unsettling of taste? These questions circle back to an earlier point made in our discussion, about the multimedia dimensions of Blake’s and Keats’s poems, where the question of piped sound might first appear to have been about medium specificity, but quickly became more about medium reflexivity, about how a medium as the act of mediation is mobilized to comment on claims about the unalloyed character of what mediates.30 A specific medium is invoked as pure, 28. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13, 110–73. 29. Ngai, however, contrasts her three categories with the traditional and thus limited pairing of the beautiful and sublime (Aesthetic, 20–23). Negotiating between Ngai’s position and Tiffany’s claims about the kitschy dimensions of beauty might involve exploring the difference between the beautiful and beauty; my own approach of using one for the other implies, perhaps as Tiffany suggests, the degree to which elevated notions of the beautiful are always one step away from being absorbed by more vernacular notions of beauty. For the reminder of—whether kitsch or not—the difficulty of either beauty or the beautiful in Kant, see Eli Friedlander, Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 19–23. For an understanding of what Ngai is responding to, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 34. 30. Similarly, Mike Goode has explored the question of “meta-mediacy,” a “reflectiveness about medium, or consideration of the particular problem of shared experience—immediacy—to which the reflecting medium serves as an imperfect or contingent solution” (Goode, 18). For Goode, meta-mediacy is always in proximity to the condition of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “hypermediacy,” the “tendency of media to incorporate or represent other media forms, especially those they are either

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as in Blake’s piped melody, or is deployed as the evacuation of plenitude, as in Keats’s idiot piped song; as Keats’s poem especially shows, this dynamic becomes intimately tied to questions of taste, distinctions attended to by the presence of different media. An awareness of a medium, especially triggered by its presence or reference in another, readily becomes a response about taste, where in Keats’s case, the song’s cliché, which could very well be the cliché of poetry as song, questions the status of the “Urn” as a poem in the first place. To this discussion of media and taste we can add two other terms still very alive in our contemporary moment: poetic style and critical judgment. That these two terms do have a purchase today perhaps speaks to how much our present is post-postmodern, while still Romantic; regardless, it’s again through Keats’s cliché that the wagers of these terms become clear. With regard to poetic style, it might seem at first that as mixed-media works both the “Introduction” and “Urn” are actually against this concept, insofar as they stress how Blake and Keats in different ways are among the Romantic poets who most produce poetic works that resist the category of a poem— Blake because of the illuminated nature of his prints and Keats because of how he reflexively thematizes the distasteful reception of his works as something besides poetry. They and others invent our contemporary sense of poetry and simultaneously do away with it. In Keats’s case especially this dynamic seems to be about social distinctions that would discipline a certain espousal of poetry for being a cliché, the absence of poetic style tout court. In a reformulation of Levinson’s famous phrasing, however, this in fact turns out to found the origins of a style, if not of contemporary aesthetic style itself. This more ambitious rephrasing connects what occurs in the “Urn” to the decisive bifurcation in English writing between, as described by Tiffany, poetic expression as either poetry or literature. Timothy Michael has his own version of this account, where he intriguingly connects Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth together by claiming that both their language and comportment assert a universal expression of the English language, and thus of the communicating English subject, that does not change because of any shifting circumstance of time or place.31 Regardless of the class or social situation, independent of the medium of communication, replacing or in rivalry with” (Goode, 18). See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 1–51. 31. Timothy Michael, “Wordsworth’s Boswellian Life-Writing,” Wordsworth Circle 44, no. 1 (2013): 37–40. See also how Guillory connects Johnson and Wordsworth (125–26).

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Johnson and Wordsworth both speak and write as they always do. This is a notion of the vernacular or, in Wordsworth’s case, of poetry as the vernacular, what Tiffany associates with literature and the generic aims of the novel, where the elevated status of literary expression doesn’t depend on any poetic, kitschy poaching of the vernacular, which would out poetry and its elite pretensions as poetry. (Tiffany’s formulation also enables us to see how much poetic style distills tensions and attendant practices, both critical and creative, that organize the history of the novel, but are arguably more obscured by the novel’s constitutive hybridity and increasingly robust association with commercial success and mass distribution.) In contrast to the double binds of such elite poaching, the communicative styles of both Johnson and Wordsworth insist on a universal Englishness that represents itself as simply that, the language or literature of common men speaking what they have in common with other men. Such a commonality is inimical to the cliché, insofar as to remain the same, independent of the contingencies of social life, is to invite a communicative repetition that would risk the cliché, something that caricatures of both Johnson and Wordsworth certainly exploit.32 Paradoxically, insofar as the cliché is perceived as always parasitic, referring to something it reduces and parodies and is not, the presence of a cliché means one’s language will always be mixed, neither pure nor homogenous. Moreover, as John Guillory and Thomas Pfau have each separately noted, the linguistic autonomy of the English subject that Michael sees Johnson and Wordsworth modeling was not a blueprint for the somewhat oxymoronic notion of a universal vernacular, but the imagined universality of the language of England’s burgeoning middle class toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.33 In the last two hundred years, as Weberian rationalization has increasingly become replaced by fragmentation within the capitalist society to which the middle class belongs, it has become clear that such an unwavering sense of language, and of either poetry or literature as that language, cannot hold in any real or desirable way. Poetic experimentation has thus become increasingly associated with its embrace of the vernacular as nonpoetic discourse—with an avid encounter 32. Arguably, Boswell made a career of flirting with this risk of turning the celebratory recognition of Johnson’s distinct persona into a caricature of his manners as a set of clichés; for one example of when Wordsworth’s constancy is perceived as a limiting type, though not quite a cliché, see Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 512–13. 33. Guillory, 124–33; and Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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with the linguistic detritus, dead language, and clichés that make up the full spectrum of verbal performance in contemporary society. A seeming break with the notion of style for the likes of Baudelaire and other antagonists of bourgeois aesthetic sensibility, this encounter comes to in many ways stand for poetic style in John Ashbery, the other New York School poets, and such contemporary heirs as Timothy Donnelly.34 Given their radical antipathy toward linguistic expression under capitalism, the antilyric, anti-style ethos of the Language School might seem to be an exception to what I suggest here; if, however, one replaces style with Jameson’s perhaps more analytic “cultural logic,” they too can be seen following in the wake of the Keatsian cliché, one of a variety of poetic and artistic configurations of nonelite culture activated for any number of purposes, from the conceptual dissonances of aesthetically indeterminate pleasures, at once embarrassing, embarrassed, and defiant, to ruthless critique and ideological demystification built not on a knowing critical lexicon but the vibrant poesis of a culture, or language, if not in ruins, then submerged in obsolescent gimmickry and postapocalyptic trash. 35 Before Warhol’s Silver Factory, there is Keats’s museum with one cliché inside. The status of critical language under this now not so new dispensation of the cliché, needs, however, further consideration. That we think we might be able to do away with the category of critical language altogether, that we understand our decentered existence to disallow the critical distance needed for critical thought, more than anything else simply registers the degree that we believe ourselves still to be what was called, back in the day, following Jameson, postmodern. Yet it would be difficult to claim that, within or beyond postmodernism, distinction in the Bourdieuan sense doesn’t occur. To elaborate: Following Tiffany, it might be bracing to consider the entirety of Songs of Innocence and Experience, with the collection’s participation in the ballad revival, as an early Romantic experiment in kitsch. Certainly, Blake’s oeuvre in a number of ways seems fearless about incorporating the cartoonish, outlandish, and campy in his verbal and visual statements.36 34. For a study of both the New York School and Baudelaire in terms of both kitsch and the cliché, see Tiffany, 169–230. 35. That Language Poetry finds in Keats a fellow traveler is suggested also in how Keats’s poem Lamia succinctly fills out the capitalist Lebenswelt composed in Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts: “Love in a hut, with water and crust, / Is—Love forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust” (Part 2, l.1). This is the netherworld age of huts—our world—between Silliman’s Blakean age of Innocence and the age of Experience. 36. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 216.

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Similarly, one can see in Blake as much as in Keats an interest in what we could call clichéd thought, in the poet’s warfare against priestly mental forms and, as Mike Goode has argued, in Blake’s send-up of the sententiae-like list of proverbs in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Goode, 46–61). Still, when juxtaposed with “more happy, happy love!” or even “Truth is beauty” something like “stained the water clear” doesn’t seem at all to partake of the denuding energy of the cliché that attaches itself to Keats’s lines. We might also wonder why Blake’s repetitive use of “happy” in his poem, as in “happy pipe” and “happy chear,” doesn’t draw the critical ire that Keats’s “happy, happy love” does. Likewise, Tiffany’s own wonderfully descriptive phrase for poetic kitsch, “My silver planet,” drawn from what Lycius dreamily sees in his lover’s eye in Keats’s great hodgepodge poem of kitsch, Lamia, does not seem to be a cliché, much less kitsch, though it may describe the weird, commoditized Eros of kitsch. Thus, as much as Tiffany’s secret history worries how much poetry might really just be kitsch, as much as kitsch seems to be full of totalizing energies that intimate there is nothing but kitsch, our encounter with kitsch and cliché also emits differences of both kind and degree, where everything isn’t a cliché in the same uniform way. There’s nothing but kitsch, but to be kitsch, there must be something else besides kitsch. With regard to Blake’s “Introduction,” which doesn’t seem to function like the cliché of poetry as song in the way that the piped music of the “Urn” vehemently does, the implication seems to involve a thornier sense of how elite poetic culture and the vernacular interact, something signaled by Blake’s status as a member of the artisanal class, a fact that complicates the field of production in which the poaching of the vernacular was understood to occur. 37 Who exactly revives the ballad might go a long way toward instancing who or what might be maligned.38 Indeed, such a question might 37. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112–34; for a helpful application of Bourdieu’s ideas about both restricted and large- scale cultural production to the question of contemporary aesthetics under late capitalism, see Nicholas Brown, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital,” Non-Site (March 13, 2012). For insights into the social and artistic implications of Blake’s standing as a member of the artisanal class, see Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 53–54, 78–154. 38. For more on the ballad revival and its conception of nonprint culture, which might then help us recognize the different expectations we now have for a ballad and an ode, see the discussion of Blake’s interest in MacPherson and others in Mee, 75–120.

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very well then enhance the ongoing question of the difference between reading Blake’s songs either innocently or with experience, with now either clueless kitsch pleasure or critically aware kitsch taste. Conversely, the opprobrium directed toward the “Urn” emphatically demonstrates that the relation between elite and vernacular poetic production was not simply equal, two-way traffic; what an artisan might produce as a poetry of the vernacular was a different wager than what a Cockney might create as a poem that claims both to be and to be about an object of elite culture. Formally, the difference between childlike and childish (as in “childish decadence”) might simply involve the placing of “happy” in two contiguous lines instead of side by side together. The more pertinent issue, however, is not simply that taste, distinction, or critical intelligence happens even during this moment within or beyond the postmodern. The dilemma is what becomes of critical reflexivity and its various inscriptions once it becomes aware of the cliché. For while poetic language arguably seems to gain some mastery over the cliché by embracing it, by seeing in its pop menace something like poetry’s own subjecthood— the fact of nonmeaning and the never in balance slide between sincerity and theatricality or directness and the elliptical, say—the same can’t be said for critical discourse. Invoking the cliché, asserting the ubiquity or endless regress of the cliché, doesn’t quite account for the structure of feeling involved in all our strenuous attempts as critics and theorists to avoid being a cliché. One might more readily admit to being linguistically indeterminate, ideologically interpellated, affectively recessive, a simulacrum, a clone, a momentary assemblage, or an automaton than a cliché. The encounter with the poetic or artistic cliché might generate critical thought, but that thought cannot face itself as a cliché. In its embrace or exploitation of the cliché, aesthetic experimentation with kitsch might be a form of critical judgment, but the critical evaluation of that form, form’s own formulation, as it were, cannot be recognized as clichéd. Regardless of the “homeopathic” logic of kitsch proposed by Tiffany, where a dose of kitsch within an artwork incites a “critical poetics of kitsch” (Tiffany, 241), we cannot help wonder how much something anterior to See also, more generally, McLane; and Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: the Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2007). See also Paula McDowell’s scrupulous argument about the way print culture enabled the idea of an oral culture in her The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

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the cliché, if not to kitsch’s silver planet, remains in tension with that logic and poetics, and thus constitutive of the very antinomy that is critical thought (and writing) itself. To put it more bluntly: Although we might be willing in theory to flirt with the homeopathic logic of kitsch in our own prose, who among us would really double down in our pedagogy and our own writing, on literature, culture, and theory, and define the outcomes of both merely (in the Kantian sense) as clichés? I leave it to the reader to consider to which particular subfield of academic production they belong, one that sees the risk of the cliché most immediately in functionalist clarity or gnomic inscription. Indeed, that for many of us our most vivid as well as narcissistic encounter with this predicament occurs within the confines of the academy, through either the successful repetition of an idea into rote jargon or the first time disastrous use of a neologism that never catches on because of its too gimmicky nature speaks to the materially social nature of these distinctions—in that sense, C. Namwali Serpell is correct that, regardless of our desires, criticism is cliché (153). In that vein we might wonder if the task then becomes one of amplifying those critical experiments, like those of Borges’s self-satirizing scholar and of the Romantic essayists the Opium Eater and Ettrick Shepherd, that embrace critical writing as an exercise in types and stereotypes, where the clichéd writing of a pop, Warholian sensibility becomes the way through and to critical thinking.39 Yet when considered beside the asymmetries of the interaction between elite and vernacular language, thought’s own affective inability to recognize its enactment of what it knows, the deconstructive relation between itself and the gimmick of language and media, might also speak to a fundamental condition by which our materially social histories are afterward then made. The interface between taste and medium reflexivity that this piece has tracked in Blake and Keats, the machinations of medium distinction instead of medium specificity, would then not be so much about the realization of critical judgment as the obligation of at once a more formal and far-reaching event, the fact of the incommensurate and the asymmetrical, the ineluctable difference from this and that, also radically internal to any identity (even kitsch) we or thought might propose. The question of distinction might very well constitute a certain history, how the repetition of “Truth is Beauty” in a host of academic and nonacademic settings turns that phrase into a cliché. But the question of distinction might also register the trope of formal repetition itself—of “More happy 39. For a fascinating account of the relation between James Hogg and “James Hogg, The Ettrick Shepherd,” see Peter Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94–135.

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love! more happy, happy love!”—as both the cliché and the elevated aesthetic form championed by “Truth is beauty”; the moment of that form’s full achievement would be the radical disappearance of content, even as the cliché would also assert itself as simply form, a mediation with nothing in it. Indeed, this is the biggest problem for the argument for medium specificity, as well as perhaps the idea of the specific itself: that such an identity exists positively without mediation; in that sense medium specificity does exist, but as an impossibility, like de Manian imposition or Derridean justice. The problematic of media in this case as the very stuff of history, instead of what history simply makes, would be the techno-magistic event that both wards off and conjures the cliché—song as plenitude and as empty noise.

Mad Pursuits If exchange is the criterion for generality, theft and gift are those of repetition. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? —John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In perhaps fitting postmodern fashion the Romantic cliché would thus seem ultimately to incite aesthetic style as contentless form, at the cost of whatever both history and critical thought might try to express. My final observations, however, refer to two historical accounts that have arguably surpassed the relevance of Jameson’s key term in his (and others’) analytic of our cultural logic: the ongoing global warming effects of the anthropocene; and late capitalism’s latest stage, the explicit transformation or sequencing of neoliberalism, brought on in the West by many of neoliberalism’s own mystified policies, into oligarchic capitalism.40 One might be tempted to contrast these two narratives not only by a difference in scale but also as the difference between a non- or posthuman and human history. That distinction should be qualified, however, when we remember one of Romanticism’s most vivid depictions of the ArchOligarch par excellence, he who transhistorically reigns over Castlereagh and Sidmouth, in one guise Jupiter and the other the more earthbound 40. For Jameson, of course, the loss of history in postmodernism could be explained historically as one symptom of late capitalism ( Jameson, 1–54). For a discussion of the anachronistic status of the postmodern as a critical analytic, see Orrin N. C. Wang, “Two Pipers: Romanticism, Postmodernism, and the Cliché,” in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel (London: Routledge, 2015), 518.

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Cenci, Shelley’s Ozymandias. Tiffany’s equation of kitsch with the formulaic, repetitive, nonexceptional power of epic (152) is arguably cathected in “Ozymandias” through the aggressively non-epic imaging of the cliché of sovereign might, something accomplished not simply by Ozymandias’s concluding, ironized statement about his despotic authority but also by his splintered visage spread over the desert floor. In retrospect, could these fragments not be the overused, effaced, meaningless printing slugs of sovereign expression and communication, the nonhuman remainder of vain power and caricatured ego that nevertheless conceptually and affectively animates much of what we encounter in oligarchic capitalism today? That this Arch- Oligarch might also simply be the Anthropos, and thus Shelley’s poem a succinct expression of both this creature’s end and continuing effect on a barren landscape, might further speak to how the disproportionate scale of these two invoked histories demands the very kind of “parallax view” that Slavoj Žižek in another context bids us to attempt.41 At this point, however, we would do well to remember Tiffany’s admonition not to overlook the potentiality hidden within the cliché as an indeterminate social entity, as a linguistically, politically, and aesthetically furtive “enigma” (153). Much like Ngai’s consideration of the seemingly innocuous terms the cute, zany, and interesting, Tiffany’s study sees in the antirealism, nonpsychology, and nonoriginality of kitsch an Adorno-like goad toward critical awareness, with the poetic cliché in particular emitting “the truth, whether manifest or submerged, of the society in which it circulates” (Tiffany, 238). And what might that truth now be, the particular, barely discernible trace of a collective “hidden” grievance that incredibly survives our prior reading of Keats’s notorious lines in the “Urn” (Tiffany, 13), an inscription nonetheless existing within an effaced, formally empty nonmeaning that is in continuity with the erasure of countless printings, the cancellation of intelligibility via multiple playings, and (now) the necessarily ongoing degradation of hardware behind our ever-increasing text messaging and telecommunications? It would be what neoliberalism envisioned as a fundamental right of market life, and what oligarchic capitalism denies for every nonelite: the pursuit of happiness. Instead, we are increasingly instructed to find value or consolation elsewhere, in the compensatory tribal body, ethnically cleansed and sexually policed with less and less subtlety. 41. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4–13. For a pertinent discussion of how the end of the anthropocene also colors the disciplinary demise of Romanticism as a specific field of study in the university, see Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 11–18.

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We are all aware of the cul- de- sacs and entrapments that the quest for happiness has presented to us, which the Enlightenment and Romanticism devised for both those gone and those living today; and, furthermore, how this happy dream of class advancement and geotemporal and spatial mobility was foisted upon us as one key pillar of the neoliberal project.42 With, however, that scheme presently facing its own insupportable dissonances and gimmickry, increasingly replaced by a ruling structure totally uninterested in the happiness of anyone outside the dynastic, one percent family, what might this newly deracinated, “mad pursuit” of happiness in the “Urn” now look like? (line 9). If, as Serpell notes, the “promiscuity” of the cliché “registers those functions of language Jakobson links to desire,” what libidinal appeal might this pursuit now assert? (175). What might more happy, happy love currently express? Perhaps something queer in the nonreproductivity of its repetition, but also queer in the nonhomogenous replication of that repetition as well, a practice and inscription found in this section’s opening quote of Deleuze that meets up with much of what is being developed as the lexicon by which the devastating consequences of the anthropocene can be articulated:43 something fundamentally—radically—total and superficial, like Tiffany’s Keatsian silver planet, not at all necessary or directed toward any end, but in ways oblique, embarrassing, and overt, worth the poetry, worth the medium, worth the struggle. Will this judgment and its practical effects be ones of taste? Without a hint of irony, we might respond, who knows? This nonknowledge would then be what we have tracked temporally as the allegory of anachronism and event in and through the Romanticism of the cliché as ruse and resource.44 More happy, happy love indeed—or, as painfully enjoined to some ears, yes, please.45

42. See, for example, Joel Faflak, “Jane Austen and the Persuasion of Happiness,” in Romanticism and the Emotions, ed. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 98–123; Vivason Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 43. See, for example, Khalip, Last Things, 15–17. 44. For the formulation of the anachronism as more than simply a dated identity—as the very potentiality of the event—see Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 11. 45. Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 90–135.

3.

The Gothic Zany

One of the categories in Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), is the zany as an unrelenting symptom of late capitalism, the embodiment and persona of a manic industriousness that blurs the difference between labor and recreation, workplace and play site, and production and consumption, making all part of the same experiential zone of remorseless slapstick energy.1 The zany as cultural referent becomes a commonplace aesthetic signaling a crazed functionality that is its own end, a never-ending process of hyperactivity for its own sake that defines the late capitalist subject. Ngai traces the affective and performative genealogy of the zany type back to its sixteenth- century commedia dell’arte roots (192–97). But might we also not see in the high-wire, improvisational, reactive, and proactive scheming of late eighteenth- century gothic villains such as Manfred in The Castle of Otranto and Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho the likewise theatrical affect of the zany? Might we not see in these archetypical figures of arguably the first identifiable genre of Western mass culture the emerging experiential signs of late capitalist life’s frantic, zany pace? Such figures’ over-the-top, theatrical pacing would converge with Jerrold Hogle’s long-standing argument about the gothic simulacrum as a proleptic sounding of late capital’s non-ontology, the hyperabstraction of the money form.2 For if late capital’s particular kind of world-making is characterized by a stage in capitalist history where capital is absolutely equated with the 1. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 174–232. 2. Jerold E. Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibility of Genre: Reforming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176–210.

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world, where there is nothing actually particular about capital, might the gothic zany already evince affectively if not cognitively for its reading and viewing audiences the future of their own immediate moment of classical capitalist modernity, a monomania that levels the differences among elites and subalterns and all heterogeneous figures in between? Like Ngai’s viewers of the postmodern zany, those earlier readers or theater audiences of the gothic zany encounter the emotional and bodily intensity by which labor or activity under the abstraction of the money form will be increasingly lived. Print and stage, the two mediums of the gothic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially foreground the zaniness of world capital that begins more and more to be the horizon of our lived experience to this day. What follows therefore participates in the argument that the interaction or interface between media and genre is an especially attuned, affective register for historical knowledge.3 In other circumstances, that interaction might signal the deconstruction or deterritorialization of such categories as history or critical knowledge, as in this collection’s attendant study of the techno-magistic cliché in Keats. In this instance, however, the focus will by and large remain on the horizon of contemporary capital tremblingly felt by the encounter with the gothic zany. Yet this essay also goes beyond this confrontation, insofar as it concludes with a consideration of the Wordsworthian gothic, Wordsworth’s world of shadowy ghostly human figures, that David Simpson has connected to the poet’s imaginative recognition of the pervasive penetration of capital into nature and mind, country and city, in and beyond early nineteenth-century England. The tone of Wordsworth’s encounters with his uncanny figures, often disquietingly subdued and minimally expressive, might at first seem the very opposite of the frantic mania exorbitantly dramatized by the gothic zany. Yet the intrageneric and intermedial landscape considered here allows us to view Wordsworth’s poetry as yet another distinct symptom of what the gothic zany anticipates, the experiential character of life under capital not as the zany hyperactive but as the gothic hypo-active, an equally valid social (or cultural or even aesthetic) reaction to a world system of capital too much, always, with us. The zany and the minimally expressive become two reactive formations attuned to not simply the theatrical but the oppressively televisual dimensions of capital’s global character. If the 3. A similar attention to the relation between genre and media can be seen in the treatment of Ann Radcliffe in Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 81–106.

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hyperkinetic maneuverings of the gothic villain seem in their most aggressive forms impossible to turn off, that dynamic, motile intractability in Wordsworth migrates away from the bodily form of the individual literary character to enliven the distant, affective rumblings of an as of yet conceptualized world system, of which a character’s appearance, or appearance itself, is, merely but also quite precisely, a transmission.

Falling The joke, of course, is that gothic characters such as Manfred and Montoni believe their hyperactivity to be in the regressive service of baroque plots of Mediterranean feudal entailment, the aspiration of the unentitled to gain titles and property through marriage and other kinship alliances, as well as murder and mayhem. Gothic zanies appear reflexively to stand in for a rearguard action, a hysterical response to how, as E. J. Clery has demonstrated, the gothic stages and manages the trauma of the transition from propertied to moneyed wealth.4 And so these characters seem to enact an earlier capitalist subject’s desire to hold onto the signs of feudal privilege and power at whatever the cost, whereas in their often ultimately pointless machinations these gothic zanies also signal the hypertemporality of capitalism’s future twentieth- and twenty-first-century subjects. Their feverish scheming and improvisations reflect a Weberian Puritanical bourgeois industriousness already gone haywire, a Ponzi-like avariciousness already fed and freaking out on the convoluted, amphetamine-like energies of a world market, and world wars, ever more coming to be. Walpole’s Manfred, inhabiting for many the first gothic novel, Otranto, embodies in many ways the gothic zany in pure form. In his hectic attempts to stay one step ahead of the seeming contingencies of giant falling armor, dying heirs, and unexpected rivals, Manfred displays the improvisational torques of the zany whose typical state is to be off balance, always on the verge of spinning out of control and falling down. Falling, or seeming to fall, is a key slapstick maneuver of the commedia dell’arte zany, one that Paul de Man sees Baudelaire endorsing as the ironic recognition of the moment when gravity makes us a nonhuman object or thing.5 The 4. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 211–16. The paradoxes of gravity and falling are key figures in de Man’s writing; for one inquiry into them, see Cathy

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counterpoint to this dynamic is, of course, Marx’s famous depiction of the animated table, the commodity form come to life, defying both gravity and non-agential existence through the supernatural forces of market exchange.6 In his own argument that Otranto stages the anxieties of market rather than of propertied capital, Jamison Kantor sees in Walpole’s uncanny objects exactly this phantasmal energy of the commodity form.7 Likewise, by describing the helmet and other gothic items in Otranto as “funny things” that defy the epistemological authority of the story’s feudal patriarchal settings, Eugenia Zuroski identifies the affective charge associated with their appearance as an indeterminate mix of humor, horror, and Satyric intimation of the grotesque, a reaction that could very well describe the simultaneously silly and menacing—zany—intuition of life under commodity capitalism, all the more kinetic and wrought up because of its yet to be named existence, its felt but not yet conceptualized, or theorized, reality.8 Hogle has connected this sense of burgeoning capital in gothic literature to the genre’s mass cultural theatrical origins, the way that gothic objects in Otranto function as props in a text that exposes the simulacra of life under capital as props, the commodity form as the simulation of the forever displaced genuine article, so to speak. (As Walpole’s Strawberry Hill suggests, first and foremost among such props would be the castle of Otranto itself.) The presence of Ngai’s reformulation of the commedia dell’arte zany in Walpole not only buttresses these connections among capital, theater, and Caruth, “The Claims of Reference,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4, no. 1 (1990): 193–205. For an account of how the dramatic devices of the harlequinade and pantomime, generic relatives to commedia dell’arte, are deployed in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, see Dana Van Kooy, Shelley’s Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 27–57, 162–87. 6. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin), 163–64. For one key discussion of this scene that explicitly reads the table through the logistics of ghostly conjuration, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1993), 142–61. See also David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concerns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 150–66. For the suggestion that there is a straight line between this passage in Marx and the commodity fetishism that is the meta- story of the technological and corporate giant that constitutes Disney animation, see Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 241. 7. Jameson Kantor, “Horace Walpole and the Fate of Finance,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 58, no. 2 (2016): 133–55. 8. Eugenia Zuroski, “Funny Creatures: Walpole’s Satyrs and the Unstill Life of Things,” (unpublished), 3.

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print. Through Ngai and de Man and Baudelaire, the always about to fall zany further reminds us that we ourselves are the most vivid things, or objects, under capitalist life. Manfred dodges this way and that, improvising and calculating his options on the spot, as giant armor and ghostly paintings close in on him, himself simply one increasingly spinning object to be crushed or flattened by another. The breathless, extemporary character of Manfred’s actions are confirmed less than a couple pages into the first chapter, where in no small order he witnesses Conrad being “dashed to pieces” by the gigantic plumed helmet;9 is caught off guard when Theodore as a then unnamed peasant notices the resemblance between the helmet and the one belonging to the statue of Otranto’s former prince, Alfonso; discovers that the helmet of that statue is missing; frames Theodore for the death of Conrad as a way to divert the mob’s focus on this connection; asserts his divorcing of Hippolyta and proposes to Isabella; and has the portrait of his grandfather spectrally confront him, causing him to let Isabella escape from his patriarchal grasp. In the way that Isabella, Hippolyta, and Matilda are first dumbfounded and then completely misconstrue Manfred’s reaction to Conrad’s death we witness a zany mentally and affectively five steps ahead of those around him, a fact confirmed by their (and we might presume, the reader’s) incredulity when he alerts them to his plan B, to marry Isabella himself to secure Otranto forever. Part of Zuroski’s argument about the “funny thing” is the ludicrous, inappropriate problem of scale it initiates, exemplified not only by the size of the helmet that crushes Conrad but also by that of its massive, billowy feathers.10 Something akin to that absurdity attends Manfred’s scheming, both in its immediacy and exorbitance (divorce wife and marry dead son’s betrothed now), by which the very madcap energies that the zany embodies becomes the chief feature of the story that he constructs for himself and those around him. If Otranto is about how the literalities of a name, body, body armor, and castle become increasingly indistinguishable, the conflation of body and thing or idea in Manfred’s case is a narrative increasingly run on zany energy. Manfred’s most bravura—that is, ridiculous—improvisation is his momentary gaining of balance after Theodore defeats the Marquis Frederic 9. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W. S. Lewis and E. J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19; all references to the novel are to this edition. 10. Eugenia Zuroski, “Walpolooza,” (unpublished), 1.

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who has popped up with a giant’s sword to threaten the ruler of Otranto. Manfred brokers a deal with Frederic that both throws the novel’s Oedipal dynamism into high relief and ratchets up the triangulation of that plot into the complexity of a mathematical equation, in which the patriarchs agree to marry each other’s daughters, excluding young Theodore from his own romantic entanglement with either Matilda or Isabella. With Manfred/ Frederic in contest with Theodore for Isabella/Matilda, this basic psychoanalytic configuration achieves the precarious equilibrium literalized somatically by the commedia dell’arte zany, insofar as at any moment, along with the threat of Theodore and Matilda successfully pairing off, the binding of either dyad—Manfred/Frederic or Isabella/Matilda—could dissipate, leaving one character to peel away from the plot and the others scrambling to come up with another way to channel or construct the conflicts of the novel. That is exactly what happens, when after his own supernatural encounter in the castle Frederic withdraws from any libidinal investment in Otranto, all but saying exit stage left, and Manfred discovers that not only does he have no way to reach his goal, but as important he has no plot to further the plot. It’s here where the wheels come off with Manfred and the novel crashing to earth, concluding with him mistakenly stabbing Matilda and Theodore revealed as the rightful heir of Otranto, all within the condensed span of several pages. Previously, Frederic actually both zigs and zags, insofar as he has two supernatural confrontations, one vicariously through the servant Bianca and the other face to face, with both resulting in him deciding to quit his designs on Otranto. Manfred convinces Frederic to stay after his initial decision, “mak[ing] such submissions to the marquis, and [throwing] in such artful encomiums on Matilda, that Frederic was once more staggered” (104; my emphasis). Archaically meaning to waver in one’s intention or certitude, “staggered” also meant during Walpole’s time what it does now, to stumble physically and almost fall. Thus through this one word Otranto condenses its entire jeopardy, action, and attraction, where to be zany is to be in a perpetual stagger, both proactively and reactively, one funny object responding to and acting upon, in pursuit and playing off of, everyone and everything else. Within the mental and physical as well as narrative kinetics of Walpole’s novel, “once more staggered” is less an interruption or anomaly as the fundamental affective condition of the zany, itself partitioned by instances of rest more like the momentary exhale among multiple crises or the focusing of one’s attention already informed by some fast approaching threat, distraction, or object appearing out of the corner of one’s eye.

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Its in-motion pleasures increasingly inhering in Manfred’s improvisations, unmoored really from any in-depth psychological understanding of his dynastic-creating desires, Otranto delineates the conflation of means and ends that is the existential sign of the capitalist zany, as objectified in its kinetics as every other still and moving object around it, with which it might collide. In a work saturated with portents and signs of every sort, what further instruction does the reading audience of Otranto really need after its first few pages and the death of Conrad by the giant falling helmet? Fit objects in this world move, swerving this way and that; unfit objects don’t and get crushed by other objects dropping from the sky. One could be Manfred or one could be Conrad; one’s plot could be that of the sins of the elder and who rightfully owns the estate, but within the hyper-uneven development that structures all modern culture and that the gothic especially evinces, one’s plot could also simply be manic action itself, movement qua movement that attunes capitalist life to the zany force of gravity as acceleration, menace, and the instant ever always before the crash—until the crash happens, as Kantor reminds us the markets in England did in 1721 during Walpole’s father’s time in parliament, and one’s thingness is unconditionally unveiled, with someone like poor Conrad segueing simply into the “bleeding, mangled, remains” of an it (19).11 That Otranto ultimately does end with Manfred and the other characters in a quiescent state of aphanisis and melancholy, with Theodore in perhaps a state as unmanned and depleted as sickly Conrad’s at the book’s beginning, speaks to the novel’s prescient sense that a revitalization of the entailment plot, its reanimation, would be the gothic-as-complete-fiction. Novelistic closure really means coming to a state of rest in Otranto, with Theodore’s Isabella-enabled perpetual mourning of Matilda signaling a less than triumphant biopolitical future for the couple and their regeneration of the Otranto estate. The attractions of gothic as well as Romantic literature to what James Chandler calls “thanatopsis,” a “view of death,” could then be seen as a critique of biopolitics avant la lettre, if we wanted strictly to assign Foucault’s theoretical formulation to a time before Malthus and others.12 11. As Kantor observes, the “South Sea Bubble” crash catapulted Robert Walpole into political power and the office of the Prime Minister, where “he continued, ironically, the Whiggish expansion of state-backed public credit and high finance”; Horace Walpole himself coined the terms “bull” and “bear” to describe how the market might fluctuate (Kantor, 141–42). 12. James K. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 430. Chandler applies the idea of thanatopsis to his reading of Keats’s “To Autumn”; for a study of

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More immediately for us, this deadening of personal and social libido that makes the Otranto castle feel, even with the restoration of its rightful heir, a haunted husk, critically engages with what the biopolitical especially converges with in our own contemporary moment, the affective machinations of zany capital. In its closing quiescence, a static future that allows Theodore perpetually to “indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” (115), the book’s unwritten message is that the only other alternative to such a condition would be to rev up these figures once again into the same furious activity, or labor, of gothic’s generic formulas—of the gothic zany. Of course, in some fundamental way that would be no alternative at all, to the degree that in a world of commodities, some spinning and moving furiously and some at dead rest, the thanatopic does not really signal some absolute other to life’s vitalist kinetics. More precisely, the nonregenerative, queer allure of the thanatopic—the “happiness” in Walpole of a man and woman in constant mourning for another woman, say (115)—simply indexes a critical awareness of its own condition under capital, a state of play that eschews both life or death, insofar as those categories hold out the possibility of escaping, either in human life or through human death, the workings of the commodity form. The gothic zany as the real of capitalist existence says otherwise. Walpole’s defense of the buffoon in the preface to the second edition of Otranto elaborates these dynamics. His move is noticeably self-serving, allying himself to the mix of tragedy and comedy in Shakespeare against Voltaire. Walpole’s buffoon, epitomized by the hysterical, superstitious servant, would also seem to confine the comedic energies of Otranto to the particular function of a nonaristocratic, class-based type. Yet Northrop Frye’s famous formulation of the differences between comedy and tragedy and irony— between the plot that resolves conflict between generations and ones that emphatically do not—enables us to see what might really be involved in Walpole’s defense of the comic.13 What is his gothic, in other words, but unregenerate comedy, a resolution that is not resolute, insofar as it blunts, sidesteps, or blocks Frye’s essential sense of natural propagation and social renewal that defines the comedy narrative, so consistently embodied in the regenerative troping of the heteronormative couple? And what is unregenerate comedy but, contrary to Walpole’s delimiting buffoon, the zany tone Keats’s ode that then extends this notion to the registering of commodity capitalism in the poem, see Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 180–86. 13. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163–239.

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of Otranto as a whole as well as of its main characters, especially the confounded, madly scheming, ever-contorting Manfred? Not really tragic, the delinking of the zany’s manic action from any outcome, what Ngai asserts is the end that the zany means, its decoupling from its own quest for an heir, property, or triumphant biopolitical life—insofar as this is what especially attracts or endures in Otranto, that is the rub of the zany glimpsed more than two hundred years ago for us, today.

No Home We would be remiss, however, not to note more fully one figure that perhaps stands out as an alternate zany to Manfred in Otranto, the first victim of his predations for land and title, Isabella. Her frantic escape from Manfred down into the maze-like foundations of the castle, replete with its own slapstick scene of misrecognition that has Theodore not only mistake her voice for Matilda’s but also fall in love with that mistake, seems full of zany, albeit thankless, energy. One might ask if Isabella seems zany why not Matilda, but that seems to be exactly the point of Otranto, how difficult it is ultimately to keep them distinct and apart. Indeed, their interchangeability hits all the high notes covered in the essay so far: not only the nonindividuality of the female subject under both patriarchal feudalism and commodity capitalism, not simply the degree to which their replaceable likeness expresses their objectified status in both systems of exchange, but also how the arbitrariness of both Theodore’s and their desires does away with any semblance of integrity needed for the generative libidinal energies of Frye’s comedic plot. (If the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream at least appear to find their proper mates at the end of the play, how does that compare to Theodore, who permanently fixates on whom he thinks he hears and talks with in the dark depths of Otranto, as opposed to whom he actually encounters?) If the main lesson of contemporary neoliberal life is that we’re all replaceable, the fate of Isabella at the end of the novel as a less than satisfactory stand-in for her idealized self anticipates the best that any of us might expect from a job or vocation today. The physical trait of her voice literally expropriated by the novel’s plot as the raw material by which Theodore imagines his romance with Matilda, Isabella resigns herself to an existence helping Theodore mourn a subject position constructed by her from which she is ultimately barred. Thankless, indeed.14 14. It’s difficult not to hear here Stanley Cavell’s famous response to whatever compensation we might get out of the epistemological compromise that Kant brokers

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Yet Isabella, precisely because of her dyadic interchangeability with Matilda, does not rise to the status of the gothic heroine, marginalized as she is by the centrality of Manfred’s machinations and, to a lesser degree, Theodore’s landed destiny. Isabella’s and Matilda’s mutual indistinctiveness thus fittingly converges with the increasingly central relation, or conflict, between the two men, both as a reiteration of the gendered priorities of the novel’s social world and as an ever-sharpening focus on Manfred’s class aspirations as exactly that, not simply as a pretender to the throne, but as the frenzied nonaristocratic, non-Theodore-like behavior of a member of the ascendant middle class, on the verge of realizing a hegemony in the next hundred years that will normalize its dervish behavior homogenously, as the not simply classed-based antics of Ngai’s late capitalist zany. That said, the gothic heroine is as fundamental to the gothic literary lexicon as the gothic villain. (There are combinations of these two roles, of course, though their rarity is arguably also part of the discourse on the gothic.)15 A comparison, no matter how schematic, of Isabella/Matilda with someone like Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho would thus be instructive, as a way also to consider how the gothic zany might further our sense of Radcliffe’s own considerable presence in the creation of the gothic novel. To give this proposition more bite: How might such a comparison also project us forward, toward the recognition of a genealogy of capital and gender connecting Radcliffe’s gothic heroine to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century female zany, such as Ngai’s own mass culture avatar, TV comedy’s protagonist Lucille Ball? (175–81). The counterintuitive dimensions of this hypothesis are clarifying. In her TV show Lucy can be many things, but as the embodiment of the zany, she is not in any prolonged or consistent way calm. A radical calm is as good as any phrase to describe the end that Emily and other heroines in Radcliffe strive to attain. (The political connotations of the term are intentional, iterating rather than resolving the debates about Radcliffe’s with philosophical skepticism: thanks for nothing (Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 31). Might there be something to this mordant echo, by which both the philosophical subject and the gendered subject of capital (or at least, those reading her) register a feeling of dissatisfaction, if not ingratitude, that limns the ontological austerity of a modern human life—a synonym for the market life of capital? Might the degree to which such a thankless response is played for laughs of a kind in both Cavell and Walpole further cement them together through the, in this case, vividly cruel tenor of the zany? 15. For a consideration of one such standout figure, Victoria in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, see Wang, 226–34.

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conservatism and historical moment.) In Emily’s case, doing so means staying true to her father’s aesthetic and moral instructions about an elevated, authentic sublime as well as realizing herself as the rightful heir of much of the contested landed property in Udolpho. It means in many ways to resist the zany, the psychic and bodily attractions of the gothic as revved-up motion, in Radcliffe’s novel, not so much expressed through Emily as a type as much as how other types (the gothic villain Montoni, the fallen woman Laurentini, and the hysterical servant Annette) act upon her. In the metageneric way that Radcliffe’s work is famous for deploying, the plot jeopardy for Emily revolves around her resisting becoming a type, including what Catherine Moreland in Austen’s Northanger Abbey must avoid becoming, the young female reader whose encounter with the settings and characters of a gothic leads her astray to a nonenlightened world of superstition, hysterical sensation, and the wrong kinds of feelings. Isn’t Emily’s triumph in Udolpho about how she achieves an interiority equal to most female protagonists of the late eighteenth-century English novel—how she doesn’t end up becoming a zany type? Much of the novel’s drama lies in the challenges getting in the way of this accomplishment: the involuntary, physical movement of Emily across most of southern Europe after her father’s death, whose convoluted, peripatetic to and fros take on an increasingly zany cast; her own epistemological temptation to narrativize the world and its objects around her as malevolent and often supernatural menace; and her susceptibility to a host of affects and intensities that seem to stray dangerously far away from the elevated, profound sublime she shares with St. Aubert and Valancourt in the Pyrenees.16 Ground zero for especially these latter enticements is the castle of Udolpho itself, where in her confused wandering though its cavernous, dark interior Emily comes closest to the vertiginous energies of Isabella’s zany, desperate search for a way out of Otranto’s foundations. Something of the spatial precariousness of the always ever about to fall commedia dell’arte zany is transferred to the psychic dimensions of Emily’s plight, where her perceptually disorienting encounter with Udolpho indicates a

16. In Richard C. Sha’s recent Kantian formulation, Emily must learn to distinguish and favor the imagination’s regulative dimensions from and over its constitutive character. Sha views this distinction as the project of a slew of Romantic artists and thinkers; we can profitably use it to understand much of what Radcliffe’s gothic attempts to do. See Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 1–30. See also Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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female subject mentally on the gothic ledge, about to fall into the hysteria of disregulated, superstitious thinking and immoderate pleasure. As well known is also Emily’s first view of Udolpho, one whose visual defamiliarizations constitute the negative sublime that Emily must ultimately put aside for the morally positive sublime of the Pyrenees. Insofar as the negativity of this view is the interpellative, gothic experience of the gothic that Emily and every other female subject of her time must finally reject, Ngai’s argument about the zany, cute, and interesting takes an unexpected twist. For Ngai, in order to register life fully under capitalism, contemporary aesthetic judgment must expand beyond the sublime and beautiful to these three putatively more minor cultural experiences (Ngai, 18–23). In Udolpho, however, at the very inception of mass culture’s entanglement with the elevated categories of aesthetic feeling, we see a knowing bifurcation between a lofty sublime and a downgraded though still dangerous sublime which, through the commercial—that is, gothic— mediation of its atavistic tendencies, gestures toward the reflexively dismissive response that the zany, cute, and interesting also invite.17 Not explicitly trivial like the zany, cute, and interesting, the sublime view of Udolpho experienced by Emily nevertheless reminds us of the necessity of a critical logic by which ultimately ancillary or secondary, if not tertiary, aesthetic formations—the zany, the negatively sensationalist sublime—are necessary for a complete critique of the phenomenality of everyday capitalist life. Emily visits Udolpho because of Montoni, and in many ways she associates the mysteries of that property with him, even though the resolution of that plot is that all along Udolpho was the nonpatriarchal mystery of Signora Laurentini. Emily’s disproved suspicion that Montoni murders her aunt thus stands in for the odd way the novel appears to be motored by Montoni’s machinations even as it becomes apparent by its conclusion how in many ways he is peripheral to the direction and force of the plot. Mediated through Emily’s own perception of him as some Žižekian or Lacanian Big Other, he appears as central to Udolpho as Manfred to Otranto, even though much of the novel beyond its plot details also resists this view. First and foremost, we might simply note Radcliffe’s often-glacial picturesque movement, her deliberate descriptive pacing so markedly contrary to the crazed 17. That Edmund Burke’s study of supposedly noncommercial, elite aesthetic categories embraces, unlike Kant’s, the atavistic dimension of the sublime is well known. For a treatment of this aspect of Burke within the context of race and empire, see Srivinas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 190–202.

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improvisational dynamism of Manfred’s that drives Walpole. Yet by the end of the novel and its denouement we learn how, much beyond the ken of Emily and her own travails, Montoni has been acting much like Manfred, busily trying to keep his balance, improvising a number of strategies on the spot in the face of numerous challenges, all in the service of a quest for property that, like Manfred’s, takes a back seat to the variegated means by which he tries to realize that end. Layered upon Montoni’s endeavors is also the plot line of Valancourt’s struggles in Paris, both depicted in the novel and relayed like Montoni’s in retrospective exegesis, organized around that most capitalist zany activity, gambling. Regulated beyond the actual description of the novel’s actions, a realm of zany activity is discovered to have been part of its narrative all along. The tension between that temporal mania and the other phenomenologies of Radcliffe’s novel, such as its exceedingly slow descriptive movement, would then be one material index of the gothic’s generic evolution, which in Udolpho unevenly entangles this latter slowness, both narrative and psychological, with what from our contemporary vantage point can be glimpsed as the emerging future present of perpetual zany activity. The gothic zany thus allows us to see how much Emily’s moral happiness is depicted as an ultimate rejection of zaniness, even as for much of Udolpho her subjectivity oscillates between a sublime, aristocratic gentility and a zany flailing about, and how her affect plays off of Montoni’s, whose stern patriarchal inscrutability is retrospectively shown to hide an ongoing, hyperimprovisational scheming comparable to Manfred’s. Udolpho, then, does contain its own complex relation to gothic zaniness. But what might that fact mean for our own twentieth- and twenty-first-century moment of the zany? More precisely, what further point about capital and gender can be made by connecting the exertions of Radcliffe’s gothic heroine to know or possess the gothic estate to the antic endeavors of Ngai’s Lucille Ball to enter the twentiethcentury workplace? (175–81). In a word, the answer is home. As Ngai cannily observes, the genius of Ball was to express the restiveness that comes with the enforced division of labor that conceives of domestic activity, no matter how repetitive or onerous, as nonlabor, as incommensurate with what is produced in the male-dominated workplace (even one as spectacular as the postwar world of popular musical entertainment, the “office” of Ball’s spouse, Desi Arnaz). In her many attempts to enter the workplace, however, Ball stages the systemic obstacle to her quest to obtain a salaried job or profession, a structural inequity by which her endeavors could only be transformed into the nonlabor of slapstick—zany—comedy. This result then registers the degree

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to which all capitalist subjects, in and beyond the workplace, become increasingly defined by that manic conflation of means and ends that is the hyperactivity of the capitalist zany. The degree to which Emily in Udolpho resides outside her own domestic space, traveling through various Alpine routes or as an unwilling guest in Udolpho or Venice, can then be seen as the structural counterpart to what Ball routinely essays in her activities outside her New York apartment home. With regard to the domestic space, Emily arguably wants in while Ball wants out; delinked from that world in some fundamental way, even if only momentarily, both experience the zany. Clarifying that structural symmetry would be the laundry ticket that Catherine Moreland finds in Northanger Abbey, the seemingly most prosaic and non-zany object in Austen’s book that by itself pretty much defuses the gothic energies that Catherine tries to muster in her attempt to live her life according to the plot of Udolpho. Of course, the grim joke is that the laundry ticket is her objet petit a, the talismanic object gnomically ordaining her unknown desires, insofar as the future wife of Henry Tilney, a soon to be vicar with modest means and a humble cottage, Catherine faces a lifetime destiny composed of, even with help, mountains of laundry and other domestic chores. That the ticket she finds was left there by Frederick Tilney’s servant taking care of his master’s needs is the closest that either she, Emily, or Lucy come to glimpsing the real of their analogous exertions as female labor, salaried or not, which vibrates through and around the zany in their lives. If Emily, however, resists the zany in order to access a domestic space that is genuinely her home, she does so by trying to escape a number of dwellings, Udolpho especially, that pose as home but contain risk, madness, and epistemological disregulations of all kinds. Udolpho and its malevolent zaniness is Unheimlich to the degree that it is of the home, and not of the home. This is the intuition that also grimly connects her to Lucy’s madcap adventures, that there might not really be an alternative for the (capitalist) female subject to a residence as threatening and oppressive as, if not exactly like, Udolpho. There is no home, or estate, that is safe. If Lucy reminds us of the libidinal longing imbuing much of her and Emily’s drive to get out the home, faux, genuine, or both, Emily enacts the suspicion that casts Lucy’s escapades in a new light, that escaping domesticity might be a matter of life or death. That fatal accidents involving the scalding waters of laundry were commonplace into the early twentieth century would simply constitute one way that Catherine’s domestic future validates this misgiving, where in this case domestic activity is explicitly work of the most dangerous and oppressive kind whose unconditional fact the zany so desperately seems to

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deflect, even as it itself expresses so uncannily the precarity of capitalist life in every twist, turn, and almost-fall of its burlesque existence.

Always On Despite how Wordsworth famously snubs Radcliffe and other purveyors of the gothic in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, many have argued for the gothic, spectral dimensions of his and other Romantics’ writing.18 Evidence for this latter view involves figures of hysterical action but also of deathly quiescence in Wordsworth—for every Margaret in her ruined cottage there’s a discharged soldier or leech-gatherer that the Wordsworthian narrator meets. (That said, much of the last section’s argument could profitably be applied to Margaret, whose narrative arc reaches its apogee in the hysterically hyperactive, before descending into the hypoactive.)19 David Simpson has noticed how much these strange ghostlike figures populate Wordsworth’s imagined landscape, and convincingly argues how they channel the encroaching ravages of capital for the poet.20 In their wraithlike, often literally mute manner, Wordsworth glimpses the consequences of a comingto-be world system ever accelerating in terms of the scale and scope of its expropriating forces. What, then, might our use of Ngai say about the fundamental nexus of Romanticism, the gothic, and capital’s Darstellung? Are these gothic, Wordsworthian individuals zany? The answer appears to be no. In their lethargic, noncommunicative affect they seem the opposite of the zany, more like what one imagines the 18. See Wang, 142–47. 19. The classic discussion of the relation of The Ruined Cottage to sensationalist writing remains Karen Swann’s “Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage,” PMLA 106, no. 1 (1991): 83–95. David Simpson also includes Margaret in his study of Wordsworth’s ghostly characters (39–53); see also Jacques Khalip, “The Ruin of Things,” in Romantic Frictions, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Theresa M. Kelley, (September 2011), https://romantic- circles.org/praxis/frictions/index.html. 20. Key for Simpson is Derrida’s own meditation on the spectral dimensions of both Marx and the object of the Marxist critique—capital—in his Specters; for another discussion of the “ghost theory” that articulates Romanticism, Marxism, and deconstruction together, see Wang, 138–57. Arguably, there are moments of the zany in Wordsworth not explicitly or immediately tied to the spectral gothic, as in “The Idiot Boy”; this essay focuses on the particular way that the zany and one dominant mode of the Wordsworthian gothic relate, through the ghostly figures identified by Simpson. That said, the Lucy poems conceivably present an intriguing complication to the dynamics explored here. I’m grateful to both Yohei Igarashie and Jacques Khalip for pointing out these exceptions to me.

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denizens of Otranto to be after the novel ends, with Theodore and Isabella settling into their melancholic yearning for the dead Matilda, the zany energy of Manfred’s machinations extinguished or switched off. Wordsworth’s figures are very much thanatopic, a view of life-in-death that is one life of the capitalist subject. As such, they embody in an especially forceful way the recessive stylistics of Wordsworth’s poetics that has caught the attention of a number of critics in recent years.21 The fascination of this dimension to his poetry is the way its expressiveness is amplified by its minimal expression, a “sensation of meaning” toward an ultimate signifying end or practice that is never clear (Wang, 2). For Simpson that very indeterminacy not only lends Wordsworth’s writing its gothic power; it is also the very literary effect by which his poetry intuits a condition of denuded life that is turning everyone and everything into a specter of capital. The hypoactive, not hyperactive, quality of these characters and their mise-en-scènes in Wordsworth is key to how, as Simpson shows, the poet registers the world-making machinations of capital. Far from arguing against our use of Ngai, however, their gothic presence extends and elaborates the zany character of capital in Romanticism. For like the convoluted improvisational exfoliation of plot involving Montoni and Valancourt beyond the immediate frame of Emily’s adventures in Udolpho, the zany, hyperactive operations of capital also happen elsewhere in Wordsworth, a burgeoning assemblage of trading routes, massive factories, and imperial wars defined by the dislocating effects of their spatial scale and heightened, frantic temporalities. That Wordsworth’s rural, still agrarian England also evinces signs of such operations simply initiates what a figure like the discharged soldier or Margaret tells us: that elsewhere is here, in all its disastrous reverberations, that this is what is common to all of us, perhaps the basic lesson of literature in, or as, modernity.22 21. See Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 154–70; Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 221; Brian McGrath, “Wordsworth, ‘Simon Lee,’ and the Craving for Incidents,” Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 4 (2009): 565–82; and Wang, 95–110. See also Lionel Trilling, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” in The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 143. 22. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1–45. Similarly, for a discussion of how the Wye Valley that Wordsworth writes about in “Tintern Abbey” was already the site of industrialized pollution, see Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29–32.

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From that perspective, the minimally expressive aura associated with many of Wordsworth’s descriptions of his wasted, ghostly characters is more than the means by which he records this link between the Lake District and the wider world of capital. The recessive character of both the figures and their depictions is also a reactive formation, the affective response that is the hypoactive to too much activity, too much motion; to the too many demands upon us, ethical, aesthetic, and cognitive, that an intuition of life as the nightmare of history portends. The critical judgment inhering in the hypoactive founds itself on one depressive way we encounter the zany and react to its implicit demand to be zany: to withdraw, bodily, psychically, and semantically, from a world that is too much with us, always. This always, the temporal condition of the zany and capitalist life, helps us detail the specific medium, the envisioned media form, that the transmitted messaging of Wordsworth’s characters takes. From Raymond Williams to Raymond Bellour video has been distinguished from film by its status as “total flow”—the fundamental phenomenology of a medium that, like capital, is always on, even when it is off.23 This is also the phenomenology of the zany, whose totems in Ngai are TV’s Lucille Ball and Jim Carrey’s video-reflexive movie, The Cable Guy (198–202). Whether we leave the room where the video art installation is placed, whether we turn off the video device in front of us, whether we drive away from the video screens on top of gas stations, whether we try to find refuge in our sleep or dreams, phenomenologically we know, video is always on, somewhere, elsewhere, everywhere. And that is the epistemic state of capital, our knowledge of its channels, networks, and relations, today. It’s always on, and can’t be turned off. Wordsworth’s gothic figures are not simply signs but quite exactly transmissions of this basic historical circumstance. This is the affect of the gothic zany in Wordsworth: not one of loss, but of an intractable, terrible gain, an interminable, bullying world able to encroach upon us anywhere at anytime. Deathly still or furiously active, Wordsworth’s ghostly figures are channeled, grainy video images of an encroaching world system that is zany in its own exponentially expanding, instrumental world-making. The ghostly figure, the discharged soldier, epitomizes this logic. As Mary Favret and others remind us, Romanticism was historically a time of perpetual war, modern in its technological advancements and geopolitical scale, the contradictory and not so contradictory 23. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 86–93; Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images (Geneva: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 12–21, 62–77, 256–61, 262–67.

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impulses of capital working itself out in and beyond Europe.24 In the 1850 Prelude, the soldier’s appearance to Wordsworth walking home at night transforms the temporality of the young student, still organized both culturally and seasonally around a summer fete (“a flower- decked room” [line 374]), into a glimpse of a history neither cyclical nor progressive, but interminable.25 (Between a Wordsworth whose sense of time is universal and ahistorical and one whose intuition is of the historically interminable lies the spectrum of critical choices we’ve faced reading the poet for some time, not only philosophically or aesthetically, but also politically and ideologically.) As Simpson notes, the episode of the discharged soldier provides us with the very vocabulary of the spectral in Wordsworth: from his literal description as a “ghostly figure” (changed by the 1850 Prelude from the “ghastly figure” in earlier versions) to the semantically gnomic nature of his unsettling laconic reply to the poet—“My trust is in the God of Heaven, / And the eye of him that passes me!” (lines 434, 459–60)—to the chiaroscuro play of shadow and moonlight that accompanies his appearance. Is it too much of a stretch to see in the visual insubstantiality of the soldier the grainy, sometimes interrupted but never quite off, images of the video transmission? (That this has become a filmic cliché in depictions of ghosts in contemporary horror films demonstrates how explicit this connection among the supernatural, video, and the always-on nature of capital has risen from our technological and political unconscious.) Within this suggestion lies the same there-not-quite-there sensation that the passage records by its off hand comment about the soldier being “scarcely three weeks past” from his ship’s travel back from its tropical adventures (line 423). In this comment we momentarily glimpse the disjunctions of temporal and spatial scale that occur when the poet encounters the soldier as the literal embodiment of the operations of empire and capital.26 24. See Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); see also Jerome Christensen, “The Detection of Romantic Conspiracy in Britain,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (1996): 603, and David L. Clark, “Unsocial Kant: The Philosopher and the Un-Regarded War Dead,” Wordsworth Circle 41, no. 1 (2010): 60–68. 25. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 145. All further line references to this episode are from Book 4 of the 1850 Prelude in this edition. 26. For an extended discussion of the imperial history haunting the episode of the soldier, see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 108–19. For another crucial account of the material history

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Wordsworth’s description of his delivery of the soldier to the charity of a rural neighbor is equally pertinent. I want to make two points about this remarkable moment. First, there is the disembodied, ghostly welcome of the rural hosts, signaled only by the “cottage door . . . speedily [silently?] unbarred” (line 460). This strange spectral hospitality punctuates the disembodied cast of the entire episode, where in a scene ostensibly about rural charity and community no other person is described except for the poet and the soldier, at either the summer party or the cottage home. The 1850 account heightens this somatic depopulation by excising the narrator’s speech to the cottage dwellers in the 1805 version, the effect of which is to denude even further the cottage inhabitants of any physical existence they might have. Ghosts welcome a ghost in a realm where, virally, an image welcomes an image and commodities welcome another: Elsewhere has arrived here, which has always been elsewhere too. The narrator’s own spectral “linger[ing]” by the cottage door simply shows his own participation in the scene’s Derridean “hauntology,” where no subject is invulnerable to the global effect of market value-as- empire that Wordsworth’s episode depicts (line 467; Derrida, 10). Second, by extension, we might ask whether the soldier ever leaves this house. To this day, even if the house no longer remains, is he still there? In this line of thinking a specific medium avant la lettre explicitly converges with its social configuration as well as one cornerstone of the gothic narrative. For what is the haunted house but a domestic space defined by the ubiquitous presence of flickering, transmitted images? And what does it mean to be haunted by the video screen but to be stalked by an awareness of a global communications system of capital that never turns off, that subtends both our waking and dreaming lives? (Williams’s reminder that television as a purely “technical means” did not necessarily have to become the future linchpin of the modern home stresses how uncannily the soldier’s arrival heralds this particular future, as much shaped by the demands of social forces as the technology itself.)27 Simpson’s observation that “despite

involved in this scene with the soldier, see Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193–207. 27. For Williams the history of television is thus especially about the intertwined, emergent social formations of broadcasting and mobile privatization under early twentiethcentury capitalism (19–31). Insofar as those formations at first assumed a capitalist center of information, news, and entertainment from which the broadcast communication system radiated, the Wordsworth in this present account intuits in his spectral figures

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accepting shelter for the night, [the soldier] promises to reside in the uncanny” is thus exactingly en pointe, both for the soldier and his new place of residence (Simpson, 94). As he quietly slips into this not yet ruined cottage, the disquieting threat of the uncanny home in our previous account of the gendered gothic subject segues into the overarching narrative of lived life seemingly once removed but always already fatally implicated in the distant but nevertheless felt zaniness of capital. If, then, the description of Udolpho that Radcliffe describes Emily first seeing seems as if it could be a movie image (“a gloomy and sublime object”),28 we should flesh out that suggestion to understand the moment as not only a protofilmic play of light and shadow but a protocinematic experience as well—a gothic partaking of the same structural dictates of the commercial cinema house, whereby consumers of both the gothic novel and modern film are able, like Emily within the castle itself, to experience its (ultimately entertaining) visual and psychological disquiet and then depart. Any formal comparison one might want to make, then, between Radcliffe’s description of Udolpho and Wordsworth’s poetic imaging of the discharged a later phase of decentered capital that Ngai’s zanies reign over and affectively model for us. 28. “The gloom, that overspread it, allowed [Emily] to distinguish little more than a part of its outline, with the massive walls of the ramparts, and to know, that it was vast, ancient and dreary. . . . The gateway before her, leading into the courts, was of gigantic size, and was defended by two round towers, crowned by over-hanging turrets, where, instead of banners, now waved long grass and wild plants that had taken root among the mouldering stones, and which seemed to sigh, as the breeze rolled past, over the desolation around them. The towers were united by a curtain, pierced and embattled also, below which appeared the pointed arch of an huge portcullis, surmounting the gates; from these, the walls of the ramparts extended to other towers, overlooking the precipice, whose shattered outline, appearing on a gleam, that lingered in the west, told of the ravages of war” (Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Terry Castle [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 227). But see also Emily Sun’s observation about the imagistic quality of the narrator’s perceptual experience walking down the country road before he meets the discharged soldier, how “the public road seems for Wordsworth—to leap ahead to a future art—the screening room for his own nocturnal road movie. . . . It is uncanny how these verses anticipate and resonate with cinema as an allegory of the mind’s own operations” (Emily Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics [New York: Fordham University Press, 2010], 114). This epistemological (and material) move from the cinematic to the televisual would thus be triggered by the appearance of the spectral soldier, who at some level retools Wordsworth’s mind-nature dyad into a subject’s encounter with capitalist history.

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soldier must also take into account the contrasting social character of each figure, with one made narratively intelligible by its existence as an elsewhere we can visit but eventually leave and another whose transmission haunts us perpetually as coming from an elsewhere that is onerously, always already here.

Savage Torpor Late and Soon If the spectral transmission in Wordsworth especially registers the history of capital bearing down on the poet and his contemporaries, there are other moments in his writing when that awareness appears even more explicit. I conclude by briefly mentioning two such instances, the first being the poet’s put-down of the gothic in the Preface, where his own brand of poetry distinguishes itself from “sickly and stupid German tragedies” in continuity with a growing network of popular culture and mass media—“the rapid communication of intelligence hourly” conveyed—that leaves its sensationaddled users in a state opposite of poetic elevation, in a “savage torpor.”29 Here then is one affective coordinate by which the poetics of minimal expression and the presence of the hypoactive ghostly figure in Wordsworth can be known. In the case of the modern urban British subject not elevated by a lyrical ballad, disregulated into a passive, addictive somnolence, we see the zoned-out model for one type of contemporary subject sensationally feted on too much always available video, too much sensationalized capital.30 As perceptually engorged as Wordsworth’s soldier is physically and psychically emaciated, his urban dweller evinces the same listlessness, an even more overt response to the overwhelming zaniness of modern capitalist life, in this case explicitly characterized by the emergence of an everaccelerating formation of mass commercial entertainment that less than two centuries later will come to be defined by TV and the video screen. My second example cites Wordsworth’s famous sonnet recoiling from too much “getting and spending,” where that zany world is indeed too much with us, the very ontological and epistemological surfeit that leads to the savage torpor of those denizens of London and elsewhere, where “too much” means always there, always available, always on (lines 2, 1).31 29. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34. 30. For more on the sensationally addictive nature of what Wordsworth describes, and what he opposes his own poetry to, see Wang, 20. 31. William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” in Gill, 279.

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My interest in “The World Is Too Much with Us” lies in the poem’s conclusion, its reactive assertion of a specific alternative to this world of capital: . . . Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. (lines 8–14)

As ironic or sincere as these lines might be, there is something discordant about Wordsworth’s cry for not only a precapitalist but also premodern and pre- Christian alternative to too much getting and spending, a conceptual incommensurability activated by the conditional form—“I’d rather be”—of its expression. Indeed, contradicting any possibility of realizing this desire, the narrator reveals his own ineluctable modern contemporaneity, by turning theology into a clichéd mannerism—“Great God!” before yoking that to a yearning for an ancient pagan world. As much as Hellenism would soon take over the English imagination, especially for Wordsworth’s younger peers, the stuff of this desire in “World” already points toward the simulated, partitioned or imagistic nature of this feeling (longing for “glimpses”), one staple for mass viewing audiences enamored with the Romantic Cosmorama, panorama, and phantasmagoria that will be part of the Hellenic mania unleashed by the British Museum’s display of the Elgin Marbles a decade later (Wang, 261).32 We can thus see in the evocation of Triton and Proteus not so much the elevated sense of antiquity to be fashioned by Fuseli and others, nor simply a reference to Paradise Lost, but instead the very stuff of the commercial world that the poem so vehemently criticizes. More unsettling is also how history after this poem will record the consequences of those who react to capitalism without any awareness of this double movement, who aggressively sell a pagan tribal past without the slightest hint of irony or sense of the figurative nature of their demands. My point is not to see Wordsworth as some proleptic alt-right figure, which would be to enact the very literality that structures the possibility of the pagan past as some genuine, accessible, and unified, though exclusionary, point of origin. Rather, I’m suggesting that the pertinence of “World” is 32. See also an account of this world of mass viewing via the notion of the virtual in Otto, 1–63, 107–28.

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in its fashioning of a language that is very much part of what makes up our own modernity and restiveness toward capital, a predicament whose spectrum of political shadings in no small way converges with how we read that language and the works both created by and creating it. Abutting against this discussion is Ngai’s inclusion of not only Lucille Ball’s TV character but Jim Carrey’s Cable Guy as her avatars of the capitalist zany. Much darker than Lucy, Carrey’s figure is a sociopath whose pathology is directly tied in the film to his consumption of television. Babysat by the television, he evinces Lucy’s wild eyes in overdrive. The joke, then, is not simply that his sense of sociability is completely composed of a collection of formulaic mannerisms derived from various TV genres, so much so that in his rapid madcap expression of such behavioral types Carrey’s character shows himself to be the modern Proteus that Wordsworth’s wished-for sighting in “World” unknowingly evokes. More pointedly, the humor of Carrey’s performance lies in how successful those traits are in impressing everyone around him except for Matthew Broderick’s beleaguered character, to whom Carrey mistakenly attaches as a genuine friend. Of course, in a world of zany TV—our world, that is—genuine attachment is the stuff of fantasy. As Žižek would put it, the Cable Guy’s fantasy is the ideological truth of our reality, that genuine attachment is more than possible in a world of market exchange. Or, more dialectically, that genuine attachment is market exchange. Given that this is the historical horizon that Carrey’s zany stages for us, the problem allegorized in Wordsworth’s poem comes more sharply into view, where the issue might not lie in coming up with a world (pagan or otherwise) different from capital’s, but in the problem of world-making itself. Given how much capital and world are now so synonymous, the historically material or philosophical origins of this difficulty might very well be beside the point. More urgent is recovering as scrupulously as possible the challenge of every attempt at pagan desire, retirement, indolence, nonanimation, worklessness, and worldlessness in Romantic and nonRomantic literature. For we face the possibility that all such endeavors, even as the act of death or the annihilation of the mind, are simply temporary epistemic strategies or intervals that ultimately fall short in the attempt to outmaneuver the (non-) ontology of world capital. We face the possibility that turning capital off is not an option. From this perspective, the unregenerate gothic comedy, the hypoactive figures in Wordsworth, and the minimally expressive quality of his poetics, overlapping but also diverging terms nevertheless activated by this account of the Romantic gothic zany, can be revisited. As thanotopic indexes of the

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commodity form as well as in the case of unregenerate comedy a critique both of feudal patriarchal and capitalist biopolitics, these tropes, dispositions, and traits further present themselves as goads toward recording a politics, aesthetics, and culture not invested in world-making. They constitute an instinct that is radically queer in its allergy toward the entrapments, expropriations, and exclusions of the project of a world propagative in its essence. The perhaps impossible but still necessary nature of this queer impulse can be glimpsed in how much even thanatopsis, a view of death, doesn’t necessarily overcome or even trouble the world we—whoever or whatever that is—have made. In Wordsworth’s encounter with his gothic figures the poet might indeed brush up against his own death, but that confrontation involves an even more unsettling formulation, the awareness that even when he and we die the world in all its zaniness remains. Derrida has said that with death, every death, the world ends.33 The zany video flow of capital, sensed vividly in its gothic and Romantic variegations, begs to differ. The world is made, makes itself, and, through every catastrophe, atrocity, and mutation, zanily lives on.

33. Jacques Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue between Two Infinities, the Poem,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Panen, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 140.

4.

Prometheus Unbound and Commemorative Thought For Dan S. Wang The sensuous representations present things as they appear, the intellectual representations present them as they are. But by what means are these things given to us, if not by the way in which they affect us? And if such intellectual representations depend on our inner activity, whence comes the agreement that they are supposed to have with objects—objects that are nevertheless not possibly produced thereby? —Immanuel Kant, Letter to Marcus Herz Thus I am answered: strange! —Asia, Prometheus Unbound

Commemoration is on the minds of a number of students of Romanticism these days, given the slew of bicentennial events occurring with regard to works and figures from the Romantic period, even as the future of those hoping to teach and research Romanticism in the university marketplace remains as clouded as it ever has been.1 Commemoration also bears upon the topic of this present collection of essays, the relation of Romanticism to media and mediation, insofar as commemoration is not simply a transparent act or wish but a technology. How we commemorate—how various media mediate commemoration for us—is obviously related to what we commemorate. This situation becomes even more complex if we allow for the medium we want especially to focus on to be called something like thought, or Romantic thought, itself. How does thought mediate the commemoration of Romanticism? How does commemoration mediate Romantic thought? One way to parse these questions would be to understand them not simply speaking to the technology of commemoration, but also evoking what other moments in this book have described as its techno-magism. In 1. The first version of this piece was in fact a contribution to a panel on Romanticism and commemoration at the 2016 North American Association for the Study of Romanticism conference.

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this case these questions do so by worrying the relation of thought to action, or, in a way both more blunt and exacting, of theory to praxis. The question of how one might mediate the other gains in exigency if we associate it with another question about commemoration, its temporal occasion. Can one only commemorate a past event or figure, a past time, a past period? Can one commemorate something that hasn’t happened yet, a future event? What about an event that has not even been thought of yet, or that is in the process of being thought, felt, or written about? Reformulating our earlier query about Romantic thought, we might ask: Is there something commemorative about the very way of thinking, or writing, the very poetics used to imagine such actions or events—the auto- or metacommemorative? The bulk of this essay argues how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyric drama Prometheus Unbound answers these last questions affirmatively. Shelley’s work does so through a formal intentionality that has motored questions about its generic hybridity and its relation to the closet drama, a predicament expressed by what I will call quite exactingly its commemorative rhetoric—its profession of theory. Risking the charges of narcissism and self-indulgence routinely aimed at Shelley the past two centuries, and now aimed at those who immodestly still wager the possibility of critique in our cultural encounters, this metacommemorative activity bases its interrogations on something akin to the möbius loop–like relation of what Kant tried to discern through the limits and possibilities of both pure and practical reason: What is and what should be. That for some Kant’s resolution to these questions involved the aesthetic judgment and acts of the imagination certainly resonates in the Shelley of this essay, though what is and what should be—what we desire—are in what follows necessarily defined by, perhaps even more vividly than in Kant, a Derridean trace structure best described as the aporia of commemorating—identifying and wanting—the alterity that Romanticism calls its future: political revolution as freedom for the species and the earth. The scandal dogging Prometheus Unbound since its writing is its insistence on commemorating that particular alterity, what hasn’t happened yet, insofar as yet designates an absolute pivot between now and not-now—yet, then—that is, in a word, impossible. For Prometheus Unbound, however, calling simply fanciful the elusive knotting of a political desire and political knowledge underwritten by that speculative aporia becomes the most unknowing stance one might take, though, of course, it is also the most unassailably sensible—the least theoretical and least Shelleyan or Romantic—position one can assume. Theory and Shelley both risk cognitive embarrassment that their metacommemorative, intentional language incites.

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One consequence of this embarrassment is epistemological: that theory must then be judged and understood through its sterner, ontologically more grounded, perceptually more assured twin, praxis. The political implications of this view, today and earlier in a variety of discourses during the Romantic period, gain in clarity with reference to the statements of a twentiethcentury figure well known for setting the table for debates about the relation between theory and praxis, whether those enacting this dynamic today recognize this fact. We thus begin with a short piece by Theodor Adorno before returning to Prometheus Unbound, first in relation to both Shelley and Prometheus as queer registers of the scission within the present that Romanticism calls the future; then in how theory marks the mixed sensation of fugitive affect and cognition that Prometheus conveys, in contrast to The Cenci, as revolutionary pleasure; and finally in Asia’s interrogation of Demogorgon, an obliteration and realization of cause and effect that unsettles any absolute distinction between praxis and theory. Each of these encounters gains in clarity by the uncompromising vocabulary retrospectively shaping them that Adorno construes in his response to the accusations of being, merely, a theorist.

(Re-) Signs Adorno published his short essay “Resignation” in 1969 in the wake of criticism from one corner, Soviet intellectuals, and another, the New Left, over the political limits of his thought. The suspicion over Adorno’s theory lies in the charge that his works exist only as theory, that there is something intrinsically allergic in them to the work of praxis or radical political action. Adorno’s theory resigns itself to nonaction, retires itself from the world of praxis. If that formulation resonates with the Romanticist steeped in the variety of British Romantic responses to the French Revolution and its aftermath, so too should Adorno’s stinging response to this charge. For Adorno, the political activists are the ones who have resigned themselves to the instrumental practicalities of world capital, including the practical belief that individual praxis matters, always, no matter how incrementally or incoherently. For Adorno, theory is not resigned precisely because it refuses to compromise with the practice of this world, even if that means refusing to believe in any magical notion of how it and praxis might escape failure. The most vehemently unyielding embodiment of thought’s resistance to the world of capital, theory approximates praxis at its most intransigent, radical, and defiant. As Adorno writes, “Open thinking points beyond itself. . . . Such thinking takes a position as a figuration of praxis

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which is more closely related to praxis truly involved in change than in a position of mere obedience for the sake of praxis.”2 We will not resolve in any absolute manner Adorno’s critique of immediate political action, but his argument about theory and praxis does give us a way to respond to the question of how temporality and commemoration relate. Commemorating the past is most immediately and conventionally assumed to be a commemoration of history as it has happened. It is the recognition if not creation of an ontology, the act of monumentalization that Paul de Man adumbrated so decisively in his essay “Shelley Disfigured,” first published a year after Adorno’s “Resignation” appeared in its 1978 American translation.3 If the violence of de Man’s reading corrosively outlines the fragmenting linguistic forces that undo any act of commemoration, his reading of the inevitable manner in which that fragmentation is offset by the binding forces of monumentalization is given a new valence by Adorno’s argument about the limitations of praxis. Following Adorno, we might say that that our conventional sense of commemoration—monumentalization—is shaped or bound by a historical intelligibility whose materiality is ultimately that of this practical, instrumental world. Every commemoration of the past, whether a document of state triumph, social conflict, or radical freedom, freezes what is already frozen, the compromised world of action that remains the horizon of history regardless of all of history’s heterogeneous forms. Within the equation of commemorating the past, the past as history stands for this compromised world. From this perspective the question of commemorating not the past but the future takes on an urgent cast. To commemorate something that has not happened yet, that might only be in the process of being thought or felt, or that has yet to be thought or felt, is to insist on indexing something beyond this compromised world, beyond this horizon of instrumental action within which we remain enmeshed. It is to move beyond the realm of pseudoactivity, Adorno’s biting term for the perceptually self-assured politics of immediate praxis, to a contemplation of the non\world of theory, of the theory and practice of theory—of the future. Conversely, it is to insist 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 175. The translation by Wes Blomster originally appears in Telos 35 (Spring 1978): 165–68. 3. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Continuum, 1979), 32–61.

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on a signifying cathexis that would resist the comforts of utopian deferral that often accompany the vagueness of political language built on “promises” for the future.4 To commemorate the future is to enter the place of theory, where commemorative thought of the future is theory.

Queer Trembling That this future theory has in its tone and affect more than a passing resemblance to Derrida’s use of Benjamin’s weak messianism is certainly the case, even more so when we consider how much the category of the future has come under withering critique from some of the most vital sources of radical thought today.5 Queer theory and Afro-pessimism have both registered the ways the future becomes an extension of the biopolitical agenda of antiBlack, heteronormative regnant culture, whose instrumental dimensions make critiques of it very much fellow travelers with Adorno and his diagnostic instincts.6 There is also shrewd work being done in our field that looks at Romanticism afresh, as a literature emphatically delinked from any investment, sanguine or otherwise, in the future.7 Yet the very power of that work comes from intervening in the way that Romanticism and its radical politics have often been understood by their attachment to the future, no matter how vexed or complicated. How, then, to commemorate the future—within and beyond Romanticism? If one is to do so at all, the future must be understood in its fully radical indeterminacy, one that inflects any commemorative action with a thoroughgoing mimetic vulnerability open to the very critiques that Adorno acknowledges can also be aimed at theory as well as praxis, the frailty of the mind faced with the compromising forces of the instrumental world. Dialectically, then, that fundamental indeterminacy tropes not only the 4. See my previous discussion of this issue in Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 151–57. 5. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 55, 181. 6. See, for example, Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020). 7. The most stringently necessary example of this line of inquiry would be Jacques Khalip’s Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

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future but also the present and the past.8 There is, as Lee Edelman famously asserts, no future; crucially, in Shelley’s Promethean Romanticism, there is no present or past either, insofar as each of these terms assumes a logic of ontological and epistemological certitude, exactly what conventional notions of commemorative monumentalization allege and ratify. In contrast, the commemorative impulse that we are trying to limn views the now of the not-future as one riven by its own impossibility, an internal scission externally projected in Shelley as the temporal alterity of what we term the future. As such, the future is that structural slot by which the present’s own friability, its radical weakness, is staged—or, as in Shelley, poetized and theorized. Weak as Benjamin’s unguaranteed messianism, queer in its recognition of its own nonnormative contingencies, theory as the commemorative thought of the future finds its force in both its analytic commitments and its openness to the radical alterity it attempts to express. That the limitation of that expression informs the very power of its analysis designates theory’s weakness, its failure and impracticality in a practical world, as its strength. Insofar as the practical world of both the right and the left believes itself to be invulnerable to the spectral form of what it dismisses as the idealist, impractical imagings of what it is not, that despotic realm of functionality outs itself as one defined by its own existential precarity, by the unseen teetering abandon at its heart that only becomes visible, as with Jupiter’s own sightings (“Dizzily down—ever, forever down”; 3.l.81), when that world breaks up and falls, downward and, most pertinently, away.9 Weakness, failure, impracticality, and queerness—I use those words deliberately, to help maneuver this discussion back toward Romanticism, and to the second-generation Romantic poet who most vividly has been read through converging vocabularies of militant future thought and failed, impractical idealism, Percy Bysshe Shelley. We know now there are socially genuine material reasons, going back to Mary Shelley’s editing of her husband’s posthumous writings, as to why Victorian readers received a corpus of work that led Matthew Arnold to commemorate Percy as that “beautiful

8. In perhaps a less hyperbolic but no less unsettling manner, the aporia or impossibility of the present is the focus of much Romanticist work being done on the period’s realization of the everyday; see, for example, William Galperin, The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 9. All references to Prometheus Unbound come from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

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and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”10 Nevertheless, I want to consider how that long-standing view of the poet, one that held sway in many ways into the latter half of the last century, might accurately designate a topos of future theory, of commemorative thought, in Shelley; how that view might challenge the very premises by which Arnold’s formulation sought to dismiss or subordinate Shelley’s work to the accomplishments of Byron and Wordsworth. Arnold’s image condenses several dynamics. The beating of wings is seen as an activity, in Shelley’s case a mental activity, that leads nowhere, causes nothing, an assumption now wryly at odds with the baroque narratives of cause and effect that students of chaos routinely associate with the action of that ethereal angel’s secular cousin, the butterfly. More immediately, we might note how Arnold figures the beating of the wings as an externalized gesture trying ineffectually to imprint itself onto the world of the void, instead of as a registering of that world, of its currents, physics, and spectral densities—how the beating of a wing might always figure the vibration or pulse of something else. That same representational (im-) pulse is embodied in the figuration of Shelley himself as the ineffectual angel—as the intensely vulnerable, trembling, prostrate or near prostrate, male figure. That such a figure appears in Shelley’s own work is certainly the case. That this figure up to and through Romanticism, and Shelley, sublimates a complex spectrum of libidinal and cultural energies is also definitely true. My particular interest alights on how in Shelley this sense of male bodily trembling acts as a Geiger counter for the future, is tied to a distinct rendition of the problem of future thought and commemoration. (Within this approach, any Christological resonances that one might want to attach to this figure would then simply be versions of this unsteady, weak messianism.) One can see this predicament in the quivering register of those infamous lines from the Romantic ur-lyric on the question of future meaning, “Ode to the West Wind,” the poet’s swooning observation, experientially mirrored by the text’s shuddering “sea blooms and oozy woods,” “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” (lines 39, 54)11 The Arnoldian aligned, modernist embarrassment with these lines of male eros and vulnerability, would then 10. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1913), 203–4. For a history of Mary’s editing of Percy’s work, see Neil Fraistat, “Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,” PMLA 109, no. 3 (1994): 409–23. 11. All references to Shelley’s poem come from Fraistat and Reiman.

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be the very affective register asserted by the poem for any truly exacting or open encounter with the future in this particular work of Shelley’s. For the rest of this essay, I want to focus on another of Shelley’s texts, where the question of the future, and future thought, is even more explicitly initiated for us by the weak, overcome titular figure of Prometheus Unbound.

Feel Me: The Want of Revolution To see Prometheus’s detumescent body in act 1 as queer is to bring attention to the normative underpinnings of masculinity that underwrite the very notions of the “weak” and “strong” in Romanticism and to align Prometheus’s frailty to the radicalness of the ineffectual and the uncertain that theory and Benjaminian messianism both embrace. It also means considering the extent that his seemingly overwhelmed, somatic posture might not simply align with political defeat or failure, but, startlingly, also with the queer pleasures afforded by a noninsurgent male body at the center of a tale of radical insurgency. Much seems cathected in bleeding upon the “thorns of life” in the “West Wind,” the force of this imagery effusive with masochistic bodily pleasures denied in modernist and contemporary appraisals of Shelley through such pallidly coded dismissals as those that describe his writings’ juvenile or self-indulgent character.12 I see something of similar intensity happening in the weak, shattered body of Prometheus in act 1, where two vectors collide: an expression of commemorative energy attached to the not quite thinkable scission of alterity structuring but also unsettling act 1’s Jupiter-defined present and an elaboration of that energy and what it might signal as revolutionary pleasure. The medium is indeed the message, insofar as Prometheus’s trembling body coincides with the vibrations of the want of revolution as revolutionary desire. Buttressing this view is Steven Goldsmith’s compelling study of Blake and enthusiasm, with its argument about how radical social transformation might only be objectively evidenced in subjective revolutionary feeling.13 In his consideration of how Blake himself tries to connect subjective encounter with objective existence—ongoing revolutionary history, in this 12. For an early but still powerful rendition of the sadomasochistic and homoerotic impulses philosophically and poetically organizing Shelley and Keats, including “West Wind,” see Adrienne Donald, “Coming Out of the Canon: Sadomasochism, Male Homoeroticism, Romanticism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1(1989) 239–52. 13. Steven Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 268–316.

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case—Goldsmith like others elaborates but also complicates the Kantian impulse to found this movement in reason, even reason associated with something as volatile or sublime inducing as the imagination. For as much as feeling or affect might be something we can reflect on, that might evidence for reason our subjective tremblings joining the objective world, a more radical formulation of this predicament tries to figure or capture the trace structure of radical transformation not through any overarching dependence on reason as cognition but on a more open-ended spectrum of intensities and feelings that also connect us to—theorize—the objective world. If, as Stuart Curran points out, Shelley’s work is fundamentally about the seriousness of the intellect, its founding power, Prometheus’s shuddering body infuses that term with energies beyond any hegemonic, or circumscribed, notion of cognition, perhaps in a manner also beyond Adorno’s formulations, though many have seen the philosopher’s own difficult writings as one long assault against the normative reifications of reason as well.14 Regardless, the point remains that Shelley’s work itself stages the practice of theory in, or as, its inscriptions of sensation—in how, before thought, that writing feels the event of radical social transformation. In Prometheus Unbound the queer, nonnormative character of that feeling is found not only in Prometheus’s weak, tortured form but also by simply how much, as the poem moves toward the celebratory rave of act 4, revolutionary affect becomes synonymous with pleasure, enjoyment, and desire. Contrary to Edmund Burke and a host of other commentators, revolutionary spectacle is defined by a sustained, almost stately temporality, characterized by the celebratory and festive, not by terror.15 In that sense, the power of act 4 in Prometheus Unbound lies not just in how it holds onto the figure of future revolution in a postrevolutionary, post-Napoleonic text, but also more crucially in how it characterizes revolution as a consistent, prolonged, and ongoing affect, both social and individual—not simply as the unthinkable 14. Stuart Curran, “Lyrical Drama: Prometheus Unbound and Hellas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neil and Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 292. In the Kant recently studied by Gerard Passannante, one can arguably see a figure as invested in feeling reason—feeling its implications and processes—as well as thinking or cognizing it. See Passannante’s Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 192–235. 15. For the argument that Shelley’s Triumph of Life engages specifically with Burke’s discourse on the nightmarish, terror- saturated character of the revolutionary fete, see Orrin N. C. Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 46–68.

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interruption of state time earlier condensed into Jupiter’s harlequinade-like takedown by Demogorgon.16 In the dance, speech, and movement of act 4’s figures, revolution becomes something we might fundamentally want and take pleasure in, as opposed to a traumatic necessity foisted upon us that we simply grimly need. This dynamic gains in clarity by juxtaposing Prometheus Unbound with the other dramatic text that Shelley wrote during his revision of Aeschylus, The Cenci. The key to that contrasting study would then not be the difference between the violence of Beatrice and the pacifism of Prometheus but the degree to which the only character markedly defined by pleasure in The Cenci is the obscene father of enjoyment, the Cenci himself. Debates over Beatrice’s anger, nobility, and recourse to violence gesture toward but don’t quite recognize her true dilemma, her insertion into a world not simply devoid of the conditions for collective revolution, but as symptomatically one where pleasure—at the banquet hall, in the courtyard with Orsino, in the offstage sleeping spaces of her rape, and in court—is in some fundamental, existential way never an option for her. In contrast, the Cenci truly is Freud’s obscene father, the figure of patriarchal authority whose grotesque appetites expose the fundamental way that law and perversion— law as the authorization of despotic enjoyment and perversion as the enthusiastically dutiful enactment of that cruelty—are one and the same. No one enjoys themselves in or at The Cenci—including any audience one might conceivably attach to its reading or viewing—except for the Cenci himself. Cenci relishes the realization of his pleasures, and, crucially, the expression of that delight. He is a metamachine of pleasure, loving what he wants, and wanting more of it, reflexively savoring how, as pleasure accrues to him, it in proportion is denuded from all around him—his family, his retainers, the social collective itself.17 Who among the banquet really has any gusto left, much less appetite, after he cheerfully describes the assassination 16. For the argument that Jupiter’s defeat of Demogorgon is literally a moment of theatrical harlequinade, imaginatively replete with action analogous to the genre’s use of a trapdoor, see Dana Van Kooy, Shelley’s Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post–Napoleonic Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 162–87. 17. An intriguing counterpoint to my view of the Cenci as a meta-machine of pleasure would be Marc Redfield’s argument for a kind of numbness or “an-aesthesia” that afflicts even the sadistic Count in Redfield’s The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 169–71. The question then becomes whether that numbing an-aesthesia can be read as the result of the Cenci’s reflexive generation of pleasure, or, perhaps even more disconcertingly, these modalities

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of his sons, Beatrice’s brothers? In that sense, the Cenci lashes out at Beatrice after her admonishment at the banquet because she is indeed his superego— not as his conscience, however, but simply as an impediment to him enjoying his desire. As and through that enjoyment he greedily hoards the pleasures of theatrical performance and spectacle, something no one else is able to experience. Whatever one might think of Beatrice’s actions before the tribunal, associating them with pleasure is not what comes to mind. (The degree to which hysteria might be the only encoded way that Beatrice can approach pleasure defines the dilemma that she and a host of other woman characters, especially in the gothic, find themselves enacting.) In contrast, the delight that the Cenci takes in his speech at the banquet, in his asides to the audience about his plans to torture Beatrice, is palpable. Similar to how Alenka Zupancˇicˇ asserts that talking about sex is sexual, without any sense of substitution or sublimation, the Cenci’s use of parabasis is not prosthetic, ancillary summary but libidinal pleasure itself.18 In that sense, Shelley’s work does not depict the incestuous rape of Beatrice because, for the one libidinal character that matters in the Cenci’s patriarchal universe, boasting about the intent in his aside is the act. According to the logics of Cencian performative pleasure, the only existing kind in this work, any graphic or dramatic illustration of the rape would not so much be epistemologically transgressive as, quite simply, after the fact. In contrast, the deliberate representation in act 4 of Prometheus Unbound of public radical pleasure, revolutionary and nondespotic, written after The Cenci, reflexively uses performance and theatrical speech to infuse cosmic society with the deliberate pleasure and joy of radical change. Saying pleasure (“Ha! Ha! the animation of delight”; act 4, line 321) and pleasurably saying coincide with the celebration of revolution.19 The putative status of both these works of Shelley’s as closet dramas thus means something different in each piece. In The Cenci, its relation to that genre is a version of what we conventionally understand by that term: if not exactly a mental theater, then a libidinal one, where the work dwells almost entirely within the erotic monad of the Cenci, Blake’s selfish father of men, a patriarchal solipsism (is there any other kind?) that delights in itself as the law, and as the law is able to carry out any impulse of desire, hurt, or want it can imagine. “Almost exist coevally as the basis for the figure of the Count as a particular kind of affective and political nature. 18. Alenka Zupancˇicˇ, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 1. 19. The new French feminisms could very well be another theoretical reference for the approach I take; I’m grateful to Neil Fraistat for this reminder.

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entirely” would then designate those attempts by readers of the text to find some resistance to that monad by Beatrice; any strategy to do so, however, carries out that goal unaided by her as a figure of enjoyment. By comparison, Prometheus Unbound exists as a closet drama insofar as it asserts a language that is dramatic regardless of its literal performance as theater. Read or seen on stage, the public setting of act 4 exemplifies a language reflexively suffused with both revolutionary pleasure and the pleasure of reflection itself. Similar to Kant’s famous formulation for the aesthetic object judged as such in the third critique, language in Prometheus Unbound retains its purposefulness, its sense of design as a public address, whether that troping ever alights upon any real end of fixing upon a literal figure on a physical stage. In Prometheus Unbound language deliberately poses, in a reflexively externalized way. It outs itself as fully invested in the immodest wagers of what I’ve called theory, a commemoration of the nonintelligible, nonlegible future, an in-visible (as Joan Copjec has said) alterity that nevertheless permeates the instrumental present.20 The language of Prometheus Unbound (and of the Shelley of light, wind, and shadow) is poetry as theory as the language of that in-visibility, asserted as the reflexive profundity of speech that is intrinsically dramatic or theatrical. In this particular work of Shelley’s the gamble of that reflexive sensation of profundity is explicitly political, something always implicit in the social character of theater, closeted or not. Reformulating Adorno through Zupancˇicˇ we might then along with Prometheus Unbound wonder if talking about revolution is revolution, if theorizing praxis is praxis. It might seem inconceivable in our own critical moment not to dismiss that notion out of hand, similar to but also even more narcissistically circumscribed than the predicament of trying seriously to consider revolution in Shelley’s post-Napoleonic world. Yet the question still remains whether that seemingly ridiculous, ineffectual political stance is actually the sign of a weak messianism, one whose frailty nevertheless illuminates the undisputedly wounded nature of our everonrushing present.

Just Ask The other literary genre or modality most associated, especially in Romanticism, with an address is, of course, the lyric. Romanticism conventionally is the lyric, though most think that the first publication to use “lyric” as a 20. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 34.

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noun to describe authored work is Charles Gray’s Lays and Lyrics from the 1840s. Lyric’s use as an adjective, as in Lyrical Ballads or Tennyson’s later Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, does occur during the Romantic period, but arguably only in limited fashion. Even more rare is the titular use of “lyrical” in a single work, as in the self-descriptions of both Prometheus Unbound and Hellas. Within the primal scene of the Romantic lyric, then, the term itself seems already explicitly qualified by Shelley’s writings to mean something else aside from Mill’s retroactive (and still reigning) designation as an “utterance overheard.”21 Specifically, the often private character attached to the overheard emotive address—a threesome at most, involving speaker, addressed, and reader—does not seem to be at all what Shelley is after. In Prometheus Unbound, at least, the combination of “lyrical” and “drama” speaks exactly to the reflexively mannered sense of what I’ve described as theory as future commemoration, enhancing how much that dynamic is public, not private, articulation. Like the lyric, the lyrical drama fundamentally figures address as the intrinsic quality of its language, infusing its words with the profundity of that attribute without needing or actively reaching out to any literal staging of that poetic action.22 Like the drama, however, the lyrical drama asserts that the quality of linguistic address is intrinsically social, whether the existence of the public collective, like the single recipient of the traditional lyric, is ontologically validated by any action beyond those of the poem’s textual operations. Much as Celeste Langan argues that the metonymic continuum of blank verse as print operates as a reflexive medium by which an encounter with Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel is best understood, the medium thickness of the language of lyric drama in Prometheus Unbound asserts a sensation of meaning that is the professed, high-wire language of theory.23 21. John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” in Essays on Poetry, ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12. See also Northrop Frye’s famous amplification of the private, voyeuristic aspects of this view of the lyric in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 248–49. For a key elaboration of the generic hybridity organizing Prometheus Unbound, see Tilottama Rajan, “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chavina Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 194–207. 22. For a key understanding of lyric as the figure of address, see Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in his The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), 135–54. 23. Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (2001): 49–70.

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In a more familiar philosophical vocabulary, Stuart Curran describes the procedure of Shelleyan lyrical drama as one in which “this concerted embedment of lyric at the heart of drama signals [Shelley’s] concern with the multiplicity of frameworks in which we all find ourselves as well as his recognition that all action is subordinate to the preliminary mental conceptions that spur it” (“Lyrical,” 292). It isn’t difficult to see Curran describing something very much akin to the trajectory in Prometheus Unbound of theory, with the one difference being that in theory’s arc there exists a more volatile understanding of any set of terms it might deploy, such as mind (“mental conceptions”) and body or mind and external world, or, as Adorno so pointedly takes up, mind and action, or theory and praxis.24 (In contrast, because of its historical setting, no matter how fantastic, Shelley’s other lyric drama, Hellas, arguably stays more comfortably accessible within the categories that Curran uses.) Similarly, Timothy Michael has described the rise of political knowledge during the Romantic period as one riven by the philosophical question of whether such understanding resides primarily in the world of empirical experience or that of speculative reason.25 The lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound can then be viewed as an especially intense argument for the latter, with this essay’s deployment of theory ratcheting up that speculative intensity to the point of questioning how reason secures itself in any foundational way during the process. The celebratory language of the cosmic denizens of act 4 would thus in equal parts assert a lyrically social, not private, intimacy, and a linguistic knowingness of that interconnectedness whose appeal lies not only in the poignancy of that want, but in the spectral nature of the claim, the future as paradoxically the furtive and the spectacular, the profession of theory. The difficulty of this proposition and the centrality of that trait vividly structure Shelley’s poem as much as its revolutionary pleasure, starting with the almost unbearably indeterminate binding of stasis and motion that defines the beginning of Prometheus Unbound. 24. For an even more vigorously elaborate argument for the intellectual genealogy that runs from Shelley to Adorno and others, see Robert Kaufman, “Intervention and Commitment Forever!: Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin,” in Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry: 1819–1820, ed. Michael Scrivener, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (May 2001), https://romantic- circles.org/praxis/interventionist/index.html. 25. Timothy Michael, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 1–30. For Michael’s own reading of Prometheus Unbound through the question of skeptical idealism and “the atmosphere of human thought,” see 203–23.

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For aside from how the topos of enjoyment might imprint itself on Prometheus, particularly in terms of how the poem progresses from the first to fourth act, his shaken, incarcerated form in act 1 especially initiates questions about theory, praxis, and the future by its seeming inaction, an ironic predicament for the individual who introduces the techné of fire to humankind. We might then see in Prometheus’s unsteady, helpless body an emblem of a “weak technics,” that in its practice of inutility gestures toward something beyond the horizon of state instrumental terror that has interned him at the poem’s beginning.26 The situation is, however, even more complicated because of Prometheus’s famous performative speech act, his recall of his curse against Jupiter, which can also be read as the ultimate moment of praxis in Prometheus Unbound, the action that causes the cosmic sea change in Shelley’s text. Yet that reading also falters in the poem’s very expression of the idea. The recall episode’s relation to cause and effect, that simple relational structure by which we intuitively try to measure the meaning of praxis, is simultaneously amplified and obfuscated by the poem. This indeterminacy is in part due to the well-recognized semantic knottiness of the scene—the fact that Prometheus’s curse could also be Jupiter’s curse, depending on who is cursing whom, as well as the question of what both a curse and a recall might mean or actually do, in the latter’s case whether a recall gathers the past, interrupts the present, or summons the future. That opacity also has to do with the narrative murkiness of the poem, the strange temporality of the first act where nothing immediately appears to occur after the recall of the curse, except for the arrival of the Furies intent on carrying out their torture of Prometheus. Likewise, the despairing reaction of Earth to Prometheus’s recall troubles any immediate consensus of epistemological revelation that might translate into what I, using Michael, have described as political knowledge (British, 1–17), in this case knowledge of a revolution that has happened, is happening, or could happen. The affect could be one of dispersion, deferral, or delay, or of an invisible ontology of furious change. The reader of Shelley’s poem is given no certain, totalizing cue as to what is happening at the moment of the recall. Rather, the scene stages its unfolding not in the mode of an epistemological affirmation but rather as an occasion for the very interrogation of its singular status—its very relation to or existence as, in Badiou’s weighty sense, an event.27 26. By “technics” I’m thinking of something akin to Bernard Stiegler’s revision of the term from Aristotle in his Technics and Time, 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 27. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2007), 170–83.

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For Badiou that interrogation is always a retroactive one; in the case of Prometheus Unbound, however, a retroactive reading does not secure the recall episode as the inaugurating end of despotic history. Prometheus’s frail body initiates the question of future change not by resolving the future but by forcefully opening up the question of historical cause and effect, by resisting any easy affirmation of his actions as the cause of the poem’s own. Quite simply, we do not know for sure why Jupiter loses his power. It could be Prometheus’s recall of the curse or his other actions, such as resisting telling Mercury his knowledge of Jupiter’s fate. Or, as most readings of the poem also wonder, it could involve the actions of that mysterious figure, Demogorgon. Whether Demogorgon stands for dialectical necessity or a more violent form of catachrestic action is unclear, which some might argue is the very point of his inclusion in the poem. We can sharpen that question further by considering another candidate for the causal forces of Prometheus Unbound, someone explicitly invested in an encounter with Demogorgon, Asia. As her fellow Oceanide Panthea notes, Asia registers historical change in her very bodily comportment. That somatic experience immediately follows another moment in which Asia also becomes entangled with the question of history, through her interrogation of Demogorgon. The scene stands out for its explicit staging of the question of causality in the play, as Asia again and again asks Demogorgon what first principle motivates the historical narrative within which they find themselves involved. As explicit is how wanting the explanatory character of the scene is, as Demogorgon repeats again and again versions of his one-word answer, “God,” or the equally unsatisfying, “He reigns.” ASIA Who made the living world? DEMOGORGON God. ASIA Who made all that it contains—thought, passion, reason, will, imagination? DEMOGORGON God, Almighty God. ASIA Who made the sense which, when the winds of spring In rarest visitation, or the voice Of one beloved heard in youth alone, Fills the faint eyes with falling tears, which dim

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The radiant looks of bewailing flowers And leaves this peopled earth a solitude When it returns no more? DEMOGORGON Merciful God. (2.4.8–19)

“God” functions less as any kind of semantically or ontologically thick answer and more as an empty slot that spurs Asia on to asking more and more elaborate questions, ultimately coming up with her own historical rendition of the conflict between the Titan Prometheus and the older gods. Demogorgon’s “God” seems less any kind of identifiable mechanical or expressive causality and more a Spinozan absent cause (if not an Althusserian or Jamesonian one), whose simultaneous, structural ubiquity and elusiveness is succinctly crystallized in the pun of “reigns” as “rains.”28 “Reigning/ Raining,” Demogorgon’s “God” incites Asia’s own allegory of history. Whether that history is the result of a dialectical hermeneutic of representational narrative, in the way that Fredric Jameson uses allegory, or a narration of cognition’s and meaning’s own stalling, in the way that de Man means the same term, Prometheus Unbound does not quite say, arguably because none of us can quite say either.29 But just as arguably that undecidability also outlines the very spectrum that theory inhabits, where theory occurs. If Prometheus’s recall makes him both the analysand and analyst who together model for us one dynamic of theory, Asia’s urgently deliberate, theatrical, and thus also commemorative questioning of Demogorgon even more explicitly figures the generative, interrogative moment that theory tries to realize. Asia’s concluding response to one of Demogorgon’s final explanatory offerings—that her own heart “gave the response” that De28. For the key argument that Spinoza’s idea of God as a causa immanens anticipates Althusser’s structural causality, see Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: NLB, 1976), 64–65. See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 35 and Peter Thomas, “Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza,” Historical Materialism 10, no. 3 (2002): 71–113. Thomas’s piece is of added pertinence to the degree it stages the question of philosophy’s (non-) relation to praxis in Spinoza and Althusser; finally, while Shelley’s notation of his copy of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is well known, we are waiting for an extended consideration of the presence of Spinoza in Shelley. See Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 4 (2007): 367–408. 29. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–208; and Jameson, 28–35. See also Wang, Fantastic Modernity, 186–87.

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mogorgon gives about how “All things are subject to eternal love”—stresses what is important about the exchange: not so much Demogorgon’s gnomic answers, not even his point about “eternal love,” but the ever-growing nature of Asia’s theoretical inquiries (lines 120–22). (The fact that Asia, as many have noted, is neither a Western nor a masculine subject further heightens the importance of her interrogating role in this scene.) In Shelley’s poem, moreover, Asia’s theorizing is followed by her own bodily change and a recognizable uptick in the narrative momentum of the play, including soon afterward Demogorgon’s overthrow of Jupiter. In Asia theory happens, in the nondialectical, techno-magistic manner described in my other chapters. And then in Asia, change, somatic and affective, happens. And then Jupiter falls. Literally staged for us in the language of what Shelley calls his lyric drama is the act of change tied to the act of theory, theory as both interrogation and affective register, theory as Asia. Or, more exactly, we might say the suggestion of that connection is staged. Reproducing the indeterminate volatility that techno-magism asserts, the approximation of Asia’s theorizing to the later events of the play could simply be that: proximity. The transformation of Asia’s theorizing into praxis, her causing the political changes so soon following her moment in Demogorgon’s cave, is explicitly raised, just as the confirmation of that idea is ultimately withheld from us. The causal relation between Asia and what follows could also be a contingent one, which is to say this relation, the relation between theory and praxis, and praxis’s own theoretical relation to itself, is figural. We might remember that this predicament is acknowledged in Wes Blomster’s English translation of Adorno’s own equation for how theory supersedes the pseudoactivity of immediate political action: “[Theory] takes a position as a figuration of praxis which is more closely related to praxis truly involved in change than in a position of mere obedience for the sake of praxis” (my emphasis).30 The relationship between 30. Arguably, Pickford’s alternate translation of “Gestalt” also signals the asymptotic physics of figure’s drive, of figure as the “form” or bearing, “akin to,” something else: “For its part, a comportment, a form of praxis, [theory] is more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is pliant for the sake of praxis” (Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 293). Theory as the “comportment” of praxis is also inherently theatrical, within the deliberate modality of a performance that I’ve suggested also characterizes the language of the lyric drama in Prometheus Unbound. The German original is “Offenes Denken weist über hinaus. Seinerseits ein Verhalten, eine Gestalt von Praxis, ist es der verändernden verwandter als eines, das um der Praxis willen pariert” (Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.2 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977], 798.)

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theory and praxis is figural, that is, theoretical. It is as theoretical as the question of whether one relation over another can actually be “more closely related to praxis truly involved in change.” It is as theoretical as the question of genuine praxis. That Asia’s questioning of Demogorgon also serves as an expositional plot device would speak to Asia-as-theory’s mechanical, instrumental dimensions, its inescapable ties to this compromised world. But theory is automated in another way that the sonorous, dramatically efflorescent language of Prometheus Unbound also punctuates. Theory is autocommemorative in that it is a value machine, an indexing of the portentous signaled by the very deliberate nature of its expression, the profession of theory that is theory’s form. Theory is also the metacommemorative in the reflexivity of that deliberation, even if in certain instances that reflexivity serves its own annihilation. Theory commemorates in that both theory and commemoration are performative. Like the language of Asia and others in Prometheus Unbound, they are intentional and dramatic, which means they each constitute an action. What those actions mean, however, whether they involve a reification, a demystification, or a deconstruction, is a question for the future—the future as and of Romanticism, as theory. Thought unthinkingly translated into practice is commemoration as monumentalization; thought and feeling as the purposeful practice of mediation, no matter its incalculability, is commemoration as theory. In Asia’s and Prometheus’s cases theoretical reflexivity, its sensation, explicitly serves the question of the future; it attends to the idea of an action that might incite the future, the idea of future change. From one perspective, one that would seem to run counter to but actually founds this essay, the future, as well as the past and present, are simply tropes. Temporality is, first and foremost, rhetoric. Commemoration would then be the deployment of such tropes and the erasure of that deployment, with the reifications coming out of such erasure constructing especially the ontologies of past and present, though also too in many cases monuments to the future. In Prometheus Unbound, however, commemorative thought targets an alterity that is also the future, the future as that alterity, a troping and a figuration that is, and is expressed by, the reflexivity of theory. In that sense, what I’ve outlined here might very well take “a position as a figuration of,” if not converge with, contemporary critiques of the future. For a queer future is one not at all, an impossible one. Within the language that some of us study it would then also be a Romantic, Shelleyan, one. It would be a weak idea, prostrate and trembling in its mimetic registers, yet compulsive and dramatic in its inquisitions. It would not be afraid of its desire. It would be defiant in its

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pleasures—the happiness of an idea, as Adorno puts it, that contemplates how it could be thought universally (“Resignation,” in Culture Industry, 175). An impractical proposition, perhaps, but that is the point. As does Shelley, as does the future, theory deals not with the practical but the impossible. Let us commemorate, let us think and feel, that.

Coda: Wanting, Still If, however, revolution is interminable, so is its discourse, which is simply another way of asking, What might the term revolution mean today? Or, more to the point, what might it mean to throw down Jupiter as the third decade of this particular century begins? What might the commemoration of radical social transformation expressed two hundred years ago say about the possibility of that wager in the fraught now of our own contemporaneity? This collection’s earlier essay on the Romantic cliché concluded by referring to two vectors of that present, the rise of oligarchic capitalism and the growing sense of some type of event horizon that would mark the finite boundaries, temporal, spatial, social, and ecological, of the anthropocene. That essay’s final say on the cliché stressed how the Romantic, Keatsian realization of that term might especially relate to the first vector, as an indigestible, unsatisfied kernel obstructing the greedy consumption of tribal pleasure that the oligarch offers its followers as its hegemonic vision of the world. My present argument on the different forms of pleasure in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound could certainly participate in this narrative, with the continuity and distance between Jupiter as Shelleyan oligarch and as current oligarch capitalist almost unbearably speaking to the stakes of imaging—theorizing—Jupiter’s fall today. However, I want to end with a thought experiment that focuses on the other historical vector mentioned by the previous essay, to wonder what might it mean for the oligarch’s fall to be the overthrowing of the regnant idea of the anthropos and of its sovereignty, the anthropocene. Prometheus unbound would then mean Prometheus untethered, perhaps never again to alight upon this earth. Jupiter’s welcome fatal drop would then simply mirror this other letting go of the Titan’s technics and instrumental proclivities, unmoored and floating away like the evening sounds in Keats’s To Autumn, beyond a now radically undefined topos and ecology. And in their celebration of the emphatic extinction of this reigning idea, in the pronounced pleasures of the new creatures of this indeterminate habitation, the uncanny affect of those cosmic denizens of act 4 in Prometheus—of the

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Earth, Moon, and spirits—would converge with the aggressively queer no future of Edelman’s allegiance to the death drive.31 The conceptual and affective task of following and commemorating that drive would constitute the impossible theory of political knowledge without the anthropos and its practice, the anthropocene. It would make the end of the anthropocene and the end of the world something besides illogical, nonsensical phrasings. And, most immediately, between two deaths, it would reconstitute deconstruction as theory, with its relation to the likes of Adorno far from clear or determined, into something explicitly beyond the debates over its political quietism, into the cynosure for this (non-) future embedded within and delinked from this (non-) present.32 It would mean recognizing, paraphrasing Jameson, that, while we might prefer to ignore what deconstruction theorizes, what is theorized—and what the techno-magism of Prometheus Unbound poetizes—will not ignore us.

31. The suggestion made to me in conversation by Jacques Khalip that Demogorgon is Edelman’s Sinthomosexual could very well also converge with what I’m describing here. See Edelman, 172. For one reading of queer theory that counters Edelman’s use of the death drive with Ernst Bloch’s notions of the future, see José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). For a reading of Prometheus Unbound explicitly inflected by the Edelman/ Muñoz debate, see Jonathan Crimmins, The Romantic Historicism to Come (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 137–76. 32. It should be clear that, as with Adorno, the Lacanian reference does not imply any absolute commensurability among these various modes of critique; the slippage here is intentional, or attempts to follow an intention. To the latest journalistic reiterations of deconstruction’s quietism, now construed as the more hostile constative relativism enabling fake news, one might simply nod and ask how either truth or capitalism were doing before deconstruction. For one suggestion of how deconstruction might inform this postfable in a way that by no means simply buttresses sanguine visions of the posthuman, see the next essay in this collection.

5.

Af ter Life Byron’s Manfred and the Umwelt Who? The Dog? —Jacques Derrida I am giddy. —Lord Byron, Manfred

As Eugene Thacker observes, the term life not only refers to a multitude of conflicting meanings but also signals and erases that very heterogeneity. We can also see that dynamic organizing the attempt indicated by the title of one of his books, After Life, to think beyond that term.1 Such too is the predicament of this present piece, where a number of diverging meanings of the idea of the afterlife informs what follows. There is the theological afterlife that follows death; death as the radical negativity after life; the characterization of life as a teleological pursuit of itself, of life questing after life; the afterlife of the nonhuman; and the afterlife, the death in life, of commodity exchange. These meanings will build on my initial discussion of the question of solipsism in the Romantic topos and spiral out of my questioning of the titular character of Byron’s exemplary mental theater, Manfred, as the quintessential Romantic solipsistic subject. By reframing the idea of how Byron’s closet drama enacts the question of Romantic solipsism, I want to suggest how that work and its own afterlife anticipate a posthuman terrain in which the meanings of the afterlife are, if not “Derrida was accused in Kansas of practicing willful obscurantism by a pointing fellow, who said words to the effect, ‘We know what you’re up to—you’re like the one in the movie, The Wizard of Oz!’ ‘Ou?’ replied Derrida in his French accent, ‘zhe dawg?’ ” Dorion Sagan, Introduction to Jakob von Uexküll, “A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans” with “A Theory of Meaning,” trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15. 1. Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), ix–xvi. The essay was part of a panel on Romantic Life at the 2017 North American Association for the Study of Romanticism conference.

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completely corralled, magnetized around a return to the problem of the human, as well as, or, the question of capital. From Morse Peckham to Andrew Warren solipsism has been a mainstay of the Romanticist vocabulary this century and the last, implicitly or explicitly.2 Its presence continues to be felt today, especially for those who see it as the inevitable outcome or cul-de-sac of what Quentin Meillassoux would call correlationist thought.3 Kant’s acceptance of dwelling with appearances, as opposed to encountering das Ding an sich, emphasizes how much this plot, or problem, is a Romantic one, for the Romantics as well as Romanticists. It becomes the basic structure for the very question of what human life might denote: Questing after life means attaining a nonsolipsistic life, even as solipsism might from another angle define the infinite finitude of human life, or thought, in its most unequivocal form. Within post- or antihumanist circles, one response to, or reenvisioning of, the Kantian subject/object conundrum has garnered renewed interest. I refer to the work of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his idea of the Umwelt, the particular perceptual world in which every organism dwells and acts. As Inga Pollmann notes, the fact of perception in Uexküll doesn’t necessarily mean a scenario defined by solipsism, where illusory phenomena stringently cordon off the noumenon of a creature’s interior life.4 What an organism senses and perceives can be observed and thus to some degree theorized and shared. For a reader of Uexküll like Agamben this can seemingly lead to a lyrically complete sublation, subjective as it is, of a being’s outside and inside worlds, where the study of a spider’s web, one whose design accounts perfectly for the flight and entrapment of the fly, engenders 2. I’m thinking specifically of Peckham’s definition of Romanticism as a move away from the spatial coordinates of up and down toward ones of inside and outside in his “Toward as Theory of Romanticism,” in Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 231–57, and Andrew Warren’s English Romantic association of the Orientalist desert with the barren, solipsistic mind in his The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Variations on this theme abound, of course, including those within this present collection of works; for one primal scene set before the 1970s deconstruction of mind and nature, see Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970). 3. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 5–6. 4. Inga Pollmann, “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, and Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 778–80.

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our view of a being totally in sync with the outside forces composing its Umwelt.5 Pollmann stresses another dimension of Uexküll’s subjectivism, where his observation of a creature’s Umwelt doesn’t so much transcend interiority as make the goal of absolutely accessing it by and large irrelevant (778–80). As she writes, “Uexküll’s biology is therefore an attempt to create a methodology that does not aim at getting behind appearances . . . but rather accepts there is only appearance. Yet this appearance reveals something about the living body to which things appear” (793). For a starfish or tick, what that creature environmentally senses, what we can see and catalogue the creature sensing—in the famous instance of Uexküll’s tick, in toto the smell of butyric acid, temperature of mammalian blood, and touch of mammalian hair—for all intents and purposes is that creature, its Umwelt and its interior life (Uexküll, 44–52). I want to stress two points here. First is Pollmann’s suggestion, how the unavoidably visual component of considering a creature’s Umwelt, of sensing the phenomena that it perceives, both runs parallel to and also converges with the promise of the medium of film in the early twentieth century: “It was when Uexküll turned to visual technological media that he was able to overcome this theoretical impasse between external determination and internal subjective autonomy” (780). Film allowed researchers’ particular Umwelten to overlap with and at least in part view a studied creature’s Umwelt. As such, Uexküll’s vision of film as a scientific tool buttressed the medium’s early twentieth- century aesthetic promise, where to immerse oneself in a film was to experience, often for the first time and uncannily, another’s Umwelt. In Pasi Väliaho’s succinct formula, Uexküll’s Umwelt reinforces the “ ‘ethological- aesthetic’ approach to cinematic experience.”6 Second is the way thinkers have responded to the question implicit in Uexküll’s claim that every organism has an Umwelt. If that is the case, what do we make of the possible relation between a human’s Umwelt and those of other organisms? For Agamben and Pollmann, as well as a number of other thinkers including Deleuze and Guattari, implied in the idea of the Umwelt is an ontological populism, where the heterogeneity of perceptual worlds also means a horizontal equivalence among different Umwelten, a nonhierarchal 5. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 41–42. 6. Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought, and Cinema Circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 103. But see also note 27.

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assemblage of phenomenal realms that dovetails nicely with many of the impulses of posthumanist or antihumanist thought.7 (Indeed, for Uexküll, there is not only one human Umwelt but a variety of Umwelten for such figures as the adult, child, hunter, and atomic physicist.) Yet equally vehement is another response to the question of a human Umwelt or of a human alternative to such a realm altogether: the philosophical attempt to define human being as essentially singular and above the animal world, as that which defines the human as the human in an emphatic, if not aggressive, way. This line of thinking in and in response to Uexküll is taken up by figures such as Arnold Gehlen and Heidegger, with the latter’s concept of Dasein fundamentally expressing the vision of a human singularity supposedly distinct from the allegedly intrinsic animal nature of the biologist’s idea of the Umwelt (Väliaho, 108–9); such concerns also appear, as both Pollmann and Agamben note, in key conversations of German National Socialist thought (Pollmann, 784; Agamben, 41–43).8 This latter genealogy, including the assertion of its end point in National Socialism, has also been long identified with one strain of Romanticism. Whether one agrees with or demurs from the twentieth-century association with Nazism, it’s a commonplace in Romantic studies to see this strain reach back to Nietzsche and, before him, Byron. More exactly, before Nietzsche there is Byron’s Manfred, whose eponymous protagonist is not only the Byronic hero but also the proto-Übermensch par excellence, as even the latest Norton anthology for Romantic literature tells us and Nietzsche’s own favoring of Manfred over Faust would seem to indicate.9 This is a Nietzschean idea of the Übermensch yet untroubled by animal studies, but that is the point, how much this philosophical commonplace is identified with an understanding of Manfred as a tale about human distinction. The status of Byron’s work as a closet drama, a mental theater, buttresses this view. To encounter a work rarely if ever staged, is to enter the gothic 7. For a summary of the various genealogies of thinkers responding to Uexküll, including those interested in his use of the visual, see Pollmann, 793, 796–98. 8. See also the account of Heidegger’s response to Uexküll’s theory of the sensory in Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2015), 357, 390–91, as well as Pollmann’s rendering of Husserl’s less antagonistic reenvisioning of a human Umwelt (795–96). 9. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D (Tenth Edition): The Romantic Period, ed. Deirdre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 634; for one long-standing formulation of the “existentialist” equation between Byron and Nietzsche, see Peter L. Thorslev Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 122, 175.

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mind of its existential hero, both cursed and blessed by an iron-caged selfconsciousness that characterizes him as quintessentially human, especially within a philosophical mode dominant during the last mid-century. (That this view still retains its bite is evident, I’d argue, to anyone teaching this text to an undergraduate class and to certain students within that cohort.) As Alan Richardson describes such works, “Character becomes plot as the dramatic interest centers on the history of a protagonist’s consciousness,” where specifically for Byron “dramatic poetry should constitute a ‘mental theater,’ taking as its subject the human mind in all its complexity, exploring not only its outward manifestation in character but its ‘inner structure and workings’ as well.”10 Self-consciousness as both Romantic solipsism and human being in their purest forms, human life attained after animal life, at once far-reaching and claustrophobic—in some fundamental way that is what Manfred emblematizes. I’d like to suggest another way to consider Byron’s resistance to producing his work theatrically, however, one that doesn’t equate mental theater with a solipsism simply separating, and elevating, the mind of Manfred from the natural, supernatural, and religious communities he confronts, as well as from ultimately all who might read and identify with him.11 What if instead we approach Manfred as something more like a protofilmic version of the Umwelt that Pollmann and Väliaho extract from Uexküll? What if we consider Byron’s work not simply as a thought experiment but as a quite serious experiment of the senses, an observational partaking of the sensation of the character Manfred and his Umwelt, where questions of perception

10. Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1988), 1–2. The quotation “inner structure and workings” comes from Charles Lamb’s description of Shakespeare’s characters’ minds, in his “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage-Representation,” in The Complete Works and Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 292. 11. For a discussion of Byron’s ambivalent, if not outright contradictory, attitude toward stage representation, see David Erdman, “Byron’s Stage Fright: The History of His Ambitions and Fear of Writing for the Stage,” in The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Gleckner and Bernard Beatty (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 5–31. For the argument that the plot of Manfred resembles Milton’s own closet drama, Samson Agonistes, see Richardson, 44. For the latest arguments for the theatrical character of Manfred, see the essays in “Voice, Performance, Circulation,” in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, On the 200th Anniversary of Byron’s Manfred: Commemorative Essays, ed. Omar F. Miranda ( June 2019), https://romantic- circles.org/ praxis/manfred.

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and phenomenal experience are not lessened, perhaps even heightened, by its status as a closet drama? One might ask why performed theater can’t convey an Umwelt as much as a film or text; yet we can also wonder, following Benjamin’s claims about film as a medium that especially makes visible what usually is invisible, whether like film and unlike the distracted social dynamics of early nineteenth-century theatrical space, the closet drama enables a concentrated form of observation, especially when that drama is reflexively organized around the details of robust, focused viewing in the first place.12 Rancière’s categories might also help us here, insofar as theater would be associated with the codified modes of mimesis characteristic of “the representative regime of art” dominant before the early nineteenth century, those which are then overthrown by a more wide-ranging set of viewing tactics in the pictorial and print media of “the aesthetic regime” initiated during the Romantic period.13 Byron’s “metaphysical drama,” an especially vivid specimen of the Romantic mental theater that for Richardson exemplifies Romanticism’s far-reaching break with the protocols of “neoclassical rule and decorum,” could then be understood as a forward-looking example of this newly forming dispositif (Richardson, 2).14 Byron’s letter to John Murray on Manfred not only explicitly expresses Byron’s “horror of the stage,” but also even more pointedly asserts his “invincible repugnance” toward “representation.”15 The question remains whether 12. See both Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 235–37, and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 37–38. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 7–25. This is not to blur the distinction between Benjamin and Rancière, of course; for the latter’s own sense of their differences see Ranciére, 8, 27–30. For the view that the representational codes of Romantic theater were actually more volatile (and generative) than what Rancière claims, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theater in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10, and Dana Van Kooy, Shelley’s Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post–Napoleonic Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 1–21. 14. For a discussion of what Byron was specifically referring to when using each of the terms “metaphysical drama” and “mental theater” and how they nevertheless in many ways ultimately converge, see Richardson, 43–44. 15. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, IV, ed. R. E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898–1901), 71–72. Quoted in Erdman, 5.

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Byron’s disgust really extends beyond the specifics of theatrical representation, and if not, whether the Kantian realm of appearances undergirding Uexküll’s filmic Umwelt might then more properly speak to what occurs in the metaphysical drama of Manfred. Key here also could be Richardson’s claim about how much the Romantic closet drama converged with not only the period’s fascination with Shakespeare, but also more particularly Charles Lamb’s “paradoxical and deliberately perverse argument” that people should best read, not perform, the tragedies (2). For Richardson, Lamb’s stress on reading points to an emphasis on the mental interiority of both reader and read character at odds with the outward appearances of theater. When reading, according to Lamb, our fancy makes us just enough aware of characters’ “flesh and blood” while the higher faculty of our imagination “is employed upon [their] thoughts and internal machinery” (Lamb, 302). Lamb explicitly associates the operations of fancy with the “external appearances” that assure us of a character’s corporeal reality. Yet we might still ask how then the imagination is “employed upon” a character’s interior life, how reading not simply Shakespeare’s plays but also other literary texts might allow us access into what the Geneva School and other mid-twentieth-century thinkers explicitly call phenomenal consciousness. I understand the broad if not hasty strokes involved in formulating such a question. Nevertheless we can begin to answer it by first alighting on how much the phenomenal criticism of the previous century was influenced by Edmund Husserl, who like Heidegger was himself very much taken by Uexküll, and who tried to revise the biologist’s Umwelt using a vocabulary of human perception and human consciousness.16 Uexküll and Manfred together demonstrate how literary activity in one of its incarnations might, like film, allow our critical imagination, either scientific, philosophic, or aesthetic, to be newly “employed upon” inner consciousness not through any immediate or transparent way, but through a concentrated form of attention amplified by the medium’s ability to make such visual or readerly focus what the medium realizes. The reflexivity of print reading like film viewing might then be understood as a mirroring exteriorization that needs no true assertion of any interiority to study something close to but ultimately not that inwardness, a subject’s Umwelt. If our encounter with the mental theater of Manfred is through something we want to call reading, that action in many ways coincides with the viewing, invariably externalized, of the observed or of observation itself. 16. Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1977), 29, 38, 48, 97–106.

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Manfred is a figure, after all, who spends much of his time acting out his experience of vertigo, existential or otherwise, swooning, fainting, or falling senseless, to the point that Francis Jeffrey protested that Byron’s work “has no action; no plot—and no characters; Manfred merely muses and suffers from the beginning to the end.”17 Vocal and physical in both his musing and suffering, Manfred is literally under watch throughout much of Byron’s piece, by both the supernatural spirits and human characters who encounter him. The gothic possibility of some incestuous, original sin between Manfred and Astarte places him under scrutiny in a way that might stress, more than any resolution of character psychology or plot, the connection between the surveillance techniques of the gothic novel and experimental protocols of controlled, scientific observation. The very narrative confines of Manfred as a text, regardless of its Miltonic or Goethean precursors, provide the parameters for that circumscribed observation, whether he lays unconscious on his castle study’s floor or teeters on an Alpine peak. Manfred does engage in quite a bit of dialogue with such characters as the Chamois Hunter, the Witch of the Alps, and the Abbot. Yet as central are the moments of parabasis or conversations among other figures aside from Manfred, where his observed behavior, his reaction to his environment, jumping beyond the mountain goats or collapsing in the Hall of Arimanes, is foregrounded as the narrative heart of Byron’s work. Parabasis and exegesis become less theatrical tactics and more portions of the distilled, self-reflexive mode of reported observation that is the story that Manfred tells, talking about, picturing, Manfred’s Umwelt. Of course, making another’s solipsism the object of one’s attention is a contradiction that traditional readings of Manfred’s existential exceptionality already mine, insofar as we acknowledge the work’s solipsistic drive by both positing its actions as all happening within his mind, or Byron’s, or mind qua mind, while also seeing his heroism defined by an ultimately unknowable and impenetrable interiority. This is the very paradox of inside and outside that Uexküll’s Kantianism, like almost every Kantianism, acknowledges, attempts to work through, and simultaneously repeats. For Uexküll, however, a creature’s Umwelt is not simply mind, insofar as it is a collection of perceptions and appearances that others can to some degree collect, study, or themselves sense. (Nor, as a concentration of such appearances, is the Umwelt the world in any simple ontological fashion.) Even as, or because, their own critical language has been shaped by the contradictions 17. Francis Jeffrey, review of Manfred in Edinburgh Review 28 (1817) quoted in Richardson, 42.

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inherent in trying to represent the solipsistic mind, past readings of Manfred have counterintuitively signaled something akin to what Uexküll describes, a mode of knowledge fundamentally based on its exteriorization from Manfred’s inner self. Thus, Timothy Morton inventively admits to the dualism in Manfred that seals its protagonist from the world, while still arguing for the affective structure of Byron’s work—“the physical and psychic darkness evoked at the very beginning of the play”—that allows us to experience Manfred’s sense of his outer reality, Morton’s own well-known rendition of a dark ecology defined by its explicit discontinuity from conventional, celebratory depictions of Romantic nature.18 Such “a physical and psychic darkness” especially touches upon two key aspects of Uexküll’s theory, the huge role that optics play in our access to the perceptual character of a particular Umwelt as well as the necessarily partial nature of each and every creature’s perceptual apparatus, that which makes the same environment for human child, human adult, and nonhuman invertebrate all strikingly different Umwelten. Morton associates the poem’s darkness and its other sensory dislocations—its “environmental art”—with how the world exterior to Manfred’s mind must always present itself to him and us “indirectly, anamorphically”; always inevitably “in the process of losing its shape” (162). Whereas Morton calls what he extricates from Manfred “a kind of amalgam of objectivity and subjectivity” (161), my suggestion is that much of his characterization of the environmental ambience of Manfred describes Manfred’s Umwelt, one that each reader of Byron’s work can readily peer into and view, as much as any scientist can in Uexküll’s lab or as any filmgoer might in Pollmann’s early twentieth-century cinema house. Uexküll helps us see Morton’s depiction of a “physical and psychic darkness” in Byron’s closet drama not as a mental theater of the mind but as the filmic promise of something like the Umwelt. The biologist’s argument also gives us a different way to understand the other side of the paradox of solipsism’s representation, the way that, even as we seem to be caught in what traditionally has been known as his psyche, Manfred is realized as an ultimately enigmatic, unfathomable entity. For Uexküll the force of that contradiction lessens when we remember that knowledge of Manfred comes from both our shared scrutiny of what he perceives and our shared observation of Manfred himself, each of which takes place exterior to Manfred. Hence the centrality of both parabasis and exegesis to Byron’s poem. From 18. Timothy Morton, “Byron’s Manfred and Ecocriticism,” in Byron Studies, ed. Janet Stabler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 156.

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that view, Manfred’s speech while he totters on top of the Jungfrau is less an expression of sublime Byronic feeling and more profitably a combination of both those narrative techniques deployed by Manfred on himself. Lines especially organized around a delirious use of parabasis—“I feel the impulse— yet I do not plunge; / I see the peril—yet do not recede; / And my brain reels—and yet my foot is firm” (1.2.20–22)— weds the classic Lacanian distinction between the speaking I and spoken “I” to the motivations of the scientific observer, as well as philosophic student and aesthetic viewer, designations that we now know vigorously imbricate one another during the Romantic period.19 Indeed, the multiple “I’s”—spoken, acting, and observed—in each of the dashed clauses operate not simply as fragments of a broken subjectivity; as a staccato burst of asides upon asides they correspond to the trembling eruptions of a hyperkinetic nervous system, impressed upon the viewer—the reader or Manfred—as that, before anything else. Elizabeth Fay gets at something like this when she describes how on the mountain Manfred’s “marked muscular strength is compromised by a body that resists his will,” especially as Fay describes a predicament not simply about a war between body and mind, but between body and muscle, the latter a somatic convulsion arguably more discernible than the speculative conflict involving the mind as will.20 If that latter struggle does exist, it does so because Manfred and we read that battle into Manfred, from a perceptual coordinate invariably exterior to him. The very cornerstone of Manfred’s solipsistic antiheroism, his tortured, never ending self-consciousness, is conveyed to us by an external supernatural voice intoning Manfred’s condition, his “proper Hell,” over his fallen body: “On thy head I [the voice] pour the vial / Which doth devote thee [Manfred] to this trial; / Nor to slumber, nor to die, / Shall be in thy destiny” (1.1.251–55). Whether the “vial” exists figuratively or literally, whether it is actually made up of Manfred’s own inner torment, the fact that the “spell” 19. See, for example, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logic of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). All references to Manfred are from Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 4, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 51–102. 20. Elizabeth A. Fay, Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 143. Fay is describing Andrew Elfenbein’s argument in his “Byron and the Fantasy of Compensation,” European Romantic Review 12, no. 3 (2001): 267–83. For Fay’s own interrogation of the multiplication of Byronic subjectivity in Manfred and the poet’s other works in relation to the “portraitive mode,” see Fashioning, 222–41.

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oppressing Manfred’s might come from the voice (line 211), that it utters Manfred’s fate to Manfred, simply underscores the degree to which the interiority of Manfred is superseded by an externalized staging of who and what he and his Umwelt are. The idea of the poem’s action as his Umwelt allows us to view this disembodied voice and other similar appearances in the poem not as externalized manifestations of Manfred’s own mind but as simply part of the external phenomena that make up his perceptual realm, voices that recall for Morton Michel Chion’s notion of “the voix acousmatique, a sound, and in particular a voice, that emanates from a hidden source,” with us adding how the qualifier “hidden” in the case of this scene stresses the partial, restricted nature of the subject’s perceptual encounter with its outer environment (Morton, 160).21 Chion, of course, is thinking particularly about movie sound, and so his help in conceptualizing what happens in Manfred further thickens how Byron’s mental theater promises something akin to the equation between film and Umwelt that Pollmann and Väliaho see. (Likewise, the concept of the anamorphic used by Morton has its own role in cinematographic history.) Yet in this instance Chion’s sense of a sound hidden, away, from the subject especially emphasizes the staging of Manfred’s self-consciousness as a moment of exteriorization. Regardless of how the voice doesn’t get everything right—Manfred does die, after all—selfconsciousness itself becomes for all intents and purposes the fact of Manfred’s explicitly discernible behavior within, his response to, this external world: the act of not sleeping, ever. What, moreover, if we use Uexküll to refashion a different genealogy of the Umwelt for Manfred that would complicate our view of Byron as a British Romantic precursor to the German tradition that culminates in Heidegger’s exaltation of the singularity of human being? As I alluded to previously, figures in animal studies such as Vanessa Lemm have already unsettled this tradition with regard to Nietzsche’s role within it, asserting how the idea of the Übermensch is in fact founded on an openness to animality.22 I would suggest the possibility of a further complication that begins

21. See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 109–11. 22. As Vanessa Lemm writes, the Übermensch “is neither the expression of the human as a being independent from the rest of life or from the rest of its own species. Rather, becoming overhuman is dependent upon one’s openness to the animality of the human being” (Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being [New York: Fordham University Press, 2009], 3). Readers will see in what follows

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with Byron and the protagonist of his dramatic poem. For what if instead of simply seeing the British poet and his creation anticipating the Heideggerian project of human distinction, we also consider Manfred along the lines of Uexküll’s own affectionate description for the tick whose Umwelt he so meticulously explored, in Pollmann’s translation a “blind and deaf highway woman”? (793).23 As with a number of Byronic protagonists, there is something recessive about Manfred. Although critics have read a certain linguistic indeterminacy into this condition with regard to other Byronic figures, with Manfred it’s still not difficult to see such recessiveness as the mysterious reserve of an expansive human prowess.24 What, however, if such recessiveness didn’t point to any dormant reserve or depth, but simply delimited the range of Manfred’s Umwelt, necessarily “blind and deaf ” and bounded as Morton’s anamorphic darkness and every creature’s is in some basic way? What if Manfred’s charisma is a misreading of recessiveness as depth or, even more dizzyingly, perhaps the appropriately poignant affect we should feel toward a version of Uexküll’s heroic old highway woman, the tick? What if the Umwelt of Manfred doesn’t simply anticipate the assertion of a singular human Umwelt or even some version of Heidegger’s Dasein? What if more exactly Byron’s work signals a bifurcation between this way of thinking and another approach adamantly against the distinction between human and nonhuman, Manfred and tick? What if within the “superior science” that Manfred claims makes him the equal of the demonic spirits there might lie an even more radical knowledge that levels the ontological playing field for every creature? (3.4.115). These questions give us another way to understand one well-known line that Manfred speaks, “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die,” infamous for how much Byron was upset that his publisher omitted it from the first edition (3.4.151). Said within the context of Manfred’s rejection of the Abbot’s salvational, religious afterlife and the spirits’ threatening underworld an attempt to think about Manfred’s animality by reconfiguring a discussion of Byron’s work not around the question of independence but around the incommensurate instead. Cary Wolfe cites Lemm’s view of the Übermensch but also observes in Nietzsche tendencies that are in continuity with Nazi thought and practice; see his Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 39–42. 23. O’Neil translates “highway woman” with the much less dramatic, nongendered “bandit” (A Foray, 45). 24. For one example of such linguistic indeterminacy, see Mai-Lin Cheng, “Lara’s Stutter,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 4 (2015): 502–23.

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of damnation, the shock of the statement is conventionally understood as the ultimate salvo of Byron’s radically secular, existential human subject. What creature except for the human could so emphatically accept a death of pure negativity, unmoored from any guarantee of a theological afterlife, blessed or cursed, that such a religious symbolic secures? Counter to the force of that rhetorical question, we might respond and simply say every other organism there is, insofar as every creature dies, and that action supersedes any prior behavior of resistance the creature enacts. Less an issue of existential will and more one of basic fact, death is not so difficult for any being, insofar as resistance to death is finally impossible. Far from distinguishing the human from animal life, Manfred’s statement could very well return Manfred and his Umwelt to a larger community of nonhuman existence defined by the finite composition of every organism within it, where each is ultimately, as Manfred says of himself, its own “destroyer” (3.4.139). We might therefore have another explanation for the scandal in this final line that Byron insisted was so essential to his work. It is true that just before this utterance Manfred makes one of his most adamantly Miltonic speeches for the Satanically solipsistic powers of the mind (3.4.125–36), a moment that has long been associated with the claims of human exceptionality that most assume drives Byron’s work (Thorslev, 175). Yet Manfred then declines the Abbot’s entreaties in a mode of increasingly hypoactive withdrawal, similar to many creatures’ (non-) actions before their impending death, a situation that underscores how much Byron’s work concludes not with the distinction of the human but its opposite. Thus, while Manfred’s comment on the not so difficult character of his death seems to build upon his manifesto for the mind as “its own origin of ill and end— / And its own place and time” (3.4.130–31), we might wonder if Manfred’s words really combine to anticipate a mid-twentieth-century conception of the Übermensch or instead express something much more discontinuous in their semantic structure and affective thrust. Quintessentially Romantic in his increasing paleness and the dulling of his eyes, Manfred at his end stresses, if anything, a quiescence, a deadening of the nervous system, whose familiarity doesn’t at all depend on its relation to anything we might want to understand simply or inoculate strictly as the end of a human life (3.4.146). We might note, however, that Manfred doesn’t quite end there, with Manfred’s easeful death. Thus, as much as this essay still adheres to the momentum of the claims expressed so far, it concludes with a series of complications to any complacent evaluation of the posthuman equivalence of Manfred to either Uexküll’s starfish or tick. Let me start by mentioning simply that it is the Abbot who gets the last words in Byron’s work: “He’s

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gone—his soul hath ta’en its earthless flight— / Whither? I dread to think— but he’s gone” (3.4.152–53). Likely not the thoughts that the Abbot hoped finally to express, they can still be answered by us provisionally, if not about Manfred’s soul then about where Manfred the name or signifier has gone. Manfred has entered the paratextual world of the literary marketplace, over which Byron famously worried and thematized, one composed of generations of reading networks beginning with the dramatic poem’s first publication, continuing through its inclusion in such collections as the Norton anthologies and such commemorative events as the recent celebration of Manfred at NYU in the spring of 2017. It might seem an unfair leap for me to invoke this realm, except for two reasons. One is the fact ingrained in every student of Byron since Jerome Christensen’s Lord Byron’s Strength, how much the event of Byronism thoroughly formulates for us the way the meaning of a name collapses into the meaning of a commercial brand in our (neo-) liberal modernity. As Christensen demonstrates, as reparative as reading Byronic strength might be, it occurs knowingly if not grimly within a field of cultural production inexorably leading to the afterlife realm of commodity exchange.25 The pressure on Manfred to have his being signify something particular in the work’s various ontological communities—the natural world of the Chamois Hunter, the supernatural realm of both the Witch and Arimanes, the Christian sphere of the Abbot—can all be seen as stand-ins for the increasing insistence of commodity life as the incessant mechanism by which the significance, the meaning and value, of a name— Byron’s, Manfred’s, any being’s—must occur. From that angle, the status of the phantom Astarte resides less in either the plot of incestuous guilt she incites or the way she models a feminine Other that Manfred’s masculine solipsism strains after to reach, and more in how she anticipates the simulacrum-like existence of commercialized brands, the ontological afterlife of commodified capital that has, as Fredric Jameson long observed, penetrated both nature and mind, culture and the unconscious, for quite some time.26 25. Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xiii–xxv. 26. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 1–54. For one quintessential reading of Astarte as an “ideal, mirror image” that Manfred searches for “in which mother and child form one organic unit,” see Peter Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 83.

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Second, then, the invocation of the literary market afterlife occurs as a necessary interrogation into the posthuman afterlife of Manfred suggested by this essay. This inquiry comes into view by way of how the scientific and poetic implications of the observation of Manfred the character by Manfred the dramatic poem coexist with the pressure to understand the exchange value of Manfred, and Manfred, in the literary marketplace, a question that echoes whether film itself can stand alone separate from cinema as a historical event enmeshed in a series of material and social relations.27 More exactly we might ask: To what degree can a consideration of Manfred’s Umwelt, any Umwelt, stand alone, independent of an awareness of the world of commodity exchange? And, if the answer is not (bloody) likely at all, what possibility exists for the Umwelt to break out beyond the economy of signifiers now embedding all of us within capitalist exchange? One answer might be that this last question, versions of which are grimly familiar to anyone with an intellectual pulse at this point in time, is actually premature, insofar as it presupposes the triumphant success of the exchange of the signifier. No economy of meanings, no orderly or iron-clad system of substitution works fully, absolutely, or simply. In Marx, the name of this failure is called expropriation and in Derrida it has been called Bataille’s laughter at Hegel’s attempt to subsume radical negativity into the intelligible economy of the social dialectic between Master and Slave.28 In Manfred, this breakdown can be discerned through the very way the dramatic poem reflexively observes its protagonist’s Umwelt. For we have to admit that the other characters in Byron’s work don’t in any consistent way experience the wonder of what Manfred senses or perceives. Rather, they just as much experience bafflement at his observed actions, especially his refusal to join their various communities as much as he might seem to share or even thrive or succeed within their Umwelten, their experiential, phenomenal realms. The takeaway from observing Manfred is that Manfred does not fit, is not

27. For a discussion of the cinema’s assertion of those relations, see Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2011), 250–80. One wonders if Väliaho’s use of the “cinematic” also implicitly redounds on the inescapably social character of the specific places where the filmic Umwelt occurs: either Uexküll’s lab or the early and mid-twentiethcentury movie theater. 28. I refer to Derrida’s essay, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in his Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–77.

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fitting; exploiting but then also estranging our familiar understanding of the sublime, he literally doesn’t agree with any standard of measure of the outside world—natural, supernatural, or religious. The Abbot’s plaintive description of Manfred as an “awful chaos—light and darkness, / And mind and dust . . . / Mixed and Contending without end or order” (3.1.164–66) stresses this view, even as it resonates with Hazlitt’s own portrayal of Byron as an “eagle [who] build[s] its eyry in the common sewer.”29 Is this then a return to the recognition of a shielded solipsistic core to Manfred’s being, an interiority ultimately as opaque as it is perverse, dominant, and unyielding? Perhaps, though, another lesson can be gleaned by attending steadily to what Manfred’s external incommensurability might say, for all intents and purposes, about his interiority as precisely the incommensurate, and where, consequently, his Umwelt would be defined fundamentally as the phenomenal experience of non-adequation. That his Umwelt might not be adequate to the laws of commodity exchange is precisely the point, insofar as his non-adequation cannot but help foreground how such laws are inadequate to themselves, a condition numerous creatures, Byronic aristocrats or no, experience intimately in a multitude of ways at this very moment in time.30 As crucial is how Manfred’s Umwelt of incommensurability also redounds on the very posthuman vistas propounded by a certain reading of Uexküll, as how in Agamben’s account of the biologist’s spider web we are tempted by a posthuman, radical immanence defined by a sense of phenomenal unity, where the biologist’s own words about the partial nature of each Umwelt are de-emphasized and non-adequation no longer exists.31 It does, 29. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 11 (London: Dent and Sons, 1932), 75. Hazlitt’s immediate reference is to the oscillation in tone in Don Juan. 30. Indeed, it’s not very difficult to see the predicament of the incommensurate structuring Richardson’s argument about the necessarily “dramatic” character of Manfred and other examples of Romantic theater that he identifies (11–12), insofar as in his own way Richardson wants to stress the cut, or literal hyphen, in any ostensively monadic suggestion of “self- consciousness,” the incommensurate nature of subjectivity in this essay that also characterizes the relation between and in, among others, mind and world, world, and history 31. In the case of Agamben, that incommensurability appears to be recognized, only to be reabsorbed into the dynamic of a seemingly impossible unity: “The two perceptual worlds of the fly and spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly . . . acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as ‘fly-like.’

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and following this reading of Manfred, we can suggest a categorical name for this predicament, though it can certainly have others: the human. In the posthuman world, whether we are talking about life systems or ecologies or economies, the problematic of non-adequation endures, which means the problem of the human does also. This formulation gives us a particular way to understand one piece of notable wordplay in Byron’s work, how much man appears in the proper names of various characters, not simply Manfred, but also Herman and Arimanes.32 Man, the human, doesn’t reside uniquely within the proper name or being of Byron’s defiant, solipsistic protagonist, but, as if by some queer, textual pollination, appears throughout the stratified realms of this poem, in Manfred’s servant as well as his demonic adversary. Rather than consecrating the foundational singularity of man, the effect of such play is to make man a constant irritant in the language of Manfred, the half-erased, half-there impediment to any fully understood expression of the posthuman as an overarching, positive identity. As such the human is more the formal recognition of non-adequation, rather than any kind of specific content or essential identity that underlies a critique of a purely animal world.33 Neither political bios nor humanistic spirit nor human cognition, the human is more properly the empty slot by which non-adequation, as the formal imposition by which no identity can sustain its shape, announces itself. No longer a transcendental affirmation but doggedly one, if not the, sign of supplementary incommensurability, man, the exception of the human, remains in the animal world, as ill-fitting and intrusive as the moonlit Roman ruins that Manfred remembers walking among or the anachronistically Though the spider can in no way see the Umwelt of the fly . . . the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness” (42). Agamben picks up on Uexküll’s use of musical figures to describe the symphonic relation among Umwelten (Uexküll, 159–60, 195–96), which underscores how much the biologist’s work doesn’t so much solve as restage Kant’s formulation of a predicament, which shuttles between resolution and emphasis as aporia. 32. I’m grateful to Geraldine Friedman for pointing out this play of names to me. 33. Claire Colebrook seems to be saying something similar with one the concluding points in her “Only an Animal Can Save Us”: “Rather than this enigmatic life of the animal allowing us to shore up the difference between human and animal, we are confronted with human indifference, never secure that what we know as objective and what we live as subjective can generate anything like a common and differentiated we,” though my interest lies more in how that “we” believes it has transcended the human, rather than how it has realized absolutely the difference between human and animal (Academia.edu Download, 11).

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existential solipsism that the metacommentary of Byron’s poem still emits. Explicitly not an underlying first principle, the human emphatically reminds us instead that a posthuman community is still a community of the incommensurate. If characterized as a mage, Manfred’s signifying force is more exactly that of a techno-magism, the unsettling intrusion of a catachresis or unsubsumable kernel—the human—in the posthuman universe. Indeed, when Thacker writes about how “thought and life approach a horizon of complete incommensurability” (ix–x), he could just as well have been referring to the posthuman community of the incommensurate, the afterlife of that realm as that which lies beyond the thought of (human) life as well as the afterlife of death that binds every organism, Byronic hero and parasitic tick, together. Although one might very well say that in the animal world only species exist and thus no being dies an individual death, we might wonder instead whether every tick or starfish is also a Manfred, insofar as every animal death shows us that the one thing we share is what we each encounter alone.34 (Thus, in an abattoir the last sheep led to its death will become upset in a way unlike the others that came before it; the explanation is not that the herd animal has somehow figured out what will happen next but that it senses for the first time its existence as a solitary creature.) Uexküll’s own interest in a particular tick’s ability to lie in a suspended state without nourishment for eighteen years would then refer not simply to the defamiliarizing coordinates of nonhuman time or even an existence unsettling the parameters between life and death (52). The tick’s scenario would rather be a distillation of Uexküll’s project, a Kantian biology that cedes the unknowable to access as much as possible what can be 34. A key coordinate for the former view would once again be Heidegger; see his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). See also Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For Heidegger, the interplay of absence and presence in the (human) language of Dasein allows for the thinking of individual death in a way not available to the animal’s immediate experience of death. My suggestion here, however, is that the incommensurate as language is a basic makeup of the posthuman, with the human also in one instance the name for the incommensurate in the posthuman. My thanks to Adam Rosenthal for our exchange on this matter. We might also wonder whether a hive life or hive death might complicate the proposition of each creature sharing an encounter with something they ultimately experience alone. Yet that very possibility is structured around its own unknowability, which then raises the further question, what can one hive know of another?

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known of another subject. What might be knowable about a subject’s deathlike state is that, first and foremost, it is not death. This is precisely what incites Bataille’s laughter in Derrida: that Hegel believes the dialectic might incorporate and use the deathlike as if it were the pure negativity and unknowability of death (“Restricted,” 251–77). More relevant to the present discussion, this gap between the deathlike and death is as populist or commonly shared as one vision of Uexküll’s Umwelten, with the like of language, literature, or media, or perhaps even bio- semiosis for some, on one side, and something (or nothing) else on the other. (Certainly, Wordsworth’s Lucy poems can be read as an illustration of this fact.) Yet one could argue that this commonality—the paradoxical incommensurability of a shared death that every creature encounters alone—sets the tone for its own distinct project altogether, the further tracking of the incommensurable in life as what life already is, the afterlife of the lifelike and deathlike, in one instance the question we have asked of the Umwelt with regard to its relation to the commodity form. From this view, the Abbot is never so unknowingly close to a community with Manfred, and something like the universe, as when he utters those last lines of Byron’s work, asking where Manfred has gone. He is also never as close as he is then to something like an exposition, if not critique, of the market afterlife of Manfred the dramatic poem. That in other works like Don Juan Byron could easily make explicit the equation between finitude, fame, and market success emphasizes how close, and far off, the Abbot was from making this point.35 Let me conclude with several afterthoughts, one a swerve based on noting how much asserting the generative nature of Manfred’s observed interaction with his environment resonates with Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of ideology as a consideration of what one does externally, not what one thinks internally.36 To suggest that the ill-fit of Manfred’s actions foregrounds the nonadequation of commodity exchange might simply be another way of saying that his external incommensurability engages with ideology in a way not simply about the subject’s subjection to interpellation. (The key reference here would not simply be to Althusser’s concept of ideology but more exactly his unelaborated comment regarding those figures able momentarily to confound the interpellative power of the ideological state apparatus: “bad subjects,” a gnomic but provocative designation that suggestively 35. See, for example, stanzas 217–22 in Canto 1 of Lord Byron, Don Juan, in vol. 5 of The Complete Poetical Works, 78–80. 36. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 28–35.

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reverberates with Manfred’s unfitting, existential delinquency.)37 Equally relevant, in his own account of the Umwelt Uexküll distinguishes his approach from the objectivist assumptions of the physiologist (41–45); yet throughout his research he also asserted a mode of knowledge based on the visually observable procedures of biology that eschewed the more speculative goals of animal psychology.38 The resonance between Uexküll and Žižek suggests, however, that in this present historical afterlife, one part posthuman and one part neoliberal, biology might yet extend the reach of its optics, as well as its discourse, beyond itself: if not to psychology then to Marxism and deconstruction, as well as psychoanalysis.

Coda: Hamlet It would, of course, be difficult to consider Manfred the first modern psychoanalytic subject, exteriorized, posthuman, or otherwise. We know already that before Nietzsche and his Übermensch there was Byron’s Manfred, and before Manfred there was Faust, as well as Milton’s Satan. Yet as Peter Manning and Janet Stabler remind us, there was also, perhaps even more ubiquitously, Hamlet. The pervasive force of this last genealogical link lies not simply in the overarching Romantic obsession with Shakespeare’s lead character, nor in the way that Romantic texts such as Caleb Williams so vigorously model their own entanglement with gothic aberration upon Shakespeare’s play, nor in how the plot of a brooding male protagonist in a feudal castle haunted by a past familial crime binds Hamlet and Manfred together in some kind of fundamental psychoanalytic knot.39 Nor does it 37. “Caught within this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition, and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work,’ they ‘work by themselves’ in a vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus.” Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 181. In Manfred’s case, we might say our Uexküll-like observation of the reaction of his central nervous system to his environment catches something very much like the jouissance that both binds and resists the interpellated, ideological subject in Žižek’s own critique of Althusser (43–44). 38. Carlo Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and Theoretical Biology, trans. Catriona Graciet (New York: Springer, 2015), 76–77. In his introduction to Brentari’s book Morton Tønnessen adds that Uexküll distanced himself from the animal psychology of his day because of its anthropomorphic overtones (11). 39. See Manning, 272; and Janet Stabler, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie: 1790–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 66, 68–69, 72. Curiously, Thorslev’s landmark

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lie straightforwardly in how the epigraph of Manfred comes from Hamlet. Indeed, contrary to the epigraph’s famous remark about a heaven and earth exceeding what Horatio’s philosophy dreams, Manfred is first and foremost Hamlet to the degree that nothing surpasses the expanse of their inner reveries, philosophic or otherwise. The possible breadth of Hamlet’s psychic inner regions made Coleridge famously claim him as the quintessential Romantic, or modern, subject; that solipsistic vastness has also underwritten much of the study of Byron’s Manfred, as well as motivated our counterintuitive provocation contesting that fact. We might then ask, if Nietzsche’s Übermensch is truly defined, as Lemm argues, by its openness to animality, and if Manfred has, as we suggest, something of the invertebrate tick and that creature’s Umwelt in and around him, what of the first modern man, Hamlet? Can any of what we’ve argued about Byron’s work speak to its early modern precursor, and, if so, how might that redound upon and affect the genealogy of existential humanism we’ve outlined, from Hamlet to Manfred to Nietzsche, or from the early modern to the Romantics into the twentieth century? I approach these questions by explicitly not trying to resolve whether an animal or posthuman Hamlet exists. This debate in Renaissance circles, while referring to Heidegger, seems quite able to continue without any citation of Byron.40 My interest lies more in the clarifying alchemy that occurs when we try to think through several contrasting scenarios at stake in this inquiry. For if Lamb’s polemical invention of a read instead of staged Shakespeare is truly some kind of historical intervention, Romanticism’s Shakespeare would seem to mark Romanticism as distinct from the Renaissance rather than signal its continuity with that earlier period of time, with

1962 roadmap for the Byronic hero mentions Hamlet only a few times, never in connection with Manfred. 40. See Laurent Milesi, “(Post-) Heideggerian Hamlet,” in Posthumanist Shakespeares, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 181–93; Marie-Dominque Garnier, “Moles, Loam, and l’homme: Reversible Hamlet,” in Herbrechter and Callus, 194–212; “ ‘This?’ Posthumanism and the Graveyard Scene in Hamlet,” in Herbrechter and Callus, 213–40; Vin Nardizzi, “Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage,” in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 204–5; and Joseph Campana, “Epilogue: H is for Humanism,” in Campana and Maisano, 288–96. See also Henry Turner’s consideration of such matters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” South Central Review 26, no. 1/2 (2009): 197–217; and Margreta de Grazia’s discussion of what occurs when we drop our obsession with inwardness and subjectivity in Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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Romanticism’s Shakespearean origin story then not simply an extension of when Shakespeare wrote. However, if Lamb’s argument buttresses a deployment of Romantic closet drama not only as a hypersaturation of celebratory, solipsistic human inwardness, but also as emitting the laboratory-like effects of filmic exteriorization that we’ve argued Manfred displays, that distinction rests on two contrasting visions of the Renaissance Shakespearean humanism irrevocably mediated by Romanticism through Coleridge and others. One is further enforced by the solitary mental experience of reading a play as we assume only humans can do, while in the other the human exists as the supplementary nonclosure to numerous Umwelten, each in its phenomenal specificity belonging to creatures not immediately hemmed in by any final allegiance to the hierarchy of the human over the nonhuman or animal. With such bifurcations, the exceptionality of Romanticism loses its steadiness, precisely because that distinction can mean drastically different things. And if the possibility of Manfred as Romantic animal might somehow spur Renaissance studies of the posthuman already under way to consider further how Hamlet might mean something else radically other than the fact of Renaissance humanism, the question of Romanticism’s distinction once more starts to dissolve, absorbed once again into the Bloomian-like influence of a Renaissance now characterized by its alienation from its own culturally sanctioning, and culturally sanctioned, role as our specific origin story, much in the same way that Jameson once contemplated how the ancient Greeks and the West’s relation to them can be defamiliarized, with the Greeks reenvisioned as a preindustrial society more akin to the Aztecs than any classical forebear of Judeo- Christian culture.41 Absorbed into a nonhumanist Renaissance, Romanticism might become more interesting even as it loses its particular intention and shape. Unless, of course, Lamb’s polemics leads only to a closet drama and Romanticism about the human solipsistic subject, in which case the valorization of Hamlet by Coleridge and others gains even more bite as the imagination of an early modern progenitor to the Romantic subject, a predecessor defined by having never really existed in the first place. If what I’ve sketched seems not only broad and fanciful but also somewhat muddled, that messiness—that incommensurability—is what I alight on as, somewhat contrarily, clarifying. I do so first to suggest the ghostlike nature of humanism, whose time is then suddenly thrown out of joint, insofar as 41. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 151.

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its genealogy, the concept of which perhaps defines the human as much as the human defines it, never quite syncs fully or plainly into view as a historical identity realized by the various récits, spun out and colliding, that I’ve just adumbrated here. That in its most positive forms Renaissance humanism was never a monolithic identity simply underscores this fact. Even as the transcendental type of human distinction that contests the nonhuman implications of Uexküll’s Umwelt, humanism doesn’t seem at all triumphant, with its inability to find its genealogical footing feeling less like humanism’s subsumption of history and more like a blockage at the core of its own narrativization, a condition more accurately in line with the human as a constant supplementary irritant, formal and contentless, than with the posthuman’s own worlding of an immanence tempted—philosophically, aesthetically, or scientifically—by ontological plentitude. First and foremost, however, I outline the problem of Hamlet for Manfred and Romanticism to reiterate one through line in this collection of critical investigations. Thinking about Romanticism and media invariably means thinking about a cultural moment abutting against but not quite of the time of the phonograph, the photograph, the moving picture, and the explosion of media that Kittler, Crary, and others associate with the Victorian age and the latter end of the nineteenth century. Romanticism and media together inevitably propose an identity that is proleptic, a wager about the pre-, proto-, and avant la lettre. However, Manfred and a number of other Romantic candidates such as Hamlet remind us that Romanticism’s anticipatory nature occurs in a temporality as much colored by Romanticism’s nonantecedence as anything else; a time very much out of joint to the extent that Romanticism’s texts come as close to those of any other period in extinguishing themselves by leaving nothing outside of their simultaneous proleptic and belated natures.42 They, and Romanticism, are mediation, media, as the in-between. Historically, they constitute historical différance as difference and delay. As the imposition of these figures—and as metonyms connected to Manfred —these Romantic texts sign the techno-magism of history. In that lies their exceptionality, and how they are not very exceptional at all.

42. I’m grateful to Marshall Grossman for pointing out to me in his own inimitable way much of what I’m formulating here, in a conversation we had in 1989.

6.

Play Time Austen, Byron, and Mary Shelley Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command. —Bob Dylan,The Times They Are A-Changin’

Every parent and guardian knows the danger of unsupervised play, just as every child knows its allure. So what happens when the parent (especially the father) leaves the child (or, more alarmingly, youth) home alone? The wager of this piece is that many of us know the answer to this question already. Unsupervised, absent of parental law, youths play; they throw a party. And, even more specifically, they might party by putting on a show. In certain instances, they play by putting on a play. The fact that we might know this answer or récit, uncannily familiar even as it becomes increasingly specific in the details of its machinations, is the subject of this essay. Part of this predicament has to do, of course, with many of us being avid, or at least very dutiful, readers of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the text of hers that I focus on here. By juxtaposing Austen’s novel with canto 3 of Byron’s Don Juan and a key scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I want to make a further claim about these three canonical works of High Romanticism—why, actually, our metareception of them has made them canonical—that is, exemplary—works of that tricky term. For out of this formalist comparison comes a historical discourse that is historical precisely because it structures a topos that is the material of our still-present horizon of social self-knowing, or self-reporting—hence, the familiarity of youths at play, and at risk, at home, in the absence of parental—indeed, patriarchal sovereign—law. The following comparison of texts reveals to us this particular playtime of modernity, the Romantic chronotope of the nonsovereign, the problematic of a heterotopic time whose wake we still inhabit. In this comparison unsupervised play will be realized as a rebellious mimesis, alarming in Austen and embraced, though also complicated, in Byron; and then as a cathected form of screen viewing in Mary Shelley. The essay concludes with a riposte to one impulse in the New Materialisms, by further asserting that playtime is about not objects and

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their relations but instead the primal imposition of the relational, produced by the cut—the screen, frame, or gap, that is the Romantic moment, or place, of our ongoing cultural and social practices.

Alive with Acting Let us proceed then to Austen’s Mansfield Park and “that acting week,” as the character Mary Crawford describes it, the well-known episode that famously ends the first volume of the novel, when the Bertram children and their cohort decide to put on a play, Lovers’ Vows, Inchbald’s adaption of Kotzebue’s German work, within the domestic confines of Mansfield Park while their father, Sir Thomas, is away tending to his slave plantations in Antigua.1 I actually don’t want to stray far from one long-standing reading of this moment of disruptive play in the Bertram household, that the potential anarchy of “that acting week” pivots on the moral dangers of theatricality—of insincerity, fiction, or appearance threatening the novel’s characters’ hold on sincerity and the reality of genuine feeling and decent conduct.2 This opposition between sincerity and insincerity generates a number of dangers for the Bertram home: the allure of improper behavior and inappropriate pleasures as well as unseemly attachments to frivolity and duplicity as a way of life. These dangers are embodied especially in Mary Crawford’s brother, Henry, acting enthusiast, lover (if not seducer) of Maria Bertram, and would be husband of Fanny Price, the novel’s steadfast moral center and Henry’s antipode, a position encapsulated in her famous line, when pressed into the service of Lovers’ Vows: “No, indeed, I cannot act” (135). Fanny cannot act because she is genuine, incapable of the deception necessarily at the heart of mimesis and theater. Things, of course, are more complicated than that. As also the chief ideologue of the novel, Fanny arguably spends almost all her time acting, hiding her true feelings from pretty much everyone in the novel, including herself; in William Galperin’s formulation, her “inability to act, or to be

1. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sunderland and Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 332. All references to Mansfield Park are from this text. 2. Tony Tanner’s introduction to the original Penguin Classics edition, included as the appendix to the 1996 edition, gives an exemplary reading of the perceived dangers of theater in Austen’s novel (456–64). See also Penny Gay’s canny argument about how Mansfield Park warns against theatricality by exploiting the English tradition of the Morality Play, in her “Theatricality and Theatricals in Mansfield Park,” Journal of the Jane Austen Society of America—Persuasions, no. 17 (2006): 121–29.

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anything but transparent, bridles against the very duplicity that sincerity, by definition, must deny.”3 As Galperin and others have argued, the constructed fabrications of theater actually characterize much of the novel’s Lebenswelt, from the ideological interpellations of national and gendered identity; to the naturalized artifice of Sotherton garden, as well as the various constructed social sensoriums of the Bertram estate, the Price home, and implicitly, though perhaps especially ominously, the Bertram plantation property; and to the biopolitical machinations of, again, the slaveholding backdrop of Sir Thomas’s wealth and, more immediately, the navigation among fraternal, sororal, and romantic love that successfully fashions Fanny’s relationships with Edmund Bertram and her brother William into something besides quasi-incestuous gush.4 As Kathryn Sunderland suggests, even Fanny’s and Sir Thomas’s aversion to the impropriety of theater might be somewhat staged, the acted-out assumptions of a relatively new baronetcy, imagining what the values of some idealized older line of propertied aristocratic wealth should be.5 Apt pupil to Sir Thomas’s conservative worldview, Fanny doesn’t entirely eschew spectacle, however. As Colin Jager reminds us, Fanny, very much in line with this tradition-oriented perspective, is disappointed in the state 3. William H. Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 174. 4. For the argument that Mansfield Park naturalizes its construction of conservative Burkean ideology, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 219–49; for the claim that the novel actually ironizes the ideological artifice it constructs, see Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 94–120. For the most authoritative argument about the ways that Caribbean plantation life constructs the sensorium of locales in Mansfield Park, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 80–96; for how the novel preforms the distinction between, on one hand, sororal and fraternal and, on the other, conjugal love, see Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 156; see also Jager, 142–45, for his discussion of the “fiction” of Fanny’s inability to act as a more complicated proposition of artificiality in Mansfield Park than the attempt to improve the landscape, which the novel explicitly criticizes. See also Galperin, 170–79; Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); David Marshall, “True Acting and the Language of Real Feeling: Mansfield Park,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 87–106; and Daniel O’Quinn, “Jane Austen and Performance: Theater, Memory, and Enculturation,” in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuitte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 377–87. 5. Kathryn Sunderland, “Introduction,” in Austen, Mansfield Park, xxvi–xxvii.

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of the chapel at Sotherton Court precisely because it means that she won’t be able to experience the transcendent, liturgical rituals that she imagines such a place should offer (128). Fanny’s observations remind us of a time that our medievalist and early modern colleagues have helped us further to recognize, where performance, play, and ritual, as deeply embedded components of everyday life, were associated not simply with insincerity but often with genuine feeling. Performance might not mean deception, or even simulation. From that angle, a perhaps more exacting and aware Fanny might have responded to the request that she participate in Lovers’ Vows with the line, “No, indeed, I cannot act—though, indeed, I can perform,” a more accurate self-representation of her behavior that would also speak to the care and deliberation she puts into her appearance later in the novel at the dance at Mansfield Park. Austen’s novel would then image for us the ways that theater and performance overlap and diverge, with one pole involving the pleasures and dangers of mimesis and the other involving the ways that the meanings and functions of ritual and performance have been studied in the 1980s and ’90s by Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and, in the context of eighteenthcentury drama, Joseph Roach.6 That said, it does seem that Mansfield Park reflexively situates itself in a moment especially aware of the epistemological dangers associated with theater—with mimesis as treacherous fiction and representation as mere appearance. These dangers are as old as Plato, with Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis perhaps most recently contrasting in a salutary manner the Platonic suspicion of theatrical imitation with an Aristotelian investment in theatricality as a site of social renewal; just as lately, however, there has been a movement to see the perceptual dangers of representation as especially part of a Romantic, or modern, predicament, with Kant’s division between appearance and essence, or subject and object, being singled out as the philosophical apotheosis of the problem of Descartes’s cogito.7 In Mansfield Park, moreover, these deceptions are specifically associated with the historical predicament of an inchoate modernity pressing down

6. See, for example, Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (London: PAJ, 1982); Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 7. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–33; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 56–57.

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on the Bertrams. These sociohistorical hazards come embodied in the figures of the Crawfords, representatives of a cosmopolitan Regency culture—though from another perspective Mary’s often instrumental pronouncements might arguably come the closest to truth telling in the book. Especially apposite for our present concerns, these dangers are also signaled by the age of those most susceptible to the fashion of appearance and theater—the Bertram children, youths in the way that critics like myself, Julie Carlson, and Richard Sha describe such Romantic subjects, postpubescent figures whose pleasures, episteˉ meˉ s, and actions otherwise more approximate the Romantic child than Romantic adult.8 Recalling but also radicalizing Turner’s formulation for liminality as a key phase in social enculturation, such youths are “betwixt and between” childhood and adulthood, figuring a gap in our knowing of their future, and thus of the future itself bearing down on us: of its safety or recklessness, its sober rectitude or frivolous inconsequence.9 For Turner, ritual performance both expresses and ultimately manages the anarchic, alienating energies of youthful liminality; in what follows, in both Austen and Byron, the claim will much more be on the anarchic implications of theatrical conduct than on any recuperation of, or reintegration into, society. In Shelley, the focus will then shift to the betwixt and between not as a temporal or temporary state but as the very condition for social and historical intelligibility within the playtime of the Romantic chronotope of modernity. In Mansfield Park, much of the energy of the “acting week” thus comes from a sense of uncertainty about the seriousness of youthful play, figured perhaps most keenly in the drama of Fanny’s increasing panic as her perception of what is happening becomes more and more singular after Edmond decides through his own rationalizations to join the play, and spend more time with Mary. The question of Fanny’s state of mind—of how much her torment is self-inflicted self-drama or true menace (is putting on a play really that pernicious?)—nicely allegorizes the tension between mere

8. See Julie Carlson, “Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (1996): 596–98; Richard Sha, Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain 1750–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 241–42; and Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 23. 9. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111.

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inconsequence and genuine threat that characterizes the role of theater in Mansfield Park, not to mention a key topos of Austen’s throughout her writing career.10 Regardless of how we might respond to this question, which would go a long way toward deciding whether we are members of team Fanny or team Mary, I don’t think it much of a leap to see her vertigo as of the same fundamental kind as Jacques Rancière’s “law of the great parataxis,” the loss of any basic standard of representation in the modern world.11 For Rancière, this loss meant a new regime of visibility whereby anything could be represented; in Austen’s case this condition is more about the fact that mimesis can now happen anywhere, including Sir Thomas’s billiard room. Unlike Prince Hal’s tavern or Comus’s debauched abode or even the carnival Neapolitan streets of Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, the eroticized mimesis of youthful play as a party occurs within, and takes over, the private home of the absent father. While not excluding previous constructivist, naturalizing readings of theater in Mansfield Park, the stress here is on how mimesis doesn’t disappear into an endless relay of different social constructions but retains its threat the way that it does in prior, traditional readings of the novel. And this threat, I want to emphasize, is especially associated with the wayward pleasures of youth, the unlicensed play as play of unregulated, betwixt and between subjects in a household momentarily free from patriarchal law. The Bertram children’s seeming frivolity is in fact the real threat of theater. That Tom, the eldest son, especially takes the production so seriously, that play for him is no laughing matter, places him in a long line of protobohemian subjects, whose Oedipalized rebellions take the form of a commitment to their art at the expense of more practical visions of what 10. Given that estate theater and private theatricals were the target of much opprobrium during the last part of the eighteenth century, there is an argument that Fanny and, earlier on, Edmond are correct to worry not only about Inchbald’s adaption but also about other social and economic dangers that performing the play risk; for a consideration of these issues see Gillian Russell, “Private Theatricals,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theater, ed. Daniel O’Quinn and Jane Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191–203. In that sense, we might wonder how much the fear of theater at Mansfield Park is more specifically anxiety over the new forms of illegitimate theater that Jane Moody famously depicts appearing at the end of the eighteenth century—see her Illegitimate Theater in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10. 11. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 44–45.

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their careers as members of the ruling class should be. Resolutely queer in his complete lack of interest in the marriage plot, and that plot’s disinterest in him, he is in nascent form the avant-garde avant la lettre, equally pure in the narcissistic drive of his creativity and in his willed unawareness of any gap between what he is producing and any immediate institutional recognition of or support for his vision.12 The fact that Sir Thomas is away in Antigua tending to the Bertrams’ livelihood reinforces this division between seriousness and insubordinate frivolity organizing the categories of both theater and youth. (That this “seriousness” carries nightmarish world-historical implications that might or might not be beyond the horizons of the novel simply punctuates this point.) At the same time, the helplessness of Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris before the youthful power of putting on a play makes clear how much Austen’s novel conflates parental supervision with patriarchal law. Either as the novel’s moral beacon or as Sir Thomas’s ideological prosthetic Fanny finds herself the only adult in the Bertram household during that “acting week,” no small reason for her sense of paratactic vertigo. Many have noted the oddness of Mansfield Park, how it has as its protagonist a character that doesn’t change, and nowhere is that more apparent than in this section of the book. Simply put, Mansfield Park is a novel about someone waiting for everyone around her to grow up, to take on the reins of sober adulthood or be disciplined into the appropriate form of subjectivity, or both. (Fanny, of course, has her own further adventures in both disciplining and being disciplined when she returns to Portsmouth.) If the narrator in Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode could look on the young child playfully imitating adult roles as a naïve form of recreation that could nevertheless still be subsumed into a normative transition into adulthood, Fanny during “that acting week” is faced with a more seemingly irresistible, more anarchic form of collective, youthful, mimesis. In that sense I want to take her overwhelmingly frail sensitivity seriously—not only as the vehement self-disciplining of a hypochondriac ideologue but as the trembling barometer for what Jager in another context calls the “frequencies” of something still elusive but nevertheless rounding into the definition of a shape, in this instance the 12. For an extensive study on what those institutions beyond the theater might be, and how they themselves undergo a number of changes during the first part of the nineteenth century, see Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also note 10.

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betwixt and between mimetic play of youthful libidinal discourse as modern oppositional practice.13 If, then, for Joseph Roach bodies in Restoration and eighteenth-century theater participate in the “circum-Atlantic performance” of geopolitical, historical violence (11), in Austen’s novel that somatic turbulence seems most focused not on the figures in Inchbald’s adaption but on Fanny’s shuddering form, ritualistically—that is, compulsively—allergic to the social threat of theater’s mimetic temptations.

Radical Play How, then, to extract more fully this supposed practice of proto–guerrilla theater from the family drama of these members of the admittedly upperclass landed gentry? Galperin perhaps comes closest when he retrieves from Henry’s giddy speech, about feeling one can be anybody when acting, a utopian freedom that’s rapidly being closed down by the burgeoning realities of England as an imperial superpower (Galperin, 178–79).14 In terms of the present argument, however, Mansfield Park does not go further than that. In contrast, a scene from canto 3 of Byron’s Don Juan, composed roughly six to eight years after Austen’s novel, explicitly does. I don’t mean this claim to be, or simply be, teleological. From one perspective this juxtaposition actually folds the crucible of the canto’s production, the annus mirabilis of 1819, into a longer durée than the hot chronology of Lévi-Strauss that James Chandler has used to characterize that year in English (and

13. Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 4–11. 14. Gillian Russell’s point about how the early nineteenth century associated private theatricals with the fragility of domestic space and the English family also speaks to much of the subversive energies that youthful play-making at the Mansfield estate seems to induce (200–2). Russell notes one moment when this connection between private theatricals and the dissolution of the English family was literalized, in a famous 1798 divorce case in which accusations of adultery were entwined with charges about the wife’s “seduction by the theater” (202). We might also remember how many associated both Inchbald and Kotzebue with a Jacobin sensibility; consider, however, how that topical reference hovers around the margins of Mansfield Park, and compare that with the more explicit political references we will see unfolding in canto 3. But note also Mike Goode’s argument that, beyond Galperin’s quote of Henry, Austen’s novel and its landscapes virtually exist (in the Deleuzian sense) as instances of ecological design, a condition that then points to political possibilities beyond the book’s narrative. See Mike Goode, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 210–59.

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Western) history.15 Yet when contrasted with Galperin’s claims about Austen’s sense of the diminishing possibilities for gendered subjects of the British empire throughout the teens, canto 3 does seem to have a certain will to power about it that doesn’t so much oppose this longer duration to the idea of an event as combine the two together. And that event, in a word, is revolution, or youths upturning a dead father’s house into spectacle and show. The father in question is Lambro, pirate father of Haidée, Juan’s lover, alone without a spouse and thus perhaps even more singular in his patriarchal authority than Sir Thomas. It is tempting to see these two as contrasting stages of the history of capital, one attached to the land and the propertied estate and the other expropriating an unbound capital exuberantly traversing the oceans. Sir Thomas’s voyage to Antigua complicates this scheme, however, as does the relatively recent history of his baronetcy; perhaps even more than Lambro he is implicated in a global economy of circulating capital. Appropriately enough then, for our purposes, both Sir Thomas and Lambro are twin paternal merchants of capital—often in fact of the same merchandise, human slaves. This is not to say that any youthful upending of their authority, passive aggressive or not, explicitly coheres into an allegorical critique of, or protest against, what Sir Thomas and Lambro might specifically stand for, either from the perspective of Austen and Byron’s time or ours, retrospectively.16 But it is to note how these texts do give us a set of connections and tropes that increasingly begin to feel familiar in their definition and intelligibility. This dynamic is especially thrown into relief in Byron’s canto 3, during the extended festival that celebrates Juan and Haidée’s succession as leaders of the pirate island after hearing news of, and dutifully mourning, Lambro’s death. I’ve written about this episode elsewhere in terms of how its lush, Orientalist setting and cornucopia of foods and drinks cannot but help gesture toward the onrushing explosion of Regency commodity culture with which Don Juan seems in so many ways obsessed (195).17 Here I want to put the 15. James K. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Cause of Literary Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 259. 16. This is precisely the revisionist argument made by the 1999 film adaption of Mansfield Park, directed and written for the screen by Patricia Rozema; see especially the scene in which Fanny goes through Tom’s journal while he is sick; the journal contains numerous hand drawings of his depictions of all the atrocities occurring at their plantation in Antigua, and it gives a pointed intentionality to Tom’s determination to unsettle Lord Bertram’s estate with a show. 17. See also the consideration of the Regency feast in canto 15 in Wang, 202–3.

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described spread of the canto’s feast in tension with this reading of the commodity form, by simply noting how the riot of foodstuffs in their sensual, physical autonomy might gesture toward a certain festive “imbroglio,” in Bruno Latour’s sense of that term, of a collision of objects and subjects, or objects as subjects, both human and nonhuman, that would not diverge from the carnivalesque, sensory ambience running through much of Juan and Haidée’s celebration (We Have Never Been Modern, 2–3, 141). In the ascendancy of not only those two to the rule of the island, but also of the banquet objects, tactile and sensual, to a certain thereness brought on by the detail of Byron’s description, one might see a parliament of things, or a democracy or even anarchy of objects akin to what Latour and other fellow travelers like Levi R. Bryant have described.18 The politics of Latour and those more specifically tied to the object- oriented ontology movement can certainly be questioned, though in the instance of canto 3 I want to suggest another option, whereby in the sensual intransigence of their objective existence the listed foodstuffs and things gathered at Juan and Haidée’s celebration at least gesture toward the possibility of some kind of inchoate existence beyond the commodity form, and thus beyond the very set of global social relations that Sir Thomas and Lambro represent, with the action of canto 3 attempting in some basic way to stage that existence for us, a provocation or intervention very much linked to the news of the pirate solicitor father’s death.19 Lambro is not dead, however, and he comes home to a libidinal explosion of youthful play that makes him and his authority a stranger in his own house. This condition doesn’t last, but for the hundred odd stanzas that it does it dilates, deepens, and stretches the temporal and experiential parameters of what in Austen appears to occur in an instant, with the clueless welcoming bow that John Yates, “having never been with those who

18. Latour, 142–45; Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 13–33. 19. Among such critiques would be the question of the for all intents and purposes transcendence of the object beyond the commodity form in OOO writings; for one corrective to this tendency see Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 233–34, 245–49. Readers will see in what follows my own engagement with this question. Consider also the charge that New Materialist readings have by and large ignored issues of race and colonialist history; see, for example, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human,’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 215–18 and Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 34, 47.

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thought much of parental claims,” gives to Sir Thomas, with Tom Bertram standing by aghast (165). Lambro is also not quite Ulysses walking unrecognized among the drunken would-be suitors of Penelope, regardless of the canto’s textual reference, shared Mediterranean setting, and the structurally implicit sexual competition between pirate father and young, exogamous lover. Securely structured within antiquity’s own version of the inheritance plot—who will take over Ulysses’s lands?—the bacchanal in his and Penelope’s home takes place in a stalled time, an interminable waiting for the true suitor of Penelope, the genuine owner of Ulysses’s property, to appear, a stasis that also converges with the fugitive temporality between wartime and the start of peace that for some returning veterans can never be bridged. In the case of canto 3, however, the succession of Haidée and Juan as her consort, with all its celebratory libidinal charge, motions toward not a stalled time but something new altogether, so much so that the term, succession, with its association of an orderly process of entailment or inheritance, might not adequately name what appears to be occurring. Describing Juan and Haidée’s celebration, Byron’s dilatory style is an extended attempt to index more fully this new event and new time, taking place, even as the two characters appear to reign over in typical monarchial fashion the celebration before them. From this perspective, the ease with which Haidée, the daughter, takes over Lambro’s island can be seen as an emphatic break with the patriarchal dynamics of the entailment plot, one whose récits seem composed of, in equal parts, an ideology of inevitability and, conversely, a litany of episodic struggles, machinations, torques, and dilemmas. True, Juan is mistaken as the new master by a partying newcomer to the island, more important than the mistress. And perhaps his presence secures her ascendancy in a way that might have preempted the line of suitors inside Penelope’s house. But as with Maria Bertram’s keen interest in Henry Crawford, Haidée’s love of Juan is a key component of indecorum in this plot of a father’s house turned upside down by youthful play; even more so than in Mansfield Park a daughter’s desire defines something combustible and transgressive that tries to herald in a new order entirely. In both texts, the law ultimately punishes this desire, yet in this section of canto 3 there is especially a sense of this agency inciting and standing in for a definitive break with fatherly rule. A stanza that occurs early in Lambro’s discovery of the party in his home stages this coupure, quite explicitly: A band of children round a snow-white ram There wreathe his venerable horns with flowers While peaceful as still an unweaned lamb,

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The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers His sober head, majestically tame Or eats from out of the palm or playful lowers His brow as if in act to butt, and then Yielding to their small hands, draws back again. (3.32)20

In these lines the band of children play, and in doing so they render the “patriarch of the flock” their playmate and pet. “Gently cower[ing],” with flowers wreathing his “venerable horns” and his head “sober” and “majestically tame,” the ram is pacified and detumescent, turned into one of the children, an “unweaned lamb.” Fatherly, dare we say sovereign, violence, is itself simply a ludic, ineffective, mimesis, a “playful” lowering of a brow, “as if in act to butt,” before the ram yields to the children’s small hands and “draw[s] back again.” If the resolution to Lovers’ Vows depends on the paternal magnanimity of Baron Wildenheim, Austen’s intertextual message about parental authority is not repeated in canto 3. The children’s play says something else entirely. What they do is a game, a ritual, and a performance. It is a show and spectacle, as much as the other, more discussed, events occurring during the carnivalesque celebration of Haidée and Juan’s ascendancy are. As such, the children’s play with the ram has the feel of the protostuff of theater, though here the perspective on their mimesis, as opposed to the ram’s, is very much different than in Austen’s novel. What the children enact—the defeat or taming of the father—is the literal truth of the reveling imaginary now structuring the social space of the island, the death of Lambro. That the characters in Mansfield Park seem oblivious to how the necessity of patriarchal forgiveness and change of mind in Lovers’ Vows is in fact the fundamental narrativized truth of their own social world, as much or more so than the play’s risqué sexual language and plottings, already contrasts with what occurs here. But even more important is how the constative act of stanza 32 is explicitly produced by the mimetic procedures of the children’s not at all simply frivolous play with the ram. Within the gap between appearance and essence, Lambro’s death and his walking presence, social desire actually takes on a recognizable shape in the children’s actions, the joyful ridding of present sovereign rule. Now not an indecorous threat but the very lack that generates a new form of collective pleasure, the structural 20. All references to Don Juan are from Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

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incompleteness of mimesis and its play are welcomed in this stanza as the imputation of a new symbolic order, paradoxically intent on closing or collapsing that gap altogether. In the language of historian Johan Huizinga, children and ram create a “magic circle” of play, though in their case the mimetic play generates a magic circle of revolution, whose borders expand to include Lambro’s entire island, if not the very horizons of political possibility in this narrative moment of Don Juan.21 The children play the father’s defeat because Lambro is dead, while, in some fundamental way, Lambro’s death is the play of a patriarch tamely retired by his children. In both the primal feel of this play, of children defeating their father, and the way that mimesis is exploited to enact a new reality, it might seem the ram’s feeding hearkens back to the habitual powers of performance witnessed in Fanny’s nostalgia for the liturgical sovereign rituals she assumes the chapel at Sotherton Court should convey. Even more vividly than in Mansfield Park, the interaction between the embodied and representational systems of the children’s game marks play as the zone where that interchange is worked out. Unlike in Austen book, however, the dynamics at work here actually embrace the disruptive potential of theater’s mimetic drive, where the repetitive, ritualistic aspects of the children’s play explicitly do not bind any of the social energies necessary for Lambro’s sovereign rule, condensing into something like an intervention against both ram and paternal legitimacy instead. Byron’s well-known topical references to the political moment of his own time in other parts of canto 3’s spectacle—most vividly the references to Southey, apostasy, and Greek nationalism that especially collect around the figure of the “Eastern Anti-Jacobin” poet singing his song for Greece— support this sense of an embrace of mimesis that is oriented toward the political insistence of a still emancipatory future, one explicitly in continuity with the topical agons, cultural, political, and literary, of Byron’s present day.22 Following the lead of Halliwell and others, we might then see in canto 3 a shift away from a Platonic suspicion of mimesis toward an Aristotelian use of theatrical imitation for social commentary and renewal, if not radical

21. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949), 10. In canto 3, the children’s play pushes hard against the sense of both (established) order and separation from the real that Huizinga describes his concept as having. 22. For one exemplary consideration of the politically topical interventions these lines in canto 3 try to make, see Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–52.

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transformation, with the canto’s mimetic pleasures or theatrics in large part a poetics in Aristotle’s sense of a creative (re)making. Regardless of the Greek philosopher’s own attempt to separate poiesis and praxis in The Ethics, the threat of theatrical insincerity in Austen has here been replaced by the exuberant promise of mimesis as a form of social action. The public dimension of theater, a key component of its formulation from Aristotle to Arendt, as well as another implicit threat to the private domestic imaginary of the Mansfield estate, is embraced in canto 3’s wild celebratory depiction of modern social—in fact, political—life. The daemonic threat of youth, play, and theater perceived by Fanny in Austen becomes in Byron a radical political force. To understand political practice in terms of the disruption of a father’s house is exactly to unsettle the authority of the father as a father and to assert how the growing boundaries between public and private life belie the degree to which that authority is connected to larger memes of sovereign rule. Themselves caught within the narrator’s melancholy “that they should e’re grow older” (3.33), the children playing with the ram are metonyms for Juan and Haidée as the betwixt and between subjects of modern revolutionary youth, in canto 3 the specific subjects of a very particular, socially reflexive, mimetic praxis: the chiasmus between the theatrical portrayal of revolution and revolution as theater that is one underlying plot of this period of time—of, indeed, political modernity itself. In a way familiar to readers of Wordsworth’s quoting of Macbeth in Paris in The Prelude to Marx’s opening lines in The Eighteenth Brumaire on tragedy and parody to the New Historicist scholarship from the 1980s on Romanticism, the representation of an event, of revolution, through the nonalterity of a recognizable—that is, past—scene, throws open a gap by which the future, revolution itself, is made present, where the representation of revolution becomes itself a revolutionary act.23 In Wordsworth or even in Marx’s ruthless critique, this is more about managing or circumscribing 23. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 362; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 595. For a consideration of the 1980s New Historicist treatment of the French revolution as theater, spectacle, and representation and New Historicism’s relation to that likewise earlier topos in the New Cultural History from France, see Alan Liu, Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 167–85; see also Mary Jacobus’s consideration of Wordsworth’s citing of Macbeth as an attempt to understand French revolutionary regicide in her Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 40–45.

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than realizing the revolutionary event. But in other writers, perhaps most famously Percy Shelley, as well as the French revolutionaries themselves, the retrospective use of festival, show, and masque (in Percy’s case), seems equally to press against a future revolutionary shape, the thus paradoxically ongoing revenant of revolution.24 In Byron’s disruption of Lambro’s house, the assemblage of performance and spectacle carries within itself that same attempt. This might seem a fairly severe, or even austere, burden to place on Juan, Haidée, and the other island revelers, even with Byron’s topical references to Southey and others. One might also note that any reference to the carnivalesque character of Juan and Haidée’s festivities needs to acknowledge how Bakhtin’s carnival was an eruption into, but only an interval within, the arguably overarching time of state authority, to which carnival was dialectically tied.25 But there is a more forward pressing way to delineate this problem, one that begins by remembering fully the very much non-austere mise-en-scène of canto 3, the degree to which Byron energetically stresses the sensory appeal of this celebratory scene, a heightening of the senses conveyed through the lush description of the feast and other activities, as well as nicely small touches such as the typical Byronic combination of sight and sound rhymes in stanza 32 (“flowers,” “cowers,” and “lowers”). However, if this essay has earlier stressed how the sensory material of the celebration can be understood as straining past the iron cage of the commodity form, let me restate my intention of putting that understanding in tension with the reading of commodity culture in Don Juan. Quite simply, if that tension is indeterminate in canto 3, that’s because that indeterminacy pretty much sums up the global stakes of modernity up to our own time. More specifically: Who in many ways is one key historical subject of this indeterminate action, except for the familiar figure of youth itself, pulled between the roles of revolutionary agent and consumer par excellence in so many of the narratives of modern life? If, then, there is any substance to 24. See the essay on Prometheus Unbound in this collection as well as Dana Van Kooy, Shelley’s Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post–Napoleonic Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 25. The homology between the structural form of Bakhtin’s carnival and Turner’s liminality as two intervals or phases that ultimately support a more stable social order, oppressive or benign, is obvious, one hopes. The task would then be to begin to characterize in a more fine-grained manner the historical details of the material sense of the social that each thinker was not only studying, but perhaps also living within at the time. Doing so might very well thicken the narrative of youth’s agential role in our political and cultural histories beyond modernity and the Romantic period.

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the disruptive energies of Juan and Haidée’s party in canto 3, “no lack of innocent diversion / For the imagination or senses,” that excess has to be balanced against Lambro’s own parental exasperation at the prosaic cost of such a rave: [He] saw all these things with aversion, Perceiving in his absence such expenses Dreading that climax of all human ills, The inflammation of his weekly bills. (3.35)

What one sees or perceives here is precisely the rub—the libido of youth culture as a father’s domestic household turned upside down, yes, but either as the proto–guerrilla theater of a counterculture or lavish self-indulgence of a youth industry we simply don’t know. The play of mimetic desire as radical disruption or as exchange value—that is the question that gives the impossible temporality, or duration, of Juan and Haidée’s party its specific historical cast as something besides the residual form of carnival that it inhabits and exploits. That the new symbolic that Juan and Haidée appear to usher in might from another perspective be the very new stage of (revolutionary) circulating capital that the Sir Thomases and Lambros of the world arguably represent, regardless of the role of the daughter’s desire in all of this, simply points to the complicated semiotic territory that revolution begins to traverse in our modernity. Similarly, the fact that the children playing with the ram are Greek implies an early nineteenth-century progressive future that increasingly projects despotism onto a non-Western subject—the Turk—in a manner that easily converges with the economic engines motoring European empire. The indeterminacy structuring youth as revolutionary agent or vigorous consumer of what Turner would call not liminal but commodified, “liminoid” experience therefore also marks an internal fissure within the oppositional illocution of revolution itself (Ritual, 41).26 26. Can one then draw a straight line between canto 3 and both Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners and Julien Temple’s 1986 film adaption of that book, as well as Fredric Jameson’s “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, no. 9/10, The Sixties without Apologies (1984): 178–209? That question, if not claim, does indeed structure the larger constellation, as Benjamin might put it, of this inquiry. Pertinent to this discussion would also be, along with Turner’s notion of the liminoid, Roger Caillois’s 1958 sociological study of gaming and play, which can only recognize from its pre-1960s vantage point the mixing of youth, “ecstasy and pantomime” in modern society as the Persuasion-like nightmare of juvenile delinquent madness, emblematized in “the rioting

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In that sense, Fanny is right to understand the threat of theater at Mansfield Park as in part referring to the concrete possibility that tickets might be sold for the show, as it is the ever-rising (revolutionary) force of capital, of the money form, whose horizon of historical effects can seem so radically indeterminate, both radicalizing and co-opting its subjects and destroying and calcifying social relations all at once.27 From that angle, Haidée’s premonition of a bad conclusion to her and Juan’s festive love is not so much about the inevitable end of youth as a troubled recognition of the ongoing, indeterminate nature of their “opium dream” existence and play.

Screen Time It’s upon this indeterminacy that I want to pivot and turn toward the concluding text of my triptych, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mixing my metaphors, this pivot is also a swerve, as the scene to be examined doesn’t exactly correspond to the ones we’ve looked at in both Austen and Byron, of youths playing in the absent father’s home. Granted, Shelley’s novel is obsessed with absent, weak, or faltering fathers (and dead mothers); the scene I focus on is also structured around one absent patriarch (Safie’s Turkish father from whom she flees after he deceives Felix) and a weakened one (Felix’s blind, aging parent, recently impoverished and in exile). As many have noted, the domestic space that Felix and Safie create thus very much draws from the same Western narrative of Turkish despotism that I’ve just identified in Byron’s canto 3. My attention, however, goes in another direction, toward, first, the varied drama of plot, feeling, and affect that is the story of Felix and Safie, and, second, how that narrative primarily unfolds for the creature through a surreptitious viewing and listening of individuals within a framed—that is, staged—space, a condition very much implied by the creature’s recollection of his first encounter with the father and Felix’s sister, Agatha: I found that one of the windows of the cottage had formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled with wood. In one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink, through which the eye could just penetrate. Through this crevice, a small room was visible, white washed and clean, but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small fire, sat of Stockholm adolescents on New Year’s Eve, 1957” (Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961], 126–27). 27. I’m grateful to Daniel O’Quinn for pointing out to me this particular way that Fanny’s worries are expressed.

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an old man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude. The young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently she took something out of a drawer, which employed her hands, and she sat down beside the old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play. 28

The creature’s account, beginning with “In one corner . . . ,” could be the opening stage descriptions accompanying the curtain-raising act of a play. We might also note the secretive, daily nature of the creature’s spectating, amplified by the father’s blindness, that in effect makes the crevice a screen, a fourth wall actually more emphatic than what was often the case in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theater, where theatergoers and their sometime antics were as much on display as what occurred on stage. The physical fit of this almost “imperceptible chink” and the eye penetrating it, famously anticipated in Polidori’s story of the “skull-headed lady . . . punished for peeping through a key-hole” in the 1831 introduction, further suggests that this built-in impasse describes something actively ocular (xxv)—how the crevice as screen is not simply an obstruction to viewing but structurally necessary for visibility. Far from a process built on transparency, vision is a consequence of some screen or impediment—the material splinter, physical or not, of mediation itself. But are Felix, Safie, and the others at play here? It might seem cruel and a bit perverse to suggest that they are. Moreover, whereas in our earlier examples from Austen and Byron theater and mimesis seemed to respond at least restively to the constraints of paternal family life, the ongoing action occurring in the De Lacey household apparently tries to restore the patriarchal, indeed heteronormative, family disrupted by religious and national strife, an attempt buoyed by the benign presence of the aging paterfamilias. But the very excess of sentiment on display in the De Lacey story, no matter how calm or noble, does speak to the sense of a performance, play as a play, transpiring. From that perspective, the number of times the creature witnesses, and is transported by, the De Laceys turning to a musical interlude seems more than appropriate; similarly the amount of exposition the creature gleans from what he views has the quality of a staged, plot device. Certainly, peering through his small crack in the cabin, the creature watches enthralled as if before a staged, or precinematic, spectacle, a melodrama. Heightened 28. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 95. All further page references are to this edition. While the creature views this scene with only one eye, it would be interesting to consider whether this scene more accurately conveys the immersive qualities of stereoscopic vision that Goode argues scenes from Walter Scott’s historical novels exemplify (Goode, 128–67).

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cathexis of a kind does seem to be occurring, even if it’s more obviously on the side of spectatorial pleasure than acting enjoyment, though one can wonder how else aside from their guitar might De Lacey, Felix, and Agatha occupy, if not entertain, themselves, especially before Safie’s arrival, in their solitary, isolated exile. Certainly, they have reason for their despondency, but Karen Swann’s reading of the reflexively sensationalist behavior of Margaret in Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage could instruct here, where Margaret learns to act out her hysteria from the romances she purchases from the old peddler.29 Likewise, in their dignified, elevated suffering De Lacey, Felix, and Agatha could very well be characters in a Radcliffe novel or gothic play—coming from Paris, they would certainly have been aware of such platforms, models, and formulas for their own travails. Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the 1823 theatrical adaption of Mary’s novel, was certainly conscious of these spectating dynamics.30 Richard Brinsley Peake takes a number of liberties with the book, though one attaches his adaption to a crucial preoccupation of Shelley’s work, namely the creature’s secretive viewing of the De Lacey household. Key scenes in act 2 involve the Demon, as Peake names him in the play, watching members of the De Lacey family from a hovel next to the cottage. This watching, however, is not the occasion for the Demon’s education into language, either spoken or read; he remains silent throughout the adaption, even as he and Frankenstein struggle under the presumably death-inducing avalanche in the Alps that ends the play. What the Demon does learn from the blind father and Felix’s sister Agatha is familial and (in Agatha’s case) romantic affection, all extrapolated from viewing how they and others interact and go about their day. As important, he witnesses, as does the audience, the father’s lute playing and a solo musical number sung by Agatha. Presumption thus confirms and magnifies how in Frankenstein the creature’s education into Eros and emotion occurs through the simultaneously secretive but also active viewing of melodrama, the theatrical genre of music, and—or as—big feeling, where both the creature and the audience experience simultaneously the entertainment of spectating.31 At the same time,

29. Karen Swann, “Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage,” PMLA 106, no. 1 (1991): 83–95. 30. The full text of Presumption is online at the Editions site of Romantic Circles, with an introduction by Stephen C. Behrendt, https://romanticcircles.org/editions/peake/ index.html. 31. For a study of Percy’s own use of melodrama, see Van Kooy, 135–61. As many have noted, melodrama becomes, during the latter part of the nineteenth century as

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in Presumption the other characters’ breaking into song or music signals the kind of hyperexpressiveness that is an intentional play of sorts, that the De Laceys in the novel could very well be staging, whether they touch the family guitar or not. I don’t want to push these historical metaconvergences too hard, only insomuch as they do lend a certain cultural materialist thickness to the spectatorial dynamics involved in the creature’s encounter with the De Laceys, a thickness that stresses how what the De Laceys might have read or viewed the creature definitely reads, views, and learns. The creature’s time with this family is best known as an account of the creature’s education, an appropriate enough theme for the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. I would simply point out how much this education—into language, history, family, sexual difference, affect, and sociability—is entangled with the creature’s joy in sense—his jouissance—over the telenovela, the visual serial drama, of Felix and Safie’s narrative, first given primal form through the stage or screen of the crevice in the cottage window wall. As scholars have recently proposed, the worlds of visual attraction and epistemic curiosity are very much entangled in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury history, and that is very much the case with the creature’s learning.32 We might more readily attribute his education, especially his lessons in feeling, to the texts he steals, particularly The Sorrows of Young Werther and, most famously, Paradise Lost. That assumption needs, however, to be thought in continuity with the Rousseau-like conundrum earlier confronting the creature, as he espies the tears of the cottage inhabitants and wonders what internal state they might signify.33 With the tears of the cottagers the screen of the cabin crevice is again reiterated, this time by the gap or impasse between their facial expressions and internal emotional states. This same structure also organizes another moment during the creature’s account of well as the twentieth century, the genre in which woman’s plight is especially depicted. As others have observed, Frankenstein is also fundamentally about that same delineation. This connection, however, appears not to be among the sociohistoric lessons that the creature learns during his screen viewing. But see also Jacky Bratton’s claim about the “iconic” form of melodrama as the “bodying forth of interiority,” a dynamic that very much organizes what the creature views when he espies the De Laceys, in her “Romantic Melodrama,” in Moody and O’Quinn, 119,122. 32. See, for example, Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 33. For an extended study of the creature’s Rousseau-like entry into both language and feeling, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 178–227.

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his time at the cottage, the much remarked upon instant, when he peers Narcissus- or Eve-like at his reflection in a pool of water. Even more literally than the crevice, the water is a screen, a reflection occasioned by the nontransparent quality of what the creature actively sees. The well-known psychoanalytic resonances of the pool scene, the way it invites a discussion of the mirror stage, for example, associates the mix of spectatorial pleasures and education with the dynamics of ideological interpellation. We might again primarily associate such an operation with the Miltonic reading practices that hail the creature as the always already God-forsaken demonically abandoned son, Satan. But at the very least, the creature learns from espying the De Laceys that emotions are heightened, and that they are emotions precisely to the degree that they are emphatically on display, to the creature at least. He learns the conventional Romantic lesson, familiar to any modern adolescent or youth, that if his emotions aren’t huge he isn’t feeling anything at all. The creature’s main lesson about his relation to others might come from his failed attempt to break the fourth wall and interact with the father. We might wonder, however, if that lesson isn’t already set up somehow by what he views before this effort, his simultaneous identification and disidentification with the De Laceys’ lives. His formative years by and large condensed into his spectating time with that family, the creature learns first and foremost that the bios of human life is narrative drama. We might wonder, then, how many of his later actions are the result of his subjection to that specific hailing—when, for example, in the 1831 edition he effortlessly takes on the role of rejected lover, all in high language, in his imagined interactions with the unfortunate Justine, just before framing and sending her to her death: “Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes; my beloved, awake”! (132).34 34. For the intriguing suggestion that the creature’s language—especially the written communication left for Victor as he hunts his creation at the novel’s end—exemplifies poetic kitsch, and the attendant connections of kitsch to both the gothic and melodrama, see Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 98–105. Tiffany concentrates on print examples of gothic melodrama, but his equation of this type of staged writing with a form of proto-kitsch is very much in line with the issues of replication, inauthenticity, and commodity culture that Jerrold E. Hogle has used to describe the world of theatricalized attractions of which Shelley’s novel was part; see Hogle’s “Frankenstein as Neo- Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 176–210.

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The youth in violent play here is the creature, a motley combination of over- and underdevelopment, of too much emotion, too much desire, too much drama, too much strength. Countering her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s own compromise with sensationalist romance—Wollstonecraft’s observation that reading such texts means that young girls are at least reading—Shelley presents a much less optimistic account of a youth indulging in sentiments generated by an early nineteenth- century nascent culture industry.35 And if that industry is definitely involved in print, the creature’s viewing also suggests an entanglement with the spectatorial. The Polidori anecdote does so also, as it refers not only to the skull-headed lady but also to Peeping Tom of Coventry. Might that model of clandestinely viewing Lady Godiva then not only be about what the creature could have viewed instead of the De Laceys? Could it in some violent, subterranean way be what he actually sees in them—not only traits of the noble and good but also what Frankenstein himself witnesses in his visits to the charnel houses, the gross fleshy body of death and desire? Such a reading might seem fanciful until we remember this combined viewing of the sentimental and prurient, or lurid, is in effect what Victor’s family does every time they pass the family portrait of his dead mother kneeling before the coffin of her dead father. (The often remarked upon, montage-like dream that Victor has after making the creature would then be the rationalized partitioning of this combined viewing.)36 The very speculative nature of this reading, its unmooring from the details of the creature’s own account of his observation of the De Laceys, the in fact absence in this recollected viewing of any mother as mater that would foreground the finite biological body, replicates the very structure of a screen that enables the watching of that particular family drama, which could be the interpellation of family drama, in the first place.

35. “For any kind of reading I still think better than leaving a blank a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight assertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratifications of appetite, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.” Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed., ed. Carol Poston (New York: Norton, 1988), 184. 36. For an exemplary consideration of this key scene in Shelley’s novel, see the collection of essays in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, Frankenstein’s Dream, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (June 2003), https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/frankenstein/index .html.

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Cutting There might be no inside, there might be no outside, but the problem of intersection remains. —Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Temperate and intemperate knowledge of the world, subjected interpellation, wrongheaded inspiration, salacious voyeurism—these are some of the possible consequences of a youth spending way too much time privately in front of a screen, a daily, more contemporary condition that breaks with the public dimensions of theater that we saw in Byron’s canto 3, and surpasses the amount of viewing of even the most avid theatergoer. In their indeterminate relation to one another, these effects of screen viewing limn yet another temporality of youths at play in modern times, one as openended and contained as this very kind of spectating involves. Modeled in a text often read for its counterrevolutionary impulses, this scenario does seem to sidestep the exuberance of the revolutionary rave, even with all its complications, that sets the tone for Byron’s canto 3. In either its 1818 or 1831 version, screening the De Laceys could very well be the co-opted fate of the oppositional youth first glimpsed in Mansfield Park and then more fully delineated in their revolutionary form in Don Juan. To resist reading this triptych teleologically would then also be to contest the delimitation of what it means for youth to play at playing in this particular chronotope of Romanticism and modernity—to see how instead that particular playtime is still in play. I conclude with several final observations about this episode from Frankenstein that further elaborate this dynamic. First, if in Austen mimesis operates as a threat and in Byron as a political practice, in Mary Shelley the effect of mimesis seems more diffuse. It is surely there, in questions about the creature’s and perhaps others’ roleplaying, his sincerity, and his appearance. Certainly his education can also be understood in terms of an imitation of emotions, from the imagined pleasures of domestic and romantic sentiment to the pains of alienated exile. And, as Jerrold Hogle and others have shown, Shelley’s novel thoroughly worries issues of duplication, of the copy, in all its technological, biological, and historical forms (Hogle, “Frankenstein,” 176–210). But the creature’s learning of phonetic speech and alphabet-based writing, his witnessing of sounds that don’t immediately resemble anything whatsoever, indicates a more complicated situation than mimetic play. More to the point, the creature is himself literally made up. In his composition, within and beyond the novel’s plot, he is fictional, speculative, in ways that upend any easy

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access to the mimetic and the referential. Likewise, while I have suggested Felix and Agatha might in their misery be acting a part, what’s more crucial for the creature (and for us) is that they are on display. This situation might entail the spectacle of theater (or of the pre-, proto-, and postcinema) but this attraction doesn’t necessarily depend on theater as mimesis. On either side, of both the creature’s and the De Laceys’, theatrical representation doesn’t cohere into either the menace of that acting week or the exuberance of a revolutionary act. Second, however, there is a side, an effect of the gap, screen, material, or cut that elsewhere also structurally initiates the mimetic difference between the insincere and sincere, appearance and essence. In the case of the De Lacey cabin, that screen is the principle between spectator and spectacle, something we could have very much talked about in terms of both Fanny’s and Lambro’s witnessing of what swirled around them, even more so than Juan and Haidée’s spectating; here, however, with the creature this screen is especially foregrounded by how much it crowds out mimesis, emphatically condensing into the crevice that frames, and fits, the eye. One could certainly then see this situation as another dimension of the perceptual and experiential character of theater: of the theater-viewing subject’s relation to the object, now not so much about either the danger or potential of representation as the attraction that the object can have over the perceiving subject—the adhesiveness of the thing, as Bill Brown reading Heidegger has put it (25).37 However, we might instead focus on the formal fact of that relation as first a cutting, or what Dolar describes as the structural “problem of intersection” and this present book identifies as the never domesticated, “in-between” condition of media as mediation: the screen, cut, or divide that allows us to talk about the subject and the object in the first place, as well as the distinction between appearance and essence.38 This formal imposition would then organize—indeed, produce—the very contrasting categories of the epistemological and the ontological. Likewise, the difference between describing 37. Insofar as Other Things considers, after Benjamin’s dialectical image, the possibility of the “dialectical object” (371), it could be argued that Brown is studying the same formal problem staged in Mladen Dolar’s interest in the place (neither inside nor outside) of voice and this book’s consideration of Romantic media and mediation as the split or cut. See note 38. 38. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 167. That throughout his work Dolar considers voice not simply as a metaphysical or physical entity but as a structural aporia speaks to the convergence between his study and this present work’s exploration of what Romantic media especially models for us.

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acting and spectating would thus not be as important as the caesura that allows that opposition, as well as the ones between acting and nonacting and spectator and spectacle. As I alluded earlier, there has been much recent discussion about the Kantian—that is, the modern or Romantic—epistemological predicament that much like theater splits the perceiving subject from the perceived object, with the intent of sidestepping, rejecting, or forgoing this split altogether. Latour has a well-known version of this polemic, as do those associated with the object- oriented ontology movement (Latour, 56–57). For many making this argument the idea is that getting rid of the epistemological split means retaining the object as an a priori existence that precedes all other relations.39 My triptych would take issue with this impulse, however; it would insist that we are modern, which is to say Romantic, first and foremost by how the subject as object, the ontology of the subject, is riven in the triptych’s narrative by the betwixt and between state of youth, of the political potential and inhibition of this subject of modernity as the effect of a precarious structural incommensurability, a split, cut, or divide, instead of an existing agent, object, or essence (no matter how occluded that essence might be from us). In Romanticism we have always been modern, insofar as the screen, split, or cut of difference is the radical structure, or play, of our politics, thought, culture, and literature. Youth, betwixt and between, now not simply a stage along life’s way as in Turner’s vision of social ritual and performance, is the subject of estranging non-adequation, not essence—of the cut, screen, or gap. Indeed, the subject is simply the structural fact of the frame or screen. (That an actor’s physical body can further act as the screen or frame by which not only player and audience but also the always bifurcated structure of mimesis occurs is exactly one relevant argument made in theater studies today.)40 And the politics of the subject as both expressing and being produced by this intersection of the cut, the politics of the subject as youth, from revolution to interpellation, so much still in play, is the practice and affect that Romanticism makes visible in our modernity, and postmodernity, 39. See, however, Timothy Morton’s argument for moving the split between subject and object into the object, or “hyperobject,” in his Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1–95. 40. Tracy C. Davis, “Theatricality and Civil Society,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127–55. For the claim that this idea of physical embodiment as the incitement of mimesis underwrites Thomas De Quincey’s notion of “theatric prose,” see Gerald Maa’s dissertation, “Thomas De Quincey, XYZ: Theatric Prose and National Literary Production” (University of California, Irvine, 2018).

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for us to this day. The theatrics or spectacle of Romanticism would then be the hyperannouncement of the screen, as manic, exuberant, melancholy, revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, or melodramatic as that proclamation might be. Playtime would be staged within this theatrics, as well as this theatrics occurring within the different registers of this temporality. This particular time as most vividly the extimacy of the temporal, that internalexternal division, screen, or gap that we merely gesture toward by debating time’s epistemological or ontological condition, would then be one very Romantic way that time becomes history (Dolar, 96, 106). As such, the political emerges from the opportunistic recognition of this fact, that playtime is always in play.

7.

Chthonic Michael Smithson, Lévi- Strauss, Freud, Wordsworth The dwelling houses, and contiguous out-houses are in many instances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have been built; but frequently the dwelling house has been distinguished from the barn or byre by rough-cast, and white wash, which, as the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing it, in a few years, acquires, by the influence of the weather, a tint at once sober and variegated. As these houses have been from father to son inhabited by persons engaged in the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their circumstances, they have received additions and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his fancy; so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected;—to have risen by an instinct of their own out of the native rock; so little is there in them of formality; such is their wildness and beauty. —William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes (1810)

The value of a site, one assumes, is measured by its security—by its safety, its ability to protect, seal off, and safeguard.1 By that metric the ruined site is no site at all. But, of course, in Romanticism, ruins litter the landscape of many, if not all, of the period’s writings. What is the significance, then, of the Romantic site in ruins, one defined by its failure to secure or protect? This essay finds that value in the Romantic imaging of a certain demarcation, a cut or split, that secures little but nevertheless organizes the very ways by which we scaffold our fantasies of protection, sustainability, identification, and intelligibility. The Romanticism read here will be exemplified by a well-known work written by a poet recognized equally for 1.I’m grateful to Andrew Burkett for this reference to Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. The occasion for this essay was a collection of presentations at the Secure and Insecure Sites Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in April 2016.

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his centrality to the Romantic topos and by his fascination with the Romantic ruin. But my wager will also be the claim of Romanticism as itself a keenly volatile, anachronistic, and therefore relevant site, a kind of echo chamber in which a number of cultural soundings, mental categories, and media forms from within and beyond the Romantic period resonate off one another. We thus begin with a contemporary artist whose artifacts rework the time and place of culture itself. Looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be a primitive, without culture. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Robert Smithson’s land art cuts across our categories of perception and cognition, cleaving, in both senses of that word, sky and earth, land and sea, time and space, stasis and movement, time and history, nature and culture. Rather than coming from the tool kit of cognitive mapping, his pieces mark more the prehistory of that endeavor, the materiality of sign making or signage not yet coming to be, a welter of forces and affects, ecological, physical, and temporal, that allows us to encounter, or imagine our encountering, the impossible pre-moment of cognition and language— the sensation of sensation as I’ve called it elsewhere.2 Bill Brown has described Smithson’s and other examples of land art, such as Michael Heizer’s and Richard Serra’s, as “chthonic,” and they are aptly so, rising from the earth, both cutting and tying us from and to the land while also projecting us to the sky, the liminal horizons of human techné, art, and society.3 Coming from the earth, land art is also chthonic in the way it purports a vast underground collection of momentous dynamism, the very spatial trope of under and above, that enables our own delineation of that enormous substrate entity—human, historical, ecological, or otherwise—that we call the unconscious (Figures 3–5). From the perspective of this discussion, Walter Benn Michaels’s fanciful thought experiment, one literally shot into space, the lines of William Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” seemingly etched onto the cliff walls of the Martian landscape, is a land art interrogation. For Michaels those figures are precisely not art to the degree no human or alien hand

2. Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 2. 3. Bill Brown, “The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour).” Brown’s examples were specifically Smithson’s and Nancy Holt’s work. Petrou Lecture given at the University of Maryland, College Park, October 30, 2014.

Chthonic Michael: Smithson, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Wordsworth

figure 3. Broken Circle and Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson, 1971. Photo © 2009 Gerardus. From Wikimedia. Released into the public domain.

figure 4. Double Negative, by Michael Heizer, 1970. Photo © 2007 Chris Fulmer. From Wikimedia. This photograph is under the Creative Commons Attribution- Share Alike 3.0 Unported License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/3.0/deed.en.

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figure 5. Schunnemunk Fork, by Richard Serra, 1990–91. Photo © 2005 E. B. Morse. From Wikimedia. This photograph is under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en.

intended their formation.4 But Smithson’s creations move in the opposite direction. He stages his work as the very cleft between nature and art, as the unavoidable alterity of a distinction that colors everything. His pieces do so by either foregrounding how his technological interventions become ecosystems in their own right or, in a manner especially germane for us, by primordially allowing the primal to be, as something in motion and existence, but also as the reference of a ruin or artifact, a concatenation of forces, unnamable in their indeterminacy, human or geological, natural or supernatural, erupting from the past. Within another well-known Wordsworth poem, an even more explicit rumination on one of his favorite obsessions—the past and its relation to 4. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 57. Michaels’s Martian scenario is a riff on his and Steven Knapp’s famous wave poem in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For Michaels, Smithson’s art—if not Smithson’s statements about art—actually makes the same argument that Michaels does about the uncontestable difference between art and non-art (Shape, 85–95).

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the present—something very much akin to what I’ve just described in Smithson occurs in lines near the beginning of that work: waiting for the traveler walking up the “tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll . . . appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones” (lines 2, 17), the unfinished sheepfold of Michael and Luke, the broken contract between father and son, superseded at once by the forces of modernity, market acquisition, weather, and nonhuman time.5 The remnant of Luke’s urban and then colonial flight, as well as Michael’s misbegotten attempt to calculate and then impose the correct relation between risk and reward onto the land as his property, the unfinished sheepfold, hardly recognized as such, stands as the receding memory of the human inhabitation of a nonhuman landscape, the failure of a particular human society attempting to be a force, or law, of nature, and thus the law of the social. As with so many other images in this particular poem and others by Wordsworth, the incomplete sheepfold is the Romantic split, cut, and suture between nature and culture, in this instance especially the trace or failure of a contract that paradoxically embeds that anthropological idea, along with other mental categories such as the incomplete and the failed or fallen into a nonanthropological landscape of nonhuman occurrence. Broken, the contract between human steward and animal flock, and human patriarch and human son, exists by its very incompleteness, an unfinished formation that itself is the impossible cut or contract between human and nature, or human and earth. We are encouraged to photograph examples of land art, which often are, like Michael’s ruined sheepfold, physically difficult to visit.6 That instruction resonates in several further ways with the present discussion. The photographed image, with its stress on the indexed object, has a well-known role in aesthetic debate, where the photographic impulse to document contradicts the value of artistic technique or style.7 Photography, then, is the art of nonart, a proposition very much part of the Romantic topos. This predicament 5. All quotations from “Michael, a Pastoral Poem” are from William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 146–56. 6. As Bill Brown says of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, “Both works are difficult to find and to access, but photography and film quickly made them iconic, within and beyond the art world.” Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 153. 7. See, for example, Michaels, 95–97. For a very suggestive argument about how Coleridge installs a photographic imaginary in Romantic philosophic and literary thought, see Alexandra Neel, “ ‘A Something-Nothing out of Its Very Contrary’: The Photography of Coleridge,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 208–17; see also Geoffrey

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certainly helps us understand someone like Rousseau but more immediately illuminates the use of prosaic, conversational blank verse in Michael and other poems by Wordsworth, his polemic about prose and meter and the language of common men in the Preface, the self-representation of poetry as the simple documentation of rural life, the very principle of marginalization, if not erasure, of artistic form that Coleridge scoffs at in the Biographia. In both the photographic image and the Wordsworthian poem this marginalization of artistic technique, willful or genuine, stages that impulse, encapsulated in my quotation of Barthes, to erase or absolutely minimize the split between nature and culture, a desire that paradoxically enunciates that split or cleft ever more vehemently and intransigently. As important is how photographs of Smithson’s land art introduce the temporal dimension of these creations by creating a collection of images that convey the seasonal existence, or becoming, of these objects. Yet that very temporality is itself transformed by the nature of this archive, spatialized as so many sides or moments of the object’s predication. The photographed image, then, becomes a synecdoche, one part of a larger whole, captured or corralled by the numerous images of the documented artifact. That, however, is only one part of the story of the photographic image. For Barthes has also taught us how one single image can capture us absolutely, how it need neither belong nor refer to anything but itself and what it indexes, how as with the Deleuzian cinematic close-up the detailed image is not part of a whole, but a part that is the whole itself, what Ernesto Laclau after Joan Copjec calls a unique re-dimensioning of that whole found in the singularity of the one image.8 In what follows I explore these two senses of the photographed image in relation to Michael in a way that will seem to range far afield from that poem, but ultimately will hopefully show how in some fundamentally or anachronistically Romantic way our discussion has been in that work’s wake all along. Let us return then to the impulse to collect images of Smithson’s land art, such as Spiral Jetty, to turn them into an archive of that entity or artifact (Figures 6–9). This archival impulse is a familiar endeavor in cultural history insofar as one of its most ambitious forms is the very attempt to archive Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 56–102. 8. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2007), 113–14; Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 53.

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culture itself, the profession of the anthropological that comes into Eurocentric view during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Derrida and others remind us, one of the most formidable twentieth-century heirs of this in many ways Romantic, Rousseauian genealogy is Claude LéviStrauss, who models for us one motivation behind collecting numerous versions of one thing. If in Smithson this entails temporal variants of one entity, in Lévi- Strauss this involves spatial variations—culturally diverse specimens—of one temporal plot, or narrative: the structural study of myth. As important as the object of this analysis is the vision subtending Lévi- Strauss’s methodology, whose account is pertinent for my present inquiry. For Lévi- Strauss, to study myth structurally is to survey the increasingly complex relationships among different portions of an expanding array of individual myth stories; to collate and compare those parts on index cards, to reorganize the relations of those cards onto two- dimensional charts, whose variations can best be glimpsed by rearranging the charts into three dimensional models (Figures 10), and then in 1955, to project

figure 6. Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, 1970. Photo © 2004 Joshua Shannon. Used with permission of the photographer.

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Figure 7. Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, 1970. Photo © 2005 Soren Harward. From Wikimedia. This photograph is under the Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 /deed.en.

figure 8. Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, 1970. Photo © 2006 Michael David Murphy. From Wikimedia. This photograph is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses /by- sa/2.5/deed.en.

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figure 9. Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, 1970. Photo © 2014 Elizabeth Haslam. From Flickr. Used with permission of the photographer.

that ever-expanding structure into a techno-administrative, DARPA resonating future not yet coming to be: To discover a suitable pattern of rows and columns for those cards, special devices are needed, consisting of vertical boards about six feet long and four and a half feet high, where cards can be pigeon-holed and moved at will. In order to build up three- dimensional models enabling one to compare the variants, several such boards are necessary, and this in turn requires a spacious workshop, a commodity particularly unavailable in Western Europe nowadays. Furthermore, as soon as the frame of reference becomes multidimensional . . . the board system has to be replaced by perforated cards, which in turn require IBM equipment.9

9. Claude Lévi- Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229. “Structural Study” was originally published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955; that version contains a prescient plea that the type of anthropological research envisioned by Lévi- Strauss might be initiated in the United States, where the promise of computer research appeared brighter at that moment than in France.

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figure 10. Three- dimensional charts in Claude LéviStrauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 218. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

In his IBM-colored dream of a multidimensional map, model, or graphic that would illuminate, indeed reconceive, his collection of index cards, isn’t Lévi- Strauss anticipating the flexible, ever- expanding, scalar- changing promise of the digital archive? Envisioned as the literal transformation of those cards into perforated ones, isn’t Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism one version of the digital medium, avant la lettre? As Franco Moretti observes: Today we can replicate in a few minutes investigations that took a giant like Leo Spitzer months and years of work. When it comes to phenomena of language and style, we can do things that previous generations could only dream of.10

Couldn’t Moretti just as well be talking about the structuralist dream of another twentieth-century giant, Lévi-Strauss? Take the phenomena of his index cards and myths, and replace them with images of Smithson’s art, 10. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 212.

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and Smithson’s synecdochic, photographed image more precisely becomes the portal to the structuralist imaginary of the digitally variable image. That there is a poststructuralist imaginary to what I’m now calling the digitally archived image can certainly be documented, though the assuredness of Moretti’s claim advises us that some of the most urgent questions regarding new media actually revolve around the proleptically totalizing, digital dreams of structuralist, not poststructuralist, thought. We can engage with those specific dreams by way of what I call the more properly, though equally proleptic, photographic drive of the singular image in Michael of that eponymous figure’s sheepfold. In doing so, I associate that photographic drive with the indexical operation of the cinematic close-up, and oppose it to the photograph as one part of the digital archive.11 But to prepare for that engagement let us first stay a bit longer with Lévi- Strauss and his own encounter with that earlier twentieth-century and late nineteenth-century giant, Sigmund Freud. We can recall how a key moment in Lévi-Strauss’s structural study of myth revolves around his analysis of both the Oedipus myth and Freud’s reading as two versions of a more fundamental, cross-cultural narrative. In Lévi-Strauss’s study we can see in fact the overlapping of two competing categories, the attempted transformation of the unconscious into culture, the subterranean depth of the former reconceptualized through the more spatially baroque algorithms of structure and structuralist thought. Crucial to Lévi-Strauss is the translation of Oedipus’s name as “swollen foot,” a motif of lameness that Lévi- Strauss finds recurring in a number of different myths from Europe and the Americas (214–17). One is lame, dragging one’s foot, because one is tied to the earth; the ground attaches itself to us because we are not quite free of it. Aboveground, we still are not quite free of the underground, our primal, chthonic past. We are versions of Smithson’s land art or of Antony Gormley’s sculpted figures, anchored to and breaking out of the ground, delineating, piercing, and falling back from horizon and sky. We could then very well see in Lévi-Strauss’s focus on the lame leg a reflexive allegory of his own structuralist desire, the attempt to break free from the underground, chthonic space of the Freudian psychoanalytic id to the reconceived contentless, weightless, or formalist, space of mathematical, or digital, structure. Below ground or hidden, the unconscious is 11. This is not to say that examples of the indexical photograph or the cinematic close-up are absent from the web. The ways that digital technology can now manipulate the image may further complicate this opposition, unsettling the very notion of the one image necessary for the act of visual targeting, or indexing, to occur.

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troped as an interior force that can only be accessed speculatively by the external operations of the symptom. Arguably, then, “The Structural Study of Myth” operates as a key pivot in a story perhaps more familiarly told, in North America at least, through Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson’s use of Lacan, where, aboveground culture (or in certain Marxist traditions, ideology) subsumes the binary between inside and outside; the unconscious becomes a social, externally present entity, whose existence in numerous artifacts, gestures, and practices are there for all to see.12 That within various genealogies of this story the symptom is still a necessary part of the theoretical critique and analysis of the social is certainly true.13 I want simply to note another, contradictory impulse that the convergence of structuralism and digital technology highlights and inspires. If in Derrida the archive necessarily positions itself as a troping of the external, describing itself and its relation to the psychoanalytic unconscious as a “psychic apparatus in an exterior technical model” and then as a “prosthetic of the inside,” Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist subsumption of inside and outside has culture even more vigorously transcending the speculative, hidden nature of the unconscious, transforming it into visible, accessible fact.14 From that perspective, the anachronistic leap from the archived image of Smithson land art back to the collected myths of Lévi-Strauss is overdetermined, bridged not simply by the shared act of assemblage but also by how that practice is organized around a drive toward external, objectified knowledge best attained in a visual manner. As synecdoche, the image or myth is part of a whole dispersed throughout the phenomenal world of space and time, waiting to be gathered for us to observe, study, and see, in a manner familiar to historians of the archive, or one sense of the archive.15 12. See, for example, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86; and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 34–35, 152–53, 174–76. Very pertinent here also is Jameson’s own use of Lévi- Strauss’s treatment of the Caduveo Indians (77–80); if Jameson’s intent is to apply Lévi- Strauss’s visual treatment of the Caduveo Indian tattoo to textual analyses of the symbolic, my point is how much cultural and textual analyses assume what can be had by visually gleaning the objects of the external world, especially when enabled by the prowess of the digital archive. 13. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 1–92. 14. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14, 15. 15. Using the language of Archive Fever, one might say that this synecdochic impulse, exemplified by Lévi- Strauss’s structuralist dream, actually counters Derrida by positing

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figure 11. Screenshot of Google images for Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, May 13, 2019.

This digital vision is literalized by comparing the earlier set of photographic images of Spiral Jetty to the screenshot of what happens when we Google Smithson’s work on our computers (Figure 11). Before our eyes is a structuralist archive that reconfigures the very ontology of our relation to Smithson’s land art, where Spiral Jetty is about neither encountering it physically in person or viewing a photograph of it. Instead, we see a collection of photo images on our screens, all part of the externalized, visible archive of Spiral Jetty, all leading to different sites that exponentially increase that assemblage while assuming their algorithmic identification with the synecdochic impulse that is that archive, that is, now, Spiral Jetty. One might qualify this claim by asserting that the realization of LéviStrauss’s structuralist vision in Moretti’s heavily curated data stores is distinct from the rhizomatic, open-ended archiving vision of the Google screenshot and what one retrieves from such services as Flickr or Instagram. (A number of the photos reproduced in this essay are from Wikimedia and Flickr.) Arguably, collecting images of Smithson’s land art could be thought as a “meta-archive” of the “virtual”—an archive that transfers the ontological necessity of an inside expressed outside to a structure that subsumes this spatial binary (66–67). See also notes 9 and 23.

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another example of the populist open-endedness often used to characterize these latter forms. That observation, however, raises the question embedded within Lévi- Strauss’s thoughts on the more vigorous state of academic funding in the United States (mentioned in note 9): How exactly does capital structure different forms of digital curating and influence the very argument of what methodology, or thought, should be used to study such curating? As we all know now, the intent of algorithms structuring Facebook, Instagram, and other sites might be many things, but “open-ended” isn’t one of them. Formally, with regard to the Google screenshot, any appeal to rhizomatic open-endedness must recognize, if not be absorbed by, the synecdochic impulse of structuralist digital archiving that makes a meme such as “images of Spiral Jetty” intelligible in the first place, where the digital curating of images of Smithson’s artwork realizes Spiral Jetty as that very collection. In terms of academic versions of curated data in and outside the humanities, the wedding of externalized, objectified knowledge to visual modes of display is very much in play, though now not simply in the form of a collection of images as in the Google screenshot. Thus, while the speculative dimension of this graphic approach still exists, it does so through the impulse to transform that aspect into the objectified abstraction of the structural relation, itself often realized through the visual diagram, model, or formula. If the motif of Oedipus’s lame leg can signify the gravitational pull of an earthbound heaviness, a hidden economy of primal forces, the graphic transformation of knowledge imagines an airy break with such forces, one cathected in the ostensive clarity of these often visible forms of expression. Another name for this ostensive conceptual clarity, often troped visually or with visual tropes, is abstraction. The final essay in this collection has much to say about the demands and risks of this mental and material practice for a Romantic, political modernity. More immediately in this present piece, abstraction stands for the dynamic by which the literal image in structuralist digital archiving can be translated into Lévi- Strauss’s work on myth, where the airy break from hidden, unseen, and thus unknowable forces births the stunningly laconic, formalist equation that Lévi-Strauss argues subsumes all the variants of the myth he’s tracking, from Oedipus to Freud to the Hopi and Zuni tribes in the southwestern United States: the narrativized, impossible squaring of the circle that stages how one must come from two (216). For as much as Lévi- Strauss’s own structuralist desire might be reflexively staged in the manner that I’ve just described, his own explicit use of

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the subterranean also moves in another direction. In “The Structural Study of Myth” the chthonic is first and foremost the autochthonic, not so much the sign of difference, a break or rupture from our prior identity—the earth’s—but more readily the sign of the same, the erasure of any division that might impede the self ’s rising from its constituent materials (215–16). The impossible reality of that division, sexual difference, set side by side with the cross-cultural narrative persistence of the autochthonic, is for Lévi-Strauss the scandal of thought that the structure of myth repeatedly stages for us. One might respond to Lévi-Strauss, citing Barbara Johnson’s memorable intervention between Derrida and Lacan, that one and two inevitably leads us to think of three, and so Freudian Oedipalization does not stay subsumed for long within the expanding crystalline structure of myth that Lévi-Strauss envisions.16 One might also wonder if the structuralism of Lacan is the three that emerges between the two of Freud and Lévi-Strauss (or Saussure), or whether Freud’s particular interest in numbers and repetition, which LéviStrauss mentions, is the anthropologist’s own way to stage an autochthonic subsumption of their binary differences, a reassertion of the dilemma of one versus two.20 Without absolutely resolving the challenge of these provocations and their theoretical permutations, we can still note how so much of these dynamics are on display in Wordsworth’s Michael. I’ve suggested that aside from the sheepfold other moments in that poem also bear a family resemblance to Smithson land art, for example, the path that merges with the brook that leads to Michael’s family’s valley as well as to the cottage Evening Star, mistaken by travelers walking at night as a light from the sky. But one image in particular arguably stands out in terms of its relation to the chthonic meme traversing Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist vision— what Michael points out to Luke before lifting and placing the first stone of the sheepfold—the grave plots of their ancestors. As James K. Chandler has observed about a pun associated with these earthly sites, their existence as a “family mould” assert in effect the autochthonic origins of human life, where Michael and Luke constitute a continuity of identity with their buried “Forefathers” (lines 370, 368), all born from the valley and returning to its earth after their deaths, a mortality blunted and ostensibly overcome by the ongoing existence of the latest shepherd steward of this land.17 16. Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Yale French Studies, no. 55/56 (1977): 457–505 17. James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 165. Arguably, it’s the very pun of “mould”

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As Chandler and others have demonstrated and as the term “forefathers” conveys, this autochthonic insistence is historically embedded in a Burkean ideology of entailment that foregrounds the drama of sexual difference through its very attempted erasure. The poem molds its own story into one simply between father and son, turning Michael into the single hermaphroditic parent of Luke, doing him “female service . . . rock[ing] / His cradle, as with a woman’s gentle hand” (lines 154–58) and relegating Isabel to the role of ideological sounding board, while projecting the trauma of sexual difference onto the alterity of urban mediatized life, where Luke learns to write his deceptive “ ‘prettiest letters that were ever seen’ ” before giving into “evil courses” and failing his patriarchal family within the space of five lines (lines 435, 445).18 The land’s existence as surety for Michael’s nephew’s business dealings and Michael’s own calculation of risk and reward does indicate an emerging, or perhaps even dominant, economic form of life at odds with the autochthonic ethos of Burkean, feudal primogeniture.19 We might recall that a huge portion of the land was already mortgaged when Michael inherited it. But the drama of Michael, its melancholic worrying of the narrativization of how a son fails the father, does confirm the force of a social symbolic attempting to contain the trauma of sexual difference, how one actually comes from two. As Lévi- Strauss writes, “The overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it” (216). That even in Freud the Oedipalized question of one coming from two, or of one and two making three, is absolutely about sexual difference is an open question. Lévi-Strauss’s own study makes this very point when he as not simply earth but intentionally shaped vessel or form that enables us to associate the ancestral family plots with land art. 18. See Chandler, 156–68. For a valuable discussion of Burkean primogeniture, see Jerome Christensen, “ ‘Like a Guilty Thing Surprised’: Deconstruction, Coleridge, and the Apostasy of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (1986): 775–77. For a comment on the gender politics in Smithson’s and Heizer’s “phallic” examples of contemporary land art, see Brown, 174. 19. For perhaps the most thorough reading of Michael through the trauma of capitalist modernity, see Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 190–225; as Pfau notes, “Michael’s embrace of agrarian self- sufficiency runs counter to the declining share of agriculture within Britain’s overall national economy. As Eric Hobsbawm remarks, by 1800, agriculture ‘occupied no more than a third of the population and provided about the same fraction of the national income’ ” (196). The Hobsbawm quote comes from his Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968), 97.

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turns his attention away from Freud and toward the Native American myths of plant matter and the trickster figure (220–27). Lévi-Strauss does so to formulate a more exacting equation about the narrativized form of the myth of the choice between one and two; what that question might mean beyond sexual difference, what ultimate claim of content is being expressed beyond this question, seems to go unanswered by Lévi-Strauss, perhaps because, from his point of view, it’s the wrong inquiry to make.20 But in what one could see as a further moment in this encounter between Lévi- Strauss and Freud, Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian interpretation of another study by the anthropologist, we can push this avenue of concern further. Using LéviStrauss’s study of the Winnebago Great Lakes tribe, Žižek denudes sexual difference of its primal status, radicalizing it as the more formal breach in thought and language that he argues is contained in Lévi- Strauss’s notion of the “zero-institution”: What if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the split within humankind, the naturalized minimal zero- difference, a split which, prior to signaling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such? . . . sexual difference [is not] the immediate/natural presupposition later perlaborated/“mediated” by the work of culture—[it is] (presup)posed (retroactively posited) by the very “cultural” process of symbolization.21

For Žižek, then, the fact of sexual difference is more radically the unavoidable trauma of antagonism, the inability of any one social identity to be purely or totally itself (110–14). We can push this formulation even further to say that antagonism is itself the split, cut, or cleft in identity per se, including the identity of identity as a category of thought. One does not come from two, then; one comes from the formal, a priori split between the two, between one and the other one, which themselves are merely effects of that 20. Lévi- Strauss’s equation is Fx(a): Fy(b) ≅ Fx(b) : Fa-1(y), which builds upon, or repeats, Freud’s own observation that “two traumas (and not one, as is so commonly said) are necessary to generate the individual myth in which a neurosis consists” (LéviStrauss, 228). Aside from showcasing the impulse toward autochthonic continuity that I suggested one might see in Lévi- Strauss’s encounter with Freud, these formulations point to a disposition in both Freud and Lévi- Strauss to recognize and manage trauma through the narrative handling of the temporal trauma or cut of repetition as repetition, or the mathematics of narrative form. That other dispositions might exist in Freud (and perhaps also Lévi- Strauss, if not certainly in Wordsworth) is the backdrop of this essay. 21. Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), 114.

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formal break, border, or cut. It is this cut, split, or cleft, this relational difference, the between between on and off within the binary code that initiates the generative multiplicity of digital structuralism avant la lettre, while also vehemently preempting structuralism’s speculative dream of structurally closing off—that is, identifying—any one structure, or structure, itself. In that sense, the anthropological cut between nature and culture that we have read through Smithson back to Michael would allow us to understand nature more profitably as the negative cut of, or antagonism within, any identity of the social we might offer ourselves, instead of as any positive force or law that would then underwrite society or culture as a univocal norm. This formal split, the content of the choice between one and two, lies in wait for us in Wordsworth’s poem. It literally does so, even as his work also narrates the attempt by Burkean entailment to overcome death and sexual difference—if not through Michael and Luke then through, as many have noticed, the narrator’s own literary primogeniture, his evocation of the “youthful Poets” who will be his “second self ” after he is gone (lines 38–39). For we can return to the beginning of the poem and consider the narrator’s instructions, how through his mind’s eye we ascend the steep “boisterous brook” of Green-head Ghyll and then are directed toward that “straggling heap of unhewn stones,” which we “might pass by, / Might see and notice not”: Nor should I have made mention of this Dell But for one object you might pass by, Might see and notice not. Beside the brook Appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones! And to this simple object appertains A story . . . (lines 14–19)

This zooming in, this indexical admonition toward the “object” of the poet’s—and therefore our and the poem’s—attention, this correction to “notice” as well as the parallel prepositional assertion that “to this simple object appertains / A story” (my emphasis), singles out this image of the sheepfold as the image of the sheepfold, or the image of the image not as the synecdochic part of an infinitely expanding digital archive, but as the singular photographic target or cinematic close-up that contains within itself the whole of its encounter, in this case the paradoxically formal, relational split, or cleft within any whole identity, or structure. (The account of Michael from the 1849–50 Poetical Works, generally thought to be the last

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version that Wordsworth actively advanced, especially stresses this perceptual nature of the mind’s eye’s indexical targeting in a way not found in earlier renditions of the poem, changing line 17 from “There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones!” to “Appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones!” [my emphasis].)22 The seal, border, or cut between earth and sky, the sheepfold re-dimensions the very promise behind the structuralist and digital enthusiasm for re-dimensioning, the transformation of two-dimensional index cards and boards into multidimensional models made of either wood or electronic matter that enable a new algorithmic, and graphic, advance of knowledge as data. The straggling stones of the sheepfold re-dimension re- dimensioning itself not as an advance but, like the very emotional wound of Barthes’s punctum, as the affective break, the ruin, of that knowledge instead. Two final observations can be made. First, Smithson’s most famous work, Spiral Jetty, perhaps his most photographically archived piece of land art, resonates with the term that Lévi-Strauss employs in his concluding vision of the structural entity that anthropological research can create: an expanding “spiral-wise” form that is emphatically Hegelian (of a kind) in its dialectical ability to generate multiplicity and yet contain a recognizable identity or shape (229).23 A completed sheepfold conveys much of that same circular, visually secure energy. The straggling, unhewn stones in Michael, however, suggest another spatial and temporal view, a re-dimensioning that speaks directly to the question of a secure site by insisting on the fiction of that containment, the failure of a shepherd to keep his flock, make a family, preserve land as a name or as property, the impossibility of a valley’s 22. Stillinger, xviii. 23. Lévi- Strauss does say that the “spiral-wise” growth of the myth continues “until the intellectual process which has originated it is exhausted.” But even as he admits to this sense of historical limitation, or definition, he also suggests that versions of a myth’s combinatory relationships are of a “theoretically infinite number.” Thus, while his other image of an indefinitely growing “crystal” implies a rhizomatic quality to what he’s analyzing, his stress on the “discontinuous” growth of myth’s “structure” limits that option in his thought (229). For perhaps the most rigorously Hegelian argument that Smithson’s artwork, such as Spiral Jetty, dialectically performs an encounter with totalization, see Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (London: Verso, 2013), 99–116. For his argument that the infinite generation of the digital image is not a sign of big data’s ontological certitude but the emergence of the “derealized image” that corresponds to the ubiquity of the “abstraction of exchange value from use value,” see Osborne, 131; in another language, we might see the former as the ideological mystification of the latter.

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inhabitants encircled by mountains to shield themselves from modernity.24 Encountered through the seemingly blasted remains of the sheepfold in Wordsworth, the re-dimensioned spiral in Smithson and Lévi-Strauss would then exist, like the memory of a solar system about to go nova, always on the verge of breaking up. Or maybe not. Perhaps the digital dreams of macroanalytics asserted by Moretti and others will indeed obtain for us an archive complex, expansive, and repurposed enough for us to minimize in an emphatic manner the speculative nature of our truth claims about literature, culture, history, the world. Such a move could entail a shift in our episteˉ meˉ in the humanities, certainly, of a rather momentous kind. People working in digital humanities know this, though we might still wonder what we lose by simply dismissing the cut or split of Wordsworth’s sheepfold as an affect or intensity that haunts the particularly sanguine vision of structuralist, digital archiving. In its most exuberant forms of techno-administrative boosterism, this model of big data seems to imply a plentitude or solvency—of knowledge, of resources, indeed, of spirit—that we might do well to continue to interrogate.25 This leads to my second, concluding remark: for all the architectural vastness of form and content associated with what web research can do, is not the Internet also the graveyard of good intentions, of numerous 24. “There is the ‘sheepfold’ itself . . . a wall devised both to contain the world within and to keep at bay the entropic world without” (Pfau, 200). That the eroding remains of Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp (1973), now sunk into the ground and overgrown with grass, could uncannily substitute for the ruined sheepfold, simply punctuates the phantasmic status of this intention; see http://clui.org/ludb/site/ amarillo-ramp. 25. The locus classicus for the critique of archival plentitude is Derrida’s Archive Fever. Indeed, one could read the ruined sheepfold as the archive of the archive—what remains after archive fever, le mal d’archive, the combined forces of the death drive and the “irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (9–12, 91). See also Carlos J. Alonso, “The Internet Sublime,” PMLA 116, no. 5 (2011): 1297–1301; and David S. Miall, “The Library versus the Internet: Literary Studies under Siege?” PMLA 116. no. 5 (2011): 1405–14. While working his way between polemics for and against the potential of Internet research, Miall suggests that the epistemological boosterism for the web is based on a certain “triumph of space over time” that resonates interestingly with structuralist thought (1406). Arguably, one part of this discussion is the confusion between the precise meanings of the archive and the database, where Moretti’s project would be especially aligned with the latter. I thank Matthew G. Kirschenbaum for pointing this out to me.

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incomplete, failed sites, thwarted ambitions and unsuccessful experiments, defeated by underestimations of the labor, legal machinations, technology, and capital involved? Digital second cousins to Smithson’s land art, what if these sites arrested our restless survey of the web’s span and held our notice in the same way that Wordsworth’s narrator asks us to attend to Michael’s sheepfold?26 What kind of re-dimensioning of the web might that involve? What if, in other words, the indexed photograph or cinematic close-up of Wordsworth’s straggling unhewn stones led us past the expansive archive of the digitally variable image to the digital ruin? Beyond even the exuberant poststructuralist play that many associate with the web, what Wordsworthian, or Romantic, nontriumphalist thought, might dwell, buried, there?

26. See, for example, the Wayback Machine, a collection of dead URLs found at the Internet Archive. From another angle, Kirschenbaum’s salutary reminder of the computer’s “forensic memory” as physical depository inevitably points us toward an encounter with digital decay—the digital archive as always already on the road to material ruin. See his Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

8.

Dream Animals Art thou not of the dreamer tribe? The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes, The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it. —John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion

Two Books and a Painting (and a Poem) This piece begins with references to a set of images. Teachers of British Romanticism should recognize my first as the cover of perhaps a textbook for one of their classes, Volume D, Norton’s latest anthology for Romantic English Literature (Figure 12). Even if one doesn’t use the Norton—I do, in fact—many probably recognized the image immediately, maybe because of the cover painting, but just as likely because of its Romanticist iteration of another book from Norton that came out in 1971, M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (Figure 13). For several generations of Romanticist scholar-critics, mine included, the image on these two books will always stand as the emblem or the pictorial-correlate of the critical vision of Abrams’s landmark study, his definition of what High Romanticism in both its English and German forms is and should be. Many might also know the painting both book cover images are from, John Martin’s circa 1817 The Bard. The use of Martin’s work for Abrams’s study especially makes sense, insofar as it models for us the prototype of Abrams’s isolated, individual Romantic poet as prophet and song maker, looming over and interacting with a sublime landscape, pressing against the liminal horizons of mountain and sky while also surveying all that appears in the valley below. What the Bard sees, however, makes this story even more interesting, for as many also know, the inspiration for Martin’s painting, as well as a slew of other English artists, including Blake, West, and Turner, is Thomas Gray’s 1757 poem, “The Bard: A Pindaric Ode,” itself based on historical accounts (now contested) regarding Edward I’s decision to preempt rebellion

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figure 12. Cover of Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Romantic Period, 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2018.

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figure 13. Cover of M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.

among England’s newly conquered Welsh subjects by assassinating the tribal leaders of Wales’s preindustrial society, its Bards. The very last one of which is the figure standing on the mountain ridge in Martin’s painting, seeing and cursing Edward’s long snaking phalanx of advancing troops as they leave their castle stronghold before he leaps to his death to the River Conwy below. Difficult or impossible to detect in the reproductions that grace both Natural Supernaturalism and the recent Norton Romantic anthology are these occupying troops, who are vibrantly detailed in Martin’s actual painting (Figure 14). The difficulty of discerning in detail Edward’s troops is a result of the fuzziness of the reproduced image on the Abrams, with the color red used not only in the Bard’s wardrobe but also the soldiers’ uniforms and banners, absent in the black-and-white reproduction of this cover. The tenth edition of the Norton anthology of Romantic literature simply cuts out much of Martin’s painting, including the entire bottom half of the

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figure 14. John Martin, The Bard, c. 1817 (oil on canvas). Martin, John (1789–1854). Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images.

image that focuses on Edward’s long line of advancing troops. (The ninth edition did show more of the painting, but the soldiers are still difficult to discern in any detail.) Blurred or excised altogether from the Nortons, the details of Edward’s death squads in Martin’s painting are much more striking in person than even what the image produced in full here conveys (Figure 15).

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figure 15. View of left corner of John Martin’s The Bard. It shows Edward’s line of troops leaving Harlech Castle. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/ Bridgeman Images.

Crucial to this dynamic is the change in scale that Martin’s entire image has to undergo to fit mostly or partly on the Norton covers. The version of The Bard at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle is 85 by 61¾ inches, of a size that, when encountered close up in person, one’s eye is not at all guaranteed to be drawn to the figure of the Bard on the upper right; it is as likely to alight on the long winding formation of Edward’s troops, who

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occupy both the foreground and background of Martin’s painting. Perhaps fittingly, their visual presence is much more spatially dynamic than the Bard’s, whose static, isolated position doesn’t discourage the eye from viewing him as an ancillary figure, marginalized by the advancing military forces of a violent thirteenth-century English imperialism that from the castle to the running rapids take up half of the painting’s surface, though arguably more than that of what the painting depicts spatially, given what through depth and perspective is represented in the viewed left half of the painting. This was my experience when I viewed the painting in Chicago in 1988, during the touring US exhibition titled William Wordsworth and the Spirit of Romanticism. Because of this visual emphasis on the troops I incorrectly remembered Martin’s work to have been a horizontal diorama, of which such works like his especially busy The Fall of Babylon are—a painting whose viewing invites a much more visually collective sense of all the figures or agents in it, not simply the focus on one exalted, individual figure, as both Norton books encourage with their seeming emphasis on the Bard. It is for this reason that Martin’s diorama style along with those of other Romantic artists inspired early cinematic creators such as D. W. Griffith to try to use film to depict historical events in a mode more collective than individual, though of course individuals figure throughout both artists’ plottings too. A smaller version of Martin’s painting resides at the Yale Center of British Art; at 40 by 50 inches the painting draws one’s eye more immediately to the Bard in the viewed right quarter of the work. However, even in this version, the detail and interaction of both halves of the painting, one dominated by the verticality of the Bard dramatizing individual worldly death below and transcendent life above and the other structured both by the verticality of the castle keep and the rushing river and the use of background and foreground to convey the dynamic collective movement of martial national history, are all but erased in the Norton covers—literally so in the tenth edition. The Nortons simply do not attend to what the Bard sees, the detail of the viewed lower left corner, which is an integral part of the action of the entire painting. In both the Laing and Yale versions, Edward’s troops of state-sponsored terrorism, the nightmare of sovereign history that they embody, are as visually present in the work’s details as, if not more so than, the lone figure of the Bard. Let me stress several takeaways from my account. If you ever want to teach Jerome McGann’s notion of how the Romantic ideology evades material, cultural, and critical history by eliding its messy collectivity for

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an individual, transcendent figure, this series of images is a definite way to go. If you also want to convey to a class something like what Paul de Man’s claim about the resistance to theory means, how theory anticipates its own failure to sustain its insights into the mystifications of language and culture, noting how the Abrams cover came out in 1971, how the lessons of both McGann and de Man were then taught and disseminated throughout the academy in the late ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and aughts, and how the Norton anthology cover then appears seemingly untouched by those lessons in our present teens—well, that would be a start.1 I have two final observations. First, what occurs here is fundamentally a story about different media, of the different stories a particular medium—a book cover as opposed to a painting—tells or doesn’t tell. In that sense, the story of the Nortons and Martin’s The Bard illustrates much of what is at stake in a well-known exchange between Benjamin and Adorno that John Guillory deploys at the end of his influential essay on media and mediation “Genesis of the Media Concept.”2 As Guillory recounts, Adorno initially rejects publishing Benjamin’s study of how Baudelaire’s wine poems are connected to Paris’s 1849–50 taxation of its wine drinkers, pointedly telling Benjamin: “Your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation. . . . The materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process.”3 Thus, as much as our present story is about books and paintings—about media history—it is first and foremost, as Adorno might have insisted, a 1.All quotations from The Fall of Hyperion are from John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). See Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3–20. 2. John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no.2 (2010): 321–62. For a consideration of Guillory’s argument with particular regard to his notion of mediation, see also the Introduction to this present work. 3. Theodor Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin, 10 November 1938, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 282. Quoted in Guillory, 358. Tellingly, Guillory notes but does not explore the ramifications of Adorno’s description of the Hegelian “social process” as “total” (my emphasis), a key point that others have defiantly argued for—see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 50–57. For a discussion of other attempted elisions in Guillory’s piece, see this book’s Introduction.

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narrative of what they mediate.4 More pointedly, the German thinker might have observed that this critique would involve not only the cultural and market history of eighteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century book and painting production. It would also not only encompass the political history referred to and elided by Martin’s work and the subsequent cover images, involving the rise and fall of Edward’s royal bloodline and the consequent ascendancy, as Gray’s poem explicitly celebrates, of Britain’s Welsh-inflected Tudor dynasty. Most crucially and expansively, this mediation would articulate for Adorno and Guillory the history of social relations that tells how much the rise of capital, spanning in all its phases from Edward’s times to ours, demands the subsumption and extinction of earlier forms of precapitalist, tribal life.5 For Guillory, however, that would not be the full story. Benjamin responds to Adorno by lamenting how their debate is only a private exchange of letters and not in print, and asserts how detailed, formal attention to the technology of cultural transmission enables rather than obstructs the critique of social mediation that Adorno desires (Guillory, 359, 361–62). With regard to the Martin and the Nortons, then, Guillory’s Benjamin might have agreed with Adorno’s basic point but asserted that what Adorno desires can only occur by meaningfully attending to the material objects—the media—involved in what Adorno means by mediation. As Jonathan Crimmins has recently observed, mediation as what is mediated—history—is media.6 In our present case, the media objects, the technological apparatuses of book cover and painting, whose incommensurability factors into the overdetermined manner 4. Guillory does note that Adorno insists that “that mediation inheres in the work itself, and not in a third term” (Guillory, 358). What appears to be at stake, however, is what exactly that “work” is, insofar as it is not simply the empirically realized cultural artifact and its medium, and the positivist, historical facts accruing around them. 5. There is a key scene toward the end of Walter Scott’s novel Waverly that describes how the entire episteme of Jacobite rebellion is reduced to the “tartan fever” practiced by one of the protagonist’s associates (Walter Scott, Waverly, ed. Susan Kubica Howard [Peterborough: Broadview, 2010], 449). In that one episode the reader can glimpse the reflexive stakes of the present account of the covers of books that teach us Romanticism, whether that teaching involves remembering how modern capital absorbs and extinguishes earlier, precapitalist society and societies. For one influential study of this predicament, involving Scott, see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 19–88. 6. Jonathan Crimmins, The Romantic Historicism to Come (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 1–27.

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that marginalizes or erases Edward’s troops, would once again be foregrounded, though now enhanced as the very form of social mediation that Adorno wanted Benjamin to alight on in his readings of Baudelaire. My second observation, however, further complicates what the various images of or from The Bard might tell us. For if Martin’s painting and the Norton covers fruitfully model the different and overlapping concerns of Adorno and Benjamin’s exchange over the relationship between media and mediation, these issues revolve around the question of the individuated body of the Bard, whether such a focus on this figure sufficiently affords us cognition and perception of the real. What’s told in the single body of the Bard elaborates an allegory of Romanticism at once more pointed historically than de Man’s insight about the resistance to theory and more detailed transhistorically than McGann’s polemic about how the Romantic ideology operates. I refer to how the figuration, or assemblage, of the individual, phenomenal human body—in this case the Bard’s—both records but also obstructs our ability to access any larger encounter with what the tropes of space and time might narrativize—what in a word we designate by the term history. The rest of this essay uses several key Romantic texts by Kant, Hegel, and Keats to elaborate the significance of that formulation. Together, these works model for us the Romantic problem of the individual body that dreams history. Thinking through that proposition will then allow us to return to Guillory’s account of Adorno and Benjamin, one with which McGann might also be associated. We will, however, complicate the question of the relation between media and mediation through a critical assessment not so much simply in the wake of this particular conversation but also one influenced by the likes of de Man and what our Introduction retrieved from the idiosyncratic cut deployed in the close-up scene of the creature in James Whale’s 1931 film, Frankenstein. If, however, the Introduction used Whale to stress mediation as the necessary structural insufficiency that is the (filmic) cut, one as disabling as enabling for cognition and perception, for seeing Seeing, this essay concludes with a revisionary image by William Blake of Gray’s Bard that asserts the radical incommensurability of the cut as the aboriginal, political necessity of antagonism.

History’s Body The particular historical bite of the dilemma of the individuated body phenomenally encountering history is crystallized in Rei Terada’s bravura

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reading of one passage from Keats’s Hyperion, when the poem describes in effect how the eponymous figure looks at the stars forever.7 What does it exactly mean, Terada asks, to do that? Mulling over that question allows Terada to reveal the aporia of phenomenal perception that we both signal and cover over with terms like “look” and “forever.” Terada ties this dilemma to the constative uncertainty of Keats’s historical moment, a post-Waterloo epoch defined by the indeterminate nature of what a radical, reform, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary politics might all mean, in terms of the continuity and difference each of these political adjectives has with and from one another. To her convincing, difficult analysis I would only add a suggestion as to what “stars” might figure in Terada’s formulation of Keats’s line. My claim echoes both eighteenth-century conversations about the telescope as an optical analogy for cognition, and Adorno’s and Benjamin’s twentieth-century deployment of the term constellation, where in both cases, what we empirically see with our eyes in the night sky is not all that is there.8 Through either the technological apparatus or critical thinking itself we glean an entity that, in its difference from what we simply perceive visually, is fundamentally an abstraction, or an abstract entity. Both Adorno and Benjamin then associate the abstract with the recognition of a system of relationships not discernible to the human eye, the constellation as an assemblage of relations that various thinkers might simply call system itself. Indeed, a helpful way to understand the idea of assemblage in Latour, Deleuze, and others is to grasp it as simply another way to articulate system without the baggage of a closed-off, static, or totalizing metaphysics often attached to that term. I note how such attempts are all fundamentally linked to the question of historical knowledge, of what system or assemblage of relations beyond simple phenomenal experience might make of that knowledge, which itself can be understood in part to be the attempt to clarify if not explain that experience. Romanticism itself can be understood often as the staging of 7. Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50, no. 2 (2011): 275–309. 8. Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 27–28, 90; Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977) 34–37, and “On the Concept of History,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 163–66. See also Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 49–62.

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a heightened awareness of the difficulty if not impossibility of gaining abstract historical knowledge and of the consequences of failing to do so. Romanticism constitutes for us the affective and cognitive vocabulary of trying to abstract a narrative about, in a word, modernity, which by that term’s very definition intimates the need for abstraction—the need for something aside from simple phenomenal, somatic experience to make sense of an ever-increasing scale of volatile complexity at once political, social, ecological, and cultural. This emphasis on the body helps distinguish my concerns from previous work such as Clifford Siskin’s claims about the historical rise of the genre of system, where we today are able to talk about system and the Romantics because of the emergence of system as material fact and category of knowledge during Romanticism and the long eighteenth century.9 My concerns more immediately echo the historical plot of a Georg Lukács: for him European historical consciousness arises out of the conscription of French peasants into Napoleon’s army, where their entrance from the seasonal temporality of farming into the geographic space and time of a military campaign incites an encounter with history (Historical, 23–24). The literal movement of their bodies beyond their agrarian communities into a different phenomenal realm altogether forces them to sense a cavalcade of forces at once commensurate with but also so much more than that newly expanded, for good or ill, bodily experience. Similarly, the history of philosophy reminds us of earlier instances such as Descartes’s World Picture and Leibnitz’s quest to access the infinite through our finite selves, all of which set the stage for what I’m discussing here. Again, however, the political indeterminacies of the French Revolution and especially Napoleon provide the points of reference for this present consideration of how much the figure of the body shapes and constrains the episteme that Timothy Michael has called political knowledge, an entity that, because of such historical coordinates, is for both Michael and me very much Romantic in its origins, exigency, and character.10

9. Clifford Siskin, “Mediated Enlightenment: The System of the World,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 164–72. See also the Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume, Romantic Systems, ed. Mark Canuel (March 2016), https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/systems. 10. Timothy Michael, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 1–30. Crucial for Michael are the philosophical, political, and literary debates over whether political knowledge ultimately resides in empirical experience or speculative reason. Arguably, this study’s consideration

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In this plotting, then, the phenomenal body plays two roles. It is that which is not abstraction; it is that which needs abstraction to explain itself more fully, if not completely. At the same time, material somatic experience in time and space is what abstraction needs to begin its inquiry; it is what abstraction abstracts itself from. Indeed, as Bernard Stiegler argues, that beginning or primal scene is itself an abstraction, insofar as time and space, interval and distance, are themselves products of the body’s interaction with its environment via toolmaking.11 The physical body and abstraction are knotted together, a predicament that makes the body the sign of abstraction and its impediment. Blake has his own well-known antipathy toward what he called abstraction as a diminished form of mental endeavor. If, however, we sidestep the to my mind increasingly tiresome opposition between physical and idealist reality used to describe the philosophical occupations of both Romanticism and our own moment, we can consider anew Blake’s famous question in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”12 The “senses five” would be phenomenal bodily experience, while “immense world of delight” would not diverge from but converge with abstract system as simply that larger constellation of forces and relations that includes but also reaches beyond our bodies and their interaction with one another. “Ev’ry bird” would be the provocation marking the invisible materiality of that constellation, the “airy way” both closed off and signaled by the sensual body. Blake also famously has much to say about the body, and through a study of figures such as Albion one could make headway into what I want to say about how the body images but also circumscribes our understanding of larger historical forces and collectivities, such as that of the nation-state. I, however, turn now to Immanuel Kant’s 1795 disquisition on the possibility of a world political system to get at something his pre-Napoleonic, if not proleptically post-Napoleonic On Perpetual Peace formulates in an especially singular and concentrated way. I refer to the specific kind of subjectivity

of the knotted relation between the individuated phenomenal body and abstraction is simply a more volatile rendition of the same formulation. 11. Key for Stiegler is his Derridean reading of Rousseau; see his Technics and Time, 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 104–32. 12. William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970) 35.

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the human body is attached to, which in a line of Kant’s might not really be human at all.

Kant Creatures The line occurs in appendix 1 of On Perpetual Peace, where most immediately Kant is criticizing the instrumental proclivities of the political moralist, who unlike the moral politician, allows the cynical “corrupting theory” of the justification of ends to throw, in Kant’s words, “human beings into a class with other living machines which need only the awareness that they are not free creatures, to make them, in their own judgment, the most miserable beings in the world.”13 The idea of human beings losing their humanity and acting like machines or tools because of their failure to use their reason in the face of the overwhelming instrumental demands of social life is clear enough. (Kant uses similar language earlier in his argument [On, 55], imagery that also appears, as Siskin and William Warner note, in Kant’s prior essay “What Is Enlightenment?”)14 Yet Kant’s formulation is not simply about humans losing their humanity, or their chance at attaining it. Vulnerable to the cynicism of a pragmatic worldview, human beings may be thrown into a class with “other living machines,” who seem to exist already independent of the whole drama of humans and their ostensibly potential, as well as exceptional, human being. What might be the status of these other living machines, with which humans risk being associated? Kant gives us one option earlier on, when he discusses how nature’s use of war both encourages humans to see war as an inherent value and to consider other ways of living with each other aside from war. To the degree that war becomes the perpetual end of war, nature stays a Hobbesian nature, in instrumental “pursuit of her own purposes concerning the human race as a class of animals” (On, 79). As living machines or tools humans become animals in the service of an often specifically martial set of ends, much like the warhorse that Kant describes. Yet this familiar seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equation of animals and machines and its opposition to human being is itself complicated by 13. Immanuel Kant, On Perpetual Peace, trans. Ian Johnston (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 93. All quotations from this work are from this text. 14. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Lewis White Beck, in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 2007), 37; cited in Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” in Siskin and Warner, 4.

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what characterizes humans thrown as a class into association with these other creatures: an awareness of their lack of freedom in an instrumental world. What animal, however, has this kind of awareness? What animal is an animal or living machine, because of its own conscious encounter with, in Peter Sloterdijk’s famous phrasing, cynical reason?15 The implicit answer is something catachrestic, a nonhuman human because of its enmeshment within an instrumental worldview, as well as a nonanimal animal because of its awareness of its entrapment, a consciousness that produces it as “a class with other living machines.” This creature is catachrestic because its existence isn’t necessarily beholden to what defines either the human or the animal. As important, this being is catachrestic because of, again implicitly, its central presence in human society. It’s not very hard to see in the impossible horizons of On Perpetual Peace, in its uncompromising attempt to outline how a full exercise of reason ought to demand a political world very different from the one of perpetual war that Kant knows all too well, the recognition that his (and our) present belongs to the political moralist and that, by extension, we are all, more or less, the miserable living machines he alludes to in this passage. The catachresis of the individual human body, both the sign of but also radical impediment to abstract system, finds its correlate in the non-agential agency of the nonhuman, nonanimal, creature of Kantian society.

Hegel Dreams One could try to lessen the radically unintelligible character of the living machine by squaring the circle of its contrary traits, subsuming its low level form of awareness, cynical reason, nonreason, and animal instinct all under some other term, such as, in certain Marxist traditions, “ideology.” I, however, would like to tarry further with the question that Kant provokes by turning to an opening line in Hegel’s treatise, decidedly contemporaneous with Napoleon, on phenomenal experience and abstraction, on spirit, 15. While I demur from Sloterdijk’s application of his idea to modern and contemporary philosophy, the force of his idea for the ideological subject and for Kant’s nonhuman creatures seems to me quite apt. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxvi–xxxix, 3–9. Whether other animals or living machines aside from humans are also vulnerable to or in fact created by cynical reason depends on different readings or translations of Kant’s writing; arguably, either option still leaves us with the catachresis of a nonhuman human at the heart of human society and history.

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body, and world, his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Known for its vivid imagery and vertiginous figuration, Hegel’s Phenomenology begins with an arresting formulation that speaks to the difficulty of finding the right path toward which human bare life can realize itself as Spirit, where an overinvestment in faith and intuition leads various thinkers to “imagine, that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding, they become the beloved of God to whom he gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep is nothing but dreams.”16 Nothing but dreams: as with the passage from Kant, Hegel’s explicit point seems clear enough, dismissing the paucity of what mystical feelings about self and world might convey when they sidestep philosophy and dialectical science. Yet it’s difficult not to read dialectically knotted in that phrase, given the overwhelming message of Hegel’s preface of the immensely severe challenge, so easily failed, of the philosophical realization of Spirit, that dreams might be all we have. And, by extension, that this is our condition whether we exist in the self-assured—that is, fanciful—realm of immediate religious intuition or in the trying state of philosophical Reason battling reflexively to secure the Notion of the Absolute. In that sense, as expressed by a number of Romantic writers, we don’t have to sleep to dream. Awake, we are asleep and dreaming enough, without those dreams necessarily a reception from God. As baroque as all of this has sounded, I hope my intent is clear: to outline more fully what the Romantics often elliptically or half-explicitly allude to, that strange nonhuman creature, semi-aware animal or machine, implicitly recognized as the chief figure, paradoxically, of human society during the onrushing advent of political modernity. And that by alighting on the equally peculiar status of “dreams” in the Hegel passage, I’m trying to color in more fully the specific dilemma of this being as it attempts to access or encounter that modernity as something not simply known by its embodied state—something more accurately understood as the act of abstraction that could include but is not necessarily identical with Hegel’s formidable philosophical project, insofar as I’m defining abstraction negatively, as nonembodiment, as something that exceeds the body, and sidestepping how in Hegel abstraction is further positively aligned with Philosophy (with a capital P) as the Dialectic (with a capital D). 16. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.

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Hegel’s point, of course, is to see the dreams we are left with in the quoted passage as something different from abstraction; I, however, want to consider those dreams as an emblem of abstraction exactly because of their implied diminution and weak ontological texture, because they might be all we have, or all there is. They are the fitting dreams of the nonhuman, somewhat aware animal in Kant, though perhaps not as simply miserable in their political cynicism as Kant judges. What they might be instead, however, through their fitful access to nonembodiment as system, assemblage, constellation, or history, is made all the more unsettling by the nonadequation of such terms with that of nothing but dreams, of dreams as possibly all that we have. The spectrum of feelings and thoughts that range between our sense of abstraction as Hegel’s pale dream and as the stars that Hyperion looks out at forever is, I want to suggest, much of the stuff that the Romantics used to write their poetry and shape their other literary and philosophical artifacts, creations whose difficult, evasive significance is made all the sharper by, as Terada following Carl Schmitt contends, the historicalpolitico indeterminacy that the signifier post-Waterloo brokers for Europe, England, and the globe (“Looking,” 280).17

Dreamscapes and Paper Cuts Like Terada, I too see the Hyperion poems especially invested in the consequences of this historical dilemma, and so now I look at the opening lines of Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, whose title also alludes to how dream might play a role in limning this condition. If Hegel’s work attempts a phenomenology of spirit, Keats’s second go at his saga is an anatomy of a dream, or of dream qua dream, as the constitutive status of that term is very much the question posed by his poem, one by no means settled throughout its narrative maneuverings, an open-endedness stressed both by the piece’s fragmentary nature and the fact that in some versions Dream in the title becomes Vision, a binary that resonates with simultaneous feelings of closure and limitlessness previously seen in the contrast between Hegel’s dream and the stars in Hyperion. That both qualities do not stay segregated on either side of this dichotomy—on either dream’s or vision’s, or dream’s or star’s—but restively swirl about on both, with the potentiality of vision felt in dream 17. Terada notes how Schmitt contrasts this sense of political indeterminacy to a Hegel asserting a regulative vision of political normativity (“Looking,” 280.) My use of Hegel suggests how the philosopher’s language might nevertheless clarify for us what a vocabulary of this indeterminacy might involve.

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and the disappointment of dream saturating vision, is a familiar tactic in Hegel’s Phenomenology but as significant a presence in Keats’s The Fall. The question of dream informs both Hyperion poems in a number of ways, certainly in terms of their narrative content, as Hyperion ends inconclusively though quite spectacularly with Apollo’s psychotropic encounter with Mnemosyne, and as the poet in The Fall has his own early Dante-like swoon, equal parts Künstlerroman, aboriginal dream walk, participatory theater, and virtual 3D experience. Yet of singular importance are the opening lines of The Fall, the poem’s try at a taxonomy of dreams among various figures: Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect; the savage too From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at heaven: pity these have not Trac’d upon vellum or wild Indian leaf The shadows of melodious utterance. But bare of laurel they live, dream, or die; For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. (lines 1–11)

Everyone dreams, it seems, though all dreams are not equal. Like the rest of the poem, the beginning of The Fall wrestles with the distinction between mere dreams and poetry, which seems to be of the same material as dreams, however. Those who merely dream, the fanatic and savage, in their own ways replay the reflective limitations of Kant’s instrumentally aware living machine (itself an apparent precursor to the subject of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness) and Hegel’s subject of religious feeling, left in their sleep to nothing but dreams. That Hegel’s misbegotten religious subject could be either Keats’s fanatic or savage speaks to the commonality of all these figures as beings defined by the circumscribed if not outright empty nature of their dreaming. How then does the poet’s dreaming distinguish itself as something otherwise than dream—and him as something aside from “a dreaming thing, / A fever of thyself,” as Moneta later taunts? (lines 168–69). In a word, referring to one of our takeaways about the Norton books and Martin’s The Bard, the poet’s dreams differ because of the fact of mediums and mediation. Poetry is dream “trac’d” on “vellum or wild Indian leaf.”

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That would seem to give poetry what it needs to avoid existing as dream dreaming, and then dying. The argument is not that clear, of course, with the passage confusing as much as fortifying the distinctions that it tries to make. The notion, for example, that the physical materiality of poetry—its vellum existence—separates it from the idealist character of dreams is unsettled by the insubstantial quality of what might not simply be recorded, but exist as that recording, “shadows of melodious utterance.”18 This confusion is exacerbated by the repetitive use of “alone” to qualify both “Poesy” and “words,” which separates as much as unites poetry and its medium in the way de Man once described the indeterminacy between dance and dancers in Yeats; that “alone” could also refer not to any exceptionality but to being alone also raises the paradoxical question of how necessary “words” might be—whether it is only poetry’s solitary status (separated from what?) that demands the necessity of vellum-inscribed words in the first place.19 Similarly, the claim that only poetry can save the imagination from its own worst instincts, the fetishizing impulses of “sable charm” and “dumb enchantment,” founders on the infinite regress started by the distinction between dream and poetry that simply migrates to, on the one hand, “charm” and “enchantment” and, on the other, the “fine spell of words” (my emphasis). If our discussion of Martin’s The Bard showed how particular media convey different aesthetic and historical effects, the insistence of mediation in Keats actually destabilizes any assured sense of medium distinction or specificity. Yet as important seems to be what poetry as mediation nevertheless hopes to do, as conveyed in the passage’s later rhetorical question, “Who alive can say / ‘Thou are no poet; may’st not tell thy dreams’ ”? (lines 11–12). If one is a poet, one tells dreams, an action that implicitly informs the distinction Moneta makes between those of the poet and dreamer tribes. What exactly telling a dream might mean could be as furtive and compelling as looking at a star forever. I would press this likeness even further and suggest that telling a dream is the event of abstraction, of indexing system, a set of relations that through their mediation, as mediation, is hopefully not the dream of a less than human human, or nonanimal animal. Made of dream 18. For a reading of this confusion as expressing the alienated topos of Keats’s class conflicts, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 212–13. 19. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 11–12. I’m grateful to Scott Trudell for pointing out some of the complications “alone” raises in these lines.

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poetry through vellum tells dream, mediates, looks at the stars, the constellations, forever. One would hope at any rate. What comes out of Keats’s second try at staging civil war and revolution among the gods is historical knowledge condensed or distorted into Künstlerroman, the dream of a poet as a poet, merely the embodied individuated figure of the narrator who wakes into dream as that, someone who as a witness to history is defined by, like Childe Harold at Waterloo, his after the fact status as simply a 3–D viewer of Saturn and Thea’s frozen and then animated states of being. Knotted into that voyeuristic role is the narrator’s embattled distraction over whether he is indeed a poet, a dilemma that echoes the question of whether poetry differs from dream in the first place. In a Bourdieuan manner Keats himself knew all too well, the poet finds himself tested in a variety of ways about his often tenuous hold on poetry’s evolving relation to nineteenth-century cultural capital: physically, as he struggles to climb the stairs of Saturn’s temple to prove his worthiness, and semantically as Moneta challenges him about whether he belongs merely to the dreamer tribe or truly to that of the poets, even if we readers might wonder who really does pour a balm upon the world and who only vexes it. As Marjorie Levinson observes, much of the poem’s dream world, a “museum” of “dead space,” “houses a collection of cultic objects,” some near, some far (Keats’s Life, 215). As such, the haptic and tactile existence of these relics lends further weight to the narrator’s difficult climb up the stairs, insofar as the stress is on, simply, his sensuous dream travel through space and time. (One could argue that Levinson’s prior argument about these items functioning like Winnicott’s transferential object could extend to the figures of Jupiter and Thea themselves, initially frozen into place as the poet walks around and between them.)20 In The Fall the abstraction of dream leads merely to a single body traveling through those phenomenal categories of space and time, an experience stretched into an excruciating reflexivity, when the poet waits, Hyperion-like, for not the stars but Saturn to blink or move in something close to forever time. The fragmented nonconclusion to Keats’s poem is thus not necessary to feel the diminution of the dream’s vision, condensed into and limited as it is by the experiential contours of the poet’s somatic and perceptual movement. Whatever forces and affects might run through and compose the poet’s perseverating, Spinoza-like conatus, the poem seems as much if not more so on the side of phenomenal 20. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 181–82.

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being rather than any type of wide-ranging Deleuzian becoming. The abrupt ending to the work’s fragment simply punctuates the forestalling of that option of the narrator as Deleuzian becoming-poet or becoming-more than a dream animal. In more prosaic terms, it’s not difficult to recognize in The Fall the transformation of the epic Miltonic history of Hyperion into not simply Dantean allegory but, more immediately, the idea of modern history in all its devastation as the recorded account of the individual embodied witness, a dynamic already on display through a full viewing of The Bard that still insists on concentrating not on what the Bard sees, but on the Bard seeing. From Waverly to Childe Harold to Ishmael we know these usually male figures quite well, with the Wordsworth of The Prelude towering over this tradition by depicting the maturation of this individual figure in ways that will come to define the artist or poet.21 We could then understand the fragmentary nature of The Fall as not simply buckling under the influence of Milton, Dante, or Wordsworth, but as an implicit comment on the plot of The Prelude, of the modern poet as historical witness—on not its grandeur or sublimity, but on its smallness and ultimately limited appeal as a metric for the historic, on as well the intrinsically queer or finite nature of some of these narratives, the way that their nongenerative quality is embodied in a single male whose story ultimately, in The Fall at least, ends abruptly and leads nowhere. (From that perspective we might wonder if Wordsworth’s constant revision of his work is a similar acknowledgment, camouflaged as a literary vitalism but also tasked with a similarly impossible ordeal that the quitting of The Fall more honestly faces.) If, then, the beginning of The Fall insists on the vellum as the necessary separation between mere dream and dream as poetry (what I’m arguing is abstraction), the rest of the poem and its fragmentary status seem more about the inability of this insistence to sustain this separation in any real or significant manner. I conclude this encounter with Keats by making two final contrasting—contradictory, even—observations about this ineffectuality. First, as circumscribed as the dream of The Fall appears to be around what the poet somatically feels and does, even there a constellation of relations can be gleaned, abstracted, or, as Guillory might insist, mediated. Those appear in Moneta’s name as well as the things that litter the poem’s 21. Wordsworth’s own problems with experimental philosophy and its stress on experience as constituting an implied ground for political knowledge would then add another complicated layer to how The Prelude realizes the Wordsworthian male poet as the individual, exceptional witness to history. See Michael, 161–68.

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dream realm, Levinson’s “cult objects,” as luxury items of high culture that as such index the monied relations of the commodity form that will determine how much the narrator can realize himself as a working poet in modernity’s marketplace. They also appear in what implicitly contrasts with that realm, signaled by the exoticized “Indian leaf ” of mediation and Moneta’s allusion to the dreamer tribe, as well as what mediated dream supposedly leaves behind, not simply the fanatic but also the savage. What assemblage of forces, what system of expropriating relations, what history best conveys the wiping out of a slew of preindustrialized peoples, nonEnglish if not non-European, like the Welsh tribes of the last Bard? Perhaps the fragmentary nature of dream in The Fall is also the work’s concession that even its in medias res dream of civil war and revolution necessarily falls short of the more overarching nightmare of history, the non- Oedipalized extinction of communities and populations that really didn’t have a chance, any kind of an answer to the commercial and military forces of what more and more calls itself the metropolitan West. By falling short, the poem operates Titan-like as the shed skin or discarded vellum of one abstract vision, where in its void and the semiotic vibrations of such terms as “savage” another rises, the shadow of an utterance of what Fredric Jameson calls, very much in line with Guillory’s Adorno, the history of production, as opposed to the history of the simply political (Political, 74–102). Vellum is, of course, animal hide, a fact that elaborates this history even more so, at once pithily condensing it and expanding its horizons. Embedded within the transmutation of animal life into the vellum object lies not only the material distinction between the dreams of the savage and those more technologically advanced creations of civilization- as- expressions- of-thepoet. Laying within the vellum of The Fall is also the entire history of violence and expropriation of bodies that contemporary society by Keats’s (if not Edward’s) time understands through market exchange value, an account figured here as a literal scene of writing. Following both Benjamin and Crimmins, the medium is mediation as content, the history of production, contained both in vellum and the imperializing Orientalism of “Indian leaf.” Animal, Kantian nonhuman human creature, Keatsian savage, Keatsian fanatic, and Keatsian poet: Writing, written on, written about, and erased—all these figures participate in a continuum of violence and servitude, one as heterogeneously symptomatic as it is grimly insistent and ubiquitous. However, as much as this account might owe to the material nightmares congealed in such terms as “vellum” or “savage,” its debt more emphatically involves the way it doesn’t really exist in The Fall, where the poem is, to

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take a term from art theory debates, this account’s non-site.22 If this concept enables a glimpse of what is not there, it also simultaneously must be thought in a radically negative manner, as a ruthless critique of what, in all its paucity, is there. This predicament then also elaborates the poem’s awareness of its inability to escape its existence as mere or empty dream, the failure of abstraction to belong to something beyond Kant’s nonhuman human, to mediate anything but a single body flailing in time and space, fantasying its own plot of pure triumph and sovereignty, that of the poet in The Fall, while in the farce of our own political present that of the idiot wind that claims I alone can solve this. In that sense, the learned helplessness of the individual witness to the forces of history simply mirrors the fantasy, individual and collective, of the sovereign whose individual body controls everything. This quandary speaks to my second concluding observation: I now see both the “vellum” and “Indian leaf ” as figures for the poet’s printed page, as an image that operates very much like Saussure’s paper-thin separation of sound and ideation on each side of a sheet, a sheet that is the material cut between those two events.23 As this material cut, before its structural relation to what lies on either side of the vellum-as-paper, the impressions of vibratory air and the articulations of thought, as the structural aboriginal fact of this cut, we can understand the mediation of dream, its abstraction, as in some basic way always about this cut, where the mediation is the message. In The Fall this predicament means that poetry is this cut too, cut from what dreams are made of, in a way that, as de Man noted in his own reading of Keats’s poem, makes it impossible to discern falls from triumphs and triumphs from falls (“Resistance,” 20). That this fundamental indeterminacy effectively aligns with Scott Juengel’s thoughts on the figure of sinking or “terminal verticality” in Romantic catastrophic thought (for who knows what is up or down when one drowns) is exactly what I’m trying to access here, in a more social register, as that which necessarily invokes but also disrupts abstraction, what Jameson would

22. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 108–113. 23. “Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper; thought is the front and sound is the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin [New York: Philosophical Library, 1959], 114). Saussure’s prior reference to language as air against a “sheet of water” enhances even more the cognitive and perceptual structural volatility I attempt to limn here (113).

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call the task of cognitive mapping.24 The vertigo of the human phenomenal body, in Anahid Nersessian’s words its “phenomenological estrangement” as our spur toward and obstacle to the stars, to assemblage, and to history, is the cut of the medium as mediation, a condition imbued with the same force that Guillory, after Hegel and Jameson, invokes in his argument for the latter term.25 For Guillory, however, thinking media and mediation together, an act that, as he rightly notes, has not been done nearly enough, leads to a more assured sense of what critical thought can do, leading students of the media concept and media studies to confront emphatically the history of production. As much as this encounter has inflected this study and other essays collected in the present book, my impulse has also been to consider mediation as an even more complex event, a nondialectical techno-magism that eschews the certitude of (only) dialectically generating abstraction from its absence—that grows restive with the idea of seeing beyond the somatic experience of Keats’s poet the same knowledge that subtends the segregation of dreams from poetry, of not worrying the metaphysical aspiration of going beyond nothing-but-dreams. If moreover, nothing-but-dreams is the very stuff of techno-magism, upon which its catachreses work, this is by no means simply or even a shaping of the physical world. Mediation made out of media is not only the technological, physical apparatus, vellum as vellum. It is also the cut of negative difference or, as Derrida once suggested, a materiality without matter.26 To reiterate from another angle: describing theory as some have as an always incomplete consolation is to get at the intellectual complexity of its affective charge as much as the aporias of its ethical and cognitive imperatives. This formulation approximates much of what I’ve tried to outline here in a politico-historical valence, as much spur as blockage, in terms of 24. Scott J. Juengel, “What Is Orientation in Sinking?” European Romantic Review 30, no. 3 (2019): 265–74; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 49–54. 25. Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Ltd.: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 54. Like Juengel, Nersessian is referring to the consequences of Kant’s thought experiments in his 1786 essay, “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” 26. Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 350. See also the editors’ introduction in Cohen, Cohen, Miller, and Warminski, (“A Materiality without Matter?” vii–xxv).

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Romanticism’s other modes of expression. Contrary to Moneta’s jibe at the narrator in The Fall, the otherness of poetry makes this task more a recognition of a metonymic chain than one of absolute distinctions. The paper cut of dream animals, then, as abstraction, as mediation, as history, as poetry: as theory.

The Cut of Romanticism: Media, Mediation, Theory, Antagonism Cause you and me brother we’re the dangerous ones. —Kasey Anderson, The Dangerous Ones

If, then, the opening vocabulary of “vellum” and “savage” in The Fall underscores the dialectic between media and mediation that Guillory found in the debate between Adorno and Benjamin, Keats’s figuration of “vellum” and “leaf ” as paper cut complicates that dialectic in a way that resonates with how the Introduction and other essays in this collection understand mediation as a techno-magistic cut or screen that disables as much as enables any meaning, shape, or form to emerge from its radical, nonphenomenal materiality. Literally an edited cut in Whale’s close-up of the creature in the 1931 film Frankenstein, this structural obstruction toward complete, seamless knowledge or perception seems, as my Introduction suggests, to diverge fundamentally from the sublating, abstracting powers of mediation that Guillory wants to restore to media studies through his reading of Hegel, Adorno, and Benjamin. That very well might be, though if so that divergence would only be part of the story. Blake’s own depiction of Gray’s “The Last Bard” expresses what I’m suggesting, dramatizing another dimension to the visual and semantic implications of the cut, one that does not shy away from the historical violence underwriting our readings of the Bard and Edward’s troops. Best known perhaps are the images he produced when he illustrated the poem in 1797 and 1798. With its depictions of an increasingly wild, almost colorless Bard, that series of watercolors and ink has its own particular claim to the uncanny, unearthly dimensions of historical terror. I refer however, to a later tempera revisiting of the Bard done in maybe 1809, one involving a cramped scene of martial conflict as confining and claustrophobic as John Martin’s paintings were often vast and expansive (Figure 16). In this version the Bard is not alone, but is surrounded by his Welsh allies, the executed Bards of his colonized homeland. Explicitly described

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figure 16. The Bard, from Gray, 1809, William Blake (1757–1827). Tempera and gold on canvas. Credit: © Tate, London 2017.

by Blake in his Descriptive Catalogue as “spirits [represented] with real bodies” the Bards reverse our earlier sense in Keats of the body blocking access to the abstraction of historical forces, with these figures now the physical vehicles of a deadly intellection and desire.27 (Contrasted to them is the shell of a corpse of a Bard in the viewed left corner of the tempera, his dead face 27. William Blake, Descriptive Catalogue 1809, in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1957), 576–77.

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merging into the earth and stone of the Conwy’s shore.) Undefeated in death, the Bards gather together with their one living compatriot to feed his harp blood red lightning bolts to rain down on the quaking Plantagenet, dynastic family of Edward I, including his French wife. The poetic medium is weaponized as political praxis, to wreak vengeance onto a royal heteronormative family intent on populating Wales with an imperializing bioforce. If an Abramsian vision of Martin’s Bard presented us with the isolated body of the transcendent Romantic poet, in actuality Wordsworth’s queerly diminished, nonpropagating male witness to history, here we have a homosocial assemblage of happily angry queer male bodies, an imaginary of Welsh guerrilla resistance to the history of the Plantagenets not at all interested, as in Gray’s poem, in the creation of a British nation-state or national literature based on the later ascension of the Welsh-related Tudor line. In Blake’s image the English red of its sovereign blood relations has retreated to the clothing of the shrinking figure of Edward’s one military retainer (perhaps Mortimer), cowering behind his king. Suffusing the entire image instead is the scarlet bloody light of the Welsh lightning bolts, a Los-like fiery energy equal parts visionary blaze and blood violence, raining upon and drenching the ostensive victors of history below. Unlike Gray’s ode and Martin’s painting, and certainly unlike the partial book reproductions of Martin, ascension—either in its royal, spiritual, humanistic, or poetic fabulations—is not at all a concern of this present image. If the spirit of one of the Welsh Bards has been able to escape the desiccated remains of his executed corpse in the viewed left bottom corner, that still “real” being is not at all concerned with a transcendent life that waits upward, beyond the conflicts of this earth. Gazing downward with no horizon above them, the Welsh Bards are instead decidedly engaged with the historical agents of English thirteenth-century modernity cowering beneath them, as each side take up a full half, top and bottom of Blake’s painting. (Blake in the Catalogue refers to Edward’s troops “winding away from the mountains” [576–77]; fittingly, time has made them that much more difficult to discern in the tempera, with the focus on the Bards and their hapless foes below made that much more intense.)28 Where each half meets, the 28. The Tate Gallery had an online version of Blake’s work that in its brighter colors and more distinct definition makes clearer the way the image is horizontally cut in two. Speaking to much of what this essay discusses, this screen version was made specifically for online viewing, and had no photographic relation to the original artwork. It was this online version’s explicit staging of the cut that brought me to the cut

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middle space of conflict and contradiction, where the harp’s bolts cross over, is a visually arresting horizontal cut, that is the cut of Keats’s vellum dream as, in the language of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, for all their differences, the cut of social antagonism, a radical cut in and of this world and beyond, that punctuates how this nonmaterial materiality, contrary to what some might think, is not a turn away from but the launching of the social and political in all their incompletion.29 In that pictorial inauguration we glimpse the telling of a dream, abstraction as mediation in its most emphatic sense, of but also beyond the bodies in Blake’s painting, the dream of Romanticism as this cut, the cut of a wound or resistance that bleeds or pulses, like Los’s heart, red. We encounter a dream of social relations uninhibited by any distraction of completeness, commensurability, or compromise. We encounter the figure of militancy as figure, the cut of social antagonism. And what might our Bible of Hell, our dream book of Romanticism be like with this Bard on its cover, this Bard’s body to signal to our students what our Romanticism is or should be?

in Blake’s actual painting, still viewable in the tempera but now darkened by time and the image’s curatorial history, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-the-bardfrom-gray-n03551. As the link shows, that previous digital version has since been replaced online by an image of the actual work, most likely one result of the exhibition of Blake’s art in 2019–2020. 29. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 122–27; and Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 23–28. See also the last portion of “Chthonic Michael” in this present collection.

Acknowledgments

Colleagues who helped with the making of this collection in ways both exacting and expansive, as well as transcendental and empirical: Jonathan Auerbach, Luka Arsenjuk, Andrew Burkett, David L. Clark, Libby Fay, Neil Fraistat, Penny Fielding, Oliver Gaycken, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Jesse Hoffman, Sonia Hofkosh, Jamie Kantor, Jacques Khalip, Matthew Kirshenbaum, Jon Klancher, Lee Konstantinou, Yoon Sun Lee, Gerald Maa, Brian McGrath, Daniel O’Quinn, Gerard Passannante, Forest Pyle, Marc Redfield, Adam Rosenthal, Laura Rosenthal, Michele Speitz, Joshua Shannon, Vivasan Soni, Scott Trudell, Deborah Elise White, and Eugenia Zuroski. Fordham’s readers were engaged and scrupulous in their reports to the press. All limitations on the conceptual and archival apparatuses exhibited here are on me and no one else. Thanks also to Shawn Saremi, Michael Carroll, and Jonathan Hulbert for their technical and legal help with the images. And a special thanks to Jacques Khalip for his constant curiosity about what I was up to, a definite spur to the realization of this book. I’m also grateful for the conversations I had late in the project with him, David L. Clark, Tom Lay, Brian McGrath, and Forest Pyle that gave the manuscript its final shape. W. J. T. Mitchell has his fingerprints all over this work in ways that I’m sure he’s unaware of and I’m still trying to suss out. I’m grateful to Maryland’s Comparative Literature Program and the Clara and Robert Vambery Fund for giving the time to complete this collection. Much thanks also to Arizona State, Cornell, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Mount Holyoke, Vanderbilt, University of California, Irvine, University of Colorado, Boulder, George Mason University, the 2016 NASSR Berkeley Seminar on Worldlessness and Worklessness, and the International Conference on Romanticism for graciously allowing me to try out material that’s made its way into this collection. Also thanks to my undergraduates and graduate students who listened and responded to what became portions of the book. A previous version of chapter 2 is © 2015 from British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, Mark Canuel, ed., and reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis, a division of Informa. Other versions of chapters 1 and 7 first appeared in, respectively,

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Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016) and ELN (presently published by Duke University Press). My thanks to the Laing Art Gallery and the Tate Gallery for permission to reproduce the color images in the book. Also: The cousins are all right. Finally, this book is dedicated to Marianne and Maggie—“But you do know . . .”

Index

Abrams, M. H.: Natural Supernaturalism, 37, 196, 197 abstraction, 188, 204, 205, 206, 209, 221. See also system Adorno, Theodor: on abstraction, 204; criticism of, 104; exchange between Benjamin and, 14, 29, 201, 202, 203; on media and mediation, 203; on political action, 105; “Resignation,” 104, 105; on theory and praxis, 104–5 aesthetic categories, 68, 89 Afro-pessimism, 106 afterlife, 123, 124, 134–36, 137, 140 Agamben, Giorgio, 124, 125, 126, 138, 138n31 agriculture, 190n19 allegory, 10, 15; of history, 118; of montage, 44; of reading, 52; of Romanticism, 203 Althusser, Louis, 6, 186 anachronism, 77 Anderson, Kasey, 218 Anderson, Perry, 118n28 animals: as living machines, 208, 208n15 antagonism, 191–92, 203. See also cut anthropocene, 9, 13, 77, 121, 122 appearance: vs. essence, 172 Aravamudan, Srivinas, 89n17 archive, 186, 186n15, 187, 193, 194n25. See also digital archive Aristotle: The Ethics, 162 Arnold, Matthew, 107, 108 Arrighi, Giovanni, 63n18 Arsenjuk, Luka, 50 art: marginalization of, 180 Ashbery, John, 71 assemblage, 186, 187, 203, 204

Austen, Jane. See Mansfield Park (Austen); Northanger Abbey (Austen) Badiou, Alain, 10, 11n16, 37, 116, 117 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 163 Ball, Lucille, 87, 90–91, 100 Bard,The (painting): figures, 203; impact on the viewer, 200; inspiration for, 196; reproductions of, 198, 199; style of, 200, 218; versions of, 199–200 Bards: artistic depictions of, 218–20; Edward I’s assassination of, 196–98, 218 Barthes, Roland, 43, 49, 176, 180 Bataille’s laughter, 131, 141 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre: on the cliché, 53, 60, 62, 71; falling, 80; wine poems, 201 beauty: as aesthetic idea, 61 Behn, Aphra: The Rover, 154 Bellour, Raymond, 94 Benjamin, Walter: on abstraction, 204; concept of constellation, 26, 27, 204; on creation of cliché, 60; critique of, 201; exchange between Adorno and, 14, 29, 201, 202, 203; on media and mediation, 203, 215; messianism of, 107; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 60 Bewell, Alan, 95n26 Blake, William: The Bard, from Gray, 218–20, 219; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 72, 206; medium reflexivity in, 53; paintings of, 219, 220, 220n28; piped sound in poetry of, 68, 69, 72; Romanticism of, 69; social status of, 72; Songs of Innocence, 54, 71; study of, 109 Bolter, Jay David, 12, 68n30

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book history: vs. media studies, 4 books cover: vs. painting, 201–2 Bordwell, David, 50 Boswell, James, 70n32 Bourdieu, Pierre, 72n37 Bratton, Benjamin H.: The Stack, 67 British associationism, 50, 51 broadcast communication, 96n27 Broderick, Matthew, 100 Brown, Bill, 81n6, 158n19, 172, 176, 179n6, 190n18 Brown, Ivor, 65n22 Brown, Nicholas, 72n37 Bryant, Levi R., 158 Burke, Edmund, 65, 89n17 Burkett, Andrew, 3, 7n11, 36 Byron, George Gordon Byron, baron: attitude to theatrical representation, 128–29; dilatory style of, 159; letter to John Murray, 128; protagonists of, 133–34; studies of, 136. See also Don Juan (Byron); Manfred (Byron) Cable Guy,The (film), 94, 100 Caillois, Roger, 164n26 Calder, Alexander, 46, 47 capital: global character of, 78–79; hyperactive operations of, 93; as Lebenswelt, 28, 71n35; nondeterministic status of, 13n20; search for alternative to, 99–100; zany character of, 93 carnival, 163 Carlson, Julie, 153 Carrey, Jim, 94, 100 Caruth, Cathy, 80n5 Castle of Otranto,The (Walpole): biopolitics in, 84–85; gothic items in, 80–81; Isabella’s fate, 86; plot, 82–83, 84; preface to the second edition, 85; supernatural encounters in, 83; unwritten message of, 85; zany in, 83, 86 catachresis, 10n15, 19, 43, 50, 52, 58. See also figure; techno-magism cause-and-effect sequence, 45, 51

Cavell, Stanley, 86n14 Cenci,The (Percy Shelley), 111–12, 111n17, 112 Chandler, James K., 3n4, 51n28, 84, 156, 189, 190 charge of occasionalism, 13, 15, 28 Cheng, Mai-Lin, 134n24 childlike vs. childish, 73 children’s play, 155, 161; danger of unsupervised, 149; eroticized mimesis of, 154 Chion, Michel, 133 Christensen, Jerome, 51n28, 77n44, 190n18; Lord Byron’s Strength, 136 chthonic art, 176 cinema, 51n28, 137 cinematic montage, 41, 42, 50 Clark, David L., 10n14, 64 Clery, E. J., 80 cliché, 53; commonality of, 70; conscious experience of, 68; criticism as, 74; definition of, 60, 67; expressions about beautiful and, 68; history of, 55n3; modern usage, 60, 60n13; parasitic nature of, 70; potentiality hidden within, 76; “promiscuity” of, 77; reading of, 66n24; risk of, 74. See also techno-magism cliché-verre, 60n12 Colebrook, Claire, 139n33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 143, 180; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 33, 38 Collings, David, 59n10 commemoration: as act of monumentalization, 105, 120; of the future, 105, 106, 108; of the past, 105; technology of, 102; temporal occasion of, 103 commodification, 13 communication, 17, 18, 19, 19n28, 25 computers, 34n1. See also techné constellation, 26, 27, 204 Copjec, Joan, 113, 180 Crary, Jonathan, 3n4, 145 Crimmins, Jonathan, 122n31, 202, 215 critical judgment, 69, 74

Index critical language, 71 critical reflexivity, 73 Culler, Jonathan, 114n22 Curran, Stuart, 110, 115 cut, 1, 11–12, 19–27, 26, 150, 172–73, 179, 171, 191–94, 216–17, 220n28, 221; as antagonism, 203, 220–21. See also Romanticism; social antagonism dark ecology, 131 de Grazia, Margreta, 143n40 de Man, Paul, 11n16, 14, 15, 16n24, 44, 80, 118, 201; “Shelley Disfigured,” 105 de Witt, Helen: Lighting Rods, 63 death, 101, 134–36, 140, 140n34, 141 deathlike state, 140–41 deconstruction, 1, 10, 11n16, 15, 16, 122, 122n32; assumed literariness of, 20, 142 Deleuze, Gilles, 11n16, 51n28, 75, 125, 204 Demogorgon, 104, 111, 117–18, 119, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 66, 67, 137, 217; on archive, 186, 186n15, 194n25; concept of writing, 16; critique of Saussure, 16; on death, 101; on ethics, 20; “hauntology” of, 96; Hegel’s influence of, 14; on language, 16, 17n24; Of Grammatology, 35; reading of Rousseau, 36 dialectic, 14–15, 25, 37, 42–43, 50–51, 141, 201. See also mediation dialectical montage, 42, 43 Dickens, Charles, 41, 42 digital archive, 185, 188, 195n26 Dolar, Mladen, 54, 171, 172, 172n38 domestic activity, 90 Donald, Adrienne, 109n12 Don Juan (Byron), 141, 149; allusion to Turkish despotism, 164; carnival in, 163; children’s play, 159–60, 161; commodity culture in, 163; composition of, 156; desire in, 159, 164; disruption of Lambro’s house, 163, 164; effect of mimesis, 171; Juan and Haidee’s festivities, 158, 159, 163, 164; Lambro (character), 157, 158–59, 160, 161; magic circle of

227

revolution, 161; patriarchal authority in, 157, 162; plot, 159; references to political practice, 161, 162; rhymes of, 163; sensory appeal of, 163; succession theme, 159 Donnelly, Timothy, 71 drama, 114. See also lyrical drama dreams, 209–10; of civil war and revolution, 215; as emblem of abstraction, 210; of a poet, 211–12, 213; of the savage, 215; of social relations, 221 Dylan, Bob, 149 Easthammer, Angela, 3n4 Edelman, Lee, 107, 122 Eisenstein, Sergei, 41, 42, 50 Elgin Marbles, 99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 70n32 Emily St. Aubert (character): description of, 97, 97n28; encounter with Udolpho, 88–89; gloom of, 97, 97n28; gothic experience of, 87, 88, 89; rejection of zaniness, 90, 91; wandering of, 88 Empson, William, 39, 46 English language: imagined universality of, 70 Enlightenment, 36 event, 36, 116, 136 Fall of Hyperion,The (Keats), 196, 204; dream in, 210–11, 213, 214–15; fragmentary nature of, 214, 215; Indian leaf, 211, 215, 216; vellum, 215, 216, 217; vocabulary of, 218 Favret, Mary, 94 Fay, Elizabeth, 132 Ferguson, Frances, 39, 40, 41 figuration of praxis, 119 figure, 11, 19–20 film, 125, 128, 137 Fisher, Phillip, 62n15 forefathers, 189, 190 Foucault, Michel, 5, 39, 40

228

Index

François, Anne-Lise, 38 Frankenstein (1931 film): audience of, 21; close-up shots, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 218; edited cut in, 218; mediation of, 25; as a Romantic example of the cut, 26; vs. Shelley’s novel, 21; windmill scene, 21, 22, 23, 25. See also Whale, James Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 1, 11, 149; allusion to Turkish despotism, 165; cinematic adaptation of, 21; creature’s education, 168, 169, 169n34, 171; creature’s viewing of De Laceys household, 165–66, 167, 168, 170; effect of mimesis, 171–72; emotions in, 169; poetic kitsch, 169n34; pool scene, 169; theatrical adaption of, 167 Freud, Sigmund, 185, 188–91, 191n20 Friedlander, Eli, 68n29 Frye, Northrop, 85, 114n21 funny thing, 81, 82 future: commemoration of, 106, 108; indeterminacy of, 106–7 Galperin, William, 107n8, 150, 151, 156–57 Gaston, Sean, 11n18 Gay, Penny, 150n2 Gehlen, Arnold, 126 German idealism, 50, 51 Gestalt, 119n30 ghost theory, 92n20 gimmick: abbreviation as, 65n22; capitalism and, 64–65, 65n22; formulation of, 53; function of, 63; Romanticism as, 66 gloss, 40–41 Godard, Jean-Luc, 43 Goldsmith, Steven, 109–10 Goode, Mike, 3n3, 56n4, 68n30, 72, 156n14 Goodman, Kevis, 3n3, 8n12 Gormley, Antony, 185 gothic literature, 80, 81, 84, 87, 90 gothic simulacrum, 78 gothic zany, 28, 79, 80, 85, 90 Gray, Charles: Lays and Lyrics, 114

Gray, Thomas: “The Bard: A Pindaric Ode,” 196, 218–19 Greenberg, Clement, 57, 66 Griffith, D. W., 200 Grusin, Richard, 12, 17, 68n30 Guillory, John: on exchange between Adorno and Benjamin, 201–2, 203; on failure of communication, 18–19, 19n28, 25; “Genesis of the Media Concept,” 201, 202; media concept of, 1; on mediation, 14, 15, 16–17, 18, 19, 217 Halliwell, Stephen: The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 152 Hamlet (character), 142–43, 145 happiness, 76–77 Hartley, David, 51n28 Hartman, Geoffrey, 7n11 Hazlitt, William: The Spirit of the Age, 8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: on dreams, 209–10; influence of, 14, 15; on mediation, 17; Phenomenology of Spirit, 209, 211; subject of religious feeling, 211 Heidegger, Martin: idea of Dasein, 126, 134, 140n34; project of human distinction, 134; on question of techné, 33 Heizer, Michael, 176; Double Negative, 177 Hellenic mania, 99 Hermes (Greek god), 65, 66 Hertz, Neil, 66 historical break, 8 historical knowledge, 204, 205, 213 history: deconstruction of, 79; human vs. posthuman, 75; in postmodernism, loss of, 75n40; theory and, 5 Hobsbawm, Eric, 190n19 Hogg, James, 74n39 Hogle, Jerrold, 78, 81, 171 Huizinga, Johan, 161 human beings: vs. animals, 139n33; as living machines, 207–8; within proper name, 139 humanism, 144, 145

Index Husserl, Edmund, 126n8, 129 hypermediacy, 68n30 identity, 75 ideology, 141, 208 Igarashi,Yohei, 3n3, 19n29, 64n20 image, 20, 185n11, 193n23. See also figure; sentence image inability to act, 150–51, 152 Inchbald, Elizabeth: Lovers’Vows, 150, 154n10, 156, 156n14 incommensurability, 140, 144 indeterminacy tropes, 106–7 indexical photograph, 185n11 individual body: problem of, 203, 216 inside/outside binary, 186 Internet research: limits of, 194–95, 194n25 interposition of distance, 18 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 158n19 Jacobus, Mary, 162n23 Jager, Colin, 151, 151n4, 155 Jameson, Fredric, 68, 71, 75, 75n40, 118, 122, 136, 144, 186, 201n3, 215–17; “Periodizing the 60s,” 164n26 Jeffrey, Francis, 130 Johnson, Barbara, 189 Johnson, Claudia, 151n4 Johnson, Samuel, 69–70 Jones, Steven E., 40n15 Juengel, Scott, 216 Kant, Immanuel, 52, 68n29, 86n14, 89n17, 102, 103, 110n14, 113, 217n25; epistemological predicament, 124, 139n31, 152, 173; on nonhuman creatures, 207–8, 210, 211, 216; On Perpetual Peace, 206, 207, 208 Kantor, Jamison, 81, 84 Karera, Axelle, 158n19 Karloff, Boris, 22 Kaufman, Robert, 115n24 Keach, William, 65, 66

229

Keats, John, 27; To Autumn, 121; cliché of, 28, 67, 71, 72; Endymion, 61; The Fall of Hyperion, 196, 204, 210–11, 213; medium reflexivity, 53; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 56; as progenitor of modern kitsch, 57; as Romantic poet, 69; traditions of reading, 62–3, 63n17 Khalip, Jacques, 26, 27, 64, 76n41, 106n7 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., 2n2, 34, 195n26 kitsch, 39, 55, 62, 72, 73, 74; See also poetic kitsch Kittler, Friedrich, 2, 3, 145 Klancher, Jon, 155n12 knowledge: historical, 204, 205, 213; political, 115, 116, 122, 205. See also techné Kracauer, Siegfried, 63 Lacan, Jacques, 186; idea of big Other, 40, 89; on speaking I vs. spoken “I,” 132; reference to, 122n32; structuralism of, 189 Laclau, Ernesto, 13n20, 14n22, 180, 221 Lamb, Charles, 129, 143, 144 land art: accessibility of, 179; examples of, 176, 179; photographs of, 177–78, 180; technological interventions, 178 Langan, Celeste, 4, 114 language: comparison to a sheet of paper, 216n23; “inhuman” character of, 16n24. See also mediation “Last Bard, The” (Gray), 218 Latour, Bruno, 35, 35n4, 158, 173, 204 Lemm,Vanessa, 133 Levinson, Marjorie, 62n17, 63, 69, 93n22, 212n18, 213 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: idea of multidimensional reference map, 183–84, 184; influence of Rousseau on, 36; management of trauma, 191n20; notion of the “zero-institution,” 191; study of Indian tribes, 35, 186n12, 191; study of myth, 54, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188–89, 191, 193

230

Index

life: death and, 140; meaning of, 123. See also afterlife Liu, Alan, 162n23 Lockhart, John, 61 Longinus, 66 Lowes, Jonathan Livingston, 44n21 Lukács, Georg, 202n5, 205 Lum, Ken, 43 lyric, 113–14 Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (Wordsworth), 92 lyrical drama, 115 mad pursuits, 75, 77 “magic circle” of play, 161 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 43 Maa, Gerald, 173n40 MacInnes, Colin: Absolute Beginners, 164n26 Makdisi, Saree, 72n37 Manjoo, Farhad, 34n1 Manchester Palace of Art, 61, 62 Manfred (Byron), 28, 29; body and mind struggle, 132; characteristics of, 127, 131, 138n30; death and afterlife motif, 134–36, 137; epigraph of, 143; genre, 126–27; incommensurability in, 138; mental theater of, 129; as metaphysical drama, 128; names of characters, 138–39; New York University celebration of, 136; omissions from, 134; parabasis and exegesis of, 130, 131–32; plot, 127n11, 130; solipsism of, 123, 136, 138, 140; structure of, 131; studies of, 136; supernatural realm of, 132–33, 136 Manfred (Byron’s character): behavior of, 130, 141; charisma of, 134; comparison to Hamlet, 142–43, 145; incommensurability of, 138; as Romantic animal, 144; Umwelt of, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138 Manfred (Walpole’s character), 78, 82–83, 84, 86–87, 89–90, 93 Manning, Peter, 142

Mansfield Park (Austen), 149; children’s play, 153, 154–55, 160; danger of theater in, 150, 150n2, 151, 153–54, 154n10, 162, 165; desire in, 159; effect of mimesis, 154, 171; film adaption of, 157; historical predicament of modernity in, 152–53; inability to act, 150–51, 152; Lebenswelt of, 151; patriarchal authority in, 155, 157, 160; plot, 150 Marshall, David, 168n33 Martin, John: The Bard, 196–97, 198, 198, 199, 199–200, 203 Marx, Karl: 9, 14, 65n22, 81, 92n20, 137; The Eighteenth Brumaire, 162 Marxism, 9, 10, 12, 14–16, 142, 186, 208 materiality without matter, 217 McDowell, Paula, 5n5, 73n38 McGann, Jerome, 38, 161n22, 200–1, 203 McLane, Maureen, 4, 54 media: aesthetic and historical effects, 212; digital media, 34; genre and, 79; “inbetween” condition of, 172; mediation and, 20, 25, 172, 201, 203, 215, 217, 218; new media, 35n4; prepositional enactment of, 6; Romanticism and, 1–2; as storage system, 11; studies of, 2, 4; taste and, 69, 74; technology and, 1, 2; theory of, 2, 4–5, 7 media archaeology, 6 mediation: communication and, 17, 18, 19; definition of, 6, 11, 18, 202; as form of representation, 17; identity and, 75; versus language, 16; in Marxism, 15; media and, 20, 25, 172, 201, 203, 215, 217, 218; nature of, 17–18; philosophical understanding of, 14; radical, 16n24; Romanticism and, 7–8, 15; of social relations, 17 medium reflexivity, 53, 68, 68n30 Mee, John, 72n37 Meillassoux, Quentin, 124 melodrama, 166, 167, 167n31, 169n34 meta-mediacy, 68n30 Michael (Wordsworth): agrarian selfsufficiency, theme of, 190n19; father

Index and son theme, 190; formal split in, 192; image of the sheepfold, 192, 193– 94; Smithson land art and, 180, 189; trauma of sexual difference, 190 Michael, Timothy, 69, 70, 115, 205 Michaels, Walter Benn, 176, 178n4 Mill, John Stuart, 14, Milton, John, 127n11, 142, 214 mimesis, 128, 149, 150, 152, 154, 160–62, 171–73 mind: vs. nature, 9, 20 Mitchell, W. J. T., 6, 7n10, 15, 18, 35, 45 modernity: 2, 8, 37, 93, 173, 194, 205, 220; as chronotope, 153, 171; as print, 60, 61. See also playtime montage, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51n28 Montoni (character), 78, 80, 88, 89–90, 93 monumentalization, 105, 120 Moody, Jane, 128n13, 154n10 Moretti, Franco, 184–85, 187, 194 Morton, Timothy, 38, 45n22, 131, 133, 134, 173n39 Muñoz, José Esteban, 122n31 Murphy, Peter, 74n39 Mysteries of Udolpho,The (Radcliffe): comparison to Castle of Otranto, 88–89, 90; gothic zany in, 87–88 mystery, 43 myths, 191, 193n23 The National Magazine, 61, 62 National Socialism, 126 nature and culture, 180, 192 neoliberalism, 75, 76 Neel, Alexandra, 3n4, 179n7 Nersessian, Anahid, 56n5, 217 New Materialism, 9, 10, 13, 149, 158n19 Ngai, Sianne: aesthetic categories of, 67– 68, 68n29, 76; formulation of zany, 81, 89; on gimmick, 53, 63, 64, 65n22; on Lucille Ball, 90; Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 67–68, 78 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 126, 133

231

nonhuman human, 208 non-site, 216 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 88, 91 Norton Anthology of English Literature, 196, 197 numbing an-aesthesia, 111n17 Object Oriented Ontology, 9, 158, 173 occasionalism. See charge of occasionalism “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats): aesthetic self-sufficiency of, 58, 59; cliché in, 59, 61, 63, 72, 74, 75; desire in, 58; on mad pursuits, 75; meaningless repetition in, 57–58, 59, 61, 74–75; multimedia dimensions of, 56; piped songs, 56–57, 68, 69, 72; poetic style, 69; sound in, 56 Oedipus myth, 185, 188 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 16, 36 oligarchic capitalism, 75, 76, 121 Osborne, Peter, 67n27, 193n23 Otto, Peter, 3n3, 8n12, 79n3, 99n32 “Ozymandias” (Percy Shelley), 76 pagan tribal past, 99–100 parataxis, 41–42, 46 Passannante, Gerard, 110n14 Peake, Richard Brinsley, 167 Peckham, Morse, 124 performance, 152 Pfau, Thomas, 70 phenomenal bodily experience, 206 philosophical traditions, 50–51 photographs, 49, 179, 180, 185, 186 Plato, 54, 66, 67, 152 play, 152, 162, 164n26, 165, 167–68, 173; mimetic play, 156, 171, 161; youthful play, 153–54, 156n14, 158, 159. See also Don Juan (Byron); Mansfield Park (Austen); playtime; youth playtime: definition of, 149–50; of modernity, 149 pleasure, 111–12, 113 poetic kitsch, 57, 72, 169n34

232

Index

poetry: cut of, 216; as dream, 211–12; elite and vernacular, 70, 73; encounter with cliché, 73; as kitsch, 72; as mediation, 212; origin myth of, 54; style, 69, 70, 71; words and, 212 political knowledge, 115, 116, 122, 205 Pollmann, Inga, 124, 125, 126, 126n7, 127, 131, 133, 134 poncif, 60, 60n12 posthuman, 140, 144 Postone, Moishe, 65n22 poststructuralist imaginary, 185 praxis, 104–5, 113, 119–20 predicament, 139n31, 152, 173 presentism, 26 Presumption; or,The Fate of Frankenstein (play), 167–68 Price, Fanny (character): inability to act, 151–52, 153; understanding of threat of theater, 165 print culture, 4 problem of intersection, 171, 172 Prometheus Unbound (Percy Shelley), 28, 37; act of change in, 117, 119; Asia’s encounter with Demogorgon, 117–19, 120; commemorative thought, 120; formal intentionality of, 103; genre, 112; language of, 113, 119n30, 120; lyrical drama of, 114–15; main theme of, 110; normative masculinity of, 109; pleasure in, 121; plot, 117; Prometheus’s body, 109, 110, 116, 117; Prometheus’s speech, 116; revolutionary affect of, 110–11; structure of, 116; technomagism of, 122 Proust, Marcel: Swann’s Way, 66 pseudoactivity, 105 psychoanalysis, 142 Pyle, Forrest, 26, 27, 63n17 queer future, 120, 122 queer theory, 106, 107 Radcliffe, Ann, 89–90, 97. See also Mysteries of Udolpho,The (Radcliffe) Rajan, Tilotttama, 114n21

Ranciere, Jacques, 42–43, 128, 154; The Future of the Image, 41, 42 reading, 67, 129 Redfield, Marc, 3n3, 21, 25, 111n17 remediation, 12 representation, 15, 102 Resmini, Mauro, 11n16 revolution, 13, 110–11, 113, 121, 163 Richardson, Alan, 127, 128, 129, 138n30 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 33; albatross, image of, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49; cause and effect in, 44n21, 46; critique of, 38–39, 40; dialectic in, 41, 51–52; dilemma of host and guest, 52; discontinuity of, 46, 48; ecological concerns, 38, 45, 51; gloss of, 40–41, 48, 52; kitsch in, 38–39, 45n22; language of, 46; montage in, 46–48; moral nature of, 38; rhythm of, 49, 50; sea snakes scene, 44–46, 45n22, 49; “self-same moment,” 45, 46, 47–48, 49, 52; spell breaking, 49; structure of, 38, 49; Wedding Guest figure, 39, 40, 46, 46n23 rituals, 152, 153 Ricks, Christopher, 62 Roach, Joseph, 152, 156 Romanticism: asymmetries in, 11; characteristics of, 3, 7; commemoration and, 102; critique of, 13; cut of, 17n24, 19– 25, 218; definitions of, 124n2; dialectic and, 37; as a gimmick, 66; as historical identity, 5, 6, 7–8, 204–5; humanism and, 144; lyric and, 113–14; Marxism and, 9; media and, 1–2, 5, 14; as mediation, 7–8, 145; minimal, 64; modernity and, 29, 173–74; perceived attachment to the future, 106; political knowledge and, 115; as scholarly discipline, 5, 8; significance of, 50; studies of, 2–6, 7, 8; techno-magism and, 50; terminal verticality in, 216; as theoretical event, 5, 6; as time of perpetual war, 94; unbound, 64; zany character of capital in, 93. See also techno-magism Romantic lyric, 113–14 Romantic ruin, 176

Index Ronell, Avital, 59 Rosler, Martha, 42 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16, 18n27, 19, 36, 65, 168, 180, 181, 206n11 Russell, Gillian, 154n10, 156n14 Said, Edward W., 151n4 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16 Schechner, Richard, 152 Schiller, Friedrich, 42, 50, 50n25 Schmitt, Carl, 13, 28, 210 Scott, Walter: The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 114; Waverly, 202n5 screen, 172, 173 screen viewing effects, 171 Searle, John, 17 secular modernity, 37 sentence image, 41–42, 48 sententiae, 67, 72 Serpell, C. Namwali, 55n3, 58n8, 62n16, 74, 77 Serra, Richard, 176; Schunnemunk Fork, 178 sex, 112; sexual difference, 168, 189–92 Sha, Richard C., 88n16, 153 Shakespeare, William, 85, 127n10, 129; Hamlet, 143–44 Shannon, Claude, 17n25 Shelley, Mary, 107. See also Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 27, 65; The Cenci, 111; commemoration of, 107–8; criticism of, 103; mental activity of, 108; “Ode to the West Wind,” 108; “Ozymandias,” 76; Prometheus Unbound, 28, 37, 103, 104, , 109–21 signification, 16, 17 Silliman, Ron: The Age of Huts, 71n35 Simpson, David, 39, 79, 92, 92n19, 93, 95, 97 Siskin, Clifford, 1, 2, 7, 36, 37, 205, 207 site in ruins, 175 Sloterdijk, Peter, 208 Smithson, Robert: Amarillo Ramp, 194n24; Broken Circle and Spiral Hill, 177; land art of, 176, 178–79, 184–85,

233

186; Spiral Jetty, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 187, 188, 193 social antagonism, 221 social mediation, 202–3 solipsism, 123, 124, 136, 138, 140 Songs of Innocence (Blake), 54, 55 sound, 133 Spinoza, Baruch: idea of God, 118n28 Spiral Jetty (artwork), 180, 181, 182, 183, 183, 187, 187, 188, 193 Spirit: realization of, 209 Stabler, Janet, 142 Stiegler, Bernard, 18n27, 116n26, 206 structuralist archive, 186, 187, 188 subject-object divide, 9, 10 subjects, 141–42, 142n37, 158, 173 sublime, 62, 88, 89, 138; as Burkean and Kantian, 68 Sun, Emily, 97n28 Sunderland, Kathryn, 151 Swann, Karen, 92n19, 167 symbolic montage, 42, 43–44 system, 204, 205, 206, 207, 212 Szwydky, Lissette Lopez, 56n4 Taylor, Charles, 37 techné, 20, 34, 35; as knowledge, 34 techno-magism: 1, 15, 19–21, 33–35, 35n4, 37, 41–42, 48, 50–51, 65, 102, 119, 122, 140, 145, 217; of the cliché, 67; of Romanticism, 19 telescope: as optical analogy for cognition, 204 television, 96, 96n27, 100. See also transmission; video Temple, Julien: Absolute Beginners (film), 164n26 Tennyson, Alfred: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 114 Terada, Rei, 203, 204, 210 Thacker, Eugene: After Life, 123, 140 thanatopsis, 84 theater: danger of, 150–51, 152, 154, 156n14, 165; French revolution as, 162n23; performance and, 152; private, 156n14; proto-guerrilla, 156, 164; public dimension of, 162

234

Index

theological afterlife, 123 theory, 104, 114, 120, 201; praxis and, 104– 5, 119–20, 119n30, 121 This Is Enlightenment, 36 Thorslev, Peter, 126n9 Thoth (Egyptian God), 66 Tiffany, Daniel, 53, 55, 57n7, 58, 61, 62, 68n29, 69–72, 73, 76, 169n34 Tønnessen, Morton, 142n38 Tooke, John Horne, 65–66 total social process, 201 transmission, 80 Trudell, Scott, 2n2 Turner, Henry, 143n40 Turner,Victor, 152, 153, 163n25, 164 Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 63 Übermensch, 133, 133n22, 135, 143 Uexküll, Jakob von: Kantianism of, 130; study of animal psychology, 140, 142, 142n38; subjectivism of, 125; use of musical figures, 139n31; vision of film, 125 Umwelt: as collection of perceptions, 130; concept of, 29, 124, 125, 142; of humans, 125–26; nonhuman implications of, 125–26, 145; theater and, 128 Väliaho, Pasi, 125, 127, 133, 137n27 Van Kooy, Dana, 81n5, 111n16, 128n13, 167n31 Vendler, Helen, 62 vernacular, 70, 73 video: vs. film, 94; total flow of, 94 Viola, Bill, 43 voice, 133, 172n38 Walpole, Horace, 27, 28, 85; The Castle of Otranto, 78, 80–81 Walpole, Robert, 84n11 Wang, Orrin N. C., 4n4, 59n10, 75n40, 85n12, 106n4, 110n15, 137n27 Warhol, Andy, 62, 68, 71

Warminski, Andrzej, 38n8 Warner, William, 1, 2, 7, 36, 37 Warren, Andrew, 124 Warren, Robert Penn, 44, 45, 46, 50 Weaver, Warren, 17n25 Wayback Machine, 195n26 Whale, James, 1, 21, 24, 203 Williams, Anne, 45nn21,22, 96 Williams, Raymond, 14, 17, 94, 96 Wolfe, Cary, 134n22 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 170, 170n35 Wordsworth, William, 27: admiration for the pagan past, 99; discharged soldier episode, 95–96, 97, 97n28, 98; distaste for the daily communications, 65; experimental philosophy of, 214n21; ghostly figures of, 92–93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 101; “Intimations” ode, 155; language of, 69, 70; Lebenswelt of, 12; Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, 92; Michael, 180, 189; moments of the zany in, 28, 92n20; operations of capital, 93; poetry of, 79–80, 178–79, 180; The Prelude, 95, 162, 214; The Ruined Cottage, 167; savage torpor, 98; sense of time, 95; “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” 176; “The World Is Too Much with Us,” 98–99 “The World Is Too Much with Us” (Wordsworth), 98–99 youth, 149, 153, 154, 155, 157, 162–65, 169– 70, 171, 173. See also play zany, 76, 78, 79, 81–84, 86, 88–89, 90, 91, 92n20, 93–94. See also gothic zany zero-institution, 191 Zijderfeld, Anton, 58 Žižek, Slavoj, 9, 14n22, 37, 40, 76, 100, 141, 142, 142n37, 191, 221 zoom lens technology, 24 Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka, 112, 113 Zuroski, Eugenia, 81, 82

Orrin N. C. Wang is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), which won the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, and editor of “Frankenstein” in Theory: A Critical Anatomy (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is the General Editor of Romantic Circles and recipient of the 2020 Keats- Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award.

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot. Translated by Hannes Opelz. Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (eds.), Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism. Geoffrey Bennington, Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth. Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. Translated by Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner, Foreword by Steven Shaviro. Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar. Jacques Lezra, On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology. Foreword by Vittorio Morfino. Jean-Luc Nancy, Portrait. Translated by Sarah Clift and Simon Sparks, Foreword by Jeffrey S. Librett. Karen Swann, Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge. Erin Graff Zivin, Anarchaelogies: Reading as Misreading. Ramsey McGlazer, Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress Zachary Sng, Middling Romanticism: Reading in the Gaps, from Kant to Ashbery. Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. Orrin N. C. Wang, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism.