The Graphic Unconscious: A Response

Author(s): Mark Seltzer

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 26, No. 1, Narratives of Literature, the Arts, and Memory
(Winter, 1995), pp. 21-28
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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The
Graphic
Unconscious: A
Response
Mark Seltzer
DORRiT Cohn's
reading
of
"optics
and
power
in the novel"
largely
devolves
on a rehearsal of the
argument
of her
Transparent
Minds
(1978),
and that
reading
is
largely premised
on a
repeti
tion of
exactly
the
simple opposition
of art and
power pressured,
for
example,
in
my Henry James
and the Art
ojPower
(1984)
-1
Indeed,
on these
terms it's
tempting
to describe Cohn's rehearsals as
uncanny?if
the
notion of the
uncanny (the unhomelike)
itself had not
by
now become
an all too
homey way
of
naming
the defensive
recapitulations,
the
belatedness,
the uncertain attributions of cause and
effect,
that
through
and
through
mark that account The
uncanny
has,
as it
were, been
domesticated
as
yet
another version of an "ethic" of better
living through
ambiguity,
the ethic that of course continues to underwrite
a wide
range
of
literary
studies. It is not hard to detect both the
tendency
to
recapitulate
and what
might
be called the recourse to
complexity-as
such in this
piece.
But if
something
like the
uncanny
seems to surface
here,
it
perhaps
has more to do with another
problem
broached,
but
resolutely
dis
placed,
in the
piece.
The
problem
of
seeing
and
power
in the novel is of
course most
powerfully
located in terms of the
fantasy
structure of the
panopticon.
But such a fantasmatics of
seeing
and
power
makes visible
something
more
general:
the
seeing
machine is also a
personation
machine. The
seeing
machine links
processes
of
objectification,
identifi
cation,
and
representation
to what
might
be called the
making
of
persons.
What becomes visible then is the
subject's
uncertain relation to
processes
of identification and
representation:
in
short,
the intricated
matters of
representation
and
self-representation,
of
seeing
and
seeing
oneself.
Hence the
question
of the
subject
as such is bound
up
with the order
of
representation:
the status of the
subject's identity
is
inevitably
bound
up
with the status of the
subject's processes
of identification.2 One
might
in fact locate the order of the
subject
in terms of the
subject's
distance,
or failure of
distance,
with
respect
to
representation.
Cohn's
account,
utterly separating
"real and fictional
worlds,"
posits something
like the
immunity
of the
subject
to
representation.
What I mean to outline here
is, rather,
the
contagious
relation between the
subject's identity
and his
New
Literary History,
1995,
26: 21-28
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22 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
identifications
or
representations.
This,
it will
emerge,
has to do
precisely
with the "fictional" status of
transparent
minds,
albeit not at all
in the sense that Cohn rehearses. In these
pages
then I want to take
up,
very
briefly,
such
surfacings
of the
uncanny?repetition, ambiguation,
and the
subject's intimacy
with
representation, focusing
on the third as
a
way
of
specifying
the effects
generated by
such haunted houses as
panopticons
and novels.
The
subject
of vision
has,
of
course,
emerged
as a
centering topic
in
recent cultural and intellectual
history.
One
might
instance Martin
Jay's
richly
informed
history
of the vicissitudes of vision from the
Enlighten
ment
on,
or
Jonathan Crary's
more
localized
history
of the shifts in
technologies
of visualization
during
the nineteenth
century.3
Correla
tively,
the status of
"panoptic theory"
has been clarified in recent
work,
in
part through
Gilles Deleuze's reassessment of the mutation of the
"disciplinary society"
into the "control
society,"
or
through
Michel
Serres's related account of the
displacement
of networks of surveillance
by
the mode of information
("The
informational world takes the
place
of the observed
world").4
This is not to
suggest,
however,
a
simple
withering away
of
panopticism.
Consider,
for
example,
the
designs
prepared
in the
early
1980s for a series of
shopping complexes
in Los
Angeles:
"The service area located at the rear of the
property
is enclosed
with a
six-foot-high
concrete block
wall;
both service
gates
remain closed
and are under closed-circuit video
surveillance,
equipped
for
two-way
voice
communications,
and
operated
for deliveries
by
remote control
from a
security 'observatory.'
Infra-red beams at the bases of
light
fixtures detect intruders who
might
circumvent video cameras
by
climbing
over the wall."5 As Mike Davis
points
out,
"the
prototype plan
for all four
shopping
centers
plagiarized brazenly
from
Jeremy
Bentham's
renowned
nineteenth-century design
for the
panopticon prison'
with
its economical central surveillance."6
It is not
merely
that Cohn's brief
taxonomy
of
"optical imagery" barely
registers
the rhetoric and contexts of vision and
visuality
that have
begun
to
emerge
in this work. Nor is it
merely
that her final
injunction
("But
first we had better close down the
Panopticon")
is
scarcely adequate
to
an
understanding
of either
panoptic theory
or its
revisionary practices?
and not least to the vexed
appeal
of the
panoptic
in the traditional
novel. For
example, my
own account of the
"fantasy
of
surveillance,"
in
Henry James
and the Art
of
Power,
emphasizes
not
merely
the fantasmatics
of the
panoptic
model but also the manner in
which,
for
instance,
"the
novel
departs
from this
panoptic technique"
(54);
subsequent chapters
trace,
in
part,
the
competition
between variant modes of
power
in the
novel
(above all,
the shift from the
deployment
of
power along
Unes of
sight
to
techniques
of normalization and
"organic" regulation).
More
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THE GRAPHIC UNCONSCIOUS
23
recently,
in a book called Bodies and
Machines,
I have further
specified
the
relays
between
statistics,
information-processing,
and surveillance in
realist
writing, tracing
both the
making
of "statistical
persons"
and the
materiality
and
corporeality
of
seeing
in the novel
(the
irreducibility
of
processes
of vision to
disembodied,
panoptic objectification).7
But all this would seem irrelevant to Cohn's
story.
As she
expresses
it,
"even if one
grants
that
panopticism may apply
to the
power
relations
represented
within fictional worlds no less than to those enacted in the
real
world,
serious
problems
are raised
by
its
application
to the formal
relations that
pertain
between novelistic narrators and fictional charac
ters." The concessions made in this
passage
are
astonishing enough,
granting
as it does the
"application"
of the
panoptic
model in real and
fictional worlds both.
Or,
more
exactly,
the
passage
at once concedes
and denies that
application.
That double
gesture
is here carried
by
a
well-marked idiom of disavowal
("even
if?in effect: "even if it's the
case,
it's not the
case").
Now it is
precisely
this double discourse of
disavowal and
reinscription
that,
I have
argued
(in
Henry James
and the
Art
of
Power),
defines the traditional novel's "art of
power,"
and also its
critical reinventions. The double discourse of
power
advertises
exactly
the basic
opposition
of
"power
relations" and "formal relations" even as
their
reciprocal entanglement everywhere
surfaces,
but
displaced
as a
radical
"ambiguity"
or
ambivalence
as such.
This basic
opposition
structures Cohn's account. That account
again
and
again simply appeals
to the self-evidence of
oppositions
between the
fictional and the
real,
"the formal" and "the
thematic,"
"manner" and
"matter." These
categories
are
represented throughout
as
"entirely
distinctive."
Collaterally,
the failures of distinction between them can
only
be
registered
in terms of an abstracted
"ambiguity"?in
the
abstracting preference
for
"problematizations
and 'undecidabilities'"
tout court
(Hence my
account of the
Jamesian tendency
to
represent
representation
in the terms of what
James
himself calls
"confusion,"
"muddle,"
and "criminal
continuity"
is
reduced,
in Cohn's
terms,
to a
"virulenft]
. . .
condemnation of
Jamesian ambiguity."
These
program
matic distinctions
depend
in
part
on what I earlier called an ethic of
complication
as such. What
emerges
is a
general counterposing
of the
"critical" formalizations of
narratology
and the "uncritical" tendencies
of
"socio-political
theories of
literature,"
tendencies
which,
we are
told,
"show no awareness of the
complexities
involved.")
The mutual
quarantining
of formal and
political
interests
appears,
above
all,
in what is here
represented
as an absolute
"ontological"
difference between
persons
and
representations.
This mutual
exteriority
of
persons
and
representations
is,
for
Cohn,
seen as
premised
on
Foucault's comments on
the inextricable
relays
between the
positing
of
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24 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
"the
subject"
and the modern exercise of
power. (As
Foucault
expresses
it: "Power is exercised
only
over free
subjects,
and
only
insofar as
they
are
free."8)
But whereas for Foucault this is to indicate the manner in
which
power requires
the "fabrication" and
"qualification"
of the
subject
as the
subject
of
power
(in effect,
the
subjectification of power),
for Cohn
this reduces to the absolute
non relation or
rupture
in "an author's
(or
heterodiegetic
narrator's)
relationship
to his fictional characters. The
latter do not exist on the same
ontological plane
as the former." Put
simply,
for
Cohn,
authors
(and
some
narrators)
are
persons,
whereas
representations
are
not,
and thus it
"make[s]
no sense" to "transfer"
power
relations to formal relations. This
is,
on several
counts,
nonsense.
For one
thing,
Cohn herself
scarcely
observes such
a
distinction,
albeit
violating
it from the reverse direction
("far
from
imposing
his voice on
his
characters, [the narrator]
allows the latter to
impose
their voice on
him").
For
another,
we
might
consider
James's
comments
(in
his
essay
"The Lesson of
Balzac")
on the author's "love" for his characters. The
author's love for his
characters,
as
James expresses
it,
is a
"respect
for the
liberty
of the
subject."
"The
love,
as we call
it,
the
joy
in their
communicated and exhibited
movement,
in their
standing
on their feet
and
going
of themselves and
acting
out their characters."9 The violation
of the line between
persons
and
representations
(authors,
for
James,
are
preeminently
"lovers of the
image
of
life")
could not be more
clearly
marked. Power relations in the novel
(most
clearly perhaps
in The Golden
Bowl,
as I have elsewhere
argued)
are
played
out
precisely
in terms of
what
James
calls "a love of each seized
identity":
in
effect,
in the
seizing
of
identities
by representation.10
More
generally
and more
pertinently,
the
Foucauldian account of the
subject
as
the
subject
of
power
makes visible
exactly
the
subject's
uncertain
distance,
or failure of
distance,
with
respect
to the order of
representation
and identification: that
is,
the
manner in which identifications
bring
the
identity
of the
subject
into
being
and not the other
way
round. And the
tendency
to understand
representation
as such as
conveying
a critical and self-conscious dis
tance,
such that the
representation
of
power
in effect affirms one's
exteriority
from
it,
occludes
just
these intimate
relays
between
persons
and
representations.
Now these
relays
between
persons
and
representations
are
perhaps
most
compelling, uncannily enough, just
where Cohn locates what she
sees as conclusive evidence of their absence: in what she calls "the
fiction-specific privil?ge
of mind
reading."
For
Cohn,
this
entirely
fictional
privilege
means that "the architectural
optics
of the
Panopticon"
simply
do not have
anything
to do with "the
metaphorical optics"
of the
narratologist,
since the fictional
privilege
of
"artifactually traversing
a
visual barrier
. . .
remains forever closed to real
eyes
in real life."
But,
at
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THE GRAPHIC UNCONSCIOUS 25
the turn of the
century
at
least,
the
privilege
of mind
reading
is
scarcely
imagined
to be closed to real
eyes
in real life. The intense fascination
with
hypnosis, telepathy,
and
transference,
from the later nineteenth
century
on,
is
anything
but
fiction-specific. "Psychophysical" investiga
tions of the links between interior states and exterior or
physical
states
not
merely
drew into relation
psychological,
visual,
and
corporeal
conditions. As Friedrich Kittler has traced in
detail,
the "discourse
network of 1900" is bound
up through
and
through
with the materiali
ties and
corporealities
of
reading
and
writing.11
This discourse network
makes
visible,
for
example,
what the
pioneer
in the science of work
Etienne-Jules Marey
called une
langue
inconnue
(unknown
language)
of
the
working body
(bodies
and matter
writing
themselves).12
It makes
visible what Walter
Benjamin,
a
generation
later,
identified as a sort of
graphic
unconscious
(the
"archive of non-sensuous similarities" in
writing,
such that
"graphology
has
taught
us to
recognize
in
handwriting images
that the unconscious of the writer conceals in
it").13
These
investigations
make mind
reading inseparable
from the matter of
reading generally.
I have elsewhere taken
up
some of the
implications
of the
becoming
visible and material of
writing
at the turn of the
century.14
It is not
possible
here to do more than
suggest
what these instances of the
graphic
unconscious look
like;
but a brief
sketch,
centered for the
moment on
Henry James's practice
of
writing, may help
to
clarify
a bit
the senses of
reading, representation,
and
transparency
at issue.
James's
practice
of
composition,
in his later
work?particularly,
the
practice
of
dictation?indicates
one
way
in which
James
at once
registered
and
managed
such a radicalization of the materialities of
writing
and,
centrally, writing-technologies.
I am
referring,
of
course,
to
James's
practice
of
dictating
to a
typewriter
(the
word
originally
referred both to
the machine and to its
operator, usually
a
young woman).
According
to
his
typist, Mary
Weld,
James's
dictation was
"remarkably
fluent" and
"when
working
I was
just part
of the
machinery." According
to his more
famous
typist,
Theodora
Bosanquet, James
wanted his
typists
to be
"without a mind." Not
surprisingly, Bosanquet,
like William
James,
was
fascinated with the
psychophysics
of "automatic
writing." James
thus
reincorporated
the automatisms of
machine-writing
in the
practice
of
oral
composition.
The
type-writer,
that
is,
??articulates the links between
mind,
eye,
hand,
and
paper. (As
the founder of one of the first
typewriter
businesses described it: "In
writing by
hand,
the
eye
must
constantly
watch the written line and
only
that It must attend to the
creation of each written line
. . .
guide
the hand
through
each
movement. For this the written
Une,
particularly
the line
being
written,
must be visible.
By
contrast,
after one
presses
down
briefly
on a
key,
the
typewriter
creates in the
proper position
on the
paper
a
complete
letter,
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26
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
which not
only
is untouched
by
the writer's hand but is also located in a
place entirely apart
from where the hands
work."15)
These links are
r^articulated in the dictatorial
orality
that
"automatically"
translates
speech
into
writing.
Hence
James, responding
to the
suggestion
that the
typewriter
and the
practice
of dictation affected his
style
of
writing,
insisted on the
transparency
or
immateriality
of such
technologies
of
composition.
As he
put
it,
dictation to the machine "soon
enough
becomes
intellectually, absolutely
identical with the act of
writing?or
has
become
so,
after five
years
now,
with
me;
so that the difference is
only
material and
illusory?only
the difference that I walk
up
and down."
Reducing technologies
of
writing
to the
"only
material" and the material
to the
"illusory," James
thus insists on the
transparency
of
writing
in
general
and on its disembodiment
(such that,
for
instance,
the differ
ence of
bodily
motions?the difference of
walking up
and down?makes
no
difference).16
But consider Theodora
Bosanquet's
comments on
James's
material
practice
of
composition
and the
psychophysics
of
writing
it
registers:
"Indeed,
at the time when I
began
to work for
him,
he had reached a
state at which the click of
a
Remington
machine acted
as a
positive spur.
He found it more difficult to
compose
to the music of
any
other make.
During
a
fortnight
when the
Remington
was out of order he dictated to
an Oliver
typewriter
with evident
discomfort,
and he found it almost
disconcerting
to
speak
to
something
that made no
responsive
sound at
all."17 It is as if the
"responsive
sound"?the familiar "click" of the
Remington?functions
as the concerted
response
of an
ideally respon
sive and automatized first
reader,
such that the "absolute
identity"
of the
writing
machine and the "act of
writing"
makes
possible
their mutual
transparency (writing
and
registration immediately indicating
each
other)
and thus makes material differences
illusory
differences.
The entire
question
of the
referentiality
of later
nineteenth-century
writing might
be reconsidered in terms of such
technologies
of auto
matic and immediate
registration.
Hence the dream of
perfect referentiality
or
sheer
transparency
in realist
writing
is
perhaps
most
productively
to
be considered in relation to such
technologies
of
registration
than
reduced to the
self-evidently
dismissible desire
(frequently
attributed to
realist
writing)
to
bypass
the medium of
representation
and to claim an
unmediated
access,
or
"reference,"
to the real. Practices of
dictation,
registration,
and material
impression,
such
as that of the
typewriter key
on
paper
or the
spoken
sound on the
phonographic plate,
cannot
simply
be reduced to instances
among
others of a
writing-in-general
("abstracted"
such that material differences in effect become
illusory).
Nor can such scenes of
writing simply
be reduced to the
technologies
of
writing
that "determine" them
("materialized"
in a
technological
deter
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THE GRAPHIC UNCONSCIOUS
27
minism that in effect makes authorial intentions and individual differ
ences
illusory).
It is not a matter of
choosing
between a
general theory
of
writing (say,
a
narratology),
on the one
side,
or
something
like a new
materialism,
on the other:
things
are,
among
other
things,
what
they
appear
to
be,
and
practices
are neither
simply
reducible,
nor
simply
irreducible,
to
anything
else. If for
James,
for
instance,
the
practice
of
writing
and the act of
writing
in
general
are
experienced
as
"absolutely
identical,"
it is then the work
of making
identical?the work of
making
writing
and mechanics
equivalent
such that each becomes
transparent
to the
other?that must be
analyzed.
It is
along
these lines that the
relays
between new
writing technologies
and the relations of
turn-of-the-century
"machine culture" become
mutually intelligible.
And it is in these terms that the materialities and
visibilities of
writing
in the novel themselves become visible. For
James,
the radical
recompositions
of
writing
and
information-technologies
at
the turn of the
century
are
registered
in terms of what counts for
James
as
"psychology"?a psychology inseparable
from the
writing of writing.
This is
particularly
evident in his fictions of the
1890s,
fictions that
relay
the
materiality
of
information-processing
and
technologies
of communi
cation
{In
the
Cage,
for
instance);
the
corporeality
of
thinking
and
speaking
{What
Maisie
Knew,
for
instance);
the
psychophysics
and
pathologization
of
reading
and
writing
{The
Turn
of
the
Screw,
for
instance).
One
might
further trace the
operations
of the
graphic
unconscious,
une
langue
inconnue of the
body-machine complex,
more
generally,
in the
graphomanias
of Bram Stoker's
Dracula,
for
example,
or in the naturalist mechanics of
writing
in the work of Mark Twain or
Jack
London. But this is
perhaps enough
to indicate what the mediated
intimacies of the
visible,
the
legible,
and the
bodily
look
like,
in the
make-up
of
persons
and
representations
from the turn of the
century
on.
Cornell University
NOTES
1 Dornt
Cohn,
Transparent
Minds: Narrative Modes
for Telling
Consciousness in Fiction
(Princeton,
N.J., 1978) ;
Mark
Seltzer,
Henry fames
and the Art
of
Power
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1984).
2 On the
subject
as the
subject
of
representation
and the
precipitate
of
processes
of
identification,
see Mikkel
Borchjacobsen,
The Freudian
Subject
(Stanford, Calif., 1988).
3 Martin
Jay,
Downcast
Eyes:
The
Denigration of
Vision in
Twentieth-Century
French
Thought
(Berkeley,
1993); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of
the Observer. On Vision and
Modernity
in the
Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990).
See also Vision and
Visua?ty,
ed. Hal Foster
(Seattle, 1988).
4 Gilles
Deleuze,
"Postscript
on the Societies of
Control," October,
59
(1992), 3-7;
Michel
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28
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Serres,
"Panoptic Theory,"
in The Limits
of Theory,
ed. Thomas M.
Kavanagh
(Stanford,
Calif., 1989), pp.
45-46.
5
Jane
Buckwalter,
"Securing Shopping
Centers for Inner
Cities,"
Urban Land
(1987), p.
24.
6 Mike
Davis,
City of Quartz: Excavating
the Future in Los
Angeles
(New York, 1990), pp.
242
43.
7 Mark
Seltzer,
Bodies and Machines
(New York, 1992).
8 Michel
Foucault,
"The
Subject
and
Power,"
Critical
Inquiry,
8
(1982),
777-95.
9
Henry James,
"The Lesson of
Balzac,"
in The House
of
Fiction:
Essays
on the Novel
by Henry
fames,
ed. Leon Edel
(London, 1957;
rpt. Westport,
Conn., 1973), pp.
78,
77.
10 See
Seltzer,
Henry fames
and the Art
of
Power, pp.
88-93.
11 Friedrich A.
Kitder,
Discourse Networks:
1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif., 1990).
12 Etienne
Jules Marey,
La M?thode
graphique
dan les sciences
exp?rimentales
et
principalement
en
physiologie
et en medicine
(Paris, 1878).
On
Marey's graphic
method,
see Anson
Rabinbach,
The Human Motor:
Energy, Fatigue,
and the
Origins of Modernity
(New York, 1990).
13 Walter
Benjamin,
"On the Mimetic
Faculty,"
in One
Way
Street
(London, 1979).
14 See
my
"Serial Killers
(1),"
Differences:
A
fournal of
Feminist Cultural
Studies,
5
(1993),
92-128;
"Writing Technologies,"
New German
Critique,
57
(1992),
170-81. The
paragraphs
that follow
expand
on the discussions of the
writing
of
writing
in
my
Bodies and Machines
and,
particularly,
on a note on
James
and
writing technologies, pp.
195-97.
15
Angelo Beyerlen,
as
quoted by
Kittler,
Discourse
Networks,
p.
195.
16 See Leon
Edel,
The Master: 1901-1916
(New York, 1972), pp.
9S-94, 360, 366, 127;
Theodora
Bosanquet, Henry fames
at Work
(London, 1924).
17
Bosanquet, p.
248.
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