The Graphic Unconscious: A Response

The Graphic Unconscious: A ResponseAuthor(s): Mark SeltzerSource: New Literary History, Vol. 26, No. 1, Narratives of Literature, the Arts, and Memory(Winter, 1995), pp. 21-28Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057262 .

Accessed: 11/05/2014 02:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 192.211.16.106 on Sun, 11 May 2014 02:03:38 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057262?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


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



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



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




"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




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,




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




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




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.



Documents

The Graphic Unconscious: A Response