Abstract
This chapter shows how the ubiquity of technological stimulation was considered pathologically dangerous by pseudo-scientific thinkers at the end of the century including Max Nordau, Georg Simmel, and Benjamin Kidd. Rather than the simultaneous totality idealised by panoramic discourses, simultaneity in Nordau’s thought quickly disintegrates and fragments as experience becomes compartmentalised through technological mediation. Whereas in previous chapters individual texts are shown to make uncritical use of multiple visual discourses to articulate multifaceted experiences, here attention turns to authors who deconstruct hybridity. Rather than daydreams prompted by technological visions (as in Chap. 6), the technological becomes the cause of degenerative nightmares perhaps most evocatively (and famously) described by Nordau.
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Notes
- 1.
In Nietzsche’s account, the removal of perceiving subjective self from objective reality which takes place in dreams is a relic of “primeval humanity” so that “in dreams we all resemble this savage […] in sleep and dreams we repeat once again the curriculum of earlier mankind.” This is, interestingly, a complete reversal of the logic of cause and effect so that remembered perceptions (sensory effects with physical causes) are reiterated in sleep and, from this, the dreaming mind infers totally new causes. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, introduced by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–18.
- 2.
The seminal text here is, of course, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1967, repr. 1999) , 211–44. Furthermore, T.J. Clark’s study of impressionist painting and Paris gives a compelling account of consumerism and artistic endeavour. See T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Erika Rappaport gives a useful primer on emergent methods of selling to the masses in the late nineteenth century in her essay, “A New Era of Shopping,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (London: Routledge, 2004), 151–64. Further useful studies include Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990); Sara Thornton, Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 3.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 153–4.
- 4.
Whilst several decades old, Marshall Berman’s account of the ways in which scholarship, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, conceived of modernism and modernisation remains an excellent elucidation of this. See Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), esp. 23–36.
- 5.
See, for example, Richard Lehan’s book which contrasts modernism with a more positivist “naturalist” view of reality. Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
- 6.
Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann’s edited collection gives a range of interventions into this dichotomy. Utopian Spaces of Modernism British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 7.
Although, as the dates of the cited material make clear, this is not a clear-cut chronology. It is, however, reasonable to consider this discourse of anxiety as generally intensifying as time progressed.
- 8.
Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind (New York: Appleton, 1880), 129.
- 9.
The novel’s concern for reification and fragmentation has been examined elsewhere. For example, Andrew H. Miller considers the novel’s iconic dust-heaps as a part of a wider “economic rationalization of the society” discussed in the novel. Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 125.
- 10.
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 20–1. Subsequent in-text page citations are to the Penguin edition cited earlier.
- 11.
Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (London: Duke University Press, 1999).
- 12.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1989), 214.
- 13.
It was used, for instance, to detect forged bank notes. See Anon. “The Stereoscope and Forged Bank Notes,” Edinburgh Evening News, 27 March 1886, 2.
- 14.
For examples, see Anon. “Explosion at a Magic-Lantern Entertainment,” Edinburgh Evening News, 30 December 1881, 2; Anon. “Fatal Magic Lantern Explosion,” Evening Telegraph, 23 February 1884, 3; Anon. “Another Magic Lantern Explosion,” Evening Telegraph, 20 March 1884, 2; Anon. “Panic at a Magic-Lantern Entertainment,” Edinburgh Evening News, 2 December 1886, 2.
- 15.
Anon. “Advertising by Magic Lantern,” Edinburgh Evening News, 26 January 1883, 4.
- 16.
Anon., untitled, Coventry Herald and Free Press, 17 January 1890, 5.
- 17.
Anon. “Romance of a Magic Lantern,” Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 12 July 1884, 9.
- 18.
Anon. “Romance of a Magic Lantern,” 9.
- 19.
Bain, Senses and the Intellect, 543.
- 20.
Richard Henry Horne, “A Time for All Things,” Household Words, 22 March 1851, 616.
- 21.
Anon. “Popular Literature,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1859, 102.
- 22.
Peter Bürger gives an indication of the extent of concerns about subjectivity and textual claims to truth and reality in his discussion of naturalism and aestheticism, remarking that the aestheticist critique of naturalism stemmed from the loss of a clear relational “dialectic between subject and object,” resulting from nineteenth-century developments of capitalism. See Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 97. See also the discussion of Daston and Galison in the next chapter. Daston and Galison’s book Objectivity provides an excellent account of the role of machines in the subjective-objective divide.
- 23.
Anon. “Popular Literature,” Blackwood’s, 102.
- 24.
Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 28.
- 25.
Anon. “More Sport in the Wilds of Uist,” All the Year Round, 18 December 1869, 65–6.
- 26.
William Henry Wills, “The Golden City,” Household Words, 29 June 1850, 313.
- 27.
Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Physiologist’s Wife,” in Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (1894) repr. online by University of Adelaide 2016. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/round-the-red-lamp/index.html.
- 28.
Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 7.
- 29.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 12–13.
- 30.
Le Bon, The Crowd, 49.
- 31.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolutions, trans. Bernard Miall (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 20; 15.
- 32.
Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolutions, 27.
- 33.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. by Daphne Hardy (London: Penguin, 1982), 128.
- 34.
For a detailed discussion of the broader discourse of degeneration that began in the 1850s and intensified towards the end of the century, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 155–221.
- 35.
Anon. “Popular Pessimism,” Morning Post, 18 January 1896, 3.
- 36.
The task of “the modern pessimist” being, according to one critical journalist, “to trace on the most slender evidence the decay in his own generation of some recognised virtue of its predecessors,” it came in many guises. Anon. “Modern Pessimism,” Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 26 December 1891.
- 37.
For a discussion of Enlightenment histories and progress, see John Zammito, “Philosophy of History: The German Tradition from Herder to Marx,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), ed. Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 817–21.
- 38.
A lecture given at the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society as early as 1863 considered degeneration as a series of racial and biological deteriorations. This was met with applause and comments from the audience giving anecdotal evidence to support the theory. See Anon. “Degeneration and its Causes,” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 4 February 1863, 4.
- 39.
Anon. “Modern Pessimism,” Pall Mall Gazette, 3 September 1880, 888.
- 40.
Max Nordau, The Interpretation of History, trans. M.A. Hamilton (London: Rebman, 1910), 17.
- 41.
Nordau, Degeneration, 42.
- 42.
This inversely relates to Leo Marx’s notion of the “technological sublime” which is a harmonisation between people and nature via the interceding spectacle of technological power (replacing the natural power that inspired the early Romantics). See Marx, Machine in the Garden, 195.
- 43.
Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 95–6.
- 44.
Anon. “Is the Present Pessimism Justified?,” Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 25 October 1886, 4.
- 45.
See Altick, The Shows of London, 133–4. This is discussed in Chap. 2.
- 46.
Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 131–2.
- 47.
Dickens’ observer also comes with a context of urban sketch literature that was popular at the time and, in many ways, corresponded with the controlled comprehensive view of the static panorama. Dickens, himself, contributed to this genre with Sketches by Boz (1836) which, a decade after Pierce Egan’s influential Life in London (1820–1821), continued the tradition of pseudo-documentary writing for “fire-side heroes and sprightly maidens who may feel a wish to ‘see Life’ without receiving a scratch.” Pierce Egan, Life in London, or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. And his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, ill. I.R. & G. Cruikshank (London: Chatto and Windus, 1870), 47.
- 48.
Smith, Comic Tales and Sketches, 106–7.
- 49.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 35.
- 50.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 19–20. Similarly, in 1885–1886, Nietzsche wrote in his notebook: “Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 262.
- 51.
See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 26.
- 52.
The OED traces the use of the word “biosphere” back to 1899. See “biosphere, n.” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). [accessed: 6 December 2016].
- 53.
Morton, 489.
- 54.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. Edward A. Shils, in Social Sciences III Selections and Selected Readings, 14th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948), repr. in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324.
- 55.
Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 324.
- 56.
Nordau, Degeneration, 245–6.
- 57.
Interestingly, this gave rise to a kind of metaphorical telephony to connect the different fragments of new media. Richard Menke points towards fictional representations of the telephone as “kind of imaginative switchboard” which stands as a figure for new media as a system, operating as “a way of connecting new technologies to a set of inferior print forms.” Richard Menke, “The Medium is the Media: Fictions of the Telephone in the 1890s,” Victorian Studies, 55, no. 2 (2013): 214.
- 58.
Nordau, Degeneration, 247. Elsewhere, Nordau claims that nerve cells have “capacity of preserving an image” which allows us to recognise similar stimuli and thus make sense of the external world, so that “Memory is therefore the first condition of normal brain activity” (47–48).
- 59.
For a detailed discussion of attention as a fundamental concept of the second half of the nineteenth century, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Crary locates Nordau within a broader scientific and philosophical discourse of attentiveness (14–17).
- 60.
For a discussion of this, see Iwan Rhys Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electrical Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 33, no. 4 (2000): 455–475. For more on the telegraph, see Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 312–333.
- 61.
Kai Eriksson, “Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks,” The European Legacy, 10, no. 6 (2005): 596.
- 62.
To this end, Judith Halberstam continues the metaphor of the body, contending: “Othering in Gothic fiction scavenges from many discursive fields and makes monsters out of bits and pieces of science and literature: Gothic monsters are over-determined, and open therefore to numerous interpretations, precisely because they transform the fragments of otherness into one body.” Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’,” Victorian Studies, 36, no. 3 (1993): 337.
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Potter, J. (2018). The Networked World: The Psychopathology of Simultaneity. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_7
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