Abstract
Anti-Jacobin writers in the 1790s were extremely suspicious of the market for cultural commodities. They saw the public consumption of literary texts, political pamphlets, popular journals and philosophical tracts as the means by which a gullible and manipulable audience could be swayed from passivity to the violence and atavism of revolution. In anti-Jacobin discourse the image of the ragged crowd, an aggregation of individualized, serialized subjects, typically signifies a demographic that is impressionable, malleable, fickle in its affiliations, easily distracted, and motivated by the hedonistic laws of monadic pleasure. This crowd, lacking any stable commitment to moral norms, is also a collection of potential consumers awaiting writers, hacks or demagogues prepared to empower or gratify it. Far from embodying any genuine sense of unified and rationally considered political purpose, the crowd is the form in which anti-social individualized desire becomes available to cognition: multiplied by that indeterminate number, the multitude, individual desire takes on its visible manifestation in cataclysmic outbreaks of popular violence.
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Notes
Peter Brooks, ‘Virtue and Terror: The Monk’, ELH, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1973) p. 259.
David Punter, ‘1789: the Sex of Revolution’, Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 24 (Summer 1982) p. 206.
See Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983) pp. 219–23.
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See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978) pp. 1–49, where Foucault articulates these ideas with regard to the discursive production of sex in the nineteenth century.
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On the Minerva Press see Clery, pp. 135–40.
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© 1999 Andrew McCann
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McCann, A. (1999). Gothic Consumption: Populism, Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading. In: Cultural Politics in the 1790s. Romanticism In Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376977_5
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