the graphic unconscious: a response
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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 .
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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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