These parallel evolutions of print, painting, and music were surely central to the much greater attention paid to the notion of culture in the nineteenth century, and in particular to a basic transformation of the word’s meaning highlighted by Raymond Williams. Whereas culture and its equivalents in other languages through the eighteenth century referred chiefly to a process, the cultivation of the mind through education and exposure to the arts (modeled on the improvement of the earth in agriculture), the term now signified the objectified realm of objects and activities to which it still points today. The people who established this meaning in the nineteenth century were clearly aware of its connection to the more palpable and visible sphere whose rise we have been chronicling. When Matthew Arnold characterized culture as “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” he added that its ability to give vitality to society was most clearly demonstrated in moments “when there is a national glow of life and thought” that permeates the whole: the benefits to be derived from the repository of culture depended on its diffusion and by implication on means being available to effect it.
By the end of the century Georg Simmel would recognize the public and material presence of intellectual and aesthetic objects as a characteristic feature of modern culture, noting that over time ideas and images came to be increasingly embodied in “objective” or “supra-individual forms: books, art, ideal concepts such as fatherland, general culture, the manifestation of life in conceptual and aesthetic images, the knowledge of a thousand interesting and significant things.” Simmel, not unlike Arnold, valued the realm of culture for its contrasts with material life, emphasizing that one person’s enjoyment of its contents did not deprive others of access to them.
The more values are transposed into such objective forms, the more room there is in them, as in the house of God, for every soul. Perhaps the wilderness and embitterment of modern competition would be completely unbearable were it not accompanied by this growing objectification … [which] contributes to the noblest and most ennobling result in the historical process: to build a world that may be acquired without conflict and mutual repression, to possess values whose acquisition and enjoyment by one person does not exclude that of another, but opens the door a thousand times for him to acquire such values as well.24
We will see later that Simmel himself regarded this as a one-sidedly optimistic assessment, and we will need to consider what it left out; for now we note only his testimony that the strong awareness of culture as an objective realm by the end of the century depended on its acquiring the more public and palpable forms whose appearance and evolution I have sought to describe here.
Cultural autonomy and ungovernable private experience: literature and letters
This movement of cultural activities toward forms of organization and relations to their publics that were no longer shaped by patrons and authorities was accompanied by assertions of culture’s autonomy, its capacity to make its own rules. To show that the phenomenon was general across the whole field of culture, we look first for a moment at art and music, before turning to its specific embodiment in literature and letters. As settings expanded where painting and sculpture could be viewed not as accompaniments to churchly or courtly rituals, or as tributes to princely or noble status, but in a manner that gave prominence to the objects for themselves, there developed an awareness of what M. H. Abrams has called “art as such.” The notion was adumbrated in the seventeenth century, but it became more prominent in the eighteenth-century locales that encouraged comparison between works, and thus an attitude that asked how well each one fulfilled goals specific to creative activity, rather than some extra-aesthetic aim. Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790 theorized the judgment of taste in just these terms: when we say that something is beautiful, he argued, we mean that its way of being what it is fulfills its own purpose, independently of its reference to anything outside.25 Max Weber regarded Kant’s formulation of aesthetic self-sufficiency as an exemplary instance of the overall “rationalization” of modern life that allowed different spheres of action and theory to develop independently of each other, free from the control formerly exercised by overarching religious ideas and institutions. In the terms we are proposing here this replaced teleocratic principles with autonomous ones. The social dimension of this independence was the development of an institutionalized “aesthetic sphere,” a “historically unique network,” as Richard Wolin describes it, composed of “artists and persons of taste, whose interactions are mediated by a new series of public institutions” – museums, galleries, libraries, and periodicals.26
In music a similar claim to autonomy took the form of an insistence that compositions were “works” in an emphatic sense, enclosed, self-regulating entities that derived special value from their inner coherence. The notion of musical pieces as works in this sense has become so common since the nineteenth century that Lydia Goehr has justifiably chided modern composers, critics, and historians for inappropriately imposing it on certain of their predecessors, for whom it mattered much less whether particular instruments or voices executed a given line, how a melody was ornamented, or whether a composer re-used material from one piece in another; often it was non-musical purposes that determined these choices. The change did not come all at once, since aspects of it were developed by Bach, Couperin, and other early eighteenth-century composers who still retained the older practices, but the idea received much stronger expression in the years around 1800, when E. T. A. Hoffmann insisted that “the genuine artist lives only for the work,” and cares about nothing so much as being true to what gives it its special being.27 A work in this sense was the exemplary product of the figure Kant called the “genius,” the creative poet or artist whose special powers at once provided liberation from inherited and traditional rules and allowed such a person to generate and follow new ones. Genius was a universal quality, but it had always to be rooted in the individuality that distinguished one person from others, and only works whose essence lay in this individuality could be called products of genius. For this reason Kant refused to recognize scientists as geniuses, since even the great Newton gave expression to the way the world was rather than to his own nature; his achievement might equally have been effected by some other person. The composer who best exemplified this power to nineteenth-century listeners was Beethoven; we will come in a moment to the ways by which listeners sought to enter into the powers thought to be lodged in his music.
These notions encouraged a new exaltation of art and artists. Kant’s belief that a genius, by following only laws generated out of his own being, came as close as any human being could to transcending the material cause-and-effect relations that keep the rest of us from realizing the moral freedom to which humanity is called, was amplified by romantics into a view that raised poets and painters above everyone else. The critic W. H. Wackenröder demanded that “galleries become ‘temples’ where, in silent humility and in heart-raising seclusion, one could take pleasure in marveling at the greatest artists as the highest of earthly beings.”28 Such views set the bar for giving artists their due very high, so that we should perhaps not be too harsh on ordinary people, bourgeois or not, who failed to come up to it. Artworks now acquired a new and specifically aesthetic aura, different from the one that Walter Benjamin associated with their earlier ritual functions and settings. This more specifically modern aura could only shine forth when works were removed from contexts where they served “higher” purposes into ones organized to recognize and promote aesthetic value itself.
This changed situation of culture presented both new opportunities and new problems to those who drew on it, and it is these that will occupy us for the rest of this chapter. Literature provides our first point of entry into them. One powerful eighteenth-century testimony to the autonomy claimed for writing and reading as against the authorities previously entrusted with regulating them was Denis Diderot’s enthusiasm for the positive effects that the sentimental novels of Samuel Richardso
n, Pamela and Clarissa, could have on the development of their readers. When one of Richardson’s characters behaves in a particular way, Diderot declared,
one pictures him [or her], one puts oneself in his [or her] place or at his side (on se met à sa place ou à ses côtés), one fires up [on se passionne] for or against him: if he is virtuous, one unites oneself with his role, if he is evil, one draws away from him indignantly … Often have I said while reading him: ‘I would willingly give my life to be like a certain personage, I would rather be dead than be that other one.’
In a remarkable essay, Jean Starobinski has pointed to the important moment in cultural history marked by this notion of “putting oneself in the place” of literary characters. Made explicit by Diderot but implicitly practiced by other readers, it asserted a new relationship between literature and moral self-formation, giving to secular and novelistic materials and the feelings they evoke a role in shaping personal being that had earlier been reserved to religious and didactic texts and precepts. Diderot gave expression to the Enlightenment concern to foster the moral autonomy of individuals, their capacity to regulate their behavior free of outside direction, and thus also to set the terms of their interaction with the objects and feelings that nurtured their moral formation.29
In fact, however, Diderot was not always so confident about these things as his effusive praise for Richardson’s novels suggests; at other times he was anxious or suspicious about the ideas and feelings generated by individuals’ interactions with real or fictional others. He titled one of his plays Is he good? Is he wicked? [Est-il-bon? Est-il méchant?], a question rendered unanswerable by the revelation that what draws the story’s main character to help others is the pleasure he takes in making them beholden and thus subordinate to himself. As with the couple at the center of Rousseau’s Julie, persons moved by feelings toward others they regard as virtuous may be exposed to an undertow that carries them in equivocal directions. If this is what humans are like then novels such as Pamela that picture the vulnerability of a young woman to the seductive wiles of more powerful men (even though the story is about her successful resistance) may stir up anything but virtuous feelings.
The dilemmas this created for the expanding realm of literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are nowhere clearer than in the relationship between the developments that made printed texts of all kinds so easily available and one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of moral and cultural anxiety, the widespread fear about masturbation that spread from the middle of the eighteenth century. As both Thomas Laqueur and Isabel Hull have shown in remarkable studies, the near-panic about masturbation that lasted into the twentieth century (and still affects people to some degree today) was a specifically modern phenomenon, arising and spreading during the eighteenth century (the most powerful alarm bell was rung by Samuel Tissot’s book L’Onanisme in 1760), and largely independent of earlier religious and communal attempts to regulate sexual behavior. More important in our context, both these writers show that the worries about the harms people inflicted on themselves through “self-abuse” were intricately tied up with awareness about the growing importance of relations to distant people and objects in individual lives, and with the spread of printed materials as a vehicle of such relations.
One thing that made the mounting terror modern was that writers on the subject often associated masturbation with a quality regarded as a great virtue in Enlightenment culture, namely imagination, the very faculty that enabled readers like Diderot to “put themselves in the place” of others. Imagination allowed people to expand the range of their associations and achieve independence from the narrow limits of their lives, but since it was directed toward objects that had no physical presence, it opened the way to the danger Goethe once described as “slipping into the seductive allurements of uncontrolled fancy.” Masturbation was regarded as so dangerous because it had just this quality, allowing a person who engaged in it to enjoy any real or fictional partner, expanding his or her range of pleasure and power, but in a way that required no actual social or material relationship, no dependence on either real people or the conditions of establishing actual ties with them. Such a way of orienting oneself toward others threatened individuals and society from late in the eighteenth century as never before, Laqueur argues, because old ways of anchoring life to a transcendent structure were losing their force in favor of a moral order that rested on whatever resources of reason and feeling humans could bring to bear on constructing it. Masturbation rose up as “the vice of individuation for a world in which the old ramparts against desire had crumbled,” the exemplary evil of “an age that valued desire, pleasure, and privacy but was fundamentally worried about how, or if, society could mobilize them.”30 Both Hull and Laqueur demonstrate the place of distant relations, especially literary ones, in this complex; it is well-illustrated by a passage the former cites from a German comment of 1801 about modern newspapers: “The kind of happiness that many newspaper readers enjoy has only been available to Europeans in the past century. [It consists of] sailing on the wings of fantasy out of their small civil [bürgerliche] and domestic sphere and into the great theater, and there playing in their minds the roles of a main actor, a public speaker, a statesman, a legislator, a hero.” The kinds of relations to others that made masturbation appear so dangerous entered into people’s lives in just the same way, through printed materials, both texts and images.31
An important portion of these materials was composed of the growing body of writing about masturbation itself. The masturbation literature was part of the Enlightenment project of improving life through spreading information about dangers and remedies of all kinds, and in particular of the belief that social and moral betterment could be fostered by publicity and discussion. Writings intended to publicize the perils of masturbation resembled novels such as Julieand Pamela in that large parts of them consisted of letters, real or made-up, in this case from people who reported on their experiences or fears, on the practice’s bad effects on their health, or on how some treatment (not uncommonly offered for sale by writers or editors) had helped them. Like novel readers (of whom Rousseau’s admirers provide the most famous but by no means the only case), readers of books on masturbation wrote to the authors and communicated with each other through them. As Hull notes, such groups of readers and writers were part of the modern search for self-improvement by way of formal and informal exchanges, a practice exemplified by the literary and patriotic societies, masonic lodges, and coffee houses that were important vehicles of Enlightenment.32
By its resemblance to these other projects of self-improvement, however, the masturbation literature revealed how much all of them were threatened by the uncertainties about the use people made of the expanding stock of publicly available materials. Open discussion of masturbation was presented as a way of increasing understanding about it, and therefore warning people away from a supposed moral and physical danger, but as Laqueur makes clear it was immediately evident that such discussion could not escape being a vehicle for drawing attention to the very practices it aimed to curb. Just because masturbation was a private and secret activity, many people only came to know how widespread it was, and how powerfully it drew others despite the guilt it inspired in them, through the literature intended to condemn and combat it. People learned about masturbation in many ways of course, by themselves or through various others, but private reading played “an essential part in creating the secret vice.”33 In these ways the anxieties about masturbation made evident a central feature of modern moral culture that would mark it through the nineteenth century and beyond. The expanding public sphere provided the frame for an enlarged and unregulated realm of private experience, within which people could invest the objects made available to them with hopes or desires generated inside themselves. Although the reading public was still relatively limited during the eighteenth century, its growth already engendered worries of a kind that would be amplified as the au
dience for books and periodicals (and later film and radio) swelled in the nineteenth century. It was not possible to know either just who the audience would be, or what use people would make of the materials made available to them.
We should not leave this subject however without recognizing that the spaces for private experience the new cultural relations opened up also made room for developments regarded as less problematic. One illustration is the expansion of letter-writing. In a sense most letter-writing was always a private activity but it too took on new and publicly supported-forms during the nineteenth century. What is often regarded as the golden age of correspondence began earlier, in part because of the important role it played in keeping up contacts between family members separated by distance, as well as between friends and business associates. The volume of postal exchange was still limited before the middle of the nineteenth century, however by arrangements that kept rates high and put the burden of paying them on recipients of letters rather than senders; since the former could refuse to pay, some letters were never delivered and the common practice of basing charges on distance kept many people’s exchanges within strict bounds. It was to remedy these defects that cheap postal services were established, with uniform rates for whole countries and payment by senders, who could remain anonymous once stamps and mailboxes came into use.
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