ATTENTION
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8. THEATER, THE DIALECTIC (OF THE INDIVIDUAL), THE FICTION (OF SELFHOOD), TYPES OF TYPES
OUR THEMES CIRCLE LIKE MODEL planets—like the automata of monks and Moors and Jews and Nativity livestock orbiting the faces of the astronomical clocks in Strasbourg, Dijon, Prague, Venice, Messina, and Bern, as death’s skeleton—a japing jacquemart in cloaked disguise—tolls the bell to rouse the skull from its dreaming.
Or else—curtain up—consider the figures’ themes: statuesque allegories for Beauty, Wisdom, Intellect, and Truth perched atop columns in the midst of a misty garden that might also be a cemetery. They’re nude, or they aren’t because they’re not real, or they are real, just not cognizant of their nudity. Other figures are stilled toward the rear in a tableau vivant, still others painted onto, as, the backdrop: staffage. The cemetery is a set. This is a theater and you are an audience.
Music starts, a march for flute and drum, and dancers enter, in costumes immediately “read”: merchants, farmers, shepherds—sheep. Others rush onstage as if refugees from war—this ruined cemetery must’ve been a battlefield. The dancers are survivors, dancing because they’ve survived, in historically accurate wardrobe and steps. They move before the statues in a mood that would’ve been propitiatory in Antiquity, but here is merely instructive—they’re instructing their divinities.
In time, the statues are also moving: first an arm; then another arm; legs are uprooted from their pedestals; plaster turns to muscle; marble turns to the marbling of fat. Finally even the flesh-colored backdrop falls into flesh, and all the paintings come alive and join the living statues to twirl around and around like they’re signing their autographs in air, while the pit orchestra decrescendos into a dirge.
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IT’S ALWAYS PREFERABLE TO go to the theater than to discuss dialectics. Especially if the hope is to better understand “the individual,” and if the boulevards outside the theaters have turned into proscenia themselves—theaters of rebellion, venues of debate over the authorization of rights (whether they’re natural, or given by God, earned, or granted by state, whether they’re transferable not just between France and America, for instance, but universally). Individuality has become the newest self, or the newest proxy for the self’s understanding. If a thing cannot be looked at or listened to directly, other approaches have to be found: duction, analogy, metonymy (part for the whole/whole for the part), mimesis (incarnation in another).
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) defined the tripartite dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; the philosophical analogue of a systasis in the arts: in music, the sonata’s “exposition” finding complication in the “development,” only to resolve itself again in the home key, with the “recapitulation”; in painting, the X grid framing the resolutions of “length” and “width,” whose intersection disturbs with a false appraisal of apex, or “depth”; while in drama, the three-act play—which introduces the protagonist, complicates his or her actions with the reactions of an antagonist, then leaves them both to their respective, comedic and tragic, conclusions—is too paltry a parody or satire of the structure of daily life to even consider as phenomenological. Editing Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) shifted the weight of the antithesis from a counter-idea, or countervailing consciousness, to “reality”—the individual implicated in an empirically shared awareness. The world as it is would be the veritable development or depth of human experience—as the keys don’t modulate but crash dissonantly; the counterpoint tangles into chordal knots; and with smeary Prussian blues the dewy plot of a fête galante dims into the dämmerung.
Hegel regarded history as the progress of a person becoming himself by dint of testing his theses, or self, against reality’s antitheses, or everything that wasn’t the self, which process would force both to revise their beings toward greater, or higher, or otherwise tralatitious synthesis. However, only the self can be conscious that every grouping to which it belongs is experiencing this same process, symbiotically: the nation-state, the empire. Russia strains to become more Russian; Germany to be better at being German.*1
Each individual, in what he chooses to see and hear, in what he consumes, opposes himself to all the forces not himself and hopefully profits from the bargain. Life, then, can become a measure or frame, an event of self-composition, or curation. The mind can be a Wunderkammer, a museum of the self, where the exhibits change by the whim or the visitor. Which is also to suggest, in depressing terms, that when you become an individual, you risk becoming more or less than an individual: a parochial citizen, a nationalist, or just a mobile advertisement for your own “personality.”
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HEGEL INTUITED AN ABSOLUTISM to be sought in the synthesis of subjective experience and objective world. It was left to Mozart and Watteau to attain it. Goethe and Voltaire tried their bests. Ideals like the subjective and objective, the true and false, as conceptions distinct from “fiction”—all were better dealt with in concerti (the piano or violin resisting integration into the reality of the orchestra), or portraiture (the figure either actually Pierrot, or just an actor playing Pierrot), or in the ductive and empirical languages of philosophy.
Instead, eighteenth-century literature was best concerned with identities—which might be defined, in a Hegelian sense, as the thoughts by which a person opposes knowledge. Such is the plot of the coming-of-age novel, in which a handsome young man—typically spurned by a handsome young woman who’s opted for marrying another, or death—sets out to find alternative meaning in life, which means, of course, himself. The Bildungsroman is often a closeted Künstlerroman or artist’s novel, as its protagonists are often the narrators (first person), and the narration frequently proceeds by letters addressed to friends or diary entries strictly for self, all of whom are metafictional proxies for the reader. Metafiction, literature conscious of its own literariness, is the belated sibling to canon and fugue, and mirror-play mise en abyme. But unlike in music or painting, autoawareness in literature must be accomplished in words, and so is not just acknowledged but also critiqued. Characters assume their own lives, quite apart from the stated intentions of their authors, and assume to comment on authorial plans and offer alternative prospects; their behaviors—obreptions, subreptions, editing peer characters (even if due only to the opportunities of epistolary structure), and passing among texts (Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, appearing as guests at a ball in John Kidgell’s The Card, 1755)—none are difficult to read as drafts of equivalent liberties in life.
If Enlightenment existence took on many of the qualities of a book, or of the theater, misconduct in life had more immediate, social if not legal, consequences. The Church had told you how to live, feudalism told you how to live. You were a lord, good for you. You were a vassal, too bad; now go take a stroll in the Tiergarten (formerly the hunting ground of the Electors of Brandenburg, opened to the public in 1742), or in the Tuileries (formerly the private garden of the Medicis, a public park in 1792), money in the pocket.
Now you were liberated. An inhabitant of the British Empire had to settle for being an alternate definition of “subject,” while the French individuel, between the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleon, went from meaning “indivisible,” as in numerically singular, to “separateness,” or “distinction.” You were a parishioner, an employee, and perhaps even a citizen too, if you were lucky enough to be French or an American Caucasian. You were lost. Not you specifically but also you specifically. That was the point. You were a character protesting that you were an author protesting that you were only you, ink and paper or of materials equally fragile. “Individualism” struggles into English in 1840, courtesy of the translation of the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. De Tocqueville contrasts Individualisme with Égoïsme—the former a “mature,” “calm” severance, the latter “a passionate and exaggerated
love of self.”*2 The book’s first translator, Henry Reeve, appends a note to this new term—individualistically: “I adopt the expression of the original, however strange it may seem to the English ear, partly because it illustrates the remark on the introduction of general terms into democratic language which was made in a preceding chapter, and partly because I know of no English word exactly equivalent to the expression. The chapter itself defines the meaning attached to it by the author.”
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ATTENTION IS NOT JUST what you consider, but who you consider yourself to be. The defining feature of democracy is not the poetry of its liberties; rather, it’s that such liberties encourage people to live as though the heroes of novels, the novels of their lives. But not everyone can be a Young Werther, let alone a Goethe. Few deserve to be even Eckermanns. The majority of every age is just a head at the rear of a mob, intact though disconcerted, between the execution of Charles I (1649) and the guillotine slaughter of la Terreur (1793–94).
Within that span, London and Paris especially became as crowded as their fictions—as supporting characters and their descendants rushed to divert service from a lord or God to the Lord our God of capital; as they apprenticed themselves to masters, joined guilds, and escaped their births; as they died and were buried by a different demographic than the one by which they were raised. Society required an abridgment for this—an abbreviatory technique that communicated the essence of a person with the efficiency of the antiquated sumptuary decrees (in Elizabethan England only the royal family could wear “any silk of the color of purple,” and only knights and barons could wear “spurs, swords, rapiers, daggers, skeans, woodknives or hangers, buckles or girdles”; while the color yellow—used in hats and badges—identified Jews in the German cities and throughout Austro-Hungary, until it was retired by Joseph II only in 1781).
With the collapse of feudalism, fixed rank determined by heredity became changeable position determined by commerce—each position to its persuasion. How much you had was who you were and how much you were both. Your politics, to say nothing of your free speech, would follow.
The ancient estates would be machined into “classes,” and though by the time of Karl Marx (1818–83) they’d manifested as credible gradations, defining everyone from bourgeois burgher to proletarian, their origins weren’t in industry, but in literary efficiency: in David Ricardo (1772–1823), a Sephardic Jew turned British economist, applying the abstract notion of “labor” to the humanity that made concrete, steel, and textiles.
Individuality, by contrast, was a private matter: You might be an individual to your spouse, or family, or intimate correspondents, but in public you were subsumed. What followed was a reengagement of typing.
In the theater of Antiquity, masks denoted the roles. Aristophanes developed the boastful alazon, his ironic sidekick the eiron, and the fool, the bomolochos. Theophrastus’s The Characters lists thirty varieties of character: Lalia, the Talkative; Logopoiia, the Fabricator; Authadeia, the Unsociable; Anaisthesia, the Absent-Minded. Menander wrote plays predicated on types: The Heiress, The Misogynist. Plautus’s depictions of miserliness and lechery—his clever slave, servus callidus; foolish slave, servus stultus; and swaggart soldier, Miles Gloriosus—developed into the Pierrots and Harlequins (the servants, or zanni), the Pantaloni and Dottori (the elderly masters, or vecchi), the bounding Capitani and young innamorati, of the Commedia dell’Arte. Giovanni Boccaccio (ca. 1350) and Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1390) furthered this typification through political parody or satire. Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) found individuality more readily, writing stock roles but for a recurring cast that would—typically—subvert them. The figure of the alazon/Miles Gloriosus reappeared after Waterloo as the fictional Napoleonic soldier Nicolas Chauvin, patriarch of “chauvinism,” a French patriot before a partisan of gender. The courtesans of Antiquity and the Commedia took positions as ingénues and soubrettes in the music hall and opera, their roles essentially puppetry—trite marionettes, strings timeworn but still attached.
Meanwhile, “scientific” characterization—“typology”—comprises an altogether more sinister literature. Throughout Antiquity, literary and scientific systems of type were patently the same. With genotype inconceivable, phenotype was all, including personality. Hippocrates codified personality as being influenced by fluids, or “humors”: blood, yellow and black bile, phlegm. Galen split the human temperaments into hot/cold and dry/wet, based on interpolations of the elements: Earth, Water, Air, Fire. Choleric men have broad jaws, sharp noses, compact builds; ambitious, active, dominant, they become politicians, generals, murderers. Melancholic men have square or rectangular heads, thin lips, lean physiques; passive, submissive, they’re independent but fragile, artists to a fault. Phlegmatic men are stout, dimpled, florid; kind, affectionate, but weak and shy, they can be trained into wonderful husbands. But sanguine men might be the most desirable: their heads oval, builds moderate, hands strong but delicate, hair ample; they’re sensitive, sociable, though easily distracted, and at risk of becoming alcoholics and smokers.
Combining rationalist science with superstition, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) suggested that animals could bequeath to their descendants the abilities they’d individually acquired, thereby improving the species. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) adapted himself to this position and applied it to his theory of “transmutation,” a term he inherited from alchemy. One of Darwin’s grandsons, Charles (1809–82), never explicitly denied the inheritance of acquired traits, but chose to address himself instead to the processes of natural selection. It was left to another of Darwin’s grandsons, Francis Galton, to apply Lamarckism to humanity, in the hopes of ascertaining whether genius could be nurtured into nature and passed along, while insanity and debility eradicated. In founding his science of eugenics, in 1883, Galton compiled genealogies of accomplished families, including his own. He studied twins sundered and raised in different environments, and experimented with graphology, phrenology, anthropometry, directed fertility, and succeeded in identifying, by superimposition of photographs, the composite or “average” “criminal,” “tubercular,” “cripple,” and “Jew.” Physician John Hunter (1728–93) believed Africans—“negroids”—were white at birth, but became blistered by the desert. Physician Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) believed “negroidism” to be a form of benign but heritable leprosy. Ethnologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) identified three races; James Pritchard (1786–1848) seven; Charles Pickering (1805–78) eleven, and Louis Agassiz (1807–73) twelve. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte of Buffon (1707–88), prophesied evolution if only by promulgating its opposite: a theory of devolution, which posited blackness as the degenerate result of poor diet and housing.
While racists charted pigmentation, a more superficial skin was being retailored. From 1801, fashion was produced by a machine that, after it was threaded, didn’t require much humanity of any color for its operation. Joseph Marie Charles dit Jacquard’s programmable loom, which encoded textile patterns by perforations on cards, was the warp and weft of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (described 1837), a contraption that allowed data to be encrypted on cards, and calculated. Babbage’s machine, in turn, was the prototype of the Hollerith Tabulator, the human loom or punch-card machine that made its debut with the 1890 United States census. Because its inventor, Herman Hollerith (1860–1929), had been allocated the use of Treasury Department boxes, he commissioned cards the same size as paper bills (3.25 by 7.375 inches, at the time). Each person was allotted a card, and each card was marked as that person was marked; holes punched, keyed, to clarify every miscegenation: “mulatto, quadroon, octoroon,” “crippled, maimed, deformed.” Hollerith censuses followed in Canada, Russia, Austria, and Germany. By the first Nazi census of 1933, the textile industry had stitched its last brown shirt, and by the second of 1939, it was producing red armbands with black swastikas and white armbands
with blue stars. The yellow-star breast patches followed. The Tabulator went on to schedule the rail deportations east into Poland, in a strange rearrival at origins: Hollerith claimed his device had been inspired by a trip he took through the American West, by the train conductors validating their passengers’ tickets. The first hole the point of departure, the last just a pit, a mass grave.
*1 The development of a political entity recapitulates the development of its citizens, of humanity. This concept of Hegel’s friend Friedrich von Schelling (1775–1854) was inverted and transposed into biological terms by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919): “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; the development of an individual organism recapitulates the development of its species. Haeckel’s biologizing was taken as evidence that every recapitulation was directed toward betterment or perfection. Subsequently humanity would convince itself it was able to manipulate the process: By practicing grafting and pedigree breeding, on itself, each improvement would mean more glory for the Volk.
*2 De Tocqueville writes, in his first translation: “Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart. Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.”