Veneering Government with Charles DIckens

     In her Mapping the Victorian Social Body, Pamela Gilbert claims that Dickens' Our Mutual Friend displaces the novelist's more famous satire of specific governing institutions onto the all-pervasive, immersive environment of London. Instead of a single, localizable parasitic government figure like Chancery or the Circumlocution Office, we get a metropole of permeable, porous, leaky bodies. This pervasive, uncontainable social ailment radiates from the Thames through its unsanitary tidal flows of sewage and muddy banks. According to Gilbert, such metaphorics exploit a prevalent feature of sanitary discourse: subterranean flows of sewage formed a circulatory system of disease whose heart was the Thames. This vision of the urban social body compelled the construction of the Thames river embankments during the late 1850's and early 1860's.
    Something is missing from Gilbert's account. Any Londoner from that period would wonder, where is the Metropolitan Board of Works? Depending upon one's political inclinations, Gilbert's omission would read like a liberal utopia or dystopia. Or rather, it would read just like Dickens' novel perused rattling about within an omnibus, distracted, preoccupied, and intermittent.
    Not that Gilbert's formal assertions aren't intriguing, especially her claim that Our Mutual Friend is at once hyper-realistic about places while Gothic in its atmospheric placelessness, a tension giving rise to pleasurable disorientation. But what if in this disorientation a grotesque face of government lurks? What if Dickens' once-bellicose satire of institutional authority became so extreme that it vanished into thin air?
    Our Mutual Friend comprises two narrative perspectives, one a past- and one a present-tense third person omniscience. As with Bleak House, the present-tense narration performs much of the novel's satire. Rather than another Chancery or Circumlocution Office, in the satirical narration we get the Veneerings, the epitome of speculative finance's nouveau riche. Ceaseless social climbers, the Vaneerings are Uriah Heep sans "umbleness" ensconced in the nation's ruling classes.
   Dickens introduces us to these social climbers as they throw a dinner party. Of the couple's many guests, "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt" form the center of attention. Typical of this novel's satirical de-individualization of the ruling classes, these figures appear as mere titles, mere occupations – an M.P., an civil engineer, and a Capitalist. Or: the constituents comprising the M.B.W., the very institution building the Thames river embankments.
     So what if the powers at the top of the Thames River Embankment project are sitting at Veneering's table? What matters is how they sit at the table. Reduced to occupations, to their positions within overlapping hierarchical professions, these governing figures are just that, figures not individuals. They are caricatures taken to the a veneered extreme. As mere titles, these figures' power and authority disappears from view. They are, in essence, black boxed. All that matters is their input and output – their eating and their, well, shitting.
    While Gilbert misses this detail, she does because of an instructive reason. Gilbert's omission of the M.B.W. and her subsequent claim that Dickens diffuses mis-goverance across the urban social body results from taking the Veneerings at face value. Veneered into "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt," the novel's governing institution slips from view. Dickens enacts formally the practice of governance performed by the M.B.W.: infrastructure. Infrastructure when working appears as merely input and output, as pipes, sewers, and embankments. Infrastructure in this guise comprises a black box. Like their sewer pipes and river embankments, the agents of the M.B.W. – politicians, engineers, and capitalists – appear in Dickens' novel as infrastructure, as black boxes –– "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt."
   At the Veneerings' table in chapter two, Dickens introduces his readers to a new form of immanent satire, one that turns the obscure, routinized, black-boxing power of infrastructural governance against itself. Yes Our Mutual Friend pursues a trenchant critique of unlocalizable social ills. But it does so by appropriating its routinized form. The threats once posed by Chancery or the Civil Service now pervade the everyday, routine, habitual lives of all Londoners because they have become infrastructure. They have become "a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt." Our Mutual Friend depicts government not as absent, but rather as everywhere. But being everywhere as infrastructure it evaporates into veneer.
 
 

Object-Oriented Dickens?

             This is more or less a short essay I just wrapped up for seminar on Victorian Labor. Other than being about Great Expectations, it has little to do with labor. Rather, it begins to trace what I tentatively call a Dickensian ontology -- which, in closely following Dickens's text, emerges as curiously object-oriented: 

Imploring Pip to keep isolated the moat-surrounded Walworth and the criminal-teeming Little Britain, Mr. Wemmick remarks: “Walworth is one place, and this office is another. Much as the aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is another. They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken in this office” (288, emphasis added). While Wemmick’s petition stems from a desire to separate the personal from the professional (a separation mimicking his employer, Mr. Jaggers’, ceaseless abdication of personal sentiments), his comments point towards a more widespread field of separations. Not only must the personal Walworth be isolated from the professional Little Britain, so too must the persons who inhabit each sphere. Yet, Wemmick’s final sentence further widens the scope of separation. While the modal “must be” hints at the potential collapse of the personal into the professional, Wemmick’s final “none . . . can be” insists on the impossibility of thinking any personal–professional collapse. After all, the sentiments of Walworth are unintelligible to the sentiments of Little Britain.

            Wemmick gives us, on the one hand, a material plane of seemingly tenuous separation, and, on the other hand, a conceptual sphere of irreducible isolation. Simply: things appear able to connect, while thoughts cannot. Yet, Wemmick presupposes not only this dichotomy, but also the conditions of possibility requisite for the collapse of places and persons. Wemmick’s modal “They must not be confounded,” indicates that while Walworth and Little Britain, the Aged P and Mr. Jaggers are equally one and another, they can, potentially, be confounded – thought of as not one and another, but rather one and the same. Only through such confounding thought, Wemmick anxiously argues, can an underlying isolation be mistakenly collapsed. Or, to shift the valence slightly, places and person can be connected only through the medium of thought.

            Wemmick’s implicit ontic claims hint at a larger Dickensian ontology. Once we see the curious isolation–connection model girdering Wemmick’s petition to Pip, we begin to see Great Expectation as teeming with isolated objects connecting with other objects only through the mediation of some third object: Pip serving as a “connubial missile” between his sister and Joe (9); Pip’s fantastic translation of Miss Havisham’s connecting working class with middle class (66-67); Wemmick’s “portable property” yoking former clients to him (199); the “avenging phantom” linking Pip to London’s lumpenproletariat (216); the “oath” ensuring communion between Herbert and Magwitch (336).   

            Given the two constraints I find myself under – Great Expectations’ preponderance of object mediations and a blog format – I will isolate a singular instance of object mediation: Mr. Jaggers' appearance at the Blue Boar. This prolonged yet demarcated scene offers two main advantages. First, Mr. Jaggers can, with relatively little mental agility, be read as emblematic of Dickens’s insistence on the isolation of objects; second, while Mr. Jaggers is fully aligned with the juridical concerns of Great Expectations, he can nevertheless be more easily isolated from the larger social contingencies of the novel, namely class. Like Dickens and his characters elsewhere, I can, with Mr. Jaggers’ entrance, trace an autonomous object’s mediated contact with other equally autonomous objects.

            An unidentified Mr. Jaggers arrives at the Blue Boar amidst a thoroughly one-sided discussion of a recent murder. Immediately isolated from the “that group” of which Pip “was one” (130), Mr. Jaggers is, at first, dimly noticed by Pip as “a strange gentleman,” and then, his presence being made known to the group itself, he appears “as if it were the murderer” (131). As a narrator, Pip sets up a fundamental opposition between Jaggers and the group not simply by marking him out as strange, but by further reducing him to the vague pronoun “it.” Such a nameless and genderless Jaggers stands as an object (an “it”) radically opposed to the group. Out of this second object (the group), Mr. Jaggers enacts his own condensation by separating out Mr. Wopsle as a metonymy for the group. So, instead of a Jaggers–Group opposition we get a Jaggers-Wopsle–Group mediation. Yet, once Wopsle becomes a metonymic mediator between Jaggers and the group, he also becomes an autonomous object by immediately establishing an opposition between himself and Jaggers (“‘without having the honour of your acquaintance’”), an opposition (Jaggers–Wopsle) that demands further mediation.

            Misleadingly, the medium between Jaggers and Wopsle appears to be simply language – the mere fact of their engaging in conversation. Yet, the mediation here is far more complex than any Jaggers–language–Wopsle mediation. Indeed, while the content of the discussion provides the impetus for communication, its initial modality provides the conduit through which it can pass. Jaggers’ demanding from Wopsle a hypothetical verdict on the murder suspect shifts the entire discussion into an abstraction of the conversation’s manifest content, the murder. Immediately, Jaggers comports himself towards Wopsle not simply through language, but through the special modality of abstraction, a gambit Wopsle quickly adopts by identifying himself through the equally opaque appellation, “Englishman.”

            Having entered into an equally abstract modality of language, the potential for any Jaggers–Wopsle mediation appears met. Yet Jaggers not only refuses Wopsle’s “Englishman” response – “ ‘Come . . . Don’t evade the question’” – but also initiates another form of mediation: the act of “biting his forefinger at him.” In pattern that will repeat moments later, the potential mediation of Jaggers and Wopsle through a modality of language is foreclosed upon, immediately substituted with the mediation of finger biting, and then shifted back onto new modality of language – a pattern spatially sketched by the narrator Pip: “ ‘Come!’ [cessation of previous discursive mediator], said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him [gestic mediation]. ‘Don’t evade the question. Either you know it, or you don’t know it [new discursive mediator]” (emphases added). Jaggers’ “it” condenses the previous discursive mediation (the abstraction of a hypothetical verdict) into a crystalline yet vague pronoun. Nevertheless, this condensation of discursive mediation carries with it an exigency for physical mediation; the finger biting is again repeated before Wopsle seemingly connects with Jaggers: “‘Certainly I know it’” (132).

            Nevertheless, Wopsle’s entering into contact with Jaggers through “it” is, for Jaggers, insufficient. So, after another bite and point of Jaggers’ forefinger a new discursive mediator is introduced: the question of the murder suspect’s cross-examination (a procedure to which Jaggers clearly suspects Wopsle). With this new discursive mediation something curious happens. Whereas the mediations of the hypothetical verdict and condensation “it” were only sequentially connected with the physical mediation of finger biting, this new discursive form is irrevocably tied to its own materiality. Wopsle is not simply implored to consult the discursive fact of the suspect’s cross-examination, but also the material vessels through which that fact is made intelligible:  “‘the printed page’” and Wopsle’s “‘eye.’”

            Provisionally, then, we can plot the scene’s overall mediation dynamic like this: Jagger -- Discursive (verdict, it, cross-examination)/Material (finger biting, printed page, eye) -- Wopsle. Rather than a simple Jaggers–language–Wopsle mediation, we have instead a mediation through an intermediary field of discursive and material objects. To read the entire scene as one act of mediation is, therefore, to diagram a mediation not merely through a field, but rather through an object that is simultaneously discursive and material: Jaggers–Material/Discursive–Wopsle.

Overall, my provisional, diagrammatic sketch allows for a tentative assertion: real objects (Jaggers and Wopsle) are mediated not merely through sensual, intentional objects (Jaggers-in-thought, Wopsle-in-thought), but another type of object entirely, one that has “real” content (materiality) and “ideational” form (discursivity): the gesture. Accordingly, in the Blue Boar scene the actual mediation is Jaggers–Gesture–Wopsle. Such a hybrid object as the gesture may allow a more nuanced reading of class (perhaps the parting welded together that Great Expectations is most concerned with) than orthodox Object-Oriented Ontology would allow. The splitting of the gestic object that connects Jaggers and Wopsle into a simultaneously material and ideational form is precisely what enables the mediation to occur, as if the gesture’s dual-frequency alone is what allows for complete resonance between disparate objects.

Reading Gesture Part I: Benjamin and Dickens

     A couple of posts ago, I introduced a self-revolution in methodology, rejecting the underlying logic of deconstruction in favor of a type of reading based in an element I tentatively called the gesture. Yet the post left the consistency and means of ascertaining the gesture in a text unexplained. I did, fortunately, indicate that the gesture rests somewhere on the margins of a text – both inside and outside the text. The gesture could be, therefore, defined as a sort of textual membrane of a specific sort, one which produces a self-reflective resemblance.
     In “The Image of Proust,” Benjamin outlines, in one of his most lyrical passages, Proust’s “cult of similarity.” Proust’s similarities (resemblances) do not point towards a likeness of one thing to any other thing, but instead, towards “the deeper resemblance of the dream world in which everything that happens appears not identical but in a similar guise, opaquely similar one to another” (204). Here, the underlying context for Benjamin is his concept of the Messianic as a world wherein “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different” because of a “tiny displacement” occurring (and this is Agamben on Benjamin) at things’ “periphery, in the space of ease between everything and itself” (Coming Community 54). The messianic world in which everything is just as ours only with a tiny displacement between the thing and itself is the dream world of Proust’s cult of similarity. Importantly for any understanding of the gesture, things in this messianic dream world (which, crucially, is a state of absolute between-ness) appear as “images.” Through the Benjaminian/Proustian image appears “the world distorted in the state of resemblance, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through” (205). Benjamin continues (and I will just quote this amazing passage at length): “To this [Messianic] world belongs what happens in Proust, and the deliberate and fastidious way in which it appears. It is never isolated, rhetorical, or visionary; carefully heralded and securely supported, it bears a fragile, precarious reality: the image. It detaches itself from the structure of Proust’s sentences as that summer day at Balbec – old, immemorial, mummified – emerged from the lace curtain under Francoise’s hands.” m
     This detaching emergence is precisely what any reading of the gesture must address and bring into language. The gesture, a declension of the messianic image, belongs to both any given sentence and the “air” surrounding and supporting it within a world that simultaneously is and is not the text’s and, very powerfully, our own. Once again, this world that we, in reading gestically, share with the text, is a messianic world, a world of the resemblance of the thing to itself in a typology allowing the thing’s fulfillment in language. Through the gesture the thing as such both enters into language and emerges as a crystalline image of itself.
     Now for a concrete example. Benjamin’s Messianic world of resemblance bears a striking parallel to Dickens’s states of hypnagogia, of which his fiction is rife. An early (and particularly illuminating) example occurs midway through Oliver Twist. One evening at twilight, Oliver, lodged in middle-class privilege and comfort, sits reading in his “little room” overlooking the Maylie’s idyllic gardens and fields. Fatigued from his studies, Oliver passes into that “kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it,” and Oliver, in this state of bodily sleep, retains “a consciousness of all that is going on about [him], and even if [he] dreams, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist in the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to [his] visions” (281). Now, while we all can remember such moments of half-sleep (so often when we drift away from our reading, the text running on according to our own thoughts, the author’s cadence flowing underneath our own half-thought words), Oliver’s particular moment of hypnagogia is of a momentous occurrence. Dreaming that he is once again back in Fagin’s den of thieving children, Oliver overhears Fagin speaking to an as yet unrecognized man. Startled within his liminal rest, Oliver pushes himself into a more conscious state and, in a flash, recognizes both Fagin and his gothic accomplice: “It was but an instant, a glance, a flash before his eyes, and they were gone. But they had recognized him, and he them” (283). Out of his hypnagogia, Oliver recognizes the unrecognizable, the mysterious strage stranger’s resemblance only to himself. Such recognition, Dickens asserts, is possible only through the preparation of the liminal state of hypnagogia. Oliver, pushed to the threshold of sleep and consciousness, enters into the Messianic world of profound resemblances and glances, however momentarily, the gestic guise of his never before glimpsed brother.