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.
 
 

Blog Name Change

     I have changed Fractal Paradigm's title to Governing Victorians. This new title captures the historical, theoretical, and literary specializations this blog will undertake.
   Governing Victorians plays two ways: governing of Victorians and governing by Victorians. Referring to the acts of governing during the long nineteenth-century, this title also encompasses the governed and the governing.
    My hope is to post frequently, perhaps one to two posts a week, succinct portions of my current research. Entries will involve stray lines of inquiry, such as my recent post on Thirkell's neo-Victorianism. I will also use this blog to test ideas for future dissertation chapters. Most practically, this blog will serve as a training site for my technical imagination, not simply thinking in words, but physically forming them.

Trollope and Thirkell's Barsetshires: Neo-Victorian Formalism and Racial Purity

       Formal criticism about Anthony Trollope's series fiction centers on its open-ended nature. Not only are his individual novels reticent about the generic conventions of the Victorian domestic novel, but the Barsetshire Chronicles and the Palliser Novels push formal innovations to an extreme. Ever the willing novelist, Trollope satisfies his readers' desire for marital resolution by deploying what Caroline Devers calls "embryo plots": half-realized plots accumulate only to fall aside as the desired, "natural" plot fulfills itself, achieving at best a contingent, near-Darwinian sense of an ending. Embryo plots, the series reader quickly realizes, stay half-born only so long. Characters pop up in new novels to "realize" plots laid long before. These novels as they delineate the social milieux of clergy, gentry, aristrocracy, and parliamentarians are ever fraught with invasions by other characters, from incursions from other territories. The Barsetshire Chronicle's  Old Duke on Omnium gossips about the Palliser novel's Lady Eustance and her stolen diamonds. Liberal Planty Palliser's Tory nemesis, Mr. Daubeny, sits for Barsetshire. Trollope's series fiction is always permeable.
      Despite wide-spread popularity throughout the '60's and '70's, Trollope's popularity precipirously declined after his death, reaching a nadir during the first world war.
      Enter Angela Thirkell.
      During the interwar period, Trollope's fiction underwent a resurregence. Part of a craze for of "South Counties England" -- the literary embodiments of which also comprise Austen, Hardy, and Shakespeare -- Trollope's series fiction, especially the Barsetshire novels, satisfied a British need for social cohesion under the creeping shadow of Nazism. In the Grantleys, Dales, Pallisers, and Finns of Trollope's fiction Britons found a common heritage, a common identity as strong as any provided by the great bard.
    Or so it would seem. Beginning with 1933's High Tide Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels resurrected the varied geneologies of Trollope's orginal fiction, placing decedents in an every changing Britain. The heirs of Omnium loved and lost across two world wars. The Grantleys steered Christian flocks through war and peace and war again. Thirkell's series is notable, however, not for the repetition of character names, but also for the continuance of constitutive Trollopian formal practices: near-contemporary chronicling and social milieux permeated with a cast of recurring characters.
   One could peg Thirkell as opportunisitc, a literary recyclist intent of quick returns. And of course, the same had been said of Trollope himself -- such a complaint famously drove Trollope to kill off the Barsetshire novel's Mrs. Proudie.
    Instead, Thirkell's recurrence to Trollope's recurring characters is a cagey neo-Victorian formalism. And hers is one with profound inplications for the nature of series fiction. If Trollope's own series novels were porous, and if such permeability was generated by the artfully self-referntial recurrence of characters, then Thirkell's Barset novels are as "authentic" as Trollope's.
   Imagine the reading experience of Thirkell's generation of series readers. Not only would they faithfully wait the latest contemporary installment (a reading practice little different from the Victorians' serial reading practice), but they would while their waiting with Trollope's novels. The oscillations between generations could have created a seemingly coherent history of English culture, a fictional continuity across three generations reassuring to a nation imperiled.
  Of course, Thirkell's expanded series served conservative, nativist desires. The continuity of racial (and class) bloodlines across multiple generations is, to a degree, a more staid version of the racial purity bellowed across the channel.
   

    A personal post seems fitting after such a long hiatus. Since passing my qualifying exam and becoming ABD in early June 2013, I have been working on the first chapter of my dissertation. Focusing on Anthony Trollope's series fiction, I have found myself caught in a bizarre literary-form/lived-experience spiral.
   Trollope's series fiction, like that of nearly every series novelist since (Hardy, Dorothea Richardson, Faulkner), drives readers onwards in a serial prolongation of desire and resolution. Sure, this or that novel ends with this or that generic resolution of the novel, but we want MORE on and on and on. And Trollope gives us that. Novel upon novel, we consume.
     My chapter commenced with the thought: I will write about the multi-novel series of Trollope and Hardy and their intersections with rural government reform between 1850-1890 -- because the scope of that literary archive and its historical span made sense for a chapter. I shelved Hardy after finishing the Wessex Novels. But I became addicted to Trollope. At first I jokingly called my attempts to read the Barsetshire novels by their original part installments my "daily Trollope." Cute, innocent scholarship.
    Eight months later as I wrap up the last of Trollope's Palliser novels, the second of two six-baggy-novel series, some 7,000 pages of mid-Victorian realist bliss, I now must face the truth. Not, "how the f--- do I write about this monster of monstrous novels," but rather, "what the hell happened to the last eight months?"
   Trollope, the series novel, will do this to you. Or at least me. I started my academic career with two series novels: Salinger's Glass novels and Faulkner's Yaknapatopha novels. Faced with the challenge of learning how to be a scholar all over again, I turned to my novel security blanket -- the series. It promised what any fledgling academic writer needs: deferral, delay, the denial of closure. First chapters take a year, we are told. Don't beat yourself up, you've got a year. For me, the series novel offered the literary form of this assurance. I could take longer because I had to read more . . . and more . . . and more.
    But it works out in the end. Because there must be an end to the series. Trollope waxed nostalgic when dropping the curtain on the Barsetshire novels. The Palliser Novel's Duke's Children did the same by embedding that sentiment in the reminiscences of Plantagenet Palliser. And my chapter will be written, but only because I have gone full circle just like the novels I love. I started with the series novel again, and again, and again.
   Like any addiction, it never seems to cease. My next chapter centers on Hardy's Wessex Novels. All of them. As a series.

Buttermilk Falls: Collective Policing

            Abandoning the notion that police are the strong arm of the law, the bobbies on the beat, and instead taking up the Foucauldian conceptualization of police as a public health apparatus ensuring the stability of a population, let us examine a recent collective policing enterprise in the Black River, Vermont region.

Last month the NGO Black River Action Team coordinated various public and private agencies in order to monitor the e.coli levels at Buttermilk Falls, a popular swimming hole outside Ludlow, Vermont, itself a popular tourist destination.  BRAT allied itself with various funders (Okemo Mountain Resort and Kiosko) in order to generate the operating capital needed to perform water tests at Endyne Labs, a nearby private laboratory. These water tests are then posted on a sign at the head of the short walk-in trail to the falls where any swimmer can read the conditions and decide whether or not it is “safe” – based on EPA standards and guidelines for “full emersion,” i.e. swimming – to swim in the river. Here then we have numerous private and public actors. Okemo, Kiosko, Endyne Labs: private. Environmental Protect Agency: public. And then there is BRAT itself, the hybrid entity whose undecidability between private and public gives it the ability to coordinate a collective policing endeavor. What should we call this endeavor, The Buttermilk Falls Police (BFP)?

            One might ask, so what? What is at stake here if not the health of a population? The BFP is a collective endeavor to secure the health of a population at a common gathering point, which, interestingly enough, is a location of leisure. To secure that health, BFP not only operates as detailed previous, but also through its ability to get a population to conduct itself in a specific manner seemingly on their own. To be successful, signs produced by BFP – those posted e.coli levels – must not only be read immediately prior to swimming or not swimming (to state the obvious) but also that members of the population recognized the signs as signs and then, more importantly, trust them as verified by standards of "public health" vested in the entity "Endyne Labs." Generated by Endyne's aura of veracity such credulity ensures that potential swimmers in turn freely opt to follow the police’s (in)directive. An internalization of a model, deliberative conduct occurs here: Low levels? Dive in! High levels? Hit the chlorinated town or resort pool.

            But there is another side to this as well, the tones of which resonate with much writing on rural government at least since the beginning of the Romantic period. Ranging from George Crabbe’s “The Village” to Hardy’s Wessex Novel to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, from Joseph Ritson's radical antiquarian to William Morris’s socialist merry old England to Raymond Williams country proletariat, novelists and theorists alike have viewed similar intrusions into once non-policed activities as destructive of desired precedents. The Buttermilk Falls policing clearly fits such a reader: a location and activity once “outside” a certain regime of policing now clearly within the ken of The Police.

Let us slow down a moment, though. The issue isn’t that the swimming hole, its participants, or their conduct were once free from policing and are now policed. The swimmer and his/her like were always subject to police, if only in the local knowledge operative at the moment of any decision (Swim? Not swim?) based on observations of water flow or clarity and framed by preexisting conceptions of what those observations "mean."  And these alternative modes of policing don’t stop operating because BFP has moved in. To understand BFP naively is to see it as monolithic: “The State is foisting its power onto the lives of free subjects via the EPA” or “Neoliberalism is taking over the lives of free subjects via capitalism ventures like Endyne. Rather, what is occurring in this case is a change in the balance of regimes at a single location. Non-BFP policing operates upon a population, but aren’t tied to collective enterprises between public and private entities orchestrated by a hybrid entity like BRAT or even codified through a regime of veracity based in a set of scientific practices. In short, what we witness with the Buttermilk Falls signage is the transition into a neoliberal mode of police, one marked by collectivization between private and public entities, the formation of alternative “grammars” (how one knows that the water is “safe” and what “safe” even means).

Coda:

           The comportment of the critic here to his/her object of inquiry should not be “neutral” in any naïve manner. One cannot say that he/she should approach this emergent police endeavor without judgment. But that doesn’t mean a critic should be as partisan as a Williams or a Ritson, even if it is maintained reflexively as Donna Haraway. Rather, one must be agnostic faithfully. For example: the approach to BFP above sets out agnostically: Here is the emergence of this thing, BFP, and this is what that thing does. However, the purpose of such a critical effort is to make salient the contingency of BFP, methodologically something visible in the contrast and conflict between alternative regimes of police at a single location, or, more interestingly, as they coexist in the same location and with shared populations. Contingency is crucial to this project because it allows the critic to evaluate the object of inquiry and provide the discursive, conceptual, practicable opportunity to imagine alternatives. This is what the humanities (could a more flawed a name be given to this discipline?) can and should offer. We can not only document the operations of “police” and other government operations but also test the conditions for alternative practices of policing or, more broadly understood, “government.” Now comes the oft repeated mantra: We have done a good job with the first, documenting and contesting liberalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, biopolitics to name only a few of the more fastidiously delineated modes; we have not done an adequate job offering alternatives. The humanities (or whatever we will call ourselves) must get its utopian verve back.

Prospectusing Fun Part 1

 In 1862, at the very moment the Metropolitan Board of Works (a government entity) was terraforming the shit out of London, Samuel Smiles proving that current neoliberal rhetoric is zombie-speak: "Government has done next to nothing to promote engineering works. These have been the result of the liberality, public spirit, and commercial enterprise of merchants, traders, and manufacturers." Didn't we just have this dialogue -- in 2012?

Prospectus-ing sneak peak: "Once conduct gains a physiology with English Idealists the governmentalization of the state becomes philosophically biopoliticized."