Richard C. Sha

Volta's Battery, Animal Electricity, and Frankenstein

Although Frankenstein critics generally agree that the battery gives life to the monster, they have missed the significance of Voltas invention to the novel. This essay situates Frankenstein within the Volta/Galvani debate about the existence of animal electricity. Since Volta invented the battery precisely to refute the existence of animal electricity, Mary Shelley harnesses the battery to undercut vitalism. In thinking about the battery and the curious material status of electricity, she wonders how experiments might distinguish between life and the mere appearance of life.

Imagination as inter‐science

The imagination was central to Romantic epistemology. This essay examines how scientific writers on the imagination had to locate the science of the imagination somewhere else. Since the anatomy of nerves offered so little concrete information, especially before the dawn of cell theory, physiologists turned to concepts like life or action or electrical nerves to explain nervous action. Likewise, natural philosophers turned from proliferating organs of the mind (neurology) to the thoughts of individuals for knowledge (psychology). This need to make mental processes empirical was assisted by a general slide in psychology from experiments to experience. The imagination, thus, was located between the various sciences: it was an inter‐science. I am therefore interested here in the ways in which the imagination provided instrumental and necessary cross‐pollinations within science, so that scientific work could advance without the technologies needed for advancement.

The Power of the English Nineteenth-Century Visual and Verbal Sketch: Appropriation, Discipline, Mastery

This essay argues that the eighteenthand nineteenth century English practice of outdoor sketching acculturated its middle-class practitioners into the act and discourse of appropriation. I mean appropriation in two senses: for one, sketching was a way of making gentility one’s own, of appropriating nobility. Secondly, sketching facilitated the taking of views, which figured and, by implication, legitimated the domination of women, the enclosure of common land, and colonial imperialism. The combined force of both forms of appropriation meant that sketching empowered the middle-class with a sense of distinction, what Bourdieu calls “a distant self-assured relation to the world and to others” (56), and a way of preserving the distance between itself, and the lower classes and natives by reducing real landscapes and real people to the status of picturesque objects. The negative aspects of enclosure and colonialist appropriation were thereby erased. Sketching manuals and picturesque tour books aestheticized the violence of appropriation and transmogrified that appropriation into an innocuous kind of private amusement. Insofar as the sketch’s instantaneity enables it to close the gap between object and representation, the sketch renders appropriation pleasurable precisely by confusing the taking of landscapes with real property. Following the work of Robert Weimann on appropriation, I take appropriation to mean both the aesthetic act of making things one’s own by making it part of the education of one’s subjectivity and, in a more worldly sense, the constitution of juridically-defined ownership (465). If the former definition makes appropriation harmless, the latter reminds us of its potential harm. Whereas Weimann sees the former as richly discursive and the latter as “limited by juridicial ideas of private property” and therefore as ideologically flat (466), I examine the complex aesthetics by which the desire to “take” sketches offers tourists the sensations of taking real property, whether by dint of virtual enclosure of common land or colonialism. My point is that even literal world appropriation approximates the aesthetic in the process of legitimating itself; that is, the legalization of the enclosure of common land and of colonialism and the representation of them as being in the national interest, embroiled physical taking in aesthetic contradictions. Even imperialism, we now know, is a complex narrative of encounter and ambivalence. However fixed world appropriation seemed, moreover, it could remain unstable despite possession;

Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge

The imagination was often pathologized within Romantic-period medicine. Although this pathologizing of the imagination made it the source of delusion, it actually set into motion a disciplining of the imagination that was scientifically useful. Through careful discipline in the form of a scientific method, the imagination bracketed its discoveries as appearances, something yet to be proven. I show how, within the physiology of the time, speculation, hypothesis, and imagination are entangled, so that speculations come to have value in relation to what they explain and the experiments they inspire. I then consider why Coleridge praises the work of physiologist Richard Saumarez on his way to developing his famous definition of imagination, and I show how physiological method provides a new understanding of Coleridges methods in the Biographia.

Blake and the Queering of Jouissance

On the face of it, Blake is so queer that it is simply astonishing that it has taken so long to produce a collection of essays on queer Blake. Although Blake’s poetry lends itself to deconstructive analysis, and although queer theory is often indebted to de construction, his poetry is perhaps more resistant to certain forms of queer theory than we might expect. This chapter, therefore, examines the unexpected pressures Blake may be said to put upon queer theory. It does so by considering how Blake resists certain concepts in queer theory because he does not embrace the necessary dis- ruptiveness of jouissance, meaning enjoyment; rather, he insists upon the consequences of desire when he suspends reproduction yet demands that jouissance lead to self-annihilation.1 Building upon Jonathan Dollimore’s (2001) sense of queer theory as a form of wishful theory because desire is framed as disruptive, but rarely disrupts the critic, I argue that Blake insinuates a gap between jouissance and self-annihilation, and therefore, desire cannot be inherently radical or subversive if it contains desire back in forms of identity like gender or essentializes desire as disruption. By making jouissance not the end, but the means to self-annihilation, and by not granting jouissance the automatic power to shatter the self, even when that self embodies heteronormativity, Blake frames jouissance as a precondition for change, but one that does not in and of itself achieve meaningful change.2

The Turn to Affect: Emotions Without Subjects, Causality Without Demonstrable Cause

Probing the theoretical implications of claims, championed by Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough, that affect is physiological and pre-subjective, this chapter argues that if the personal history that comes with emotion is subsumed into affects so construed, then the subject is twice removed: once in the stripping down of emotion to affect; and again in the shift in political and social analysis from consensus to contagion. A turn to affect that entails a turn away from conventional rationality risks leaving behind concepts like the human, the subject, and agency, and so put at risk the ability to define the social and affect in ways that enable them to do meaningful work. Having effects is not quite the same as being efficacious, for ubiquitous effects threaten to make them inconsequential by mystifying causality. To address this danger, the chapter proposes a theory of affect that at least gives it the possibility of recognizing the value of further cognitive processing.

Introduction: Organizing Romanticism

Although we have become justifiably wary of keys to all the mythologies, “Romantic organizations” is a powerful tool for thinking about Romanticism and its legacies. To wit, the Romantic period organized the world through trade, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism; by developing links between the metropole and colony; through massive attempts to circulate and distribute knowledge through books, publishing networks, and periodicals, including the development of the Encyclopedias and theories of them; by means of the organization of society and consolidation of institutions of learning like the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Institution; in alignment with the origins of biology, and the attempts to understand life by organizing the concepts and structures that try to do more than name it. In its striving towards unity or the Romantic absolute, Romanticism recognized organization as both a central problem and an opportunity. Was it the cause or an effect? Were organizations supposed to be natural and modeled upon autopoetic organisms? (We are thinking here about how current theories of cognition take autopoesis as the ground of cognition and how Kant made available the concept of purposiveness for biology.) Romantic taxonomies struggled with what to do with remainders like monsters, and thinkers of the day knew that whatever benefits organization might have, it was not without costs. Hence, in this volume, historian of science Peter Dear argues that taxonomic arguments require the judgment of Romantic naturalists to settle them. One important index of how central the problem of organization was to society was the way in which the biological and physiological sciences turned to “organization” to finesse emergent relations between structure and function. As function gained priority over structure, functionalism began to make knowledge of structures ancillary, so much so that the idea of a commitment to the principle of structure becomes more important than actual knowledge of how structures relate to function. One might say much the same pertains to today’s neuroimaging. Functionalism was perhaps a necessary maneuver before cell theory: the closest the Romantics come to cells is to think of the body in terms of tissues and nerves. The 386 registrants who participated in the 2014 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism certainly found “Romantic organizations” suggestive, but to catalogue all of these contributions would threaten to be a Causabonlike project: one with no end and, more importantly, no product in sight. The editors, moreover, would then have to confess our rusty German. One cannot highlight this theme without thinking about the organization of Romantic studies today, and thus

Byron, Polidori, and the Epistemology of Romantic Pleasure

Pleasure in Romanticism provided the very basis of moral theory. Locke not only insisted that all action is directed towards pleasure and the avoidance of pain (Foot 83), but he also linked pleasure with good, and pain with evil.1 Jeremy Bentham believed so strongly in the motivating force of pleasure that he went so far as to invent a means of calculating it, his infamous felicific calculus. Immanuel Kant linked pleasure with self-interest and mere empirical knowledge, and this meant not only that pleasure was potentially selfish, but also that, unless it could be universally shared, it was not knowledge. Pleasure could be a form of knowledge only when it was apprehended in terms of purposiveness (Kant 68). The pleasurable sensation of beauty could become knowledge only if one thought of its sensuousness as if it were designed, without assuming any actual designer. By linking form with purposiveness, the inescapably subjective feelings of pleasure could be transformed into necessary and shareable knowledge. Kant thus made pleasure central to his moral theory, stipulating that feeling good could often be at odds with moral knowledge.

Lydia Syson, Doctor of love: James Graham and his celestial bed , Richmond, Surrey, Alma Books, 2008, pp. 331, illus., £20.00 (hardback 978-1-84688-054-4).

It is no easy matter to situate a man who cared more for celebrity and marketing than science or medicine within the history of medicine. Yes, James Graham (1745–94) was a quack, but this epithet hardly captures his ability to exploit scientific ideas for commercial gain. And how does one take seriously his use of medical ideas? More critically, how does one recognize how Graham was shaped by and shaped the science of his time? In her canny and erudite new book, Lydia Syson presents Graham as the first sex therapist, showman, and entrepreneur. She navigates a tightrope between Graham as huckster and Graham as physician, and in the process, raises important questions for the history of medicine. At a time when the grand narratives of science are being replaced by more contingent and localized public cultures of science, the career of James Graham is ripe for reconsideration. Syson’s early chapters usefully detail James Graham’s medical training and education. Doctoring, she reminds us, was a business and a profession, and payment was the only requirement for taking classes if one did not expect to graduate. Most did not. Even when one graduated, it was possible simply to pay someone to write your dissertation. She speculates that Robert Whytt, a teacher at the University of Edinburgh, was the source for Graham’s fascination with the body’s influence on the soul. Graham managed to get William Buchan, author of one of the most widely sold medical reference books, to act as his patron. In America, Syson argues, Graham would turn to Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist minister, to learn about the medical uses of electricity. Syson’s piece de resistance is, of course, Graham’s famous celestial “medico, magnetico, musico, electrical” bed (p. 181), the one that cost £50 per night and guaranteed conception. She shows London awash in visible spectacle. Deciding to expand to the West End, Graham took on Schomberg House, then quickly renamed it the Temple of Prolific Hymen. To link it with fine art as opposed to vulgar showmanship, Graham borrowed Philippe De Loutherbourg’s use of lighted transparencies. He surrounded the bed with 1500 pounds of magnets, taking advantage of longstanding connections of magnets with sexual attraction, including William Harvey’s idea that semen had magnetic force. To bolster the science behind the bed, Graham published alleged accounts of successful treatment in his Medical Transactions; Syson does not mention that he stole the title from the Royal Society’s official publication. His lectures on generation, moreover, straddled the highly permeable line between medicine and erotica. Eventually he was jailed for promoting lasciviousness. Syson’s limpid prose whets the appetite for more. How did Graham persuade his audiences of his therapeutic effects? While Syson deftly shows how Graham sought to use every resource in his powers to overwhelm the senses of his patients, including chemicals like laughing gas, the music of Franklin’s glass harmonica, and the svelte beauty of Emy Lyon (later Emma Hamilton), playing the Goddess of Health, she might have considered more the gap between sensuous effects and belief in a cure. Coleridge, of course, invented the term “psychosomatic,” and although she uses this term, she might have done more to think about why the psychosomatic acquires such influence during this period. Likewise, recently historians of science have begun to credit this period with the development of controlled experiments, and Graham’s commercial success certainly fuelled a desire to subject therapies to rigorous proof. Finally, much more could be said about the notion of health in this period, especially since Graham advertised his place as the Temple of Health. Despite these lapses, this entertaining and thoughtful book reminds us of the strangeness and familiarity of the eighteenth-century medical world. In so doing, it shows the costs and benefits of our grand narratives which have long relegated Graham to the fringes of the Enlightenment.