The Masses Are Revolting

Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust

Zachary Samalin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501756474
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica moderna

The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontë—whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.

Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

PART I

The Rationalization of Revulsion

CHAPTER 1

The Odor of Things

A trailing robe of sludge and slime,

Fell o’er his limbs of muddy green,

And now and then, a streak of lime

Showed where the Board of Works had been;

From out his mouth’s mephitic well,

Poured fetid stench and sulphurous flames,

And—was it sight, or was it smell?—

All there, somehow, knew Father Thames.

—“How Father Thames Appeared to the Cabinet,” Punch, July 31, 1858

To put it crudely, the memory actually stinks just as in the present the object stinks; and in the same manner as we turn away . . . the head and nose . . . in disgust, the preconscious and the sense of consciousness turn away from the memory. This is repression.

—Freud to Fliess, November 14, 1897

In June 1858, a heat wave descended on London, leaving the Thames sitting slightly lower than usual and revealing to the nearly three million inhabitants of the metropolis that the river from which they drew their drinking water had become an open sewer visibly overflowing with their own semisolid excrement, which was washed upand downstream with the tide twice daily in “thick, slushy waves” before coming to rest on the “muddy” shores. For anyone in the vicinity of the riverbanks, the stench was overpowering. No interior space was impregnable; doors and windows were shut tight, but to no avail, “a thick, warm steam, surcharged with odeurs from every imaginable abomination penetrating into the apartment, and into you,” as one self-described “Sufferer in Thames Street” put it. Soon enough, Parliament was engulfed, its windows hung with lime and fresh air pumped in through vents in the Star Chamber as the stench made its way to the core of the state. The Daily Telegraph reported a “Panic in a Committee Room,” as Benjamin Disraeli, “with a mass of papers in one hand, and with his pocket-handkerchief clutched in the other and applied closely to his nose, and body half-bent, hastened in dismay from the pestilential odours” in search of new quarters in which to debate the Bank Act; a proposal to relocate the whole of Parliament to the countryside was promptly put into circulation.1 Meanwhile, the Dreadnought infirmary, a floating hospital for retired seamen, pulled up anchor and shipped itself downriver; a woman who had jumped off London Bridge in an attempted suicide was rescued alive but insensible, knocked out cold by the river’s hot fumes; shore workers known for their strong stomachs were seen vomiting spontaneously off the docks. And crucially, after six weeks of olfactory crisis and unceasing communal revulsion, a colossal system of intercepting sewers and palatial pumping stations was commissioned, along with the embankment of the Thames—a vast public works project that had been stalled in bureaucratic limbo for more than a decade, and which radically transformed the sanitary, spatial, and administrative landscape of the metropolis.

In this chapter, I consider what it means for a social transformation of this magnitude not only to have been rooted in an experience of collective disgust but also to have been understood as such at the time. For London’s Great Stink, as it came to be called, was just that: a moment in which an appeal to unwanted communal affect was generally acknowledged to have been taken as sufficient grounds for juridical intervention in the public sphere and for a major expansion and consolidation of government authority. “This has been a Sanitary Session,” the Times editorialized. “The Parliamentary gorge has risen quick and high. The House of Commons has followed its nose, and nausea has become a principle of legislation.”2 Disgust had produced political consensus where before there had been none—but in so doing it had also produced a self-consciousness about the general role of sensory and affective experiences such as nausea and revulsion in steering and shaping public affairs. In this regard, the Great Stink was not only an instance of social agreement that came together around a particular understanding of the meaning of the subjective experience of disgust, but also a pivotal moment in the broader historical process of determining which features of the subject (or collectivity of subjects) count toward social agreement in the first place.

The usual name given to this broader historical process, according to which certain disinterested modes of judgment and deindividualized formal qualities of the subject have been given priority over others in the gradual reorganization of the social domain as a space dominated by collectively managed institutions, is rationalization. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a better emblem of the rationalization of the city space and the consolidation of the bureaucratic institutions charged with administering it than Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s plan for the drainage of London and the embankment of the Thames, a proposal that threaded its way through parliamentary grid-lock over the course of many years. Antiquated and haphazard methods of waste removal—the accumulated outcome of centuries of conflicting attitudes toward urban filth and municipal responsibility—gave way to a more effectual and systematic approach; concrete infrastructure paved over mud; ancient tunnels were modernized; and London’s so-called cloaca maxima was buried out of sight, all but out of mind, with the goal of rooting out from the social domain unwanted and disruptive affective experiences and the public health dangers they were feared to pose. “In the large-scale transformation of the river and its human ecology,” Jules Law has written, “politicians and public alike could find a model for the ‘progressive’ state management and regulation of entities straddling the boundary between public and private. The embankment thus symbolized and consolidated one of the most profound shifts in relations between bodies and public space in mid-Victorian Britain.”3

Disgust was a significant motive force behind the specific rationalization processes that were catalyzed by the Great Stink. The peculiarity and difficulty of establishing this fact lies in claiming to find subjective emotion expression and the appeal to affective experience at the very heart of rationalization processes whose raison d’être has been understood precisely, in Weber’s terms, as the elimination “from official business [of] love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.”4 Yet time and again, and in various arenas of social change throughout the nineteenth century, disgust became the discursive-affective medium through which the exclusion of subjective and affective experience from putatively rational processes took place. Consequently, the discourse of disgust that was mobilized in the wake of the Great Stink complicates our received understanding of rationalization in a number of very specific ways. This chapter focuses particularly on the extent to which mid-nineteenth-century rationalizing appeals to disgust depended, contra Weberian accounts, on ascribing to the emotion a total irrationality nevertheless characterized by its utter calculability, a reflexive dependability that was often taken as a kind of ersatz or pseudo-objectivity. To experience disgust was understood as an intensely sensuous, highly subjective experience, unable by definition to transcend the realm of strong personal feeling—and yet for all that, it was also an experience whose alleged universal undesirability was implicitly acknowledged, without apparent contradiction, to provide a sufficiently predictable albeit unstable basis for a model of social agreement that prioritized disinterestedness and objectivity.

While the first section of this chapter paints a portrait of this structure of unwanted feeling, within which disgust was simultaneously invoked and disavowed as a foundation for social agreement, the second traces the underlying conception of revulsion as a negative sensus communis back to its proximal origin in debates in Enlightenment aesthetics, where the disgusting was excluded from artistic composition as the antithesis of the beautiful. Aesthetic theory offers the sole sustained theoretical investigation into the meaning of disgust prior to Darwin and after him Freud, and aesthetic subjectivity also offers the strongest explanatory model for understanding how disgust took on its specifically contradictory status as an emotional basis for the exclusion of emotion from the realm of social judgment. Yet while thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière have for quite some time understood the relevance of aesthetic theory to lie in just such an expanded social and political context rather than in the restricted domains of art and literature, the specific pleasures and disgusts of the aesthetic subject have rarely been invoked in the context of nineteenth-century British culture, where the discourses of liberalism, sympathy, and utilitarianism have for various reasons held sway. Part of my endeavor in this chapter, then, is to show how the aesthetic discourse of disgust and the revolted subject it calls into being are better equipped than either the principle of utility or the self-sovereign individual to explain the public role that disgust came to play during the Great Stink.

I call the process by which strong, putatively excessive feeling was installed as an engine of the depersonalization and desubjectification of particular social domains aesthetic rationalization. Like Foucault’s discussion of the sensory and affective dimensions of disciplinary power and Elias’s historical account of the formation of the modern rationalized habitus through affective shaping and the molding and muting of drives, this account calls attention to the precise ways in which rationalization depended on alterations in the meanings afforded to aesthetic experience broadly construed. Disgust figures centrally in the unfolding of this long-term process for a number of reasons that bear directly on its active role in the public processes surrounding the cleansing of the metropolis. First, disgust came to be understood as a calculable, quasi-instinctual form of judgment, a compulsory voice bubbling up from within the body and demanding agreement about the need to be rid of its unwanted objects. On this account, the strength and reflexive automaticity of feeling constitute the grounds for judgment; the proof is in the puking. This compulsory attribute of disgust allowed it to integrate into a politico-juridical framework that placed an increasing emphasis on predictable, rule-governed processes that connected cause to effect. In the context of the Great Stink, disgust proved for this reason to be a highly effective administrative emotion.

Second, the rhetorical strength and pseudo-objectivity of disgust were complicated by a self-effacing activity that was not so much ascribed to the emotion as enacted by it, and that was connected to a constellation of phenomenological characteristics traditionally associated with the emotion’s confusion of boundaries and its negative grammar. In articulating one’s disgust, this account of the emotion goes, one confers recognition on an object through its seemingly instinctual repudiation—as in the simplest cases, by spitting it out or vomiting, or by turning away. In bestowing meaning on some object through its repudiation, the involuntary act of rejection thus also becomes a performance of rejection, a socially symbolic gesture that conveys its negative judgment to others, regardless of its success in eliminating the unwanted thing. Yet while the expression of disgust only sometimes overlaps with the actual rejection of a disgusting object, this distinction between gag reflex and communicative action or performance is rarely remarked; to the contrary, the confusion is part of what gives disgust its rhetorical force.

The play between symbolic or enacted repudiation and embodied or corporeal rejection can ramify in significant ways. In “Negation,” for instance, Freud invoked and further developed this double-sided structure of disgust when he observed that the infantile ejection (or egestion) of objects from the body sits at the root of adult capacities for qualitative (i.e., good/bad) as well as existential (i.e., real/unreal) judgments about the external world. In this light, what is thrown outside the self in disgust is at once gone and bad or, more to the point, gone because bad, and in this sense the emotion depends on a particular affective mode of imagination or fantasy—specifically, the fantasy that one’s deeply negative subjective experience will take effect as a kind of objective disappearing act.5 It is through this fantasy that disgust serves as a complex grammatical pivot point between the qualitative and the existential, between fact and value, between the sensation of distaste and the desire for an absence.

That absence can be attributed to a particular object, but it can also be attributed to the sensation of distaste itself, and it is this latter formation that contributed so prominently to disgust’s absorption into the sociopolitical affairs of the nineteenth century. In this case, the primary confusions between reflex and symbolic gesture and between qualitative and existential negativity are exacerbated by further confusions about the location of the objects that provoke one’s disgust, and by anxiety regarding the transgression of boundaries. Sometimes the revolting object is something diffuse or ephemeral that threatens to enter the self through the body’s openings, like a rotten smell or unavoidable atmosphere; sometimes it is something already internal, something that comes back up. Sometimes the object of disgust is neither wholly external nor exactly an object, but rather, as Darwin hypothesized, a disgusting idea or imagination or memory. Such boundary confusions reduplicate in theoretical accounts of disgust and tend toward a more fundamental ambiguity about whether what has to be rejected are the objects that cause feelings of disgust or the feelings themselves. For once the self’s boundaries have been opened up and transgressed, object and feeling may be too closely enmeshed with each other to be fully distinguished. Rather than naming a subjective state belonging to a coherent self, then, we might say that disgust names the performed, aspirational repudiation of an unwanted collapsing of relations between a subject and an object.

With surprisingly little variation, this constellation of effects and relational features has accompanied the discourse of disgust from its initial aesthetic theorization through psychoanalysis and on to contemporary psychological and neuroscientific studies. There is, in a sense, a relatively stable set of meanings that can be attached to collective disgust, even if the meanings themselves appear explicitly as forms of fantasy or are defined as unstable in themselves. Consequently, the appeal to disgust has long claimed a special coherence and self-evidence in public discourse as a form of collective affective experience entitled to demand social recognition. It is in this regard that collective disgust is able to produce a powerful variant of the kind of politics of sentimentality and sympathetic identification that, according to thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, in large part organize national belonging in contrast to and alongside juridical forms of sociopolitical membership. The revolted subject is in many ways a version of what Berlant has called “the subject of true feeling,” a wounded subject whose affective experiences can claim a “hard-wired truth, a core of common sense [that places it] beyond ideology, beyond mediation, beyond contestation.” Pain, in particular, Berlant argues, has the status in the “dominant public sphere” of a “universal true feeling,” which can galvanize collective identity around the desire for its eradication. Significantly, in discussing pain—that most utilitarian of aversive experiences—Berlant slips into an olfactory register. “Theoretically,” she writes, “to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian odor.”6

What is singular about the role of disgust in this context is that it is an affect invoked specifically to demonstrate the self-evidence of the general need to delimit and police the role of affect in the public sphere. This introduces a recursive character to the collective appeal to disgust that makes it difficult to account for simply in terms of the utilitarian pleasure-pain calculus. That is, while an outcry of collective revulsion such as the Great Stink certainly called for the eradication of the particular, localized nuisance, it also sought to further the progressive disqualification of affective experience as a basis for social agreement. Unlike the sentimental politics Berlant describes, this project has in general tended to look forward, rather than backward, for its justification, toward a fantasy of a sanitary future rather than toward the restoration of the “utopian odor” of the past.7 Through its own productive exclusion, disgust has been a passion of rationalization, modernity, and civilization.

Needless to say, the self-effacing activity of the discourse of disgust makes it difficult to determine what cultural materials form part of its history, since the language of ...