HOW DID WE come to think of ourselves not as souls but as nerves? A 2014 issue of Scientific American declared ours to be the “Century of the Brain,” and if popular literature and academic initiatives are any indication, then neuroscience has emerged as our Key to All Mythologies, unlocking puzzle boxes as diverse as clinical depression, crime prevention, purchasing habits, and the proper interpretation of Jane Austen novels. Popular science titles announce the claims (The Synaptic Self, The Tell-Tale Brain, The Self as Brain) and new technologies mint words that help form new ways of being: neurolaw, neurocriminology, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroergonomics, neurophilosophy, neuropsychoanalysis, neurotheology, neuroeducation, neuroaesthetics.1 It is starting to look as though functional-MRI, EEG, and transcranial-magnetic-stimulation scans might come to know us better than we know ourselves, and that psychopharmaceuticals might provide ever more potent abilities to fundamentally reprogram the psyche. Again, how did we get here?
The answer this book gives is a history of the neural subject. That is: a history of a subject understood as primarily and essentially a nervous system, or, more specifically, a brain. Could my brain be transplanted into another body; could it be placed a vat; could it be decoded and recoded, transformed into a data stream, and uploaded into a digital cloud? When neuroscientists and philosophers, when popular magazines and everyday people start to answer “yes” to these questions—even more, when “yes” becomes an assumed backdrop to all sorts of unacknowledged behaviors, structures, and ways of thinking—then we have entered a new discourse of personhood.
One might well imagine that this is a rather recent phenomenon, maybe arising alongside the term “neuroscience” itself, a word coined only in 1963. Or perhaps we could go back further in time, to, say, 1938, a year that saw the publication of B. F. Skinner’s Behavior of Organisms and Franz Kallmann’s The Genetics of Schizophrenia, Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini’s pioneering use of electroconvulsive therapy with schizophrenic patients, the coining of the term “magnetic resonance” by Isador Rabi, and (last but not least) the creation of LSD by the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann.
And 1938, as it happens, is also an important year in theater history: it is the year of the publication of Antonin Artaud’s The Theater of Cruelty (Théâtre de la Cruauté). Artaud’s cultural importance would be difficult to overstate. Susan Sontag, for one, has argued that he “has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theatre in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud” (Under the Sign 42), and Sontag’s judgment has been echoed in one way or another by artists, philosophers, and critics ever since Artaud’s rediscovery in the late 1950s.2 At the heart of his vision of a Theater of Cruelty was a performance that would short-circuit language, that would directly and violently assault the nervous systems of spectators: “a spectacle,” in his words, “unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility” (Theater 87). Did Artaud’s performances point forward toward our own Century of the Brain? Or is beginning with the transformations of 1938 too anachronistic; does it place the formation of this conception of the self too far back in history?
This book claims: not far back enough. It argues that Skinner and Kallmann, Cerletti and Bini, Hofmann and Artaud should be thought of less as generators than as aftershocks. To find the roots of the transformation, we would need to go back much further, at least as far as the publication of Thomas Willis’s Pathology of the Brain in 1667. While subsequent scientists were also instrumental in the development of the neural subject before the nineteenth century (Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller, and William Cullen come to mind), Willis’s work, as George S. Rousseau argues, lays the best claim to being truly paradigm changing. In Rousseau’s words, Willis “was the first scientist unassailably to posit that the seat of the soul is strictly limited to the brain, nowhere else … [I]t was this theory of Willis’ that inspired a revolution in intellectual thought concerning the nature of man” (Nervous Acts 165–166).
But to say that the earliest formation of the neural subject lies in the seventeenth century is not to mitigate the importance of the nineteenth. For it was during the nineteenth century, above all, that the discourse of nerves became foundational for myriad and not always compatible institutions and practices. We find this change, most obviously, in neurology itself, a word that came into English in 1681 (in a translation of one of Willis’s works on brain anatomy, where it refers to a “systematic arrangement of the nerves”), and a word that came to mean “the branch of science that deals with the nervous system” in 1878 (see Oxford English Dictionary Online, “neurology, n.”). And we find the discourse beyond neurology as well. We find it in literature and the arts, in popular journals and newspapers, in legal practice and theory, in psychology and spirituality, in widespread theories of race, gender, and class. Changing meanings of common words such as “nerves” and “nervousness” help mark the shift. As Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail argue, the meaning of these two words transformed significantly in the nineteenth century, assuming connotations and denotations of illness and degeneration. “The first half of the nineteenth century,” they note,
saw a consolidation of popular notions of nervous agitation sufficient to introduce into common usage a meaning that was precisely the opposite of that which had been in operation before the 1840s. Even though the old meanings still obtained, the new meaning widened from the temporary state of having one’s nerves agitated, to a permanent state of liability to such agitation. (28)
The word “nerve,” for example, which derives from the Greek for “sinew” or “string,” was widely identified with strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus Edward Phillips’s 1658 dictionary defined “nerve” as “a sinew, also by metaphor, force or strength of body,” and “nervous” similarly appears in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary as meaning “well strung; strong; vigorous.” But a fresh meaning also peeks forth in Johnson’s Dictionary. Now “nervous” has also come to mean, at least in “medical cant,” “having weak or diseased nerves” (quoted in Salisbury and Shail 27). This new connection of nervousness with illness gradually became more common, and spread from the medical world into the popular lexicon, such that, by the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of nervousness had become broadly connected with disease and instability.
It is during the nineteenth century above all that the conception of the subject as essentially nervous went through what was its most intense period of formation and development, and thus it is during the same century that we discover the formation of a subject largely comprehensible, interpretable, and transformable through neurophysiological networks. This subject was magnetic; felt vibrations; was thrilled, electrified, and shocked; became hysterical; succumbed to neurasthenia and was re-energized. It was a site for the influx and efflux of nervous sensations, a site that was also understood as a subjectivity, a personality, and a person.3
The neural subject, then, is not a general theory of the subject as such, but rather an account of one particularly compelling construction of modern personhood that developed over the course of the nineteenth century—compelling not only because of its extraordinary importance for the emergence of modern cultural practices, but also because the neural subject was and is a peculiarly self-deconstructing creation, an aggregation of energies that manifests itself as a whole. This subject existed in a space that destabilized a range of binary distinctions—between inanimate and animate matter, between flow and stability, between bundles and unities, between self and object—and much of this subject’s labor and pleasure lay in the control and the dance of these distinctions. This subject was a site of scientific inquiry but also of vertiginous terror and thrill. The late-twentieth-century cultural turn from depth psychology to neuroscience, then, was in this sense also a return of sorts, a return to the nervous century that ended with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—that is, with Freud’s turn from neurological to psychoanalytic accounts of the self.
One of the central institutions in the nineteenth-century rise of the neural subject was the theater, but in order to get a sense of why this was so, it may help to step back for a moment and consider the history of theatrical performance and reception. In the eighteenth century, one went to the theater to laugh, to cry, and especially to weep.4 Many scholars have described this theater of sentiment, but none more knowledgeably than Erika Fischer-Lichte. Here, to take just one example she supplies, is an account of a tragedy performed in honor of a princess’s engagement in Mannheim in 1785; it comes from the autobiography of the great actor August Wilhelm Iffland.
[M]any voices were heard shouting in unison: “My God. Oh my God!” The people in the stalls rose from their seats, shouting, and finally, screaming wildly—arms waving in the air—hats tossed up in celebration! “Live, live! God keep you!” … The young princesses kissed the hand of their great-aunt, who was swimming in tears—weeping loudly the princely brothers embraced each other—more cheers broke out—the performance was forced to stop to allow the audience emotion to reign for a while. (quoted in Fischer-Lichte, “The Body” 118)
Accounts such as these are pretty common across theaters from Berlin to Rome to Paris to London. In short, the eighteenth-century theater was above all a theater of sentiment: sentiment expressed by actors and enthusiastically returned by audience members.
But what, precisely, was the medium of this sentiment? To say “the theater” is too broad to be helpful—how, in the theater of the period, was sentiment transmitted from stage to audience? The primary means of this transmission was a new art of acting, forged across Western Europe over the course of the eighteenth century by theorists such as Denis Diderot, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Jakob Engel and performers such as August Wilhelm Iffland, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, and David Garrick. The aim of this new art, in Fischer-Lichte’s words, “was to develop those mimic, gestic, and proxemic signs which could represent the different emotions or conditions of the human soul most perfectly, for only such signs would be in a position to bring about the desired emotion in the audience” (“The Body” 119). The actor was intended to transform his or her body into a mimetic sign of emotional states, a sign that was a trigger and a conduit for the sympathetic emotions of the audience.
These emotional overflows were a matter of semiotics and affect; they were also a matter of politics. If sentiment was the glue that was to hold liberal, enlightened society together, then the theater had a vital role to play. It was through the theater, primarily among the arts, that private sentiment could become common feeling and suffering could become public sympathy. In Schiller’s famous words of 1784, the theater enables us to approach that ideal state in which
people of all circles and zones and ranks, having thrown off every chain of conventionality and fashion, torn loose from every fateful demand, are made brothers through one interweaving sympathy, are once again resolved into one single family, having forgotten themselves and the world, and come nearer to their heavenly origin. Each individual delights in others’ pleasures, which return to him stronger and more beautiful, and there is now room in his breast for only one emotion—it is this: to be a human being. (“Die Schaubühne” 40)
Though not all echoed Schiller’s unbridled enthusiasm for the singular power of the stage, many of his contemporaries (including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Adam Smith, and David Hume) shared his appreciation of the theater as an important institution for forging bonds of sympathy, bonds essential to the proper functioning of society.5
This emotionally exuberant and fluid theatrical system, marked above all by the circulation of tears, gradually hardened over the course of the nineteenth century. In its place emerged, in Fischer-Lichte’s lucid account, a far more fixed and demarcated mode of performance.
The spectator withdrew, as far as possible, into the boundaries of his own body, reinforced by his clothing, which sealed these boundaries as tightly as possible—through items such as lace-up corsets, or neck ties—and limited the danger that it should betray its emotions through involuntary bodily movements or changes in facial expression (also masked by large hats and veils). The darkening of the auditorium, which gradually became customary, also helped spectators to overcome the danger of betraying their emotions. In the 1820s, gas lighting was introduced. In the 1850s, Charles Kean began to darken the auditorium considerably and in Bayreuth 1876, Richard Wagner placed the spectator in total darkness, which entirely hid any possible sign of emotion from his neighbor. The spectator tried to become an observer in total darkness, at a distance from the object of his observation, the actor. He wanted to know nothing of a field of energy between himself and the actors or even between himself and other spectators. (“The Body” 129)
In short, where the eighteenth century developed a flowing network of sentiments, the nineteenth clamped down on emotions, isolated spectators, and secured bodies from one another and from themselves.
We have, then, in the eighteenth century, a celebration of extreme expressions of audience emotion, and a transmission of that emotion through the privileged vehicle of gesture—and then we have, in the nineteenth century, a gradual decorporealization of the audience, an audience that is being taught to sit still and hold its emotions inward. Alongside this narrative we could add another, complementary one, of the gradual decline of bodily gesture as the privileged means of bourgeois theatrical communication in the nineteenth century, as grand gesture, like exuberant expressions of audience emotion, came increasingly to be seen as the vocabulary of tragedy’s vulgar cousin, melodrama.6
Altogether, it is a tidy and elegant account of the rise of modern theater, and even of the modern bourgeois subject. And yet, at the same time, it is inadequate, for it obscures as much as it reveals. There was of course a tremendous transformation between the social worlds of, say, Defoe and Dickens, or the theaters of, say, Lessing and Wagner—of that there can be no doubt—but to see this change as essentially one of increasing isolation, rigidity, and disembodiment is to miss another and perhaps a deeper story. It is to miss a story that went on, literally, beneath the surface of the skin.
The nineteenth century, in short, was not primarily away from the body but rather toward the nervous system. In other words, it was toward the inner, hidden—but increasingly discoverable—body. And where gestural sensations once offered a natural and universal route to the inner life of the mind, neurology seemed to offer an even truer, because more essential and less fakeable, window into the psyche. This shift from gesture to the nervous system can be found across the theatrical—and more broadly, the cultural—landscape of the nineteenth century, from the writings of Georg Büchner to those of Émile Zola, from Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinto Victorian “sensation dramas” to Richard Wagner’s music dramas and August Strindberg’s plays.
It is of course true to say that the nineteenth century experienced a cultural revolution in bourgeois behavior. The familiar version of that revolution is this: corsets tightened and upper lips stiffened; bodies vanished under the iron gaze of Victorian repression. But what actually occurred is something more interesting, something that may be summarized in two fundamental shifts.
1.Where gestures once served as a window into a person’s hidden inner life, nerves increasingly fulfilled the same function.
2.Where sympathies once helped to construct the liberal subject and the promise of a liberal social order, the stimulation and networking of neural sensations increasingly operated in their place.
It is a story, in short, less about repression than about electrification, a story about the emergence of new fields of energy between actors and spectators, and between subjects. Not the energy of sentiment but of sensation.
Before the nineteenth century, Western understanding of the nervous system was still considerably governed by a model advanced by the ancient Greek physician Galen (129–199 a.d.), according to which the brain was the center and fount of the whole nervous system, with the spinal cord and nerves merely prolongations of the cerebral mass. Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, this model was gradually replaced with one in which the nervous system has no center or point of origin and in which its various parts, some of them at least partly autonomous, interact within the whole. One example of this shift was the “Bell-Magendie Law,” according to which the ventral spinal nerve roots contain only motor (output) fibers, and dorsal roots contain only sensory (input) fibers. The law was independently proposed by the British neurologist Charles Bell and the French neurologist François Magendie in the 1810s and 1820s, and subsequently confirmed through experiments on frogs by the German neurologist Johannes Müller (all of whom we discuss in greater depth in the first two chapters of this book). Though Müller quickly reinterpreted this law in a manner harmonious with the old Galenic model, the fuller lesson eventually became clear: the lesson that the elements of the nervous system operated in a semi-autonomous fashion, without a center of origin or control.
Nineteenth-century science, then, began to conceive of the subject as a complex of organically interacting mechanisms operating more or less autonomously and unconsciously (Clarke and Jacyna 30; Richardson, British 6; Salisbury and Shail 14–26). While literary and cultural critics have made much of the autonomous, masculine, bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century, examining its ideological functions and rifts, much less has been said of the ways in which this hegemonic subject was also engaged in the diligent pursuit, through neurological investigations, of its own deconstruction. For the new picture of the bourgeois subject that emerged from neurological research over the course of the century, and was broadly received in the popular consciousness by the 1860s, was profoundly destabilizing to any sense of personal autonomy, whether that autonomy was couched in idealist or materialist terms, as mind or as matter.
This study’s focus on the nineteenth century is not a mere accident of the calendar; while hardly unified, the period from roughly 1800 through 1900 witnessed a profound change in conceptions of life and the ordering of society. Tellingly, the word “biology” first arose in 1802, in the writings of the German naturalist Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and, independently, later that same year in the writings of the French naturalist Lamarck. In both cases, the neologism was used in opposition to the older “natural history.” Where the older term encompassed a wide range of objects (minerals, plants, and animals), the new one singled out one object in particular for study: the living organism.
As Michel Foucault has argued, this new focus on life as a particular and separate category of study was part and parcel of a broader social transformation. In The Order of Things, Foucault traces two simultaneous and in some ways contradictory movements that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. “On one hand,” he notes, “we see criticism displacing itself and detaching itself from the ground where it had first arisen” (162). Here Foucault is particularly thinking of Kant, whose critical idealism “questions the very possibility of all knowledge” (162). “On the other hand, however, and during the same period,” he continues,
life assumes its autonomy in relation to the concepts of classification. It escapes from that critical relation which, in the eighteenth century, was constitutive of the knowledge of nature. It escapes—which means two things: life becomes one object of knowledge among others, and is answerable, in this respect, to all criticism in general; but is also resists this critical jurisdiction, which it takes over on its own account and begins to bear, in its own name, on all possible knowledge. So that throughout the nineteenth century, from Kant to Dilthey and to Bergson, critical forms of thought and philosophies of life find themselves in a position of reciprocal borrowing and contestation. (162)
Foucault draws our attention here to two separate developments: to the emergence of radical epistemological questioning after Kant on one hand, and to the emergence of biology after naturalists such as Treviranus and Lamarck on the other. These two developments are neither complementary nor antithetical; instead, they borrow from and struggle against each other. And one result of this interaction is that “life” becomes both an object of knowledge and the necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge itself.
A similar dynamic occurs in the discourse of nerves over the course of the nineteenth century. On one hand, neurological discoveries in the beginning of the century destabilized knowledge in ways seen, even at the time, as analogous to Kant’s critical idealism. On the other hand, the discourse of nerves escaped from earlier modes of classification. It escaped—which means both that “nerves” became an object of study and control and that “nerves” became a marker of the vital, the unclassifiable, the uncontrollable, the real. The neural subject was at once an object of knowledge and management and a welter of energies that eluded such ordering.
Because of its peculiarly embodied and social nature, theater served as a nexus for the energies of diverse neural subjects. This potency can be found across traditional artistic boundaries, from avant-garde dramas such as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck or August Strindberg’s Miss Julie to mass-cultural thrill rides such as the melodramas of Dion Boucicault and Augustin Daly, or, indeed, to literal thrill rides such as roller coasters, which emerged during the same century. It was in large part with the decay of gestural language as an accurate representation of mental states that modern theater emerged over the course of the century, a decay inextricably linked to the rise of the neural subject. What we find over the course of the century, in short, is a gradual transition from a discourse of representation (with gesture as a privileged medium) to a discourse of neural sensation. While by no means universal, this transition was influential enough to drive many of the artistic innovations we now understand as distinctive of the modern stage.
At least two significant implications of this shift should be underscored. The first is that the semiotic transition from gestures to nerves is a shift from a sign system that is detectable to one that is undetectable to the naked senses. The consequences of this transition were significant for both science and the arts. For science, it meant a new attention: attention to the instruments by which this previously invisible realm might be detected, measured, and regulated. For the arts, it meant a new challenge: a challenge to represent the new neural subject. How, after all, to represent, artistically, the nervous energies that drive human interactions? As the theater in particular has historically been an art form in which the representation of social interaction plays an especially central role, the difficulty of staging the underlying neural drama behind the mere play of words and gestures was felt by many playwrights, directors, and composers, and helped to drive major artistic transformations.
The second significant implication of the shift is that it entails a movement from a system in which sign and referent are substantially separate to one in which they are substantially identical. Much eighteenth-century theory understood gesture as the privileged means of accessing and communicating the inner resources of the mind. Even more than words, gestures were held to function as ideal vehicles for the communication of thoughts and emotions because, unlike words, gestures are natural and universal and, particularly when made involuntarily, cannot be faked. Gestures are like words, however, in that they differ radically in type from that which they represent; that is, feelings and thoughts are totally separate in substance from the words and gestures that communicate them, even if these vehicles succeed in representing the contents of mental states. In short, medium fundamentally differs from message.
When people began to treat nerves as a kind of language that expresses the truth of mental states, however, they shifted into a very different register. Insofar as the actions of the nervous system are regarded as a kind of language—as over the course of the nineteenth century they increasingly were—it is a strange kind of language, one in which that which is to be communicated and the means of communication are the very same thing. Put another way, to read, quantify, and interpret the energies of the neural subject is to read a sign that is its own referent: the unmediated subject itself. Looked at from one angle, this sort of language is thus no language at all; looked at from another, it is language’s ideal state, an utterly transparent sign system: medium and message become identical. The neural subject as unreadable or as wholly transparent: the operation of this dialectic drove much of the artistic innovation of nineteenth-century theater.
The gradual shift toward an increasingly neurological discourse, then, disrupted representation in a number of ways. Over the course of the nineteenth century there were certain works—some widely staged, some limited to niche audiences, some only imagined—that pressed against the fault lines of this disruption. These works sought to play directly on the nerves of the spectators through nonrepresentational and sensorial means and did not so much eschew representation as profoundly destabilize it by means of direct effects upon the audience’s sensorium. We will collectively refer to such works as theaters of sensation. While their history began in the early nineteenth century, it continued beyond the bounds of that century and this book. In the twentieth century, theaters of sensation could be found in a wide range of avant-garde and mass-cultural performances, from Futurist and Dadaist interventions to Grand-Guignol horror shows to fascist spectacles. Their most famous twentieth-century practitioner and theorist, however, was Antonin Artaud, with whom this book concludes.
The study of the cultural significance of the neurological sciences in the nineteenth century is a complex endeavor that has lately captured widespread scholarly interest. Much of this interest began around the turn of the millennium, with Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001), one of the first and most lucid of a steady stream of works. To be sure, there had been decades of research by psychoanalytically informed literary scholars into the roots of modern psychology in the nineteenth century, but that research tended to be far less interested in issues of brain science than it was in, say, Mesmerism or Hartleyan associationism, both of which were then generally stripped of their neurophysiological aspects. Almost entirely overlooked was the cultural significance of neural scientists such as (in the British Romantic context) Matthew Baillie, Charles Bell, and William Lawrence. Richardson’s book directed the attention of critics to the cultural influence of these scientists and their discoveries, an influence that, as he convincingly demonstrated, shaped canonical writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats as well as society more broadly.
In the wake of Richardson’s book, and sometimes inspired by it, have come numerous studies on the intersection between neurology and culture in the nineteenth century.7 Theater scholars have been part of the conversation as well, though their contributions have so far been relatively marginal, and it is telling that the most important book-length study of theater and the medical sciences remains Joseph Roach’s first book, published back in 1985. With every passing year, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting seems to have been more ahead of its time. Roach’s central insight there, that “conceptions of the human body drawn from physiology and psychology have dominated theories of acting from antiquity to the present” (11), at once illuminated and expanded theater history, drawing attention to centuries-old dialogues between the arts and sciences of embodiment, and his attention to eighteenth-century theories and practices in particular demonstrates how crucial that period was to the formation of modern theater. In more recent years, one especially valuable voice in the comparative field of modern theater and the medical sciences has been Stanton Garner, whose contributions include a revealing 2000 essay on Zola, experimental medicine, and the Naturalist stage as well as a 2008 special issue of Modern Drama on “Theatre and Medicine.”8
This wave of scholarship has been tremendously valuable, though it is not without its blind spots. Where previous generations of research frequently excavated earlier medical science in search of precursors to twentieth-century psychological and psychoanalytic insights, the current generation all too often does the same for precursors of twenty-first-century neuroscience. From a historical perspective, this is obviously a problematic approach, and one of the things it misses about nineteenth-century culture is how tightly intertwined the fields of neurology and psychology generally were at the time, and how odd the later separation between the two would have seemed. Take, for example, the case of hypnotism, a single word for a complex set of cultural practices that crossed spheres of science, medicine, arts (both popular and avant-garde), and daily life. Older studies of fin-de-siècle psychology delved deeply into these practices, which were generally represented as providing a bridge between Mesmer and Freud. More recent, neurologically informed studies, by contrast, have ignored hypnotism almost entirely, on the implicit assumption that it is not a significant part of the prehistory of present-day neuroscience. In this case, both approaches miss part of the historical reality, which was that hypnotism was largely understood during the nineteenth century as a phenomenon at once psychological and neurological, just as Mesmer had previously understood “animal magnetism” as both a material and a spiritual force, inseparably. More broadly, what this partial blindness may miss is the profound appeal that the vision of a harmony of soul and brain held for many in the nineteenth century, and at the same time the painful thought that this harmony may have already been shattered by recent advances in the neurological sciences. Briefly put, neurological discourses in the nineteenth century cannot be neatly separated from psychological discourses—even and perhaps especially in the case of Freud, at least until The Interpretation of Dreams and arguably throughout his career. Research into nineteenth-century neurology, then, should and at some points even must draw on research into nineteenth-century psychology, including those pre-psychoanalytic aspects such as hypnotism and hysteria, if this research aims to accurately account for the general inseparability of these fields at the time.
This book consists of six chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter examines a dialogue between theater artists and neurological scientists at a particular historical moment. While we will advance more or less chronologically through the nineteenth century, there will be occasional forays into the twentieth to point toward the continuing development of the nervous stage.
How can one read another’s true thoughts and feelings?—this is the question with which Chapter 1 begins. Many philosophical texts and acting manuals arrived at the same answer, and the answer they reached was this: we can read another’s hidden mental states through careful observation of gesture. Gesture, in this account, held out a promise that words could not, the promise of a natural and universal language and a royal road to the psyche. The story that this chapter tells is one of the disintegration of this promise and the gradual replacement of gestures by nerves as reliable signs of mental states. The first part of the chapter traces lines of connection between acting handbooks of the period, the plays of Joanna Baillie, and the scientific work of two of Great Britain’s most prominent medical researchers: Joanna’s brother Matthew Baillie and Charles Bell. These interactions indicate both the continuing cultural importance of natural-language theories of gesture as well as their gradual disintegration in the face of neurological developments. The chapter’s second half examines the ways that Percy Shelley’s play The Cenci rends this fraying fabric asunder.
The Cenci was not publically staged until more than a century after its composition, and Woyzeck, left unfinished with Georg Büchner’s death in 1837, had to wait almost as long. These two plays mark an early stage—too early to be digested at the time—of the breakdown of systems of representation and the rise of networks of sensation. The second chapter reads Woyzeck alongside the neurological research Büchner was engaged in at the same time he was writing his fragmentary play. Woyzeck performs the paradoxical work of representing a profound crisis of representation, a crisis it depicts as at once neurological and political. At the same time, the play introduces a new form of aesthetics, one that operates directly and materially upon the nervous system of the spectators in much the same way that the play's environment operates upon its eponymous character. In this sense, Woyzeck does not merely conceptualize but bodily enacts the shifts from representation to sensation and from gesture to nerves. Where The Cenci staged the breakdown of the language of gesture, Woyzeck proposed a new language of nerves and demonstrated the creation of the neural subject.
Chapter 3 returns to Great Britain and advances the clock to mid-century. It is during this period—during the 1860s, more precisely—that the cult of sensation took full hold of cultures across much of Western Europe and North America, sweeping not only across borders but across genres as well: theater, fiction, and journalism were all sensationalized during the period. As the term “sensation” implies, this craze was linked (sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly) to developments in neurology, developments that had become ubiquitous in the middle-class consciousness and so deeply ingrained with the institutions of society that we can speak of the solidification of a neural subject in the latter half of the century. This chapter focuses on one particular network in the construction of this subject, a network that connects elements as seemingly diverse as railway trains, changing notions of risk and trauma, and the newly popular form of melodrama dubbed “sensation drama.” This network found its emblem in the melodramatic scenario of the person tied to the train tracks and rescued in the nick of time. This “railway rescue” scenario emerged in the late 1860s, spread like wildfire, and remains in our collective consciousness to this day. The chapter traces the explosive rise and iconic significance of this scenario, and concludes by reading a short story by Charles Dickens that reflects on the relation of melodrama to industrialized sensation.
Chapter 4 turns to Richard Wagner. The move from Victorian sensation drama to Wagnerian music drama may seem like an impossible leap, but part of the argument of this book is that such seemingly disparate artworks actually share a common, if subterranean, genealogy. All too often forgotten, even among Wagner scholars, is the sheer material force with which his music was first received. Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites frequently agreed at least in this: that the novelty of Wagner’s art was that it was directed first and foremost at the nerves. If the nerves belonged to Baudelaire, this stimulation was felt as bliss; if the nerves belonged to the critic Eduard Hanslick, it was hell; if they belonged to Nietzsche, it could go both ways. Moreover, it was not simply audience members who understood Wagner’s music dramas as essentially neural; it was also Wagner himself. Critics have long appreciated the importance of Wagner’s Beethoven essay of 1870, an essay that theorizes Wagner’s late movement toward “inner drama” and toward the dominance of music over text. Largely unappreciated, however, is the central importance of the neurological sciences in this transition; what Wagner was aiming at in this essay was not simply the inner drama of the psyche but also, and inextricably, the inner drama of the body: that is, the drama of the brain and the nervous system. It is this profoundly neuropsychological understanding of art that drives Wagner’s late work, above all his final music drama, Parsifal. In Parsifal, Wagner demonstrates the material force of sound waves on the auditory nerves, and points toward one of the central neuropsychological problems of the fin de siècle, the problem of hysteria.
No study of the cultural effects of nineteenth-century nerve sciences can avoid consideration of one of the century’s most famous and notorious medical scientists, a man widely considered the founder of modern neurology: Jean-Martin Charcot, whom we examine in Chapter 5. Charcot’s public lectures, in which he exhibited and commented upon a parade of neurological patients with the panache of a born showman, made them popular spectacles even before he turned his attention to the study of hysteria. It was his famous cast of female hysterics, however, that ultimately turned these lectures into popular-science extravaganzas that attracted many of the leading scientific and artistic figures of the age, and did much to make hysteria one of the central elements in the fin-de-siècle construction of the neural subject. This chapter argues that the charge of “theatricality” was frequently used by Charcot’s opponents at the time, that theatricality was felt by Charcot himself to pose a potentially mortal danger to his scientific enterprise, that much of Charcot’s method was a sort of theatricality against theatricality, and, finally, that theatricality—the great, necessary repressed of Charcot’s method—returned to take its revenge in the theatrical form known as Grand Guignol. In some cases, the revenge was direct and personal, as several of these stage shockers were cowritten by his own scientific disciples.
Chapter 6 turns to two of Charcot’s contemporaries: Émile Zola and August Strindberg. Zola’s 1873 stage adaptation of his novel Thérèse Raquin is generally considered the first Naturalist drama, an experiment that inspired the most famous Naturalist play, Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Chapter 6 examines these two plays in the context of the neurophysiological theories that underlie Zola and Strindberg’s conceptions of Naturalism. It argues that Zola’s Naturalism, like that of his scientific mentor Claude Bernard, attempts to harmonize a commitment to neurophysiological determinism with a commitment to independent scientific observation, and that these dual commitments produce an uneasy fault line in Thérèse Raquin. And it argues further that Miss Julie should be understood as an earthquake centered in the rift of Zola’s earlier Naturalism. Strindberg’s artistic innovations are partly rooted in the author’s refusal to harmonize the most disruptive neurological findings of his time with more palatable ideas of objectivity, independence, and agency. In order to fully appreciate Strindberg’s artistic contribution, it is therefore crucial to understand his intellectual debt to the neuropsychological research of his day, and to Charcot and Bernheim above all.
The history of the nervous stage continues into the twentieth century, and indeed into the twenty-first, and like any living genealogy it sprouts, branches, and mutates as it grows. Together with the section on the Grand Guignol at the end of Chapter 4, the book’s Conclusion helps give a sense of some of the directions that growth took after the nineteenth century. The Conclusion begins with a consideration of parallels between two works written around 1900: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901), works that correspond with the rise of hermeneutics at the end of a nervous century. This neurologically informed turn to hermeneutics ultimately sets the stage for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and a new and more virulent form of theatrical sensation.
Neuroscience is now profoundly changing our understanding of human behavior, and beyond this is altering us as individuals and societies. This study hopes to show that, while the impact of this transformation is real and significant, it is not unprecedented. The nineteenth century, too, experienced an intellectual upheaval driven by the neural sciences of the age, a revolution that anticipated and helped to create the conditions of our own. We are already neural subjects, and have been for a long time.
1 A sampling of the avalanche of twenty-first-century popular-science books on neuroscience and the self would include LeDoux, Ramachandran, Metzinger, Churchland, and Eagleman.
2 A general overview of Artaud’s influence may be found in Leach 187–195.
3 Other scholars have identified a similar subject as a late-twentieth- or even twenty-first-century construction, the rise of which is connected with recent advances in neuroscience and psychopharmacology. In scholarly works since 2003, this (post)modern subject has been variously dubbed “the neurochemical self” (N. Rose), “the neurostructural self” (Fein), “the neurologic subject” (Pickersgill et al.), “the neural subject” (Bates and Bassiri; Pelaprat and Hartouni), “the cerebral subject” (Ehrenberg; Ortega; Vidal), and “the sensational subject” (Jervis). My own study seeks to show that this recent construction in many ways returns, with a difference, to a subject position most extensively developed in the nineteenth century. This connection of the neural subject with the nineteenth rather than the twenty-first century has particular affinities with the account of Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, whose illuminating essay collection traces the development of what they call “the neurological self” from 1800 through 1950. G. S. Rousseau prefers a somewhat earlier starting point and a longer history than I consider here, tracing the emergence of “nervous selves” to the mid-eighteenth century (215, 345). I do not disagree with Rousseau’s dating, or with his extensive account of the significant cultural roles played by the neurological sciences in the early modern period. However, I believe that the changes to both the neurological sciences and their cultural impact brought about from roughly 1800 onward were changes not simply of degree (e.g., of knowledge of the nervous system; of proliferation of such knowledge to the general populace) but of kind. More specifically, the shift in neurology toward a decentralized account of cerebral functioning set the stage for profound epistemological, psychological, medical, and artistic transformations that unfolded over the course of the nineteenth century.
4 As Anne Vincent-Buffault puts it in her study of eighteenth-century French sentimentality, “[a]udiences cried a lot, and took pleasure above all in being seen to cry” (54). Her general summary of the history of tears in the theater from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century is a model of scholarly concision (54–76). See also Baasner 171–172; Dixon 69–122.
5 The political function of eighteenth-century displays of sentiment has been widely noted. See, e.g., David Denby, who reads eighteenth-century sentimental narratives as “a figure of the social relationship which lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project: a project of social solidarity and sympathy, but also one in which notions of community and public opinion play an increasingly important role,” and further notes the pan-European nature of this sentimental-political project (2–3). Susan Manning agrees that sensibility “functioned as a kind of social cement” in the period (83). John Mullan focuses on the politics of sentiment in Hume and Smith (18–56), while Reddy examines the same in Diderot and his circle (164–172, 182–184). The theatrical origins and political uses of sentimental discourse in Georgian Britain is well covered in Orr. A provocative general account of eighteenth-century politics of sentiment may be found in Jervis, Sympathetic 74–84.
6 The importance of (highly codified and hyperbolic) gesture to melodrama is crucial to the argument of the third chapter of this book. The best introductory account of melodramatic gesture remains Brooks 56–80.
7 A representative but by no means exhaustive list of books on the topic published since 2000 would include (in chronological order) Wood; Rousseau; Dames; Jackson; Daly; Stiles, Popular; Murison; Steege; and T. W. Smith. Given the complexities of such an interdisciplinary enterprise, it is perhaps unsurprising that several of the most illuminating studies of neurology and nineteenth-century culture have been essay collections that have drawn together scholars of various national traditions with historians of science. Several have appeared since 2000, including Stiles, Neurology; Salisbury and Shail; and both volumes of Boller et al.
8 I am differentiating historical studies of relations between neurology and the theater, such as those of Roach and Garner, from the application of contemporary neuroscience and/or cognitive science to theatrical practices. The latter approach is best exemplified in the work of Blair; Blair and Cook; Cook; Falletti et al.; McConachie; McConachie and Hart; and Shaughnessy. In my opinion, the methodologies and aims of such works are quite different from those of the cultural historian, and so I do not generally draw from them for the present study. For more sanguine views of the relationship between the historical study of culture and contemporary neuro- and cognitive sciences, see Richardson, Neural 1–16; Zunshine 1–33, 61–63.