Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 by David Collings

Abstract

David Collings. Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Pp. 332. $61.50. David Collings's Monstrous Society is a subtle and ambitious book with a dual focus. In its broadest terms, the book offers an account of England's transition from the early modern period into modernity, a transformation that Collings dates to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The subsidiary theme that drives much of the book's argument is the contention that the emergence of Gothic literature in this period represents both the demonization of the plebeian body and the resistance of that body when its claims to expression were delegitimized by official discourses such as Edmund Burke's appeals to natural law, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, and Thomas Malthus's work on economy. Collings takes up the standard account of the shift from early modern to fully modern England as a transition from a customary social order grounded in embodied practices to a constitutional society based on codified principles. With this narrative as a point of departure, he argues that the concept of that depicts premodern societies as more organic formations than modern ones is mistaken. While both traditional and Marxist accounts of early modern English society describe reciprocity as a sign of mutual recognition between the propertied and plebeian classes, Collings argues that the reversibility of power demonstrated in social rituals like bread riots does not demonstrate the mutual recognition of legitimate interests but shows the effects of a structural antagonism. This thesis has two significant implications. The first is that antagonism is not a modern social phenomenon, dependent on the spread of literacy and the articulation of interests in written form; it is a fundamental feature of early modern society that was expressed in embodied practices. The second implication is that the belief that we inhabit a world of political modernity separated from the by an epistemic abyss is illusory. Collings argues for the necessity of a nonmodern historiography, one that does not rely for its premises on the notion of a break from the past (19). What does change in late eighteenth century England, Collings argues, is the representation of the bodies involved in this structure of antagonism. Defenders of the propertied class, such as Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus, now claim to deduce public policy from an expert mastery of natural law (20). The effect of this claim is to deny the plebeians the right to demand accountability from the ruling class; when social arrangements are imagined not as expressions of class interest but as effects of natural law, the ruling class disappears from view and plebeian counterforce is figured as a monstrous violation of the natural. The subtlety of the argument in Monstrous Society involves the articulation of the rhetoric of economic determinism with the metaphorics of the body. While the originary, premodern conception of natural rights that informs bread riots is collective, modern discourse imagines subjects in terms of individual sovereignty and universal equivalence. Defenses of the classical body, whether in Burke's accounts of the beauty of Marie Antoinette or in Bentham's valorization of individuality, deny the rights of the plebeian body. Where carnivalesque rituals assert a reversibility of power along a vertical axis of high and low, in the modern era the delegitimation of power from below takes the form of the hyperbolization of the grotesque, carnivalesque body into a monstrous body. The Gothic investment in tortured, ghostly, and deformed bodies reasserts the claims of the negated collective (22) of plebeian counterpower. In Collings's account of the birth of modern English discourse, the possibility of revolution is crucial to converting the reversible present of carnival into revolutionary history: Revolution shifts the symbolic reversal of social norms into the process of their literal transformation; its axis is not high/low but past/future (46). …