"Unhuman Humanity": Bodies of the Urban Poor and the Collapse of Realist Legibility

Abstract

Recently, several scholars of late nineteenth-century urban fiction, photography, and social science discourse have stressed the complicity of these cultural forms with emerging modes of social discipline. In particular, critics have argued that the desire to represent the lives of socially subordinate populations-tenement dwellers, immigrants, vagrants-in novels, photographs, and scientific studies converged with governmental and private-sector reform and social service programs to establish an extensive, tightly-woven web of surveillance through which the poor and disenfranchised were analyzed, regulated, and policed. Literary historian June Howard contends, for example, that naturalist writing reinforced Progressive-era structures of social dominance in which the poor become objects of professional-managerial class scrutiny. Howard argues that naturalism is characterized by an organizing dichotomy between privileged, autonomous narrator, with whom the reader is aligned, and degraded inhabitant of deterministic world. Rather than an self-governing individual, the is the central subject in spectacle of determinism that confirms the of the narrator's gaze and the moral authority and freedom of the readers. [T]he menacing and vulnerable Other-the brute-is incapable of acting as self-conscious, purposeful agent[;] he can only be observed and analyzed by such an agent (104). However, although the spectator describes and explains the brute, he (rarely she) retains his autonomy the deterministic environment the inhabits; while explore determinism, we never submerged in it and ourselves become the brute (104). Ultimately, Howard argues, the narrator/brute split anticipates the Progressive movement, which placed reform in the hands of small cadre of ostensibly enlightened, nonpartisan experts. It is very short step, Howard contends, from naturalism's gesture of control to progressivism's, the sympathy and good intentions of the naturalist spectator to the altruistic and ultimately authoritarian benevolence of the progressive reformer (131). Along similar lines, Mark Seltzer has recently argued that realism's drive to render the social world legible operates as form of cultural surveillance. Seltzer contends that realism's and naturalism's diverse registers are coordinated within single technology of regulation (Statistical 84), a flexible and totalizing machine of power (Bodies 44). [T]he realist vision of the urban underworld, Seltzer contends, involves disciplinary relation between seeing