Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Aesthetics of Disgust. Zachary Samalin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. xi+325.Anna KornbluhAnna KornbluhUniversity of Illinois Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhatever the opposite of disgust is—relish, gusto, delectation—that is the feeling of encountering this formidable study of disgust as a political emotion. The vagueness of that affirmation flows necessarily from the expansiveness of its converse: disgust is a visceral instinct that is also indelibly social, an animal reflex that is also the index of civilization, a gaping repulsion that is also insuperably magnetic. To study it systematically is to muck one’s hands in these slippery spans, and Zachary Samalin dauntlessly rolls up his sleeves. In a herculean survey of primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, evolutionary science, and literature, woven with threads of twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, Samalin finds Victorian formulations of political affect that go on to anchor such enormous modern motifs as the unconscious, public health, and decolonization. Readers will have their noses rubbed in quite stinky minutiae of nineteenth-century thinking, through which will waft enormous and continually redolent questions of contemporary life.Although disgust is conceived throughout as an “emotion,” the book’s subtitle—“the political aesthetics of disgust,” only slightly less evocative than the punning title “the masses are revolting”—points to the underlap of emotion and aesthetics, and indeed the arguments consider the political force of aesthetic experience beyond emotion, as well as, to a lesser degree, the aesthetic mediation of political emotions. Sensuousness and art have political salience, and politics operates aesthetically, as practices like protest chants with their poetic meter of collective harmony, and theories like Walter Benjamin’s account of fascism as rendering “politics aesthetic,” well know. In this double attention, the book smells strongly of Karl Marx’s grand assertion that “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.”1 Senses themselves have been formed in the course of producing history, and one of this book’s aims is to penetrate the hidden abode of that forming. However primal or uncultured it feels, the sense of disgust belongs to the entire history of the world.History therefore provides much ballast in this argument. In the oppositions and paradoxes it continually provokes, disgust is an “unstable recursive formation” (32), so instability becomes both motif and frame; one of the unctuous delights is its peristaltic movement between querying “the emotion’s lack of fixity and coherence” (257) and cataloging its consistent emission across many scintillating particular iterations in law, science, politics, infrastructure planning, and imperial administration. Disgust, “the unwanted feeling” (12,13, 14, 15, 16, etc.) is everywhere, and more specifically it is an animating pretext for every type of discourse—but then again it is also nowhere, its visceral heft disgorged by its cultural construction. There is thus a kind of tail-chasing quality to the analysis, only fitting for trying to get to the bottom of the emotion that was said famously by Freud to have propelled bipedal civilization to leap forward out of the quadraped’s recoil from their own reeking undersides (125).So the book’s method involves arguing for emotional incoherence while also arguing for emotional coherence, a method that the book calls “historicist” (257). And indeed, the evidence is organized in chapters that respectively center major discursive events—public infrastructure projects, literary realism, Darwinian science, emergent sociological theory—as they reveal themselves to be roused by disgust. The Victorian period is a ripe one for this study, not only because its much-lauded transformations like urbanization, industrialization, and imperial administration provided all manner of crowded corporeal aesthetic experience, nor only because aesthetic technologies like sensation fiction, the panorama, the phantasmagoria, and the photograph so altered aesthetic experience, but also because, perhaps most consequentially for Samalin, it began the formulation of theories of society and sociability that continue to underpin our own political imaginaries. Liberalism, sociology, critique—these are sense-making enterprises that owe their epistemic scaffolding to experiences of disgust. Samalin’s achievement in auditing that debt is genuinely revelatory.This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. For starters, there is a question about the place of the aesthetic among these many discourses, since the book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as “political aesthetics.” Dickens, Bronte, and Hardy appear in one chapter with thematic rather than formal perches, inclining the book to cultural history rather than aesthetic criticism. Why were literature and art of such limited use in thinking through the paradoxes of political aesthetics? Is disgust, in its contradictory consistency and constructed spontaneity, a circumvention of, or unavailable to, aesthetic mediation? Is disgust unfigurative even though it is inconsistent and generative? In psychoanalytic terms, is disgust uncondensed and undisplaced, and instead diffuse and at home?Readers might also note how psychoanalysis enters the scene here as an illustration of disgust’s centrality to narratives of civilization, but is not avowed as methodological influence—the science of speaking contradiction, the practice of punctuating necessary inconsistencies. That may be because the book is often in the position of taking discourse at its word, even though bureaucrats and anthropologists and obscenity prosecutors, in their appeals to disgust, very well also performed its allure. When a feeling is directly presented as “unwanted,” a formulation the book employs often, what else is being presented? Is there such a thing as “wanted” feeling?And to complement the psychoanalytic question with its regular companion in contrasting historicism, in not only accounting for contradiction but in working through: Is The Masses Are Revolting a project of marxist dialectical interpretation devoted to the possibility of mass revolt? The book tries to make recoil agile, to keep the beat of the contradictions of civilizational ideology. It shows, in short, that the successful industry of subjugation has also cultivated the emotional intelligence of disgust. But it shows less how disgust motivates the ongoing project, not wholly unsuccessful, of struggle for freedom instead. Could it? The book chides the Marxist tradition as an example of “the uncritical appeal to and absorption of the discourse of disgust” (173), even though it ostensibly accords that tradition great weight in its title. Because disgust is so all consuming and so generative, founding modern social science, propelling modern infrastructure, articulating modern legislation, the Victorian culture that the book catalogs remains very much our own. The contradictions of civilization abide and endure. The concluding note of the central chapter 4, from which the book takes its title, is that Marxism’s “political aspirations” cannot be “sustained” by aforementioned uncritical appeal (209). What would be political emotions that could gird more sustaining work? What, after all, is disgust’s opposite?Notes1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2007), 250. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1972), 241. 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