The Complete Bentham: Rationality's Afterlife in Victorian Literature By

The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature by Stefan de la Peña Waldschmidt Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Robert Mitchell ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 ABSTRACT The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature by Stefan de la Peña Waldschmidt Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Robert Mitchell ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Stefan de la Peña Waldschmidt 2017 Abstract This dissertation uses Jeremy Bentham—philosopher of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” and architect of the Panopticon prison—to ask: what happened to rational thought after it no longer seemed capable of explaining human behavior? Literary studies have long critiqued Enlightenment Liberalism’s ideal of the rational individual whose disembodied qualities of mind supposedly allowed him to own property and represent the general interest. A search for alternative models of community has recently led scholars to argue that the Victorians, armed with breakthroughs in biology and psychology, embraced an anti-rationalistic theory that imagined human life as a materially embodied and de-individuated tangle of instincts and sensations. My dissertation uses Bentham to consider the possibility that the Victorians dispensed with the discourse of Enlightenment reason because, taken to its limit in Bentham’s utilitarianism, it becomes illiberal. Utilitarian rationalism, I argue, became a Victorian way of fantasizing about alternatives to liberalism that are variously bureaucratic, queer, and socialist. The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal iv government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. “The Complete Bentham” shows that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property, the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society, and the attainment of high culture as the ideal of good citizenship. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptical apparatus for purposes of reinforcing the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century v literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of Bentham’s rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate. In order to see what became of rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. Building from Bentham’s procedure for calculating pleasures and pains, I show how his logic drives him to design a new institutional basis for liberal government and how that same creative impulse carries over into the novel as it imagines its own fantastical worlds. Chapter 1: Calculating Pleasure . My first chapter begins with the formal conundrum contained in Bentham’s proposal to calculate “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” In his writings on legal reform, Bentham describes a process where all anticipated pleasures and pains are represented in the present as “weights” to be placed on either side of a scale and measured by a disinterested legislator. In this metaphor vi Bentham attempts the paradoxical task of taking the diachronic unfolding of future events and rendering them synchronously present for the purposes of passing rational judgment. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) shows how that procedure for predicting the consequences of future actions actually produces new forms of unpredictability. When Bentham’s calculating procedure is taken out of the theory that represents it as a synchronic procedure and reinserted into the diachronic unfolding of events in the novel, we see that very practice of weighing and measuring future pleasures and pains produces new and excessive affects. Bentham had assumed that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains might be governed by the carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley shows the reverse: the more Victor and his creature imagine their future pleasures and pains, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to antisocial behaviors. I further show how J.S. Mill’s Autobiography (1873) takes Bentham’s theory of calculation and rewrites it in an attempt to imagine a form of utilitarian life that is lived in the diachronic unfolding of events—in other words, a narrative life—rather than in the synchronic sums of Bentham’s imaginative calculus. vii Chapter 2: Expanding Bureaucracy. My second chapter considers the problem that Bentham’s procedure for summing up “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” encounters when it meets his assertion that all individuals are self-interested. How could a government made up of such rapacious individuals ever be trusted to serve the general interest? In Bentham’s theory of government this suspicion produces an ever- expanding bureaucracy where one layer of officials is added after another until the whole population is involved in the bureaucratic work of monitoring bureaucratic institutions. In Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857), Charles Dickens also insists that individual self-interest fuels an infinitely expanding bureaucracy. Rather than discarding self-interest like other Victorian theorists attempted to do, Dickens recognizes it as a vital form of life capable of provoking alternatives to liberal government. Dickens accomplishes this feat by making utilitarian self-interest into a monstrous spectacle that provokes alternative communities to form around the contrary principle of mutual aid. In Dickens’s world the affects of trust and suspicion are interdependent, each animating the other. I see recent re-evaluations of the so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion” as likely to miss this point. Rita Felski has argued that our contemporary literary institutions resemble a stultifying bureaucracy because critique, the very type of suspicious reading, always provokes counter-critiques, resulting in an infinite series of viii diminishing returns as each new reading accuses its predecessors of taking the novel at face value. As Felski replicates the logic of Bentham’s bureaucracy in her diagnosis, she overlooks the alternative that Dickens offers where trust and mutual aid turn out to depend on shared suspicions around which communities of readers and critics can gather. Chapter 3: Panoptic Economics. Bentham was not only worried that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” might fall victim to the depredations of government functionaries; he was also concerned that a desperate surplus population might destroy the institution of private property. As my third chapter shows, Bentham’s plan to secure property from this danger paradoxically creates an alternative political economy that dispenses with the institution of private property altogether. Filtered through Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Bentham’s Panopticon has come down to us as the blueprint for institutions that produce self-policing subjects—the modern school, hospital, and prison. But if we return to Bentham’s plans, we see that they actually resemble the germ of a socialist state. In order to preserve life and prevent the rebellion of a growing surplus population, Bentham expanded his Panopticon prison into a network of institutions

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