Bentham and the Arts Bentham and the Arts Edited by Anthony Julius, Malcolm Quinn and Philip Schofield First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Contributors, 2020 Collection © Editors, 2020 Images are public domain, copyright of the Contributors or reproduced by permission of third parties, as noted where they appear. The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Common 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Julius, A., Quinn, Malcolm, and Schofield, P. (eds). 2020. Bentham and the Arts. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787357365 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-738-9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-737-2 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-736-5 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-739-6 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-740-2 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787357365 Contents List of contributors vii List of figures x Acknowledgements xii Introduction 1 Philip Schofield Part I. Philosophy and sexuality 1. The Epicurean universe of Jeremy Bentham: Taste, beauty and reality 21 Philip Schofield 2. Not Kant, but Bentham: On taste 46 Frances Ferguson 3. ‘Envy accompanied with antipathy’: Bentham on the psychology of sexual ressentiment 71 Stella Sandford Part II. Intellectual history and literature 4. Literature, morals and utility: Bentham, Dumont and de Staël 91 Emmanuelle de Champs 5. Jeremy Bentham’s imagination and the ethics of prose style: Paraphrase, substitution, translation 115 Jan-Melissa Schramm v 6. ‘Is it true? … what is the meaning of it?’: Bentham, Romanticism and the fictions of reason 140 Tim Milnes 7. More Bentham, less Mill 160 Anthony Julius Part III. Aesthetics, taste and art 8. Enlightenment unrefined: Bentham’s realism and the analysis of beauty 201 Malcolm Quinn 9. Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility and taste: An alternative approach to aesthetics in two stages 227 Benjamin Bourcier 10. From pain to pleasure: Panopticon dreams and Pentagon Petal 244 Fran Cottell and Marianne Mueller 11. Bentham’s image: The corpo-reality check 270 Carolyn Shapiro Index 289 vi CONTENTS List of contributors Benjamin Bourcier is associate professor of moral and political philosophy at the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL) at the Catholic University of Lille. He holds a PhD on Jeremy Bentham’s cosmopolitan thought. His main interests are in history of international political thought and cosmopolitanism. Fran Cottell is an artist and senior lecturer in fine art at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She has been producing performance and installations since the 1970s and for the last 18 years she has been staging live installations displaying the contents, visitors and occupants of her house. Her work questions how to present life, or rather the breath of aliveness, within the fixed frame of the art institution. Emmanuelle de Champs is professor of British history and civiliza- tion at Université Cergy-Pontoise and dean of the Faculty of Languages and International Studies. She was a COFUND research fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt in 2017–18 and holds an honorary research fellowship at the Bentham Project, University College London. She has published several books and articles on the intellec- tual history of Benthamite utilitarianism, including Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in French, Bentham in France (‘Ideas in Context’ series, Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has co-edited, with Jean-Pierre Cléro, Bentham et la France: fortunes et infortunes de l’utilitarisme (SVEC, 2009). Her recent work focuses on the late-Enlightenment context in which English utilitarianism emerged. vii Frances Ferguson is the author of Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism did to Action and other writing on eighteenth- and nine- teenth-century topics. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Anthony Julius is professor of law and the arts, University College London, and deputy chairman of law firm Mishcon de Reya. His book on arts censorship in liberal democracy will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Tim Milnes is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to Edinburgh he was junior research fellow at University College, Oxford. He is the author of The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009). He is also the co-editor (with Kerry Sinanan) of Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010). Marianne Mueller is a practising architect and professor of architectural design and building typology at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. She studied and taught at the Architectural Association in London. Her practice Casper Mueller Kneer Architects is based in London and Berlin. Malcolm Quinn is professor of cultural and political history, associate dean of research for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, University of the Arts London and honorary senior research associate, Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, University College London. He is the author of Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-century Britain (Pickering and Chatto, 2013) and is general editor of The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life after Bourdieu (Routledge, 2018). He has published articles on utilitarianism, taste and art in History of European Ideas and Revue d’études benthamiennes. Stella Sandford is professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Her main research interests include sex and gender in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of natural history and philosophy and psychoanalytical theory. viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Philip Schofield is director of the Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, University College London and general editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Jan-Melissa Schramm worked as a lawyer before undertaking doctoral work on the changing idea of evidence in the long nineteenth century. She is now reader in literature and law and deputy director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Atonement and Self-sacrifice in Nineteenth- century Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2019). She has also co-edited two volumes of essays: Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Macmillan, 2011), and Sacrifice and the Modern Literature of War (Oxford University Press, 2018). Carolyn Shapiro is senior lecturer at Falmouth University, Cornwall, where she has been teaching critical theory across disciplines since 2002. She was previously a lecturer in the English department at Baruch College, City University of New York. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix List of figures 8.1 William Hogarth (1697–1764), Beer Street, 1751. 203 8.2 William Hogarth (1697–1764), Gin Lane, 1751. 203 8.3 William Hogarth (1697–1764), The Edwards Hamilton Family on a Terrace, 1734. 215 8.4 William Hogarth (1697–1764), The Bad Taste of the Town, 1723–4. 216 10.1 Ordnance Survey. London, Sheet XI. 3., 1895. 245 10.2 Overlay of Millbank Prison onto the present site. 245 10.3 Willey Reveley (1760–99), Plan of the panopticon penitentiary, UC cxix. 120v (c. 1791). 247 10.4 Willey Reveley (1760–99), Section of the panopticon penitentiary, UC cxix. 122v (c. 1791). 249 10.5 Willey Reveley (1760–99), Sketch of the panopticon penitentiary and its airing yards, UC cxix. 129 (c. 1791). 250 10.6 Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), Plan, elevation and two sections, 1807. 252 10.7 Guillaume-Abel Blouet (1795–1853), Plan du Rez-de-chaussée Prison Départementale, 1841. 253 10.8 Presidio Modelo, Cuba, 1926. 254 10.9 Koepel Panopticon Prison, Arnhem, 1980. 255 10.10 Canaletto (1697–1768), Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, London, 1754. 256 10.11 After William Jones (d. 1747), Ranelagh, 1742. 257 10.12 Charles Fourier (1772–1837), City with Guarantees (ville garantiste), 1820s. 258 x 10.13 Aerial photograph of Millbank Prison taken from a balloon, London from Aloft, Strand Magazine, 9 May 1891. 259 10.14 Scale comparison: Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Millbank Prison. 261 10.15 Cottell/Mueller, Pentagon Petal, Terry Watts, 2016. 263 10.16 Millbank Prison and Panopticon Petal drawn at different scales. 264 10.17 Cottell/Mueller, Pentagon Petal, Terry Watts, 2016. 265 10.18 Cottell/Mueller, Pentagon Petal, Terry Watts, 2016. 265 10.19 Scale comparison: Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Panopticon Petal.