Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, And the Romantic Poetics of Feeling‪.‬

TO BEGIN WITH AN AXIOM AND A COROLLARY: FEELINGS CIRCULATE, AND civility, which requires the circulation of feeling, equally requires its regulation. Recent writing about the history and philosophy of feeling confirms the standing of these truisms and grants them a more or less specifically Romantic origin. Adela Pinch couples the tendency of feelings to "wander extravagantly from one person to another" with "a concern with the vagrancy of emotions [that] persists from the eighteenth century through the romantic period." (1) For Thomas Pfau, "sympathy" becomes the sign of this need to "achieve a kind of homeostasis between self and other" even as it demands "the incessant labor" by which it is continually reoriented toward benevolence. (2) Rewriting this story as an account of "ambivalence" toward empathy that results in a distribution of emotional labor between the felt for and feeling, Julie Ellison brings it forward from the Romantic period into the present, where it is confirmed by Martha Nussbaum's discussion of the necessary conditions for human flourishing: a well-tempered experience of emotional neediness coupled with a "transcendent" form of sympathy that understands its own desire for general well-being as "love." (3) This kind of consensus is especially striking when it is compared with the equally well-known evidence for the establishment of very different models of circulating feeling before the later eighteenth century. In his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm of 1708, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, describes a kind of emotional virulence transmitted "by contact or sympathy," which he names "panic": "looks are infectious. The fury flies from face to face, and the disease is no sooner seen than caught." (4) But he remains adamant that the best way to temper such contagion is through sympathy rather than punishment or other forms of rule: by "entering into the concern of the people and taking, as it were, their passion upon him," the magistrate will be enabled to "divert and heal it" (10-11). Shaftesbury's underlying, Aristotelian assumption is that societies, like bodies, are given to occasional disequilibrium, and that it is through occasional "eruptions" that they heal themselves (9). On the level of bodily and social systems, his is a version of homeostasis that does not require the supplement of labor or regulation. Thirty years later, the mechanisms and existence of affective spread seem to David Hume to have become general, even ubiquitous, a part of the human condition that requires no "panic" to take place. Yet in asserting that "no quality of human nature is more remarkable ... than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to, our own," Hume provided no accompanying prescription for the regulation either of the propensity or its outcomes even as he emphasized the subject's and society's lack of volitional controls. (5)