Oscar Wilde and the Brain Cell

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Oscar Wilde and the Brain Cell

Elisha Cohn1 Department of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Corresponding author: Tel.: þ1-607-255-7111; Fax: þ001 607 255 6661, e-mail address: [email protected]

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Abstract This chapter considers Oscar Wilde’s interest in the brain cell as an aesthetic object. Offering an account of Wilde’s career that analyzes his early interest in physiology and philosophy, this chapter argues that Wilde’s uniquely aesthetic take on the brain suggests that he rejects an account of the self as autonomous or self-determining. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the freedom of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience. But writers whose work Wilde knew, like John Ruskin, W. K. Clifford, and John Tyndall, avoided the despair of materialism by using aesthetic terms in their own discussions of life’s invisible materials. Wilde’s art collaborates with the contemporary sciences. His depictions of the cell direct the senses to a new field of being that emphasizes the molecular life all humans have in common, in which individual responsibility and activity matter less than the necessity of beauty.

Keywords neuron, Oscar Wilde, aestheticism, atom, molecular, John Tyndall, materialism, Henri Bergson

1 INTRODUCTION Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was one of the first writers to use the image of the brain cell in literature (Stiles, 2012). In an 1894 letter about the recent composition of his Poems in Prose, Oscar Wilde complained that his mental architecture inhibited his writing: I wish I could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go elsewhere. I hate writing: the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain. Wilde (2000, p. 621) Progress in Brain Research, Volume 205, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63273-9.00002-2 © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Wilde’s depiction of the brain cell functions as a kind of open secret: it is impenetrable to self-reflection yet it allows him to create his aesthetic vision. Wilde’s interest in the sciences is a persistent, if subtle, presence in his oeuvre. He writes in The Critic as Artist (1891), “When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realize that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action” (Wilde, 1891/2000b, p. 147). And in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde imagines the brain cell as a gorgeous artifact when Dorian attempts to track “the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 253). Equating “thoughts” and “passions,” Wilde suggests that mental life might be biologically determined and is not even quite accessible. But the loss of freedom does not diminish the experiential keenness of either “passions” or sensations: by attending to the brain cell’s pearly quality, Wilde imagines the self a kind of ornament (Bennett, 2010). This image of the cell renders beautiful the density of this inaccessible, invisible, inhuman-yet-human object. Hiding mental life inside the cell, Wilde privileges contemplative sensations while maintaining his characteristic critique of or indifference to action. For some it may seem surprising that Wilde was interested in neuroscience. He is best known as one of the leading figures in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s, who claimed, in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that “All art is quite useless” in order to defend art’s value (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 167). Born into an environment of privilege and intellectual engagement in Dublin in 1854, he was famous for his style before he became known for his writing, presaging his afterlife as an enduring gay icon. Attending Oxford from 1874 to 1878, he acted the dandy. Wilde was interested in extravagant ornamentation. He wore velvet jackets with significantly unnatural green carnations in the lapel, and decorated his undergraduate rooms sumptuously with blue china. After he graduated from Oxford and married, he worked as the editor of a journal on fashion and the arts called The Woman’s World, lectured in America on the decorative arts, and became celebrated for his essays on criticism and above all for his plays about London’s upper crust—Lady’s Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The theatrical success of the last was diminished by a feud begun by the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895 Wilde sued the Marquess for libel, but despite his eloquent defense of “the love that dare not speak its name” (Ellmann, 1988, p. 386), he was ultimately sentenced under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which punished “gross indecency.” Imprisoned for 2 years, Wilde wrote several works describing the experience, but he emerged a broken man, and he died in 1900 of cerebral meningitis in a hotel in Paris. In a well-known anecdote about his final days, he remarked, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go” (Ellmann, 1988, p. 581); the quip speaks to his legacy as, above all and under adverse conditions, a stylist. As the consummate aesthete, Wilde was given to disparaging comments about science that would make it seem an unlikely source for creative thinking about neurobiology—after all, unlike scientists, “No artist desires to prove anything”

1 Introduction

(Wilde, 1891/2000b, p. 167). In a letter written after his time in prison, he wrote, “Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so” (Wilde, 2000, p. 969). Yet Wilde remained persistently intrigued by scientific ideas. This essay will focus on Wilde’s repeated and even repetitive images of the brain cell, which he used for the first time in his poem “Roses and Rue” and repeated on several occasions, with few variations, throughout his career. Wilde encountered scientific approaches to the materiality of mind when he began at Oxford in 1874, a year that saw a distinctly aesthetic moment in the material sciences. Wilde shared with these scientists both an interest in the beauty of the unseen and a commitment to the common molecular basis of all organic and inorganic matter. Beginning in the early 1870s, theorists of science like W. K. Clifford (1845– 1879), T. H. Huxley (1825–1895), John Tyndall (1820–1893) and others began to make highly public statements about the materiality of mind. Clifford’s “Body and Mind” and Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata,” both given as lectures in 1874, constituted major endorsements of materialism which assessed consciousness as epiphenomenal (Clifford, 1886; Huxley, 1882). But at the same time, some scientists imagined microscopic matter in aesthetic terms, which also served political ends. In 1865, the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), with whom Wilde studied at Oxford, gave aesthetically oriented lectures on physics, called The Ethics of the Dust, at a girls’ school. These lectures led his students to appreciate “so many beautiful things we never see!” in order to teach them that humans could derive ethical lessons about energetic social cooperation from the process of crystallization (Ruskin, 1865/ 1905, p. 255). Ruskin emphasized that the energetic purity (as he saw it) of atoms should be understood to affirm humanistic beliefs about individuality and responsibility. As crystals were formed by the cooperation of atoms, each with its own pure energy, societies should be ideally composed through the collaboration of vital individuals (Robson, 2001). In other words, individuals were like atoms, but this did not mean that social life was atomistic in the sense of isolating or dissociated. For Ruskin, “[i]t it just as true for us, as for the crystal, that the nobleness of life depends upon its consistency,—clearness of purpose,—quiet and ceaseless energy” (Ruskin, 1865/1905, p. 264). Other writers pursued less overtly humanistic but similarly aesthetic approaches in attempts to democratize science by making it more readily available to the general public. Tyndall, a physicist, published Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (1871, later expanded) to render materialist concepts beautiful and scientific methods appealing, though unlike Ruskin he did not hinge ethical analogies on his elaboration of the work of atoms. These ideas informed Wilde’s fiction, prose, and poetry, which continued to stay au courant with scientific debates. Both Wilde and the scientists whose work he encountered showed interest in experiences of seeing, sensing, and imagining ephemeral or invisible processes of physical flux. In what is sometimes seen as the founding text of aestheticism, the art critic Walter Pater (1839–1894) in The Renaissance conceived beauty in the smallest units of perception and dispensed with any demand for active mental reflection on passing sensations (Pater, 1873/2010). Tyndall’s science and Pater’s

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aesthetics attuned themselves to the vitality of the minimal and the inorganic. This attention also informs the democratizing commitments socialist aesthetes and democratic scientists shared: a scientific aestheticism directed the senses to a molecular life held in common. Yet scientific theorists tended to emphasize the molecular flux of the physical world, while Wilde emphasized the brain cell as a static object. Whereas many scientists emphasized physical change, process, and sometimes infinitely perfecting progress, Wilde’s use of the same image of the cell again and again calls attention to stasis, imitation, and determinacy. How, in this context, should we read Wilde’s recurrent images of the singular brain cell, an attractive yet unknowable unitary figure, set off against the ground of connection and relation? Why does not he emphasize the seemingly liberatory implications of atomic flux? By 1890, when Wilde wrote much of the work for which he is remembered, the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934) had identified the neuron as the basis of the brain’s architecture, making intricate drawings of the cells rendered visible with silver stain. It is unlikely that Wilde was aware of this development, but he was a product of what critics recognize as the accelerating materialism of Victorian culture on two fronts—on the one hand, the industrial production of goods, and on the other, scientific culture. Wilde, indebted to these seemingly disparate materialisms, stresses their intersection. His fiction, with its fascination with jewels, collection, and ornamentation, and its frequent invocation of scientific reductions of human thought, feeling, and action, clearly understands these materialisms together. He not only suggests that conscious experience might be reducible to physiology but also stresses the aesthetic qualities of the brain as an object. The curatorial life of materialist consumption and languorous contemplation, Wilde implies, is not threatened by scientific materialism. Rather, scientific materialism lends credence to the sensuous attractions of particularly fine and singular material things. After all, at a microscopic level, material attractions are what matter is made of, and such attractions might be said to resonate with the aesthetes’ highly tuned taste for exceptional collectible objects. The brain was a particularly intriguing late-Victorian object, for theorists of mind perceived a conflict between the brain’s “object-ness” and the experience of consciousness (its function, its product, or its depth). Wilde’s images of the brain might best be understood as, to use Elaine Freedgood’s terms, “fugitive” (Freedgood, 2006, p. 29)—they emphasize what resists comprehension and are best grasped sensuously. Wilde’s response to Tyndall and his contemporaries places him beside a direct lineage of representations of the brain in the philosophy of science, from Tyndall writing in the 1870s, to philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), and Catherine Malabou (1959–) today. Malabou draws on this line of thinkers to highlight the brain’s “plasticity”—its ongoing, continuous ability to change in and through its relationship with other matter. But Malabou argues that to talk about the brain’s plasticity “means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (Malabou, 2008, p. 6). This account of the brain in its physical relations are also, then, means of thinking about its finitude as much as about its capacity

2 Scientific Aestheticism

for movement, change, and flux. Wilde’s image of the single, isolated brain cell is an image of the present rather than of the ongoing relations that structure the present. The aesthetes and the scientists collaborate to suggest, as Wilde always does, that art inheres in life. By making the brain cell into a gorgeous artifact, Wilde at once “make[s] common things strange to us” (Wilde, 1891/2000b, p. 280) and makes seemingly strange or self-estranging things sensible. The aestheticization of the microscopic brain cell recognizes that the materiality of the self cannot be fully known, for the brain cell is all surface and no depth. As Wilde writes in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. Wilde (1891/2000a, p. 167)

Stressing surface, density, and opacity, and preserving the possibility of pleasure, Wilde emphasizes that the brain-object is perceived from a particular perspective, within a finite duration. In other words, he conceives scientific epistemology through the present, pleasurable phenomena of sensation and desire.

2 SCIENTIFIC AESTHETICISM When Wilde matriculated at Oxford in 1874, he began keeping notebooks that tracked not only his burgeoning interest in Greek philosophy and his dedication to Pater’s art history, but also his fascination with debates in the sciences. He noted, for instance, that the new scientific technologies have given rise to hitherto unverifiable claims about matter: We have only five senses, but science has added largely to what nature has given us in the microscope, telescope, machines for the weighing and measures of infinitesimal atoms. The microscope has shown us that the division of bodies into animate and inanimate, or organic and inorganic, is quite arbitrary. Wilde (1989, p. 160)

These two claims collaborate in a significant reframing of the human mind. Wilde suggests that technology boosts the limitations of the evolved body; once technology becomes a part of species being (Armstrong, 2008), the human is no longer tied to a particular bodily form, and the division between the natural and the technological is undone. In turn, the blurred boundary between human and technology enables us to understand that this boundary does not hold on a molecular level. New microscopic technology empowers the human scientist, but only to suggest that the human is an inescapably material and indistinct category. Others have seen a disconnect between Wilde’s notebooks and his dandified career (Brown, 1997), but in addition to adducing a materialism upheld in many of his later references to science (Mao, 2008), these notebooks quite remarkably show the development of Wilde’s style. In addition to their proto-aphoristic fragmentary form,

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the prose deploys some of his most characteristic descriptive language in sections that condense Wilde’s scientific reading. Wilde’s notebooks show his fascination with the process of evolution, which he saw as threatening to render the individual passive (Foster, 1998; Haley, 1985; Seagroatt, 1998; Young, 1970). Describing the evolutionary process, he uses an adjective that evokes his life as a dandy: The social organism resembles the bodily organism, but not the individual, but the generic type[.] the pearly Nautilus has lasted from the Silurian epoch to now[.] so may social institutions. Wilde (1989, p. 164)

It may not be a green carnation, but the pearly nautilus becomes a desirable object for the senses here, and it is a signal of attention paid where it normally might not be, expressing the impossibility of discarding aesthetic experience, even in a context where the individual (presumably the originator of that experience) is rendered irrelevant. Wilde also uses the gothic imagery of the open secret to conjure the process of biological development: As regards the hierarchy of protoplasmic phenomena we can ascend gradually by increased differentiation of function and division of labour from the structureless albumenoid matter (Bathybius Haeckelii) which the depths of the north Ocean hide, to the elaborate cerebral cells of the human brain which if they are not themselves consciousness are at least the organs by which consciousness manifests itself. Wilde (1989, p. 112)

The pale protoplasm that T. H. Huxley had identified in 1868 as a good candidate for the physical basis of all life lurks on the ocean floor, waiting, perhaps like Tennyson’s Kraken, to rise from the depths and take form in the human brain. However, the brain is not, here, a metonym for transcendent thought, but an image of a batch of cells. And Wilde uses a term, “elaborate,” that exemplifies aesthetic intrigue. He later uses it as a verb of curation—to “elaborate” a system, a theory, or a collection—and as an adjective. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, the word bridges living form and aesthetic production: for Dorian, “now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 219). Dorian wonders, here, “whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 219). Wilde’s emphasis on the beauty of microscopic matter was not unusual. Latenineteenth-century scientists are supposed to have been skeptical about the validity of subjective experience, and, according to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, many scrupled to avoid “the temptations of aesthetics, the lure of seductive theories, the desire to schematize, beautify, simplify” (Daston and Galison, 2007, p. 116). However, beauty was very much still in the purview of the scientific public sphere in England in the 1870s: it was not impossible to imagine matter differently. Ruskin, beginning his lectures to girls, encouraged them to imagine the atomic world in the terms he clearly thought would most appeal:

2 Scientific Aestheticism

My dear children, if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this moment, as you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eye of a mineralogist, but a lovely group of rosy sugarcandy, arranged by atomic forces. And even admitting you to be something more, you have certainly been crystallizing without knowing it. Ruskin (1865/1905, p. 221)

For Ruskin here, although the microscopic dimension of life helps us develop, or crystallize, it is not fully known. Likewise, for mid-nineteenth-century microscopists, the lens granted access to matter that remained enchanted and mysterious— we might note the wealth of mid-century writing on microscopy for amateurs, such as Agnes Catlow’s 1851 Drops of Water; Their Marvellous and Beautiful inhabitants Displayed by the Microscope, Charles Kingsley’s 1855 Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore, and G. H. Lewes’s 1858 Seaside Studies (Armstrong, 2008). Lewes writes of his small-scale scopic adventures, “Life, reduced to its simplest expression, seems invested with even deeper and more thrilling mystery” (Lewes, 1856, p. 185). But microscopes challenged the perfection of human vision, revised hierarchies of living being, and distorted the stability of a human sense of scale (Armstrong, 2008). Thus we might read scientists’ concern with surfaces as an attempt to legitimate consciousness through aesthetic pleasure. In the 1870s, W. K. Clifford, whose work Wilde read and admired, posited a distinction between the “molecular” level of existence that humans cannot see, and the “molar” level which they regularly experience. Clifford, who conceived human life as the immersion of the individual into what he called the tribal self, was interested in the way individual beings emerged from, dissolved into, or separated themselves from systems. The molecular, made up of what he called “mind-stuff,” constitutes thought—it is thought in a different form—and represents the profound unity of the physical world, in which matter is constantly in flux (Clifford, 1886, p. 285). Clifford claimed that humans can only perceive the molar, and must leave the molecular to operate in its inhuman chaos beneath the human surface. Yet this did not stop John Tyndall, who in his infamous 1874 Belfast address followed up this possibility by making the imagination itself a microscope technology: you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force; that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful structures which are thus produced. . . . This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. Tyndall (1874a, p. 32)

For Tyndall, molecular objects have surface qualities, and the present inadequacy of microscopes to detect those qualities was a side issue. Tyndall allowed that these perceptions of beauty were at best hypothetic or virtual. In a lecture called “The Uses of the Imagination in Science,” Tyndall remarks, the first marshalling of the atoms on which all subsequent action depends baffles a keener power than that of the microscope. . . . [B]ut the speculative faculty, of which imagination forms so large a part, will nevertheless wander into regions where the hope of certainty would seem to be entirely shut out. Tyndall (1870, p. 41)

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By stressing the speculative qualities of science, Tyndall affirms an affinity between scientist and atom—in picking out individual forms from the “play of molecular force” he himself is playful: It required no great boldness of thought to extend its play into organic nature, and to recognize in molecular force the agency by which both plants and animals are built up. In this way out of experience arise conceptions which are wholly ultraexperiential. Tyndall (1874b, p. 53)

Tyndall validates conscious experience by stressing the aesthetic pleasures made possible through the revelation that the molecular world might be rendered accessible to human consciousness through the sensory technology of the imagination. At the same time, his perspective foregrounds the virtuality and ephemerality of the beautiful images made available. Unlike Ruskin, who harshly criticized the moral paucity of scientific materialism as well as its pretensions to mastery over nature, Tyndall stressed the beauty of the crystalline world without emphasizing nobility. Attacking Tyndall for a faithless, amoral science, Ruskin had held to an idealist conception of physics which prized, as Paul Sawyer puts it, “an almost childlike form of natural piety” (Sawyer, 1981, p. 240). Whereas for Ruskin, the atom’s physical integrity was a kind of moral integrity, Tyndall was more interested in surface. Thus the “Belfast Address” and Tyndall’s other lectures provoked controversy for their purportedly amoral, atheistic determinism, which deprived humans of all agency. In Punch, a doggerel verse poem, “Atom, the Architect,” mocked Tyndall’s images of a gorgeously symmetrical, ever-changing world: These ‘Architectural Atoms!’ O ’tis fine To see humanity so sadly dwindle! Let Michael Angelo and Wren resign; Atoms can build Cathedrals—so says Tyndall. Anonymous (1874, p. 198)

The versifier in Punch suggested that Tyndall’s aesthetic science devalued the human mind by relocating its agency to atoms it could only admire. For others, the idea of Tyndall in verse highlighted his affinities with ancient physics. For one writer in The Spectator, Tyndall’s ideas might be suited to a more self-consciously aesthetic form: “poetry of Lucretius reads as if it might almost have been published by some imaginative devotee of modern science,—say some poetic Tyndall of our own days” (quoted in Dawson, 2007a, p. 89). Clifford (1886) pointed out that the difference between ancient and modern physics was that the ancient view was merely a guess while the modern was a certainty. Indeed Tyndall’s account of the molecular basis of life not only invoked these Greek sources, but had them in common with the contemporary aesthetic movement. Pater, Tyndall’s contemporary, likewise traced his conception of flux from Epicurean physics, and Tyndall in the Belfast Address

2 Scientific Aestheticism

and elsewhere explicitly drew connections between the ideas of Democritus and Lucretius and his own account of all matter as structured by the flux of inorganic molecules (Sawyer, 1981 p. 233; Brown, 1997, p. 53; Dawson, 2007b, pp. 43–44; Leighton, 2008, p. 81). This commonality was not lost on those readers who took offense at Tyndall’s conception of matter’s agency and his vision of unity in infinite fragmentation (Dawson, 2007a; Lesjak, 2010). As Dawson (2007a) argues, the Epicurean connection was damaging for Tyndall in the popular press; despite his preference for the eminently respectable Tennyson (who had his own Lucretian affinities) over the likes of Pater, Tyndall had an ongoing job of distancing himself from decadence, and from the charges of hedonism and paganism that beset aestheticism. This is not to claim any direct influence; as Lesjak (2010) argues, the connection between Pater and contemporary theorists of mind might be best understood as one of proximity or affinity, rather than influence. But certainly, Pater adopts a position of scientific detachment only in order to appreciate the “gemlike” experience of the moment, while Tyndall conjures vividly the sensuous qualities of molecular structures, and fixates on crystals particularly—solid but transparent, seemingly rigid yet ephemeral. Tyndall saw crystals as showcasing the “vitality” of organic structure (Tyndall, 1874b, pp. 81–82). He explains in a lecture “On Crystals and Molecular Force” that through electromagnetic “attractions and repulsions some poles are drawn together, some retreat from each other.” He continues, atom is thus added to atom, and molecule to molecule[.]. . . From this play of invisible particles we see finally growing up before our eyes these exquisite structures, to which we give the name of crystals. Tyndall (1874b, p. 79)

A transparent structure that could refract light, the crystal might capture both a distortion of human visual sense and an aesthetic order. In stressing the play of the microscopic crystal’s molecules, Tyndall captures a concept with a specific aesthetic theory of time. In Friedrich Schiller’s 1794 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, he argues that the experience of beauty involves a kind of play with time. On the one hand, when we play, we desire to make permanent the special object of our attention, and other hand, our senses want to drink in endless, ever-changing phenomena as time passes (Schiller, 1794/1954). This experience is highly relevant to discussions of physics and descriptions of toy-like atoms and crystals in late nineteenth century Britain. The work of Bergson, an influential French philosopher of psychology and metaphysics who responded to many of the texts that had sparked Wilde’s interest in the 1870s, suggests that we form images of the brain itself through this kind of combination of infinite sense-impressions and special, finite images. Bergson argued in his 1896 Matter and Memory that living beings are not stable and singular but always-changing “centers of indetermination” which react of everything else in their environment. Nothing is singular; everything is constituted in its relationship to everything else. Whereas for Ruskin individual atoms collect into a larger whole in the crystal and thus work well as analogies for human individuals, for

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Bergson, because atoms are always in motion, identity is always in flux, and everything is relational rather than individual. Therefore, the images we have of living beings are finite and only reflect the state of that being for an infinitesimally brief moment of the present. Images of an object, whether a crystal or our own brain, “become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” from the relations that actually constitute them (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 36). To create an image of matter, even the matter that makes up the mind, demands picking out a definite figure from the indeterminate, ever-shifting ground.1 This logic suits well with Tyndall’s approach to crystals. Implicit in Tyndall’s emphasis on play is the notion that imaginary images of crystalline molecules do not offer total access to the flux of the entire molecular world—this would be impossible not just because it is literally invisible but also because it is always changing. A tension in Bergson’s account of the production of images captures well the ongoing relevance of beauty in the microscopic domain. On the one hand, as I will discuss further below, Bergson takes the materiality of mind to show that the brain is not a center but more like a telephonic exchange, a comparison he and Wilde both derived from Tyndall himself. But on the other hand, Bergson appears to produce a subject-centered account of the way we form images of objects. As Bergson writes, “diverse perceptions of the same object, given by my different senses, will not, . . . when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object; they will remain separated from each other by intervals which measure, so to speak, the gaps in my needs” (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 49). For Bergson, objects are not perceived in their totality (Deleuze, 1989, p. 41); rather, “The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them” (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 21). Given this tension, an aesthetic framework makes it possible to grant the living reality of microscopic objects that are not consistent with a conventional notion of human identity, or fully accessible to human thought, but are still beautiful in ordinary terms. Tyndall’s and Bergson’s notion of the endless transformation of molecular matter registers in Dorian Gray; when Dorian tries to understand how the portrait has come to embody his soul, he asks himself, Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought of conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? Wilde (1891/2000a, p. 258)

1

Gilles Deleuze elaborates on Bergson’s image of the brain in Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989), where he defines a “crystal-image”: “What the crystal reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 98). Built up and “preserved” over time, whether organic or inorganic, the crystalline image embodies a long-lasting physical process, but the present time of looking is infinitely fleeting.

3 The Neuron

Wilde evokes a molecular world that, in its indifference to human actions and values, has egalitarian potential. Here, high-order human emotions do not supervene, but rather inhere in relations of play themselves; this model relocates conscious experience to outward motions, as it upholds the profound interconnection of all things, human and otherwise. If material attractions are what matter is made of, the human attraction to beautiful objects picked out from the flux appears less a movement of self-aggrandizing possession of the microscopic world, but a macro-scale enactment of the impulsions which structure the molecular. “Love” and “affinity”—the ordinary terms of human life—revive through moments of rest or stasis amid the flux. This view of atoms preserves human experience and values amidst the absolutely impersonal, uncontrollable flux of molecules and atoms.

3 THE NEURON When scientists shifted their focus from a molecular framework to a neurological one, the notion of flux became particularly poignant. What was the status of the neurological self, if all is change and movement? Wilde’s notebook suggested science “cannot solve the problem of consciousness” because it fails to explain “the consciousness of a persistent ego underlying all sensations and different from them.” Yet he allowed that “elaborate cerebral cells of the human brain,” “if they are not themselves consciousness[,] are at least the organs by which consciousness manifests itself” (Wilde, 1989, p. 112). In 1878, Tyndall hypothesized, “Impart simple magnifying power to our present vision, and the atomic motions of the brain itself might be brought into view” (Tyndall, 1897, p. 412). Here, brain matter is human-but-inhuman—brains, like crystals, have a fundamental molecular basis. Yet, Tyndall (like Wilde) argued that these physical processes were not the same phenomenon as consciousness—he wanted to keep separate the dancer from the dance. Nonetheless, mental life is in a sense all surface—at the molecular level, the play of atoms, and at the molar level, a skim of consciousness produced by atomic flux yet not explicable through direct casual analysis. Bergson, agreeing with Tyndall, rejected the notion that “penetrat[ing] into the inside of a brain at work and behold the dance of the atoms which make up the cortex” (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 12) could offer information about corresponding states of consciousness. Bergson insisted that the brain is an object like any other that “remain[s] inseparably bound up with the rest of the material world” (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 24, 25). But how, precisely, the brain maintained its bond with the outer world, and how the parts of the brain communicated with one another, was not known in England before the end of the nineteenth century. Wilde’s approach to the brain emphasizes the single cell, rather than molecular flux. This perhaps reflects his readings in developmental biology. Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) influential work on cells and embryology—which Wilde recorded in the Notebooks and would identify in Dorian Gray as part of “the Darwinismus movement” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 111)—contended that the complexity of the human

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body can be reduced to what is contained within a single cell. In The History of Creation, published in English in 1876, he writes: “Most organisms are many-celled, and [. . .] originate out of an egg, and [. . .] this egg, is a single, perfectly simple cell — a little lump of albuminous constitution, in which another albuminous corpuscle, the cell-kernel, is enclosed.” For Haeckel, a cell reproduces in miniature the development of the species, giving new meaning to common terminology: “The general principle of life, which is usually designated as soul, and which appears to be the general regulator of all the vital activities, is met with [. . .], in its simplest form, as ‘cellsoul.’” Haeckel redesignates the terms “soul” and “mind” to reject the everyday terms for consciousness: “what is commonly termed the ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ of man (consciousness included) is merely the sum-total of the activities of a large number of nerve-cells, the ganglia-cells, of which the brain is composed” (Haeckel, 1892, pp. 40, 96, 494). The relations among molecules was better understood at this time than the relations between living cells, especially those in the brain. How brain cells related to one another was not yet known: was the brain a fibrous web or net? If not, how did individual cells communicate with one another? (Shepherd, 1991; Stiles, 2012). Reflecting the uncertain state of brain science in the 1870s, Pater refers to cells in his description of the Mona Lisa: “It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions” (Pater, 1873/2010, p. 70). In Pater’s formulation, thought is both granular—each little cell containing a unit of piquant experience—and built up collectively into a totality of flesh. While this claim clearly suggests that “we are governed by our material substrate” (Mao, 2008, p. 78), it also reflects the uncertainties of brain science in the 1870s. But in 1889 the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal first claimed that brain cells, like the cells in the rest of the body, are individuated, calling each “an absolutely autonomous canton” (Finger, 2001, p. 47. Cajal had arrived at this discovery by the use of new silver staining techniques, which made the neuron’s fibers more visible (Finger, 1994). Wilde’s interest in the cell developed just as Cajal’s finding was introduced in Britain.2 Though Wilde was unlikely to have known about the discovery of the neuron at the time, his images of the cell throughout his career emphasize its singularity and isolation as emblems of its unknowability as opposed to the plurality of atomic flux. He writes in one of his critical essays, “The Critic as Artist,” “In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even [scientists] have dreamed of” (Wilde, 1891/2000b, p. 200), reflecting the sciences’ new understanding of the brain cell as a selfcontained structure, its interior inaccessible, and its connection to other cells 2 See the entry for “neuron” in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/126411 [accessed 10 August 2011], which cites Brain (1891) as the first use of the term to refer to a nerve cell. Ramon y Cajal made his first appearance in England on 8 March 1894, giving the Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society, which was written up as “The Minute Structure of the Nerve Centres” (Ramon y Cajal, 1893–1894).

3 The Neuron

unexplained. The neuron, as Wilde seems to have grasped, could not be known from the inside, even if the word cell in English, after all, comes from the term for a dwelling place.3 The new application of concepts like “individual” and “autonomous” to cells instead of to persons threatened to dehumanize cells entirely. If autonomy occurred at the microscopic rather than the macroscopic or humanist level, the idea that humans are the autonomous and self-developing species became, to a certain extent, nonsensical (Dellmora, 2004). Bergson would reject the notion that the brain is a wholly impersonal “world within a world,” or “a separate being” (Bergson, 1896/ 1990, p. 44), rather than an object in ongoing relationships with everything outside it. But Wilde suggests that individuality recedes into the ever-shrinking density of the cell, seemingly beyond the horizon of human perception, even with the technological aid of the microscope. Why does he choose to isolate the single cell, in this way, when the cells of the brain were believed to communicate? Why privilege an image that suggests that the brain cell is autonomous of context—an opaque object in an acontextual void—rather than in organic relation? Is the cell just a metonym for the individual? Toward the end of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry tells Dorian: “don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 351). The image of accreting cells and the phrase “thought hides itself” evoke the triumph of introspective self-consciousness. However, the sentence ultimately insists on the cell’s hermetic mystery. “Thought” is usually aligned against passion as the ground of human freedom, but here there seems little difference: both “thought” and “dreams” end up in the same inaccessible place of darkness, sleep, and secrets. The cell is similar, too, to the painting that cells Dorian, which insistently exteriorizes thought and action, and rejects the possibility of depth. The image of an ivory cell first appeared in Wilde’s 1884 poem “Roses and Rue,” and it reappears in “The Critic as Artist”: People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who [. . .] have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material. Wilde (1891/2000b, p. 200)

3 See the entry for “cell” in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/29468 [accessed 27 April 2013]. The early definition of the term meaning a dwelling place gives rise to penal as well as neurological definitions.

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Neither introspective art nor science achieves the insight it supposedly offers: thus Wilde presents the marvellous and terrible brain cell as the horizon of knowledge in order to claim that the individual artist’s creative power should not track it. But color and texture make the cell something to be grasped as an object for the senses, not as a metonym for interior experience that must be made known. In Dorian Gray, Wilde returns to the image of the single cell when Dorian explores materialism: He never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system. [. . .] [F]or a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their mysteries to reveal. Wilde (1891/2000a, pp. 280–281)

Dorian eagerly accepts materialism—it is a convenient excuse for bad behavior. Yet given Wilde’s reuse of this image, its neurological claims deserve to be dwelt upon. The pearly cell and white nerve sound gorgeous but impenetrable, underlining the isolated passivity of the determined subject. Thus Wilde’s work explores a kind of molecular vision that makes the invisible brain cell an object pleasing to the senses. Wilde appeals to the brain and to brain cells as objects in a rather ordinary sense. According to Lord Henry, it is important to attend to the surface of things: in a typically Wildean inversion, only “shallow people . . . do not judge by appearances” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 186). The surface, in other words, means more than the depth. In editing, the nerve was changed from the scarlet of sin to immaculate white, and an ivory cell became a pearly one (Fig. 1). Neurological accuracy may have factored into the editorial changes (Lawler, 1988). Moreover, this move from scarlet to white respects Wilde’s commitment to representing the cell’s density, and makes the image more similar to ones Wilde had already used. A “scarlet” nerve would certainly have accorded with Lord Henry and Dorian’s rationalization that materialism renders sin unavoidable and thus excusable. And in just this sense, Dorian Gray might be taken to caution against overidentification with an aesthetic object (Lesjak, 2000), for it is merely self-exculpatory. Nonetheless, there are aesthetic reasons for the cell to be white: physiological accuracy coincides with white’s connotations of immaculate purity, sterility, and inaccessibility, as well as its association with sculpture. Elsewhere, I have argued that the cell resonates with Pater’s discussions of sculpture: for Pater, drawing on Hegel, sculpture represents the finitude and determinacy of individuation in tension with the dynamism of spirit

3 The Neuron

FIGURE 1 Detail of 1890 typescript of Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with handwritten corrections. Reproduced by kind permission of Merlin Holland and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. The typescript is held at the Clark Library: W6721M3 P611 (1890) Boxed.

(Cohn, 2012a,b).4 As Malabou (2008) points out, the more recent notion of the brain as plastic—capable of both giving and receiving form—connects it explicitly to this conception of sculpture, which, once molded, cannot return to formless potentiality. Like Bergson’s “image,” the sculpture’s finitude both creates form, and destroys alternative physical configurations lit up when movement and flux are privileged. Thus the sculptural aspect of the singular white neuron resonates with the idea that the finitude of a material object takes its place in the ongoing flux of molecular change. And this is thinking finitely: Wilde returns again and again to nearly identical images, refusing to move forward, insisting on determinacy. This mode also reflects other aspects of Wilde’s writing practices—the portability of his maxims from life to text, and his free borrowing of gems from others’ writing as well as his own (Cohn, 2012a,b). Wilde’s perspective on perception, temporality, and flux situates him with respect to a genealogy of writing on the brain that leads from Tyndall, and Wilde’s reaction to the issues he elaborates, to Bergson and his more recent interpreters. Tyndall’s Belfast address compared the nervous system to a “telegraph operator,” relaying information “between the perceiving power and external things” (Tyndall, 1874a, p. 30). In Wilde’s Notebooks, he cites Tyndall’s image: “the popular notion of mind is that it is a metaphysical entity seated in the head like a telegraph operator—modern science contends it is a function of the brain” (Wilde, 1989, p. 164). For Bergson, likewise, “the brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic 4

Whereas that article was primarily focused on Wilde’s conception of the brain cell, here I am interested in more deeply contextualizing his images in the history of thinking about material process and the brain.

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exchange: its office is to allow communication or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives” (Bergson, 1896/1990, p. 30).5 If the brain is a center that relays representations without producing them, it is not more or less than its material relations. Thus, in Deleuze’s words, the brain was [for Bergson] only an interval, a void, nothing but a void, between a stimulation and a response. But, whatever the importance of the discovery, this interval remained subject to an integrating whole which was embodied in it, and to associations which traversed it. Deleuze (1989, p. 211)

To produce an image of the brain, or a part of the brain, is thus to isolate a partial image of the object (as all images are partial) from the material relations which constitute it. Malabou’s recent account of the brain’s plasticity draws on ideas articulated by Deleuze in his analysis of Bergson. She notes the brain’s capacity for development and multiplicity, but also the irreversible permanence of its alterations. For Deleuze, she writes, Cerebral space is constituted by cuts, by gaps, and this prevents our taking it to be an integrative totality. Between two neurons, there is . . . a caesura, and the synapse itself is ‘gapped.’ . . . Because of this, the interval or the cut plays a decisive role in cerebral organization. Malabou (2008, p. 36)6

The chanciness of these cuts or breaks introduces disconnection and into the creativity or open-ended potential of neural connectivity. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Joseph Le Doux, as Malabou notes, claim that mental states track to specific brain states. But Tyndall and his readers—Wilde and Bergson among them—did not yet know about the synapse, so the disconnection between brain cells suggested noncommunication. As Malabou puts it, drawing on Deleuze, “at the very core of the undeniable complicity that ties the cerebral to the psychical and the mental, a series of leaps or gaps” (Malabou, 2008, p. 75). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian attempts to escape the limits on thought and action imposed by his material body through transformation into an image (Felski, 1995), which becomes, even more than most, a virtual representation of

5

In a talk, “Is Man an Automaton?” contemporaneous with Tyndall’s usage of the image, William Benjamin Carpenter offers a slightly different telegraph analogy, comparing the communications between the body and the mind to telegraph clerks who meet at the Great Exhibition despite never having met—“intimacies, I have been assured, of the most fraternal kind, frequently spring up between those who have never seen each other” (Carpenter, 1875, pp. 6–7). Carpenter rejects Huxley’s and Clifford’s contentions that the human is a biologically determined machine. 6 Malabou (2008) argues that Bergson’s view of the brain as telegraph-exchange is overly static and cannot capture the brain’s plasticity. Instead, she privileges Deleuze’s attempt to make Bergson’s “brain” a more vital and dynamic center of indetermination.

3 The Neuron

Dorian’s accretive past as well as the fleetingness of his present. But Wilde does not quite offer an opposition between the real and the ideal, but between the material and the virtual that resists the attribution of depth to Dorian. Wilde’s images of the cell describe it as having a finitude that both conjures and refuses depth. Through the device of the painting, Wilde gives Dorian’s soul a decidedly physical form (Cohen, 2008; Mao, 2008). And nothing, in Wilde’s novel, has any particular kind of agency; this is especially clear in Dorian’s inability to control his absorption of Lord Henry’s passively held ideas. His inward guilt is always exteriorized. Dorian’s object-density is especially clear in the novel’s infamous Chapter 11, where Wilde elaborates the young man’s collections in sumptuous detail, often borrowed from museum catalogues. He samples perfumes; collects musical instruments from around the world; immerses himself in gemology, textiles, and the history of ecclesiastical costume; reads up on poison; gets into brawls in distant, sketchy parts of London; and tumbles his young, aristocratic friends into irrecoverable disgrace. The ordered chaos of Dorian’s collection establishes nonhierarchical relations among the objects, which threaten to overwhelm the curator. The collection, Dorian’s attempt to forestall the development of a conscience, makes the novel’s status as an anti-Bildungsroman particularly clear. Chapter 11 proposes that “everything that [Dorian] collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 286). Aesthetic neuroscience appears to do similar work, its loveliness distracting from the despair of recognizing the materiality of mind. The tactile, textural elements of the “pearly” or “ivory” cell and the “white nerve” may decompose the mind into mere matter, but also make it available to the same eager senses that drink in “[o]ld brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories” (Wilde, 1891/2000a, p. 261). To figure the brain cell as a collectible is, from this perspective, to imagine in bitterly reductive terms the artificiality of human identity and action while still valuing the broader span of history not as a product of human agency but as an impersonal, inhuman system. The mode of collecting and classifying (Mills, 2010) made possible by Dorian’s collection, is certainly pleasurable, but it is a way of elevating objects above the self. Therefore, it is also a reminder of the loss of the agency and autonomy of consciousness that comes with conceptualizing the human mind as a part of the world’s physical flux. Dorian’s voracious acquisition might be taken to reject rigid modes of classification and scientific ordering, answering with unpredictable yet passionate expertise, and to evoke the immanent collectability of all the world’s infinite objects. As Stewart (1993) has argued, museum collections operate through a decontextualizing logic in which pieces of the natural world, or even everyday commodities, can be endowed with meaning by being set apart into from their histories of relation. The artifact is still a commodity, yet removed from the ordinary circuit of exchange value through a heightened fetishistic appeal. Wilde’s decontextualizing move highlights the application of an aesthetic paradigm to the mind. The logic of the collectible or the artifact emphasizes that recognizing the materiality of human life commodifies the self. At the same time, however, it selects the commodified self for special attention in its

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finitude and specificity by allowing it to radiate aesthetic value while preserving it from the circuit of transfer and exchange. The efforts of collection, then, constitute an attempt to shore up a dissipating sense of individual identity, an attempt to play in Schiller’s and in Tyndall’s sense by picking out beautiful objects against a background of physical change and never-ending process. Precisely in Dorian’s unapologetic taste for the refined beauty of pricey ornament, Wilde makes the virtual move that Tyndall first recommended—reframing the value of the biological matter that all humans have in common, and recasting its materiality as a pleasure rather than a problem.

4 CELL POLITICS Wilde and the scientists who informed his work offered a kind of virtual—and flagrantly qualitative—access to the molecular, in which consciousness has no privilege yet the senses remain a means of grasping matter. Though it may appear counterintuitive, Wilde and his scientific sources used their attention to the atomic, the molecular, and the cellular, to advocate forms of democracy. After all, by making the molecular accessible, they granted a new way to think about the matter held in common, among all people, even among all beings. In Wilde’s work, the relation between flux and finitude in conceptions of the microscopic material of the self has political implications. Ruskin’s comparison of people to atoms celebrated the notion of individual agency and made the atom’s physical integrity a metaphor for human moral integrity. For some scientists as well, molecular relationships became a way of imagining social collectivity, even if they did not adhere to Ruskin’s strong vision of individual autonomy. As Clifford argues, “The conception of the universe or aggregate of beliefs which forms the link between sensation and action for each individual is a public and not a private matter; it is formed by society and for society” (Clifford, 1886, p. 337). Huxley proposes that learning about the sciences could unite employers and artisans as they come to understand that “social phenomena are as much the expression of natural laws as any others.” In their conception, learning about science meant learning the connections between physics and politics—“social statics and dynamics” (Huxley, 1882, p. 22) that enact macroscopic versions of physics. Wilde, meanwhile, famously prioritizes individuation over relation, and thus he lends a radical, impersonal, and deeply political individualism to the aestheticization of the invisible. His most overtly political work, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), is usually taken as more a statement of individualism than the sort of collectivization we usually associate with communism or even socialism. Condemning capitalism because it prevents individuality from flourishing, he presents individualism as inevitable and biologically natural. But notably, he does not make individualism equivalent to individual autonomy: To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except toward individualism. Wilde (1891/2000b, p. 263)

References

His claim does not focus on inner experience, and it suggests a certain indifference to suffering and other humanist concerns. Instead, Wilde stresses the impersonal biological process of evolution in a way that recalls Haeckel’s redefinition of the term “individual” as the “cell-soul.” Thus, it is interesting in this context that Wilde describes an impoverished man as a microscopic object, “merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him” (Wilde, 1891/2000b, p. 234). Karl Marx had used the language of physics in Capital (1867): under capitalism, for Marx, “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their own control and their conscious individual action” (Marx, 1867/1992, p. 187). Like Marx, Wilde implies that capitalism has reduced the man to a disconnected object. But while for Marx atomism has only negative connotations, Wilde’s interest in the surface qualities of the isolated object enables him to defend the man’s singularity, individuality, and integrity. The poor man described as an atom becomes a figure for universal matter, and especially for molecular life that too easily escapes notice. Wilde insists that just because an object is minute, powerless, and singular within an impersonal system does not mean that it can be treated reductively. The molecular basis of life may be shared, but it is not undifferentiated: substance is infinitely divided into singular individuals with their own boundaries—a point too easily forgotten in the molecular perspective of the view from everywhere and nowhere. Neither scientific aestheticism nor aesthetic science depends upon understanding the interior workings of the individual, whether that refers to an atom, a cell, or a person. Not unlike Tyndall, Wilde points us to the material world, the world of commodities, of living as well as nonliving objects, in order to establish the necessity of pleasure on the smaller scale, since notions of human agency and inward depth founder. For the scientists whose work stressed the flux of the molecular, the beauty of the invisible implies that what we take to be our feelings and sensations are not “our” own, that they belong to a shared material world to which we might be attuned as a recognition of collectivity. For Wilde, in contrast, scientific aestheticism is a way of asserting the integrity of the small, the powerless, and the hitherto unobserved.

Acknowledgments In completing this essay, I am grateful for the support of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010-2011, and particularly for the guidance of Joseph Bristow. I would also like to thank Jesse Rosenthal, David Coombs, Benjamin Parris, and the audience at NVSA 2013 for their insights.

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