Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling. Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling. Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

Duke UP, 2018. Pp. 282. ISBN: 9780822369530

Susana María Jiménez-Placer, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

In The Biopolitics of Feeling. Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth CenturyKyla Schuller explores the often overlooked connections between nineteenth century sentimentalism and the scientific development of the period by delving into the notion of impressibility as a central element in what she calls the “sentimental politics of life.”Starting from the premise that “Sentimentalism (…) operates as a fundamental mechanism of biopower” (2), Schuller justifies the accuracy of such a premise through an in-depth analysis of the works and ideas of a variety of personalities who left an indelible (but not always sufficiently acknowledged) trace on nineteenth century US culture, society and science.

In the Introduction, Schuller identifies the concepts that animate her approach to sentimentalism as a tool of biopower regimes, and announces her courageous intention to decipher the unexpected presence of the sentimental politics of life in apparently divergent trends of thought such as feminism, social constructionism, etc. She starts her analysis with an enlightening discussion of the notion of impressibility as essential for her interpretation of sentimentalism as a strategy of biopower. From her perspective, the sentimental politics of life was characterized by the combination of both impressibility and sentimentalism: impressibility implied the dynamic interplay of a nervous system—“a neurobiological substrate”—with the surrounding environment, while sentimentalism served to stabilize the effects of such an interplay by regulating the “vulnerability of the civilized body” through the “ability to respond to sensory stimulations on the basis of emotional reflection, rather than instinctive reflex” (4).

Impressibility is thus defined as the capacity to be affected by external impressions, a capacity which determined the origin of the modern concepts of race, sex and species since in the nineteenth century it served to distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized bodies. Moreover, Schuller argues that impressibility and the sentimental politics of life actually functioned as an antecedent to twentieth century eugenics, thus dismantling the traditionally assumed opposition between eugenics associated to biological determinism and racism, and the nineteenth century sentimental reformers’ belief in “mutable heredity.”

Chapter 1, “Taxonomies of Feeling,” analyses the influence of Cope’s American School of Evolution on the development of the sentimental politics of life defined as “a dominant mode of nineteenth century biopower in which the regulation of feeling qualifies members of a population for life” (36). Schuller explains how in the nineteenth century the concept of impression turned into “the biopolitical concept of impressibility” under the influence of Cope’s American School of Evolution and its Lamarckian approach to the evolutionary process. From Lamarck’s perspective, repeated sensory impressions caused physical adaptations which were transmitted through sexual reproduction from generation to generation. In the nineteenth century impressions developed into impressibility, which comprised the emotional response to a physical sensation and became a biopolitical tool essential not only for individual evolution, but also for the evolution of the species.

Impressibility meant the possibility of growth and evolution, but it also positioned the organism on a vulnerable stance, and nineteenth century sentimentalism developed as a means to control this vulnerability and regulate the impressible body through the disciplinary technology of sentiment, which was understood as the emotional response to a physical impression requiring refinement and mental reflection rather than just an impulsive, animalistic reaction. Schuller argues that under the influence of the American School of Evolution, impressibility combined with sentimentalism became essential for defining civilization, species, race and sex, since this concept served to distinguish the impressible body of the civilized, from the unimpressible body of the primitive, and thus to justify the imperialistic and colonial mentality. In contrast with physical sensibility, which was considered almost universal, impressibility was a mechanism of species and racial differentiation. Schuller defines it as a technology of biopower determining those who could contribute to the growth of the species and those who could not and who were for this reason disposable. This in turn led Cope to distinguish between the plastic body of the civilized and the static flesh of blackness (or the racialized), whose bodies were unable to absorb impressions and regulate their emotional responses through sentiment.

Not only race, but also sex hierarchies were determined by impressibility. To solve the problem posed by the vulnerability attached to the impressibility of the civilized body, the American School of Evolution divided it into two halves, male and female: the female half enjoyed a heightened impressibility and accordingly an extreme vulnerability absorbing all the instability of impressibility, which liberated the male half from this same negative effect.

In chapter two, “Body as Text, Race as Palimpsest,” Schuller turns to Frances Harper’s use of sentimentalism to illustrate how nineteenth century black feminists, who as black women were primarily victims of biopower, paradoxically relied on biopower strategies to fight for black uplift. Since within the general framework of the sentimental politics of life the black race was classified as disposable because it was considered unimpressible and unaffected by sexual differentiation, Harper and other black feminists understood that the only operative way to work for the uplift of the black race was by civilizing it through the use of sentiment to regulate physical impressions, that is, by resorting to the same biopolitical strategies they were trying to overcome.

Harper understood impressibility as a quality of youth rather than whiteness, and for this reason she appropriated accusations of black childlike behavior to claim the youthfulness of the black race and enhance its impressibility and thus its potential for growth and evolution. Schuller analyses Harper’s rendering of black pain as a means to counter accusations of blackslacking impressibility since “Pain denotes the capacity of absorbing and integrating impressions over time” (75). Within the general framework of the sentimental politics of life Harper used sentimentalism as a strategy to discipline and regulate impressions for individual self-development and collective racial formation. Moreover, Schuller comes to the conclusion that contrary to “her perceived relinquishing of black pleasure in the pursuit of bourgeois respectability” (98), the black writer advocated the disciplining of the body’s sensuality without denying erotic pleasure by presenting sensory discipline itself as pleasurable stimulation.

Harper enhanced the role of women in race uplifting through pregnancy and motherhood. In accordance with the new sciences of heredity emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century, marriage and reproduction represent an opportunity for racial improvement through the transmission of impressions to the following generations. Inspired by Harper’s proposal of individual and racial evolution as dependent on impressions layered on the flesh and accumulating through generations, Schuller develops a palimpsest metaphor of race, which determined the definition of race in the nineteenth century. The author explains that the term “racial palimpsest” refers to the accumulation layer by layer of sensory impressions (in Harper’s case mainly tactile impressions) “over the life span of the individual and the evolutionary time of the race (…) to gradually transform animal carnality into human rationality” (71). This palimpsestic model of race determined the degree of civilization achieved, but it was an unstable model since it implied that the more primitive layers of sensory impressions were always present and in contact with more modern ones, and could always reappear.

In chapter three, “Vaginal Impressions,” Schuller analyses how two of the earliest women physicians in the USA, Mary Walker and Elizabeth Blackwell, fought for white women’s sexual and social self-determination from within the sentimental politics of life by enhancing the impressibility of the vagina in “civilized” women. From Schuller’s perspective, the work of these two physicians rested on two basic premises. The first of these premises was “the notion of ‘woman’ as a politicized category of identity” (103) since, as Shuller insists, womanhood was understood as a state affecting only the “civilized.” The second premise is related to the use of the affectivity, vitality and plasticity of matter as strategies of biopower to establish race and sexual differentiation.¹ In this sense Schuller elaborates on the link between impressibility and affect by referring to the establishment of a hierarchy distinguishing those bodies which affect and are affected from those which can only affect.

In order to introduce Walker’s and Blackwell’s studies on the vagina as the basis for their claims for the political rights of white women, Schuller describes again—sounding a bit repetitive at this point—the sentimental politics of life and binary sex differentiation to conclude that for Walker and Blackwell the vagina was “the only orifice suitable for the reunion of the bifurcated body” (108). In contrast with other nineteenth century studies that saw the vagina as containing the memory of the animal past and the state of the flesh, for them vaginal sexuality distinguished civilized from primitive sexual practices, since the vagina condensed the impressibility of the civilized races endowing women with better capacities of stimulation and growth than those of men or the sexually undifferentiated primitive. Among the primitive, sexual stimulation only strengthened their “brute, unsexed matter,” while among the civilized it contributed to intellectual and mental growth, which allowed the transformation of a primitive instinct into love. Schuller admits that for Walker and Blackwell the regulation of sexual sensation distinguished the civilized from the primitive races, and that they seemed to favor the “higher” capacities of emotional regulation, but she insists that the two physicians made the civilizing process dependent on women’s sexual agency and satisfaction, since the impressions left by sexual stimulation on white women’s bodies constituted hereditary material. She affirms that their writings “suggest a pleasure in the act of self-regulation” (110).

Schuller argues that within the sentimental politics of life impressibility was the basis for the defense of white women’s physiological, sexual, mental and emotional capacities, and concludes that Blackwell’s and Walker’s “politics of women’s rights rooted on genitalia-based interpretations of womanhood” works within the racial power of sex differentiation which delineates the notion of womanhood at the heart of affect theory, white feminisms, mainstream gay movements, etc.

In chapter four, Schuller studies the work of Charles Loring Brace through the Children’s Aid Society and its Emigration Plan as a manifestation of nineteenth century biophilanthropy accurately defined as “the elite and middle-class effort to impress a new heritable endowment on the bodies and minds of the children of the poor and otherwise allegedly uncivilized in order to render their labor profitable to the population as a whole” (136). Following Darwin’s and Lamarck’s ideas about the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics (pangenesis in Darwin’s terms) and under the influence of the corresponding nineteenth century evolutionary models which defined inherited traits not as innate and immutable but as a result of environmental influences, Schuller suggests that Brace’s biophilanthropic projects put into practice the belief that environmental impressions could originate hereditary traits. By removing indigent children from their families living in the tenements of New York City, CAS attempted to rewrite their hereditary material through the accumulation of new impressions in a new environment in the rural West, so that they could become civilized and work for the benefit of the population and the capitalistic system. In this way the children from the tenements, who were originally primitive, could be turned plastic “through the repetitive movements of labor and the habits of civilization” (142).

When the biological sciences inspired by the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics began to posit heredity as fixed, innate material determined by genes rather than the environment, Brace’s Emigration Plan began to decay, and reformers became more concerned with controlling who could give birth than with controlling the environment of children. Even so, Schuller considers that the figure of the malleable child prepared the way for eugenics to emerge and concludes that child migration projects were in fact an antecedent of eugenics regulating childrearing rather than childbearing.

Chapter five, “From Impressibility to Interactionism,” is devoted to the analysis of Dubois’s work to exemplify the continuity between the nineteenth century “eugenics” of the sentimental politics of life and the twentieth century eugenics of the genetic era. From her perspective, Dubois and Boas adopted the sentimental politics of life to develop the idea that “race is contingent on culture rather than genetic condition” (175), but Dubois’s uplifting plan also participated in the eugenic tradition, since it entailed the use of birth control and other tools for the biocultural transformation of the African American working class. Thus he tried to counter racism by combining his understanding of race as a cultural phenomenon and his belief in eugenic better-breeding. According to Schuller, this interaction of culture and biology explains DuBois’s conception of race and justifies her interpretation of his work as sentimentalism transformed into eugenic practice.

Sounding again a bit repetitive, Schuller describes the origin of Galton’s eugenics and the biological turn to genetic deterministic models of heredity at the beginning of the twentieth century in contrast with Lamarck’s evolutionary theories and impressibility discourse, which rendered impressions a main source of hereditary material. She explains how this caused a change in the practice of security strategies from focusing on youthful impressibility and environmental conditions to focusing on women’s reproductive capacity and genes. As a consequence of this shift, birth control rather than social reform programs was the main tool to ensure the proliferation of the fit at the expense of those deemed unfit.

In spite of the apparent opposition between eugenics and sentimentalism, Schuller discerns a relationship of continuity between both, and analyses Dubois’s work as an example of how the sentimental politics of life transformed into the new biopolitical models of the twentieth century. From her perspective, in his notion of development “biological and social factors have distinct processes over the course of individual lifetimes, but intertwine over the course of phylogenetic development” (189). Thus DuBois’s model of evolution depends on two kinds of heredity determined by different temporalities: social heredity and physical heredity. Schuller’s conclusion is that DuBois’s notion of race was mainly cultural, but not exclusively so, since she insists that DuBois was also interested in the black body as a civilizing entity, which led him to endorse eugenic reproduction and to become an advocate of birth control for racial progress (195). He adopted the nineteenth century premises of the sentimental politics of life to challenge racial determinism and at the same time assumed the new premises of heredity: “The result was an early example of twentieth century interactionist theory that attempts to reconcile the dynamic role of culture with genetic heredity” (202).

Schuller closes her insightful study of the nineteenth century sentimental politics of life with an Epilogue, where she argues that the “binary models of biology and culture” animating the notions of race and gender were still alive in the late twentieth century in the postulates of social construction theory. Moreover, she refers to epigenetics and analyzes the works of Anne Fausto-Sterling and Sylvia Wynter to bring her discussion to the contemporary twenty-first century scene. Thus, Schuller’s reflections on race, sex and science in the nineteenth century prove extremely helpful for our understanding of the contemporary scene since they invite readers to search for the connections between modern and even current trends of thought and concepts, and the scientific, cultural and ideological implications of nineteenth century sentimentalism. Her analysis of the sentimental politics of life offers a new insightful perspective not only on race, sex and science, but also on other related concepts such as affect, heredity, biophilanthropy, etc.

Footnotes

1. Inspired by Walker’s and Blackwell’s interpretation of the impressible vagina as essential for the establishment of affective connections among the network of nerves, Schuller analyses the parallelisms between nineteenth century impressibility and current theories of affect, and concludes that modern notions of affectivity, plasticity and vitality should not overlook the origin of these concepts in the “biopolitical logic of racial and sex differentiation” (126).