What Objects Know: Circulation,Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives

Modern self-possessing subjects must learn how to alienate parts of themselves economically – their labour, ideas, recorded voices, photographed faces – without alienating themselves psychologically. Victorian it-narratives provide object lessons for such subjects: they tell the stories of their owners, suggesting that inalienability need only be imagined – in the shape of talking umbrellas, feathers, and needles – to be effective. Object narrators also enact a form of omniscience unavailable to human narrators. Rather than traversing the consciousness of characters, they more ‘realistically’ simply over-hear the innermost thoughts of their owners. They circulate among a much wider range of subjects than do the narrators of mainstream fiction. Royals, gypsies, aristocrats, thieves, actors, and shopkeepers are witnessed intimately and accurately by their possessions. Their circulation is comic: they knit the social world together in collecting the stories of their disparate owners. They suggest that the subjects who are most like objects in Victorian Britain and its empire (women, the colonized, slaves, children, the poor) have a specific power: a certain omniscience, and therefore the power to confer, contain and preserve inalienability. Silas Wegg, of Our Mutual Friend, has suffered radical dispossession – his leg belongs to someone else. He is the modern subject par excellence, resolutely optimistic about the inalienability of his leg, which he refers to as ‘I’. Wegg, like the object narrators this essay discusses, suggests to us the necessary porousness of the subject–object boundary given the self-possession of liberal individuals. That boundary has become more porous since the Victorian period: we now alienate our DNA, organs and infants. It is the disavowal of this permeability that marks the great divide between then and now.     

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the rift in Leibniz’s conception of determinism after being rebuffed by the Parisian theologian Antoine Arnauld in their correspondence of 1686. As, in addition, his study of surds infracted his confidence in the “complete concept,” Leibniz embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance or “law of the series.” In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as “tweaking” the system to allow some self-assertion of free will. But as this article will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and the disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor an empirical proof can be given.