Robert Mitchell. Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. Lit Z. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 304 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8232-9459-6.
Reviewed by Robert Metaxatos (Indiana University Bloomington)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (October, 2022)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
As engagement with the significance of human-made climate change becomes more prevalent in scholarship that applies humanities methods to science, literary scholars have gradually widened their critical scope from the individual to collectives. Several publications from the late 2010s in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies bear witness to this trend as they rethink well-known claims to the emergence of individualism in a modern context which, not coincidentally, saw the consolidation of “literature” as the creative category we know today. Robert Mitchell’s newest book considerably develops our understanding of collectivity from the Romantic to the present era with a theory-driven account of a “population imaginary” (p. 108). Drawing on a wide range of familiar literary, political, and philosophical writings then and now, Mitchell argues that Romantic authors not only rejected but also sought alternatives to the biopolitical regulation of populations in ways that portend and can be useful in our own, heightened biopolitical moment. To that end, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism rereads Romanticism alongside liberal theory as a form of biopolitics beyond which Romantic authors conceived a more “just version of biopolitics” that affirmed life in the face of government regulation and ecological crisis (p. 5).
The reader may consider Mitchell’s remit from the increasingly specific areas of literary studies (discipline), Romantic literary studies (field), and biopolitical theory (theory). From the 1980s and into the 2000s, the influence of Michel Foucault’s early work was apparent in literary studies and arguably commenced with eighteenth-century “rise of the novel” scholarship by Lennard Davis (Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, 1983), John Bender (Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, 1987), Nancy Armstrong (Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, 1987), and D. A. Miller (The Novel and the Police, 1988). Despite widening the scope of Marxist analyses to cultural institutions besides class, these critics focused on how literature abetted social trends that controlled individual subjects. It was then striking that the publication of Foucault’s later work on biopolitics coincided with a 2000s shift in literary studies away from the disciplinary control of individuals to ways that Enlightenment-era policy evidenced the opposite emergence of broader, national concerns with regulating swathes of land (and people). Mitchell is more particularly interested in refining those earlier studies that ascertained literature as just another institution that has historically enforced normal behavior: a technology of sameness. Rather, Infectious Liberty considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses that began “to see the world in terms of populations” characterized by variation (p. 64). Population here derives from Foucault’s 1977-78 lectures as a paradigm of biopolitical control that succeeded disciplinary power and became an object of policy intervention with increasing regularity at the end of the eighteenth century (Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, 2007). Accordingly, Mitchell’s book is compelling as an intervention into Romantic literary studies. Recent scholarship interested in population-level technologies such as statistics, war, and insurance has tended to focus on the nineteenth century in England and America, with exemplary Victorianist studies by Nicholas Daly (The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City, 2015), Emily Steinlight (Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, 2018), and Kyla Schuller (The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, 2018). As Mitchell notes, the far fewer Romantic literary studies of eighteenth-century biopolitics are for good reason suspicious of population-level interventions proposed by economists like Thomas Malthus but ultimately lack contextualization as to competing accounts from literary authors curious about more “just” biopolitical outcomes. Not only field-specific, the negative critique of biopolitics appears more broadly in twenty-first-century criticism according to Giorgio Agamben’s reconsideration of Foucauldian biopolitics as that in which all modern life is exposed, “bare” life; who in this line would not be suspicious of new biometric technologies designed to protect but also regulate life? (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998). Yet it is Mitchell’s simultaneous turn away from a hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized earlier literary critical work to how Romantic authors sought to create new norms of living collectively, and from a negative biopolitics associated with Agamben to an “affirmative” biopolitics outlined by Roberto Esposito (Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 2008), which allows Mitchell to trace “continuities between past literary texts and our own efforts to discover new norms that can help create a better world” (p. 5).
Bearing in mind this critical form of presentism, Infectious Liberty is divided into two related parts. Part 1 builds up to a population-minded methodology that refines the literary critical focus on sameness, and part 2 develops Esposito’s theoretical contribution in relation to Romantic authors who envisioned an affirmative biopolitics. Undergirding these larger arguments is Foucault’s perhaps idiosyncratic notion of population, which provides him and Mitchell a historical link between biopolitics and liberalism. The book’s introduction establishes that while eighteenth-century liberalism is commonly associated with individual liberty, theorists such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Malthus had a vested interest in variations among individuals as a means of locating “regularities” within a population that could be harnessed to improve collective behavior. It is neither surprising nor erroneous that literary critics should have thought literature complicit in molding individual liberty for a privileged few, Mitchell maintains, without also considering the latter aspiration of authors to think in terms of the collectives that make up the true address of liberal theories. In this way, Infectious Liberty contends that only a more generous reading, beyond suspicion, allows us to understand that Romantic authors saw beyond liberalism. And today, that we ourselves might be able to see beyond neoliberalism.
Mitchell reads Romantic authors’ engagement with liberalism as a source of variation across a population in order to advance a methodology that utilizes difference rather than individual identity. In chapter 1 he turns to William Petty’s “political arithmetick,” a precursor to Smith’s and Malthus’s theories which Mitchell argues was heavily laden with liberal and biopolitical ideas. Among Petty’s writings is a section in which he argues that population growth would engender more geniuses, a claim that is bolstered by Romantic literature as a reciprocal fear that geniuses might be lost to time or improper resource management. Here Mitchell introduces an analogous example that will appear often throughout Infectious Liberty: late eighteenth-century British smallpox inoculation campaigns, which sought to secure the health of a growing population at the same time as they provoked worry about lost life, political instability, and economic stalling (p. 39). These discourses around genius and inoculation became reality at the same time as literature became a medium in now-classic works by Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and William Godwin, whose “biopolitical forms of worry” appear on a suspicious reading to advocate for social hierarchy topped by geniuses but in fact gesture toward possible futures without bourgeois order (p. 37). Mitchell develops this line of inquiry in chapter 2, wherein a Romantic-era debate between Malthus and Godwin provides the basis for difference-oriented concepts of population later taken up by Romantic authors. According to Foucault and so Mitchell, these “new sciences of population” proceeded Malthus and accounted for variations across a population to regulate, say, the incidence of smallpox. In contrast to Marxist- or poststructuralist-inspired assessments of normative behavior among individuals, this specific brand of population imaginary is found in nineteenth-century literature (primarily Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and its contemporaneous reviews), as such texts grapple with “new” population models whose biopolitical implications helped readers understand alternatives to liberal ways of living. How exactly one reads for a difference-oriented concept of population in literature is the subject of chapter 3. Mitchell asks, “What would the nineteenth-century novel look like if we thought of it as analogous in spirit and effects to an inoculation campaign?” (p. 82). To make this analogy, he considers literary devices that emerged in nineteenth-century novels: increasingly complex character systems and free indirect discourse enabled novelists to consider forces beyond the individual that bore differently across a population comprising human and nonhuman agents. Infectious Liberty thereby follows Foucault’s lead in turning away from individual surveillance to collective regulation, concluding that novelists tapped into a biopolitical mode of thinking that resisted predominant biopolitical forms used by governments that made—or in more complex versions, let—their subjects die.
Having established that Romantic-era writings evince population-level concerns, part 2 of Mitchell’s book details their authors’ proposed alternatives to biopolitical regulation. Chapter 4 offers a field-specific engagement of the individual-collective shift, asking how Romantic literary authors were concerned not only with local threats to nature but also global phenomena that altered collective living. This argument requires a generous reading of otherwise imperialistic ideas in works by Erasmus Darwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley for early notions of globalization, which, unlike today, help us think beyond liberal economic models and their accompanying effects on the environment. Either author serves Mitchell’s subargument that globalization has lost its Romantic meaning, in which writers conceived of shaping the globe to make people healthier, in favor of a neoliberal tendency to overcome the limits of consumption. Indeed, the Romantic meaning, which Mitchell appends to contemporary science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, is far more “joyful” because it redeems the wrongs of civilization through collective effort (p. 135). To understand present-day entanglements of globalization and neoliberalism, chapter 5 retraces eighteenth-century liberalism as a model of “collective experimentation” (p. 148). Though Mitchell’s rich synthesis of liberal and neoliberal theorists is at times abstruse, readers will appreciate learning about constellations of collectivity that sprouted in previous centuries and have taken root today. The intellectual crossroads of the chapter lies with John Stuart Mill, who built on Edmund Burke’s suggestion that liberalism can function without individual liberty to say that all individuals should be able to conduct “experiments in living” free from external restraint and, applied to collective society, free from inequality (On Liberty, 1859). Mitchell notes that neoliberals have since reappropriated the notion of collective experimentation for an economic “market” that conflates a diversity of perspectives. Here the complexities arising from early liberalism reveal a paradox of neoliberalism, best illustrated by Esposito’s work: liberty must be “secured” through an external force, be it the market, police, or other institutions. Advancing this theory, Mitchell argues that liberty is further beholden to a concept of survival that Romantic authors would have eschewed in favor of the potential of individuals creating new norms together. In the final pursuit of an affirmative biopolitics, then, chapter 6 turns to “regulation” as a Romantic-era concept that links biopolitics and neoliberalism. Mitchell’s motivation can be gleaned from the ambivalent meaning of regulation as it is found in Foucault's and earlier authors' works: Does regulation refer to the disciplinary regulation of individuals through control or the general regulation of an aggregate through freedom? Mitchell contends that Romantic writers (loosely defined as Malthus, Burke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant) contribute significantly to the second meaning of regulation by locating economic, cultural, and philosophical tendencies toward a collective subject: the population. This is easily Mitchell’s most ambitious chapter, not least because it boomerangs back to regulation in neoliberalism and Bruno Latour’s political ecology.
In sum, Infectious Liberty represents a significant contribution to literary studies, Romantic literary studies, and biopolitical theory. Mitchell reinterprets a number of writings from the eighteenth century to today and finds in the concept of biopolitics a reason to broaden his field’s methodology, thus adding to an understanding of liberalism beyond the individual. His book carries forward the later Foucault’s emphasis on population, as well as, more implicitly, Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference or variation as central methods for reconceptualizing liberalism (Difference and Repetition, 1994). Mitchell’s incisive analysis of biopolitics “between” Romanticism and liberalism asks us to consider the increasingly important notion of life as an issue contested in literature as much as it is demarcated by government. Beyond its more explicitly addressed audience, Infectious Liberty will be of interest to scholars across disciplines who find resonances between the book’s discussion of smallpox inoculation campaigns and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
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Citation:
Robert Metaxatos. Review of Mitchell, Robert, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58017
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