Rather unexpected or even arbitrary as it might seem, George Makari’s historiography is somewhat reminiscent of Judith Butler’s concept of citationality or performativity. This textual gesture may be summarised as strategic and repetitive quotations of previous and prevailing discourses in new contexts, thereby altering their original meanings retroactively and opening up further ideological dimensions. In Butler’s context, this idea is expounded as a possible dialectical resistance to the hegemonic power of heterosexuality, in the sense that its coercive and persuasive structure of repetition could simultaneously engender its undoing. This theoretical implication may allow us to cite in our different context. I am reminded of one of the most insightful and important scenes in Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, Makari’s previous work, in which he foregrounds Freud as an ambitious but obscure young doctor who ‘ransacked the psychologie nouvelle’ then represented by Charcot and the Nancy school: faithfully referring to their theories of ‘hypnotic states’ or ‘suggestion’. Freud simultaneously and ingeniously reformed them in the alternative contexts of ‘transference’ and ‘defence neurosis’. Thus emerged a new intersubjective and intrapsychic psychology – or ‘psychoanalysis’ as he named it – from within the almost cunningly eclectic and citational language of Freud, ‘[o]nce Charcot’s man in Vienna’ (48). This is undoubtedly one crucial aspect of Freud’s historical ‘performativity’ (we may also recall Harold Bloom’s literary historiography of ‘misreading’). What most distinguishes Makari’s work is thus, an expert unravelling and unfolding of a similarly complicated yet potentially dynamic entanglement of competing and interdepending historical discourses. Makari terms this a ‘tapestry’, a textual metaphor which suggests its affinity to literary ‘close readings’ or, by extension, even to Roland Barthes’s ‘pleasure of the text’ (a probable justification for my reference to Butler and Bloom).
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind is another perusal or disentanglement of a series of historical and textual complications or densities. Its manner serves to accentuate the theories of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Napoleon and other historical subjects who quoted, synthesised and deviated from preceding dominant theories and doctrines. No less meritorious in Makari’s history of the ‘mind’ is its focus on the impossibility of any attempt at modern psychology, which is deftly hinted at by the book’s title: ‘Soul Machine’. This phrase should be read as an oxymoron or contradiction in terms – a terminological commixture of the religious, immaterial or even eternal, and the enlightened, material or secular. Makari’s ‘tapestry’ is thus complicated or woven not only by the Butlerian simultaneity of citation and deviation but also the radical aporia inherent in ‘the invention of the modern mind’ itself. Its complex textuality reveals itself as a quite often combative discursive arena of metaphysical, religious, medical, scientific and political languages in an entangled, impossible and unending narrative.
In this sense, amongst the most important parts of this book is undoubtedly a set of descriptions of those who called themselves ‘Modern’ in the seventeenth century: Gassendi, Hobbes, Descartes and others. Their preoccupation was with a ‘thing that thinks’ (25), that is a ‘Soul Machine’, in their desperate and disparate attempts to reconcile Christian theology with natural philosophy. It is in this discursive arena or tapestry that Descartes’s historical feat was performed by quotation, synthesis and deviation. Taking into account the then prevailing discussions and debates, his theoretical and theological virtuosity manifested itself especially when ‘he zigzagged back and forth interchangeably using words for mind and soul’. He thus deployed ‘the ambiguity in French to unify the indisputable thinking being with that eternal life force and distinguish both from the material body’: hence it was a ‘synthesis’ and simultaneously ‘old wine in a new bottle’ (28). Worthy of particular mention is Makari’s vivid dramatisation of the heated discussion or vituperation between Descartes and the more materialistic Gassendi – ‘Mr. Spirit and Mr. Flesh’ – ‘over great questions regarding how exactly the Moderns, advocates of the new natural philosophy, would define the soul, inner being, thought, and the body’ (34).
The most outstanding merit of the book lies in its privileging of Locke as the first modern psychologist to problematise the very impossibility of modern psychology. Locke’s empiricist observations of individual subjectivities cannot be counted amongst ‘experimental proofs or mathematical calculations’, but they were concomitantly ‘cast out from the Church’. This means not just that Locke’s psychology ‘fell between the borders of mechanistic science and theology’ but that it also ‘created an impasse, since the mind, though immediately knowable to itself, remained hidden to others’. Despite this scientific unprovablity, his ‘inductive and empirical method’ was hard to disprove completely, thus ‘mak[ing] room for belief’ (141). Paradoxically, this impossibility of proof creates the credibility of his science. Of great interest is Makari’s suggestion that this dilemma of Locke’s empiricist psychology triggered ‘the Age of Authors’ (132), ‘a flood of English autobiographies’, or the explosive proliferation of ‘memoir and fiction’ (131), represented by Johnson, Pepys, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne. No doubt, this is the ‘tapestry’ of modernity or the dawn of the modern age of psychology and literature in our own definitions.
Modern psychology and novels would develop themselves as impossible projects to visualise the invisible, thus continuing to invent ‘the modern mind’ and becoming obsessed with optical vision over the following centuries. This tapestry of modern psychologisation – invented by Lockean citational synthesis – faces another paradox: any synthetic attempt at ‘creating an objective science of subjectivity’ (506) only perpetuates epistemological dividedness: ‘the mind-body problem, the Nature-Nurture problem, free will versus determinism, and secularism and faith’ (510). Of course, this remains the reality for our contemporary psychologised modernity despite the cutting edge progress of genetics and neuroscience in the twenty-first century.
