Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750-1830  Broglio, Ron (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008)

In studies of aesthetics, the picturesque is traditionally regarded as a particularly British discourse that precipitated out of the rich ferment of discussion initiated by the re-emergence of the fragmentary text of uncertain authorship often called Peri Hupsos (commonly translated as On the Sublime), which achieved its most influential interpretation at the hands of Nicholas Boileau in 1674. While the text of the pseudo Longinus treats the sublime in part as a matter of techne, the tasteful application of rhetorical techniques that produce a certain affective elevation in an audience or reader, the vibrant discussions which it inspired in the eighteenth century habitually inscribe aesthetics in terms of binary oppositions: the sublime and the pathetic, the sublime and the elegant, and, most influentially, in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the sublime and the beautiful. Betwixt and between this array of binaries, the picturesque emerged as an aesthetic middle ground in the tour guide to the British countryside, Observations on the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland penned by the Reverend William Gilpin in 1786. 

Essentially, the picturesque is that in nature which is like a picture—particularly insofar as the tourist’s experience of the picturesque prospect can be made to duplicate the qualities of the immensely popular prints of landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa and Claude Loraine. In particular, it was Gilpin’s contention that to understand the picturesque was to understand the landscape as an expression of national identity. He claimed that in the picturesque “we find a species of landscape, which no country, but England can display in such perfection: not only because this just species of taste prevails no where else; but also, because no where else are found such proper materials.”

Ron Broglio's Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750-1830 is paradoxically both a treatment of the very foundations of the picturesque aesthetic and a distinct departure from most contemporary critical studies of the picturesque. In taking the picturesque more as a privileged trope for the way that natural becomes that which is only recognizable and valued as a product of techne, Broglio accepts the central critical orthodoxy, but he radically expands the techne of the picturesque by placing it within the broader cultural context technology. A quick look at Technologies’ table of contents and the introduction suggests that the term “picturesque” only hints at the various discursive topographies with which this book is engaged. In some ways, “the picturesque” hardly seems an adequate description of Technologies of the Picturesque’s critical engagement with histories of science, cultural studies, literary studies, and animal studies. Thus, the scope of its inquiry is what is truly impressive about the conception and execution of Broglio's book: it invokes the dominant critical methodologies of its varied subject matters ultimately to submit them to consideration from a point of view that includes the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ontology of Gilles Deleuze.

Certainly, the real spirit of Technologies of the Picturesque is more bound up with its reading of technologies than it is in strictly re-tracing the terrain of the picturesque aesthetic as such. As a flexible trope, the picturesque opens the door to an exploration of the way technologies inevitably reconfigure as they represent the natural world, simultaneously demanding a rethinking of the human subject in the experience of these representations as a constantly shifting contingency (something akin to a Deleuzean assemblage) of the quaternary elemental categories of animal, earth, air, and sky around which this book is organized.

While positioning itself, in part, as a “supplement” to Christopher Hussey’s 1967 classic The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, and more recently Jacqueline Labbe’s Romantic Visualities and Richard Sha’s The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism, Technologies of the Picturesque has a much more ambitious scope. Rather than supplementing or developing established lines of enquiry into the picturesque, Technologies detonates the epistemic bounds of the picturesque as a site of critical interest, revealing the construction of a national sensibility attendant upon technologies inseparable from the picturesque aesthetic in the British Romantic Period. Here Broglio takes us on a journey that includes the clash of methods by which longitude might be determined, the techniques of the ordinance survey, cloud classifications, and the breeding of cattle. What Technologies accomplishes in its wide-ranging explorations is to establish the productive possibilities for what it calls “the phenomenological critique of technology” (18). In moving beyond the ideology critique endemic to cultural studies to suggest that in developing an ontological, rather than an epistemological, framework for its inquiry, the technologies loosely associated with the picturesque change not simply the way individuals know themselves, but rather they are taken as moments that suggest fundamental, ontological, shifts in what it might mean to be human. Technologies thus argues that the fundamental philosophical implications of technology have yet to be fully realized in the contemporary critical assessments of the British Romantic Period. In short, Broglio’s book challenges the persistent critical narrative wherein the Romantic self is seen as a reactionary assertion against the emergence of a technologically-driven modernity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The “machine use” described in Technologies identifies instances where “the Romantic self reveals a level of instability that teeters between collapse and a Deleuzean ‘line of flight’ toward a redefinition of what it means to be human” (22).

Most of the chapters of Technologies are organized as a series of transformations of natural objects and their human observers brought about “by the visual demands of the picturesque and by similar demands in technological instruments” (17). For the purposes of this review, I want to highlight the particular chapters that I think best represent Broglio’s project. Presenting as a scene of competing “cognitive ecologies,” chapter 2 chronicles the competition between astronomer/mathematician Nevil Maskelyne and clock maker John Harrison to claim the £ 20,000 prize offered by the British Longitude Act of 1714 for a reliable method to figure longitude aboard a ship, Broglio makes clear that what is at stake in Harrison’s “clock” method versus Maskelyne’s “lunar” method is more than a question of which method is the most practical and effective way to determine longitude. Bound up in Maskelyne’s lunar method is the traditional institutional prestige and disciplinary authority accorded to the sciences of astronomy and mathematics expressed as a particular distribution of cognition between the user and the heavens and between the heavens and the earth. By contrast, Harrison’s clock method presents itself as both a challenge to the authority of science from a craftsman and a fundamentally different distribution of cognition. In the cognitive ecology constituted by Harrison’s clock method, “time becomes a human mechanism, not reliant upon nature” (40) and, simultaneously, navigation across the oceans becomes reconfigured as a relationship between a navigator and the clock. Here, the arbitrary human representation of time becomes the basis of one’s perception of geographical space. While Harrison is never able to claim the prize, an act of Parliament along with £ 8,750 was eventually passed to recognize Harrison’s efforts. Fittingly, it is the more abstract relationship to the surface of the earth based on time that eventually triumphs. This instance of competing technologies and different cognitive ecologies is revealed as operating “in much the same way as the picturesque orders nature” (41). With the example of the way the distinct cognitive ecologies of navigational methods create distinct subjectivities, Technologies moves to a discussion of the picturesque as such.

Rather than retreating to the well-worn ground of Gilpin’s, Price’s, and Payne-Knight’s attempts to define the picturesque during the period, Technologies takes as its object Thomas Rowlandson’s parody of Gilpin in the series of illustrations collectively entitled, The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in the search for the picturesque: A Poem. While the reconstruction of the subject in its relationship to nature in Harrison’s clock method is historically regarded as a great achievement, the advent of the picturesque tour is not. For Technologies “Rolandson’s humor derives from the Doctor’s obsession with representing nature over or against his actual surroundings” (43). The cognitive ecology of the picturesque in the hands of the hapless Dr. Syntax represents nature in language effectively substituting the discourse of the picturesque for nature as such.

Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, focus on the human engineering of cattle as a source of flesh to be consumed and injected. While the production and consumption of beef became tantamount to an expression of national pride and personal achievement, the injection of serum derived from the diseased flesh of cattle into the human body provoked deep-seated anxieties about a fundamental animality lurking beneath the surface of humanity. Taking up Robert Bakewell’s selective breading of cattle, Technologies identifies “cattle [as] both the technological tool for changing the breed and the object that is worked upon” (162) to read Romantic cattle as a technological “hinge object between the foreignness of wildness of nature and its cultivation, both in agriculture and aesthetics” (162). Thus, Romantic cattle are both the means and the end of radical changes in the breed’s size and shape via the selective breeding initiated by Bakewell and, the visual representations at the hands of Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner that “make the seemingly timeless domestication of the animals and that naturalness by which humans rear them” (164) a national institution. As the breeding of cattle become in Bakewell’s phrase, “the best machine for converting herbage into money,” Technologies’ charts the concomitant rise of the cattle portrait, a genre best exemplified by John Boultbee’s The Durham Ox (1802), as the art work that became an iconic expression of the British nation’s pride in its manipulation of nature. By contrast, Edward Jenner’s development of a small pox vaccination from cows infected with cow pox become the site of Technologies’ interest in the “animality which contrasts human interiority with the physicality and animal nature of our material body, its appetites and diseases” (187). While there were widespread fears that injecting the diseased bodily material of cattle into the human body would produce perverse hybrid bovine/human monsters, Technologies argues that we need to read such anxieties, alongside Derrida and Heidegger, this fear as a “a deferral and displacement of human thought” (193). In effect, we see reflected in the fears of something bovine within us, a realization that what constitutes the “I” is the point of view of the animal external to us. Just as Derrida, in the late essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” finds himself naked before the eyes of his cat only to discover “thinking perhaps begins there,” Technologies suggests that the British cattle of the Romantic period are the external point of view, irremovably Other to the human, from which the “I” and “us” of British and national consciousness emerges as an instance of distributed cognition.

In its search for the way the technologies associated with the picturesque provide the possibility for developing an expanded notion of the subject as an effect of distributed cognition, chapter 5 of Technologies re-examines the contemporary critical orthodoxy of Karl Badt’s and John Thorens’ claims that John Constable modeled his cloudscapes on the scientific cloud nomenclature of the Romantic period meteorologists Luke Howard and Thomas Foster. Broglio suggests that it isn’t so much a question of human observers “reading” or delimiting cloud structures as discrete objects in space in Constable’s paintings as it is one of reading in Constable’s clouds a representation of interrelationships in time. By reading Constable’s clouds as primarily expressions of time, rather than space, Technologies finds within Constable’s work the possibility of “make[ing] landscape [as] an agent of change above and beyond the agency of the human subject” (158).

Technologies’ fullest exploration of the line of argument it makes for the role of Constable’s clouds as presenting an alternative to a purely human agency in representations of the landscape is in chapter 4’s extended analysis of William Wordsworth’s poetry. While Constable’s clouds become a kind of non-human agency focused on time rather than the visual possession of space, Wordsworth’s descriptions of landscape often show the centrality of the human subjectivity on the brink of giving way to a series of vector relations between fragmented elements of the human body and the environment. At the center of this exploration is Technologies’ reading of the Simplon Pass section of Book 6 of The Prelude. In its consideration of landmark readings of the Simplon Pass episode by Geoffrey Hartman and Alan Liu, Technologies identifies their common dependence on a construction of agency and identity as exclusively human attributes. For Broglio, the challenge of the “c” section of the Simplon Pass episode is to preserve “the connectedness of the viewer within the experiential field” (90). The tendency in Wordsworth’s own text is duplicated by its critics insofar as the connections the passage suggests are “replaced by an observer talking about an object” (90), in much the same way that Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax habitually converts nature into language. In negotiating the problem of language Technologies invokes Whitehead’s notion of “prehensions” as “The means by which an entity is revealed in the world. Each prehension is a smallpart of an infinitely divisible entity” (91). In attempting to displace a sense of language as the habitual interplay between subject and object, Technologies asserts that the “c” section of the Simplon Pass episode “presents the experience of a new, expansive, dynamic landscape from within the scene itself” (92). The “vectored relations” that emerge from the interconnection of the landscape elements of the scene itself work against subject/object relations to become rather a site for the prehension of divisible points of a single entity that is neither exclusively human nor landscape. Why should one want to give up the perfectly comprehensible Wordsworthian “I” for the subjectless contingences of Whitehead’s prehensions or Deleuzean assemblages? Technologies explains:

The larger claim is that the ontology of objects is more fluid than congenitally conceived and that this protean nature of entities prevents conventional patterns of experience and representation. Objects are in a continual state of becoming rather than possessing an unchanging essential being. They emerge within the landscape by functioning as open nodes that take in their surroundings and reflect them back from their unique standpoint or ‘prehension.’ If objects work as the points of intersection or condensation of vectors, then the being of an object is simply the meeting point of a number of vector becomings. (94)

In this way, Technologies offers not only an exciting critical engagement with some of the giants of Wordsworth criticism, but also an eminently practical and productive rethinking of the object of British science, culture, literature, and art in the Romantic period.

All of this is not to say that Technologies is a book absorbed by a Deleuzean vocabulary. Rather, this book is evidence of the necessary meeting and productive relationship that historically-oriented and theoretically-driven methodologies can achieve. As rich as it is in exploring the implications of non-essentialist constructions of being, Technologies  is equally well-informed in the fundamentals of the interrelated histories of its subject matter. Technologies is able to achieve what it is often difficult for the archival historicist in individual relationships between seemingly unrelated discourses such as cattle breeding, meteorology, cartography, geography, and painting. As long as Technologies can find readers who are neither paralyzed by terms that identify necessarily specialized theoretical concepts nor impatient with the detailed narrative unfoldings of history, this book will generously reward the time it takes to grasp the connections between the often far-flung pieces of its mosaic.

David M. Baulch is Associate Professor of English at the University of West Florida. He has published articles on William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.