engleski

A Victorian Deconstruction of Scale

Sandwiched between Lyell and Darwin, the Pre-Raphaelites emerge as a Victorian configuration where a deconstruction of scale takes place, symptomatic of a more general reconstitution of biopolitics at the time. The Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with detail, that is, ensures that the question of scale gives way to visibility in terms of a metonymic assemblage, with the suggestion now that scale is defined around metaphor, or else that scale depends on the logic of metaphor. As the metonymic constitution of detail is also how to understand the Pre-Raphaelite insistence on “truth to nature”, it follows that metonymy entails a truth which is not to be accessed through metaphor, almost a type of rationality which both metaphor and scale need to sidestep if they are to claim their reason. Insofar as this rationality is predicated on nature, where nature is to secure the Epicurean swerve so to speak rather than the empty space (of metaphor), the Pre-Raphaelites make sense only as relative to other Victorian discourses on nature and life, primarily those of Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s biology. For this reason, I propose to discuss the Pre-Raphaelites as symptomatic of a more general Victorian “naturalism” and of the biopolitics implicit to it, in the position where they point to the rift between Lyell’s scale and Darwin’s deconstruction of it.

scale; the Pre-Raphaelites; metonymy; Victorian biopolitics; Charles Darwin; Charles Lyell

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