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In the next pages I propose to examine the relations between discipline and the structures of power and knowledge in Victorian poetics in the four relationships I isolated

:i That Tennyson aims for something different is corroborated by Walter Bagehot’s differentiation of Tennyson in 1864 as an "ornate" rather than "pure" or "grotesque" poet (Walter Bagehot. "Wordsworth. Tennyson and Browning: or. Pure. Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry". National Review, n. s. 1 [November 1864], 27 - 66). It should be borne in mind, however, that Bagehot's well-known review is outside the scope of this thesis, and also, unlike Ruskin. promulgates a conservative, typological measure of the Grotesque.

at the beginning of the chapter. I will examine by turn the kinds of effect poetry is thought to have on readers; the question of the revelation of the poet’s self; the object of poetic knowledge and the knowledge assumed in the representation of that knowledge. The chapter will then proceed, as did the examination of historiography, to sum up the practice o f the self associated with poetic discipline and indicate what the construction of poetic knowledge means for Arthurian discourse.

The first relations to be examined here are those which emerge in discussions of the way poetry can affect its readers. There are two aspects to consider: the type o f effect poetry seeks, and the type of person it is supposed to affect. For both elements, there are analogies with disciplinary processes. The form of power poetry is thought to exert posits a subjectivity for the reader which is identical to the subjectivity discipline posits for its addressees. At the same time, that form of power exerts a type of influence many of whose salient elements are identical to those of discipline. It will be necessary first to explain the aspects of disciplinary power that are involved.

The mechanisms of surveillance — the particular relationships and activities through which it seeks to direct people — posit a particular form of subjectivity in those over whom power is deployed.-2 I mean two things by this. On the one hand, these

” One of the principles of disciplinary power — part o f what distinguishes it from other mechanisms through which hierarchies of power flow — is the aim of a profound inner transformation in the creature subjected to it. Discipline is not an exercise of power upon one subject which seeks to make other subjects

witnessing the exercise fear and obey its possessors. Rather it is an exercise of power upon many subjects

which seeks to make them and only them internalise and close with the aims and desires its stewards have for their behaviour. In other words, it seeks among other things directly to manipulate the structures of

mechanisms interpellate a form of subjectivity in Althusser's sense, establishing a series o f relationships for the subject which render the appearance of this subjectivity mandatory. On the other hand, discipline depends upon the existence of this form of subjectivity in those it seeks to transform. It requires that subjectivity as an anchor for its own manipulations of the subject — in other words, that subjectivity is an element in the disciplinary mechanism itself.

What is this subjectivity? Its structure must be such as to allow the transformation o f its patterns through those agencies, and those agencies alone, which discipline brings into play. The first elements to consider are those which are the condition of discipline as a practice which claims both to alter a specific subject's moral compass, and for the subject still to read by this compass when no longer directly addressed by disciplinary power. This implies that each subject is addressed individually. It also implies a particular kind of relation between the internal patterning of the subject and the environment through which it moves. On the one hand, the subject must possess a

personality which determine the subject's agency. In some respects, the concept of discipline is very close to that of certain analy ses of the objective of ideology. Neither disciplinary pow er nor ideology are mechanisms which intervene upon bodies with phy sical violence or which seek to leave their subjects w ith any sense of being coerced. Both attempt to form the cognitive matrix through w hich the subject interprets his or her world, and to stimulate and direct the subject's desires within that perceived world. However, discipline and ideology operate at different sociological levels. The former is a single micropolitical function, at work within many institutions and many distributions of power, for whom these objectives are a defining technical style. The latter, contrariw ise, is a macro-political result, one of whose side-effects is to occlude the realities of coercion: it is a structure of representation which proceeds from many socialising agencies and w hose purpose is to reproduce but one distribution of power.

cognitive framework for interpreting its environment and an associated framework for acting within it which is autonomous with respect to that environment: i.e. not the mirror of w hat it sees. On the other hand, it must possess a principle of self-determination which is not tied to these frameworks — it can at any moment ignore them and act wholly outside them. In other words, it entails a subject whose interiority is the origin of its behaviour. At the same time, however, the subject’s interiority must be susceptible to its environment. Both the cognitive and moral frameworks it possesses, and its self- determination, can be transformed in their depths by encounters with what is outside it.

The second element of the structure of subjectivity posited by discipline results from the mode by which discipline transforms subjectivity. Discipline encapsulates the desired behavioural matrix in a series o f simple norms, and confines the subject in an environment where it is constantly measured against those norms and subjected to mild rewards or punishments as it meets or fails to meet them. The result of these agencies is the subject’s internalisation of the code of norms, so that it carries out the code’s standards even when it is not actually being watched. In this regime, subjects do not conform merely because they exercise a rational desire to escape pain and make the best of their confined lot. On the contrary, their transformation must be such that they come to love the standards they are measured against, and anchor their identity on them even when confinement as well as surveillance ceases. Discipline therefore involves two other processes. One is that the subject independently observes those who have authority over it, becoming impressed by their behaviour to the point of wanting to imitate them. The second is that the norms of discipline must somehow be attractive on their own terms, appearing to harbour a capability that benefits or pleases the subject of discipline, rather than being merely a yoke restricting its freedom.

What does this imply about the general structure of the subject? Not only is it individual, autonomous and transformable, it is one in which transformation simultaneously involves a multiplicity of faculties in the subject. It is a subject whose interiority is a structure of physical and emotional as well as rational experience, and which exists as a complex and centred whole. Second, it is a subject which, to a large extent, by virtue of its positive engagement with the environment it finds itself in. transforms itself. Third, it is a subject which is transformed in this way not by focusing on what not to do, but on pleasure and activity which can be construed as gain. Finally, it is a subject which is infinitely malleable in these terms, always striving to correct itself, or always needing correction, against standards which exist outside itself as well as in its interiority and which do not themselves necessarily remain constant.

Middle-class poetics in the period between 1830 and 1860 broaches this subjectivity in a number of ways. It does so in response to a crisis of prestige felt from the 1820s up to as late as the mid-1840s. Utilitarian-influenced critics — including, among others, Macaulay — opined that poetry was worthless, or a "primitive" mode of thought inevitably in decline as Reason "unw[o]ve the rainbow".23 Conservative writers lamented the prurient level of interest in and achievement of contemporary poetry.24

:jJohn Keats. ''Lamia”, Part 1!, I. 237. T. B. Macaulay, "Milton". Critical anti Historical Essays, op. cit.. I. 153-56. Bryan Proctor, "Poetry — Cunningham's Songs", Edinburgh Review, 47 (January 1828), 184-204 discusses this question in relation to the competing claims of history and philosophy. See M. H. Abrams.

The Mirror and the Lamp. op. cit., 300-12; and Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson, op. cit., 11-21 for different

historical discussions of this point.

:4 Henry Taylor, Preface to Philip van Artevelde (London, 1833),

Well into the fifties, a different but equally disabling analysis observed, as Arnold fils put it, that the "bewildering confusion" of the conditions of modem life scuppered any chance of really great or "classic" poetry being written.25 The response to this crisis elaborates certain traditional ideas of the form of discursive power poetry wields — its relation to ethics, pedagogy and the rhetoric of logical proof. It is in this elaboration that notions of subjectivity and power appear which duplicate those of discipline. In particular, poetry achieves the combination of social and subjective effects it does because (a) it manipulates the subject’s cognitive framework (b) it evokes the whole interior structure of the subject (c) it surrounds the subject with a discursive experience of normative behaviour whose principles are pleasure and attraction, rather than a rhetoric of restriction (d) it expects the subject to be drawn into an engagement with the consciousness of poetic discourse whereby it transforms itself.

I shall examine three recurrent questions posed in early-mid Victorian critical texts which connect these matters. How may poetry be justified as a form o f writing relatively autonomous of plain economic, moral or social utility? Secondarily, how does poetry relate to the promulgation of religious and political doctrine, and to the communication of class experience alien to the readership? Discussion of these questions negotiates one stark conundrum. Poetry is a discourse which neither self-interest nor legal and social coercion force readers to attend to. If it is to reassert its authority it must discover a forcefulness which does not require the institutional or economic mechanisms of reward which empower a judge's, legislator's, priest's, scientist's, teacher's, journalist's, or even a

:,Matthew Arnold, "Preface to First Edition of Poems (l 853)", in Matthew Arnold, Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. 1970), 54.

historian’s words. This is why poetics reaches toward notions which echo those of discipline. Poetry cannot gain a hold by denying subjects expression, demanding that they fulfil an obligation, or requiring them to articulate their commitment to a proposition or group. It may only gain a hold by tapping a capability within them, drawing it out. developing it and training it. In the texts this capability and direction is understood via a more or less sophisticated appeal to associationist psychology and a post-Kantian division of the contents of consciousness into separate faculties. Poetry pleasures the capillary network o f "association" which joins together all a subject's experiences. It attains social efficacy — in two ways — because this appeal travels throughout the subject's associative network. It renders cognition more inclusive and flexible by clearing the paths between emotional, intellectual, sensory and linguistic consciousness. It manipulates the content of these pathways, forging connections between doctrinal commitment and experiences which go deep in the memory, body and relationships with others. Since such pathways comprise the structure of personality, poetry may thus tend the very conditions of behaviour themselves.