Terror Machine: Automated Affect in London's Gothic Theatre 1790-1840

我打算研究18世纪末和19世纪初伦敦的流行戏剧，特别是那些改编自哥特小说或坚持这一流派美学的戏剧。这家剧院在当时受到批评，因为它更喜欢场面而不是文本意义，它精心设计的布景和技术创新——以及它们所激发的内心情感反应——成为人们关注的焦点。我想研究这一技术奇观与同期英国发展的工业社会之间的关系。通过对这部哥特式戏剧中情感的自动化——其主要关注的是在观众中不断产生恐怖——的质疑，我将探索新兴工业资本主义下技术与情感之间的关系，反思人们对国内产业工人和国外奴隶人口所从事的新型伪自动化劳动的普遍态度。对这一时期戏剧自动化的研究将允许我——特别是考虑到哥特类型的狂欢倾向——探索表演本身固有的机械品质，这些品质使演员的所谓人性复杂化。这个受欢迎的哥特式剧院提供了一个与技术共存的潜在恐怖对抗的场所，同时坚定地将以城堡和贵族人物为代表的先前的技术时代作为过去。正如Fred Botting所说，哥特文学为启蒙社会提供了一面异位镜，向他们展示了一段他们现在认为自己与之对立的历史的黑暗、迷信和暴力。然而，这些戏剧在产生情感方面的明显成功——例如，导致包括昏厥在内的身体反应——威胁着观众，使他们被剧院自己的自动过程所吸引，反映出他们越来越需要在日益自动化的社会中定位自己。

I intend to investigate London's popular theatre of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly those plays either adapted from Gothic novels or adhering to the genre's aesthetics. This theatre was criticised in its time for preferring spectacle over textual meaning, its elaborate sets and technological innovations - and the visceral affective responses they inspired - taken to be the focus of attention. I want to study the relationship between this technological spectacle and the industrial society developing in England during the same period. By interrogating the automation of affect in this Gothic theatre - whose primary concern is the consistent production of terror throughout its audience - I will explore the relationship between technology and emotion under an emerging industrial capitalism, reflecting on popular attitudes regarding the new pseudo-automaton labour performed by industrial workers domestically and slave populations abroad. The study of automation in this period's theatre will allow me - especially given the carnivalesque tendencies of the Gothic genre - to explore mechanical qualities inherent to performance itself, qualities that complicate the supposed humanity of the actor. This popular Gothic theatre offers a venue for confrontations with the potential horrors of existence alongside technology, while firmly consigning the prior technological epochs represented by the castles and aristocratic persons populating Gothic literature to the past. As Fred Botting suggests, the Gothic genre provided Enlightenment society a heterotopic mirror, presenting them with the darkness, superstition and violence of a history they now thought of themselves in opposition to. However, these plays' apparent success in generating affect - leading to, for example, accounts of physical reactions including fainting - threatens the audience with absorption into the theatre's own automatic process, reflecting their growing need to situate themselves within an increasingly automated society.