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

我打算调查18世纪末19世纪初伦敦的流行戏剧，特别是那些改编自哥特式小说或坚持该体裁美学的戏剧。当时，这家剧院因更喜欢场景而不是文本意义而受到批评，其精心设计的布景和技术创新--以及它们激发的内心情感反应--被视为关注的焦点。我想研究一下这一技术奇观与同期英国工业社会发展的关系。通过对这个哥特式戏剧中情感的自动化--它的主要担忧是在整个观众中持续制造恐怖--我将探索新兴工业资本主义下技术与情感之间的关系，反映出人们对国内产业工人和国外奴隶人口表演的新的伪自动化劳动的普遍态度。在这一时期的戏剧中学习自动化将使我--特别是考虑到哥特式流派的嘉年华倾向--探索表演本身固有的机械素质，这些素质使演员本应具有的人性复杂化。这个广受欢迎的哥特式剧院提供了一个与存在的潜在恐怖和技术对抗的场所，同时坚定地将哥特式文学中的城堡和贵族所代表的先前技术时代交给过去。正如弗雷德·博廷所暗示的那样，哥特式风格为启蒙运动社会提供了一面异质的镜子，向他们展示了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，导致对包括晕倒在内的身体反应的描述--威胁着观众，让他们全神贯注于剧院自身的自动过程，反映出他们越来越需要将自己置身于一个日益自动化的社会中。

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.