Motion sickness: spectacle and circulation in Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit."

The steam roundabout exists on a slightly different plane of reality from its surroundings: it is "in the agricultural world, but not of it" (Tess 319). We might say that it systematically distorts visual stimuli around it. Debord's definition of "spectacle" is relevant here, especially given Thomas Hardy's notable concern with distinguishing between work and play:

The spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing even combined

with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that

which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work.(18)(6)

What is seen on the roundabout is disconnected from any of the ordinary standards by which any sensory input can be judged. Vision gains some unquantifiable added essence.

The results of the roundabout's visual plus-power are enormous, ranging from Charles's paying for (one) young beauty to continue riding the roundabout, to the judicial circuitry wheeling young Charles away at just the right (or wrong) moment, to the eventual entire misguided correspondence. But the salient fact is that all of these later misuses of three entirely different circulatory systems of the world--money, the judicial circuitry, and letter writing--are the results of an initial visual misapprehension. All the subsequent trouble can be indirectly traced back to the original spectacular mistake, the thing seen that not only was not there, but could never even have been imagined without the roundabout.

Vision

The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by

means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be

grasped directly) naturally finds vision to be the privileged

human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs.

The most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the

generalized abstraction of present-day society. (Debord 18)

Vision, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, is credited with almost mystical powers and acknowledged as the site of imponderable occurrences: occurrences, that is, that cannot be weighed against other sensory input. That visual imponderability, or incommensurability, and the corresponding rise in fascination with mechanical phantasmagoria, opens up an entire sphere of the world that can neither be "brought back into focus" nor "brought back to earth" (Castle 30). If the fascination of mechanical phantasmagoria partially depended on the knowledge that they were not "real" ghosts but "only" optical illusions, their allure was only heightened by the realization that this merely transplanted the realm of the eerie into the subjective mind: made alchemy psychology.

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer documents the rise of interest in the phantasmagoric and illusionary and the era's increasingly strange and vivid speculations on the science of optics. A chart in Johannes Muller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833), for example, lists all the agencies capable of producing the sensation of sight. After mechanical abrasions, electrical influx, chemicals, and blood, photons are ranked a poor fifth, and with this caveat: "although they [photons] may have many other actions than this; for instance they effect chemical changes, and are the means of maintaining the chemical processes in plants" (90). Muller also goes on to document the effects on the other sense that the aforementioned stimuli may have (effects that do not correspond to their effect on vision). What is being created is a world of hermetically riven senses, in which there is no reason that any one sense can serve as standard for another.