Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

You may have noticed a trend in my blog posts: Hyde, Hyde, and more Rah! Rah! Go Hyde! But in continually attempting to break the bonds between him and Jekyll, by always reading him as a separate, struggling, sovereign self perhaps I have been carried away by, as Ashley Sarpong terms it in her Friday, October 18th blogpost, the "myth of the individual" (3rd paragraph).  I’d like to bring Jekyll and Hyde back together^[1], not in opposition but in an exploration of how the two (and possibly “others”) are irrevocably intertwined, specifically within a psychological Latourian network. While I realize that applying a sociological theory to psychology is a potentially problematic move to make, I’d like to see if thinking of the psyche of Jekyll as a network clarifies Latour’s rather murky concepts of “individuals,” “attributes” and “properties,” while also dealing with and moving beyond the Sarpongian specter of “lack” in networks.

Jekyll & Hyde is a story that is obsessed with the idea of splitting the identity. At first, this split is viewed as being dual in nature:^[2] “Man is not truly one, but truly two” (Stevenson 79). We have Jekyll and we have Hyde—two identities, two bodies. But, in fact, the separation isn't as clean as we, and definitely Jekyll, might like it to be. It’s clear that when in the body of Jekyll, Hyde is always still there in his mind, bubbling beneath the surface and fighting for ascendancy (88). Although there is less textual evidence to prove the flip side, Jekyll also seems to be present within the personality of Hyde. We know that they share a “memory in common” (85) and that Hyde, oh so coincidentally, retains Jekyll’s handwriting (89).  Conscious supremacy determines then, in Jekyll & Hyde, whose body is shown to the world and what actions that body takes. But the conscious supremacy of one identity does not mean the complete disappearance of the other. Though we have the bodies of Jekyll or Hyde, psychologically, we actually always have either Jekyll/Hyde or Hyde/Jekyll. Internally, they can never be fully split. To further complicate matters, Jekyll raises the specter of more than two identities being possible. He states, “I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens” (79). Basically, if two, then why not three, or four, or so on and so forth. Thus, we actually have a psyche created of Jekyll/Hyde/Others (or Hyde/Others/Jekyll, etc.) and Jekyll(Hyde/Others), in his depression-induced cynicism, mistakenly views these identities as independent when in fact, his own experiment has proved that they can never be so; they are forever internally networked together, regardless of what exterior shape is displayed.

So, when Latour states, “a given individual will be defined by the list of other individuals necessary for its subsistence” I argue that it is possible to view “other individuals” as interior as well as exterior. In so doing,  Latour’s “attributes” and “properties”(5, 12)  become, not isolated facets of an individual, not finite objects, but individual themselves who have their own networks while also contributing to larger networks of other individuals or societies—creating networks within networks within networks, spheres within spheres.  Yet, even with this proliferation of meaning and connection,   Sarpong raises the question of the data lack, the empty space, than can exist between two networked characters or indviduals.[3]   But, if we visualize networks as 3D objects (especially according the pictures Latour gives us on pgs. 6 and 7), then the empty spaces that interest Sarpong are on the surface of the network.  I do not find this superficial “lack” to be a cause of anxiety because, while there may be a lack of data, the “lack” doesn’t signify that the connections aren’t there, it only signals that we don’t yet have the technology to render them visible.[4] The “lack” I do find far more troubling is the empty space that exists at the very center of any network.

Latour’s networks don’t appear to revolve around anything, they’re only a series of constantly proliferating connections that we use to define ourselves and create meaning in the world.  In this sense, they’re very Derridean. I’m not even the center of my own network, because my network is composed of myriad other networks and “I” am only a network within larger networks. Structures or networks have no center, which is why there is always room for another network, or another sphere of meaning to be fitted inside or outside our current sphere of meaning—excluding totalization in an infiniteness of play. I’d like to close by grappling with my sense of unease in viewing meaning and the world this way. It seems that in arguing for ever-expanding connections and play, all these scholars have argued for is a new Heaven and Hell, a way of thinking about and encapsulating the beyond beyond the beyond. This expansion, then, remains reductive in nature. Post-structuralists haven’t expanded meaning; they’ve just reduced it to the infinite—a word that perhaps we use too casually, a word whose meaning is always beyond us, always unknowable, and always non-existent.  Is saying a person, object, thing, idea, or word has infinite meaning the same as saying it has no meaning? I think it quite possibly is. 

Citations:

Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres.” Keynote. INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON NETWORK THEORY. 19th February 2010. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Los Angeles. 1-18

Saposnik, Irving S. "The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 4^th ed. 11 (1971): 715-31. JSTOR. Web

Sarpong, Ashley. "Slippery Semiotics: Identity, Network and Meaning. (For Obama-the Shutdown Warrior)".  Friday, October 18th. Blogpost from ENL 200 Fall 2013. <http://enl200f2013.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-last-weeks-post-i-wasdetermined-to.html>

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay.    Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.

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^[1] I’m influenced by Irving Saposnik here who argued that thinking about Hyde without thinking about Jekyll is to never have the full story. As he states, “Without a Jekyll, there could never have been a Hyde, and without Hyde, one can never fully know Jekyll” (727).

^[2] Jekyll is constantly using a language of doubling when he describes himself and Hyde: He describes his psyche as being “polar twins” that are constantly struggling for a conscious supremacy (Stevenson 79). He talks about the “thorough and primitive duality of man” (79). He gives us another image of a double when he describes Hyde as being “knit to him closer than a wife” (91).

[3] Sarpong is specifically interested in the moments when characters in Sir Gawain are found “’in lack’/deprived of the evidences ‘needed to read their connections with each other’ (1^st paragraph, comment)

[4] Latour states that the trick of rendering the empty spaces on the surface of the network as no longer empty “is in changing the density of connections until a net ends up being indistinguishable from a cloth” (7)