ABSTRACT
My focus in this chapter is on exploring the role of the image in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. I revisit here images and affective space at Defoe’s moment to investigate how seventeenth-century science and literature formed a conjunction in relationship to new technologies of perception amid theories of body and mind. To this end, I also draw on some concepts from the contemporary science of mirror neurons to reconsider the relationship between the mediated image, temporality and consciousness. Transversal theory has talked about the idea of “paused consciousness” as a way of thinking about the powerfully “affective presences” that can emerge from transversal mediations and performancesforces that can “inspire emotional, conceptual, and/or material deviations from the established norms for any variables, whether individuated or forming a group.”1 Paused consciousness elicits a “cut” or break with the subjectively familiar and opens up the potential for new movements and conceptual or emotional formations. Significantly, this method requires that we look past the “quagmires” of progressive and conservative ideologies in investigating new ways to read, perform, and create.2 To this end, I want to suggest that bringing mirror neurons into dialogue with Defoe’s early modern chronicle of disaster and terror is not just an exercise that forces science into the discourse of literature and vice versa. Indeed, a careful treatment of both discourses reveals the potential for finding new models for not just how we “do history,” but how we think of the affective presence of time and the materiality of mediation (new and old).
