In 1862, a riot formed outside of the Religious Tract Society in London, with ‘protesters storming … Paternoster Row and threatening to put the windows out’ (Arnold 148). The rioters were pro-unionists, and they formed not as the result of some political agitation or legislation but in protest of a sensation novel, Ellen Wood's A Life's Secret. The novel was serialised anonymously that year in The Leisure Hour, a periodical published by the Religious Tract Society. A Life's Secret depicts an attempted strike and lockout, and it is pointedly critical of trade unions and the impact of strikes on workers’ families. As Wood herself put it in the preface to the 1867 edition of the novel, ‘The appearance of the story in 1862 did not please everybody, and angry remonstrances came down on the managers of “The Leisure Hour”’ (vi). This is a rare instance in which a novel that expressed a fear of a working-class mob actually provoked one.

I will return to the specific example of Wood's novel, but my broader focus in this chapter is the way in which sensation authors depicted crowd and mob behaviour and how such depictions of the transmission of affect are related to the narrator's directive sympathy. The mob, which might be understood as the crowd with intention, is a deeply affective entity, in which people can experience a loss of inhibition and act spontaneously and even violently. In his 1895 study of the crowd, French psychologist Gustave LeBon argues that a crowd exhibits intense affects and lower intellectual functioning than separated individuals. In a crowd, the individual ‘is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will’ (32). In this chapter, I explore the notion of the crowd as a space for heightened affects and wilful abandon. The crowd demonstrates what Stephen Ahern calls the most central insight of affect theory, that ‘no embodied being is independent, but rather is affected by and affects other bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world’ (‘Introduction’ 4).

The previous chapter focused on the Scriptures as a figure that speaks of the instituted practice of writing as a constitutive element of any political community. What makes sacred Scriptures an exceptional type of writing is their prophetic character. This means that Scriptures unfolds figuratively in historical time, but also contains an idea of historical time. It is to this aspect that this chapter is devoted.

Every historical narrative is written in a present time – a now – which is not only pervaded by the past, but also looks towards something in the future. In fact, the act of writing historical narratives – the usual way of interpreting history, that is, of building history as such – is at the same time a way of shaping destiny. In this sense, historians seem to be like prophets. But can the historian achieve the future he or she imagines? The future cannot be master-built from the present. Nietzsche himself once said that ‘the past always speaks as an oracle’. In fact, past, present and future are intermingled in every twist of history in an enigmatic way that is structurally analogical to the representation of time in prophecy.

Prophetic Time: Historical Time from the Future

Prophetic literature is central to divine revelations. We find it not only in Israel, but in every ancient civilisation. The prophet is not a soothsayer, who interprets exterior signs; he is not a theologian, who interprets a given revelation. The prophet is the voice of God moved by his divine spirit to interpret the ‘signs of the times’. Certainly, prophets coexisted with the soothsayers and the augurs in ancient civilisations; but unlike them they did not try to initiate a course of action or to legitimise a situation. The role of prophets was rather to make a historical interpretation.

Prophetic history and human history are uncoupled from the point of view of their factuality and of their possible interpretations. However, from the point of view of meaning, they cannot be completely separated: first, because prophetical narratives imply a definite judgement of the events of history; and, secondly, because profane history can only expect a future to come, but not assure the future as prophetic history does.

Appendix 1a: Department of Physical Planning, December 1975 271

Appendix 1b: Department of Physical Planning and Development, 1978 272

Appendix 1c: Department of Physical Planning and Development, 1983 273

Appendix 1d: Department of Planning and Development, 1988 274

Appendix 1e: Department of Planning and Development, 1993 275

Appendix 2: Scottish Borders Council Archive Sources 276

Appendix 3: BRC (Planning & Development Department) Publications 285

Appendix 4: Selected Scottish Office Guidance on Town and Country Planning 288

Appendix 5: BRC (P & D Dept) Industrial Properties (1 January 1988) 295

Appendix 6: SDA Properties in the Borders Region (1 January 1988) 300

INTRODUCTION

Chapter Three examines the growing influence of central government, the Scottish Office, on town and country planning in the Scottish Borders in the 1960s through the issue of the White Paper on the Scottish Economy, the decision to proceed with the Tweedbank Development and the revival of the regional approach to planning with the commissioning of the Central Borders Study. It discusses the local planning authorities’ response to the Scottish Office's initiatives and describes how planning and development became closely intertwined in a bid to stem the long-term depopulation of the region.

Following the introduction by the Labour government of the 1947 Planning Act along with a raft of other pioneering legislation such as the New Towns Act 1946 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, there followed a period of consolidation in terms of planning legislation with the election of the Conservative government in 1951. During the 1950s, the planning system became centred around development control. Development plans were little more than land use maps and, as the pace of change increased in the early 1960s, they become increasingly out of date and of diminishing value in determining the future direction of growth and development.

The early 1960s was a period of great social, cultural, economic and political change; the ‘Swinging Sixties’. The legacies of the Second World War, unrepaired and unfit housing and temporary prefabs, were replaced by burgeoning local authority housing schemes. New styles of architecture, using concrete and steel, became common. The established industries of shipbuilding, iron and steel, coal mining and the textile industry were in irreversible decline. In Scotland, the SHD, which had responsibility for the promotion of Scottish industry and the DHS, which had the responsibility for planning, were replaced by the Scottish Home and Health Department (SHHD) and the Scottish Development Department (SDD), which henceforth had the combined responsibility for planning and economic development. Most contemporary commentators attribute this decision of the Conservative government to the publication of the inquiry into the Scottish economy by the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) in 1961, which urged the creation of a new government department to combine the Scottish Secretary's statutory responsibilities for planning and the promotion of industry.

Jesmyn Ward's fiction emerges from her reality. Writing for and about the community she hails from, DeLisle, Mississippi, her stories depict families beset by systemic racism and inequality – in other words, anti-Blackness – endemic to the United States. Death pervades her work as she portrays contemporary, poor, Southern Black experiences. Yet, her works remain somewhat optimistic, tinged with a sad hopefulness, and buoyed by the luck of survival. This chapter examines how Ward's fiction is defined by radical forms of kinship – moulded by family and community – and how revitalised understandings of intimacy necessarily fortify the contemporary Black experience in the face of institutional racism and historic injustice and sociopolitical inequality. These forms of oppression, moreover, leak into private spheres and impel new visions of intimacy and familial practice. Studying these wayward and savage intimacies ultimately explicates the state's tactics to erase the beating heart of Black life, those kith and kin relations forged despite abominable odds.

The nuclear and found kinship units in Ward's works operate less like a noun and more like a verb, demanding action and effort. Through such grammars of intimacy, Ward's work maintains that kinship requires an ever-budding vulnerability that permits trust, hope and love. This chapter centres on Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones (Salvage) and concludes with a reading of her 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Sing). I concentrate on how race, class and gender inform familial constructions and how the Black American South is contingent upon complex intimacies. I want to suggest that family is the hinge in all of Ward's work, propelling characterisation as well as plot, stylistic choices as well as thematic concerns. These familial relations forged, lost and strengthened put in stark relief the political resonances of intimacy. I argue that Ward's treatment of intimacy underscores the necessary dynamic conditions of family and community, especially for poor Black people.

What Counts as a Life?

In a conversation with Fina Birulés (2009) published under the title ‘Gender Is Extramoral’, Judith Butler asserts: ‘one could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life?’. Such a statement must be startling. The notion of life did not appear so often in the preceding elaboration of the theory of performativity. Yet, the statement clearly refers to the whole of Butler's work. In addition, given that she refuses to define life, as it ‘tends to exceed the definitions we may offer […] so the approach to life cannot be altogether successful if we start with definitions’ (Schneider and Butler 2010), it seems that we are here faced with a certain conundrum. What is this ‘life’ that all of her work revolves around, and has it been with us all along?

Importantly, Butler's question is not about what a life is, but what counts as a life. The inconspicuous term ‘counting’, possibly one of the most Butlerian terms, should thus serve as a link. Not only does it connect the phases of Butler's work, but it also points in the direction we should think about life. What counts as a life; who counts as living; what living counts as possible; and who counts as a life for which living is in some sense foreclosed? Can we, in fact, ever really say that such life is counted? ‘To live in the shadowy regions of ontology’ is to live a life that does not count (Meijer and Prins 1998: 277). Talking with Birulés, Butler argues that gender is extramoral. Genders are, in themselves, neither good nor bad and, therefore, there are no genders that are ‘better’ than others. If there are, however, restrictions regulating what counts as the body supported in its desire to persist, we find ourselves in the midst of a different discussion, which is primarily political in kind. This discussion revolves around the life of the body, as well as conditions for life's flourishing, and, ultimately, around inequality. In other words, the main question of the discussion is: what makes for a liveable life?

After examining different authors and approaches, what can we say about the ontological status of organisms? Even if the answer to this question might seem obvious to a biologist, it is not clear what place organisms occupy in contemporary philosophy. As we know, the discussion about organisms appeared in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement and has taken on different configurations during the recent history of philosophy. As Hui suggests, ‘Kant's Critique of Judgment imposes the organic as the condition of philosophizing, which is to say that for any philosophy to be, it has to be organic’ (Hui 2021: 16). But what does it mean that phi-losophy has to be organic? An organic form of thinking continued in the early twentieth century in the works of Whitehead and Bergson, and also became prominent in the later twentieth century, where it manifested itself in systems theory, process philosophy and cybernetics (Hui 2021: 54). As we have seen, the organic condition continues to be a preoccupation in the philosophies of Simondon, Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and also takes new turns in the works of contemporary thinkers such as Stiegler, Malabou, Latour and Haraway. In one way or another, these thinkers reveal the organic as a condition of philosophy and thus can be seen as precursors to organism-oriented ontology. Rather than concentrating on individuals and identities, contemporary philosophy is more and more interested in processes, developments, entanglements and changes; in other words, it is defined by organic features and conditions. It was Kant, again, who found that a biological model of epigenesis could be useful for theoretical thinking because it opens the possibility of imagining ‘pure reason’ as an organic system that is self-organising, self-maintaining, creative and unpredictable.

Now, in retrospect, we can say that all the authors discussed in this book take some specific features characteristic of organic beings and make them the centre of their philosophy. The first feature, shared by all authors, is processuality: the idea that processes and individuations have ontologi-cal priority over formed individuals. In this respect, Simondon's insight that physical, biological, psychosocial and technical entities develop in an analogous way is very important. Simondon clearly demonstrates that the organic condition can be extrapolated towards other systems.

Formal Innovation and Affect

The relation between formal innovation in works of literature and readers’ affective responses has not been the subject of wide discussion. Modernism, as Julie Taylor notes in her introduction to the collection Modernism and Affect, has often been characterised as ‘cold, hard and cerebral’ in contrast to the Victorian penchant for sentiment that it was challenging (2). Laura Frost, therefore, is being uncontroversial when she refers to the ‘daunting, onerous, and demanding reading practices’ required to wrest pleasure from modernist texts, and asserts that ‘modernism's signature formal rhetorics, including irony, fragmentation, indirection, and allusiveness, are a parallel means of promoting a particularly knotty, arduous reading effect’ (The Problem with Pleasure, 3). Many modernist writers themselves emphasised their control of emotion, T. S. Eliot only being the most prominent. Moreover, the influential attack on the so-called ‘affective fallacy’ by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley meant that the practitioners of New Criticism, who found in modernist texts the ideal material for their analyses, were wary of talking about emotional response (‘The Affective Fallacy’). (Emotional response was important for I. A. Richards, but this aspect of his approach to literary works was seldom followed up.) And it's commonly assumed that the reader faced with sentences that require unusual effort, language that fails to conform to its own norms, and narratives that defy generic expectations is too busy carrying out the necessary intellectual deciphering to experience an emotional reaction to the text. By contrast with famously unsentimental modernist writing, the argument goes, the realist techniques developed by Victorian novelists (and their counterparts in other linguistic traditions), and carried into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by numerous novelists, are what can provide readers with finely-drawn characters whose narrated experiences arouse strong empathetic responses.

Among philosophers concerned with literature and affect, few treat questions of form at any length, though one exception is Jenefer Robinson, who, in Deeper than Reason, argues that literary form acts as a ‘coping device’, allowing the reader to deal with painful emotion in a way that produces pleasure.

Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped tells two concomitant stories: that of her own ascension from bright young student to author, and that of the violence, physical, environmental and biopolitical, suffered by the Black community of DeLisle, Mississippi at the hands of white supremacist power structures. The narrative pans between the intimate, personal details of the character Jesmyn's life to the broader issues that are connected to and influence that life. It weaves together the story of Jesmyn's coming of age, narrated chronologically, with that of the death of five men close to her, narrated in reverse chronology: Rog dies of undiagnosed heart disease, Demond is shot dead before acting as a witness during a drug trial, C.J. is hit by a train at a crossing with perpetually broken lights, and Ronald commits suicide. The two chronologies meet with the death of Jesmyn's younger brother, Josh. Across these converging narratives, Ward relates her developing consciousness of other women's coming-ofage stories and later the writing of civil rights activists, connecting her local and family history to the practice of oral storytelling and probing the communicative and emancipatory limits of storytelling. In this essay, I argue that Ward's memoir subverts the generic convention within American autobiography of a sovereign subject, replacing this with a posthumanist biopolitical subject. I show how Ward's memoir subverts the prevalent ideological underpinnings of mainstream American life-writing, in particular the narrative of upward mobility, and questions the ways this genre conceptualises and reifies ‘the good life’ and neoliberal subjects within the American imagination. Through a sustained analysis of state-sanctioned biopolitical violence, a reconceptualisation of the sovereign subject and agency, and a rejection of the racist and classist teleology of the upward mobility narrative, Ward posits a radical understanding of what it means to be an American subject. In particular, Ward's work centres on groups who are marginalised from the sovereign subject of the Enlightenment that the autobiographical genre has been central in constructing. Ward's undoing of this sovereignty is performed through intertextual references, generic innovations and metatextual commentary that serve to assert the relationship between the story and the subject, and to establish the lacunae and failures of that relationship for marginalised writers.