In 1902, the American writer Jack London went incognito into the squalid environs of East End London, posing as an out of work seaman in order to develop a sociological testimony to the lived conditions of the local inhabitants. What emerged from London's slumming London is a compelling narrative of social immiseration, yet one fraught with statements and positions contradictory to the socialist agenda he sought to infuse into his form of muckraking critique. Although London went to the streets of the East End and immersed himself in the lives and experiences of flop house residents, hops-pickers, and vagabonds, he was never able to fully transcend his own sense of cultural and individual superiority, which he takes no pains to conceal from his audience. It would seem at times in this work that the object of London's discourse is not the social conditions of the marginal, but London's own narcissistic investment into his emulation of such a role, a kind of fetishism of the Other as the "not me who reinforces the moi." Such a performance of juxtaposition is achieved only at the expense of ideological hypocrisy, however, as London's stated sympathies remained with the proletariat, whom he believed would rise out of their natural Darwinian strength to foment a revolution provoked more by a Nietzschean angst than an informed social consciousness. Much to London's chagrin, he found neither Darwinian strength nor Nietzschean angst in the subjects of his ethnographic experiment, but disease, malnutrition, and a terrible resignation. All of these factors caused London to recoil from the sweltering masses, and to discuss them as a "new species, a breed of city savages." What this objectification of the Other signifies is a movement away from dialectics, and a fall into ontology, a metaphysics of difference that London codes directly onto the bodies of his subjects, and covalently, onto his own body as well.
At numerous points in this text, London enters into a direct physiological comparison of himself with the object specimens of his analysis. That London saw himself as the epitome of the blond Anglo-Saxon male, masculine and physical, is well documented in works such as Martin Eden, and London states as much in The People of the Abyss. Attending the Coronation procession of Edward VII, London finds himself positioned next to the 1st Life Guards, whom he lionizes, seemingly naturalizing the master-slave relationship that obtains between these "strapping men" and the East End denizens who must "feed and clothe and groom" them. What London demonstrates at such moments, along with the worst form of social Darwinism, is a profound cathexis with an imago, or ego-ideal, within what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls "secondary narcissism." According to Lacan, subjects will always engage in inevitable narcissistic comparisons with others in order to assimilate and/or reject what does or does not constitute the "self." This is Lacan's incorporation of Hegel and Sartre; it constitutes a fundamental dialectics of subjectivity. What is peculiar about London's relationship with the subjects in his ethnographic exposé is that their physical inferiority, their poverty, and their squalor do not serve in this text as the focus of a revelation that would demystify their conditions as socially determined. Quite contradictorily, he situates these subjects within a naturalized, bio-deterministic construct, a formulation no self-respecting Marxist would ever entertain. What then emerges is the fact that London cannot bear the alienation forced upon him by the gaze of the Other, and so he is compelled to make constant narrative interventions in order to define the self-other boundary that he can only cross/displace performatively, while failing to negotiate its derealization ideologically. I would suggest that London's slide toward negativity/rejection not only calls into question the positive value of his socialist commitments, and whatever political significance The People of the Abyss may retain for London's audience, but it signifies as well a sense of what Julia Kristeva calls abjection, or a failure of the subject to assimilate successfully the Symbolic order, and therefore a failure to find stable identity. The East Enders discomfort London terribly, so he is obliged to apologize for their failure to fit into his Marxian/Nietzschean/Spencerian paradigm. What he is really apologizing for is his abject denial that he has anything whatsoever to do with this "species," or its fate.
I want to demonstrate the importance of this text as a testimony to how ethnographic narrative can manifest significantly the problematical subjectivity of the author, and why the liminal project London envisioned as an initiation into social consciousness did not help to deracinate the causes of social injustice, but rather repeated a common Enlightenment legacy sin of attempting to reconstitute the significance of the Other in terms of a recuperation of the self. Such representations can speak volumes about the ways in which the information age repeats and reproduces strategies of colonization, fetishism of the Other, and narcissistic investments into ideologies of nationalism, race, and ethnicity.
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