Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body: Toward the “Unsubstantial Territory” of Disorganized Community

I have argued in the preceding chapter that Woolf’s engagement of the nervous body—and of the neuroscientific discourse within which that body finds one of its principal articulations at the turn of the century— moves from an interest in the coordinates of a moral psychology aimed at the regulation of individuals and their insertion into structures of collectivity, to an exploration of the principles of somatic organization that are presupposed by, and collaborate with, such mechanisms of moral organization. To the extent that Mrs. Dalloway provides a critique of the procedures through which the nervous body becomes the occasion for the psychological and psychiatric regulation of individual selves with an eye to their incorporation into a specifically nationalist form of community, The Waves extends this critique in its examination of the nervous body as the physical substance through which both individuals and communities are quite literally incorporated. Whereas the characterological discourse examined in Mrs Dalloway is predicated upon broad (and fairly predictable) analogies between the human body and the social body, The Waves approaches the former not merely as fodder for communitarian metaphor but as the physiological system—constituted, for example, by nerve fibers and reflex arcs—elaborated by the neuroscience of the day.