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Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne.
—Paul
Celan
-
It could have been a typo, in this word that is not
exactly a word: subjecticity. The "c" is so close to
the "v" on the keyboard that one could always easily
type one for the other. In what follows, I am proposing
that we might begin to use, deliberately, this non-word
"subjecticity" in a good many cases when we would
usually have written, typed, or said "subjectivity".
Why advocate such a neologism, why
"subjecticity"?[1]
The older, often perfectly good word "subjectivity" is
decidedly multivalent. In its most neutral senses, it
denotes that which is of the order of the subject, as
it sometimes does in Kant. Yet the word now tends so
often to come with the considerable baggage of
psychologism, as well as with connotations of
individualism and sometimes its attendant ideologies,
as if the subjective were a matter of sheer difference,
that is to say, absolutely subjective. Along these
lines, the second definition of "subjectivity" in the
Oxford English Dictionary reads: "The quality
or condition of viewing things exclusively through the
medium of one’s own mind or individuality; the
condition of being dominated by or absorbed in
one’s personal feelings, thoughts, concerns, etc.
…".
- Yet, as I hope to demonstrate, much of what passes in
and through and as the subject is hardly subjective in
that individualistic, psychologistic sense. That is, in
effect, what a good many philosophers and poets of the
late 18th and early 19th centuries conspire to suggest.
Romanticism, broadly understood, can be said to trouble
the reduction of the subject to the merely subjective,
even as the very same "movement"—though that term
suggests a false homogeneity—sometimes
unequivocally promoted that somewhat newfangled thing
called the subject in the various registers of
philosophy, politics, literature and beyond.
- In thinking through this inadequacy of the notion of
the sheer or merely subjective, we can begin by drawing
on a late, powerful essay by Adorno, "On Subject and
Object". Adorno is perhaps the theorist who has most
resolutely attended to the complexities of the subject,
as well as to the mutual determinations of subject and
object. Adorno shows, in typically dialectical fashion,
how "equivocal"—that is his word—the key
terms in question are (Adorno, 741). He takes for granted
that we know that the term subject used to mean something
close to the opposite of what it now does. If we now tend
to think of "the subject" as some version of the
Cartesian thinking, willing, and acting ego (complicated
or not by its inflections and subversions in Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud), it is good to recall an older,
"more original" sense of the subject as the person who is
"subject to …". This older sense—consistent
with its etymology in subjectus (thrown under,
placed beneath)—mainly entails the subject as
subservient to a sovereign. The historical dividing line
could be drawn, roughly, with the emergence of the
bourgeois, democratic or quasi-democratic subject of the
Enlightenment. But Adorno seems to imply that the switch
from the older to the more modern sense is not as
complete as it may appear, not least because the freedom
of the modern subject is, in crucial ways, illusory. And
to make matters slightly more complex: the term also
comprehends, Adorno notes, the subject as what we would
now more likely call "object," a sense still resonant in
the term "subject matter", such that the terms subject
and object can be thought to flip dialectically, on
occasion, into each other. Subject and object are
inextricably and often asymmetrically bound up in each
other in a dialectic of a sort that exceeds the air-tight
machine and the tendency to resolution characteristic of
Hegelian narrative.
- Not only does the term "subject" have a complicated
history, the thing itself, that is, the subject itself,
has a variegated track record, according to Adorno. For
him, any subject worthy of the name is defined by the
activity of self-reflection, of having one’s eyes
open. Thus in the ages of myth and fate, Adorno claims,
there was simply no such thing a subject. Yet
epistemology, to say nothing of grammar (following
Nietzsche), contrives to have us think of a subject in
general, indeed of the possibility of a transcendental
subject, even if, as Adorno suggests, history will have
this subject now and then encounter what he calls the
"primacy of the object" ("Vorrang des
Objekts")(746) in a variety of mutually transforming
relations. In the end, Adorno can almost predictably
reverse himself to say—this time in a
non-historicist vein—that actually "there is no
such thing as the subject," ("Ebensowenig allerdings
'gibt' es eigentlich Subjekt") certainly not
something that could be hypostasized in a single
definition (754). But to think of epistemology and even
social relations as a dialectic between subject and
object, however stable or equivocal these terms are,
risks leaving obscured an important domain for which the
words "subjectivity" and "objectivity" prove inadequate.
It risks losing sight of a kind of in-between state, a
subjectivity beyond the subject, a subjectivity whose
objectivity is not given and yet is not simply subjective
either.
- It is here that we can begin to insist on the crucial
place of the aesthetic, as expounded paradigmatically and
in massively influential fashion by Kant. His thinking
along these lines, as much as that of anyone, prompts us
to conceive of a subjectivity beyond the subject, of
something we might call "subjecticity". But why the
aesthetic in the first place? In Kant's critical
system, the aesthetic does not come in the first place
but the third, as the subject matter of the Critique
of Judgement or Third Critique, and yet this third
position acquires in the end a kind of firstness or at
least secondariness. For the aesthetic—initially
almost an afterthought for the critical system whose two
poles were pure and practical reason—retroactively
becomes the necessary but also problematic link, the
perhaps impossible bridge crossing the
gulf—Kluft is Kant’s
word—between nature and freedom, between knowledge
and action. (Kant, German 83, English 14)[2]
In this, the aesthetic is by no means simply a matter of
art. (Surely if one turns to the Third Critique to learn
about art, one is bound to be deeply disappointed, since
Kant is so much more concerned with wild flowers than
with poetry or painting. Beyond that, Kant is interested
in the representative of figurative character of the
aesthetic understood in the broadest terms, as is perhaps
implied in the root sense of aesthesis as
perception.[3])
Despite all the famous strictures about Kantian aesthetic
judgement having to be a purely disinterested affair, cut
off from the realm of concept or desire—such that
one wonders whether anyone has ever actually had an
aesthetic judgement—the aesthetic, in Kant’s
terms, is in some sense ubiquitous, not least because of
the omnipresence of imagination posited in the first
Critique. There Kant had maintained that the figural and
synthetic character of imagination was a necessary
ingredient in every act of knowledge. So the "aesthetic"
in Kant exceeds its status as merely aesthetic by its
massively important mediating function, such that it
informs, in fundamental fashion, all the protocols of
knowledge and action. Yet even in the circumscribed sense
of aesthetic judgements of something beautiful or
sublime, aesthetic experience poses a potential problem
for the integrity of the Kantian system.
- In the Copernican turn effected by Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, philosophy turned
finally, as it had begun to do with Descartes and Locke,
from object to subject and found that much of what was
thought to be objective—most famously, space and
time—emerged rather as subjective. Thus space and
time became categories of a priori intuition
(Anschauung), yet so hard-wired into the human
subject as to allow for a certain possibility of shared
experience and knowledge, at least at the level of
phenomena, that is, short of knowing things in
themselves. But the subject matter of the Third Critique
poses a more radical problem, for it takes the
singularity of aesthetic experience as its object. The
experience of the beautiful risks being merely
subjective: no one, by definition, can have someone
else’s experience—at least not yet.[4]
Kant repeatedly refers to the sheer or merely subjective
status ("bloss subjektiv") of the experience of
the aesthetic (99, 29), so one can wonder, at the outset,
how this sort of experience is even available to
philosophy. Aesthetic experience, for Kant, is of a
radically singular nature, as is the "reflective"
judgement that it prompts. It is by no means a matter of
knowledge and so the judgement it elicits is not a
"logical" one, in Kant’s terms. It is always a
matter of whether, for example, this or
that tulip is beautiful, not whether tulips in
general are beautiful. Aesthetic experience is of the
order of the sheer example, but not, unusually, an
example of something larger than itself.
Moreover, it is not so fortuitous for the philosophical
system that, as Kant insists, aesthetic experiences are
first and foremost feelings, nothing more than ...
feelings. They are even, as Lyotard underscores, the
feelings of thought, such that even thought has the
feeling of feeling.[5]
This utterly singular experience of, or feeling about, a
single beautiful object seems then a rather uncertain
ground on which to construct the bridge between knowledge
and action, even for the ordinary human being, much less
for the transcendental subject (Lyotard 1991, esp.
13-33).[6]
Unless, as we shall see, language comes, arguably, to the
rescue.
- The threat to the system is all the more
pronounced—if that is possible — in the case
of the sublime, when we no longer are faced with a
readily knowable object, but rather a matter of
"unboundedness" (Unbegrenztheit)(165, 90) or
even "un-form" (Unform), as Kant terms it (103,
33 [translated by Meredith as "formlessness"]). It is an
abuse of language, a catachresis, even to call any object
sublime: the most we can do, Kant maintains, is say that
something—which is not necessarily a thing at
all—lends itself to an experience of the
sublime.[7]
Even less an object of knowledge or something resembling
an object of knowledge than is the case with the
beautiful, the sublime, by definition, exceeds our
ability to comprehend the "object" eliciting judgement.
And so with the sublime, we are arguably in a domain even
more radically subjective than that of the already merely
subjective realm of the experience of the
beautiful.
- Yet the singular aesthetic experience, in
Kant’s elaboration, prompts something possibly less
singular: aesthetic judgement proper. Kant insists again
and again on the linguistic character of aesthetic
judgement, on the somewhat mysterious need to render a
judgement that, for example, this tulip is beautiful.
Indeed, it is crucial to call the tulip
beautiful rather than simply to feel it is.[8]
(This rendering of aesthetic judgement is not quite a
categorical imperative but it is something virtually as
inevitable.) One can glimpse in the following passage how
so many of the key terms enlisted to characterize the
dynamics of aesthetic experience, translated into
judgement, are markedly linguistic. Kant maintains:
Whether a dress, a house, or a flower is beautiful is
a matter upon which one declines to be swayed
(sich beschwatzen lassen) by any reasons or
principles. We want to get a look at the Object with
our own eyes, just as if our delight depended on
sensation. And yet, if upon so doing, we call
(nennt) the object beautiful, we believe
ourselves to be speaking with a universal voice
(eine allgemeine Stimme), and lay claim
(Anspruch) to the concurrence, whereas no
private sensation would be decisive except for the
observer alone and his liking. (130, 57).
To say that aesthetic judgement
is linguistic is in some sense tautological or at least
should go without saying—but the consequences of
this notion are not always registered. The
concatenation of terms emphasizing the linguistic
character of the dynamics entailed in (Kantian)
aesthetic judgement is notable. The passage invokes
"the universal voice" (allgemeine Stimme), who
"lays claim to" (Anspruch—literally a
"speaking to") for the agreement of the others, what is
here and elsewhere called the Beistimmung
(102, 32), the voice of the other which is already
surely included, virtually, in the "universal voice".
The move from the singular to the universal is partly
effected by a certain doubling of the subject to begin
with. Already in privacy of aesthetic experience, one
"plays the judge" (Richter spielen) (117, 42),
as if, even in the feeling in response to a beautiful
or sublime object, one had to step outside, internally,
oneself. The distance within the self is underscored in
Kant’s formulation: one is not just to
be a judge but to play a judge.
Moreover, in aesthetic judgement one "promises to
oneself" (sich verspricht) the "agreement" of
everyone (Beistimmung), a nice trick if one
can do it. This structure of promising to oneself
involves a certain splitting of the subject and it is
all the more remarkable that this purely internal
promise to oneself entails the agreement, in principle,
of everyone else. Even if, as Kant says, it is only "an
idea".
- In the third Critique, the metaphors for
these moments are primarily oral, by contrast to the
first Critique, where the emphasis is rather on the
inscriptional character of the imagination and its
products. In The Critique of Pure Reason the
work of the imagination is the necessary ingredient in
all perception and all knowledge and its products are
consistently figured as "monograms" or inscriptions, thus
forming a striking parallel to Kant’s reflections
on the writing on his own philosophy, in the remarks on
Darstellung in the two prefaces to the different
version of the first Critique.)[9]
That the imagination, as the faculty of representation,
the Darstellungsvermögen, is categorically
said to be blind—a "blind but indispensable
faculty" (A 78, B 103)—does not bode so well for
all perception and nothing less than all knowledge, since
the understanding always depends on the materials
delivered to it by the imagination. But I digress.
- The relative "orality" of the aesthetic in the
Critique of Judgement is a bit odd, since the
aesthetic judgement of the beautiful is implicitly a
universal affair. One can have private feelings and
experiences of what is pleasant, das Angenehme,
but the experience of the beautiful and its attendant
judgement is in principle public or virtually so. I note
this is odd, because in the famous essay "What is
Enlightenment?" Kant insists on the necessarily written
character of what is public. Strange as it seems, he
maintains that a sermon given before what we might call a
public—a church congregation—does not count
as public.[10]
Yet perhaps more important than deciding on the primacy
of the oral or written character of this aesthetic voice
is to recognize that the inexorable movement from feeling
to language is the key moment in the objectification of
the subjective, a movement of and within the subject to
something more and other than the simply subjective.
Given that language is, by definition, shared, however
unevenly, within a community, the turn from feeling to
language, even the language of feeling, seems to hold out
the possibility of a more solid, non-subjective,
foundation for the aesthetic in itself and as well as for
its status as the posited link between knowledge and
action.
- But is the move to the "I" of language much more
certain a ground than the singularity of a possibly
private feeling? Benveniste’s seminal essay "On
Subjectivity in Language" suggests otherwise. Far from
the "I" being the designator of a stable concept or of a
discrete individual, the "I" refers to the act of
discourse in which it is enunciated, to where the pronoun
is pronounced, as it were. To imagine that "I"—an
instance of what linguists call a
"shifter"—referred to a "particular individual"
would be, Benveniste says, "to admit a permanent
contradiction in language and a state of anarchy in
practice". (226). Benveniste goes on to argue:
How could one and the same term refer indifferently
to any individual whatsoever and still at the same
time identify him in his individuality? We are in the
presence of a class of words, the "personal
pronouns," that escape the status of all the other
signs of language. To what then does I refer? To
something very peculiar which is exclusively
linguistic: I refers to the act of individual
discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it
designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be
identified except in what we have elsewhere called an
instance of discourse and that has only a momentary
reference. The reality to which it refers is the
reality of the discourse. It is in the instance of
discourse in which the I designates the speaker that
the speaker proclaims himself as "subject." And so it
is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is
in the exercise of language. (226-7)
Benveniste’s notion of the
instantaneous and temporary character of the subject as
performed in language accords well with the radical
singularity of the aesthetic experience as expounded by
Kant. But both accounts suggest how the very terms
needed to enunciate that singularity are shadowed by a
certain generality, such that the voice is in some
sense always more than that of a particular I, that is,
a general or even "universal" voice. As such,
Benveniste’s analysis of the I in its enunciatory
mode jibes with Kant’s critical project, which
attempts to lay out the conditions of possibility for
the transcendental subject. But this is only to the
extent that everyone can say "I" but cannot possibly
mean the same thing—"I"—in saying so. It is
no accident that Benveniste’s manner of thinking
subjectivity beyond subjectivity proceeds, rather as
Hegel’s does, via the grammaticality of the
pronoun.[11]
- So far we have been considering the not-so-single
subject with respect to the dynamics of aesthetic
judgement. Something of the same paradoxical texture, it
turns out, can be read off from the discourse of
aesthetic production. One could pursue this line
further in Kant, in his pointed discussion of genius in
the Third Critique. Yet it would broaden and perhaps
deepen the discussion if we turn away from Kant to
consider a number of key passages in the reflections of
the British Romantics on poetry and genius. Some of the
Romantics reason, as Kant does, that "genius" is a
faculty that contributes to the production of all art.
Kant tends to speak of "genius" and not "a genius," as on
the order of a Goethe or a Mozart. But others speak of a
more singular sort of genius, designating by that term a
particularly sovereign or inspired artist who vaults
above the others more or less—less,
actually—of his kind. This sort of artist is
thought to be blessed with a preternatural gift unalloyed
by or at least not interfered with by learning or craft,
an "original genius". One sometimes imagines that the
artist of this sort is a rather Romantic invention. Yet
the genealogy charted long ago by M.H. Abrams, and
rehearsed more recently by Jonathan Bate, returns us to
Addison (especially Spectator 160) and his
contemporaries.[12]
(Here, as elsewhere, one has to re-think the absolute
divide between the Romantics and the Augustans, of the
sort trotted out in Wordsworth’s Preface to
Lyrical Ballads.)
- Certainly the poems of the British Romantics are
replete with invocations of muses, testimonies to
prophetic inspiration, and comparisons between
poet’s voices and Aeolian harps, all of them
pointing to the poetic persona being subject to a
voice—or a force like a voice—that comes from
somewhere above, outside, beneath, or beyond the poet.
Sometimes these poetic devices seem just that: poetic
devices, trappings of lyrical convention with little or
no purchase on the beliefs of the poets. Yet appeals to
Aeolian harps and prophetic inspiration riddle the
poetological or theoretical reflections of the very same
Romantics, where presumably the truth claims are rather
different. Here too we shall see any number of
configurations where the subject is said to be subject to
something beyond itself and yet whose force finds
enunciation only in, through, and as a subject.
- Keats's famous letter to Woodhouse on the "poetical
character" actually takes the concept of genius as its
point of departure. For our purposes, it helps to recall
the text at some length:
Your Letter gave me great satisfaction, more on
account of its friendliness than any relish of that
matter in which it is accounted so acceptable in the
"genius irritable." The best answer I can give you is
in a clerk-like manner to make some observations on
two principle points, which seem to point like
indices into the midst of the whole pro and con about
genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition,
and coetera. 1ST As to the poetical Character itself
(I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a
Member; that sort distinguished from the
wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a
thing per se and stands alone), it is not
itself—it has no self—it is everything
and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys
light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or
fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It
has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an
Imogen … A Poet is the most unpoetical of
anything in existence because he has no Identity, he
is continually filling in for and filling some other
Body. The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women
who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have
about them an unchangeable attribute. The poet has
none; no identity. He is certainly the most
unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he
has no self, and I am a Poet, where is the Wonder
that I should say that I write no more? (194-95)
Feeling the burden of the past, the major
Romantics were torn between the two not very similar
exemplars of Shakespeare and Milton.[13]
Virtually all of them aspired to write, variously,
epics and dramas. All failed, more or less
spectacularly, at the epic. A moderately higher level
of success was achieved in the dramas. Keats was not
alone in aspiring to be a kind of Shakespeare
après la lettre. It is no accident that
in this speculation about the non-identity of the
poetical character, Keats invokes the author who
scarcely, so far as we know, wrote in his own voice, an
author who could just as easily speak (in) the voice of
Imogen or Iago, conveniently bracketing morals or
beliefs, since, for poetic purposes, its ideological
content is beside the point. Never speaking simply in
his or her own voice, the poet creates poetical
characters, that is to say characters with definition,
but his or her ability to create such defined and
definite characters is predicated precisely on a lack
of identity, a lack of definition in himself or
herself.
- Drama is also the literary mode uppermost in
Keats’ mind when he formulates the doctrine of
Negative Capability. He had just been thinking of
Richard III and Edmund Kean as a actor, when he
praised to his brothers the disposition of the poet that
can dwell in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" and
entertain a certain resistance to identity. (60).
Shakespeare, we are told, possessed this capacity "so
enormously". Drummond Bone, in a valuable essay on "The
Emptiness of Genius: Aspects of Romanticism," invokes
these moments of Keatsian theory, in an argument
centering on Coleridge and Jean Paul, to point to the
paradoxical status of genius for the Romantics: so often
it is conceived in terms of emptiness, precisely where
one might expect a rhetoric of plenitude (Bone, passim).
For our purposes, it is crucial that Keats anchors poetic
production in the work of a subject that exceeds the
workings of what is usually thought of a subject, a
subjectivity beyond the merely subjective, a paradoxical
absence of subjectivity that is the prerequisite for
producing poetic subjects. Another instance of what we
might call "subjecticity".
- A related but differently inflected speculation on
the poetic subject can be found in Shelley’s "A
Defence of Poetry." Shelley offers a decidedly expansive
notion of poetry, returning it to its sometimes general,
Aristotelian sense of making and thus seeing poetry where
one might least expect it as, for example, in the making
of laws. The poet, as maker, stands as the exemplary man,
and of man in general Shelley says at the outset:
Man is an instrument over which a series of external
and internal impressions are driven like the
alterations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian
lyre which move it by their motion to ever-changing
melody. But there is a principle within the human
being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which
acts otherwise than in a lyre and produces not melody
alone but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the
sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions
which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which
strikes them in a determined proportion of sound,
even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the
sound of the lyre (277).
The figure of the lyre, so often compared
to the voice of the poet, is likened to nothing less
than "man". Its enlistment makes sense in
Shelley’s generalization of the poetic faculty
far beyond those with a claim to being called poets in
the strict sense. For our purposes, it is important
that the subject is constructed here as simultaneously
active and passive, "subject of" as well as "subject
to". As an instrument subject to the wind for the
sounds it produces, it is, in its structure, radically
passive. The subject is hardly the source of the sounds
it produces: it is rather the medium or vehicle for a
discourse that comes from elsewhere. But Shelley is
concerned that the comparison not issue in a sense of
the sheer passivity of man, and so he stresses the
sounds the instrument produces, commenting on the
inadequacy of the figure of the lyre, not least for
communicating the sense of the subject he has in mind.
Thus the lyre "accommodates", it produces, it
"acts".
- Moreover, when Shelley shifts from man in general to
the poetical faculty, however broadly generalized from
those we call poets, that faculty is said to "create new
materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure"
(293).[14]
This claim is immediately followed by one pointing to
how—if it is not already clear—Shelley tends
to conceive of two different modes of language
corresponding, at least roughly, to the passive and
active poles of the (split) subject of poetry: "…
it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and
arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order,
which may be called the beautiful and the good" (293).
Reproduction is linked to representation, the more or
less passive, mechanical mirroring of what is.
Shelley’s essay multiplies the terms for this sort
of, typically mimetic, representation: "reduplication",
"mirror", "picture", "record", "image", or perceptual
equivalents such as "apprehension". The paradigm is
summed up in the following passage:
… poetry in a more restricted sense expresses
those arrangements of language and especially
metrical language, which are created by that imperial
faculty [imagination] whose throne is curtained
within the invisible nature of man. And this springs
from the nature of language, which is a more direct
representation of the actions and passions of our
internal being and is susceptible of more various and
delicate combinations than color, form, or motion,
and is more plastic and obedient to the control of
that faculty of which is it the creation. For
language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination
and has relation to thoughts alone; … (279).
Here we glimpse both the primacy of
representation and the notion that language is subject
to the inscrutable faculty of the imagination, whose
glossing in Shelley hardly suggests a mode of mind
available for control by one’s consciousness. (As
in Kant, the source of the imagination is thought to be
hidden from us, and as in Locke, the products of
language refer not directly to things but to thoughts.)
Poetry worth its name is not even composed, if that
tends to imply deliberation. Poetry appears as if
instantaneously:
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determinations of the will. A man
cannot say "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet
even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is a
fading coal which some invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power arises from within like the color of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed,
and the conscious portions of our natures are
unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
… when composition begins, inspiration is
already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry
that has even been communicated to the world is
probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions
of the poet. (294).
Even when located within—though here
too the figuration is sometimes cast as external, as it
is in the wind—the source of poetry is far beyond
the conscious control of the poet. Shelley can appeal
to the example of Milton and his own thematization of
inspiration: "… for Milton conceived the
Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in
portions. We have his own authority also for the muse
having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song".
(294) What many might understand as a mere "literary
device"—the appeal to inspiration—Shelley
construes in the most literal fashion.
- To this relatively passive model of representation
and reproduction is conjoined, perhaps uneasily, a model
of language as action or institution, of which we have
already seen some versions: accommodation, institution,
creation, etc. William Keach identifies the two poles as
the representational and the expressive, the latter term
indeed corresponding to a good many passages on poetic
(in the strict and not at all strict senses) production.
In linguistic terms, these two poles are aligned with the
constative and the performative, the latter being not
quite identical with the expressive, since that category
assumes a certain interiority which is not requisite for
the performative. Furthermore, this later pole, of
expression of performativity is linked to what Keach
calls the "non-representational" character of form, which
Shelley variously designates by terms such as "arrange,"
"order," and "combination"[15],
that is, in general, to the syntactic aspect of language,
which is not in itself meaningful but without which there
would be no meaning. It is in this realm that the young
Edmund Burke located the sublime power of words, the
sublime being, once again, a veritable paradigm for the
locus of subjecticity.
- As in Keats, so in Shelley, the poetic subject is
scarcely a subject in vaguely Cartesian fashion. What
emerges from the subject—but only through the
subject—can only in the most neutral and misleading
sense be termed "subjective". Shuttling between the poles
of the two main and not particularly compatible senses of
"subject," this poetic subject is better thought along
the lines of "subjecticity" than "subjectivity," if the
latter term connotes an individualized, and largely
conscious discourse of an identifiable subject.
- But can the examples of Keats and Shelley really
stand in for the variegated discourses of Romanticism,
even in Britain, to say nothing of on the Continent?
Would there not be significant counter-examples? Keats's
own formulation seems to separate his Poetical Character
from, for example, the "wordsworthian or egostistical
sublime". Could we not find in Wordsworth, for one, a
full-fledged discourse of the subject, highly
individualized and attendant to the peculiarities of his
life, his psyche, his psychology? Certainly the monument
of The Prelude, perpetually scandalous in
generic terms, insofar as it an autobiography and an epic
at the same time, seems to offer a prime example of the
"subjective". One could hardly argue that anyone else
could have written The Prelude, with its wealth
of autobiographical detail, whose charged meaning could
not quite be so charged for anyone other than William
Wordsworth. And yet from the original draft opening ("Was
it for this … ?") or the eventually published
beginning, "O there is blessing in this gentle breeze
…," the poem’s voice is crossed by prior
voices, Virgil’s in the first instance or a
(transformed) invocation of the muse in the second.
Wordsworth not infrequently invokes the model of the
ancient Biblical prophets, who are nothing if not
vehicles for a divine voice not their own. And sometimes
at seemingly the most personal moments—such as the
Dream of the Arab—will present an experience as
happening to himself in one version and to another person
in another, which is rather unsettling if we are to take
the poem as the faithful transcription of a singular
life.[16]
Wordsworth is scarcely unaware of this divided or
traversed character of his poetic voice and indeed the
thematization of this split character may be one reason
he can think of his own story as exemplary of the growth
of a poet’s mind. I cannot do justice here to all
the possible counter-examples to the paradigm of
subjecticity I am trying to sketch but the
over-determined example of Wordsworth does help suggest
that a mere thematization of subjectivity rather than
subjecticity is not quite enough to undermine the latter
concept’s viability.
- We have been concentrating on theorists and poets of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but
the claims of these writers are not themselves cast in
historical terms: they believe themselves to be
addressing the character of art and aesthetic judgement
irrespective of time or place. And certainly the sorts of
insights rehearsed here are not narrowly limited to
Romanticism conceived as a period. The epigraph from Paul
Celan, a post-Romantic writer in a sense that respects
from sides of the hyphen, claims, in his (in)imitable
style, "Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne", literally "Art makes
I-distance" (193). Even if the I in some sense makes art,
art makes the I and in such a way that the I is distanced
from itself: the I is not simply I. It cannot say I,
anymore than it can say "I will compose poetry". And this
dictum comes from a writer whose principal mode was the
lyric poem, the mode where one might most expect to
encounter a subject with subjectivity. Hence, the
possible desirability of a word like "subjecticity" to
get at what happens in the language and thought of
poetry, the aesthetic, and more, some "thing" or some
process that exceeds the subject without ever simply
transcending it or leaving it behind.
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