- In the famous "hymn" Shelley addressed to the "Spirit
of Beauty," the poet must call out to an absence: if this
particular aesthetic spirit is that which "consecrates"
with its "own hues all" it "shines upon/ Of human thought
or form" (13-14), the whereabouts of the spirit are
unknown. "Where art thou gone?," asks the speaker, "Why
dost thou pass away and leave our state,/ This dim vast
vale of tears, vacant and desolate?" (15-17). In "our
state," this "dim vast vale of tears," we are left only
with the effects of the spirit of beauty, precious and
"dear" though they are. These effects take the form of
likenesses, semblances of the aesthetic spirit which has
departed and which pays "visits" to our human
world—"each human heart and
countenance"—"with inconstant glance" (6,7).
- One might well invoke Shelley's lament to
characterize one consequence of the attention to history
and sociology that has governed the state of Romantic
studies over the past two decades. Indeed, one might well
say that the methodological diversity that has come to
distinguish Romanticism and its allied or subsidiary
fields is predicated upon "vacating" the aesthetic spirit
(or theories or forms or practices) that had delineated
Romanticism in the first place. What, then, does it mean
to pose the question of the aesthetic—indeed, to
insist upon it—at a time, as David Ferris
puts it in the first of the essays to follow, "when the
interpretive pendulum has swung towards increasing
textual transparency in the form of an insistence upon
historical and sociological concerns as arbiters of
literary significance"(1)? When so much of the recent
important work on the period has focused on the disparate
topics of history, sociology, politics, gender, ecology,
and the archive, what does it mean to insist on an
insistent relationship between Romanticism and the
aesthetic, to declare that the aesthetic itself insists,
remains insistent, has never not insisted?
- If aspects of Shelley's life and work have often been
marshaled to support much of the historicizing impulse of
contemporary Romantic studies, "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty" not only speaks of and to the aesthetic, it
recounts its deep commitment, and in the process
recommits itself, to the "binding" spirit of beauty. As
much an elegy as a hymn, the poem mourns the absence of
the "awful LOVELINESS" (71) to whom the poet "vowed" to
"dedicate" his personal "powers" (61). But it would be
more accurate to describe the spirit as transient,
fugitive, perpetually impermanent rather than simply
absent. After all, the poem identifies "Intellectual
Beauty" as the primary and even prime "Power" which,
though unavailable to the sense of sight, casts an "awful
shadow" that "Floats though unseen amongst us"(1,2).
While it is forever elusive as presence—it is
nothing that we could point at—Shelley's "spirit of
Beauty" is nonetheless a "Power," a force which
insists.
- In the three essays collected for this issue, David
Ferris, Karen Swann, and Ian Balfour address the question
of "Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic" by
turning in one form or another to Romantic versions of
the relationship between the aesthetic and power, whether
as a form of violence or a force of possibility. These
essays demonstrate that far from the being the exclusive
property of historicists and sociologists, varieties of
power are produced and avail themselves to reading and to
critique by Romanticism's own relationship to aesthetics.
None of the critics gathered here have construed the
topic as the return of the aesthetic and
certainly not, to cite one important recent anthology, as
the Revenge of the Aesthetic. To attend to the
insistence of the aesthetic is not to offer it as a
refuge from the conflicts of politics and history.
Indeed, in the German and English examples examined in
these essays, the aesthetic does not appear as a form of
space—not haven or enclave or utopia—but
precisely as an insistence, as something that
was never not there, however
obscured, overlooked, or repressed it might have been.
Beyond its more recent—and certainly
relevant—role in Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse
as an English translation ofinstance,
insistence is defined by the OED as the very
"action of insisting, the fact of being insistent,"
"emphatic or urgent dwelling upon a statement, a demand";
and it is closely related to persistence, to something
that persists. Webster's offers some minor but suggestive
variations by defining insist as "to stand or to
rest" and insistence as "to take a stand and
refuse to give way." We are prompted by these definitions
to understand insistence as a kind of gnawing annoyance,
the tendency of something to keep pointing to itself, to
remind us that it is there, that it has never ceased to
be there, that it will stay there. At the same time, this
quality of aesthetic insistence is contrary to the nature
of an aesthetic judgment which presents itself as
something singular and instantaneous. And, as the
following essays demonstrate, Romanticism's version of
the insistence of the aesthetic is distinguished by what
is either an antinomy or an aporia between the insistence
of the aesthetic and the instantaneousness of judgment.
In each of these essays, the aesthetic makes insistent
demands on our understanding of Romanticism and it is
something that, despite critical efforts to ignore it or
render it symptomatic, persists into the present. Each of
these essays explores aesthetic insistence not only as a
demand but as action and statement. And
each of these essays demonstrates in one form or another
the romantic irony of insistence as an urgent dwelling
upon a statement at the very moment that the aesthetic
reveals that there is nothing upon which such a statement
might securely dwell.
- Both Ferris and Balfour address in some detail
relevant features of Kant's aesthetic critique, but one
of the more insistent and perhaps most misconstrued
features of the Kantian legacy is the notion of aesthetic
autonomy which is, in turn, the source of our
understanding of the aesthetic as a state or domain,
distinct from the domains of ethics or politics. No
genuinely dialectical criticism—and Adorno remains
its unsurpassed exemplar—understands the
disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment or the autonomy
of the aesthetic simply as the retreat of art to its own
domain; but the characterization of the aesthetic as a
space often underwrites the now familiar political
criticism of aesthetic autonomy.[1]
Terry Eagleton's neat summary of the left-wing position
demonstrates the pervasiveness of this spatial logic:
"art is ... conveniently sequestered from all other
social practice, to become an isolated enclave within
which the dominant social order can find an idealized
refuge from its own actual values" (IA, 9).
Other critics have developed the logic of spatialization
in a more complicated and interesting fashion than simple
"enclaves" and "refuges" by demonstrating how the
aesthetic does not simply retreat from its historical
moment but incorporates it, takes it into itself. Thomas
Pfau has described this as "the capacity of the aesthetic
to encrypt its own contingent historical situation"
(WP,3). And Marc Redfield, in his response to
the following essays, offers a particularly acute
analysis of the insistence of the aesthetic as the secret
space of historicist criticism, its unacknowledged crypt.
Even when historicist critics seek to disavow or disallow
the aesthetic in the name of politics, Redfield asserts,
they do so only by encrypting the
aesthetic itself: in their efforts to abolish
it, the aesthetic "becomes the impensee, the
encrypted and cherished secret, of historicist-political
criticism" (3). But however symptomatic or inevitable the
spatialization of the aesthetic may be for our
understanding of the relationship between art and
non-art—the aesthetic is here or
there or inside this or
that—aesthetic spacing can only be derived
from force: it is the effect of a break. Indeed, it may
well be much more productive to understand aesthetic
insistence as the imposition of sensuous
apprehension upon historical narratives or ethical
claims. If we understand an aesthetic judgment as
something which forces itself upon us without the
grounding of concepts and which breaks the grip of the
ethical, and if we approach aesthetic experience as
something which does not deliver knowledge but which
plays against the claims of knowledge, we gain a better
sense of the power, force, and even violence of aesthetic
insistence.[2]
- The following essays found their first forms as
invited papers on a panel that I chaired at the 2001
NASSR conference in Seattle. I asked Ferris, Swann, and
Balfour to write papers on the topic of "Romanticism and
the Insistence of the Aesthetic" not only because I am a
great admirer of the work of each of these scholars but
also because each of them has in the midst of our
historicisms and sociologies consistently reflected on
the questions posed for Romanticism by problems of the
aesthetic. Marc Redfield, whose own recent Politics
of Aesthetics marks an indispensable contribution to
these issues, graciously accepted my invitation to
respond to the essays once they were prepared for
publication. As Redfield notes in his
response—titled, appropriately enough, "Reading the
Aesthetic, Reading Romanticism"—"these three essays
all affirm the centrality of the question of the
aesthetic ... within Romantic studies [and] exemplify the
diverse legacy of deconstruction" (1). Redfield
emphasizes how that "diverse legacy" is reflected in
essays that continue to "bear the signature of Paul de
Man" and to represent "the kind of thinking that we may
best call reading: reading as the effort to read the
predicament—the fascination, the difficulty, the
aporia or possible impossibility—of reading itself"
(9). If, as Redfield points out, the insistence of the
aesthetic as the necessity of reading continues to "bear
the signature of Paul de Man," it also demonstrates "how
differently the theme of reading can be written and read,
and how diversely this theme's recurrent motifs can
manifest themselves" (9).
- The diverse modes of reading exemplified and explored
by the following essays demonstrate that to read is not
to take refuge from but to subject oneself to
the adventures of power and force that are inextricable
from the aesthetic. The readings undertaken by the
following essays explore the forms of the power, force,
and even violence inscribed in and concealed by the
aesthetic as well as the power or capacity of the
aesthetic to institute, to produce, to trouble. In
"Aesthetic Violence and the Legitimacy of Reading
Romanticism," David Ferris addresses the question of the
aesthetic by attending to the figures and function of
violence in contemporary critical discussion. For Ferris,
it is not merely the case that the recent emphasis on
historical and sociological knowledge can occur only at
the expense of—and violence to—the question
of the aesthetic; he is interested, rather, in the ways
in which violence itself has come to serve as a
legitimizing principle, much as beauty served
for previous generations of criticism. Ferris explores
this question by returning to the crucial—perhaps
even founding—relationships between aesthetics and
politics in Kant and Schiller. In revisiting this de
Manian nexus of violence and the aesthetic and extending
the argument set out so compellingly in his book
Silent Urns, Ferris arrives at some crucial
formulations which complicate the de Manian reading and
demonstrate that insistence is the perhaps the best way
to characterize the relationship between Kant and
Schiller: the aesthetic, in other words, is insistent
from the beginning. "What Schiller undertakes," says
Ferris, "is the authorization of the aesthetic Kant
invokes in the place of such an authorization. In this
respect, Schiller pursues the political project of Kant's
critical enterprise by fulfilling the political
consequences of Kant's attempt to ground judgment"
(6-7).
- In Ferris's reading, those who would critique the
aesthetic on ideological grounds fail to realize that the
very possibility of critique is inextricable from the
aesthetic:
This is also why the critique of the aesthetic as an
ideologically charged category can in no way overcome
the aesthetic or even the ideology it associates with
the aesthetic since, as an example of critique, it
can only appeal to the category it would dismiss for
its power of dismissal. To undertake an ideological
critique of the aesthetic for failing to critique
itself for its aestheticism (that is, for being
unable to be critical in any sense, for being simply
about beauty, or simply beautiful) is to affirm
precisely the means by which Schiller has secured the
possibility of critique (9).
- The power of the aesthetic is also a precondition for
Ian Balfour's critical explorations of the figures of
"Subjecticity" that appear in the texts of Kant and in
what Balfour terms "The Texture of Romanticism." His
account of Romantic forms of "subjectivity beyond the
subject" opens with a sustained discussion of the status
of the Kantian aesthetic: "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.'" Balfour's reading of Kant suggests
how a genuine critique of aesthetic judgment demands and
even generates alternative models and figures of
subjectivity, or what Balfour calls "the not-so-single
subject with respect to the dynamics of aesthetic
judgment" (13). While it would be wrong to suggest that
Romanticism or the aesthetic creates what
Balfour is calling "subjecticity," it is more to the
point of his argument that the genuine crisis posed by
aesthetic judgment for the status of the subject
simultaneously gives rise to the need to think
subjectivity otherwise:
"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" (2).
- In his exploration of the relationship between
aesthetics and subjecticity in the registers of
philosophy and Romantic literature, Balfour's attention
to the "linguistic character of aesthetic judgment" in
Kant demonstrates the strange power of the aesthetic to
insist upon language. If, as Balfour puts it,
"aesthetic experiences are first and foremost feelings,
nothing more than ... feelings," a properly aesthetic
judgment forces or demands its linguistic
articulation: "Kant insists again and again on the
linguistic character of aesthetic judgment, on the
somewhat mysterious need to render a judgment that, for
example, this tulip is beautiful. Indeed, it is crucial
to call the tulip beautiful rather than simply
to feel it is" (8). It is crucial, in other words, to
indicate in language the beautiful tulip, to point it out
and say "that tulip there is
beautiful." Moreover, the singular, "subjective" quality
of an aesthetic judgment is in turn compromised by its
insistence on being spoken "with a universal voice"
[eine algemeine Stimme].
- In the second half of his essay, Balfour moves from
the ramifications of the force of this aesthetic
linguisticity in Kant to the "discourse of aesthetic
production" where "something of the same
paradoxical texture" can be discerned or "read off" (13),
"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" (15). Balfour turns to the
letters of Keats where the famous articulations of the
"poetical character" and "negative capability" offer the
kind of dramatic or theatrical self-erasure that supplies
"another instance of what we might call 'subjecticity'"
(18): "Keats anchors poetic production in the work of a
subject that exceeds the workings of what is usually
thought of as a subject, a subjectivity beyond the merely
subjective, a paradoxical absence of subjectivity that is
the prerequisite for producing poetic subjects" (17-18).
Even Wordsworth's most detailed thematizations of
subjectivity in The Prelude are riven with the
kinds of temporal and linguistic doublings and splittings
that can be said to demonstrate the workings of
subjecticity. But Balfour's most sustained account of
"subjecticity" in the Romantic discourses of aesthetic
production is devoted to Shelley's Defense of
Poetry and its representations of poetic agency, a
force or power that does not originate in the subject but
would seem only to be available—expressed or
represented, named or performed—through the
subject. As Balfour concludes, this "texture of
Romanticism" demands "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"
(25).
- Between these two accounts of the Kantian legacies of
the aesthetic—or what one might call the Kantian
insistence—Karen Swann discerns and examines a
certain recurrent "shape" in Shelley's poetry, "a
beautiful, slumbering human form" (1). In "Shelley's Pod
People," Swann explores these strange forms, alien and
"beautiful dreamers" that "live a posthumous life, beyond
life and death, but transcending neither" and that "speak
to a fantasy of the endurance of poet and the poetic
work, not as endlessly renewable, socially-efficacious
resources, but as forms radically closed to our concerns"
(2). As such, Shelley's figures are "related to a
construction of 'the aesthetic' that descends to us from
Kant through Adorno: 'the aesthetic' as autonomous,
enigmatic, auratic form" (2). Swann's essay brushes
against the grain of recent interpretations and
mobilizations of the poet which emphasize his political
and historical poetics—Shelley's "commitment to
social and political change"—by stressing how the
power of this poetry, the "experience" of reading it,
often derives from its very resistances to our concerns:
it can "strike us as most wonderful at its most difficult
and hermetic, the point where it fails to yield to our
reading" (2).
- Swann's essay is marked by startling insights into
the nature of the psychic and cultural investments in the
Shelleyan reliquary, from the tortured passions of the
Shelley circle to the often unavowed obsessions of
professional Romanticists. By attending so acutely to the
rich and the strange in Shelley's works and death, Swann
may well produce a genuine sea change in our
understanding of the poet. Her essay also intervenes in
the question of aesthetic space as a kind of cryptology.
Rather than decrypting Shelley's aesthetic, Swann attends
closely to the aesthetic form—and power—of
the Shelley crypt, the "Shelley circle's posthumous
constructions" (2) and preservations of the poet as well
as the "radically arrested figures" that are "strangely
insistent in The Witch of Atlas" (13). By
reading the figures of "live burials" in Shelley's
strange poem alongside the poet's own overdetermined
afterlife, Swann's essay demands that we reconsider the
presumed naiveté of friends such as Trelawny who
loved the poet enough to ask not only for his bones but
for as much of the corpse as could be salvaged from the
fires. In its course, Swann's essay teaches us to
recognize the aesthetic as the medium through which we
can read the fluid, chiasmic relationship between what is
living and what is dead in the life-work and death-work
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. If the Romantic figure of
Shelley is aestheticized in the process, it is a process
which has insisted itself from the start, a process that
demands we learn how to reckon with what Swann calls the
"figures of the aesthetic as that which adamantly refuses
to matter in terms of human economies of desire and
exchange" (3).
- "Figures of the aesthetic which adamantly refuse to
matter in terms of human economies": this is precisely
the kind of aesthetic insistence that resonates in
Keats's engagements with what has become if not the
"mother" then at least the "foster-child" of all
aesthetic objects, the "silent urn" of the poet's most
famous ode. However we ultimately regard that poem's
relationship with the aesthetic, it is certainly the case
that by the final stanza, the speaker is addressing the
urn as that which insists, as that which "shalt
remain, in midst of other owe/ Than ours." It is the
insistence of the remainder, one which is also a reminder
that however much "happiness" in all its forms may insist
on the object itself, the ekphrastic response it provokes
is a vexed one, that "dost tease us out of thought." If
the poem's aesthetic seductions have teased countless
critics into the delusions of understanding, they have
also prompted some of the most important critical
encounters in Romantic studies, among which Ferris's
chapter on the poem in Silent Urns is the most
powerful recent example that I can point to. There Ferris
reads the poem's own reading of "a Grecian Urn" and
demonstrates that far from proposing any resolution
between truth and beauty or between history and the
aesthetic, Keats's great ode alludes to an aesthetic
understanding that the performance of the poem itself
resists. For Ferris, the insistence of Keats's poem is
itself a reminder in the midst of our own debates that
"[w]hat has still to be digested is a romanticism that no
amount of ideology finger-pointing will allow us to
evade, a romanticism that undertakes a reflection on the
relation of historical knowledge and aesthetic
understanding" (SU, 60). "Finger-pointing" is a
fascinating way to describe this contemporary aversion to
the aesthetic, especially when we consider the diectic
character of Keats's ekphrastic poem and of the
insistence of the aesthetic in romanticism more
generally. For if Keats's poem "consistently fails to
answer its own questions about the historical status of
the urn" (SU, 83), the questions it
poses—the questions it insists
upon—"confound, rather than lead to, understanding.
Part of the problem that Keats points to in
these lines is that what is being looked at does not
guide or define the poet's" questions, "questions that
are suspended because they cannot define what they ask
after" (SU, 77, emphasis added). If Keats's poem
insists that "the power is there," in other words,
there, in the urn which the poem both indicates
and addresses, it is a persistent if recalcitrant
aesthetic power.
- "The power is there" is, of course, part of a crucial
declarative line in a poem which Shelley wrote about
another aesthetic spirit during the summer he composed
his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Whatever else "Mont
Blanc" may be, it is an aesthetic object, one
which—composed in and about the "awful shadow" of
the sublime—insists on the aesthetic even as it
undoes the mystification of aestheticizing: "Mont Blanc
yet gleams on high — the power is there"
(l.127, emphasis added). And if the poem's speaker and
perhaps the poem itself refer to a non-aesthetic power of
the object—point at it—it is impossible to
know whether or not the pointing or the power are merely
aesthetic effects. For if the power is indeed there in
the object as such, the poem leaves uncertain whether the
poetic declaration is not itself the result of a properly
aesthetic judgment about the mountain's insistent
"gleaming." If in the course of his restless, uncertain
surmising, Shelley's speaker finds himself and his poem
colluding between signification and indication, these are
the collusions of signification and indication generated
by an aesthetic insistence. There, after all, is
something that the poem can never make into a
here: there is perpetually elsewhere,
it insists at that place to which we point, and it
insists in the aesthetic form of pointing.
- But it's at this point that I should, in turn, point
you to the following essays: it is there where one can
witness the power of critical readings which not only
insist upon the aesthetic but which indicate that that's
where the power of Romanticism is.
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