- The challenge, already formidable, of responding to
these essays becomes all the more imposing when one
returns them (as one is so often told to do these days)
to their context, and recalls the fact that they form
part of the ongoing work of three critics who rank among
the most significant contemporary interpreters of
Romantic literature. In what follows I won't try to
trace filiations between the essays collected here and
their authors' previous work—David Ferris's
analysis of modernity, criticism, and aesthetics in his
brilliant Silent Urns, or Ian Balfour's reading
of inspiration and self-loss in his award-winning The
Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, or Karen Swann's
meditations on form, reception, gender, and figuration in
those extraordinary essays on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and
Keats that for twenty years have taught Romanticists how
richly consequential close reading can be.[1]
It will be enough to try to say something about each of
the texts at hand, and about how we might read them in
each other's company. Written in very different
styles and taking on markedly different tasks, these
three essays all affirm the centrality of the question of
the aesthetic both within Romantic studies and, more
generally, within the academic institution of literary
and cultural criticism. They may also all three be
said to exemplify the diverse legacy of deconstruction,
and more particularly that of Paul de Man—and it
may be that the best way to understand this legacy is as
an ongoing reflection on the aesthetic. To reflect
on the aesthetic is necessarily, as our authors show, to
reflect on language, history, and the subject; it is to
have patience with the problem of why and how powerful
texts at once compel and resist reading; it is to pause
over the uncertain mutual imbrications of textuality and
psychic and political life. Nothing more distant
from the banal misreading of the aesthetic as an
apolitical "aestheticism" can be imagined than the
arguments to be found in these essays. Rising to
the challenge of their difficult subject matter, these
texts return us, in their different ways, to the skewed,
double character of the aesthetic and its privileged
period-metaphor, "Romanticism."[2]
The aesthetic fulfills itself in turning against itself;
it succeeds through failure; it ruins even as it
reproduces the monumental artwork, the monumentalized
artist, the psychological subject, and the space of
pedagogical and political formation within which modern
subjects come to pass.
I.
- David Ferris, in "Aesthetic Violence and the
Legitimacy of Reading Romanticism," mounts for inspection
de Man's analysis of aesthetic education as founded in a
violence it must also conceal. Ferris suggests that
historicist approaches that treat literature as a more or
less transparent window onto a social and historical
landscape—approaches that imagine themselves
light-years away from de Man's concerns or
formulations—depend upon the possibility of
recognizing such violence. The complication here is
that, in setting out to locate a failure of ideology, a
moment when the labor of aesthetic concealment falters or
goes awry, criticism repeats the trajectory of aesthetic
education itself. For, in "failing to conceal its
concealment of violence," the aesthetic opens the space
of a criticism that must always be in complicity with the
aesthetic.
- Ferris locates in criticism the possibility of the
political itself, insfar as the political, in coming into
being, must criticize and set itself against some other
politics. He is thus led to claim that modernity
produces itself through an ongoing reproduction of the
very category—the aesthetic—from which, in
the name of critique, it claims to separate itself: the
contemporary rush to reduce the aesthetic to ideology
occurs in the name of aesthetico-political
goals—the formation of self, community, and
state. "To speak of the aesthetic in these terms,"
Ferris observes, "is to speak of a historical unfolding
governed by a critical project unable to authorize itself
by critique alone, even by the invocation of a violence
within its own operation." It is this excess within
criticism that historicist criticism seeks to evade,
through the hyperbolically aesthetic gesture of imagining
the abolition, through criticism, of the aesthetic.
The aesthetic becomes the impensée, the
encrypted and cherished secret, of historicist-political
criticism. Thus a "critical project unable to
authorize itself through criticism alone" masks its
predicament by transforming the uncriticizability of the
aesthetic into the unconscious of its practice, thereby
refusing to recognize its failure to recognize
failure.
- In the second half of his paper, Ferris reads
passages from Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man in order to develop and
clarify the aesthetic's relation to politics.
Drawing attention to a footnote to Letter 20, Ferris
examines Schiller's version of the Kantian identification
of the aesthetic with a harmony between freedom and law:
the laws of the aesthetic, Schiller tells us, are not
represented (vorgestellt). Aesthetic
education is nothing less than a process of recognizing
the aesthetic's unrepresentable laws, the
unrepresentability of which removes them from the reach
of criticism. Historicist criticism, which is at
bottom a thoroughgoing aestheticism, transforms the
aesthetic into that-which-cannot-come-to-representation,
thereby securing the political by way of an
uncriticizable law. Thus the aesthetic secretes and
assures the power it posits: a power that achieves force
of law precisely as the uncriticizable, and achieves this
through failure (the failure of the aesthetic law to be
represented). This is a difficult moment in
Ferris's essay, since the "failure" he notes here seems
to be the opposite of the aesthetic's "failure" to
conceal its violence that he was discussing earlier: here
the law cannot come to representation, whereas
earlier, the violence of the aesthetic had to
come to representation (or more precisely, to
recognition; but even the recognition of a
non-representation demands a certain
manifestation of this
non-representability). Both imperatives are perhaps
more ambiguous than they may seem at first. The
aesthetic's claim to recognize its originary violence was
in a sense an illusion, since the aesthetic was simply
recognizing itself, thereby establishing itself through
failure. And the aesthetic's claim to recognize its
laws as unrepresentable (and therefore uncriticizeable)
is also in a sense an illusion, since, as Ferris will
soon show, this unrepresentability can immediately be
read as, once again, violence.
- At this point Ferris turns to a famous passage in
Letter 4 of the Aesthetic Education, where
Schiller contrasts the artist or artisan with the
politician. The artisan uses his material with
overt violence; the artist, who manipulates his material
just as violently, "will seek to deceive the eye," as
Schiller says, and conceal this violence; but the
politician, whose material, "man," is also his goal, may
not use violence. The political or
pedagogical artist must exclude violence
altogether. And as Ferris comments, adding a
skeptical twist to Schiller's sequence, "the political
state in which true freedom occurs is then one in which
the concealment of the artist is concealed to the point
of appearing not to exist." Thus, "the emergence of the
political artist, the artist of the state, is then the
emergence of the position from which all art can be
criticized as an essentially violent undertaking because
it is essentially aesthetic....This is why Schiller can
only speak of true political freedom as the perfect work
of art: it lacks the violence that renders art imperfect,
or, to put this bluntly, it is more successful in hiding
art's concealment of its violence since the law that
guides it is without representation." The art of politics
is the concealment of the concealment of art; it is the
presumptively non-violent moment "in which the critique
of violence is established." Consequently, "the political
critique of the aesthetic is hopelessly compromised from
its inception since it is already part of an aesthetic
project it has forgotten how to remember." Ferris
concludes by sharpening his critique of the debate
current in the United States around the period-term
"Romanticism." To reject Romanticism as the aesthetic is
endlessly to "legitimize Romanticism at the very moment
of its critical rejection." And to engage in a genuine
critique of this predicament is to risk repeating the
Schillerian paradigm. "Here, de Man's remark...also
faces its most difficult challenge: the challenge of
ignoring a history and a politics that remains
inseparable from the critical necessity that underwrites
our understanding of literature since the advent of
Romanticism, the necessity of the aesthetic." This
challence would be that of "entertain[ing] the end of
Romanticism, and, with it, the end of the concept of
freedom through which our history and our politics is
refracted."
- Ferris's powerful reading raises more issues than I
can address here; let me point to what I take to be one
or two significant complications suggested by his closing
sentences. Throughout, his emphasis on the
complicity between aesthetics and the critique of
aesthetic violence finds validation in his own text's
highly self-conscious critical performance: Ferris must
repeat the gesture he critiques as he "recognizes" the
concealment of the concealment of violence that is
aesthetics as politics (which is to say, aesthetics
per se, in its fullest Schillerian
development). When he suggests in his closing
lines that we could "ignore" this politico-critical
"necessity," I take him to be compacting the aporia he
has encountered into a vibrantly ambiguous
phrase. As we all know from our personal as well
as our professional lives, the act of "ignoring"
someone involves considerable violence; even the act of
ignoring something can be fraught with
aggression, denial, and phantasmatic projection.
And if we are ignoring a "necessity," we are as likely
as not to fall, like Thales, flat on our
face—for, as the verb itself tells us in its
circulation through various Latin-influenced European
languages, to ignore is always possibly to
be ignorant of.[3]
We will never be sure whether or not we have succeeded
in ignoring the aesthetic because we will never be able
to control our ignorance of the aesthetic—which
is also to say that the violence of our ignorance is
likely to fall short of cathartic or sacrificial
violence. And such, I take it, is Ferris's
point. The "end" of Romanticism may in this sense
turn out to be, like art in Hegel, a thing of the past
that has also, paradoxically, never quite
arrived.
II.
- In her subtle reading of "Shelley's Pod People,"
Karen Swann draws attention to those strange, beautiful
human forms one encounters now and then in Shelley's
poetry: figures suspended between life and death, within
landscapes of wreckage and loss. They resist motion
and transference and "the movement of trope and verse
itself," and they speak to "a fantasy of the endurance of
the poet and the poetic work...as forms radically closed
to our concerns." Swann links these figures to the labor
of mourning and consecration that went into the making of
"Shelley" by his circle of intimates, both before and
after his death. Noting that "it is not easy to
disentangle the valuative work of commemoration from the
rigor of a reading," she elaborates Paul de Man's severe
emphasis on aesthetic monumentalization into a rich
reading of the kind of biographical
material—memoirs, anecdotes, letters—that is
so often marshalled as an antidote to textual
complexity. Swann shows us how Shelley is figured
as a figure in these biographical accounts: as a
shape all light, volatile, vulnerable, yet also
unreachable and not entirely of this world, "always on
the brink of being lost." Lost in books, lost to and in
the world, he is at once infinitely vulnerable and
ruthlessly self-absorbed. "The posthumous creation of the
circle that labored to give shape to the poet after his
death, this glimmering figure is neither a naive nor an
escapable construction," Swann affirms. "It
descends to haunt the most powerful of our modern
readings of Shelley, for instance, de Man's—a
haunting symptomatized by de Man's gestures of figuration
and his inordinate attachment to the figure that refuses
to attach itself to any life supports whatever."
- The analogous figures within Shelley's poetry, Swann
proposes, at once elicit and represent our fascination
with them. They preserve "magical archaic forms
from a devastating human interest," and offer a
"ruthless, magical refusal of loss." At once "a fantasy
of the poet, the work, and the baby," this glimmering
body is also "the exquisite corpse buried alive in the
heart of the one who cannot grieve." For to refuse loss
is also to encrypt and cherish a wound beyond all
healing. Aesthetic monumentalization is at once
loss and the refusal of loss; mourning and a failure to
mourn; Mary Shelley's grieving heart and Edward
Trelawny's vigorous trade in relics (of which the first
and most memorable, of course, was the poet's literal
heart). We cherish and are held within the grip of
this fascination: "In death, Shelley's bones arrange
themselves into the posture of the reader arrested in a
moment of absorption, but too late to save himself from
drowning; or, perhaps, of the reader already
drowning...or, even, of the reader halted before the
'shape' of the dead Shelley, discovering herself already
absorbed into his circle." Swann's lyrical and
acute reading asks us to dwell with the possibility that
it is "the radical alterity of this apparitional form to
human desire" that entraps and fascinates us.
Perhaps, she affirms, echoing Adorno, "art may be most
loyal to humanity's dreams when it preserves, encrypted
within it, a resiliently inhumane impulse—a
ruthless refusal to speak to what we may only imagine are
our concerns."[4]
III.
- Ian Balfour's "Subjecticity" emphasizes the way
Kantian aesthetics and Romantic writing generally render
inadequate psychological and individualist notions of the
subject. Through readings of Kant, Keats, Shelley,
and Wordsworth he works to "conceive of a subjectivity
beyond the subject, of something we might call
'subjecticity'." His title marks and deforms the subject
with the stroke of a typo, a coquille, the
semi-random byproduct of the workings of technological
reproduction; his thesis is that "Romanticism, broadly
understood, can be said to trouble the reduction of the
subject to the merely subjective," even though
Romanticism has also "promoted that somewhat newfangled
thing called the subject." This double bind
finds its most concentrated expression in the domain of
the aesthetic. On the one hand, aesthetic
experience is radically singular, a matter of feeling
rather than conceptual thought; on the other hand,
aesthetic judgment claims universal assent, and it does
so via a detour through language. Judging something
beautiful or sublime, "we believe ourselves," Kant
writes, "to be speaking with a universal voice,
[allgemeine Stimme]." Language,
Balfour suggests, comes in to rescue aesthetics from its
antinomy, facilitating the movement from singular to
universal and transforming the subject of aesthetics into
"something more and other than the simply subjective";
yet language proves a quagmire into which the "I" of the
subject sinks, unable to speak itself except by
obliterating itself. This predicament of aesthetic
judgment surfaces elsewhere in the discourse of
Romanticism as the self-loss of the "poetical character"
in Keats, the uncertain agency of the inspired
imagination in Shelley, the haunted and redoubled
narrative voice of Wordsworth's Prelude.
"Shuttling between the poles of the two main and not
particularly compatible senses of 'subject,'" Balfour
summarizes, "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 individual subject."
- One might dwell a little longer on the term
subjecticity. Balfour offers it as a "word that
is not exactly a word," a "non-word" and a "neologism";
but it is arguably both less and more than that. It
fails to appear in dictionaries but "one can find
instances of it through a Google search, mainly in the
context of linguistics"
(Balfour, endnote 1). That is not really
surprising, since its morphology is unexceptional:
"ivity" and "icity" are alternative suffixes for Latin
words with stems ending in c (e.g., mendax,
mendacis; thence, mendacity), and though
subjecticity rings in our ears as the sort of
barbarism we're used to encountering in the writing of
social scientists and undergraduates, it is not quite a
non-word, not simply improper or wrong. It
wavers in the gray area between proper and improper
speech, and in that sense could be said to be a bit
"more" than a mere neologism.
- Yet Balfour's discussion implies that it is also a
bit "less." Whereas a neologism is normally understood to
be a new word formed consciously, by a subjectivity in
possession of itself and its language, in Balfour's essay
subjecticity falls into play possibly by
accident: "It could have been a typo, in this word that
is not exactly a word: subjecticity." On one level,
of course, we are being teased. So you thought it
was a typo (and an egregeious lapse in editorial
proofreading) as you read Balfour's title? Or even
if you didn't: you always possibly did.
The joke, if it is one, lasts only a moment; but the
punch line resonates through Balfour's essay. "It
could have been" a typo—a blow from outside,
deforming language and derailing the subject's
intention. This kind of outside, however, is also
always an inside: "The 'c' is so close to the 'v' on the
keyboard that one could always type one for the other."
Throughout his essay Balfour hints at the inseparability
of language from its technologies of production and
reproduction: the keyboard; the Internet and its
technologies of search and retrieval; the technical
reproducibility of experience itself in science fiction
(Balfour, note 6)—which last, if fantastic, is in
one sense no more than a lurid trope for the way our most
intimate ("romantic") self-expressions are the most
vulnerable to repetition, cliché, and literary
encoding. Language has always been our exemplary
techne, above all when it seems to be doing
things beyond subjective or semantic control—doing
things, that is, by "accident." The relation of the
QWERTY keyboard layout to English-language morphology and
its rules for generating suffixes is a non-relation, a
sheer metonymy; yet here, by chance (or fate? or
neither?) the exteriority of the typo has become
teasingly indistinguishable from the interiority of the
language. It could have been a typo—but maybe
not.
- Such undecidable moments, when accident and form
threaten to become impossible to hold apart, can inspire
aggressive efforts to stabilize oppositions (a typo!) and
fix blame (can't Balfour, Redfield, Pyle, and Orrin Wang
and his staff read?). Yet they can also
inspire thought: the kind of thinking about Romanticism,
language, technics, mourning, and subjecticity that these
three essays offer us. It is 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. If that theme, particularly though
by no means only in Romantic studies, bears the signature
of Paul de Man, these three essays demonstrate both how
differently the theme of reading reading can be written
and read, and how diversely this theme's recurrent motifs
can manifest themselves. For it cannot be doubted
that certain motifs recur: a violence or catastrophe at
the origin of signification; a text's constitutive
openness to accident; a reader's consequent inability to
weigh her ignorance, hold herself apart from the text, or
avoid repeating its error. This "wound of a
fracture that lies hidden in all texts" (de Man, 120) can
leave its mark as a typo (Balfour); as the "formal
material dimension" of the image "swim[ming] up into the
supposedly living thing" (Swann); as "a historical
unfolding governed by a critical project unable to
authorize itself by critique alone, even by the
invocation of a violence within its own operation"
(Ferris). Thus, in their vaious ways, these essays
locate the aesthetic as the place where the seductions
and problems of reading emerge most tellingly, and
suggest that the uncertain, conflicted phenomenon that we
go on stubbornly calling "Romanticism" continues to have
so much to tell us precicely because it names a
literary-historical displacement of the aesthetic.
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