Romanticism and Philosophy
in an Historical Age
The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant
PART I
Thomas Pfau, Duke University
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The following, somewhat speculative remarks constitute part of a larger project concerned with the historical transformation throughout the nineteenth century of something frequently called interiority. More specifically, my aim is to explore how interiority during that period pivots on two fundamentally distinct models of aesthetic experience and, implicit in these, two opposed theories of aesthetic response. As I intend to show in some detail, the dynamics of interiority are dialectically bound up with the operation of aesthetic form, and perhaps nowhere more so than in German culture during the first half of the nineteenth century.[1] While exploring the sociological and political causes of the insistent aestheticization of subjectivity during that period seems tempting and potentially rewarding, this essay is generally limited to a theoretical account of the relation between interiority and form. It presents interiority as the effect of a complex relation between the psychological and formal-aesthetic values. The latter are those conventionally associated with the period's broad (preponderantly bourgeois) notion of "art," and the disciplinary institutions of criticism seeking to articulate the deeper epistemological and historical implications of aesthetic experience.[2]
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An observation perhaps most frequently made by readers of lyric poetry will help to throw the issues before us into sharper relief. It involves the seeming paradox that what we call voice, and as such often wish to regard as authentically expressive of an inalienable subjective state, usually turns out to be far more than that. For quite commonly we also experience voice, even that of the lyric, as something social and iterable, an articulate structure capable of producing a complex and potentially communicable response. Fundamentally, that is, such an experience suggests that voice is the specific form required by the balancing of individual against universal values. Figuratively speaking (and there really is no other way to speak about it) voice may be understood as a kind of formal half-way house between a basic propositional or expressive content and the exigency of a socially valid form. To the logician, it appears to be a paradox, whereas the rhetorician is likely to ponder its persistent oscillation between the inalienable status of the name and the as yet unrealized authority of the concept. However justified the scepticism of each, neither position quite addresses the most salient characteristic of voice. For in aiming to reconcile, however provisionally, the experience of a deeply significant interiority with an articulation of its social significance, voice itself manifests a unique form of desire. It is what Kant terms a postulate, a notion that entwines materiality and cognitive potential and that aims at redrawing the boundaries between subjective intuition and the discursive, public sphere.[3] For however plausible it may be to characterize voice as an outright paradox or as an irreducible trope, the very urgency and concentration with which it manifests itself as an articulate and sustained form gives evidence that what is being negotiated are always values rather than abstractions.
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Let me now develop further my introductory suggestion that during the first half of the nineteenth century the dialectical relationship between interiority and aesthetic form is conceived in two fundamentally different (and often opposed) ways. The first of these postulates a homology of the work of art's formal composition with that of its beholding intelligence. In this view, aesthetic experience inheres in an essentially dynamic interaction between the work's progressively more complex and reflexive morphological units and their evolving manifestation as a proto-conscious, disinterested pleasure. The other paradigm, by contrast, rests on the premise (already latent in later eighteenth-century aesthetic theory) of a categorical divide between the affective quality associated with aesthetic production and a post-lapsarian consciousness of the discursive world, a welter of discrete, often incompatible interests.
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This basic opposition in turn gives rise to the question concerning the relation between the form of the aesthetic and the possibility (or impossibility) of giving articulation to its experience: in short, the proposition of criticism as an official discourse/discipline of pleasure. Of seminal importance for so-called political readings of Romanticism, as well as for the recent, intense debate over new hermeneutic developments in musicology (to name only two discourses), the question may also be formulated thus: is the telos of aesthetic pleasure that of its critical articulation, its redemption by some kind of discursive intelligence?[4] And, if so, does the pleasure that is being held discursively accountable merely constitute the object of the critical practice involved? Or does that pleasure effectively prepare the ground for the subject's epistemological authority? Does pleasure remain inaccessible to the claims and purposes of discourse and signification? Or, conversely, does pleasure conceal from the very subject caught up in (and consumed by) its experience the critical and social values that so vicariously flow from its experience? Finally, is the (belated) articulation of aesthetic experience, what we call criticism, strictly the "Other" of pleasure, or is it but a more surreptitious strategy for partaking of that pleasure—namely, by continually professing to be on the other side of it (in the manner of Nietzsche's ascetic priest)?
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Long before (and ever since) Wimsatt's theory of a bipolar interpretive disorder of imitative and periphrastic fallacies, criticism had to confront these kinds of questions and, implicit in them, those of its own epistemological and institutional legitimacy. While concerns of this kind are hardly novel, it may be the case that every generation must redefine the basic relation between the forms of pleasure and the objectives of criticism. To reflect on such matters is to involve oneself in a genealogy of critical thought that seeks to name the specific historical moment when pleasure became a constitutive and official problem for philosophical aesthetics and its subsidiary critical disciplines (e.g. poetics, compositional theory and musical aesthetics). Once the point has been identified at which the idea of interiority became inextricably linked to a particular aesthetic paradigm (thereby becoming detached from older, overtly religious models of inwardness) other issues arise. We may then consider, for example, how aesthetic production itself began to respond to, or build upon, the growing institutional authority of aesthetic criticism.[5] Admittedly, the authority and the boundaries of the kind of critical reexamination here proposed are likely to remain uncertain. Indeed, we may be forced to conclude that critical thought—regardless of whether it is conceived as overcoming the aesthetic or as reaffirming its unimpeachable integrity—can never amount to more than a self-referential and self-confirming pursuit. As my preliminary distinction between the two paradigms of early nineteenth-century aesthetic theory suggests, criticism typically risks succumbing to one of two scenarios (with curiously indifferent theoretical consequences). Either it seeks to cultivate a type of knowledge likely to be perceived as incommunicable, unintelligible, and potentially irrelevant; or it aspires to a propositional style that is destined to fall short of aesthetic experiences, notwithstanding its insistence on their merely proto-articulate character.
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Precisely this teleological conception of the aesthetic as proto-articulate is key here. For it simultaneously opens up the two paradigms of the aesthetic that I outlined above: that of its eventual redemption by criticism and the alternative possibility that critical intelligence, judgment, or cognition might be constrained by the irreducibly contingent grain of the voice that utters them. Both historically and conceptually, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) is the key text for any attempt to determine the basic coordinates for these concerns. As Kant argues in that text, the larger significance of aesthetic judgment inheres in its overall application to what he calls "cognition in general," as well as in its performativity as a distinctive type of utterance. By contrast, the propositional specificity and force of aesthetic judgments appears slight at best. For "in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated but . . . a universal voice [allgemeine Stimme], in respect of the satisfaction without the intervention of concepts, and thus the possibility of an aesthetic judgment that can . . . be regarded as valid for everyone" (§ 8, 50). The pleasure that attaches to aesthetic judgment is not the cause of it, for as such it would be purely sensual enjoyment. Rather, it is a pleasure growing out of the subject's reflexive understanding that its own "subjective condition" at the moment of aesthetic experience amounts to something "universally communicable" (allgemein mitteilungsfähig). The "proportionate accord" (proportionierte Stimmung) between the discrete faculties of cognition, Kant argues, constitutes both the cause and the substance of the aesthetic-reflective judgment (§ 9, 54). At its most general, all cognition (Erkenntnis) can thus be characterized as a way of being attuned to discrete phenomena, such that their contemplation will gradually "determine" (bestimmen) the subject via its affective experience of a "concord" (Übereinstimmung) or "conformity" (Zusammenstimmung) between the subject's sensory and discursive faculties: The subjective universal communicability of the mode of representation in a judgment of taste . . . can refer to nothing else than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding (so far as they agree with each other [zusammen stimmen], as is requisite for cognition in general (§ 9, 52). For Kant, that is, the concept of pleasure stands for the manifestation of cognitive potentialities at the level of affect. Harkening back to Leibniz's "monads," the aesthetic is conceived as an encryption of the very intelligence that will constitute itself through its interpretive discernment.[6] And yet, Kant insists on the strict heterogeneity of the two faculties (viz., imagination and understanding) said to circumscribe any knowledge whatsoever, including all knowledge-of-self. Consequently, "th[is] subjective unity of relation" can never be objectified by consciousness as such but, instead, "can only make itself known by means of sensation" [Empfindung] (§ 9, 53).
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With this assertion, however, the Critique of Judgment performs an abrupt shift from the abstract, formal dynamic said to determine our feeling of the beautiful to an inherently empirical and material vocabulary of "sensation."[7] Indeed, the text's metonymic slippage from "feeling" (Gefühl) to "sensation" (Empfindung) imperils the entire transcendental structure of the third Critique, and not surprisingly some readers have suggested that Kant's argument (particularly his digression on music) exposes itself to an "intru[sion of] bodily pleasure into the space reserved for thought" (Kramer, Music as Social Practice, 4).[8] At the very least, the conceptual rupture alerts us to empirical contingencies that lurk within Kant's transcendental argumentation and, consequently, to the precarious balance of the "analytic of the beautiful." Other evidence (as we have already noticed) involves the text's often-critical reliance on various cognates of "voice" (Stimme).[9]
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What makes this shift from "feeling" to "sensation" so significant is the simple, albeit crucial fact that all pleasure demands the materiality of sensation. Only then can it appear for the consciousness whose epistemic authority it underwrites. Speaking about an analogous crisis in Kant's account of the sublime, Paul de Man goes so far as to characterize all transcendental discourse as a purely "tropological system" wherein conceptual advances of any kind are "conceivable only within the limits of such a system." Yet once such tropologically conditioned insight is being "translated back, so to speak, from language into cognition, from formal description into philosophical argument, it loses all inherent coherence and dissolves in the aporias of intellectual and sensory appearance" (de Man, 78). Given the sweeping nature of his conclusions, it is perhaps surprising that de Man should have never troubled himself to inquire whether a similar tropological strategy of generalization might also be at work in Kant's "Analytic of the Beautiful."[10]
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Clearly, there is reason to suspect a pervasive debt of Kant's transcendental argumentation to contingent empirical sensation. For inasmuch as the coherence of Kant's overall critical project depends on a unique feeling of pleasure, the feeling of such pleasure will have to prolong itself in the realm of appearance. Put simply, such a realm of (supposedly) pure affect cannot simply be claimed as a theoretical fact, since the overall coherence of transcendental thought stands or falls with the hypothesis of "feeling," and that always means: its potential detour through the social and material netherworld of appearance and representation. In short, pleasure will have to manifest itself as an appearance at once philosophically pure and materially authentic. Linking the idea of pleasure to the politics of exile, Rousseau had already argued, in the fifth promenade of his Reveries, that pleasure rests on an uninterrupted (albeit contingent) empirical sensation:
Just as Rousseau contrasts "short moments of delirium and passion" with "a simple and permanent state . . . whose duration increases its charm to the point that I finally find supreme felicity in it" (68), Kant's third Critique aims to configure the punctum of empirical sensation with the durée of an interior feeling. The result of this critical negotiation is a subject capable of "knowledge in general" (Erkenntnis überhaupt) or experiencing what Rousseau famously calls le sentiment de l'existence—a state at once phenomenally distinct and transcendentally pure.
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It is important here to note how the language that asserts the contingency of sentiment and pleasure on "a uniform and moderate movement which has neither shocks nor pauses" does itself contribute to and prolong the experience in question. Such uniformity, Margery Sabin observes, manifests itself in "Rousseau's evident satisfaction with his own language of analysis" (113). Similarly, Kant argues that "'pure' in a simple mode of sensation means that its uniformity is neither troubled nor interrupted by any foreign sensation, and it belongs merely to the form" (§ 14, 60, translation modified). Consequently, the representation of knowledge (Vorstellung) in Kant's critical philosophy is not only founded on a basic "feeling of pleasure," but it effectively aims to prolong that pleasure even where (as in the Critique of Judgment) it had been proposed as the object of critical reflection. Inasmuch as the virtual beauty of "harmony" and "proportion" said to prevail between the intellect's discrete faculties is to prove vocal, audible, and lasting, the reflexive operation of critical writing is at least one way of producing that outcome. For the transcendental "disposition" (Stimmung) of our intellectual temper always strives to objectify itself through the formal-material continuity of a "voice" (Stimme).
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What renders the trope of the voice so pivotal for Kant is its potential for establishing communication between two otherwise opposed spheres, the contingent world of appearances and their phenomenal experience on the one hand, and the rational claims of formal-intellectual processes on the other. With these concerns on his mind, Kant now supplements "voice" with the further hypothesis that aesthetic experience, far from being something ephemeral, is in essence "contemplative" and therefore invested in its own prolongation:
In order to accommodate the almost instinctual desire of "pleasure" for self-perpetuation, "contemplation" seeks to recover from the spatio-temporal sphere of empirical sensation precisely those formal conditions that support Kant's basic transcendental argument about "cognition in general" (viz. as resting on the proportionate interplay of the faculties). What Kant ultimately requires is the seeming paradox of a pure form that shall become phenomenally distinct as empirical sensation: a "voice" untainted by the contingencies of interest, signification, and context. It is precisely this exigency that connects "voice" with "tone" and, ultimately, with music. For to the extent that the critical significance of pleasure depends on its temporal duration, the "voice" that gave rise to it requires formalization.[12] That is, prolonged experience of pleasure is best realized in aesthetic forms of a particularly high degree of internal differentiation. For by reconstituting, in a specific medium, the basic "harmony" (Stimmung) that undergirds all critical activity, aesthetic form lends support to the mere postulate concerning the rationality of our representations—that they be internally consistent, verifiable, and communicable.
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As it proclaims a basic continuum between the realm of pure form and the contingencies of empirical sensation, Kant's notion of voice appears to be indeed little more than a trope—desire masquerading as knowledge. However, given the pivotal role of voice for transcendental philosophy, as well as its palpable connection with music and lyricism, it would be imprudent to dismiss it on the grounds of an absolute, indeed self-privileging linguistic scepticism. Rather we ought to trace the role of voice in post-Kantian theory and take particular note of a possibly increasing emphasis placed on its musical connotations. Admittedly, Kant's own thinking about musical form seems erratic and revolves around exotic or parochial examples. Yet at the same time, the complex and altogether lucid deployment of Stimme and its cognates throughout the "Analytic of the Beautiful" contains all the seeds for the subsequent orientation of nineteenth-century aesthetics toward musical form. Thus we might take note of Kant's stress on the ability of "tone" to operate simultaneously as "sensation" and as a "formal determination of the unity of a manifold of sensations" (§ 14, 60; italics mine). Such a claim underscores the prescient, indeed foundational role of the Critique of Judgment for the subsequent aesthetic theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Eduard Hanslick among others. Still, the intellectual bequest of Kant's aesthetic theory was almost immediately split up into two competing models of aesthetic production—and, by extension, into two competing models of aesthetic pleasure and criticism. Each of these is premised on its own distinctive, non-negotiable semiology of the aesthetic work, and each produces a response that—in sharp contrast to Kant's central hypothesis concerning the "universal communicability" of aesthetic pleasure—is alternatively conceived as strictly self-referential or as altogether ineffable.
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