Romanticism and Philosophy
in an Historical Age
The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant
PART II
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Let me now offer a fuller account of the first of these paradigms. Above all, it insists on the epistemological significance of aesthetic experience, that is, on its ability to "attune" the mind and thus prepare the ground for what Kant had called "knowledge in general." The aesthetic, in other words, is being conceived as a formal rehearsal of the subject's cognitive mobility. Thus the subject of aesthetic experience focuses at first on minimal units of observation—say, a musical motif in a Beethoven piano sonata or string quartet, a figure of perceptual or intellectual activity in Hegel's phenomenological narratives, or as a temporalized set of morphological differences emerging in Darwin's analyses of the geological record. In all these cases, a listening, reading, or otherwise observing intelligence reflects on the imitative, differential, and recursive relationships of these minimal units so as to extract a developmental pattern. What Kant had identified as the teleological nucleus of empirical "sensation"—viz. as anticipating the form of its eventual, interpretive re/cognition—thus unfolds as a process in which perception and analysis seem inextricably interwoven. Insofar as it gradually refines raw morphological data into narrative textures of increasing formal and semantic complexity, aesthetic experience develops an Enlightenment model of subjectivity whose intellectual and social authority are fundamentally vested in its interpretive competence. At the same time, Kant's decision to summarize the affect associated with that operation in the word "pleasure" also reflects his understanding that interpretive activity is fundamentally designed to "correct" sensation—that is, to redeem the materiality of being from its vagrant and unreflective drift through time.[13]
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Let me briefly exemplify. Remarking on the striking lack of thematic, much less melodic, substance in Beethoven's op. 31, no. 2 sonata (also known as "The Tempest"), Carl Dahlhaus notes how that sonata's gradual distillation of its central musical "concept" presupposes a strong dialectic bond between "musical form" and the practice of listening. Both have to be "reflective." In his words, the intelligibility of musical form hinges on "an awareness of the pattern from which it deviates, and through this deviation draws attention to the change in the central category of instrumental music—the concept of the theme. The 'theme' is both an improvisatory introduction and a transitional pattern; instead of being presented in standard exposition, it dissolves into an ante quem and a post quem" (14f.). Arguably, the dominant models of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics and analysis (Hanslick, Riemann, Schenker) are all premised on an active experience of music, one revolving not around the passive reception of sound but demanding the silent, listening isolation of recursive, imitative, antithetical, or otherwise differential patterns in a given composition.[14]
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Dahlhaus's notation of the musical "motif" in Beethoven as a purely cerebral, modular unit--"the mere substrate of a process which imparts meaning to the music by providing that substrate with formal functions"--curiously replays Charles Darwin's analogous dismantling of a putatively organic and timeless idea of "Nature" in his Origin of Species. "Nature," Darwin contends, is nothing but the "aggregate action and product of many natural laws," and these laws, in turn, are ultimately but a "sequence of events as ascertained by us" (Darwin, 55). As Darwin clearly understood, to take that view is to establish a teleological bond between the apparent narrative sophistication of his evolutionary theory and the hidden complexities of so-called primitive forms of life. Not only does his principle of Natural Selection confirm "the standard of high organisation, the amount of differentiation and specialization of the several organs in each being." It also institutes these axioms of "specialization" and "high organisation" as conditions for disciplinary and formal developments in the realm of human affairs, which eventually will yield highly reflexive theories, such as the account conceived by Darwin himself (Darwin, 83). Darwin's core-reflection has been provocatively extended in Richard Dawkins's now famous, post-Cartesian account of evolutionist thought. As is well known, Dawkins has argued that "the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene" (The Selfish Gene, 12). On that premise, the morphological developments mapped by generations of evolutionary biologists and their geological counterparts can never actually be said to culminate in any particular form--not even in the particularly recent species of "rational" philosophers or evolutionist thinkers. Rather, each developmental stage is strictly characterized by a modification of inherited, physiological and intellectual traits that responds to prevailing conditions. The psycho-physical reality of the body is not the objective purpose of the development but only the temporary expression of the differential, transitional logic that undergirds all development. As such, the body is but a "survival machine" exclusively dedicated to the transmission/replication of unique genetic information.
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What biologists have long called morphé (in apparent analogy to what, in the humanities, commonly goes under the title of "form"--Grk. eidos) should be understood as encryptions of core-information that is distinguished by its capacity for self-replication. Given the self-replicating character of such "information" we may also call it "intelligence," and as such its embodied (formal) constitution aims to facilitate its transmission to those generations particularly suited for ("receptive to") its inheritance and, again, its future transmission. Not surprisingly, Dawkins draws our attention to how cultural processes unfold in strict analogy to patterns of genetic replication. Indeed, he suggests that the fundamentally imitative logic of culture, really a process of transmission-by-replication, may actually constitute a recent (i.e., over the last three million years or so) evolutionary leap. Speaking of "unit[s] of cultural transmission" (206), which he names memes, Dawkins anticipates Bourdieu's arguments about cultural reproduction by remarking on the "survival value" of such mnemonic or cognitive units ("cultural capital" in the widest sense). Compared to the slow and uneven evolution of genes over some three thousand million years, "memes" may be viewed as a dramatic improvement and, possibly, a paradigmatic change: "For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. . . . The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the 'soup' in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off" (208). [15] It is my contention that nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and musical practice display the operation of self-replicating units whose progressive organization, combination, and reconstitution in/as cultural "work" pivots on correspondingly evolved, "constructive" patterns of reception. Among these rank prominently certain insistently collaborative reading and listening practices aimed at reconstituting the information contained in a specific aesthetic form and, in so doing, replicating the "intelligence" that produced that form.[16] In a similar vein, Roland Barthes characterizes "listening" in the proper, musical sense (as opposed to the mere physiology of "hearing") as "the exercise of a function of intelligence, i.e., of selection."[17] It is in that sense, too, that we may understand Kant's pointed remark on how "we linger over the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself" (§12, 58).
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To return to musical aesthetics, the formal/morphological paradigm of the aesthetic as an encrypted intelligence emerges with full force in Eduard Hanslick's 1854 treatise Of the Musically-Beautiful. Premising early on that "composing is a work of mind upon material compatible with mind" (31), Hanslick formulates his conception of musical form as the development of an abstract intelligence, alternately engaged in its composition or in its reconstruction: "Music consists of tonal sequences, tonal forms; these have no other content than themselves. . . . The[se] forms which construct themselves out of tones are not empty but filled; they are not mere contours of a vacuum but mind giving shape to itself from within" (71, 30; italics mine).[18] Hanslick's formalist approach is succinctly captured by his much-quoted characterization of listening as "contemplating with active understanding," a process that compels us to "rigorously distinguish between the concepts of feeling and sensation" (3, 4). Unfolding in strict analogy to the compositional process, then, "listening" is generative of pleasure precisely insofar as it occasions reflexivity:
For Hanslick, interiority no longer comprises any affective experiences in particular. On the contrary, any Romantic conception of "feeling" is quickly repudiated as a mere illusion, an unreflected verbal condensation (or trope) of the intricate structural effects that, in Hanslick's view, define the work of composing and listening. Far from positing some putative emotive or expressive content, Hanslick's post-classical theory conceives of musical composition as an increasingly complex encoding and replicating of formal possibilities said to have originated in the core datum of music—the motif.
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Eventually, such recursive and differential patterns reach a point where their organizational logic becomes self-conscious: replication yields to reflexivity, thus generating a subjective self-awareness that Hegel's Encyclopedia of 1819 had already described as the structural signature of subjective intelligence. Insofar as it merely furnishes the empirical substratum of all affect (11), but no particular affective content, music is pure temporality—"motion" but not "emotion." Like Kant, who had remarked on the tendency of pleasure to reproduce and strengthen over time, Hanslick predicates the "mental satisfaction" or pleasure of aesthetic experience on the complex, self-replicating morphology that allows the listening subject to distill musical form by retracing the temporal organization of all composition. Not surprisingly, the knowledge produced by such listening proves strictly non-propositional and ineffable. As Hanslick puts it: "if we want to specify the 'content' of a theme [Motiv] for someone, we will have to play for him the theme itself" (81). In Hanslick's proto-structuralist understanding of musical form, "pleasure" has been absorbed into the cognitive play of an attentively listening, analytic intelligence. Emptied of all affective content, and only incidentally attached to the materiality of sound and tone, musical experience has been pared down to an objective corollary of the analytic processes it sets in motion. What drops out of the picture, to overstate the case but slightly, is the music itself. No longer considered is the material and tonal specificity of music as "sonority" (Klangbild) as it is shaped by countless decisions in the area of orchestration, instrumentation, tonal color, to say nothing of the innumerable contingencies that shape a given musical performance. Here, then, Kant's purposely ambivalent conception of pleasure has been intellectualized to the point where the analytic aims of aesthetic experience have altogether erased its distinctive materiality—what Kant had carefully peserved under the heading of "sensation" (Empfindung).[19]
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Substantive differences now begin to emerge between Kant's original, cautious balancing of the formal organization and the material mode of appearance of the aesthetic—that is, our "feeling" of the potential determinability of appearances and their "communicability" in propositional forms. For Kant, configuring the material sensation of voice with the transcendental work of representation had always served an ethical purpose: namely, to define the conditions for (and thus work toward) the discursive production of knowledge and, by extension, of community. The Kantian "aesthetic" thus strives to reflect and represent the crucial balance between the subjective "intensity" of Gefühl and in its phenomenal origination as Empfindung. It pivots on the (ultimately paradoxical) notion of a "pure sensation," a materially concrete, determinate construct devoid of any contingent or discordant features that would compromise its formal compatibility with the postulated, beholding intelligence. For the purpose of this utopian object lies at all times with the "communicability" of our judgment of it. In Kant's argument, "pleasure" unfolds as a metonymic series leading from contingent "sensation" via its contemplative extension to purely formal inwardness of "feeling" to a para-practice better known as the discourse of taste. Some sixty years later, Hanslick's musical paradigm of the aesthetic as an objective and immediate correspondence between the physicality of sound and the psychology of a listening intelligence effectively abandons this Enlightenment objective of "communicability." Thus Hanslick pares down the dynamics of Kantian affect (Gefühl) to a purely reflexive formalism that construes music as a total homology between the quantitative notations of a musical score and the "attentiveness" of a listening intelligence: it is a paradigm at once irrefutable, incommunicable, and (almost defiantly) irrelevant.
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