Romanticism and Philosophy
in an Historical Age
The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant
PARTS III & IV
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Let me now take up the second, in some ways diametrically opposed aesthetic paradigm. A first impression of it can be obtained by considering the work of the later Keats, particularly the great odes. Though these poems are profoundly intellectual, their emphasis arguably differs from the complex irony of narrative plot as it operates in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Lamia." Forever uncertain as to whether something by the name of interiority might ever be ascertained in that vast gallery of spectacles and commodities known as London, Keats vacillates between ironic abandon and melancholic longing. Indeed, to the author aspiring to a Shakespearean "life of allegory," either position may finally be nothing more than a way of acknowledging the impossibility of the other. Hence the intrinsically equivocal (figural) interaction between the distinctive Keatsian rhetoric of erotic and cultural desire—the prominent sensualism of his Romances, his Odes, and book III of "Hyperion"—and an equally characteristic rhetoric of despair often centered around the motif of vulgar Capitalist materialism.
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Particularly in the 1819 Odes, Keats appears in search of a sphere of virtual (and no more than temporal) refuge from the cognitive and emotive limbo that is the price of uncompromising radical (self-)irony. Interiority here is sought precisely not in the domain of intellectual agility. Instead, the trope of the "heart" is once more resurrected as the essential repository of an abiding, subjective truth. As he promotes that heart as "the Mind's Bible, . . . the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity," Keats also seems to aspire toward an emphatically material aesthetic. Given the latter's incompatibility with any expressly propositional and self-consciously theoretical language, Keats collapses all historically determined reference into a voice at once richly sensuous and altogether beyond the reach (and taint) of propositional and discursive obligation. Often it seems as though the rich imagery of the great odes (capstones of Keats's so-called "objective" aesthetic) was designed to hypnotize the reader, and perhaps also the writer. Keats's elaboration of the material and synaesthetic richness of the image, and his correspondingly thorough elision of all narrative, appears preemptive of conscious awareness. Hence we are perplexed by a persistent, if equivocal, continuity between Keats's familiar idiom of erotic and cultural desire—extending from his earliest sonnets and Romances to the opening of the abandoned third book of "Hyperion"—and his equally distinctive rhetoric of askesis, even despair in the odes.
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We recall the pungent still-life of "To Autumn" with its opening imagery of "mellow fruitfulness," "ripeness to the core" and "clammy cells"—a scene suffused with tactile and olfactory sensation. By the third stanza, however, that potentially scandalous plenitude has been subtly assimilated to a chorus of voices whose gradual ascent from the "loud bleat" of lambs to the "treble soft" of the "red-breast" completes the distinctive Keatsian transfiguration of desire into autonomous form with that last, evanescent image of how the "gathering swallows twitter in the skies." "Voice" here serves as the latently embodied sanctuary for anthropomorphic desires whose gradual muting or transfiguration organizes the stanzaic sequence of Keats's odes. In Keats's unique textual and imagistic world, tropes suggestive of natural reference and the aesthetic distillations of a second-order Classicism often appear mutually reinforcing. The result is a poetry in which the physis and mnemosyne—rerouted through the Keatsian image—ventriloquize his (and, perhaps, our own) deep-seated desire for an existence unburdened by the rigors of philosophical discourse or by the unrelenting ironic awareness of its impossibility. Abandoning his intermittent ideal of a pseudo-Hellenic sobriety, the late Keats thus appears to embrace a palpably simulated interiority—a position referred to as a "system of Spirit-creation" and, somewhat extravagantly, praised by its inventor as "a grander system of salvation than the chryst<e>an religion" (Letters, II, 102-3).
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The most thorough instance of this intellectual position can be found in the writings of Schopenhauer. For him, the aesthetic experience is the capstone of all finite existence in that it facilitates the self-transcendence and transfiguration of subjectivity by means of contemplation. To contemplate is to submit to the mesmeric force of material appearances whose concision and presence leave "the entire consciousness . . . filled and occupied by a single image" (§ 34, 179). Already in its very title, The World as Will and Representation reacts to the deeply equivocal implications of Kant's "critical" project. For Kant "knowledge in general" (or, simply, "Enlightenment") pivots on a transcendental condition of a "feeling" (Gefühl), a strictly formal, harmonious interplay between the subject's intuitive and conceptual faculties that insures the a priori "determinability" and "communicability" of all experience. Precisely because of its exclusive, transcendental status, however, the affective condition of feeling could not be verified (or falsified) by the subject whose representations it was said to ground and authorize as genuine knowledge. For any attempt to authenticate the transcendental condition of "feeling" would have to scrutinize its contingent appearance in the world of empirical "sensation"—a world no longer defined by rational harmony (Stimmung) but by the grain, texture, and charisma of multiple styles, tropes, and voices (Stimmen).
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Rather than insisting on an analytic transcendence of such multiplicity, however, Schopenhauer affirms the potential uniqueness of all appearance. Far from qualifying some ultimate epistemological objective, "voice" to him constitutes a presence at once unsuspected, mesmerizing, and irreproducible. His aesthetic of contemplation thus demands an utter transmutation of the inchoate and narcissistic desires of the conscious intellect, or "will," into an aesthetically embodied idea. The Enlightenment ideal of the intrinsic rationality, or transcendental coherence of all representation here gives way to a (Buddhist-inspired) conception of transcendence, a metaphysical ideal that demands askesis (Ger. Entsagung) and promises ekstasis. Both the condition and the reward, however, imply that the subject of aesthetic experience entrust itself altogether to the mesmerizing, sonorous, and material presence of the aesthetic object, thus effectively surrending all the epistemological and moral objectives that Kant had struggled to balance in his third Critique.
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For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic functions as a sanctuary, a virtual sphere of refuge for the subject forever entangled in an inscrutable and inextricable nexus of pre-conscious motives, analytic claims, and conscious objectives. This inexorable causality—which Schopenhauer efficiently identifies as "the will"—is said to objectify itself exclusively in two forms, both supposedly immediate and hence authentic: music and the body. Arguing that the "will" manifests itself "through [everyone's] actions and through the permanent substratum of . . . his body, Schopenhauer reinstates the Kantian exigency (or paradox) of pure sensation. In its corporeal and musical objectifications, "the will constitutes what is most immediate in . . . consciousness, but as such . . . has not wholly entered into the form of the representation, in which subject and object stand against each other" (§ 21, 109). Reminiscent of the body in early Greek tragic ritual, music is essentially dithyrambos, the "immediate objectification and copy (Abbild)" (§ 52, 257) of the will. Such an apodictic definition notably forecloses on any accounts of music as generative of discursive meaning or as the transcendental (formal) prerequisite for the production of such meaning:
Not only is the materiality of "tone" posited as the true locus of aesthetic experience, but the passage also attests to the underlying desire of philosophy to escape itself by embracing the inalienable, positively mesmerizing aura of body and sound as its ultimate sanctuary. In its sheer sonority music is said to absolve us from the inchoate, rough-and-tumble world of conflicting representations. This desire of philosophy to secure absolution for its fallen subjects—at its core a deeply anti-theoretical fantasy—also accounts for Schopenhauer's overtly Platonist notion of the aesthetic "idea." Inasmuch as that "idea" requires ascetic self-transcendence, Schopenhauer sets it in direct opposition to representation (Vorstellung). For only that may qualify as an "idea" which is not afflicted by the partial, finite, and contestable quality of discursive representation. As he puts it, the idea lacks "plurality" or, rather, it precedes all plurality.
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The aesthetic idea and its embodied appearance thus have become fully homologous. Irreducible to logical propositions and irrefutable in ways that discursive representation can never be, the aesthetic idea, as conceived by Schopenhauer, is prima facie a presence: embodied, material, and irreducibly "sonorous." Realized as such by music and the body, this formulation of aesthetics allows post-Kantian theory to realize its most precious dream, that of materiality as "immediate representation." The materiality of the aesthetic thus no longer mediates any epistemological concerns, nor is it any longer restricted to the incidental status of "sensation" as had still been the case in the Critique of Judgment. Instead, the proclaimed isomorphism of materiality and idea opens up the last frontier of philosophical writing—namely, to transfigure contingent experience into outright revelation. A precursor of the New Criticism's concrete universals, Schopenhauer's conception of the body and music appears to challenge current critical techniques and hermeneutic methods that promise to restore to the aesthetic productions of the past the supposedly lacking consciousness of their own ideological determinacy. Yet precisely because of its ostensibly antithetical intellectual tendencies, Schopenhauer's magnum opus urges us to consider the cognitive and moral claims of our own critical moment (and possible limits to them). Does a theoretically inspired historical critique amount to authentic action, or does it merely seek to compensate for the deeper intuition that neither the antagonisms of the past nor those of the present can be resolved by any form of action?
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Provided its metaphysical rhetoric is not simply being ignored or preemptively dismissed as a mere phase in the history of philosophy, Schopenhauer's account will be found to contain some important lessons for contemporary criticism. Perhaps it does so all the more because—again like most critical writing today—it altogether lacks the saving grace of Keatsian irony. Above all, there is his extraordinary claim that we may immediately access a world beyond "will and representation," a world of wholly authentic (if mostly tragic) insight that can be reached only through the expressive inroads of the body and music. If such a metaphysical credo lies at the very heart of Schopenhauer's writing, it also seems uncannily prescient of the self-privileging, not to say hedonistic, forms of autobiographical and confessional critical writing that have taken center stage in the humanities during the past dozen years or so. Only very recently has this phenomenon of an "Intimate Critique" and of "Thinking through the Body" (to appropriate but two of the titles in question) begun to receive proper theoretical attention. Thus, in his polemic on The Illusions of Postmodernism, Terry Eagleton offers a blunt indictment of a professionalized hedonism at the very heart of confessional and autobiographical critical writing. Eagleton here appears to follow David Simpson's slightly earlier thesis that such flamboyantly stylized critical voices are symptomatic of a pervasive methodological uncertainty and a flagging of genuine political commitment across the humanities.[20]
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Of particular relevance for present purposes is Eagleton's insistent questioning of what he calls the "new somatics," specifically the current fetishization of the sexualized and unfailingly "well nourished" body. Indeed, it seems increasingly axiomatic to argue that critical work in the humanities and literary studies can only advance insofar as it is cued by the obliquely glamorous aura of the body—its tantalizing promise of ever-new modes of transgressive and performative sexuality. Like Schopenhauer's twofold essence of body and music, the spectacle (or reality, as the case may be) of an anonymous, strictly physiological conception of the sexual subject thus finds its complement in the unwavering gaze and often sternly disciplinarian voice of postmodern critique. Such a model can presumably only advance by continually intensifying the closeness and reflexivity of its focus on the embodied subject, an approach that risks appearing coldly analytic, narcissistic-confessional, or as outright invasive. At the same time, the construction of the body as a subject of professional (if esoteric) critique effectively confounds the very values of a humane, liberal society in whose name such writing is being pursued. For the more insistent the "outing" of the sexualized body, the more that body—and indeed the voice of critique itself—appears interchangeable, remote, and anonymous. At the very least, that is, it has become increasingly hard to tell whether the soulless and abject appearance of the postmodern sexualized subject is merely the latest object of critical practice or, perhaps, its unwitting effect.
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Arguably, in a profession as particularized as the humanities at the end of the twentieth century—a scene Fredric Jameson describes as the "delirious nonstop monologue of . . . so many in-group narratives" (Postmodernism, 368)—questions like those raised above may quite likely never be settled. By comparison, it seems rather obvious that the recent view of the subject as almost exclusively determined by its embodied sexuality has eroded even the most basic criteria for verifying or falsifying intellectual claims. At the very least, the strenuously confessional approach to critical writing during the past decade has suspended any serious reflection on the basic conceptual and ethical questions that the Enlightenment (well before Kant) had considered integral to any pursuit of knowledge. Inasmuch as a crudely material focus on the body and a correspondingly self-privileging conception of voice have eclipsed the basic Enlightenment goal of articulating the fundamental connection between the (aesthetic) phenomenon of pleasure and the communicability of knowledge, much theoretical ground has been lost. Thus the postmodern vision of the body as the site of incommunicable, irreproducible, though nonetheless spectacular experiences effectively collapses "pleasure" and "sensation" into one another. In Eagleton's view, the body has become a self-privileging, "stubbornly local phenomenon . . . [that] offers a mode of cognition more intimate and internal than the much scorned Enlightenment rationality" (70-1).
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Against the Enlightenment paradigm of critical knowledge as the open-ended progression of an intersubjective conversation, this new fin-de-siècle idiom posits a different, overtly subjectivist or self-referential form of small-scale discourse that ventriloquizes critical knowledge in the minimalist form of subjective reminiscence extracted, in turn, from autobiographical experience. Thus, for example, the "Preface" to Marianna Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway already puts readers on notice that, however intense our assimilist and educational yearning, life "invariably . . . shows me that ethnicity matters." Read in conjunction with the author's preceding stipulation that her text issues "from my special cultural situation: that of a female Italian American professor of English who lives in North Carolina and writes about American society," the reference to ethnic victimization effectively immunizes the book as a whole against all possible dissent. For to take exception with the book's subsequent representation of what it means to be "White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst" is liable to leave the dissenting voice exposed to charges of incompetence and/or insensitivity (Torgovnick, viii). As David Simpson notes in The Academic Postmodern, Walter Benjamin's essay on the "Storyteller" already offered a historical analysis of what can be described as the shift from a diegetic to a transferential logic of narrative:
Simpson's account of the transferential logic of postmodern storytelling reveals some striking continuities between post-Kantian aesthetics and the recent upsurge of a confessional and autobiographical critical writing—a genre less invested in the cogency of its propositions than in the performative recreation of its embodied subject(s) as a public spectacle. The transferential logic underlying what Bernstein calls "a species of narcissistic activism" is the result of a persistent shift away from public argumentation toward the subtly coercive dramaturgy of subjective reminiscence. Rather than retaining the conscious position of an addressee, that is, readers are being conscripted for an obliquely moral agenda that they may no longer contest without appearing to violate a covenant with the confessional subject. Inasmuch as it sentimentalizes, and ultimately privileges voice over text, disclosure over debate, the genre of confessional criticism reveals a fundamental "tension between a focus upon subjectivity and a construction of identity which is communal rather than individualistic."[22] Far from constituting some startling epistemological breakthrough, the authority of such affect-centered storytelling pivots on the "sweet enforcement" (to borrow Keats's apt phrase) of that unsolicited covenant with its audience. The ultimate objective, in other words, is not knowledge but a smooth and fully collaborative professional relationship between teller and addressee. Attempting to forge a significantly personal and critical voice, Jane Tompkins expressly foregoes argument in favor of transference: "I'm asking you to bear with me while I try, hoping that this, what I write, will express something you yourself have felt or will help you find a part of yourself that you would like to express" (Tompkins, 28). Yet to lay claim to personal experience in the supposedly unmediated, extra-disciplinary form of confession implicitly collapses cognition into performance and, as a further (and perhaps not unwelcome) consequence, forecloses all possibility of rational dissent. Thus freed from the methodological constraints of intersubjective discourse, the critical authority of the writer's voice now subsists solely on its ability to simulate or conjure the proton pseudos of ineffable, contingent experience—itself no longer represented to a discrete listener but, instead, transferentially reproduced through an identically situated addressee.
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Another consequence of this development involves the palpable aloofness of criticism when it comes to questions of class. Rather than demanding consideration of the political, social, and cultural antagonisms that variously impinge on a given subject, the confessional voice is accredited almost exclusively by its established or presumptive connections with an audience of materially identical status. These relations, in turn, can be understood as the products of an intrinsically narcissistic pattern of narrative transference and self-replication, an open-ended Lacanian dialectic in which speaker and addressee subsist strictly on the basis of affective claims and an inherently confessional rhetoric. The social (even moral) authority of such claims is typically secured by the speaker's peremptory rejection and indictment of any alternative modes of cognition, such as might still rely on certain principles of evidence, falsifiability, or motive.
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What we witness here is the final passing of the Enlightenment paradigm of intelligence—with its Kantian postulates of rational, dispassionate cognition and transparent representation. In its stead, we find a postmodern, self-interested, and highly adaptive professional voice whose critical authority depends on its ability to imbue its subjective (and putatively transgressive) subject matter with an aura of public urgency. As Jeremy Bentham observed long ago, to collapse the work of cognition into the spectacle of confession effectively misappropriates the reader's sympathetic potential for purposes of critical coercion. For in and of itself, affect "is not a positive principle itself, so much as a term employed to signify the negation of all principle." Consequently, attempts to predicate the authority of one's voice on a purely subjective state are but "so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself" (Principles, 16-17). To indulge in such an approach for any length of time is likely to replace the inevitably provisional and often disputatious logic of principled discourse with a supple and fluid logic of affective manipulation. The result will likely be an intellectual environment where critical and social authority is almost exclusively vested in highly particularized forums and in obliquely circumscribed "in-groups."
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Here, then, any intersubjective and deliberative conception of knowledge has been supplanted by the critical exigency of elaborating a distinctive professional persona and adapting its voice to a carefully mapped discursive environment. The result, as Theodor Adorno notes, is a "mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there actually being any business to transact." Adorno's prescient 1951 account of a quintessentially postmodern interiority—one defined by the phony transactionalism of hyper-professionalized communities—is worth quoting at length. As Adorno remarks, the "nervous" subjects of this new order
In Adorno's account, which conceives postmodern professionalism as a thorough adaptation of the subject to its chosen discursive or interpretive communities, the ethical integrity of "voice" has been abandoned—one might say, almost as a matter of principle.
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Gone is the basic ethical imperative as it had found expression in Kant's master-trope of the "voice" (Stimme). The latter, we have seen, postulates an agency at once unmistakably "subjective" yet intensely committed (both in an ethical and teleological sense) to the objectives of cognition and community. Moreover, to the extent that this "voice" is said to manifest itself as the "sensation" and "feeling" of "harmony" (Stimmung) it also constitutes the most distinctive and articulate evidence for what the third Critique calls "communicability." Kant's ambivalent bequest to aesthetic theory had been to name—in the precise way that the act of "naming" hovers between the creative and the recursive, the tropological and the referential—"pleasure" and "voice" as the non-transcendable conditions for the operation of criticism itself. At the same time, the much larger stakes of Kant's critical enterprise strongly militate against an exclusive, indeed narcissistic reflection that would promote pleasure and voice from a necessary condition for representation to the sole object of knowledge. Arguably, this question of how to conceive of a "voice" (Stimme) capable of investing the irreducible experience of "pleasure" with greater social significance undergirds the cognitive and confessional authority of contemporary historicist and "experimental-critical" writing, respectively. As I have suggested elsewhere, these discourses often enough turn out to repeat the logic of their disciplinary object (e.g., Romantic "expressivism," the egotistical sublime), either by promising to overcome it in the supposedly autonomous modality of critical knowledge, or by emulating it in the ineffable dramaturgy of critical confession.[23]
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