Imagination under Pressure, 1789~1832:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility

For example, when Burke comes to the surplus 'expenditure of a great landed property' he has in mind something more palpable than the mere aspect of majestic liberty or the lustre of statesmen or monarchs. In his catalogue of the glorious cultural edifices of aristocratic culture, 'the accumulation of libraries', the 'great collections of antient records, medals, and coins', 'paintings and statues', and 'collections of the specimens of nature',^[48] Burke offers a cultural history to rival the festivals and rituals of the new French Republic. The historical nature of this culture is used to attack the selfish and voluptuous individualism of its French counterpart. Burke stresses not only the revered, majestic, and sacred nature of the edifices, but also the work - the 'sweat' of the artisans and peasants who are differently involved in their construction and maintenance. As he plays off the religious identity of British cultural edifices against the upstart and secular nature of French festivals Burke finds a dignity in work, a dignity produced by 'the fictions of a pious imagination'.^[49] At the same time as offering aristocratic culture as a sign of historical self-consciousness he is only able to guarantee social cohesion by reference to the mere fictions of a 'pious imagination' rather than the true nature of glory. This capacity to see certain forms of imagination as the psychological tool of class hegemony at the same time as celebrating the civilisation of aristocratic culture is entirely characteristic of Burke's strategy. He is not worried by this powerful combination of ornamental and transcendent glory and ideological weapon:

[the great critics] have taught us one essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge, as well as a perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere applied it, or something like it, in his own profession. It is this: that, if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists (Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo) whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them, until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on. It is as good a rule, at least, with regard to this admired Constitution. We ought to understand it according to our measure, and to venerate where we are not able presently to comprehend.^[50]

When Burke considers the glory that was ancien regime France he deploys a similarly complex position as he mixes reverential awe with an engagingly explicit account of the way in which such a response to the culture of second nature operates as an anti-revolutionary psychological mechanism:

when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets, and her orators sacred and profane, I behold in all this something which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure . . . (Reflections, p. 236[180])

Within his own constitutionally supported and constitutionally bolstering version of the imagination, however, the dangers of individual caprice and collective ennui are both avoided. In Burke's version of the moral and reverent imagination, its creative and transcendent capacity working under 'a pious predilection' for ancestors is capable of 'realiz[ ing] . . . a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour'.^[52]

Burke provides ample illustration of the powerful ways in which the imagination in conjunction with beauty can serve to secure the fabric of society by offering the pleasing aspect of aesthetic experience at the same time as displacing possible critique. Nevertheless, it might seem strange to see him at the end of the Reflections championing one of the more extravagant fictions of the economic imagination: the South Sea Bubble.

Just as the French revolutionaries have turned the social compact into an act of terror represented by the ubiquitous prospect of the scaffold, so, too, their financial representation is a manifestation of force. For Burke, the assignat is a sign of tyranny, an imposition which flies in the face of reality and the choice involved in the act of exchange:

When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper-money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on the Change, because in Westminster- hall it is impotent. (Reflections, p. 357[278-79])

A grand imagination found in this flight of commerce something to captivate. It was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle. It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours is. Men were not then quite shrunk from their natural dimensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy, and fitted for low and vulgar deceptions. Above all remember, that in imposing on the imagination, the then managers of the system made a compliment to the freedom of men. In their fraud there was no mixture of force. (Reflections, p. 369[287])

The negative revolutionary potential of the compliment to liberty to be found in the limitlessness of imaginative speculation is the subject of Burke's concern in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. Here there is a powerful awareness of the danger of imagination cut loose from the community of feeling:

It must always have been discoverable to persons of reflection, but it is now obvious to the world, that a theory concerning government may become as much a cause of fanaticism as a dogma in religion. There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination . . . When a man is from system furious against monarchy or episcopacy, the good conduct of the monarch or the bishop has no other effect than further to irritate the adversary. He is provoked at it as furnishing a plea for preserving the thing which he wishes to destroy. His mind will be heated as much by the sight of a sceptre, a mace, or a verge, as if he had been daily bruised and wounded by these symbols of authority. Mere spectacles, mere names, will become sufficient causes to stimulate the people to war and tumult.^[53]

Indeed, the particular power of Burke's sophisticated rhetoric might be said to reside in its ability to short-circuit any crude binary opposition between the particular and abstract. His use of the aesthetic as integral to the formation and apprehension of one's civic identity does not stop him retaining a sense of the aesthetic as ornament. His strategic and, at times, inconsistent reference to first and second natures allows him to make use of both possibilities. The hegemonic potential of Burke's rhetoric depends upon a representational doubling which allows for a literal presentation at the same time as a figurative one. It is precisely the possibility of moving from an empirical to an idealist position, from a literal to a symbolic mode, from the particular to the general, that provides the enclosing circularity necessary to enforce a dominant ideological position. In this way a moral imperative can be linked with commonsense, the largest idea of the state with the 'smallest platoon' of our social life. It is characteristic of such an ideology of commonsense that it operates upon such oscillations. The fluctuation between different modes of representation allows for the presentation of pragmatics as morality. In Burke's case, as we shall see, there is a disjunction between metaphysical power and the realm of worldly concerns. The doubleness that I have identified as belonging to a symbolicmode can be found in the split between power and the political. Precisely because there is this enforcing power already at work, society and government can be legitimately plural or 'liberal', but by the same authority they must always remain contingent, mixed, and complex. Politics is thus not for theorists, speculators, or projectors, but for practical ability. Burke's desperate defences of the English system of government and the European code of chivalry can, by turns, appeal to a cohesive spirit of unity on the one hand, liberal choice and geographical specificity on the other. From this perspective it might be said that, precisely because he always falls short of a Romantic aesthetics of the organic or the symbolic and retains a sense of difference, Burke is able to avoid the alienation produced by an ideology of the aesthetic and is able to afford both imagination and beauty a central role in the formation of a dominant ideology.

The reactionary nature of Burke's mode of representation as it relates to the sublime and the organic has, I think, been well documented. The essentially duplicitous nature of an aesthetic experience which stages radical encounters for the purposes of self-empowerment and selfaggrandisement, and a model of representation which uses the natural as a means of short-circuiting critique, have become familiar stories underpinning the historiography of Romantic period aesthetics. By concentrating instead on Burke's idea of imagination, other more positive stories are available. It is still possible to see the appeal to freedom evident in Burke's imaginative response to the South Sea Bubble as a sign of privileged luxury: only those enfranchised few, who might also be the elite audience of Burke's own Reflections, can enjoy the appeal. They, at least, have a measure of liberty to enjoy. It is also possible to see such an appeal as a disarming act of chivalry whose effect is to out-face or dissolve critique. Having one's liberty appealed to maintains the fiction that one is in possession of liberty in the first place. Acknowledging these caveats, I would prefer to maintain some belief in the efficacy and power of Burke's texts. There is some appeal in his dynamic engagement with the problematical and spectral capacity of the faculty of imagination and in his idea that the workings of power need to be legitimised and given assent by self-consciousness. Self-consciousness need not inevitably be a subscription to false-consciousness; there is a possibility here for dissent and at least a strong sense of active participation which, as Burke would be the first to agree, needs intelligence and vigilance if it is to survive.

Burke's depiction of an imagination which is capable of offering an appeal or even a compliment to one's individual freedom, albeit concessionary and limited, turns out to be important for the way in which literary culture uses another version of imagination as its touchstone in the war against utilitarianism in the 1820s and 1830s. Even the compromised liberty offered as a sop by a dying aristocratic culture turns out to have its uses. For Hazlitt, literary culture is peculiarly fraught for this reason. It is always likely to side with legitimacy, but contains a well articulated discourse of individual choice which originates from a problematically constituted freedom. This capacity to register individual choice and to articulate individual experience provides the means by which his brand of dissenting humanism can offer at least some kind of counter to the ideology of utilitarianism which is seen to have ruled out choice from its ethics, soul from its metaphysics, and individual experience from its demography. This is also why the imagination is of such concern for Coleridge. It is the faculty of individual perception on which he attempts to build an epistemology and an ethics based on hope and faith. At the heart of his enterprise is the notion of choice. Even within his deployment of the organic analogy, which can undoubtedly act to occlude and more obviously naturalise (and thereby legitimate) the workings of reactionary or established power, he persistently seeks to locate a point of access for the workings of individual will.

It is my contention that Burke's deployment of imagination in response to the French revolution in his Reflections is a politicisation of the faculty which has as many opportunities as disadvantages. I would choose to focus on Burke's creation of a political imagination rather than on his ideological masking of the workings of hegemony evident in his subscription to a pre-Coleridgean notion of organic form - the collusive naturalising of the organic model as a way of mystifying or occluding the real forces at work in the body politic. Imagination, in contrast, offers a more unstable subject position which actually foregrounds self-consciousness, indeed, highlights the subject's self-consciousness as a prerequisite for social order. The mediatory and mediating agent of imagination performs an unsettling double-act which lies at the heart of Burke's ideology. Burke's articulation of the imagination in his Reflections provides a means of accessing what James Chandler has recently referred to as the essentially miscible nature of Burke's thinking. ^[54] Imagination not only inhabits that miscibility, it articulates it as a subject position which can be dynamically inhabited by the enfranchised citizen. That Burke's deployment of imagination as the very agent of civic self-consciousness is accompanied by an awareness of its polymorphous, even suspect nature - its capability of offering too much liberty, of, in short, offering a fantasy of freedom to the ego - makes it even more fascinating and fraught.

As Burke is reviewed and revalued in the wake of the bicentenary of his death, the instabilities of such a subject position are beginning to be appreciated and understood, and in ways which rightly complicate the assessment of the aesthetic's ideology as being one which is simply serviceable to the dominant: a history of the aesthetic which renders it marginal, even depoliticises it. Only by appreciating this other story within Burke's politicisation of the aesthetic and the imagination's particular role within it can we begin to properly rewrite the history of imagination in the Romantic period and its response to the burgeoning ideology of utilitarianism. The force of Burke's imagination was taken up by Coleridge. Hazlitt also recognised in Burke's example imagination's ideological character, its inscription of power within culture, and even its resurgent capacity within a dying aristocratic culture.

The response of Burke's most famous liberal and radical opponents in the 1790s to his deployment and defence of aristocratic culture is to consign it to the oblivion of history, to make it look like the swan-song of its age.^[55] Aristocratic culture in the guise of chivalry is made to look belated, even gothic in nature. And even this, of course, can be attributed in part at least to Burke's own rhetoric: his defence of aristocratic culture sometimes appears to lack conviction, as we have seen; and the rhetorical strategy of the Reflections is in some large measure to offer the threat of a new age which shall sweep away all vestiges of European civilisation. It is not surprising, therefore, that both Wollstonecraft and Paine direct their attacks on Burke towards his deployment of an aristocratic aestheticising culture which their own rhetoric dismisses as belatedly historical. In some ways they could be said to turn Burke into a romanticist of the previous generation.^[56] While Wollstonecraft struggles to revitalise the radical potential which sensibility had contained within the 1780s by combining it with a moral version of imagination and a progressivist rationality, Paine attempts to bypass the aesthetic of literary culture altogether and by so doing escape the need for a mediatory faculty of imagination.