I.iii.Sentimentality, and Its Relevance with the R...
The argument of this section is that the inwardness[41] of feelings, sentiments and sensibility historically co-evolves with a long scopic tradition of vision that exists “in some sense continuous, for instance, from Plato to the present, or from the quattrocento into the late nineteenth century”(Crary 1990:25-26).The possibility of a discourse of sentimentalization cannot dispense with the rise of visuality.These two issues complement each other, and present themselves respectively in the form of psychoanalytical and social self long existent in Western modernity.
The rise of modern visuality mainly refers to the increasing significance of the visual regime of camera obscura from the fifteenth century on, which is often captured as the Cartesian perspectivalism[42].If modernity has been “dominated by the sense of sight in a way that set it apart from its pre-modern predecessors and possibly its postmodern successor”(Jay 1988:3), this ocular-centric perceptual mode cannot be achieved without the invention of modern print medium, as works of McLuhan, Ong and Eisenstein convincingly suggest[43].It makes no historical sense to take the visual mode of camera obscura—specifically the invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century—as a single apparatus.The economy of disciplining and regulating the status of an observer and its tangent forms of subjectivity co-evolves with many other issues of the long period of several centuries.Critical theorist Giorgio Agamben justifies the methodology of paradigm that has been reflected in his and Foucault’s works on archaeology of knowledge.For him,
joining Aristotle’s observations with those of Kant, that a paradigm entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never be stated a priori.(Agamben 2009b:22)
The method of paradigm for Agamben is not the way Thomas Kuhn used in his historical study of science, and is dated back to Plato and Aristotle by Agamben.This method “is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes”(18).Following Agamben’s methodology on the relation between paradigm and exemplarity, this section takes the inward turn of sentiment and sensibility along with the predominant model of perception of camera obscura in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was “fundamentally nonreflexive, visual and quantitative,”as Donald M.Lowe concludes[44].It examines how a new stage of organization of subjectivity is reached as effective to the entire economy of the perceptual, affective and cognitive.David E.Wellbery argues:
Aesthetics, in its emergence as an independent philosophical discipline in the eighteenth century, is a representational theory; that is, the organizing model that lends this theory-type its character depicts the aesthetic field in terms of the category of representation.(Wellbery 1984:44)
Modern aesthetics and representation are an emergent discursive formation closely related to a shift in perception, mediation of the sensible and epistemology in general, of which the modern mode of visuality forms a part.Foucault writes that “observation”in the last two centuries is “a perceptible knowledge,”and it “leaves sight with an almost exclusive privilege, being the sense by which we perceive extent and establish proof, and, in consequence, the means to an analysis partes extra partes acceptable to everyone”(Foucault 1970:132-133).What this observation and practice of visuality valorize are “the appearance of its screened objects:lines, surfaces, forms, reliefs”(133).If visuality is not the exclusive way of organizing knowledge[45], it becomes a significant episteme in talking about what Heidegger categorizes as “the projection of the objectivity of whatever it is”since the Renaissance.Foucault defines this as “a mode that was to be considered as positive, as objective, as that of natural history”(131) in the nineteenth century.This epistemic desire of “tabulation of things”(131) in Western Enlightenment finds its fullest expressions in the pages of the Encyclopédie, a way of organizing knowledge made possible by a print media culture.The great project of this thought is an exhaustive ordering of the world characterized by
discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination; and at their center they form a table on which knowledge isdisplayed contemporary with itself.The center of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the table.(Foucault 1970:74-75)(https://www.daowen.com)
It is in this sense that the thought of the eighteenth century is, as Foucault says, “through and through a philosophy of the sign,”and it formulates a new relation of object and subject.This “tabulation of things”in the visual modality, which is a semi-technology of documentation, provides a site of cultural labor, a body of textual formations that has to be worked through interminably, ad infinitum.
It is an epistemology of “imprinting,”which as John Locke says, “if it signifies anything, being nothing else, but the making certain Truths to be perceived.For to imprint anything on the Mind without the Mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible[46].”In Richard Rorty’s words:
It is as if the tabula rasa were perpetually under the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind—nothing, as Descartes said, being nearer to the mind than itself ...it becomes obvious that the imprinting is of less interest than the observation of the imprint—all the knowing gets done, so to speak, by the Eye which observes the imprinted tablet, rather than by the tablet itself.(Rorty 143-144)
Knowledge of self is immediately hinged upon a self observing upon the mediation between the internal and the external.The visual perception directly participates into an epistemological construction of a selfhood.Jonathan Crary points out that perhaps the most famous image of the camera obscura is in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding written one decade before the eighteenth century[47]:
External and internal sensations are the only passages that I can find of knowledge to the understanding.These alone, as far as I candiscover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room.For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left ...to let in external visible resemblances, or some idea of things without; would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion it would very much resemble the understanding of a man[48].
This becomes a predominant apparatus epistemological as well as perceptual through the eighteenth century.A strong sense of introspection is projected as a salient feature in this visualization of the spatial and perceptual operations of the intellect.The significant function of the mind’s eye lies in its transparent and decorporealized mediation for an observer isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within the dark confines of the camera obscura operation[49].The eye, as metonymical of the human subject, is prevented from having any capability of self-representation as both subject and object.The positioning of the body is marginalized into an invisible spectral non-existence so that an objective imprinting and representation could ensue.One could identify this as a case of what David Wellbery names as “the principle of transparency”(Wellbery, 1984:72) in the representational aesthetic theory of the Enlightenment.This transparency economy effaces any possibility of a reflecting selfreflection[50] for the purpose of objective “tabulation of things”before human beings becomes an event in the order of knowledge in the nineteenth century[51].In the British context under discussion through this writing, it is reflected in the aesthetic disinterestedness as “a major watershed in the history of aesthetics”(Stolnitz 138).This emergence of modern aesthetics is first suggested in the first decade of the eighteenth century by Lord Shaftesbury, which opposes “the desire to possess or use the object”(Stolnitz 134).It becomes, by the middle of the century, a staple in British thought.Inhibiting any action on behalf of the self, this positions a subject as “a spectator rather than an agent,”whose “involvement is controlled and tempered by the detachment of selflessness”(136).Thus, the visual mode of camera obscura as an epistemology seems to be a paradigmatic[52] resolution of what Edmund Husserl defines as the major philosophical problem starting from the seventeenth century:“How a philosophizing which seeks its ultimate foundations in the subjective … can claim an objective ‘true’ and metaphysically transcendent validity[53].”
It is not far-fetched to read this increasing predominance and prevalence of the camera obscura reflecting what Juri M.Lotman’s characterization of the Enlightenment as a “battle against the sign[54].”During this battle, language is desacralized, extricated from its place within the ceremonies of religious and absolutist authority, and transformed into a medium of communication and debate among equal subjects.Language and representation become a medium of exchange, that is.At the same time, this also “impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the now ‘exterior’ world”(Crary 1990:39).Indeed, there exists a historical connection between such an observational empiricist theory of knowledge and what Adela Pinch terms as “emotional extravagance”(3) in the eighteenth century:“extravagance”both in the sense of “that which strays beyond boundaries”and “excessive, lavish, unrestrained emotionality, or sentimentality”(3, 4).This connection leads to the rise of individuality through an epistemological confinement towards its physical and sensory experience, and it is summarized aptly by Nietzsche in The Will to Power:“The senses deceive, reason corrects the errors; consequently, one concluded, reason is the road to the constant; the least sensual ideas must be closest to the ‘true world.’—It is from the senses that most misfortunes come—they are deceivers, deluders, destroyers”(317)[55].Martin Heidegger calls this “the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism”(66) in the modern anthropology of man.This current writing argues that this paradox of Western modernity could be approached through a critical history of mediation and media study, and it is significant for another emergent media shift.