Chapter II Rhetoric and the Rise of Modern Aesthet...
No man, in his senses, ever thought of applying his eyes to discover what passes in his mind; far less of blaming his eyes for not seeing a thought or idea.
—Elements of Criticism(1762), Lord Kames[1]
It is, indeed, difficult to visualize thoughts or ideas through one’s eyes, as suggested by the epigraph from Elements of Criticism, an influential eighteenth-century aesthetic text by Henry Home(1696—1769), who was also called Lord Kames.What remains of significance, however, is the importance that Lord Kames places upon human “senses”in its possibility to realize and present interior activities, whether these senses are intellectual or not.This visualizing strength of eyes has always been interweaving with epistemological question about self-presence in the mind.Indeed, it is in a visual sense that the word “idea”has its Greek etymology[2].The objective of this current writing—except the last chapter, nevertheless, is to situate this visual approach to epistemological issues such as rhetoric, emotion, identity, and language in the eighteenth- century British culture.It was a historical period that witnessed a proliferating print culture, which is a massive shift from an early modern scribal or chirographic culture to a modern typographic culture.The modern print culture is the first of what has made possible Walter Benjamin calls “technological reproducibility[3].”This project is to historicize the theatrical intermediate stage of the visual in between the mind and the thing so as to see how a perceptual change of selfhood is initiated through the formation of a modern printed textual culture.It is concerned with outlining a history of self- or other-presence through vision, and how a modern textual media has made it possible.
Lord Kames addresses this commentary quoted above as a critique towards Scene 8 Act 8 of William Congreve’s 1697 tragedy play The Mourning Bride:
Yet I behold her—yet—and now no more.
Turn your lights inward, Eyes, and view my thought.
So shall you still behold her—’twill not be.
O impotence of sight! mechanic sense(https://www.daowen.com)
Which to exterior objects ow’st thy faculty,
Not seeing of election, but necessity.
Thus do our eyes, as do all common mirrors,
Successively reflect succeeding images.
Nor what they would, but must; a star or toad;
Just as the hand of chance administers! [4]
This reflection upon mental faculty—here as its impotence—of visualizing a presence of either an other or an imagery is from Osmyn after a temporary departure of Osmyn’s from Almeria, the speaker’s beloved.It is a grandiose emotional moment from the male character, where a yearning to domesticate a female presence of his beloved is expressed.Visuality, containment, and emotionality all percolate with a discursive trope of sympathy with the eyes and with the audience[5].This probably explains how the successive images in mental faculty reflected in this passage from Congreve’s play interests Henry Home.Lord Kames was an active founding member of the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture, and the Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland, two of the offshoots from the Select Society, to which both David Hume and Adam Smith belonged.As a matter of fact, David Hume was a distant cousin of Home’s[6].The writing of the Elements of Criticism was made possible partially because of Hume’s suggestion to Lord Kames that criticism could be reduced to a science.During the years 1748—1750, Adam Smith delivered a series of public lectures in Edinburgh, and it was funded by Henry Home.Out of these lectures both Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments(1759) and The Wealth of Nations(1776) were based[7].Henry Home was conversing with both of them.For instance, in Elements of Criticism, he wrote on “ideal presence”achieved from spectating “as distinguished from real presence on the one side, and from reflective remembrance on the other”(Home 2005:68), an obsession that both Hume and Smith expressed through their work of writing.He also wrote on “sympathy,”without which no person could fully understand another, and thus no bonds of society could be secured[8], which is assigned a central role in the theories of both Hume and Smith’s.The point of interest is that this impossibility of a visual inward turn towards one’s self-presence is extenuating around the middle of the eighteenth century, around which various authors—Home, Hume and Smith included—could be read in the light of a media history of textual culture.In this historical process, I argue that the rising of a literary modernity occupies a primarily significant role as part of the consequence of a saturating textual culture.I take the concept of “literary modernity”from Paul de Man[9].Through his reading of Nietzsche’s “Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life,”de Man writes:“Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure”(Home 1970:388-389).This denial of history, paradoxically, “discovers itself to be a generative power that not only engenders history, but is part of a generative scheme that extends far back into the past”(390), which is implied in the rise of Western modernity.The activity of modern literature offers a most manifest instance of this very contradiction that Nietzsche discovered at the endpoint of his rebellion against a historically minded culture.It is a culture with its “constitutive affinity with action, with the unmediated, free act that knows no past”(392) on the one hand.On the other hand, it is “not as a single moment of self-denial, but as a plurality of moments that can ...be represented ...as a succession of moments or duration”(398).I situate the ways of representing presence and emotions in a history of this culture, when the modern concept of “literature”as part of modern textual culture was establishing itself in creating a sense of history through the eighteenth century.In this way, I try to radicalize the work of writing in its historical sense as well as in its pertinence to our understanding of modern self.
This history of emotions and representations takes its methodology and terminology from media studies in its critical sense.For instance, the vocabulary of “human sensorium”is from media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Walter J.Ong.It describes the effects of media and ways of mediation upon the ratio of human senses and perceptual proclivities[10].McLuhan once wrote on the psychological function of the Western alphabet as follows:“The translating of auditory into visual terms set up an inner life in man which separated himself from the exterior world and, in part, from his own senses, as we know from the study of pre-literate societies”(McLuhan 1962:284).Alphabetic literacy is instrumental in constructing an inward interiority as a neutral and abstract space:“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world”(18).This separation of senses brought by the technology of writing promotes the visual over the audile, which is part of the reason—for McLuhan—why a progressive history of Western civilization becomes possible along with the rise of Western possessive individualism:“Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual mode; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear”(27).Orality, literacy and visuality are taken in the current writing as they relate to ways of organizing human sensoria and perceptions in media history.In this way, they are what Martin Heidegger calls techne, which shares an etymology with “technology,”from the Greek root technikon.It concerns the work of enframing with which Heidegger developed his phenomenological approach:“What is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in ...revealing[11].”For Heidegger, “the essence of technology lies not in instrumental productions or manipulation of material, but in the process of a special kind of knowing through the techne”(Liu 2010:28), as pointed out by Lydia H.Liu.Epistemological aspiration of knowledge is not a cause or origin of technology as usually presumed.Instead, new technologies present space of revealing and clearing, which enframes the perceptual economy of representation and emotion.The print media, in the current case, realizes and disciplines an organizational ratio of orality, aurality, literacy and visuality that affects modern selfhood.It is through this perspective we can delineate a history of textual culture, with an emphasis upon Paul de Manian “literary modernity,”through a study on representations, emotions and work of writing.