II.i.Sympathy, Description and Its Sounding Econom...
This current writing starts with Edmund Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime in the middle of the eighteenth century.I situate his theory at the threshold of the emergence of modern textual mediation or perception, whose maturity and permeation is well reflected in Adam Smith’s textual construction of sympathy.Smith’s theory of moral sentiments dovetails with sense of transparent exchangeability regarding personhood, human nature and commodity explicated in modern political economy of his later writings.That pre-mediates a potential development of psychoanalysis that appears of historical necessity in the late nineteenth century so as to deal with the existence of the unconscious beyond the exchangeable transparency of selfhood of the political economy writings.Thus, textual culture has obtained a social life of its own, in the history of which there seems to exist a genealogy of genres from aesthetics(Edmund Burke), modern literature(William Wordsworth), moral philosophy(David Hume and Adam Smith) and psychoanalysis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.I take these authors as snapshots of a media history of modern textual culture.All of them participate into this history of modern writing and become parts of the institution of the work of writing.It is of historical contingency that each of them is in a significant position in this social life of the textual culture.I historicize Burke’s attitudes toward the function of language in communicating emotions in a tradition of early modern rhetoric, when a proliferating textual cultural media was about to be in its place.Thus it is an attempt to revalorize aesthetic as figuring a problem of textual mediation and its affective economy[12].Through this I argue that theatricality as the emergence of a new type of aesthetic “interface”provides a site of cultural labor and a body of textual formation during the transition from “the age of flesh[13]”to the age of paper, or to what Samuel Johnson calls an “age of authors[14].”Textual media thus helps manufacture the modern perceptual and emotive with regard to figured conditions of communications made possible through a proliferation of words.Through a critical investigation on sentiment and its relation to language as they are reflected in these authors, I demonstrate how the construct of a specific regime of theatrical selfhood becomes tangent upon the emergent forms of abstraction and exchangeability in a history of textual media.Or, to put it differently, this is a transition from what is formularized by Henry Home as impossible(as quoted in the epigraph) into a phase of applying eyes to psychology—or, psychology as visual as everyday happening.This change of cultural disposition affects the dimensions of different perceptions involved in representation of feelings, and formation of modern individuals in general.
Indeed, sympathy, as one technique of stimulating bodily sentiment and sensation, was a significant element of aesthetics in the middle of the eighteenth century.It involves corporeal engagements and mediation.As practice of sociality, it is registered in the aesthetic theory of the sublime and the beautiful by Edmund Burke, who writes:“We yield to sympathy, what we refuse to description”(Burke 1958:160).Burke juxtaposes embodied sympathy and disembodied description as complementary with each other.Sympathy comes to rescue of its own accord when “we”cease using the visual “description,”and it occupies a higher position of preference in the system of human sensorium.Feelings are not approachable through visual display or representation of words.Its economy is spiritual, personal, immediate, and less adaptable to communicative mediation.For Burke, the function of language is to communicate and persuade, but on a more local scale:“words”produce “three effects … in the mind of the hearer.The first is, the sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing”(166).The affective dimension of the mediation comes as that of the auditory and the visual.In this scheme of words, the auditory effects come to be of primary significance, the visual as secondary.As a matter of fact, the pictorial meaning of communication is achieved through the signification from the acoustic.The priority that Burke puts upon the aural-oral aspects of words probably suggests a historical episteme of a scribal or manuscript culture.Indeed, when Burke published his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757, Europe was changing from an oralscribal to a print society, which ran through the century[15].The two means of cultural media—the acoustic and the visual, that is—involve different forms or techne of consciousness and organization of human sensorium, which has been studied in various disciplines through decades[16].For instance, the media theorist McLuhan writes:“Manuscripts were meant to be read aloud.Church chantry schools were set up to ensure oral fidelity”(McLuhan 1989:46).This acoustic regime is an episteme of the pulpit, and it “had … been coupled with news about local and foreign affairs, real estate transactions, and other mundane matters”(131)[17], as Elizabeth L.Eisenstein argues in her history of the printing press.Burke’s aesthetics can be identified more in an episteme[18] of the traditional rhetoric.It remains analogous to the “morning prayer”and the pulpit, which is to be substituted by what Hegel perceives in newspaper reading in the early nineteenth century[19].The Burkean theory of the sublime and beautiful came into its shape between 1747 and 1756[20], years of changing values and new points of view.His philosophical enquiry was published on 21 April 1757, and the second edition came in 1759, when Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiment was materialized[21].Following what Foucault elsewhere calls “genealogical[22],”this writing offers an analysis of the bodily economy of sentiments in Burke’s aesthetics and a glance into various discourses of sentiments as they remain particularly pertinent with a history of modern textual culture.Through critical inquiries upon the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects—such as aesthetics, exchangeability, communication—this current writing traces a genealogical outline of sentiments from perspectives of different textual mediations of perceptions and sentiments.
For Burke, sympathy, as one kind of human “affections”(sic), can be accomplished through aesthetic labor, which is reflected through the description with words.However, in Burke’s theory work through words does not necessarily breed “sympathy.”Concerning the affective function of language as a mimetic medium through description, he remains significantly suspicious, partially from which his political conservatism is derived.As he writes:“It may be observed that very polished language, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength”(Burke 1958:125).The more detailed linguistic descriptions are, the more insufficiently they would be able to appeal to emotions.This is well observed by J.T.Boulton, who wrote the famous editorial preface to Burke’s philosophical enquiry in the 1950s.In Burke’s system of language as a technical instrument in social venues of communication, Boulton writes, “the emotive power of language is not proportionate to its image-raising capacity”(Boulton xxvii).Indeed, for Burke, the images once attached to words may fade out, but a residue of the original emotion may become part of the ecology of words, which is charged with an acoustic economy:
Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which, being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied to other interesting things and events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned; effects similar to those of their occasions.The sounds being often used without reference to any particular occasion, and carrying still their first impressions, they at last utterly lose their connection with the particular occasions that gave rise tothem; yet the sound, without any annexed notion, continues to operate as before.(Burke 1958:165)
Sound as a medium and oral-aural apparatus, in the process of decontexutalization, seems to obtain a communicative valence, equivalent to that of floating signifiers in postmodern culture, or what Jean Baudrillard defines as “a hyperreal”in simulation—“the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”(Baudrillard 1).It could leave its original territory and still maintains an operative mechanism.What is of more significance for Burke is that sound serves as the instrument of rhetorical suasion, as he writes:
Now, as there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of words, which ...touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject matter.(Burke 1958:175)
The “moving tone of voice,”“impassioned countenance,”and “agitated gesture”of enunciating words are acts more embodied and local, thus the acoustic dimension of words seems to have a life more social than when the postmodern de-territorialized signifiers.Burke’s aesthetic theory on the fierce, noble, and almost supra-sensuous appeal of the sublime is more of the acoustic type, though he devotes a good deal of space to his naïve theory of retinal fatigue in producing the visual sublime as Dixon Wecter observes[23].This is suggested in his extreme sensitivity to sounds—to thunder, roaring cataracts, the crises of wild beasts, artillery, shouting multitudes, drums, tolling bells, and even “low, confused, uncertain sounds”(Burke 1958:83).What matters is not whether Burke had little or no education in music[24], neither is it about the peculiarities of Burke’s own sensory equipment[25].Rather, the economy of sound in his aesthetics as the celebrated sublime suggests a sense of im-mediation and corporeality paradigms of some period in the eighteenth-century West.It is reminiscent of what Foucault defines in his theory of language in its break from the classical episteme:(https://www.daowen.com)
...in the Classical period the expressive function of language was required only at its point of origin, and in order to explain how a sound could represent a thing, [whereas] language in the nineteenth century, throughout its development and even in its most complex forms, was to have an irreducible expressive value, for, if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests and translates the fundamental will of those who speak it.(Foucault 1970:290)
This shift of the function of language, from that of revealing and disclosing the origin—“its old kinship with divinatio”(Foucault 1970:59) that is—into that of representation and communication, is historically situated in the current writing as imbricate with a rising print culture.The deluge of writing brings forth proliferation of signs, establishes a world more into its visually neutralized form, and creates aesthetic experience of a new audience and a society of readers and writers.The saturating verbal signs in British culture through the long eighteenth century would demand a revaluation of a whole episteme, which affects not merely the way objective knowledge is organized and accessed, but also the way how affective knowledge works upon the somatic body.In this way, the “print turn”co-evolves with the “affective turn[26].”The transmission of feelings is made possible by the techne of a print culture, which enhances the division between the private / domestic and public[27] as reflected in activities of reading and writing.Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory offers a point of departure in this discussion of the role of the perceptual in this affective turn—how and through what means one feels and communicates.
Burke’s aesthetic economy of sound and hearing as a mediating sensorium bears relevance to discussions from his contemporaries.For instance, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder(1744—1803) once delivered a speech of “On the Education of Students in Language and Speech”in the context of his secondary school reform, which describes the subject of Bildung as organized through the spoken and heard words.His theory reads similar to that of Burke’s:
Youths who have acquired ...unpleasant dialect of merely animal sounds, whether they come from the cities or the country, should make every effort in school to acquire a human, natural speech possessed of character and soul and to rid themselves of their peasant or shrieking back-alley dialects.They should leave off the barking and yelping, the clucking and cawing, the swallowing and dragging together of words and syllables and speak human rather than animal language.Happy is the child, the boy, who from his first years, onward hears understandable, human, lovely sounds that unnoticeably mold his tongue and the sound of his speech.[28]
Constantly hailed as “the founding document of German as a school subject”(Kittler 1992:37), this shows the self-identified cultural mission for Herder as a German Enlightenment philosopher, the pedagogical function of bildungsroman, that is.If Bildung means “the autoproduction of a subject that produces or forms itself in the very act of coming to consciousness of itself [29],”this process of phenomenal realization in aesthetics of body comes through purifying acoustic signs of contaminating noises or animalistic sounds.For Herder, “[s]ounds and the sense of hearing provide the ideal means for negotiating and organizing the soul’s interior space and its exterior sphere.Sounds are external givens that function as a minimal difference or mark, and they can resonate in the internal space”(von Mücke 170)[30], as Dorothea von Mücke comments.Thus, the acoustic dimension of the aesthetic perception is not peculiar in Burke’s philosophical inquiry.It is rather a prevalent discussion.Burke’s aesthetic theory upon language suggests this through a strong emotional appeal, which is corporeally embedded rather than mentally represented or visualized.For him, “passion,”“emotion,”and “affection”are a cluster of lax and apparently interchangeable terms[31], and are more of oratorical effects than of linguistic representations made at a distance.The influence of words through representation upon passions, he claims, “should be but light; yet it is quite otherwise; for we find by experience that eloquence and poetry are as capable, nay indeed much more capable of making deep and lively impressions than other arts, and even than nature itself in very many cases”(Burke 1958:173).The acoustic eloquence and poetry as locally experienced by an “us”are more communicative.Hence Burke’s fascination with the power of rhetoric, which is “an instrument of emotional transport … dominant among the ancients, and the grand style, the purpose of which was to move, … an integral part of their rhetoric”(Monk 1960:11).Indeed, Burke writes on the sublime in the tradition of critics and theorists preceding him, such as John Dennis, Hildebrand Jacob, and Robert Lowth, whose work “bears witness to the continuation of the rhetorical tradition,”and “they would, perhaps, never have studied the question had not the rhetoricians of antiquity and of their own age based much of the persuasive power of their art on the emotions which the great style evokes”(Monk 1960:84), as Samuel H.Monk’s classical study suggests.In sense, this rhetoric tradition even included David Hume[32].John Ward, a contemporary of Burke’s, writes in his A System of Oratory that rhetoric
not only directs to those arguments, which are proper to convince the mind; but also considers the various passions and interests of mankind, with the bias they receive from temper, education, converse, and other circumstances of life; and teaches how to fetch such reasons from each of these, as are of the greatest force in persuasion.(qtd.in Howell 74)
Rhetoric, in the eighteenth century, “was a history of the voice, taught through speech and authenticated by phonocentric values”(Fielding 11)[33].For Hugh Blair, who was the occupant of the specially created chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University from 1762 to 1783, language is “the expression of our ideas by certain sounds, which are used as the signs of those ideas,”and is communicated by means of the warmth and feeling of the speaker’s expression[34].Burke’s appeal to an emotional rhetoric over logic accords well with such a definition and function of rhetoric in its classical tradition[35].His aesthetics deals with “bodies acting mechanically(sic) upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses”(Burke 1958:112), rather than “the languid and precarious operation of our reason”(107).He considers the emotional effect of words “put together without any rational view,”such as wise, valiant, generous, good, and great—which belong to what he calls “compounded abstract words”(164), when spoken apart from local contexts without “a warm and affecting tone of voice”(166).