II.ii.Rhetoric, History and French Revolution
It is helpful to recall that rhetoric in antiquity assumed the primacy of speech as the substance upon which this art was first and longest practiced.Similar to what Josiah Royce calls Lessing’s praise of dynamic poetry as “the verbal motor type[36],”Burke’s aesthetic theory is an oral-auditory apparatus of communication.In his historiography of the genesis of modern concept of media, John Guillory argues that “even though rhetoric early on incorporated writing into its practice, the concept of speech retained preeminence in the definition of the art until the demise of formal rhetoric in the curricular reformations of the late nineteenth century”(Guillory 1995:326).However, Burke’s emphasis upon sentiment and emotion makes his theory different from the guidelines given in the rhetorical and belletristic handbooks of the period.For instance, in the notion of clarity.It is a stylistic norm applicable indifferently to speech and writing that language should always be transparent to meaning, and this is a very important Lockean version of words as medium of thought[37].In this tradition, language is taken as a transparent and neutral instrument to communicate.George Campbell writes in his The Philosophy of Rhetoric published in 1776:
Perspicuity originally and properly implies transparency(sic), such as may be ascribed to air, glass, water, or any other medium, through which material objects are viewed.From this original and propersense it hath been metaphorically applied to language, this being, as it were, the medium, through which we perceive the notions and sentiments of a speaker.(qtd.in Guillory 2010:339)
This is a claim to “establish a post-Lockean stylistic norm”(Guillory 2010:339).Francis Bacon also captures the psychodynamics of objectivity, clarity and democracy in print in his The New Organon published in the previous century.Bacon states:“[T]here is surely nothing in the craft of printing that is not open and almost obvious … which does so much to propagate learning”(114-115).Print, indeed, promotes a rising culture of abstraction with its regulated forum and sentences.It co-exists with the post-Baconian writers’ desire to evolve a language in which words would simply be marks of things[38].What remains at stake for this current writing is Burke’s strong sense of emotionalism as a reaction against this technological globalizing tendency in which emotional and historical associations would be nonexistent.This tendency is a tradition extending from Bacon to Locke, and it posits “an essential equivalence between linguistic and philosophical standards of clarity, precision, and transparency of thought as the basis of a new empiricist epistemology”(Porter 2005:17).Robert Stillman has persuasively argued that the rationalist regimes imposed on language within this tradition reflect not only the new ordering of experimental knowledge promoted by the Royal Society, but also a fundamental commitment from its adherents to reinforcing and legitimating the authority of the state.The universal language schemes of Bacon, Wilkins, and others “emerged as rival authority structures designed, in great measure, to contain and control the disorders of words because such disorders threatened chaos in the historical world of things”(Stillman 10).In the aesthetic theory under discussion here, Burke strategically associates these practices of clarity, precision, and transparency of thought through linguistic with the feminine beautiful.Meanwhile, the objects that impress us with their power, obscurity, vastness or infinity, succession and uniformity, or their effect of “painful delight”upon the senses, can be read as a gender issue with the masculine sublime[39].Acquainted with this rhetorical tradition of language[40], Burke develops a rather different theory upon the relationship of senseimpressions with words and ideas.In his scenario, clarity and perspicuity correlate with the finite and they are less capable of psychological stimulation upon the body:
But let it be considered that hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness which does not make some sort of approach toward infinity; which nothing can do while we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, are one and the same thing.A clear idea is, therefore, another name for a little idea.(63)
For Burke the Irish, it is the French who embrace “polished languages,”with their “superior clearness and perspicuity,”which brings forth ruptures rather than continuity, and thus “deficien[cy] in strength”(Burke 1958:176).
With a historical hindsight, we may be able to recognize historical precursor to the contemporary revolt against theory in Anglo-American academy in Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution in the 1790s.It is not exaggerating to say that when Burke was developing his aesthetic theory in the middle of the eighteenth century, it had already anticipated his attitudes toward the French Revolution elaborated in the 1790s.David Simpson defines this mythological English Francophobia “as a central motif in the definition of a nationalism,”the pattern of which is
based on [English] common sense, on a resistance to generalized thought, and on a declared immersion in the minute complexities of a ‘human’ nature whose essence is usually identified in an accumulation of mutually incommensurable details rather than in a single, systematized personality.(Simpson 4)
What remains pertinent to the argument is that the British national character—as reflected in Burke’s case for the power of English habit and custom—to keep the French contamination away dovetails with a transformation of consciousness and perception brought upon by a diffusion of print technology.In Burke’s aesthetic theory, the French pollution is metonymically transferred as an intrusion of the visual and verbal upon the acoustic and interior.The Burkean aesthetics embraces the empathic involvement natural to the oral society and the audile-tactile man, whereas the phonetic alphabet media promotes the rise of the visual component as ways of abstraction and systemization[41].This visual perception and abstraction is long existent in the historical process of what Martin Heidegger categories as “the world grasped as picture”that started from Renaissance, a process of objectification:
This objectification of beings is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing [Vor-stellen], aimed at bringing each being before it in such a way that the man who calculates can be sure—and that means certain—of the being.Science as research first arrives when, and only when, truth has transformed itself into the certainty of representation.(Heidegger 2002:66-67.)
In the current writing, this eventually manifests itself in the formalized methods of representation and exchangeability of self in everyday life in Adam Smith’s political economy of moral sentiments[42].Strategically, Burke represents the French Revolution as a visual spectacle, which produces a “bewildered English audience.”For him, the revolutionary spectacle negates “the laws of Aristotelian dramatic law by failing to resolve the violent struggles in any satisfying symbolic way”(Klancher 103), as pointed out by Jon P.Klancher[43].He writes in his reflections upon the French Revolution as follows:(https://www.daowen.com)
...[W]hen kings are hurl’d from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things.We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds(as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled, under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom.—Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage.I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatrical sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life.With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to shew my face at a tragedy.(Burke 1890:175)[44].
In other words, the Reflections is initiated as a claim to a dramaturgic performance not visualized, not on display, or even not written.The reflexive form, as a text, is made possible by what must remain invisible and unwritten as manifested by the English Constitution that requires a committed silent reading[45].Thus Burke establishes himself as a writer of Englishness, whose work of writing appears to incarnate precedents, customs, institutions, and habits:
Society is indeed a contract ...a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.(Burke 1890:194-195)
The English “great chain of beings”—to use a phrase from Arthur O.Lovejoy[46], along with all its physical and moral manifestations, is made possible through the primeval oral moment of “the inviolable oath.”Natural sympathy is prompted in individuals to good moral action through this moment.An immobile universe of value as inscribed through this apotheosis of the oral moment enables a historical rhetoric[47].For Burke, there exists a fundamental tendency to preserve the heritage of the past in the history of English law and constitution:“All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity;”even the Glorious Revolution was “a revolution, not made, but prevented”(qtd.in Suter 68).By insisting that the English constitution is a work of continuity and is justified by its long duration, Burke, indeed, is “attacking the primacy of the present, which is characteristic of the philosophy of the Enlightenment”(Suter 58)[48].It is a calculated historical determinacy, and an appeal to temporality as the source of its authority[49], a writing strategy Burke takes to “outauthor”the French revolutionaries as well as the work of writing from French philosophes.His written text, as a medium of print, is mediated to this revolutionary moment, which can be represented only reflectively[50].The enlightening rays of light from the French revolutionary practice or work of philosophical writings are described by Burke as a “conquering empire of light and reason”and “a speculative benevolence”(qtd.in Suter 53).The power of intellection and the actions it embodies must be refracted back to a non-visual moment of phonocentrism[51] in Burke’s theories and reflections.It cannot be a visual origin of blankness, for he writes:“I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases”(qtd.in Suter 53).In this way, the oral and Burke’s empirical truth parallel the association of anti-French sentiment and fundamental states of human nature[52].This economy of sound enacts a superior act of overwriting over the revolutionary act.To address this conservative strategy, Thomas Paine’s reply will not only “simplify Burke’s terms by inventing an ‘intellectual vernacular,’ but will wound radical discourse upon a radical critique of such authorship itself”(Klancher 105)[53]:“A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact.It has not an ideal but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none”(Paine 71).Orality that is equated with an instinctive and primeval recognition of natural right in Burke’s argument has to be exposed as metaphysical and ideal, and thus historically impossible.
“Clearness,”“perspicuity”and “clarity,”of which Burke holds suspicious in his aesthetic theory, are all visual terms.Burke’s attitude towards this visual mediation of ideas and history is suggestive of an antagonism against the objectifying property of language promoted through a proliferating textual culture.Dixon Wecter argues that Burke borrows from Locke’s “elaborate system for classifying ideas”in devising his three classes of words, which are taken as “those symbols which have only an arbitrary connection with real objects and which affect us in a different way”(Wecter 1940:170).Burke defines his aggregate words as “simple ideas united by nature to form some determinate composition.”Simple abstracts are “they that stand for one simple idea of such compositions and no more,”and compounded abstracts are “the arbitrary union of both the others, and of various relations between them, in greater or less degrees of complexity”(Burke 1958:163-164).These words are able to stir emotion merely by “the sound, without any annexed notion”(165), and their effects “arise in the mind of the hearer”(166).That is how “the power of poetry and eloquence”works, through “raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand”(163).At places, Burke concedes that words may evoke the full cycle from sound to image-forming and thence to emotion, although here an ellipsis is likely[54]:
But I am of opinion, that the most general effect even of these words, does not arise from their forming pictures of the severalthings they would represent in the imagination; because on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed, and when it is, there is most commonly a particular effort of the imagination for that purpose.(Burke 1958:167)
This antagonism against the visualizing and imaging property of words implies a distrust of an abstract and transparent medium of writing and representation, which, through abstracting and de-territorializing, pulls the mediated communication away from its affective and immediate environment[55].Burke explains this through a comparison:
In reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description as well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.(172)
This conclusion agrees with the traditional distinction, often discussed in the eighteenth century, between spoken words that are conventional signs, and painting that uses natural signs to imitate reality.It even could be dated back to what Aristotle defines as energeia:the “actualization of potency, the realization of capacity or capability, the achievement in art and rhetoric of the dynamic and purposive life of nature,”not to “the achievement in verbal discourse of a natural quality or of a pictorial quality that is highly natural [enargeia]”(qtd.in Bender 1972:9).Eric Havelock, in his convincing argument on how the beginnings of Greek philosophy are tied in with the restricting of thought brought about by writing(1963), shows the correlation between writing(“verbal discourse”) and the visual as perceptual apparatus has existed far from antiquity.The term idea meaning “form,”is visually based, and comes from the same root as the Latin video, to see.Havelock argues that Plato’s entire epistemology is unwittingly a programmed endorsement of writing, which Plato conceives of through analogies with a visible form.It is voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, and abstracted out of the human life-world.Plato does this through rejecting the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive life-world of an oral culture, which is represented by the poets that he would not allow in his Republic[56].The oral culture and its properties could easily be associated with the rhetoric and poetic style in Burke’s aesthetic theory.The exploitation of fear and ignorance of rhetoric and thus its “power to seduce”—if we use a phrase from Burke’s French contemporary Condorcet(100)[57], is an art of communication based on face-to-face exchange.It is prevalent in Burke’s writing, which is charged with emotional persuasion, a rhetoric power assuming the primacy of speech.Both—with Burke—as witnesses of the decline of formal rhetoric and the triumph of print, Condorcet remains more as a prophet, to whom the medium of print, in part creating a new public sphere for its productions, ensures that “all proofs are developed and all doubts discussed”(100) and hence that no tyrannical cause prevails as it did through the old techniques of verbal seduction; whereas Burke appeals to the power of English habit and custom with an emotional rhetoric of persuasion through an acoustic economy of the language.