II.iii.Body Economy of Sentiment and Somatic Aesth...
Burke’s view of language reflects a formula of clarity as impediment to communicating the sublime emotionalism not merely in as visual and written, an essentially ideographic medium, but also of painting, a largely iconological medium[58]:
...and even in painting a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear(sic) and determinate.(Burke 1958:62)
Obscurity, uncertainty, simplicity and infinity are celebrated over clarity and definiteness, the latter of which could be achieved through detailed mimetic descriptions.That “power on the fancy”from “nature dark,”a sort of sensation or effect of an object upon the faculty of sensibility is of course Burke’s violently emotional sublime, one example of which is the phonocentric moment of “the inviolable oath.”It provides an instance of “the sublime that helped to release this flood of emotionalism into the aesthetic theory of the period”(Monk 1960:61).Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Burke’s, terms that as “matter,”and invests it with substance or the permanent in experience, whereas the formal and material are considered as “secondary”or “superficial”(Caygill 1989:288-289).This theory of a preexistent virtually unmediated, a mystical sense of oneness, of being within a universal continuum and the hierarchical position that it has over others—such as “means,”“form,”“media,”“technique”—has been a recognizable pattern in the political economy of Western perceptions.Burke, in his writings on aesthetic and politics of revolution, is rather typical of this logocentric metaphysics, which takes a physiological form of patho-centrism, as explicitly stated in another passage:
The truth is all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself.Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described.(Burke 1958:175-176)
This Burkean model of communication requires that the body of both the speaker and the audience be involved with sentimental investments.“[N]aked description[s]”do not convey emotional messages, whether they are “the contagion of our passions”or that “fire.”Objects make sense in relation to feeling subjects.The body, and all its sensations, take on communicative implications, which appear to be correlative with orality.This somatic involvement in sign production in conjunction with a theory of media is similar to what Condillac proposes in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines(1746).For Condillac, an infant, who, in the language originating in speech, lacks full control over his bodily motor functions, has to have recourse to the tongue.This most flexible organ complements the language of action:“[T]wo codes develop, supplementing each other and referring to each other at the intersection of the two media, body and voice”(von Mücke 36).It is a theological act to turn this primeval signifying practice into a gestural language so that the social meaning of the human sound can be realized.Condillac produces a moment of tracing a scene of imaginary plenitude in this history of language.He situates a passage in the Old Testament, where the direct force of the spoken word works its tactile, spectacular and theatrical significance upon the body:
It seems that this mode of speaking was preserved chiefly to instruct the people in regard to matters in which they were most deeply concerned, such as government and religion.Because as itacted upon the imagination with greater force, the impression was more durable.Its expression contained even something elevated and noble, which the language of articulated sounds, as yet poor and barren, could not come up to.This mode of speaking the ancients called by the name of dance, which is the reason of its being said that David danced before the ark.(qtd.in von Mücke 36)
This dancing moment in a history of human perceptual signification, as contextualized in an oral tradition and a culture of spectacle, nevertheless, experiences a division of labor brought about by the advent of the new medium of writing.The new medium separates poetry from music, and thus word from sound.In this way, the modern world is marked by “a language that has come to follow the rules of logic and ...has a full repertoire of artificial signs and thereby the perfect means for analysis”(von Mücke 37).The progress of analytical knowledge and the development of a scientific methodology presents a history into a modern media of language, and Edmund Burke is concerned with the loss of “graphicity[59]”and “tactility”as presented in the primeval moment of this history both in his writing on aesthetics and reflection on the French Revolution.
Terry Eagleton declares modern aesthetics as “born as a discourse of the body”in the mid-eighteenth century(Eagleton 1990:13), and Samuel H.Monk argues that the chief fault of writers on the sublime during the first half of the eighteenth century is “their habit of oversimplifying the aesthetic experience, of attempting to find the one sublime emotion or quality”(Monk 1960:76).For Burke, this is an aesthetic theory mediated through his medium of writing to advocate a conservative politics of culture and empire.It is emotionally charged with sublime experience that affects the body, and positions the feeling in a rhetoric of history.This theorization accords with materialists in ancient times, for whom matter is a “lyric substance”more akin to comets, meteors, and electrical storms than to some hard, uniform mass.[60]In his Aesthetica(1750), Alexander Baumgarten, the German philosopher, formulates “aesthetics”as the “whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought.”Such a definition predominates before it turns into a discourse about individualized “taste”at the end of the eighteenth century.This historical change of the aesthetic discourse is taken by cultural conservatives like Burke, and it co-evolves with an inward turn of interiority.In Burke’s aesthetic formula—as in Condillac’s first part of the Essai—the body and its aesthetic sentiments are not separated, but in a sensual and synesthetic moment of dancing, which is more an invention of the primeval out of a writing economy.Writing is usually taken as a means of a transmission of meaning that is designated as particular, secondary, inscribed, and supplementary, the existence of which pre-mediates the primeval moment, either dancing or the Burkean inviolable oath.In other words, the Enlightenment thinkers take a defensive and conservative strategy through making the birth of aesthetics as a body economy with a character of divinity.It is a strategy more indicative of their confrontation with the coming of modern writing[61], which, in a history of modernity, “conform[s] to a law of mechanical economy[62].”If “abstraction”[63] involves “withdrawing,”“separation,”or “removal,”and can be defined in a specifically philosophical sense as “the act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations[64],”Burke’s aesthetic theory embraces the totality and immediacy of experience and feeling before being displaced by writing.His French contemporary Diderot centers on the achievements of the blind mathematician Nicholas Saunderson in Lettre sur les aveugles(1749), and uses this instance to illustrate the knowledge attainable by the sense of touch alone.Diderot gives a more contemporary definition of “abstraction,”with regard to sense of embodiments:
[A]bstraction merely amounts to the ability to separate in our thoughts the sensible qualities of bodies either from each other or from the body itself, which serves as their material support; error arises if this separation is badly executed or applied; it can be badly executed in metaphysical questions, and it can be badly applied in questions concerned with physics and mathematics.(qtd.in von Mücke, 44-45)[65]
Indeed, the sensory path to knowledge emerged as a problem for the newly reconfigured field of aesthetics.Another example comes from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing(1729—1781), who formulates the media of painting, poetry, theater by adjudicating just how appropriately a given art form targets its particular sense whether it is eyesight, hearing or feeling[66].[67]Negating a possible “abstraction”in the distribution of the sensory qualities of bodies at the first place, Burke maintains that the affective serves as the message and the channel of subjective and saturating communication or continuum.Ruptures between the body, its thoughts, sensations and ideas are politically not justifiable.This address of sensations is from its physiological embryology, part of the science of man starting from Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as G.S.Rousseau’s classical essay argues[68].If mediation is the manner in which, according to Raymond Williams, the producer becomes alienated from his product[69], the immediacy is an absolute state in which the producer and production becomes unified into one seamless organic unity.It is a myth of an experiential totality for Burke, the loss of which could be attributed to the institution of the artificial signs of a print culture.(https://www.daowen.com)
Burke’s French contemporary Denis Diderot, in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets(1751), puts this in a slightly different way:
Thus, poetic discourse is touched by some spirit that moves and vivifies all of its syllables.What is spirit?Only a few times have I felt its presence, but all I know of it is that it is due to this spirit that things are said and represented simultaneously, that at the same time they are grasped by the understanding, the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, and the ears understand them.And this discourse is not merely a concatenation of energetic terms,which expose the thought with force and nobility; it is also a tissue of hieroglyphs piled upon each other, that paint the thought.In this sense I could say that all poetry is emblematic.(qtd.in von Mücke 46)
For Diderot, what poeticizes the primeval moment of spirit and origin is all at once oral(said), visual(seen), and acoustic(heard).More significantly, this associated concatenation of perceptions combines with a palimpsest of pictorial writing and representation to communicate this spirit, which is identified as an emblematic property of poetry.Thus, Diderot “gives primacy to the simultaneity of a multiplicity of perceptions that constitute the totality of the soul as a ‘moving picture’”(von Mücke 46).Addressing what is defined by Baumgarten as the crucial issue for the new mid-eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics that engages all the driving springs and motives of the soul[70], Diderot turns his and the painter’s gaze inwardly to a “tableau mouvant”instead of the exterior material details traced by the painter’s brush:
The paintbrush merely executes over time what the eye of the painter embraces in an instant.Linguistic formulations required decomposition; but to see an object, to find it beautiful, to experience an agreeable sensation, to want to possess it, all this is the state of the soul in one single instant.(qtd.in von Mücke 46)
Dorothea E.von Mücke points out that this is the same project of “establishing and maintaining the soul’s unity and the unity of perception”for a “totality of the operations of the soul[71],”whether the objects of their critical negation are linguistic decomposition or imitative description.The overall effect of an aesthetic object and its correlation with the multiple sensorial perceptions it evokes is distinctly and clearly elaborated by this of Burke’s contemporaries:
The state of our soul is one thing, the account we give of it toourselves or others is another thing.On the one hand, there is the total and instantaneous sensation of this state; on the other hand, there is the successive and detailed attention we must give to this state in order to analyze it, to express it, and to understand it.Our soul is a moving picture after which we continuously paint:it takes us quite some time to render it with some degree of fidelity, but it exists in its entirety and all at once:the mind does not proceed step by step like verbal expression.(qtd.in von Mücke 46)
The totality and instantaneity of an immediate perceptual to the world is privileged over the figured actions of communication, either verbal expression or imagistic imitation, both of which set up conditions for “objectivity”and “abstraction”in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.Actions of communication through writing coordinate with the modern consciousness deeply conditioned by literacy and print, and are entirely different from what Jack Goody and Ian Watt call “direct semantic ratification”(Goody 29) by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now[72].Terry Eagleton argues that the distinction that the term “aesthetics”initially enforces in the mid-eighteenth century “between the material and the immaterial:between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas”remains “that which is bound up with our creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowy existence in the recesses of the mind”(Eagleton 1990:13).Here in the Burkean scenario, the distinction seems to be a rehearsal of the romantic division between the physical as the organic, living and feeling substance, and the material as the inert, dead, or mechanical[73].Or, on this point, Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher contemporary with Burke, defines more explicitly in Part I, Book II, of the Critique of Judgment:“Beauty is concerned with limited objects, with forms; the sublime is to be found in objects that are limitless, that have no form, though they are always accompanied with a ‘superthought’ of totality”(qtd.in Monk 6).Thus, aesthetics could be taken as an instance of the body economy of presence, or what Giorgio Agamben calls “apparatus,”a concept with its evolution from the Greek oikonomia that Agamben extends from that of Michel Foucault:
[L]iterally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth(whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.(Agamben 2009a:14)
This celebrated somatic aesthetics, as an apparatus of the body and feeling, could be spectacular or theatrical, but its aesthetic preference is primarily that of “immediacy”and “authenticity”in the primeval moment of communicating sentiments before the coming of the modern textual culture.