II.iv.Sentiment, Immediacy, and Ekphrasis
Burke assigns this reliance on feeling—“the contagion of our passions,”as a means of somatic communication, that is—as the “business”of poetry and rhetoric, which is “to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker [emphasis mine], or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves”(Burke 1958:172).This preoccupation with emotions as an aesthetic and epistemological question was widely addressed by theorists in the mid-eighteenth century[74].Lord Kames states that “by a good tragedy, all the social passions are excited,”and passions arise “from that eminent principle of sympathy, which is the cement of human society[75],”for instance.What is specific in Burke’s aesthetics is an emphasis upon an auditory and tactile immediacy, suggested by “a fire kindled”by “the contagion of our passions.”This somatic presence of bodily sentiment as a medium of communication remains antagonistic to visual mimesis and its consequences in sensorial formation, the latter of which, as argued through this current writing, dovetails with a rising modern textual culture and deserves a very significant position in discussions of Western perceptual modernity[76].For Burke, poetry and rhetoric are superior to painting, which, as a very visual medium, can “succeed in exact description”(Burke 1958:172) and “imitation”through presenting “a clear idea of the things themselves”to its visual spectators.Poetry and rhetoric are more of oral and acoustic media, and are more accustomed to invoking a sense of immediacy and presence.They address an English audience before the coming of ideas, signs, and styles which establish and cross new cultural and social boundaries.This suggests a cultural moment of the mid-eighteenth-century Britain when a “reading public”in the modern sense is not formed yet.It is not until the late eighteenth century that is ushered in a confusing, unsettled world of reading and writing[77].
David Wellbery elaborates very well the difference between painting and poetry as two different media in his investigation upon Lessing’s Laocoön(1766):
The signs of painting are motivated both materially and formally.Their spatial structure corresponds to the spatial structure of thecorporeal object represented and the individual signs duplicate the material nature of that object insofar as they are solid, colored and fully determined as material things.The motivation of poetic signs, however, is only formal.The sign vehicles bear no similarity to the action-referent except as regards their successivity.The poem replicates only the form of perception, not its content.Poetry is a natural sign only because its signs present themselves to the reader in the same successive form as would the action itself.Poetry, therefore, maintains the advantages provided by its more advanced stage of semiosis; its individual signs remain arbitrary.The distinguishing feature of poetry is that it recovers for language the form of intuitive presence because the poem as a whole attains to the status of a natural sign.(Wellbery 1984:236-237)
The difference between these two generic conventions is that between a natural sign from an arbitrary sign.It is distinguished by “the manner in which signifier and signified are related”(von Mücke 14).Dorothea von Mücke suggests as follows:“Whereas for the arbitrary sign the two are merely yoked together by convention, the signifier of a natural sign is informed by the signified”(von Mücke 14).The notion of “the poem as a whole”and poetry as a natural sign immediately raises the issue of textual mediation of perception.It suggests that through poetry, an immediate presence would be presented, and a quasiimmediate access to the “natural”world would be established.It is exactly in the same way that Burke organizes the socializing function of aesthetics into an immediate and affective economy.Which could be labeled as an “anti-theatrical transparency or immediacy,”a pattern of perception not irrelevant to Burke’s puritanical background[78]?(https://www.daowen.com)
A historical investigation into the political connotation of the word “immediacy”and the historical world in which it once worked, would suggest an interesting understanding of further layers of power and control in the history of mediation.In this conception, “immediacy”describes the condition of the relationship of a person who is subject to a power superior to her.Existing primarily in the feudal context of medieval Europe, “immediacy”describes the essentially binding relationship of the tenant to the landlord, or the vassal to the sovereign:“In Feudal language, said of the relation between two persons one of whom holds of the other directly, as in immediate lord, tenant, tenure”[79].The understanding of “immediacy”in such a manner fades out of the lexicon in direct correlation to the political diminishment of the feudal “holding”of a person within one’s power.Yet this leads to a political economy reading of the human sensorial orientation in general.J.F.Suter argues that Burke
develops an interesting dialectic between talent and property, between those who have nothing apart from their native gifts and natural ability(lawyers, doctors, traders, writers) and those whose influence in the states comes from inherited wealth(aristocrats, squires, clergymen).(Suter 63)
For Burke, property is a “sluggish, inert, and timid”principle.It must predominate in the state, and must be protected from the “invasions”of that “vigorous and active”principle of ability.Burke thinks that the “solid substance of land”(qtd.in Suter 63) must “counterpoise the superior skill and vigour of the burghers”(Suter 63).Suter argues that “Burke’s idea of ‘a natural and just order’, maintained by a ‘chain of subordination’ between the landlord, the farmer and the labourer is still that of a predominantly feudal society, based on the ‘natural’ production of the land”(71).For Baumgarten, aesthetics is the sister of logic, a kind of ratio inferior or feminine analogue of reason at the lower level of sensational life.Burke takes this feminine analogue of the sublime as constitutive of the autonomy of culture, and society as an expressive or organic totality.In his aesthetic theory, the intuitive dogmatism of imagination, the priority of local affections and unarguable allegiances, the incontrovertible character of “immediate”experience, all work for a discourse that history is a spontaneous growth impervious to rational analysis[80].Then, the questions become:What kind of politics of psychophysiology does this imply?How to reorient this aesthetic and critical speculation on the sublime in the eighteenth-century Britain in relation to a history of feelings in mediation?What is its significance to a(n)(anti-)theatrical construct of selfhood that has been distributed and disseminated in Western affective modernity?These are the questions that I try to address through setting up a triptych of aesthetics(as a psychophysiology of the intelligible and the sensible), politics(in its relation to aesthetics), and a historical development of the print as a media or techne(or more or less, as a technology of self in the Foucauldian sense)[81].
The very possibility of affective dispersal has indeed become a significant aesthetic concern of Burke’s.The attitudes of suspicion and hostility he holds of “verbal description”or “naked description”in a rhetoric of affective communications is a reaction against the very notion of ut pictura poesis(“as a painting, so also a poem”), the practice of which by the mid-eighteenth century had been established more than a hundred years as a dogma of criticism[82].This sentiment holds a relation of what W.J.T.Mitchell defines as “institutions of the visible”(visual arts, visual media, practices of display and spectating) and “institutions of the verbal”(literature, language, discourse, practices of speech and writing, audition and reading)[83].A contemporary of Burke’s, Lessing shares this sentiment in his Laocoön(1766).It is a sentiment against ekphrasis, which is the verbal representation of visual representation[84].In Lessing’s aesthetic polemic, it is “prescribed as a law to all poets”that “they should not regard the limitations of painting as beauties in their own art.”For poets, to “employ the same artistic machinery”as the painter does would be to “convert a superior being into a doll.”It would make as much sense, argues Lessing, “as if a man, with the power and privilege of speech, were to employ the signs which the mutes in a Turkish seraglio had invented to supply the want of a voice”(qtd.in Mitchell 1994:154-155).W.J.T.Mitchell takes this phobia of Lessing’s regarding literary emulation of the visual arts as “not only of muteness or loss of eloquence, but of castration, a threat which is reechoed in the transformation from ‘superior being’ to ‘doll,’ a mere feminine plaything”(Mitchell 1994:155).Mitchell elaborates this ekphrastic fear of free exchange, transference and reciprocity between visual and verbal art as a phobia of “a dangerous promiscuity”and an attempt to “regulate the borders with firm distinctions between the senses, modes of representation, and the objects proper to each”(155).For Burke under discussion here, it is a defensive stance taken to maintain the pure English sense of custom, manners, tradition and sensibility through the technique of immediacy of feelings.