II.v.Print, Communication of Feelings, and Reformu...
If print, in Burke and Condorcet’s time, was still an art, “in the special sense of being a highly skilled craft or what was called a mechanical art”(Guillory 2010:325), the Burkean rein of rhetoric or oratory may be situated into a historical context, in which speech and rhetoric still dominated the most important social venues of communication.It remains arguable whether a rhetorical hermeneutics is adequate to support a history of communication, and whether a communication concept as an explicit challenge to the system of rhetoric emerged in early modernity [85].Discontent with rhetoric became discernible in the seventeenth century, nevertheless.John Guillory argues in his seminal essay that such a discontent “produced the first attempts to advance a different concept for the goal of speech, a concept we now know as communication”[86].The way Burke configures aesthetics is in the middle of this reorientation of language toward the goal of communication as a pressure of the print medium on the conceptualization of writing.It suggests a changing figuration of what Foucault reformulates notions of state and power as “governmentality”in an early Western modernity as well.Significant to governmentality is the operation of “biopower,”or “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them”(Foucault 1990:136).Amit S.Rai explains that it is a new permutation of modalities of practices, discourses, sentiments, and disciplines, which is much more than “policing”—“that far-flung apparatus of normalization which tied together as widely disparate phenomena as hygiene boards, and evangelical missions”(Rai 62).This Foucauldian conceptualization of the modern technology of self seems significant to understand the Burkean aesthetics in relation to “persuasion, communication, means, medium, media, mediation, representation,”which is a linked set of evolving terms that John Guillory uses to chart the reorientation of language toward the goal of communication in the early modern genesis of the media concept(Guillory 2010:326).Its historical predecessors include aesthetics in the way Terry Eagleton declares it “born as a discourse of the body”in the eighteenth century, or as “the distribution of the sensible,”the way Jacques Rancière takes it[87].In The Order of Things, Foucault outlines the paradigmatic shift from resemblance to representation in the knowledge of Western culture from the end of the sixteenth century.He takes such a shift significant to and simultaneous to the rise of modern Western governmentality, in which sympathy is taken as one of the four essential “forms of resemblance”at the moment when “resemblance was about to relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear, in part at least, from the sphere of cognition”(Foucault 1970:17).For Foucault, sympathy
excites the things of the world to movement and can draw even the most distant of them together.It is a principle of mobility:it attracts what is heavy to the heaviness of the earth, what is light up towards the weightless ether; it drives the root towards the water, and it makes the great yellow disk of the sunflower turn to follow the curving path of the sun.Moreover, by drawing things towards one another in an exterior and visible movement, it also gives rise to a hidden interior movement—a displacement of qualities that take over from one another in a series of relays ....Sympathy is an instance of the Same so strong and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear—and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were before.Sympathy transforms.It alters, but in the direction of identity, so that if its power were not counter-balanced it would reduce the world to a point, to a homogeneous mass, to the featureless form of the Same:all its parts would hold together and communicate with one another without a break, with no distance between them, like those metal chains held suspended by sympathy to the attraction of a single magnet.(Foucault 1970:23-24)
Foucault defines this form of resemblance in the early modern Europe through its physics, not its chemistry, nor biology:to excite, to mobilize, to assimilate, and to homogenize.It is a form of knowledge on a science of mechanics and thermodynamics, as Foucault illustrates:
[F]ire, because it is warm and light, rises up into the air, towards which its flames untiringly strive; but in doing so it loses its dryness(which made it akin to the earth) and so acquires humidity(whichlinks it to water and air); it disappears therefore into light vapour, into blue smoke, into clouds:it becomes air.(Foucault 1970:23)
It is descriptive of the classical world, where the world is linked together like a chain through the way the figures of knowledge are organized by articulations of the semantic web of resemblance like convenientia, aemulatio, analog and sympathies[88].Their primary concern is similar to what is covered in Book I of Newton’s Principia, “the two principal cases of attractions,”namely, the question of action at a distance.R.W.Home puts it in this way:“[O]scillatory motions brought about by forces varying directly as the distance between two bodies, and motions in conical orbits brought about by forces varying inversely as the square of the distance”(Home 360).It is more of the nonhuman realm of what Wordsworth called “rocks, and stones, and trees,”[89] and all the rest—the earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, the planets, and stars in their courses.In the British context, the science of man—the human realm—“may not have had an influence on the manifold aspects of routine daily life until the mid-eighteenth century”(Rousseau 145), which began to be dealt with in John Locke’s Essay published in 1690.Decades ago, Northrop Frye [90] famously defines the mid and late eighteenth century as an “Age of Sensibility.”Extravagant feelings, emotions, sentiments and epistemologies of them were proliferated by the production of various “sets of physiological texts”(Rousseau 143).It includes the eighteenth-century schools of Scottish morality, English empirical philosophy, and even French ethical thought.Out of such a historical context, Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful proposes an approach to the study of man by means of a theory of sensory perception and a theory of knowledge, which directly form his understanding of the physiology and psychology of perception.Instead of taking “beauty, sublimity, taste, imagination, and the picturesque”merely as “the most important ideas”in eighteenth-century England as Samuel H.Monk’s classic study on the sublime did, this current writing outlines a genealogy of the politics of the body in mediation.
It is, therefore, not fortuitous, nor anomalous that sympathy and liberal sentiment emerged in the eighteenth century at precisely the moment that Foucault locates the rise of governmentality.As Amit S.Rai writes:(https://www.daowen.com)
[I]ndeed, discipline was enabled by, and security legitimized through sympathy for the other—the poor, the heathen, criminals, delinquents, deviants, prostitutes, slaves, colonial subjects, and the insane were to be sympathized with, and their condition ameliorated.In other words, sympathy was central in making the other proper to the self, and so a way of habituating the self to propriety.(Rai 62)
Mobility of affinity between things is transferred upon that of sensibility, cognate with the proliferation of feelings.It seems that, in the eighteenth century, sympathy, an European concept primarily on “(real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence each other(esp.in some occult way), or attract or tend toward each other,”becomes more on “relation between two bodily organs or parts such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other.”[91]For Burke, it
must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in my respects as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of the nature of those which regard self-preservation, and turning upon pain may be a source of the sublime; or it may turn upon ideas of pleasure; and then, whatever has been said of the social affections, whether they regard society in general, or only some particular modes of it, maybe applicable here.(Burke 1958:44)
The physical becomes the social.Affinity changes to substitution.This means affective mediation, one of the three principal links in “the great chain of society”(44), is taken as partaking the nature of selfpreservation.These invoke in the mind pain, sickness, death and strong emotions of horror.This source of the sublime is an aesthetic of feelings deployed by Burke to establish some specific form of emotional sociality.Through “this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another,”(44) physical objects are connected to mental and psychological states.At one place, he quotes this “curious story of the celebrated physiognomist Campanella”from a “Mr.Spon, in his Récherches d’ Antiquité”:
This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate observations on human faces, but was very expert in mimicking such as were any way remarkable.When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he could into the exact similitude of the person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind he seemed to acquire by this change.So that, says my author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men ...Our minds and bodies are so closely and intimately connected, that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other.Campanella, of whom we have been speaking, could so abstract his attention from any sufferings of his body, that he was able to endure the rack itself without much pain; and in lesser pains everybody must have observed, that, when we can employ our attention on anything else, the pain has been for a time suspended; on the other hand, if by any means the body is indisposed to perform such gestures, or to be stimulated into such emotions, as any passion usually produces in it, that passion itself can never arise, though its cause should be never so strong in action; though it should be merely mental, andimmediately affecting none of the senses.(Burke 1958:133)[92]
Contrary to the expressive mode of emotions that internalizes feelings[93] and emphasizes inner feelings as the ultimate motivation for external expressive behavior[94], the dissemination of the Campanella case in that historical period[95] suggests the popularity of the circumstantial mode of emotions:human feelings and emotions[96] not inward yet.The physiological and psychological inward turn of interiority was not in its place until the saturation of textual signs and the literary culture it produced were simultaneously put in the process.This passage on an economy of the exteriority of emotions and how Campanella takes it as a theatrical performance, again confirms that Burke’s episteme of writing is situated more of an early modern rhetoric.It is also important to bear in mind that Burke prescribes an ordering of these “affecting arts.”