II.vii.Empiricism, Physiological Effect of Sensibi...
In the Preface to the first edition of the Enquiry, Burke writes that the confusion in aesthetic ideas could be remedied only by
a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions.(Burke 1958:1)
Aesthetics is rather an economy of psychological affect and physiology effect for Burke to correct the confusion and ambiguity of discussions of beauty and sublimity, which is the primary reason why the young Burke undertook his investigation of the subject[104].It is also very empirically based, as J.T.Boulton observes in the stylistic symptoms of Burke’s general approach:“I have more than once observed ….From hence I conclude”; “This I know only by conjecture … but I have since experienced it”; “I have heard some ladies remark”(Boulton xvii).At another place Burke states:“When we go but one step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth”(Burke 1958:129-130).No wonder Samuel H.Monk would attribute an immense amount of speculation on aesthetic questions in the eighteenth century throughout Europe to “the emphasis which empiricism had placed on sensation”(Monk 1), significant as Burke’s Enquiry remains as an eighteenth-century archive.David Wellbery argues that by the 1730s the new discipline of aesthetics began to displace the traditional discipline of rhetoric:
In one and the same movement, art becomes the subject matter of theory and aesthetic experience is transformed into something that takes place between subjects and their representations, without the mediation of inherited bodies of erudition and independently of a locally defined cultural site.(Wellbery 1984:232)
If we follow this historical argument, Burke’s(and British in general) empirical inclination of “the inherited bodies of erudition”and “locally defined cultural site”requisite for the traditional discipline of rhetoric were to be replaced by a new paradigm of relations between subjects and their representations.That is manifest through the emergence of modern aesthetics.Nevertheless, claimed as “a distinct knowledge of our passions”(Burke 1958:129), such an esoteric and “classy”communication of affective message is inclined to keep its organization away from exchangeability, suggestive of an obdurate inclination of Burke’s conservatism that may possibly lead to a solipsist, private and absorbed myth of aesthetics.This emphases of Burke’s upon the local and personal, and his having a stake in “our passions in our own breasts”in an argument on the aesthetics of sympathy reminds, for another time, of its etymology and predominant meaning about to change around midcentury.
In the eighteenth century, this empirical reformulation of passions, specifically sympathy, was rather part of the medicine discourse on “sensibility”in a physiological sense.Physicians began to have concepts of “sensibility”as “the coordinating principle of bodily integrity, providing the basis for the overall integration of the body function”(Ellis 19).Christopher Lawrence argues that, from this framework, sympathy “was no more than the communication of feeling between different bodily organs, manifested by functional disturbance of one organ when another was stimulated”(qtd.in Ellis 19).Steven Bruhm, another critic, draws a similar argument:
What comes to be valorized by late eighteenth-century moralists as ‘sympathy,’ then, is physiologically based.Galenic medicine had discussed sympathy, but only as the product of moving humours throughout the body.(12)[105]
The Scottish physician Robert Whytt wrote in his Essay on the Vital and Other Voluntary Motions of Animals(1751) that nerves “are endued with feeling, and … there is a general sympathy which prevails through the whole system; so there is a particular and very remarkable consent between various parts of the body”(italicized sic).For him, “there is a still more wonderful sympathy between the nervous systems of different persons, when various motions and morbid symptoms are often transferred from one to another, without any corporeal contact”(qtd.in Bruhm 11, 14).This is in accordance with what Terry Eagleton declares the birth of modern aesthetic “as a discourse of the body”(13) during the eighteenth century.The early formulation of the concept in the work of the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten(in his Aesthetica [1750]) referred primarily not to art, but “to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought”(Eagleton 1990:13).In other words, what aesthetics initially enforces is not between art and life, but “the material and the immaterial,”“things and thoughts, sensations and ideas”(Burke 1958:13).The phrasing Burke uses to address this “remarkable consent between various parts of the body”is a “general agreement”or “clear concurrence of all”(123) of all the senses.In a section on the beautiful in feeling, Burke writes:“There is a chain in all our sensations; they are all but different sorts of feeling, calculated to be affected by various sorts of objections, but all to be affected after the same manner”(120).In the same section, this sympathy between different bodily organs and senses is called “a similitude in the pleasures of these senses,”which exists “if it were possible that one might discern colour by feeling,(as it is said some blind men have done) that the same colours, and the same disposition of colouring, which are found beautiful to the sight, would be found likewise most grateful to the touch”(121).
Burke’s formula of the unity of perception could not be further different from that sense of “tactile, synaesthetic quality”(Mitchell 1978:59) that the quaint romantic William Blake restores to pictorial form, nevertheless.W.J.T.Mitchell argues that in a history between oral, illustration and writing, Blake’s significance is upon an emphasis of “the nonvisual sensations of heat, cold, wetness, dryness, hardness, and softness rather than the sensory alienation of visual distance”(Mitchell 1978:60)[106].This remains almost completely contrary to the classical definition of senses, which remains closer to an Aristotelian view of perception.For such a view, each of the five senses—sight, sound, hearing, taste, and touch—has a distinct and proper sphere of activity[107].It is anything but the production of an associated mental image of a sense impression of one kind from a sense impression of another.Burke follows a separation of senses so as to make sympathy in between them work:
The touch takes in the pleasure of softness, which is not primarily an object of sight; the sight on the other hand comprehends colour, which can hardly be made perceptible to the touch; the touch again has the advantage in a new idea of pleasure resulting from a moderate degree of warmth; but the eye triumphs in the infinite extent and multiplicity of its objects.(Burke 1958:121)
This separated economy of senses is one means by which Burke makes a hierarchical ordering of perceptions and feelings, including the inter-subjective fellow feeling of sympathy.No wonder, William Blake, who consistently associates his art of writing with a synesthetic spectacle that “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report”(qtd.in Mitchell 1978:149) in the “age of paper[108],”was to feel “Contempt and Abhorrence”(qtd.in Monk 96) for Burke’s philosophical enquiry.What is at stake for Burke seems to be the production of “experience, custom, tradition, and habit”(Mitchell 1986:136) through a physiological ecology of sound:
When the ear receives any simple sound, it is struck by a single pulse of the air, which makes the ear-drum and the other membranous parts vibrate according to the nature and species ofthe stroke.If the stroke be strong, the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension ....The tension of the part thus increases at every blow, by the united forces of the stroke itself, the expectation, and the surprise; it is worked up to such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime; it is brought just to the verge of pain.(Burke 1958:140)(https://www.daowen.com)
This economy of sound regarding aesthetics of the body runs against that of the proliferation of words in the “age of paper,”which, with its graphic form of mechanic print, enhances the rupture between different sensory structures.
Regarding our contemporary media paradigm shift, Jacque Derrida writes:What is happening to paper at present, namely what we perceive at least as a sort of ongoing decline or withdrawal, an ebb or rhythm as yet unforeseeable ...remind[s] us that paper has a history that is brief but complex, a technological or material history, a symbol history of projections and interpretations, a history tangled up with the invention of the human body and of hominization.(Derrida 2005:43)
This chapter focuses on the origin of modern aesthetic and its sentimental economy upon the body.It is an attempt to outline a genealogy of the historical tangle by working with what G.S.Rousseau calls “physiological texts”and with some texts “physiologically”.Regarding the poetic economy or the mentality of the West, Water J.Ong observes acutely:
By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more think-like, impersonal and religiously neutral.Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held insome sort of inert mental space.(Ong 1982:129)
Burke devises an acoustic affective dimension of communication to run against this visualizing property of words that appears as an emergent form of mediation relevant to an increasing consumption of textuality[109].This is especially the case when words are deployed to verbalize images, to create exact descriptions and imitations, and thus to increase means of communicating human sensorium.Description may be thought of as the moment in narration when the technology of memory—and what to be memorized:“experience, custom, tradition, and habit”—threatens to collapse into the materiality of its means.Description typically “stops”or arrests the temporal movement through narrative.It “spreads out the narrative in space,”according to narratologist Gerard Genette[110].W.J.T.Mitchell observes that in Burke’s “antipictorial account of language,”Burke embraces its effects as that being the product of “custom, habit, and acculturation”(Mitchell 1986:138).Language, for Burke, is “primarily an oral, not a written, medium”(140).Verbal description with its unbounded cornucopia of rich details, often figured as the textual site of greatest wealth, has not come to what Foucault would call a “threshold of epistemologization[111]”yet in the writings of Burke.Instead, in his scenario, language still “operates … by means of sounds which by custom have the effect of realities”(Burke 1958:173).The ear wins over the eye in the transmission between a speaker and an audience.French narrative theorist Gerald Genette admits that the narration and description “frontier”may be nothing but a late development in the history of narrative structure.Indeed, it is a modern formation connected with techne of narrative in which subjectivity and privacy “establish their ‘classic’ relation to the public sphere”(Mitchell 1994:204) as W.J.T.Mitchell follows this argument in another context.For Burke, narration predominates over description.The “classic”extension of the private and subjective to the public and social, as suggested in histories of the rise of bourgeois social structure in the eighteenth century, has not reached its threshold of visibility yet.An amplifycation of the structural difference between narration and description by Genette would bring to light the political significance of Burke’s aesthetics:
Narration is concerned with actions or events considered as pure processes, and by that very fact it stresses the temporal, dramatic aspect of the narrative; description, on the other hand, because it lingers on objects and beings considered in their simultaneity, and because it considers the processes themselves as spectacles, seems to suspend the course of time and to contribute to spreading the narrative in space ...narration restores, in the temporal succession of its discourse, the equally temporal succession of events, whereas description must modulate, in discursive succession, the representation of objects that are simultaneous and juxtaposed in space.(Genette 136)
Thus, the Burkean temporal continuity is over spatial simultaneity, and the narrative restoration remains above discursive modulation.Against all historical accounting, Thomas Paine is no doubt right in suggesting that:
Hard as Mr.Burke laboured the Regency Bill and hereditary succession two years ago, and much as he dived for precedents, he still had not boldness enough to bring up William Normandy, and say, There is the head of the list, there is the fountain of honour; the son of a prostitute and the plundererof the English nation.(Paine 103-104)[112]
It is primarily the aural aspect of language that operates at both the individual and collective levels of realities in Burke’s epistemic schema.The English “experience, custom, tradition, and habit”that Burke advocates through his politics of aesthetic is regulated by the means of narration as a speaking inscriptive mechanism.This is an aesthetics of physiological embodiment to be replaced by that of abstraction regarding the way selfhood is staged.The theatricalized abstraction of selfhood is comparable to a reduction of human sensorium and perception to commodity and object of symbolic exchange in Adam Smith’s political economy.It is analogous to what Hegel, a philosopher notorious for his system of abstractions, attributes to “morning prayer”in a comparison with reading:
Reading the newspaper in early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer.One orients one’s attitude against the world and toward God [in one case], or toward that which the world is [in the other].The former gives the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.(qtd.in Buck-Morss 844)
If one takes what Marshall McLuhan defines communication by whatever media as “participation in common situations,”[113] the predominant means of participation for Burke probably still remains more that of “morning prayer”than of modern newspaper.The latter of which, with its fictive and arbitrary nature, especially its “calendrical coincidence,”[114] imposes the rituals of anonymous simultaneity on individuals, and thus creates collective, homogeneous identity among the larger group of numerous and scattered citizens of modern states.This is part of the theoretical arguments well developed by Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas.