csuf e491 history of literary criticism fall 06

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Home Page for E491

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:58:00 +0000

Welcome to English 491, History of Literary Criticism
Fall 2006 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. It contains two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading. While the entries are not intended as exact replicas of my lecture notes (and in fact, they cannot include an important part of the class sessions since each student will offer a few in-class presentations), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors. They may also help you arrive at paper topics and prepare for the final exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Leitch, Vincent (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Rationale for the course: while there is some literary criticism on our syllabus, many of our Norton Criticism and Theory authors write straightforward philosophy and social theory, not literary criticism. But that’s fine with me. This is not a course in “applied” criticism or theory. Instead, my goal is to help ground you in some of the thought that made 20^th-century literary theory possible. Literature isn’t necessarily a central concern for authors such as Plato, Augustine, Kant, Marx, or Nietzsche, but their notions concerning truth, beauty, language, politics, etc. serve as enabling ideas for modern ways of discussing literature and art.

I don’t suppose this course will cause an immediate upsurge in your understanding of literature or “life in general.” I don’t know that reading Kant or Hegel will help anyone get a better grade on a paper about Milton (though it might, in some cases), much less run into the street and change the wicked ways of the world. This is difficult, contemplative stuff we’re studying, and much of it takes several readings over many years to pay its best intellectual dividends. It would be better to think of Kant, Hegel & Co. as “lifetime companions” rather than as schoolmasters who offer us discrete dollops of factuality. I’m 42, and only in recent years have I felt able to respond to such philosophers. Nowadays I try to “think along with” texts by these writers as if I were having a conversation with them. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the complexity of their ideas. I wasn’t able to read them that way at first, and at times I’ve found engaging with them frustrating. But if a reader will stick with the task and approach it with a cheerfully Nietzschean attitude (“Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger!”), the material can inform the way he or she thinks about any number of things, including even those that touch upon practical concerns (politics, social issues, etc.) rather than “just literature.” Those who strain for immediate benefits in intellectual matters risk losing any benefit whatsoever. And as for changing the world’s wicked ways, even if reading philosophy and literature doesn’t let us do that in any tangible way, I still think there’s value in not being an utter dupe – the kind of person who imbibes notions wholesale from television, talk radio, official statements by politicians, print journalism, and so forth: if “do little harm and try to see things somewhat accurately” is the best I can attain as a citizen, I’ll settle for that and continue leading my perfectly useless “examined life.”

So here are a few practical suggestions: take good notes (even—and especially—on what sounds obscure or confusing), don’t miss too many classes (audio mp3 recordings of sessions are available online—see our E491 wiki menu at www.ajdrake.com/wiki; the link to the audio files is under the E491 Resources sub-menu), and above all, don’t worry about it if not everything is immediately and 100% comprehensible the first time you read it! If you get the basics of, say, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic or Kantian aesthetics, you’re doing just fine. I’ve become fairly good at dealing with Kant, Hegel & Co. without “sounding like Kant and Hegel”—my aim is to be understood, not to impress people with my polysyllabic prating. I want students to finish the course with the feeling that they have obtained a good “first foundation” for learning still more later on. Below are some thoughts about four of our most important authors:

Plato – modern readers are both fascinated and repelled by Plato’s obsession with order and truth and by his distrust of art as a kind of lie. As we say today, Plato views art as ideological subversion or even outright madness. In modern times, the notion that art is socially and politically subversive, of course, actually appeals to some commentators. Others, like Plato himself, distrust it on the same grounds. Again and again, Plato’s powerful combination of mimetic (representational) and pragmatic (morality-centered) concerns finds its way into public discourse about art (and, in modified forms, literary theory itself) right on down to the present day.

Augustine – Saint Augustine gives us a good instance of early Christianity’s theory of signification. Reading him is vital because 19^th-century romanticism, a key movement in western literature, is suffused with Christian hopes and anxieties that it overtly rejects. Romantics such as Shelley seem to have carried forward an elegiac conception of “fallen” language as incommensurate with divine truth, incommensurate with the expression of spirit and emotion. Romanticism, with its emphasis on the power of the symbol, also carries forward a certain faith that the gap between God and man, between the letter and the spirit, can be bridged.

Marx – Some might say that Marx the “economic determinist” marginalizes art since he places it as part of an ideological superstructure subservient to economics proper (the engine of history and its characteristic class struggles). But that would be an oversimplification – art and literature, according to Marxists and those who borrow from them, often serve the dominant class as a means of articulating and defending its power. Those disciplines might also provide a space for contesting the ideological foundations of the ruling order – so again, we find some critics pointing towards the subversive potential in works of art.

Nietzsche – this philosopher-as-literary-man distrusts his idealist German predecessors’ penchant for systems and certainty, and has been enlisted as a supporter by those who would tear down the traditional privilege of literature over criticism and theory, of the creative artist over the critical expositor. One might, of course, also suggest that the same authors exalt literary and artistic thought as the master discipline. Nietzsche prefers to treat “big ideas” about truth, being, and meaning with the light and playful touch of a true stylist, so he is sometimes called the father of 20^th-century theory (deconstruction in particular) for this reason. Always resourceful in the face of philosophy’s insoluble problems, he celebrates language and creativity even as he points out that humanity’s faith in time-honored “truths” about itself and world stems from deep misunderstanding. A fair amount of modern literary theory takes its cue from this resourceful stylist in its dislike of systemic claims about literature, society, politics, or anything else.

Week 16, Nietzsche and de Saussure

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 01:50:00 +0000

Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure. Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (870-884). De Saussure's “Introduction” to Course in General Linguistics and Part One, Chapter I (956-77).

Page-by Page Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (870-884).

874-75. It makes sense to attend to Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy. He begins with a question: given our dissimulative, self-important ways, where does anything like a “truth drive” come from? But as we might have guessed, Nietzsche’s goal isn’t simply to hand us “the truth about truth,” and by 878 he has more or less finished with that question. He’s interested in something anterior and more fundamental about us, something more unsettling and yet also, perhaps, more worthwhile—something that he will explain most fully at the bottom of 881 and onwards.

876-77. At the top of page 876, we are told that the process whereby the conceptual twins “truth/lie” are born begins with “the Social Contract.” As Nietzsche explains, “necessity and boredom” ( a need for peace and for community) lead to the tacit invocation and acceptance of this contract. Afterwards, “that which is to count as ‘truth’ . . . becomes fixed, i.e. a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the legislation of language also produces the first laws of truth….” This development doesn’t in itself account for the acquisition of an interior drive towards “truth,” but it’s the beginning of the process. People desire “the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth,” and whatever doesn’t produce such consequences is designated by common consent as untruth. At 876 middle, Nietzsche raises one of modern philosophy’s most basic questions: regarding linguistic conventions, “Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities” To put this question another way, are words and the material world commensurate, or are they completely different orders? In a sense, the question is unanswerable since, after all, we would have to know exactly what “the world” is in order to say whether or not language can describe it fully. Even so, Nietzsche’s analysis of the movement from sensory perception to speech is compelling and comes close to a firm “No.”

Let’s look at how this movement occurs: “What is a word? The copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds,” writes Nietzsche. As he describes this “copying” process, “The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere….We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities.” So whether or not language can correspond to the material realm, the empirical facts of perception show that it doesn’t. Well, we’ve all been told not to mix our metaphors – only Shakespeare was supposed get a free pass there, right? It turns out that we’re all sinners against the light in that regard: we can’t perceive and describe anything without performing what Nietzsche classifies as a fundamentally creative double-metaphorizing operation. What we call perception and experience are, to borrow a phrase, “always already” (immer wieder, toujours déjà, and all that jazz) The point he makes on 877 has some affinity to what romantic philosophers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Sage of Highgate, say: all perception is active, creative. The empiricists’ claim that we are passive recipients of the sensory perceptions that then (in their scheme, at least) become the basis of our knowledge-systems is a pure fabrication, and really quite an admirable one in its way. And what’s in a concept? Why, nothing. Nietzsche’s explanation here is incisive: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.” Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping those individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be ‘leaf,’ a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven.” But that’s crazy Cloud-Cuckooland talk straight from the Thinkery of Aristophanes’ Plato: there is no LEAF - of - which -all - individual - leaves - are - copies. In nature, as Nietzsche reminds us on 878, there are no species, forms, or types—therefore, the individual entity in the usual sense arises from a distinction we cannot prove to be legitimate. And much as we love Dr. Johnson, we really can’t be with him on his character Rasselas’ demand that artists shouldn’t streak their tulips. Johnson’s neoclassical “general idea” of a tulip, which is supposed to “recall the original to every mind,” does no such thing. It is a useful abstraction, a “concept,” that makes us suppose we’ve comprehended something universal and orderly about nature when in fact we haven’t. Nietzsche’s point isn’t that our metaphoric translation of stimuli into images into sounds is unnecessary; it’s that it has nothing to do with TRUTH.

All sorts of fine things can be done with substantive lies (i.e. nouns)—above all, they serve as false but compelling “causes” for natural actions, as in Nietzsche’s famous deconstruction of causality in The Genealogy of Morals: I say “lightning flashes,” and think I’ve explained something about nature. But really what I’ve done is invent an abstraction, a noun (a substantive, a substance, an essential thing), to account for “flashing” or “flashes.” What I’ve done is produce, ex post facto, a tautological expression that explains precisely nothing. Language isn’t caused by the external world, at least not directly. The same remarkable fiction governs statements connecting “doers” as the source and cause of their “deeds.” The “I” who is said to do the deed is just as much a fiction as “leaf” or “lightning.” (All honor to Lord Krishna in The Baghavad-Gita, who says much the same thing about the illusion of selfhood. Of course, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in Krishna, who attributes all actions to himself as “Doer in Chief.”) Again, none of this has anything to do with truth. It’s much closer to everybody’s favorite right-wing parodist Steven Colbert’s notion of “truthiness.” “I,” “leaf,” the “general tulip,” and “lightning” are truthy—they’re useful and they make us feel good.

878. But if we really want to know where the drive to truth comes from, explains Nietzsche, we must bear in mind that we aren’t even aware that we perform the above-described metaphoric and creative translations to produce language and conceptual systems. Like Colbert, we love truthiness, but unlike him, we perceivers and speakers are always on the air, deadpan, completely ensconced in our rock-solid Colbert-World. If it feels right, believe it, we might say. At 878 middle we find the heart of Nietzsche’s explanation of where that mysterious “truth-drive” comes from: “[people] lie unconsciously in the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries-old habits—and precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth. The feeling that one is obliged to describe one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as dumb, prompts a moral impulse which pertains to truth…. As creatures of reason, human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions….” There you have it: forgetting makes important things happen—a theme Nietzsche returns to again and again in his texts: “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions….” Underlying grand illusions like truth, good/evil, civilization, science, the autonomous individual self, event, causality, god, and so forth is this capacity to forget how such concepts were first articulated. We’re all “salespeople” for such illusions, and, as an old friend of mine likes to say, “In the end, salespeople are the biggest suckers for the sale.” Why? Because, to borrow a line from Hamlet, “they [do] make love to this employment”; they’re enamored of the idea of the sale far more than the goods to be sold. If lying centers and grounds us, how can we be expected to give up such a fruitful occupation? As Nietzsche says, “Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept” (878). And what accompanies this “humanity” of ours? Why, “the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions and borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative” (878 bottom). In a few words, the allied principles of rank and regularity. In sum, we acquire a taste for truth, an inner need for it; an unconscious manner of “lying” leads to a “feeling for truth.”

879. Paul de Man generally defines “ideology” as the confounding of words and the world. We seem to do this inevitably, and are most confounded of all when we think we are most certain of ourselves and our world. At 879 bottom, Nietzsche says much the same thing: our whole web of understanding is a product of anthropomorphization; “forgetting that the original metaphors of perception were indeed metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves.” Notice his near-simultaneous comic buildup and takedown of this process: first he says man is to be “admired” as a “mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water.” Shades of “Kubla Khan,” no? And then he says of these concepts we reasoning creatures have spun out of ourselves, “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing much to boast about….” In Civilization and Its Discontents (1939), Freud would later poke fun of scientific endeavor (as Nietzsche does in the present essay’s Section 2) in similar terms, comparing its great discoveries to a man sticking his leg out from the covers on a chilly evening so he can feel warm and comforted when he puts the leg under the covers again. Marx’s great line comes to mind in this regard, too, although the context is different: “Mankind . . . inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve” (“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

880-84. By now, the question about the origin of the truth-drive has come to sound a bit too truth-driven. Nietzsche is interested in leading us to consider a more fundamental “drive.” At 881 bottom, he writes, “That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed, by the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products—concepts—in order to imprison it in a fortress. The drive seeks out a channel and a new area for its activity, and finds it in myth and in art generally.” In so far as we want to keep using terms like “humanity” and distinguishing ourselves from “the animals,” it is this drive—something which really does (unlike the truth-drive, which is acquired and derivative, a necessary bad habit) appear to be primordial and innate. We don’t pick up or learn how to perform the multi-step metaphoric translations previously discussed; we just do it. That other kind of dull-making creativity—the building of a stable sense of self and society—indeed builds upon this metaphoric drive as that which is to be “forgotten.” But what is forgotten, in Nietzsche’s scheme, doesn’t simply go away; the metaphoric drive is no more eradicated than Freud’s later “libidinal energy” disappears when it is repressed. In Nietzsche’s perceptual-instinctive economy and in Freud’s psychic one, what is repressed will return. And here, the return takes the form of artistic process, a process that seems to delight in making a break from the prison-house of concepts and staying close to the chaos and instability of raw perception. It isn’t that the artist returns to a time when “people saw things as they really were”: that is a ridiculous formulation because there never was such a time. No, art is a kind of “pretence” that seems most proper to “the intellect” (882 bottom paragraph) and gives the pretence-maker a sense of mastery.

With this exuberant praise of the artist, the person of intuition, we come to that all-important Nietzschean issue of attitude or style. What happens when we consistently admit to what Nietzsche has confronted us with about our sense of self and our security in language and the world’s truth? What attitude shall we strike up? Do we make like the Stoic who, “If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on his head . . . wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it” (884)? Do we engage in what Nietzsche calls Christianity’s “denial of life,” insisting to the bitter end on moral observance, on renunciation, from each believer and yet demanding an endlessly deferred, otherworldly security and justice because none is really to be had in this “valley of the shadow of death”? (Nietzsche interprets Christ’s redemptive sacrifice as part of the denial of life since the offer of redemption makes human suffering unnecessary: there’s a clear path out of the woods, so to speak, and no inherent need to get lost in them, unless it be from willful perversity.) It seems that Nietzsche instead urges us to be more like the ancient Greeks, who (at least before that decadent character Plato got hold of them) did not believe they could demand that the cosmos or universe yield them justice, security, or peace. As in their great tragedies, suffering is shown to be necessary, and we dare not demand that the gods be just. They are what they are. At 883 first paragraph, Nietzsche describes the “liberated intellect’s way of thinking and living: “The vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. No regular way leads from these intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions.” He goes on to suggest that Greek culture established “the rule of art over life” where humanity’s “neediness” was persistently denied and where “the radiance of metaphorical visions” prevailed over reason. The Greeks had a tragic vision of life, then, and they were open to suffering, open to experience without the props of intelligibility. Consider Sappho’s fragment on love: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” She wouldn’t be open to erotic experience if she weren’t strong enough, like the rooted oak braving the wind, to withstand the sway of her own passions (which the ancients figure as a god, an external force not unlike a great wind or storm). Ultimately, I think that’s Nietzsche’s vision of life, too: openness to experience, staying “true” not to “the Truth” but rather to the intuitive and metaphoric quality in human perception and thought. There is, again, no question of a return to truth; there is only the possibility of awakening to a sense of deception’s heady immediacy rather than moving ever farther away from it. Both the society-building “distortion” and the artist’s “pretence” and deceptiveness are, at base, creative—the first is creative in a constructive, comforting way, while the second is creative in a destructive, challenging way. Perhaps these two modes of creativity, like Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus in another early text of his, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, are so intimately sourced and related that we can’t “think” them rightly in isolation from each other; perhaps they both need each other.

To conclude with a thought about philosophy and “theory” after Nietzsche, that grand concept humanity itself is just the sort of conceptual sham whose deconstruction (since Nietzsche’s way of handling his subjects is fairly labeled proto-deconstructive) such an attitude or style is meant to embrace, isn’t it? It, too, is a product of the distortional truth-drive Nietzsche has been examining. We don’t simply propagate ideology in the everyday sense—we are ideological constructions. Other modern authors have taken up an attitude, so to speak, about this great deflation of human puffery and certainty. Michel Foucault writes with antihumanist brio in The Order of Things (in French, differently titled Words and Things—Les mots et les choses), “it is comforting . . . and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (xxiii). Martin Heidegger is also instructive regarding the gist of Nietzsche’s deconstructive and antihumanist efforts. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger suggests that humanists have reduced thought itself to a kind of techne or instrument, one which entails a permanent split between subject and object. Mind comes to know “world” through the instrumentality of thought, thereby shoring up its own firmness at the expense of authenticity. This kind of “thought” has surely stepped away from all that is proper and worthy of “thinking.” Much of Heidegger’s project involves the destruction of this humanistic, philosophical imposition upon thinking. De Man, while in dialogue with Heidegger’s texts, counsels something like perpetual vigilance when it comes to the question of ideology. Jacques Derrida, as a thinker and stylist, has a strong affinity with Nietzsche, insisting as he does on rigorous, yet somehow cheerful, deconstruction of anything that appears likely to set itself up (and of course without acknowledging what it’s doing) as the newest latest metaphysical grounding of certainty. In Derrida’s view, structuralism—of which the notes of Ferdinand de Saussure the linguist and, later, the published work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, serve as prime examples—is just such a back-door metaphysical center, the unquestioned principle of intelligibility of what might as well acknowledge itself as a new version of a systemic philosophy, with its drive either to dismiss the world outright (some have said de Saussure’s emphasis on the synchronic dimension of language does that because he dismisses the troubled word-world connection issue out of hand) or to account for it altogether, as, say, the sophisticated Idealism of Hegel or the thoroughgoing materialism of Marx might be said to attempt. In a strong sense, both Nietzsche and Derrida and others who think along the same lines reject the notion (so pervasive here in America, by the way, with our move-it-along-now logical positivist tradition) that we can either simply accept or simply dismiss the ontological and epistemological concerns of traditional western philosophy. As I mentioned regarding de Man earlier, just when we have made a clean break with the past and its concerns, that’s when they have the most power to script and dominate what we do in the present. The one who thinks he or she has dismissed ideology (or Dame Philosophy) with a contemptuous wave of the hand is almost surely the biggest dupe of all. So when structuralism develops into the robust semiological adventure it becomes in the 1950’s and 1960’s (mostly in Europe; it never fully caught on here in the States), when what Derrida himself calls “the hyperinflation of the signifier” takes hold and everyone tries to explain everything after the manner of the structural linguist’s mode of analysis, it is then that the unexamined principle of “structure” should disturb us most of all. As the French saying goes about love relationships, “ni sans toi ni avec toi”: to paraphrase, “I can’t live without the other but I can’t live with the other, either.” I can’t even really decide the issue one way or the other, because if I do, it’s nearly certain that the troubles I’ve repressed will come back to haunt me when I least expect them to. Well, structuralism proper isn’t exactly in vogue nowadays, but such observations never really go out of style since they apply with equal force to anything that comes along (cultural studies, feminism, neo-formalism, whatever) and becomes the fashion in academic fields. Given that it is difficult today to distinguish between “literary theory,” philosophy, social theory, and so forth, it’s good to keep in mind this complex of concerns as you move forwards to a consideration of contemporary theory.

General Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (884-95).

Here the focus is on a genre (tragedy) from an ancient culture (the Greeks) that both produces and unsettles the Apollo/Dionysus split. Apollo is the god of light, reason, the lovely dream of order, justifying life’s tribulations in a purely aesthetic way. Dionysus is the god of wine, intoxication, and surrender of the calm, self-contained ego to forces both within and beyond that ego. But both gods are necessary to each other and cannot be kept separate. If tragedy can lead us to this insight, art is very significant, and in no way inferior to philosophy or theology.

At base, Greek tragedy offers a way to embrace one’s fate as a human being; it justifies suffering by creating beauty from it that does not simply disown the process of generation (of that beauty). End note for 894—together, Apollo and Dionysus account for the acceptance of life, amor fati, as opposed to Christianity’s supposed “denial of life.”

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

General Notes on Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Introduction” to A Course in General Linguistics and Part One, Chapter I (956-77).

1) What was the aim of structuralism as a developing movement that really got going after the eclipse of Sartre’s humanistic existentialism in the 1950’s and 1960’s? Well, the goal was that “structure” could serve as a single unifying principle: the structuralist method would unify the human sciences. Discarding all that old philosophical nonsense about “meaning” and “essence,” structuralists would go forth and discover the how of things—how they fit together, how they work, what allows them to mean anything in the first place—rather than fixating on the question of what things mean. Structuralism give us an upbeat, scientific view of language. It takes a potentially Nietzschean insight into the “arbitrariness” of language in relation to the material world and turns that insight into something positive rather than destructive: our structuralists are a bit like Kant, at least in terms of attitude: let’s admit that we can’t get at “meaning” or “things themselves.” But so what? What we can render intelligible is how things work, and that’s well worth understanding. With de Saussure, language becomes a subject to be studied in its own right as a functioning system from which meaning emerges; it is not merely a pointing device towards the material world, and it is not merely a hindrance getting in the way of our attempts to deal with that world. Words and the world are two different provinces, and there’s no natural connection between them.

2) What does this movement try to replace? It replaces humanist conceptions of the mind and of language. Some general assumptions in the humanist strain would be the following:

A. Humans are the central force in and meaning of a world that we can rationally apprehend. Remember the ancient Greek saying: “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras). Kantian Idealism is a sophisticated example of this view in its attempt to show each individual mind’s power to render the phenomenal world intelligible. Our world is intelligible; We can live comfortably in it and perhaps even achieve mastery over it. Earlier theories had more straightforwardly posited (or denied) a “real world out there,” but they struggled mightily also to establish the notion that individual consciousness, individual reason, is king.

B. Our various languages can describe or relate to the world around us correctly—at least once we build up a system of concepts sophisticated enough to describe complex phenomena accurately. There are many views on how this can happen, but here is just one: C17 authors such as Bacon and Locke said that words are the signs of ideas, and ideas are the signs of things; they would actually agree somewhat with the modern-day structuralists at least in saying that words and things are not directly or naturally linked together. (Locke was a linguistic nominalist, that is.) The Lockean view makes language rather dangerous in that if we aren’t careful, words might lead us away from the truth about things themselves; overreliance on them and on relations between them might obscure the world’s clarity and distinct diversity. Still, there seems to be an equally powerful insistence that we can strip away layers of error from languages and make them more accurately correspond to our ideas, and thus, indirectly, to things. Bacon in particular denounces the many “idols” of thinking (and language) to which fallen humanity is prone, and at times wishes language would just get out of the way so we can study our natural environment in a scientific, inductive way.

C. Language is linked to our consciousness, our intentions, our meanings. Man, both individually and collectively, is a meaning-making animal: we use language in tool-like fashion as free-acting individuals, building up a social environment around us or shaping it around the words given us by God. For example, Aristotle sees language as linked to our mental states; they are symptomatic of a state of consciousness. (Expressive theory might profitably be considered the obverse, not the absolute opponent, of this general view: it isn’t clear that there are distinct, anterior states of mind or spirit that can then be reliably “expressed” and made available to common understanding. It would be fair to suggest that especially in the realm of emotion there are “things going on inside our heads” before language comes into play, but we can’t do much with such goings-on until language comes into play.)

It may be worth remarking here that such theories always insist upon the primacy of the spoken word over the written—that’s because the written word is seen as merely a derivative or even “bad” copy of the spoken word. The farther we go from our speech, the notion goes, the farther we move from truth, self-presence, and full consciousness of our authentic being. After all, as Plato points out in the Phaedrus, you don’t even need to be present for what you have written to be read, and it can be read in the most promiscuous ways. In one form or another, we can find this idea in Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, and (according to Derrida and other deconstructive theorists) any other western philosopher you’d care to mention. Consciousness and the spoken word are jointly king; writing is a potentially harmful parasite feeding upon that sovereign’s legitimate authority.

3) Back to the basic claims of structuralism. With what does it replace humanistic principles?

A. We, as individuals and in groups, are not the measure of all things. Instead, STRUCTURE produces the effect of meaning or intelligibility. The structural operations governing whatever we are investigating give rise to the effect of meaning. One can study things as diverse as so-called primitive cultures and modern fashion with the same methodology. De Saussure is not talking in these specific philosophical terms, but later authors involved with structuralism sponsor such claims. The anthropological studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss are a fine example of structuralism at work.

B. Language does not designate an external reality. It is the structure of language that we must focus on first and foremost rather than trying to link it to external reality.

C. Language speaks man, to hijack a phrase from Heidegger’s anti-scientific philosophy to describe a more pro-scientific one. The speaking “I” does not author meaning by manipulating language; instead, the “I” or consciousness is an effect of linguistic structure. Meaning doesn’t arise from an individual’s experience or intentions but rather from the oppositions and workings, the “grammar” or rules of the language systems in question. The system makes meaning, not us, and we ourselves are creatures of the linguistic and social systems we think we have created. De Saussure himself does not fully draw this conclusion, but others who come after him certainly do.

Page-by-Page Notes on Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Introduction” to A Course in General Linguistics and Part One, Chapter I (956-77).

960-61. “Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. . . . It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” Language is a social phenomenon, not a personal possession or acquisition, and it exists by virtue of a tacit contract.

961. “Language, unlike speaking, is something that we can study separately. . . . [L]anguage is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.” The opposition here is between langue (a language such as French, English, Spanish or German, considered as an integral sign system) and parole (individual utterances). De Saussure, as what we would now call a structuralist, is saying that we can step back from the chaotic mass of actual utterances and study language as a system: how does the effect of meaning emerge within the system? It may seem that de Saussure has turned language into something entirely abstract, but that isn’t what he’s aiming to do.

Instead, he is suggesting that the half of the sign that he characterizes as a “sound-image” is an impression in the brain of the person who has heard another person speaking. You say something, I hear you, and an impression, a “sound-image,” is formed or manifested in my mind. De Saussure says that “language is a storehouse of sound-images, and writing is the tangible form of those images.” So he’s referring to a “concrete” event in the mind of the auditor or listener (a mental reality, we might call it), and, with regard to writing, to tangible marks on a surface. We may recall Nietzsche’s remarks in “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” about the metaphoric leaps that allow us to speak with unfounded but impressive confidence in our ability to describe the world’s objects and events with our words. De Saussure, as we shall see, admits that the relationship between words and the world is arbitrary, but the admission causes neither anxiety nor a proto-deconstructive urge to tear apart the notion that language makes intelligibility possible. Instead, his approach is cheerfully scientific: how does language work as a system that generates what we call “meaning”?

962. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call I semiology. . . .” This sounds like a fine idea, so why hasn’t it been worked out, asks de Saussure? The answer he gives involves the investment people have always had in an essentialist understanding of language: “people see nothing than a name-giving system in language, thereby prohibiting any research into its true nature.” When non-linguists consider how words signify, that is, they feel most comfortable with the process of which Milton gives us an eloquent summation in Book 8 of Paradise Lost, wherein God invites Adam to give all the animals their proper names:

all the Earth
To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords
Possess it, and all things that therein live,
Or live in Sea, or Aire, Beast, Fish, and Fowle.
In signe whereof each Bird and Beast behold
After thir kindes; I bring them to receave
From thee thir Names, and pay thee fealtie
With low subjection; understand the same (8.338-345 )

This Adamic naming process implies that Adam’s mind (as furnished by God) contains unimpeachable knowledge of each creature’s true name; all he has to do is speak that name, and the creature so named will be rightly signified for all time. In this view, words point to or name a pre-established reality. Words, therefore, are neither more nor less than indicators of the natural and divinely ordained nature of things. But in de Saussure’s view, this Adamic conception of language is flat wrong. The individual does not connect words with things in this manner, and in fact, neither does the community of speakers: “the distinguishing characteristic of the sign—but the one that is least apparent at first sight—is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will.” The community doesn’t come together and make Adam-like choices about word-and-thing connections any more than an individual Adam would, and de Saussure evidently doesn’t mean to suggest that it does in using the term “contract.” If we want to know as fully as possible how language signifies, we must move beyond this essentialist, instrumental conception and “learn what it has in common with all other semiological systems.” De Saussure is confident that future semiologists will be able to accomplish the task he lays out for them.

963. What is the nature of linguistic signs? De Saussure again counters the notion that words simply name things in the outside world, and adds that there aren’t any pre-existing ideas to which words might be said to relate, either. Words neither point to external things nor refer us to anterior ideas about those things. Instead, he asserts, “both terms involved in the linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an associative bond. . . . The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.” It is understandably difficult for de Saussure to describe precisely what he means by the term “sound-image” since, after all, it is not something we can gain access to directly: it is an event that happens in the brain, and not something we can grasp by empirical means. As he points out, “Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselves or recite mentally a selection of verse.” (Historically, this silent relationship to language, at least with respect to reading, was once far less the rule than it is today, but that fact doesn’t diminish the value of de Saussure’s argument. He is simply saying that it is possible to speak to ourselves or to read without muscular activity; so language can, evidently, be understood as purely a mental activity, and this quality makes it possible to analyze it structurally.)

964. “I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign. . . . I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]; the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts.” The new terms, de Saussure implies, should help clear away the deadwood and help us better understand the elements of a sign. I would suggest further that there isn’t a simple deictic (pointing) or referential relationship between the signifier and the signified; de Saussure’s preference is to speak of an “associative bond” (963) between the two elements.

965. Here de Saussure addresses the arbitrary and conventional nature of language. He says, “No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, but it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign it to its proper place.” At base, the term “arbitrary” means that words are not intimately or necessarily connected to things themselves. That the signified or signifié for “tree” is associated in Latin with the signifiant or signifier arbor, or in Attic Greek with dendron, or in German with Baum, is a matter of convention, a matter of common agreement spanning centuries of usage. De Saussure elaborates on the point somewhat by distinguishing the symbol from ordinary language. With respect to a symbol, he says, arbitrariness isn’t the right word to use: “One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.” The associations between a symbol and what it symbolizes will always be appropriate to the culture in which it functions.

When it comes to ordinary language, however, arbitrariness reigns supreme, and by it de Saussure means that “the choice of the signifier” is “unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.” In German, for instance, the crustacean we call “lobster” in English is signified by the word Hummer. If signifiers can differ so widely, it’s obvious that the words or signifiers aren’t naturally connected with what they signify: the signifier saying der Hummer doesn’t lead us towards some mysterious essence of the creature in question. It may help to consider that some experts recommend for adult language acquisition the adoption of a system known as “linkword,” which encourages learners to link a word in their native language to another native-language word that sounds like the foreign word they want to remember, and keep thinking about the connection for at least ten seconds. (There are other methods, such as the Roman Room and the Town, which add a sense of location to the mix.) An example: if you want to fix der Hummer in your memory, you might imagine a man sitting in the passenger seat of a Hummer 2 with a lobster at the steering wheel. Silly, perhaps, but rather effective—I bring it up because it reinforces the arbitrariness of linguistic associations generally. There’s no natural connection between a gas-guzzling Hummer and a big red crustacean, but that doesn’t make any difference—the point is just to learn the word so you can use it in common with a particular linguistic community, within which, of course, der Hummer is commonly accepted as the right signifier for a noteworthy crustacean. The association between der Hummer and its signified may not be based on anything so ludicrous as my whimsical association (and certainly isn’t the product of willful individual choice). Still, however it came to be what it is, it’s no more “natural” than my environment-stomping, narcissistic, Hummer-driving lobster.

966. De Saussure addresses the insistence by some people that special cases such as onomatopoeic words and interjections disprove the arbitrariness thesis. But as he points out, even these words differ from one language to the next: English-speakers say “bow-wow” to imitate a dog’s barking, while the French say ouaoua. Similar, perhaps, but not quite the same. And interjections differ even more markedly, so they prove nothing.

966. As for the linearity of the signifier, de Saussure says, “its consequences are incalculable.” Why is the principle or fact of linearity so important? Well, the linear unfolding of signification allows meaning to emerge. The individual sign does not in itself fix discrete meaning. Here is how I would gloss de Saussure’s point: when we hear spoken utterances or read a series of words on the page, they unfold as an “internal impression” within our minds. This impression isn’t available simultaneously, the way a grouping of pictorial symbols might be. The utterance unfolds in our minds over a span of time and “unidirectionally,” so to speak. Meaning is a product not of individual units in isolation but rather of the relationship amongst the terms as they unfold. De Saussure’s language is, “auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a chain. This feature becomes readily apparent when they are represented in writing and the spatial line of graphic marks is substituted for succession in time.” (He uses the word “auditory,” but I think he wants us to understand that he’s invoking the “psychological impression” he had mentioned earlier, in his remarks about the “sound-image” before he replaced that term with signifiant.) Without an understanding of this basic fact, we would probably be stuck with the outmoded idea that self-contained “words” point to “things” or at least to self-contained “ideas.”

967. “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” It is difficult to conceive of “what’s going on in our heads” before language comes into play. For practical, analytic purposes, nothing precedes the system of signs by which we live. (Perhaps there are ways of dealing with “pre-linguistic cognition” tolerably well with reference to evolutionary programming, or, more philosophically, along the lines of Nietzsche’s remarks about nature as chaotic realm whose alleged “laws” are most likely nothing more than impositions spun our own web of duplicitous desire and dire need. But none of this sort of speculation is de Saussure’s concern.) De Saussure writes further, “The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units.” Then follow his twin metaphors of “air in contact with a sheet of water” and “a sheet of paper” to represent the “union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.” The point of the metaphors is that “one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. . . .” Sound (whether by that word we mean physical sound or the “impression” it makes) does not express thought; rather, its combination with thought “produces a form, not a substance” that constitutes a vital part of the signifying process. It’s the fact of combination that matters here, not sound or thought in supposed isolation from each other.

968. “The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.” Well, that explains Humpty Dumpty’s failure to impress Alice with his linguistic cleverness in Through the Looking-Glass:

[T]here are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents--’

‘Certainly,’ said Alice.

‘And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”‘ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t--till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master--that’s all.’

Poor Humpty!—not only was he pushed off the wall by shadowy conspirators, but now de Saussure comes along and invalidates his eccentric notions about language: the signifying system itself “is to be master,” not the single person who speaks it, and indeed not even the entire community as an agglomeration of individuals.

Furthermore, writes de Saussure, “to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together.” A structural linguist, by contrast, must begin with the system in its integrity and completeness, and gain an appreciation of its smaller “parts” or elements within that complete system. Meaning or signification is relational, not a matter of discrete substances or essences that are to be “conveyed” to us by language as a medium or conduit.

968-70. “How,” asks de Saussure, “does value differ from signification?” (968) The words are by no means synonyms, even though it’s tempting to conflate them. By signification, explains de Saussure, we should understand the vertical relationship between signified and signifier, as in his diagrams picturing an oval shape with “signified” in the top half of the oval and “signifier” in the bottom half. By value is meant the horizontal relationships between signifiers and signifiers, signifieds and signifieds. If I say, “sheep,” an English speaker will know that I’m referring to a certain wooly quadruped; if I say “mutton,” an English speaker will know that I’m referring to something like “lamb stew.” But if a French person says, le mouton, he or she can refer to either of what in English would be very different things: Dolly the living sheep, or a piece of dead meat on a plate. Clearly, says de Saussure, mouton shares a signification with the English words “mutton” and “sheep,” but its value (as a term within the larger system of language) is not identical with the English words’ value since it has two significations and the English words each have only one. Mouton offers a wider range of possibilities than does either “mutton” or “sheep,” and this distinction only becomes clear when we compare the terms, or, more precisely, when we place mouton/mutton, mouton/sheep, sheep/sheep, sheep/mutton alongside one another horizontally. (De Saussure’s diagram, according to the Norton editor’s introduction, is somewhat misleading in that it posits a smoother parallelism in the relationship amongst combinations of signifiers/signifieds than really obtains.) Within a single language, says de Saussure, “all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like French rédouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors” (969). To put things simply, if you want to approach the value of a verb such as “to fear,” you must place it in a working relationship with other verbs that are used to signify sometimes similar and yet not identical states of mind and body: “to dread,” “to be terrified,” to be anxious,” “to be alarmed,” etc. Similarly, “to judge,” “to distinguish,” “to weigh the merits of something,” “to condemn,” “to pronounce sentence,” “to opine,” etc. share some common elements, but are not reducible to one another. In sum, there isn’t a simple one-to-one correspondence between one word and one idea. Instead, de Saussure is implying, a language consists of thousands upon thousands of signifier/signified associations yielding an amazing range of possibilities.

As de Saussure writes, “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. . .” (969). In other words, it is a sign’s relationship to a range of other signs that determines the value of that single sign. It would be still better to suggest that value emerges from the relationship between ranges of signifiers, and between ranges of signifieds. I say this in keeping with de Saussure’s statement as follows: “all values . . . are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined.” // Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value. To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece, or with coins of another system. . .” (969). By analogy, a signifier is similar to another signifier, and signifiers or “words” differ fundamentally from the concepts or ideas they may signify. Therefore, both the similar part of the equation and the dissimilar one must be considered in determining the value of a sign, which is the term de Saussure uses to characterize the associated signifier and signified.

As de Saussure defines value (or, very loosely, “meaning”), it emerges by way of differential relations, and the relations are purely negative: that is, values are not defined in relation to an essence or positive content, but rather by what they are not. There is no way to reduce “the world” to simplicity or perfect order by means of a set of magic pointing devices (i.e. single words that mean single things, to speak very broadly). I suppose it’s tempting—and perhaps even somewhat useful, for the moment—to indulge ourselves in a statement such as, “any one language consists of a vast number signifiers, and there are a vast number of actions, feelings, ‘ideas,’ events, and circumstances with which they have become and can become associated. Language makes it possible to live productively in the presence of what would seem to be great potential for chaos.” Of course, this sort of pronouncement assumes just the sort of “pre-/extra-linguistic reality” that de Saussure’s whole outlook is determined to deny us. What we can say confidently, according to de Saussure, is that the effect we call “meaning” is produced by the operation of the system. Meaning cannot be extracted from the system and finalized as if it referred to solid and discrete things we can describe, understand, and have done with. Of a given word, de Saussure writes, “Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it. Being part of a system, it is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different” (970).

972. On 970, de Saussure had written that “concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.” On 972, he reinforces this theme: “Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.” It’s possible to fix on this notion of “no ideas before language” to an extreme, as some have taken license from de Saussure to do. I don’t know that modern linguistics would fully support this radical assertion about the primacy of language (even though a simple return to pre-Saussurean language models seems unlikely). I would recommend Roy Harris’ book Saussure and His Interpreters (2005) as a means of understanding how de Saussure has been enlisted by other theorists in areas beyond his own concern of linguistics. But fundamentally and aside from the back-and-forth terminology shifts between the phonic or material fact of language and language understood purely in terms of “structure” (which may stem from the Course’s status as lecture notes and not a polished text) I would say that if there is one troubling assertion above others in de Saussure, it would have to be his insistence that nothing worth considering (my phrase, not his) is going on in our minds before language comes into play. I’m guessing that the truth is far more complex and that a considerable body of evidence (intelligent animals who nonetheless don’t seem to have much by way of signifying capacity, people with brain injuries who “think in pictures,” and so forth) might be brought to bear in re-examining the Twentieth Century’s claims about the all-encompassing significance of language in human life.

972. Also on this page, de Saussure briefly mentions writing, and his two main claims about it are as follows: 1) “The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection, for example, between the letter t and the sound that it designates” and 2) “The value of letters is purely negative and differential. The same person can write t, for instance, in different ways.” On the whole, argues Jacques Derrida in his early deconstructive texts, de Saussure privileges speech over writing just as western philosophers have long done: writing is treated as more or less a copy of speech, and therefore derivative. The basic problem with such treatment is that it contradicts de Saussure’s own anti-essentialist claims: there’s no reason why speech should be the privileged object of analysis rather than writing if neither is really any closer to some supposedly anterior truth or reality.

973. “Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact; it is even the sole type of facts that language has, for maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution.” What he’s talking about here is binary oppositions: when we relate one complete sign to another, the firm association between the sign’s two terms (signifié/signifiant) runs up against the firm association between another complete sign’s two terms. Now we must speak not of difference, as we would in comparing signifier to signifier or signified to signified, but instead of opposition. Furthermore, he writes, “The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind . . . .” There is still a relationship to account for, but it’s a relationship that maintains firm boundaries between one term and another: each sign is treated as a “positive fact,” and must not be confounded with another. De Saussure is saying that language works as a system of binary oppositions. He knows that we invest a great deal of importance in maintaining our binary pairings; it is how we structure our understanding of ourselves and the world, and as such it is the ally of the basic principles regarding logical propositions, “identity or non-contradiction” and “the excluded middle”: p and not-p can’t both be true; either p or not-p must be true. Later on, deconstructive theorists and others who challenge structuralism will point out that binary oppositions are inherently hierarchical: they force us to rank things and people and categories as “one or the other,” “superior/ inferior,” “presence/absence,” “speech/writing,” and so forth. Nietzsche’s “truth/falsehood” (Wahrheit/Lüge) is just such a binary pairing, and his unsettling of their claim to mutually exclusive integrity in his 1873 essay “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”) is instructive for those who want to understand how deconstruction works.

974-77. “Relations and differences between linguistic terms fall into two distinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values” (974). The classes de Saussure calls syntagmatic and associative: “The syntagmatic relation is in praesentia. It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the associative relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series” (975). With respect to syntagmatic association, de Saussure drives home the point that this kind of relation only seems to belong to physical speaking, but in fact it belongs to language: we can only come to grips with a word like indécorable, he says, in relation to other words in the system that are also prefixed with in- or im-. But he suggest also that “in the syntagm there is no clear-cut boundary between the language fact, which is a sign of collective usage, and the fact that belongs to speaking and depends on individual freedom.”

Associative relations, implies de Saussure, are even more complicated: “Mental association creates other groups besides those based on the comparing of terms that have something in common. . .” (966). As he explains, if we take a word such as enseignement, associations may be called up from the root of the word, enseign-, or from its suffix, -ment. In addition, associations may stem from “the analogy of the concepts signified” and from other factors such as “the similarity of the sound-images” (966). Thus, says de Saussure, “there is at times a double similarity of meaning and form, at times similarity only of form or of meaning. A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it in one way or another” (966). This kind of evocation, he says, is neither predictable nor necessarily finite in quantity: “A particular word is like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite number of co-ordinated terms.”

Post-Structuralism: Barthes and Derrida as Two Examples Among Many. By way of a shorthand introduction to the uses that have been made of Saussurean linguistics by post-structuralist theorists, it’s worth inferring from the last few pages of our selection that de Saussure’s remarks about “associative relations” could point us towards the endless play of language that authors such as Roland Barthes find so promising later on, or to the more rigorous practice of “deconstruction” on the part of authors such as Jacques Derrida in the 1960’s-90’s. I take these to be two of the main uses with respect to literary criticism and theory, while the third, of course, has to do with the application of Saussurean linguistics to huge swaths of cultural phenomena, of the sort practiced by the brilliant structural anthologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. That third usage I will have to leave aside since it is beyond the scope of this posting.

As for the first use, the blissful and never-ending slide from signifier to signifier really isn’t a model to which de Saussure would want to affix his imprimatur; we don’t hear him extolling our commitment to language in terms of erotic bliss à la Barthes’ privileging of readerly jouissance in essays such as “Le plaisir du texte” (“The Pleasure of the Text”). Still, a possible claim based on de Saussure’s framework is that “meaning” can’t be confined and reduced to the immediate context of an utterance or to a series of words on the page. De Saussure himself seems to take an almost Kantian approach to the events or transformation he says must be occurring in a listener or reader’s mind while it is processing speech. In essence, all speakers and listeners speak and listen in the same way. The possibility of crisp, relatively final communication, of “clarity of meaning” seems intact in de Saussure’s Cours Generale: it flows from his understanding of the linguistic system as the ground of coherent meaning. This system is beyond and bigger than any single individual, or even the entire community of speakers of a given language. We process language in a more or less unconscious manner, and de Saussure’s assumption is apparently that each of us will process, will “understand,” language in a way that accords with its transpersonal, systemic, universal manner of functioning.

In practice, of course, we make this assumption every day of our lives as communicators. I am making it even now as I write: I’m assuming that I am setting down some more or less definite, interrelated set of ideas that will reach you more or less intact, that will mean pretty much the same things to you as they mean to me. That we make this assumption empirically, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s correct, or that it must always be correct, or even that it’s the only way to think about the significance of language, speaking, and writing. Roland Barthes’ call to jouissance (from the French verb jouir, to enjoy, to play, to “come” sexually) asserts in a rather Humpty-Dumpty-like, decisive way that there’s no need to privilege decisiveness, finality, and clarity over playfulness. When de Saussure writes, “A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it in one way or another,” Barthes is delighted to take him up on the proposition: the experience of reading literature (please excuse the term—Barthes understandably rejects it as a firm category) can and should become an engagement with the endless play of signifiers on the page. De Saussure’s emphasis on differential relations and his acceptance of the great complexity of possible “associative relations,” that is, opens up the possibility of foregrounding the signifier and putting the signified on the backburner, so to speak. In his early work, Barthes takes the de-mythologizing of the signified as discrete meaning-unit to great lengths. Perhaps we can know that we are using commonly accepted signifiers when we speak or write; but we can’t know for certain that the hearer or reader’s understanding is going to follow some pre-ordained, culturally correct path (or, what amounts to almost the same thing, to the path or range of possibilities sanctioned by the “linguistic system”). How exactly would we know that? And if we insist on its happening, Barthes might say, aren’t we just imposing in an authoritarian manner a particular way of looking at language that supports all sorts of hierarchies and “unfairnesses” that have had their day and don’t deserve our support? This is very much a “radical-sixties” way of inflecting Saussurean linguistics.

The second use is apparent most dramatically in Derridean deconstruction, which underlies the more celebratory notions I outlined above. What Derrida offers is a rigorous (though by no means dour, as some claim) “take-down” (but also an abiding-with) older categories of thought, older ways of understanding what happens when we speak, read, and think. For a fuller appreciation of this author, it’s best to go to his early essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” to Of Grammatology, and to other works such as Disseminations. We can learn something about Derrida’s take on de Saussure from his coinage of the term différance based on the French word that can mean either “to differ” or “to defer” (différer), similarly to its Latin root, differre. The essay “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy makes for very complex reading, so may the decon-gods forgive me my trespasses as I forgive others. (I imagine them to look something like the Polynesian Tiki, though I’m not certain why.)

Well, we know about the verb différer now, but what of the common noun stemming from this verb? La différence cannot, in fact, mean what in English we mean by “deferral” or temporal putting-off. It can only mean “difference” in the sense of “being other than.” But différance (with an “a”) both differs from the meaning of différence and defers us in our quest to put a cap on the meaning of that word. Both the coinage and the older word are pronounced the same way, so we can’t settle the word’s meaning by reference to speech. Even a native speaker of French can locate the alterity neither in a phonic (audible) speech act nor in the unfolding of what de Saussure calls the “sound-image” impression that the speaking of a word triggers in our minds. The difference between différenceand différance is unavailable whether it comes from the voice of another person or whether we “listen to the voice in our own head,” so to speak. You can only see that difference, when you resort to graphic marks on a page. As the online Dictionary of Philosophy says concisely, “If the spoken word requires the written to function properly, then the spoken is itself always at a distance from any supposed clarity of consciousness. It is this originary breach that Derrida associates with the terms arche-writing and différance.” If we thought that we could learn everything we needed to know about language as a system from speech, we were mistaken: if anything, it is writing that might lay claim to the attentions of linguists and philosophers, not speech. Positing even the emergence (much less the pre-linguistic existence) of clear, settled meanings or ideas in “language” modeled after speech just became a much more dubious proposition, it seems.

Ultimately, I believe, Derrida’s différence example conveys a disturbing insight about language that the unexamined privileging of speech over writing elides: speech partakes of the nature of writing, and as anyone who has read Plato’s Phaedrus knows, writing and reading what has been written makes it painfully obvious to us just how tenuous our hold on “understanding” is: from the outset we confront the possibility of perpetual drift and inherent miscommunication. There can be no fully or permanently satisfying return (though there can be many partly or entirely disguised unsatisfying returns) to the myth of originary meaning, to the sign that is grounded only in itself and that therefore grounds the entire system of meanings, to the comforts of intentionality and the integrity of consciousness, etc. If such claims are made and accepted, the questions one faces are the ones Nietzsche proposed, among them being, “What styles to adopt? What attitudes to take up, and towards what? What avenues of insight to pursue? What stance to adopt towards past ideas, texts, and events?

Suggestion: if all of this talk about writing, or écriture, as Derrida often calls it, seems maddeningly difficult, you might try the following meditative experiment to help you get a handle on what is being posited about the self-consciousness that responds to and participates in language: sit down and be still for a while, and try to attend to the flow of thoughts in your mind. Try after a while to trace the connections between one thought and another; try to “get back to the source” of your ideas or series of idea. I feel certain that you won’t be able to do it—at least not in any impressive, final way. You cannot “get back to the origin of your thoughts.” Why? Well, perhaps because there isn’t one: it’s all a web of feelings, thoughts, sensations, and whatnot, and there’s never going to be a final resting place for any of it—at least until the final irony, death, “kindly stops for you,” to adapt a line from Emily Dickinson.

Final Thoughts on de Saussure. The desacralization and de-essentialization of language has proven important to some who deal with political science and social theory. Much modern literary theory of whatever sort is generally founded upon a Saussurean model of how language “means,” or at least de Saussure serves as a point of departure. You could say that de Saussure is like Kant in this regard: just as philosophy has never been quite the same after Kant’s sophisticated reworking of the relationship between man and nature, freedom and necessity (and throw in Hegel’s refined dialectic here, too), most theorists have come to accept de Saussure’s conception of language as ruling out any simple return to earlier ways of thinking about language. Today, de Saussure is hardly the last word about language (again, I would recommend Roy Harris’ 2005 book Saussure and His Interpreters) , but one really can’t go back to Plato’s Cratylus, with its assertion that words and things are intimately connected: that just seems like confusion. At their best, de Saussure’s linguistics teaches us to take linguistic artifacts seriously without treating them as set in conversation-stopping, sacred stone. And “linguistic artifacts” is a broad enough category, of course, to encompass a Jane Austen novel and the United States Constitution. Moreover, the idea that language (not “mind” or “spirit”) is the primary mode of self-consciousness turns out to be a powerful one, even if it need not go unchallenged: much of what many of us find unacceptable and cruel in our social and political arrangements can be understood in terms of the great power of language to define us and thereby to include or exclude, affirm or deny, encourage or repress, reward or brutalize, etc. This direction is not the one in which Ferdinand de Saussure tries to take us, to be sure—he was a linguist, not a political scientist—but post-essentialist linguistics and other disciplines are often put to such analytic use. Perhaps language not only “makes man” but also, in some instances, “makes man miserable.”

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 15, Baudelaire and Mallarmé

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:50:00 +0000

Notes on Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé

General Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life

We can use Pater’s impressionism to draw out Baudelaire. It’s only the roughness of the eye that makes two things look identical. The point of Baudelaire’s ideas about art is that it’s getting harder to perceive anything in a fresh, accurate way. The artist’s task is to defend that capacity without rejecting modernity. To lose this ability is to lose your soul— Baudelaire borrows a lot from Christianity (original sin, the fallenness of perception, etc.) So he employs technological metaphors for moral purposes. Seeing is itself a moral act for Baudelaire. The Greek middle/passive verb Aisthanomai means “I perceive for myself” (not as others try to make me perceive or understand). Expressive poetics aside, this is not unlike what the romantics argued when they said it was vital to clear or strip away the ”film of familiarity” so that we might see things anew.

But Baudelaire doesn’t tell us to desert the urban site of spiritual corruption. Rather, he says we have to begin by seeing clearly what is all around us in our cityscapes. Artists should wrest from the Parisian boulevards with all their businesslike evanescence something of permanent value, something that will make them see what is all around rather than accept stale, conventional perceptions. Denaturalization is the key term here: art denaturalizes us to our surroundings, makes us see them as if we were wide-eyed, highly intelligent children with fine expressive capacity.

Baudelaire’s dandy does something different from the flâneur: he rejects life in order to maintain a perhaps archaic, but nonetheless valuable, principle of excellence. One can either embrace modernity or remain dispassionate and understand it, and the dandy does the latter in a somewhat haughty way. Here, the goal seems to be to maintain a sense of permanence and quality even as one is surrounded by the temporal and the evanescent. The flâneur's aim is to obtain clarity for an instant and to make art register that clarity in a clear thought or image. Impressionism in painting explains much in this regard; see also Pater’s literary impressionism.

Baudelaire captures the way modern art is of two minds about its relationship to the era. On the one hand, there’s immersion; on the other, there’s ekstasis. In neither case is there any question of simple realism. Even the flâneur as artist treats life as his raw material. It is a point of honor to create or capture beauty in the evanescent cityscape. It seems that Baudelaire’s “doubleness” would be a good way to describe modern art, its two tendencies: and literary modernism involves both of them.

Page-by-Page Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life

793. Artists don’t always have to privilege or represent the past, any more than they need to go back to nature and rustic language.

Beauty is a double phenomenon: an eternal element and a circumstantial element that depends on “the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.” Beauty is both here and now, a kind of fashion and democratic realm, and aristocratic, aloof, ideal, standoffish. It is here for us but also leads us beyond the here and now. Artist experience themselves in dualistic terms—the pull of the body and the aspiration of the spirit.

794-95. The artist is a “photojournalist” and child. To make it new, you first have to see it new. Again, the artist’s task isn’t to abandon the present with disdain. the flâneur enters the hustle of modern commercial life, but keeps something, some portion of his or her being, always in reserve. This is not romanticism—individuals with their own “passions and volitions” coloring the world with subjectivity or rejecting it stormily. Rather, it is closer to the model of a roving, voracious photographer—the camera as “eye,” taking in everything as it is, this instant. To photograph is not simply to copy, and to repeat is not simply to copy.

Baudelaire is offering a new model of subjectivity that seems drawn indirectly from technology. The eye captures fleeting opportunities for clear images, the way a good photographer can catch the ineffable and render it permanently evocative in its ephemerality. Impressionism (cf the reference to Manet) is an enduring model. How does an “I” open to the world perceive the world just for this moment? Pater and Baudelaire are both insightful on this matter. And how best to “paint” my perception? Baudelaire posits a mind engaged with a modern, seemingly unaesthetic world, a world in flux yet entirely capable of offering up its beauty one instant at a time. Baudelaire’s “kaleidoscope” must be set over against high-romantic solipsism, the Byronic man.

796. Modernity? Well, it is the mutability of one’s age, one’s social life, and so forth, that matters. There is a modernity to be captured in every society: the ephemeral. Ignore it and you lose the chance to capture beauty whole, like a portrait of a nineteenth-century person in seventeenth-century dress. Only if you capture your era accurately in all its fleeting details and qualities will it pass into eternity, and become a worthy and true “antiquity” in its own right. Rejecting the present as one’s element is a mistake, just as surely as vulgar realism or mere copying would be. Beauty needs context; it isn’t a mere ideal. As Blake says, “eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

798-99. Dandies like Beau Brummel are a product of their times who seek to transcend them by imitating certain aspects of them in concentrated form. Dandified self-commodification is an attempt to keep the principle of aristocracy alive, to maintain the effect of distance from the crowd. Birth and wealth once afforded this, but “fashion,” a commodity realm, now generates the effect of aloof individuality and uniqueness. How utterly utter! Even today, we can’t stand to see someone else wearing exactly the same article of clothing as we are wearing. Imitation, yes, but not simple copying or homage. Self-commodification or dandyism is also a mode of criticism. When Brummel quipped in response to someone who asked him about his favorite lake in Wordsworth country, “I say, Robinson, which lake do I prefer?” he criticized the aristocracy’s belief that one could farm out one’s aesthetic judgments to a trained lackey, just as we pay people to make our clothing and other useful items.

800-02. Oscar Wilde is obviously on the same page as Baudelaire on many issues. On art’s relationship to nature, for example—Wilde, like Baudelaire, places art higher. That is a defiant posture, but it retains a tie to Schiller’s tradition of culture as an improving power. It also remains tied to romanticism’s emphasis on self-consciousness, even if the model of the self is not that of the romantic expressive individual. Wilde also writes that artifice is a virtue—it is natural for human beings to be “as artificial as possible.”

Page-by-Page Notes on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry”

Mallarmé is anti-utilitarian and anti-instrumentalist: poetry is an encounter with language as language. We might, of course, ask whether or not this Mallarméan scheme takes anti-instrumentalism and impersonalism too far. It amounts to a complete divorce between ordinary language and poetic language, and perhaps therefore repeats on the level of pure language the isolation of the romantic poets from their society. At least, that’s one way of looking at the matter.

Music, for Mallarmé, is orderly and yet liberatory. We align ourselves as listeners with its successive notes, with its unfolding, and we should experience music as pure play. We should not reaffirm our personal or “tribal” power over nature, but instead connect by means of music and poetry with something beyond ourselves. Mallarmé refers to this realm as “impersonal,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is devoid of passion. Poetry is a supplement—it supplies a lack in the ordinary.

845-47. The “French Revolution II” is the movement from the Alexandrine verse of Racine and Corneille to free verse, vers libre. This change is no doubt allied with a shift in social and political arrangements from monarchical, semi-feudal to modern, parliamentary, commercialist nineteenth-century society. Mallarmé isn’t in favor of middle-class vulgarity and self-satisfaction, but the breakup of the Alexandrine is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s an opportunity for poetry to become what it ought to be—both sensuous and ideal, an order that liberates all who come to it. It ought to be personal and yet lead us beyond personality.

The Alexandrine imposed a false decorum and order upon language, taming and imprisoning it. Language was therefore used to ratify conservative French values. Mallarmé’s poetics are anti-instrumentalist, just as he is anti-Cartesian more generally—against the preeminence of mind as opposed to matter, reason as opposed to passion. As for ordinary language, we “use” it to express our feelings and ideas (romanticism) and to refer to things in the external world (realism, everyday living). Both uses are instrumental, and they falsify experience and even the meaning of being human. Language thereby becomes a mere tool shed full of implements, not the House of Being.

But Mallarmé considers language more worthwhile than the fake “autonomous individual” who supposedly uses it to shore up a narrow sense of self and world, more worthwhile than the everyday business that can be transacted with it or within its sphere. This anti-middle-class sentiment makes language the new principle of aristocracy, the ennobling force, the power that lets us keep contact with mystery, with “play” (jouissance, as in Barthes and Derrida) and with the holy (Heidegger). Yet, the realm of Language isn’t an empty externality, a metaphysical far-away place we can command. The goal isn’t facilely to get there from here since that would be to commit the same error as instrumentalists commit.

848-49. As the Beckett character says, “what matter who is speaking?” Ordinary speech disappoints us because it doesn’t correspond to real-world qualities when we expect it to. We aren’t gods and cannot achieve a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. (Perhaps this is what Paul de Man refers to when he says that even Mallarmé leaves the supremacy of nature untouched.) But poetry liberates us from such selfish demands for pedestrian intelligibility; it’s an impersonal language where the Ideal is at play. It creates an order that we can enter, a sort of mystical realm. There is no need, as far as Mallarmé is concerned, to turn to the “author-function” (as Foucault calls it) as a principle of interpretive stability.

Evocation and suggestion are better than fact. In somewhat plain terms, we might say that they lead us to a better realm than the everyday one we usually inhabit. Mallarmé might be described as a Platonist, but again that would be rather misleading. He isn’t really pushing a movement from a deluded “here” to a metaphysical “there.” In his view, it seems, language itself is the realm of purity; language is a here-realm of pure play, not a beyond of the sort that philosophical realists posit. Even so, it seems that Mallarmé invests a great deal in this order of language. The Symbolists generally treat language as having magical incantatory power, and (following Schopenhauer), as a refuge from human will and strife. Yeats describes the city of Byzantium in this manner; the holy city disdains “All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.”

851. Mallarmé’s flower example implies that what Nietzsche calls the abstraction-making power of language (its tendency to lie about the referential world), ought to be turned to account as music, as suggestibility that creates its own order. Mallarmé is not out to shore up the triumphant individual ego, the narrow shopkeeper-self in us all. Instead, he wants to see the triumph of language with a capital “L,” language as its own order, one that liberates us into what Heidegger will later call “the light of Being.” Language isn’t a tool shed; it is the dwelling-place of all that is most valuable in humanity.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 13, Marx and Engels

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:49:00 +0000

Page-by-Page Notes on Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

764. “On the basis of political economy itself....” The darkened chamber metaphor is a figure for ideology — the paradox is that the worker creates an opulent society and starves in the middle of it.

764. “Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does not explain it to us.” Political economists see private property as natural, and they think value resides in things. At the bottom of this page, Marx implies that political economists cannot account for capitalism’s development, for change and historical process. We might “apply the master/slave dialectic to this page — the political economists speak for the masters and do not understand their relationship to property, or at least they have naturalized that relationship. Labor, implies Marx, must and will come to understand its relations with capital and the commodity form.

765. At the top: alienation from labor and the product of labor — labor is turned against itself as a human expressive act and a force for social cohesion; now labor produces atomistic relations amongst humans and treats things as if they alone were alive. We suffer an “attack of the killer widgets,” so to speak. Marx writes, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain.” Marx refers a little below to the myth of the fall, and asserts thereby the need for a dialectical view — what is the relationship between two things?

765. “With the increasing value of the world of things...” here Marx brings up an actual fact: an increase in commodity value makes labor cheaper. Then he goes on to say that under capitalism, labor is stripped of its human value, congealed in abstract form in an object, the commodity. The worker owns the minimum socially necessary command of other people’s labor to prop up the capitalist order – ever more capital is generated, but the worker does not share in that affluence. “All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object.” Marx plays the anthropologist with capitalism, comparing the commodity form to magic and fetishism. We invest or transfer our own power to an object we have made with our hands. Nature becomes an alien, determining power over us, not something over which we have dominion. That is the paradox of the Industrial Revolution.

766. “Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object....” Under private property, the worker’s relation to objects is one of slavery.

766. “Political economy conceals the estrangement....” political economy conceals ideology, and makes exploitation seem natural. That is the function of ideology. Below, refer to the relationship between the master and the object that he simply consumes; here this idea is applied to the accumulation of capital.

767. Page top: work as meaningless when it should render us free agents who belong together in a morally intelligible world. “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?” Marx’s fourfold theory of alienation: we are alienated first from our self-image as free human beings, second from the labor process, third from the product of labor, and fourth from the community. The capitalist productive process involves self-alienation; the production of commodities creates a worker who is not human. It renders labor meaningless in terms of human expression and identity — we are not “at home” in the world we are creating. He also brings up religion as mystification, and says “what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

767. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic applies here to what Marx says about capitalists and workers. The revolutionary potential lies with the working class. The workers’ experience consists in fourfold alienation. They are alienated from themselves as free human beings with the power to develop; they are alienated from the activity of working; they are alienated from the products of the labor (refer to 765); and they are alienated from their fellow workers and therefore from society in general.

Workers do not benefit from the products of their labor. When the factory worker makes an item, its value is lost to him and will be sold by the boss as a commodity. The worker “produces” a world of rich capitalists and consumer goods, few of which goods he or she can afford. We find misery and despair in the midst of plenty. The worker becomes a thing, and things themselves, as commodities, come to life.

Marx’s view of human nature is that we produce ourselves through the active process of laboring. However, there is a suggestion here of a potential to be expressed and developed. We do not have a fixed, pre-existing nature but rather work, as the creative process, produces our nature. This emphasis on expression and self-development is similar to romanticism. Marx stresses a dialectical mode of expressing the self in relation to natural objects. He resembles Hegel in that regard. What would be the point of criticizing capitalism if one system or environment were not better? Scientific socialism has a humanist basis in asserting the primacy of humanity in the relationship between humanity and nature.

Page-by-Page Notes on Marx’s The German Ideology (1845-46)

768. Note on the camera obscura figure for ideology. Capitalism produces the ideology that perpetuates it — it not only personifies things, endowing them with fetish power and turning human beings into mere things — it produces the illusory philosophy that keeps most of us from understanding the true basis of ourselves as workers and of our society. Marx’s metaphor of the darkened chamber implies that descrambling ideology is possible. Things are upside down, but at the same time absolutely clear: we can examine the life process (economics) and strip away ideology to get to the truth. But we might also ask whether illusions must be perpetual, representation perpetual, and the production and variation of desire also perpetual – if so, that might account for the continuing existence of capitalism to this day. Marx apparently believes in a teleological conception of history, one in which the contradictions inherent in the market order and its social forms will lead to something better. (By “contradiction,” I refer to such phenomena as overproduction, the association of workers, and so forth.)

768. The superstructure, says Marx, has no history. But as he recognizes, in his brief comments on art later, the correlations between ethics, religion, art, and the economic system are not necessarily synchronous. The realm of ideas isn’t a mere reflex — it takes on a power and temporality or rhythm of its own, it becomes semi-autonomous. Artists and philosophers can resist the reigning ideas of their time, i.e. the ones that merely support private property and bourgeois individualism. We must ask, therefore, “where does such resistance come from, and how successful can it be?”

768. “The production of ideas....” Would Nietzsche accept this passage? He would take things further back to biology — what Marx refers to comes along too late in the process; refer to Nietzsche’s discussion of the way language falsifies our relationship to the world.

768. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Must we always generate an ideology? It does not seem so from this selection.

768. “Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history....” So the superstructure is derivative, not material. Therefore, working with abstractions — even dialectically as Hegel does — only leads us further astray from material history’s processes, the very processes that give us our ideas. When Hegel talks about the march of spirit, he is tilting at windmills like Don Quixote. Kant also provides interesting examples, but his conception of the self remains abstract, and his nature is a general world — not Marx’s world of struggle, or the pain of our ancestors. For Kant, each mind functions similarly, but in isolation, and universal laws are generated from supposedly stable inner capacities.

Page-by-Page Notes on Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Capitalist philosophy assumes that our default nature is acquisitiveness. It assumes that “greed is good,” as the movie line goes. It also supposes that our basic instinct can perpetuate itself by encountering and incorporating infinitely many objects of desire — fashion is a fine example of this process. Fashion recycles objects of desire. Desire — and the desire to desire — drives the system. We might say also that excess is vital to the functioning of capitalism — “reason not the need,” as King Lear says. We are creatures of excess, and would never be satisfied with the bare minimum for life. Capitalism is like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive. If we only purchased what we needed, the capitalist order would collapse almost instantly, and we would relapse into something like a barter economy such as existed during the Middle Ages. We might refer for example to the Great Depression and to the fascist order it led to in Europe. But does this process ever need to stop? Are the chickens coming home to roost, or are we dealing with “real chickens in an imaginary hen-house”?

One argument might be that Marx, with his contradiction-theory whereby the desire to accumulate capital results in overproduction, and the need to bring workers together in factories leads them towards revolutionary class-consciousness, covers up the possibility that the answer is no, the process need not end. Furthermore, since Marx obverts Hegel, he is quite invested in the idea that object-relations are central to the full development of humanity. He remains chained to what Jean Baudrillard calls “the mirror of production” — it’s all about us and objects, and about how we represent that relationship to ourselves and others. Perhaps that is unfair to Marx — has anyone really escaped from that trap, from the order of representation, from the need to understand that we are not simply pure spirit freed from materiality, that desire will always be partly for material things and never for purely immaterial or spiritual things?

In any case, the point is that Marx privileges “material reality” over representation, even if he admits that the relationship between them harbors some complexity. Is postmodernism complicit in perpetuating post-industrial capitalism? Postmodernism suggests that there is no viable exit strategy from the order of representation to the real. This raises the question as to whether capitalism is simply better at representation (refer to the African-American expression “representing”) than socialism or any other idealistic way of looking at the world.

769. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Class struggle is the law of history, and reality is a material process. It proceeds by strife, and the contradictions that develop can be understood through dialectical method.

770. Top: history proceeds by contradictions and conflicts, and then comes a new set of warring groups, a new form of society.

770. On this page, Marx repeats Hegel’s ideas about the march of spirit, but here the engine is class antagonism. “From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns.” Therefore, productive forces and social forms develop in accordance with their own internal laws. Development comes organically from within; Marx does not rely upon a model with external interruptions as the agent of change.

770. “The feudal system of industry... now no longer sufficed....” we go from feudal production to manufacturing, which makes better use of division of labor. But as markets increase, the big capitalists and the industrial order alone can meet the new demand. Feudal society generated its own opposition — thanks to the contradictions in the feudal order. Its productive forces outgrew the social system.

770. “We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development....” The bourgeoisie is the product of successive revolutions in the modes of production and exchange.

771. On this page, Marx points out the revolutionary quality of the bourgeoisie. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The state represents class interests. The representative state is built upon the bourgeois notion of the self as isolated and as pursuing pleasure through the purchase and consumption of commodities. This kind of self is intimately related to the laws of property and to the efficient accumulation and circulation of capital.

771. “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.” This class strips away all of the old illusions in favor of direct, brutal exploitation. But in his chapter on the fetishism of the commodity, Marx hints at the kind of illusion that perpetuates capitalism. He uses an anthropological framework to describe powerful human tendencies to make people content with their lot. Moreover, among the exploited are some of the biggest producers of middle-class ideology.

771. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production....” There is a constant revolution in the relations between workers and employers, and in social institutions. When Marx says, “all that is solid melts into air,” I must ask whether this is what actually happens. Or is it rather that the upheaval comes to seem natural?

772. “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” This is a very important point — capitalism actually produces desire itself, and even the desire to desire things. Marx goes on to explain below that capitalism is bent upon internationalizing and globalizing the economy and social relations generally. “It creates a world after its own image,” he says. It would add that when we arrive at global capitalism, capitalism as a universal system, it comes to seem natural and we begin to lose the power to criticize it. What is universal is everywhere and nowhere at the same time — that is probably what Foucault is getting at with his term “power.” First comes nationalism, and then internationalism.

772. “The bourgeoisie... has agglomerated population....” The bourgeoisie therefore centralizes the means of production. But that is one of the contradictions in capitalism — the working class comes together and becomes conscious of itself as a class.

Page-by-Page Notes on Grundrisse (1857-58)

773. Marx says that he is no Marxist, and to some extent, that flexibility shows here, when he discusses the relationship between art and the base. Mythology is possible only when people do not understand natural forces.

774. We take Greek art to be naïve and childlike — we become nostalgic for an earlier state of human development, for the good old days. Is Marx suggesting that in pre-technological Greece, myth flourished, and became sophisticated in its naivety? That is, the Greeks had better art than we would expect because art was proportionally such a large part of life in ancient times, whereas at present, science and economics dominate the scene? The second question — Marx says that from nostalgia, we set up the Greeks as an ideal. Does that imply self-deception? Is nostalgia a form of distortion?

774. “Why should not the historic childhood of humanity... exercise an eternal charm?” Marx says that the Greeks were normal children, and that we feel nostalgia for that earlier time. Does this point towards self-deception or illusion as a basic human trait? That would be suggestive with regard to the Marxist view of literary criticism as a practice that demystifies distorted representations of real material conditions.

775. The superstructure transforms rapidly, but parts of it may take longer to change, so they become ideological battlegrounds and what is said requires decoding. A novel by Dickens, for example, criticizes the excesses of capitalist bosses and those who unreflectively act within capitalist ideology; even so, Dickens can be read as a supporter of the system trying to fix it, to mend it rather than end it. The word “reform,” is similarly tricky — one person’s reform is another person’s poison. Marx says that no class or system gives way until all of its resources (of whatever kind) have been exhausted – art is one of those resources.

Page-by-Page Notes on Marx’s “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

775. “With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.” This passage is important to the understanding of art. The old order may carry out a rearguard action, maintaining a human face on its old ways. I like the suggestion that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.” I should repeat here what I said earlier — history proceeds by strife from one system to the next; each system generates its own internal contradictions. We can understand and even predict such movements scientifically if we comprehend the contradictions. History proceeds in an orderly fashion and we can understand its processes — that is a fundamental assumption behind scientific socialism.

Page-by-Page Notes on Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 1., Section 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (1867)

776. Marx defines society as people producing their subsistence and the means of production. Man the toolmaker produces his society materially, and the form of production determines social relations and institutions like law and religion. So if man loses control over those relations — as happens in a capitalist commodity culture — he becomes alienated from his work and from the products of his labor, from others, and from his own potential for freedom. His consciousness becomes determined by capitalist production. That is why Marx is so determined to explain commodity production and exchange — it is the site of this displacement.

777. On this page, Marx explains what he means by fetishism. Exchange is the key to mystification.

781. “Let us now picture to ourselves....” At this point, Marx discusses the social nature of labor. Production and distribution ought to be in harmony.

783. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” Marx sarcastically brings up the way we invest value in things. Sarcasm of this sort is a major feature of his writing style.

Page-by-Page Notes on Engels’ “Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch”

787. Here Friedrich Engels argues that while the economic system is the base, superstructure determines the form of struggle. End of notes.

General Guide: Marx on Commodities and History (Written at UCI in the 1990’s)

It is best to begin with a statement about Marx’s conception of human society. Marx (1818-1883) largely agrees with his philosophical predecessor Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) that it is essential to human beings to “objectify” themselves in an external world and then to comprehend that external world as an adequate expression of themselves. Work, for both Hegel and Marx, is the main way in which humans accomplish this self-affirming objectification. Labor, that is, brings out the latent potential in human beings and leads them toward an ever-greater realization of freedom within a community of fellow-workers. Human society, for Marx, consists in people laboring to produce what they, as members of society, need for their subsistence and happiness. At one and the same time, their labor both brings out their human capacities or potential and affirms their relationship with all their fellow workers. Work then, is for both Hegel and Marx essential to the very concept of humanity. Both thinkers are aware, of course, that this ideal society has by no means been fully established, and in their analysis of the reasons for the imperfection of human affairs, they part company.

Hegel and Marx use the term “alienation” to describe the cause of human unhappiness and failure to live in harmony. The content of this abstract term, however, shows the great differences between Hegel and Marx. While to the idealist Hegel alienation has to do primarily with the sphere of religion, Marx interprets the concept in accordance with his own materialist philosophy. Hegel, that is, argues that an alienated, “unhappy consciousness” is the result of humans’ experiencing themselves as empty and placing “worth” out of reach in a supernatural realm. Marx, by contrast, insists that such idealist formulations only obscure the true cause of human misery, injustice, and alienation. The real reason for these problems, says Marx, can be traced to the material ways in which people work and live—to their economic and social arrangements. Religion, says Marx, is nothing but a reflex of this real world; the misery humans express in religious terms is, therefore, nothing but a reflexive distortion of the misery and alienation they experience as members of an actual, material society. It will not do, then, to look to religion and the realm of the spirit for an understanding of (or a cure to) human ills. One must look to economics and to the “class struggle” that has always—right up to and most intensely in the time of industrial capitalism—characterized human history. After all, as Marx says succinctly in The German Ideology, “men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

Since Marx argues that economics is the key to understanding how human societies function and change, his task in Das Kapital as an antagonist of nineteenth-century capitalism is to explain the nature and behavior of that system’s most important phenomenon: the commodity. Since, in turn, understanding what a commodity is and how it behaves in the marketplace involves an understanding of the term “value,” we must turn first to Marx’s analysis of this concept, and then move on to the revolutionary implications which Marx himself draws from this fine-grained economic study.

The three types of value that Marx identifies in Capital, Volume One are use-value, exchange-value, and surplus value. We should consider use-value first. An object becomes a use-value, says Marx, by virtue of its utility, its capacity to satisfy human wants. A useful object cannot become a commodity, however, until we sell it to someone, and so exchange-values come into play. Exchange-value, which we must now consider, is quite different from use-value. While an object’s use-value is dependent on its “usefulness” and the labor that went into its production need only be conceptualized as “specific and determinate,” its exchange-value must, says Marx, be determined differently.

The following example will illustrate the difference in valuation: Let’s say I have some wheat. Insofar as I simply want to grind it up and bake for myself some bread with it, I am only concerned with the “productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim” (Capital 49) that I have put into the growing and harvesting of my wheat. There is as yet no need to determine its value in terms of anything but its usefulness to me. But what if I live in a fairly well-developed market society and so intend to sell my wheat as a commodity? What if I want not to make bread with my wheat but to exchange it for something else that I need? How do I compare its value in relation to that something else? Well, says Marx, I have to recognize that my useful object, once I take it to market, can only function during a given exchange as a manifestation of abstract labor power. I cannot compare two things without reference to a third thing that will serve as a common denominator. How, for example, could I say, “My ten pounds of wheat are equal in value to one coat”? (Use-values or useful objects can only confront each other as qualitatively different; no one would exchange a coat for a coat, but someone might exchange a coat for another useful thing. Nonetheless, such qualitative differences do not establish a common standard of value.) Abstract labor power is Marx’s answer—I can compare the two objects because into the making of both went a quantity of homogeneous, “abstract” labor. Notice here that no one cares about the specific, determinate labor that went into the making of a given item, or even about the object in all its glorious usefulness. At the market, at the point of sale, all we care about is the fact that “abstract labor,” however absurd such a concept may in fact be, can serve as a common property for both items. If we started arguing over the quality of the work involved, we would no longer be able to agree on a standard measure of value.

Since a commodity can express its value only through exchange, we must measure that value in terms of congealed, socially necessary labor—just as much quantity of time, no more, no less, as it takes efficient workers in an efficient commodity-society on the average to produce a given item. (Adam Smith had explained long ago the benefits of the division of labor, wherein each worker does only one little task with robot-like efficiency. Thanks to the division of labor, ten people making part of, say, a pin can make thousands of pins in a day while those same ten people, each trying to make an entire pin, would have very little to show for their efforts at day’s end.) So here we are, gone to market with our useful objects. In order to transform those objects into commodities, we must exchange them as pure congelations of abstract labor power. During the moment of exchange, nothing else matters except that abstract standard; all else is unavailable to us, is bracketed out.

The commodity, to repeat, is no respecter of specific, determinate labor; it requires that we should consider it merely as a portion of general labor. All commodities are equal; all work is equal, when exchanged in certain proportions. A commodity is indeed a useful thing, but that usefulness cannot be realized as value until the thing is exchanged. The commodity then, says Marx, is a peculiarly two-fold phenomenon. We can grasp its value only as an expression of abstract labor, only when it embodies this labor at the point of exchange, only in “the social relation of commodity to commodity” (54). Our own mutual relations and interdependence, our own concrete labor as producers of serviceable objects, says Marx, no longer matter; once a capitalist economy gets going, those commodities might just as well have picked themselves up and gone to the market without us. We exist to produce commodities; they do not exist to serve us, and we cannot hope to commandeer them our way just because we happen to have done some specific piece of work a few days back. In effect, the man working himself to death in a coal mine has no right to demand more from the society he keeps warm than his paltry wages allow. His money represents a given amount of abstract labor, and he may command only that much and no more. Money, of course, is the absolute, universal standard, the congelation of labor by which all other items may be measured as values, and our workman has very little of it to show for his pains, and so no right to live like the capitalist who employs him.

How, indeed, is it that the capitalist lives so well? We must now bring up the third kind of value that Marx discusses, “surplus value.” Simply put, this is the profit that the man of business turns. Whatever certain economists may say, Marx explains, profit is not generated by sharp buying and selling prices. People do, of course, sometimes buy things below their value and/or sell them to some poor devil at an exorbitant price, but we must not equate such practices with profit. No, our capitalist generates his profit not during an exchange of commodities but beforehand, right in the factory. How so? Well, consider that in a given society, the entirety of the workforce only needs to produce a certain quantity of goods to keep itself going. Society X (read “workforce plus dependents”) needs to make only quantity Y of goods, no more, no less, to provide for its own well-being. Let us say that providing this quantity of serviceable things—food, shelter, tools, and the like—takes each worker an average of, say, four hours per day. Thanks to the marvelous technology and division of labor that came into play with the Industrial Revolution, it only takes half a day’s work to satisfy all basic human needs. Nonetheless, we must forget any ideas this fact may have given us about producing our way to industrial utopia; the capitalist is intent on turning a buck, and he cannot do it so long as the workers all provide for their own welfare and then go home. He points to the terms of employment laid out in that lopsided contract between himself and his workers. He knows full well that he, the capitalist, owns the means of subsistence (money and the materials with and upon which to labor) so necessary to the worker, who has only his labor power to sell. In practice, this means the worker will have to do a little more work than he might have planned. Does ten or twelve hours sound like a nice round figure? Fine, it’s settled. Welcome aboard!

In essence, each extra hour of labor, each extra object or part thereof that the worker provides, goes right into the pocket of old moneybags the capitalist, or at least it will make that familiar jingle when all of his surplus commodities reach the market and get sold at the rate determined by competition. The point is, the worker owns only his labor and is paid in wages for the exercise of that labor; he does not own the products of his labor, and has no right to any of the money to be had from the sale of these products. What the capitalist accumulates, then, is the surplus labor provided by his workers, which surplus labor, conveniently compressed into its money form, he can then venture in exciting new ways to harvest even more surplus labor. For the moment, let us leave aside the obvious question that arises here: since the worker’s wages command only a rather small quantity of goods, who is going to buy all the extra things that the dynamic capitalist’s ambition brings to market? Some of them, says Marx, will obviously be bought by those who have accumulated a great deal of money and can afford to live well, but it is not as simple as that, so we shall have to return to the problem below.

What does Marx draw from all this economic analysis? Well, he says that the commodity, by its very conditions of existence, has by the nineteenth century transformed the relationship between human beings and the quality and products of their labor. Human relations are no longer valuable until they are expressed in the grotesque exchange of commodities; they have to be “embodied” in commodities, which then take on all the power and ferocity and determining quality of fetish objects. Instead of regulating the great productive capacity that the scientific revolution has given us, instead of making what we need to live well and distributing it on a rational, orderly, and just basis, says Marx, we live chaotically. The old, hierarchical social bonds of feudal Europe have been broken forever, replaced by the Darwinian social environment of capitalism with its two great antagonistic classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. While the latter class has little to hope for in Marx’s day except to work and subsist on what wages it can earn, the former class has for its interest the ceaseless accumulation of wealth, a quest which leads to what Marx calls perhaps the worst “contradiction” of capitalism. Namely, since nearly round-the-clock manufacturing of goods is essential to the capitalist, overproduction, undertaken on far too grand a scale to respond to the Invisible Hand of competition in which Adam Smith put so much faith, is bound to result in periodic crises. The market, that is, will surely suffer through ever-increasing cycles of boom and bust. The owners of capital, helped along by the state they control, will try anything to keep their markets expanding—including subterfuge, colonization of pre-industrialized lands, and war against the capitalists of other nations. (Not that the word “nation” means much within such an international system as capitalism, Marx would point out.) Obviously, even the most cursory look at the first two world wars should convince one that Marx’s model, whatever its flaws, has a certain predictive value. This century’s wars in Europe surely had much to do with economic crises and empire-building. The great powers became desperate for new markets and jealous of one anther’s successes, and hell broke loose.

As for the strictly social effects of capitalism, or what Marxists call the “superstructure” when they are not on guard against being called vulgar, these follow the same fetishistic logic as capitalist economics. Marx, a good materialist who tries to begin with his observations of the world around him, declares in The German Ideology that “men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with . . . their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (47). However, under capitalism, just as in the economic sphere the mutual relations between human workers are obscured and displaced into the allegedly social exchange of things, of commodities, so in the social sphere the institutions by which humans live are taken as a priori, eternal commands from some supernatural being. The contents of religion, morality, philosophy, law both civil and criminal, politics domestic and foreign, and so on are taken as natural rather than as corollaries, however indirect, of a given economic system, or, in Marxist terminology, of a given “set of material relations between men.” If capitalism dictates that our actions are controlled by the objects we produce, says Marx, it follows that we understand everything else on the basis of our mystified relation to commodities. We become the slaves of abstractions which we ourselves have produced, whether directly in the factory and marketplace or in our minds. The tendencies of the logic described here are perhaps to be summed up best by the Romantic poet William Blake’s almost Marxian line, “Prisons are built with the stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.” That is, we take our religious dogmas and our laws and institutions as unquestionable, eternal truths rather than as the effects of the way in which we relate to one another as human beings, as producers of our material subsistence. This reification and naturalization of certain moral values, says Marx, we then employ to condemn those who do not share in the benefits of a market-based economy. As always, ranking follows reification, and the final equation is just what we might have expected: “whatever is, is right.” The poor, the thief, the prostitute, are born losers, and they deserve whatever happens to them, while the wealthy are considered superior and deserving of all good things.

Finally, we should remember that while the foregoing description of capitalism sounds rather bleak and hopeless, Marx himself is anything but a pessimist. He is a firm believer in “progress” or “historical development.” In other words, Marx is convinced that just as certain historical factors made the development of industrial capitalism inevitable, so will its demise occur almost like clockwork. The increasingly violent economic cycles and imperialist sprees that system is bound to suffer, says Marx, will lead to that system’s overthrow. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he says, the proletariat will realize that they have already attained the capacity to produce enough to make the world a comfortable place, and they will stop obeying the orders of capital. Then the revolution will occur on an international scale, and the path will be open to the full development of that many-sided “communist man.” Remember when you compare Marx to some of the English cultural analysts that for Marx, the proletariat is a class like no other in history. Its appearance on the world stage precludes any attempt to turn back the clock to some falsely idyllic feudal age and thereby defuse the threat that the working class presents to the new, but self-destructive, world order. We could, of course, spend a great deal more time discussing the problems with Marx’s historical vision—his ideas about women, race (he says that Asia has no history!), and the time-frame or even the inevitability of capitalism’s self-destruction, for example. One thing to keep in mind, however, as we move towards Sigmund Freud, is that Marx has no fully developed notion of the Unconscious, though his analysis of fetishism clearly bears a psychological cast. Perhaps this dark little secret about humanity, the Unconscious, plays a role in the survival of capitalism. At least, that is what Freud would say.

Marx and Engels’ Guide to Appearing German, Profound, and Speculative:

First of all an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based on the abstraction. That is how to proceed if you want to appear German, profound, and speculative.

For example: Fact: The cat eats the mouse.

Reflection: Cat = nature, mouse = nature, Consumption of mouse by cat = consumption of nature by nature = self-consumption of nature.

Philosophic presentation of the fact: Devouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the self-consumption of nature.

From The German Ideology. London: International Publishers, 1965. 530.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 12, Emerson and Poe

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 01:49:00 +0000

Notes on Emerson and Poe

Page-by-Page Notes on Emerson’s The American Scholar

722-23. Emerson advocates a romantic, almost Blakean view of intellectual life’s processes and purpose. One generation’s living utterance becomes the next several generations’ test material. An individual or a people produce something really fine, and subsequent generations stop thinking in order to bow down and worship the prior productions of genius. When you “bow down” too long, you find yourself unable to stand up again. Education ought to fight this tendency, but instead perpetuates it. That’s true whether we are dealing with ivory-tower dwellers or culture-watchdogs (depending on which metaphor you prefer), or with a mere determination to endure what’s necessary to get a degree and move on to a better job, higher pay and status, etc. Emerson apparently identifies the discovery of truth with intuition, not with abstruse and abstract study. He was a learned man by anybody’s standards, but he didn’t see erudition as the point of study. I admire Emerson’s deep connection to the tradition of wisdom-writing—he does not go to literature seeking vulgarly practical “ideas” or detached beauties. Instead, he approaches both in a truly philosophical spirit. Much in the same spirit (if in a less exalted vein) is the modern critic Kenneth Burke’s statement that literature is “equipment for living.”

A basic difficulty with Emersonian motivational rhetoric is that the tendencies he would like to see reversed stem from incredibly powerful social and economic imperatives. You can’t just “talk” them out of existence, no matter how eloquently you talk. (Thomas Carlyle—yes, George Costanza of Seinfeld’s famous “Tommy C”—Emerson’s fellow wisdom-writer in the British Isles, faced the same problem.)

For example, who among us disagrees with many of the sublime pronouncements of, say, Blake or Shelley? But at the same time, what is more easily and continually appropriated than “British Romanticism”? It’s in every poetry anthology, and in teaching it as test material we almost inevitably strip it of much of its power. Shelley wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn if “Ode to the West Wind” helps you get an A on an exam; he was trying to radicalize people’s sensibilities and shake up the world, not get himself enshrined in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. By and large, English literature is taught as a technical skill. One becomes “proficient in the modalities of literary production” or some such bureaucratic nonsense. (It really is pathetic, isn’t it, how a bygone era’s grand humanistic ideals get translated into Orwellian Newspeak by school catalog editors?) That technical skill then becomes useful to, say, corporate entities seeking wordsmiths who can convince others that drilling for oil has something to do with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that large SUV’s are actually good for the environment, that “Harry and Louise” really give a solitary smoking-induced cancer cell about finding “a better way” to bring us all health care, and so forth. Well, I suppose there’s no point in being so cynical—perhaps we need not demand that Emerson and his fellow poets and critics produce an immediate revolution in sensibilities. Ultimately, my response to those who dismiss Emerson’s kind of critique is that it’s better to know what you’re up against than not to know what you’re up against. And Emerson is surely clear on the nature and force of the problem, isn’t he?

Page-by-Page Notes on Emerson’s “The Poet”

727-30. Emerson makes a characteristically romantic claim: the poet, just as Wordsworth suggested, is most in command of the power of expression. Emerson nicely describes human aspirations when he says that the better half of us is expression. We are, that is, works in progress, the objects of our own reflection, and so forth. In fact, Emerson (like Carlyle) insists that it is deeply human to regard symbols and believe in “mystery” without surrendering passively to either. And it’s the poet who is most conscious of this need for symbolism and mystery. (Not “mysticism,” which rigidifies symbols and becomes passive towards them—mysticism is a kind of false, unearned universalism, a pretension to universal significance.) Words are, says Emerson, a kind of action, and vice versa—everything calls for interpretation, spiritual interpretation. That is not only romantic, it is scriptural in tenor. I think the bottom line in Emerson’s claims about the poet as guide is that we mustn’t let false, popular messiahs take away our faith in the power of the genuine article, the true poet-prophet.

731-34. Emerson claims that language is “fossil poetry.” Every word was once vitally metaphoric, close to raw experience, intuition. In its modern, more restricted form, it retains this potential for spiritual awakening—the poet is almost a Buddha figure, “he who is awakened.” (The claim that poetry gave humanity its first laws and institutions is, of course, much older than romanticism—you can even find a version of it in Horace’s “Ars Poetica.”) On 731, Emerson says that genius “repairs the decay of things.” That’s very similar to Shelley’s remark that poetry “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” Another piece of romanticism is the idea that imagination must follow its own course, generate its own forms—not accept those prescribed by artistic conventions or social expectations. Art is not to become passive, a cipher for politics or economic needs or class interests. It should remind us that we all have the power of self-expression and development.

737-39. Emerson describes America as a poem that remains almost entirely to be expressed, and it would seem that Whitman is an exemplary Emersonian poet. Whitman was a free spirit, but was always concerned to register and express all kinds of American experience, as evidenced by the long “catalogs” in his poetry and by his refusal to prejudge a diverse collection of people, practices, and tendencies. Whitman embraces the transgressive and the conventional, the intellectual and the sensual, the urban and wild, etc. Borrowing the language of Coleridge, we might say that Whitman “reconciles opposite and discordant qualities” without canceling them or reducing them all to some false, facile unity.

Page-by-Page Notes on Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition”

742-43. Poe’s outrageousness stems from his self-conscious insistence that romantic creativity is a matter of calculated effect, not a cause of great poetry. The poet, in Poe’s view, is rather like the Raven, except that he or she is a highly self-aware iterator of stock devices and phrases. It’s as if the Raven alighted on somebody’s door, fully intending to keep saying “Nevermore” just to get under the poor devil’s skin. Personal expression evidently has nothing to do with the composition of poetry, on this view. Design is what matters. Poe’s scandalous “peep show” of poetic creation makes fun of Transcendentalist pretensions, the Emersonian prophetic strain, and any kind of romanticism whatsoever. Does Poe take himself seriously? I doubt it—he always has seemed to me a bit of a humbug, a showman trying to please his public. But that’s no condemnation—he pulls it off well, doesn’t he? I mean, who doesn’t like “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Pit and the Pendulum,” not to mention “The Premature Burial” and “The Case of Mr. Valdemar”? Romantic irony is generally taken to be a way of destabilizing preconceived notions, but Poe turns lighthearted irony on romanticism itself.

746. The Raven’s utterance establishes a tone of sadness by its inhuman repetition of the word “Nevermore.” Now sacrifice a beautiful woman, and you’ve got yourself a shocker of a poem. Poe’s combination of anxiety about death and desire for beauty reminds me of Walter Pater’s formulation in Marius the Epicurean, a decadent masterpiece from the 1880’s. When these two powerful motivators or impulses combine, we are treated to particularly intense moments, as when Marius sees a pair of snakes mating. Furthermore, in an uncanny way the speaker is doomed to export his own melancholy into his environment, which melancholy then returns to him, redoubling his intense gloom. Of course, “The Raven’s” speaker indulges in his despair as if it were chocolate ice cream, and progressively gives himself over to morbid speculation and dread of the supernatural. Poe’s macabre stories, like some of his better Gothic poetry, may be droll at times, but they get under our skin, don’t they? Some of his stories remind me of modern masterpieces like Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, which I admit makes me unable to sleep normally for days after I’ve seen it. Evidently, Poe was able to tap into and exploit unconscious anxieties with his tales—he was a Freudian before Freud.

749-50. Poe says that an undercurrent of mysteriousness and the supernatural ought to stay just that—an undercurrent. The poet shouldn’t militantly promote this kind of undercurrent to the surface of a poem. Mystery feeds on understatement, and the poem’s design and wordcraft should generate the proper psychological effects.

In conclusion, I want to offer a few thoughts on the general question as to why the French take Poe so seriously, whereas we Americans never know quite what to make of him. I think the French admire Poe because they respect his sheer artificiality, his way of crafting his own public image as an artist—he makes no pretensions to romantic originality, social responsibility, or anything of the sort. Baudelaire, after all, praises artifice as an essential element in human nature, and he says that nature “can counsel nothing but crime” because it reduces neatly to base self-interest. Then, too, Poe embraces modern conditions for the production and interpretation of literary texts—he’s a reviewer, a critic, a shameless self-promoter who is perfectly willing to sell his macabre visions to a paying public. There’s quackery in Poe, but it is of an oddly authentic sort. He’s a quack with integrity, perhaps….

Or we might approach the matter in a different way—why should Stéphane Mallarmé the Symbolist poet and critic make so much of Poe? Well, Mallarmé liked to think of language as an entirely autonomous order—something created by human minds that slips the bonds of all things human to become its own sacred realm. Poe seems to be simpatico with that kind of emphasis—he creates another world, a Gothic Death’s Dream Kingdom, that maintains itself independently of everyday life. His “supernaturalism” may be akin to French claims about the Sacred Word. But perhaps this idea needs work and is too general to be satisfying. My sense is that while Poe knows he is manufacturing this eerie realm in a most scandalous way, that mechanical nature of the process seems justified beside the results are so good.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 11, Wordsworth and Coleridge

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:47:00 +0000

Notes on Wordsworth and Coleridge

General Notes on William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802” (645-68).

According to Wordsworth, our response to nature grounds elemental passions such as love. Language is the medium for the communication of these passions. City life destroys the link, and urban language cannot reestablish it. The poet’s language mediates between nature and the emotions based upon nature. That is why poetry is vital: poets can still feel and express the link to nature and so can help us reestablish it. Through their efforts, we can feel the link to nature anew, and reaffirm the power of our own minds because of the pleasure we take in art. The aim is to regain emotional health for the individual and to regenerate a sense of community.

Romantic poets represent and bring order to their own and others’ passions in a skillful manner, so they are not primitivists or solipsists. As we’ll see, meter is part of the poet’s craft, and it allows for the establishment of a distancing effect from raw emotion that might otherwise not rise above “gross and violent” stimulation. Craft helps the poet attain the proper meditative or reflective effect of poetry. A healthy mind is capable of being stimulated without immediate sensory experience—that’s a point Kant was determined to convey while explaining the basis for aesthetic judgment.

Wordsworth assumes that there is a general human nature, which is an eighteenth-century idea. But nature isn’t just an external standard; we are nature, and of course “reason” isn’t as important as the bedrock of humanity, the passions. To these we can always return, at least if we have the proper mediator and the right language as our guide.

Unlike the scientist, the poet must identify with rural humanity and with everyone else. He is “a man speaking to men.” Poetry is therefore intersubjective, and it reveals unified human nature as the basis for a united human community. Scientific knowledge is analytical, individual, objective; poetic knowledge gives common pleasure and universalizes and synthesizes experience. As Shelley will say later, we must “imagine that which we know.” Poets have the “courage” (Shelley’s term) to help us do this. They have the boldness to set deep culture against the mere public opinion of the day. That will be a critical and artistic task from the Enlightenment and Romantic period onwards.

1. The preface is a manifesto in an age of manifestoes, a revolutionary age. But this is a different kind of manifesto in that Wordsworth says social transformation comes after a renewal of the individual’s imagination and of a purer language tied to the primary, universal human emotions. Wordsworth is offering us a declaration of the poet’s power.

2. What is a poet? A poet is “a man speaking to men.” His imagination and need for self-expression are kindred to those of his fellow beings, but greater. Poets are in full, pleasurable contact with nature, their own thoughts, and their own feelings. Moreover, they can achieve the tranquility necessary to select and reorder those thoughts, feelings, and situations. When they do that, they are able to reveal the universal, orderly quality of readers’ thoughts and feelings. There is a common human nature, and poets are best able to express it because they experience it most fully.

3. What is poetry? Well, it is expression. It is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.” It is certainly not an imitation of an action, as Aristotle would have us believe, nor is it likely to serve up Samuel Johnson’s tulip without the numbered streaks. Poetry is a concrete expression of the poet’s thoughts and feelings. This idea is genuinely new, at least in its intensity.

4. Wordsworth does not advocate direct self-expression or primitivism. Only by reordering their thoughts and feelings can poets present them to us as universal; only by selecting language and situations carefully can poets accomplish their task: to reveal and express the universal primary passions and tendencies of humankind. They need to make available to us the things in our common nature that bind us into a spiritual and emotional community.

How should poets compose and how should they select their materials? They should avoid neoclassical diction, which makes arbitrary connections between words and things and which tends to prop up an hierarchical class structure. Poets (if they follow Wordsworth’s advice) make a selection of language really used by ordinary people, choosing rustic, yet dignified language that is in touch with the “permanent forms of nature” and with the primary passions that have nature as their source.

5. Here we see the social dimension of Wordsworth’s claims about the poet and poetry. He opposes the destructive, analytic methods and effects of science and technology to the healing and unifying method and effects of poetry. Poets are “the rock of Defense for human nature”—they are prophetic figures and healers who unify fragmented, alienated, isolated individuals into a regenerated community. The Industrial Revolution, which involves urbanization, mechanization, and the accumulation of capital, has a dehumanizing effect upon individuals, reducing them to a state of what Wordsworth calls “savage torpor,” in which only “gross and violent” excitement satisfies.

Only the poet can attain the tranquility necessary to the composition of poetry. So this fuller human being is the catalyst of individual and communal regeneration. The poet is the key to social transformation. On this point, Raymond Williams claims that the effect of capitalism and technology was to marginalize, specialize, and commodify the act of writing poetry. Adam Smith, the main proponent of early capitalism, said that one day we would pay people to do our thinking for us; it makes sense to say as well that one day we would pay people to do our feeling for us.

Poets offer a religion of nature as an answer to the crisis of authority. They will serve as high priests in this religion of nature. Wordsworth plays something like this role in “Tintern Abbey” for his sister Dorothy. That poem is about two individuals—social and political transformation presuppose transformation in the sensibility and consciousness of individuals.

It has sometimes been said (notably by M. H. Abrams) that Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads displaces the revolutionary ideals of the French and recontextualizes them in a theory of poetics. Thus, “Liberty” becomes the freedom to express oneself freely and to reject the system of mimetic conventions prevailing in 18th-century poetry. Some would say that this amounts to middle-class individualism. “Equality” means that the poet may choose a common language from rustic incidents and thereby convey universal emotional states. “Fraternity” might be evoked when the poet writes in a vivid state of sensation and expresses a common human nature grounded in emotions that supposedly transcend politics, culture, and history. There is, in this view, a permanent human nature.

Page-by-Page Notes on William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802” (645-68).

648. At the outset, Wordsworth takes a scientific stance, claiming that his poems are experimental. Wordsworth aims to clear away perceptual deadwood and get to the most elementary passions and to the essential relationship between humanity and nature, between one human being and another. Just as Sir Francis Bacon aimed to brush off the cobwebs of scholastic theology to allow for concentration on the actual processes of nature, Wordsworth aims to clear away the false language and thought of the Eighteenth Century so that his audience can reconnect to the passionate element of their existence.

649-50. The poet aims to convey pleasure. Wordsworth implies that arguments about language amount to arguments about social regeneration. He says that he has selected rural life and speech because it is a safer repository for the essential passions of the heart. In rural speech, the link between the natural world and human manners is most purely expressed. We might say that language mediates between the passions and nature, which is partly a sign system for human emotions. As Wordsworth says, the goal is to reestablish the link between the primary laws of human nature and the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. He is by no means solipsistic in his poetics, but rather identifies the poet with rustic people and through them with all people.

651. At this point, Wordsworth says that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But he modifies this statement when he says that “our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts.” Repetition and habit play a large part here, and so we find common ground between David Hume and Wordsworth. Moreover, Wordsworth follows John Locke’s ideas of association; that usage is important because it allows the poet to suppose he is methodizing the passions and linking his own with others’ feelings. Representing feelings is more valuable than simply experiencing them.

652. “The feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation....” We find in Wordsworth an expressive theory of poetics as opposed to a mimetic one. “A multitude of causes....” The phrase “savage torpor” refers to the degrading effects of urbanization and the beginning of the industrial revolution. Technology and urbanization make us passive, killing the synthesizing power of the imagination and deadening our capacity to feel without “gross and violent stimulants.” Raymond Williams the cultural critic would suggest that the anti-industrial solution the romantics offer is an effect of the problem—poets stood to become merely specialized workers, so they hit back with the notion that their “specialty” really has universal and general significance; it should not, therefore, be marginalized or dismissed. On 652, Wordsworth offers a prophecy about the inherent powers of mind and the permanent therapeutic power of nature. He plays John the Baptist here, and is a romantic optimist in emphasizing the universality of our feelings.

654. “There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” Elsewhere in the Preface this remark finds its fullest significance, but it’s worth suggesting here that Wordsworth’s statement must hold for him because he has been saying all along that poetic language is itself at the root of all that is worthwhile in ordinary, rustic speech. There can’t be an infinite or unbridgeable gap between the two, or a difference in kind as opposed to a difference in degree or intensity. Language mediates between the passions and nature; nature is a sign system of passions.

655. “What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?” The poet is “a man speaking to men.” The poet has a more lively sensibility, greater tenderness and enthusiasm, knows his own passions and volitions, feels more connected to an external nature, and has a more comprehensive soul. Wordsworth defines imagination as a power to be affected by absent things. In sum, the poet is able to express thoughts and feelings more powerfully than most people. So poets are 1) fuller and purer human beings; 2) connected to their own and to others’ passions and to nature; 3) gifted with a powerful imagination and expressive capacity to convey universal passions; 4) craftsmen who can and reorder their own feelings and thoughts into a pleasurable and intelligible whole or story.

656. “Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing....” Poetry conveys the best kind of knowledge in the best way. The object of poetry is “truth general and operative.” In other words, its object is truth most closely tied to deep human nature. The poet conveys universal truth born of pleasure and carried into the hearts of others by passion. Poetry is “the image of man and nature,” and it links man and nature meaningfully. Poetry gives pleasure to the entire person, not to specialized elements of a person. Later, Wordsworth asserts this idea again when he discusses poetic truth in comparison to utilitarian, scientific truth, which actually turns out to be more remote than we had thought. The poet conveys a universal truth of the human heart, of feelings derived from unspoiled human nature in contact with an equally unspoiled natural realm. In sum, Wordsworth makes transhistorical claims about human nature.

657. “The poet writes under one restriction only....” Here science is contrasted with poetry. On the link between knowledge and sympathy, Wordsworth says that pleasure helps achieve this link. Pleasure comes from perceiving and feeling the harmony between humanity and nature, their mutual adaptation. Science, by contrast, dissects things and seeks remote truth as its object. The poet binds us into an expressive community by means of passion that conveys intuitive and pleasurable knowledge, while the scientist keeps us divided and subject to perpetual delay in achieving social harmony. Poetry delights us with its kind of knowledge because that knowledge flows from the depths of human nature.

658. “The knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure....” Again, science versus poetry is Wordsworth’s theme. We might contrast Sir Francis Bacon’s idea of science as future amelioration with Wordsworth’s more immediate promise of prophetic insight. The poet is almost a priest, erasing the consequences of original sin. Is this unfair to science? Well, Wordsworth probably refers more to a tendency than to specific practices, or to so-called pure science. What he offers amounts to a religion of nature. The artist is the high priest of that religion. At times, Wordsworth writes like a pantheist, praising “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

659. “Among the qualities which I have enumerated....” The poet more promptly feels in absence of external excitement and is able to express feelings more promptly. This is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The poet conveys passions arising from moral sentiments and animal sensations; the poet derives these things from contact with nature and from his or her own emotions.

660. Wordsworth refers to “the tendency of meter to divest language in a certain degree of its reality....” Meter meets the need for restraint and distance. Wordsworth does not seek to convey extreme emotion or raw events. For both the poet and the reader, poetry is a meditative act. Meditation requires the bracketing out of noise, focusing intensely on some specific place or thing, and calling to mind what is associated with that place or thing or person. The point is to reorder thoughts and feelings and attain clarity, which moral and emotional clarity, Meyer Abrams suggests, constitutes “the affective resolution” of the greater romantic lyric.

661-62. “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” On this page, Wordsworth discusses the mental process leading to composition. The poet contemplates an emotion such as love, gratitude, hope, loss, etc. (as on 659) in tranquility. Then, a new and kindred emotional state arises, at which point mental composition begins. Later, when the poem is committed to writing, readers may go through a similar process, one that takes them from tranquility to a state of deep, genuine emotion. But in keeping with Wordsworth’s meditative scheme, neither the poet nor the reader experiences only raw and chaotic passion. Instead, while composing the poet is in a “general state of pleasure,” and the goal is to provide the reader with an “overbalance of pleasure.” How to do that? Well, meter generates a degree of distance from unprocessed reality and raw feeling, and its regularity gives us a sense of “similarity in dissimilarity.” This sense, says Wordsworth on 661, is the spring of all mental activity. His view of meter may recall Aristotle’s comments about mimesis: we can enjoy a representation of things that would cause us emotional pain in real life. Again, poetic composition is a species of meditation: the poet may experience vivid emotions, but restraint, ordering, reflection, and selection are vital if the poem is to produce in readers an “overbalance of pleasure” instead of simply stirring up chaotic feelings.

In general terms, meditation requires a combination of freedom and discipline. A person must bracket out “noise” while focusing intently upon some specific place, thing, or event and calling to mind the thoughts and feelings associated with it from past experience. The aim is to deal constructively with these thoughts and emotions; it is to achieve moral clarity and enlightenment. In some species of meditation, aside from attaining clarity, working through problems, and so forth, there may occur a passage to or intuition of a state not conveyable in words: perhaps a kind of ekstasis or sublimity. There are elements of this latter kind of meditative experience in Wordsworth, moments when, as in “Tintern Abbey,” one may feel “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, / whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” That poem is what Meyer Abrams calls a “Greater Romantic Lyric,” and as such it follows a three-part structure that resembles the stages of Ignatius of Loyola’s meditative technique in his Spiritual Exercises. The first is “composition of place,” in which t he meditator or “exercitant” thinks about some personally or theologically significant location, with the goal of achieving the calm necessary to focus the mind on some spiritual problem that needs resolution. The second consists in the examination of the spiritual predicament that has been recalled to mind thanks to reflection on the place; and the third is what Abrams calls the “affective resolution,” which in Loyola and Wordsworth, in their respective ways, amounts to an affirmation of spiritual faith and hope for the future.

His ideas resemble St. Ignatius of Loyola’s theory of meditation in The Spiritual Exercises. ( ) We begin with the composition of place. The origin of poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. We contemplate past emotions until a new emotion is produced and composition begins, says Wordsworth. Then, the reader will contemplate the poet’s new emotion in tranquility, and the cycle continues. So poetry involves meditative states and the ordering or reordering of emotions. Again, that is why meter is important: it alleviates pain and chaos in the contemplation of real emotions and events.

663. “I put my hat upon my head, / And walk’d into the Strand, / And there I met another man / Whose hat was in his hand.” Indeed! Snorts the inestimable Dr. Johnson at his own delightful parody of Thomas Percy’s “The Hermit of Warkworth.” But Wordsworth wants us to take note of the real problem here: it isn’t so much that we are dealing with a poem that’s bad because its language is too ordinary; it is that the parody isn’t a poem at all because, in spite of its being of regular meter, its subject matter is too trivial to deserve expression in verse. It leads nowhere—well, nowhere except the Strand, anyhow.

664. “I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others.” This is an appeal to avoid being co-opted into accepting the prevailing aesthetic tastes, be they aristocratic and effete or melodramatic and vulgar. It’s common nowadays to lament that criticism has become an industry that does little good for poetry and the arts, but the truth is that such arguments have been leveled against criticism in some form or another since ancient times. And certainly in the English context, Alexander Pope was already well attuned to the problem of ignorant, arrogant, bloviating critics who nonetheless threatened to rob the public of any chance at achieving good taste, while Sir Philip Sidney and Dr. Johnson justly excoriate the absurd “illusionist” premises of some neoclassical critics.

666. “[T]he first Poets . . . spake a language which, though unusual, was still the language of men…. [T]heir successors . . . became proud of a language which they themselves had invented, and which was uttered only by themselves; and, with the spirit of a fraternity, they arrogated it to themselves as their own.” Wordsworth goes on to suggest that such clannishness is then extended to the gullible readership, which is thereby flattered into believing it has been offered membership in an exclusive club, a religion of poetic puffery. He condemns this sort of “personality cult” tendency as prideful and disunifying, as opposed to the kind of poetry he advocates. The concern that language will assert its autonomy from the world of men and things is an ancient one, of course, and it runs all the way forwards to the British empirical philosophers Wordsworth himself must have studied. Sir Francis Bacon, in particular, writes cogently in his scientific treatises about the way language sets “Idols” of various kinds in our path whenever we try to understand the workings of nature.

Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Page-by-Page Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual (668-74).

673. Allegory turns upon keeping two points of comparison distinct; it wields abstractions, and is no more than extended metaphor. An example from chivalric romance: the poet may allegorize a demonstration of virtue as “a knight slaying dragons.” This satisfies mechanical understanding, which in our mental capacity is most closely tied to sensory data. Even metaphor, considered as a mere literary device, is mechanical. By contrast, Coleridge says, symbolic language participates in the reality it renders; it is not something separate from reality. A symbol allows us to discover universal meaning in a particular representation. In fact, “representation” is not strictly the right word—symbolic language doesn’t merely represent something universal or spiritual; it is part of the universal to which it refers. Coleridge’s key example is Jesus’ remark that “the light of the body is the eye.” The eye here is both material and spiritual at the same time.

674. The phrase “I am”—implies that our self-positing is a divine mystery. It seems that Coleridge is adapting the philosophical notions of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling to his present critical needs. The mind plays an active role in construing what we term reality, and this ability is a divine gift. Symbolic language, as Coleridge describes it, honors that gift. Language works like nature; it creates organic, living unities. As John Milton says in “Areopagitica,” a book is “a living thing.”

Page-by-Page Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (674-82).

675. Regarding the precision required of poets, we can see that Coleridge’s schoolmaster the Reverend James Bowyer is the patron saint of formalism. Coleridge does not care about the author’s cleverness but rather about the unity of the poem itself. He’s against the C18 emphasis on “wittiness” because such wittiness demands the kind of language that calls attention to itself as ornamentation. Evidently, Coleridge believes symbolic utterances participate in reality without defacing or otherwise leading us away from reality.

676-77. The primary imagination is the miracle of consciousness itself—human consciousness involves self-consciousness: “I see a tree.” If I posit a tree, first I must posit the “I” that sees the tree. Coleridge says that this act is a finite repetition of God’s pure and continual act of self-consciousness. (As God says to Moses, “I am who am.”) As subjects, we are aware of ourselves confronting an object. The tree is an object of our experience; being human involves synthesis of subject and object.** We constitute raw data into intelligible forms, making them correspond to our mental categories. In this basic sense, imagination is the creative, synthesizing power that operates in all perception. We continually create the intelligibility we discover. Fancy is more limited to sensory data. Fancy is dead; it is too dependent upon the laws of association, as set forth by David Hartley, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. We—that is, our will and imagination—are not the concentrated effect of nerve impulses, fluids, synapse-firing, imprints on gray matter, and so forth. To overemphasize memory and fancy is to deemphasize free agency until human beings are determined by external forces (or by internal forces that might as well be external since they are characterized as mechanical.)

**Postmodern theorists might say that we are thereby always doing something to something else, incorporating it by means of language and self-consciousness. Still, if such incorporation is inevitable, it comes down to “table manners”—perhaps how we incorporate something makes all the difference.

676. “Secondary imagination” is apparently Coleridge’s term for the poetic imagination. It is a purposive, directed “echo” of the primary imagination. The poet is used by and uses imagination to create symbolic meaning systems. Poetic imagination “dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to re-create.” Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” and “Solitary Reaper” exemplify symbolic treatment of a given character. A symbol is not just one word or a mere device—it is a mode of language in its own right. Wordsworth’s secondary imagination breaks up, conjoins, and reconciles disparate categories of perception, feeling, and experience—the “Lucy Gray” lines, “a violet by a mossy stone / half hidden from the eye / fair as a star when only one / is shining in the sky do exactly that with respect to our ideas about Lucy, violets, and stars. We wouldn’t ordinarily put them into a meaningful relationship, but Wordsworth does so without hesitation.

In the above poem, the poet has made free choices; as Coleridge would say, the secondary imagination coexists with the conscious will. This does not necessarily mean that the source of poetry is consciousness, but rather that this power operates alongside of the conscious will. The esemplastic power (the imagination) generates complex unities but does not simply cancel distinctions—good symbolic language depends upon dynamic tension between a word and its contextual neighbors. What goes on in the poet’s imagination explains such poems as “Lucy Gray”—the poet brings together and synthesizes ideas, emotions, and sensory perceptions, and integrates them into an organic whole. Lucy is a star, a violet, and just Lucy all at once, and not simply in a mechanical way. The poet’s imaginative act generates this Lucy-star-violet, and we, as well, can understand and feel what Coleridge would call “multeity in unity.”

Further comments—in speaking of the primary imagination, Coleridge says it posits pure being. As repetition and re-seeking, it is linked with the basic human capacity to perceive and bring order to an otherwise chaotic world of sense data. Rhetorically, Coleridge is elevating our sense of humanity’s status perhaps to an even higher level than that posited of the Renaissance “man the microcosm,” since in Coleridge’s partly Schelling-based view, the mind is fundamentally creative. Coleridge cultivates a sense of mysterious communion drawn from the Bible, the Scholastic notion of community, and German Idealism. God says that he simply is. Being is mysterious, and so is our power of perception: the harmony between our minds and the world is mysterious. If secondary imagination is poetic imagination, it answers a need—it responds to the threat posed by quotidian habit and stale perception (cf. Nietzsche “On Truth and Lying in an Ultramoral Sense” on this matter), and it gives us a chance to “make it new” perpetually. The imagination makes possible a permanent revolution in consciousness. Mystery and belief in the supernatural are a meeting ground between Wordsworth and Coleridge, although they start from a different place to get there.

677. Notice the phrases “lethargy of custom” and “film of familiarity.” The secondary imagination helps to counter the threat posed by daily habit, which leads to stale perceptions and thoughts. We turn everything into an abstraction, a category, “other people’s convictions,” perceptions, and feelings. Coleridge makes one of the first in a long line of arguments against “mass culture” as something dehumanizing. Poetry is revolutionary with regard to perception—it shakes up the mind. It reorganizes minds so that they perceive and think themselves and the world differently, and to some extent more democratically and ecumenically. We may even, as Wordsworth promises, “see into the life of things.”

680. What is a poem? It is “that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species . . . it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” So a poem is a living, complex entity. If you cut a branch from the tree, the tree isn’t whole anymore, and the branch has lost its purpose.

681. The poet is the person who can, by creative imagination, produce the poetry alluded to above. A poet is a unified person who “brings the whole soul of man into activity.” Imagination of this sort demonstrates the potential for the harmonious operation of our faculties: sensory perception, feeling, reason or intellect, willpower, will not be at odds when we are engaged with a poem; all will be exercised in a productive way. Imagination may be what Coleridge calls in the Biographia Literaria the esemplastic power or the power that “makes things into one,” but that same power doesn’t cancel differences to arrive at some indeterminate lump of oneness. Instead, it “Reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Our “Lucy Gray” example in the Wordsworth section is a fine illustration of imagination at work in creating symbolic language: Lucy, the star, and the violet don’t lose their identity but instead gain something by being related to one another so vitally. Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode” offers a negative illustration in which the poet’s imagination isn’t harmonizing the natural world with his own subjective experience and emotional state. He remains isolated, and can create no order because his “genial spirits fail” and he can only “see, not feel,” how beautiful nature’s eternal forms are. Also on 681, symbolic language is said to remain true to the creative and imaginative process; it registers the “life” in which alone “nature lives.” It does not render the world as externality, and does not imitate it or distort it, but brings home to us the power of the primary and secondary imagination.

Final Comment. Coleridge disagrees with Wordsworth on the idea that we must get back to nature. He does not agree with the idea that rustic life is purer than city life. Only a philosopher (or at least an educated person) could benefit from close contact with nature. Nature, like trade, narrows the mind, and we quickly become impervious to its charms. Moreover, while Wordsworth relies a great deal on habit and meditation, Coleridge’s concept of imagination seems more dynamic and active, and his idealism is more thoroughgoing than that of Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness,” which implies a high degree of openness to the power of external things and the sensations they provide. (Walter Pater’s essays on these two men in Appreciations make this distinction aptly.) Coleridge opposes the materialist concept of experience, and he applies his point of disagreement with Wordsworth very broadly—only cultivation makes us capable of experiencing nature and truly appreciating the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness.

It is true that both poets offer a touch of the meditative and the mystical, but Coleridge privileges the philosophy of self-consciousness over Wordsworth’s rustic “wise passiveness.” As for poetic diction, rustic language is tied too closely to narrow, particular things. Philosophical language is superior because it flows from “reflections on the acts of the mind itself.” (See the Everyman edition of Biographia Literaria 197.) As for the effect of this kind of philosophical poetry, the audience would perhaps imbibe some of the benefits of reflection from their superiors and religious instructors.

Edition: Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 10, Hegel

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:47:00 +0000

General Notes on Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” from Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art

Dialectic. In Plato’s dialogues, it’s easy to see that “dialectic” (root: dialogos,dialogeo) is a linguistic process whereby two speakers reason their way to the truth of some subject—or in Plato’s case as often as not and especially in the early dialogues, they pursue the object to the point where they realize they’ve said what they can say and haven’t arrived at the truth, even if they think there is a truth to be attained. The ancient contrast is between dialectic as a truth-retrieval process and rhetoric, language employed as means of praise or of persuasion in, say, a law-court as “forensic rhetoric” or in the assembly as deliberative rhetoric—what should we do? etc.

Rhetoricians may be concerned with truth, but all those jokes about lawyers should tell us that they may not necessarily be after truth first and foremost. Hegel’s version of the dialectic can be read in different ways—anthropologically or in terms of strife within an individual’s consciousness (as in deconstructive readings that don’t accept Hegel’s belief in the processive evolution of consciousness to higher and ever higher stages). What he’s trying to do in the Phenomenology of Mind, in the standard reading that it’s best to employ here, is to explain how individuals become fully conscious of themselves as rational and spiritual beings and how they come to understand that their individuality can only be brought out within a genuinely social setting. We need an objective realization of spirit in the good society.

Dialectic’s modern form is a way of arriving at philosophical “Truth” while accounting for a complex and dynamic world and individual consciousness, and for the interdependence between one human consciousness and others. In the Master/Slave Dialectic, we read about an unsatisfactory stage in the development of consciousness. But in this discussion we can see the makings of modern concentrations on the play of power, on struggle as central to social and political development, and on the need to place the individual in a dynamic relation with the others we collectively term “society.” Hegel isn’t trying to describe a disembodied, bloodless self; he’s trying to deal with the reality of human existence as something lived, felt, and experienced in subtle and ever-changing ways. One major point is that labor turns out to be central to human life: we “produce” ourselves through labor. Marx derived his ideas about the status of work from Hegel. Because of his sophisticated dialectic and refusal to oversimplify the processes of thought, Hegel remains central to philosophy and theory—in other words, we can’t just talk about individuals and events or historical periods in total isolation from everything else, formalist style.

Ideological Critique. Hegel articulates the question of form and content, and he also relates individual consciousness to the political or ideological realm. For instance, the first kind of consciousness, historically, would have been “desiring self-consciousness”—just being aware that one has needs. All those desiring people got into many a scrape, and so we move to master/slave consciousness—which is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs societally or individually. The slave consciousness works out strategies for coping with servitude—namely stoic self-consciousness and its concern for work and virtue, which of course tend to result in punishment since, as the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished”; and then skeptic self-consciousness (cynical disbelief and resignation, disdain of care for others). Skepticism leads to the unhappy self-consciousness: ascetic rejection of the world, etc. But the unhappy self-consciousness at least gets some sense of the power of free will. That leads to idealist consciousness, which makes Ideas the sole reality. That notion is ultimately untenable—it excludes nature, and we must come to terms with nature. So Rational Consciousness leads to Empirical Consciousness. But then the Empirical Consciousness can’t see itself as other than animal, with reality as something outside itself.

Ideological critiques are, of course, a mainstay of modern criticism and literary/cultural theory. One might say that ideology consists in the linguistic and institutional rules that inform our actions and beliefs and make us think there is a stable world and a place for a stable “us” in it. A different definition would be that it consists in a fundamental confusion: the attempt to confound words and the world. Language, according to some modern critics, simply doesn’t work the same way physical nature does, and you can’t just “use” it to describe the world as if there were a close fit between the workings of language and the workings of natural processes. People are constantly eliding the fact that words, no matter how well you arrange them, don’t describe reality and are not “the same as” reality. To think otherwise is to be mystified and to think that words and the world correspond or even reduce to the same thing.

It’s easy enough to understand that the word “tree” isn’t the actual thing out there in the park, but at a broader level we tend to assume that our language is operating on the world in substantive ways. We naturalize our linguistic tricks to the point where the tricks seem like nature itself. So today theorists tend to focus on the constitutive and ideological role of language and not on arriving at philosophical certainty about events and things by means of it. Perpetual demystification might be a good way to describe this process, except that demystification tends to presuppose that there is an unmystified final state we can get to. Hegel thinks he can account for the world and consciousness as a dynamic totality, or at least that it would be possible to arrive at an intelligible perspective on that totality.

Page-by-Page Notes on “The Master-Slave Dialectic” from Hegel’sThe Phenomenology of Spirit

Introductory remarks. Immanuel Kant tends to assume that we are self-contained units, and he depends upon the sameness of our faculties in dealing with our activities and customs, and with aesthetic perception, ethics, and so forth. For Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments—risk, contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition and certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others. Hegel is an idealist who finds progressive states of consciousness embodied in certain historical moments. History is teleological, and labor is central to subjectivity and purpose in life, to social formations. Humanity’s relation to objects is central to life.

630-31. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when... it so exists for another....” To attain self-consciousness, we must first set boundaries. Emerson describes this as distinguishing between “me/not me.” Exclusion and separation are necessary to the founding of the self. The earliest stage is desiring self-consciousness. But then the situation becomes confrontational: a pair of self-conscious individuals confront each other as objects. They are not yet authentic in their self-consciousness.

632-33. “The individual who has not risked his life they will be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” Abstract self-consciousness must risk itself, must risk death to move towards genuine self-consciousness. Each side must try to annihilate the other. Something more active than exclusion is needed—recognition, a kind of incorporation/destruction of the other. But death would be negation, not a step forward. Therefore, a person needs recognition, but resents this need. Life implies limitation, negotiation, mediation. A different kind of relationship emerges from the struggle. The struggle shows a need for a mediated relationship. The Lord and bondsman both relate not directly to each other but rather to the thing.

The Lord consumes and negates objects, while the servant is forced to labor upon those objects—that is not the same thing as consuming them. But this is still unsatisfactory—the Lord only gets recognition from a non-essential and unequal other. The bondsman’s recognition cannot give the Lord a true grasp of himself or his relationship with others.

633. Paragraph 190. “The Lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent....” The thing becomes the locus of necessary mediation, part of the bargain struck to stave off death. However, as Karl Marx understood, this thing/being is also the site of great confusion in our relationship to things and, through them, to one another.

634-35. “The object in which the Lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness…. he is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself.” The Lord is in effect the slave of his slave and of the objects upon which the slave works. Moreover, the slave withdraws into himself and becomes independent. See 635 on this matter. Fear throws us back upon the body’s confines, and the servant-to-be shrinks into “absolute negativity.” Service allows him to realize that he is an individual. Work allows him to work at recovering a sense of his independent selfhood. We produce ourselves by means of work.

636. Hegel goes on to describe the movement from stoicism to skepticism to the unhappy consciousness. The point is that the movement grasps increasingly the unsatisfactory nature and contradictoriness (divided consciousness) of the servant consciousness; and therefore of the whole lord/servant relationship. The movement is supposed to be towards freedom, which will require genuine reciprocity. Marx will exploit this exposure of contradictions. The keys to this selection are 1) intersubjectivity as the foundation of the self rather than positing an autonomous ego, which is no more than an effect; 2) contradiction as teleological process; 3) the centrality of labor.

Page-by-Page Notes on Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art

639-40. “What is man’s ‘‘need’’ to produce works of art?” Why do we need art and adornment? We think ourselves, represent ourselves to ourselves. (This point will be appropriate when we come to Baudelaire as well.) Perspective and identity imply a going-out-of-self. You cannot see something or grasp it mentally unless you get far enough away from it: “the universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that man is a ‘‘thinking’’ consciousness....”

We make the journey in two ways—theoretically, through acts of self-consciousness, and practically, through practical activity like ordinary labor and artistic creation. We set objects before us and shape them, we embody imaginative acts in sensuous form.

And in the product, we see ourselves. So labor is self-production, spiritual process. A central human need is to transcend what we are, and to ‘‘get’’ somewhere.

A similar idea occurs in the master/slave dialectic—our sense of identity is not left to solidify on its own. It is a product of social interaction, a product that involves risk and confrontation. We confront another person, see ourselves in another person, and seek to annihilate or dominate that other person. Notice that Hegel often shows contradictions emerging in systems—competing, incompatible demands generated within the same system. Marx will describe capitalist economics the same way, especially when he discusses how overproduction crises lead to cycles of boom and bust.

639 bottom. “In the second form of art....” Adornment is natural—we turn nature into a means of self-reflection. Nature is useful as a springboard for successive acts of self-consciousness. However, this process is destructive and violent—what ought to be respected is annihilated or interpreted out of existence. Compare the Westerner’s “I have conquered the mountain” to the Buddhist’s claim, “the mountain has befriended me.” Hegel’s march of the spirit could be a violent and destructive series of aggressive acts against others. Marxism tends to advocate an outright struggle between humanity and nature for supremacy. We might even connect this attitude towards nature with Baudelaire and his fellow decadent authors on the need to reject nature in the name of artifice and variety.

640-41. “The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation....” Symbolic art is a search to embody a vague ideal in matter. This kind of art achieves an asymmetrical yoking together of idea and material. The two roughly correspond but do not fit together well. Symbolic art also shows the foreignness of ideas to matter. It reaffirms striving as one of the keys to humanity, and it also encourages respect for the sublime, the mysterious, fermentation, and movement. It is a necessary stage in human experience—we must be foreigners in our own territory. Symbolic art is expressive of mystery.

641 (bottom) - 642. “In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double defect of the symbolic form is extinguished.” Classical art is the second stage. Greek statues would be the perfect example. Greek sculpture achieves an adequate embodiment of the ideal. The human form expresses spirit determined as particular and human. The problem is that to do this, the sculptor must bring spirit down to the level at which it can be adequately represented or embodied. That is unacceptable since spirit is “the infinite subjectivity of the Idea” (643).

643-44. “The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of the Idea and its reality....” The third stage is romantic art, the perfect form of which is music. In romantic art, striving comes to the forefront again. Music is freest of material limitations. Romantic art seeks to transcend itself through itself, and we rediscover, as in the earlier stage of symbolic art, the incommensurateness of material to spirit. The problem with romantic art is that it triumphs over matter. The idea can only achieve perfection within itself. We see that we cannot simply fix spirit in stone or on the canvas, or even in a succession of notes on a page. William Blake understood well, for instance, that media are necessary but also liable to become traps. Romantic art is by no means comforting. It does not satisfy the individual’s sense of his or her own cognitive powers, the ability to render events intelligible, as in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory.

Edition. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 09, Kant

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:45:00 +0000

General Notes on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Kant’s significance in his own era: a “Copernican Revolution” in Philosophy.

1. Politics: Kant’s Enlightenment-based, philosophical idealist claims about the sufficiency of the mind’s moral and rational powers leads to much grander claims on the part of romantic expressivists and political revolutionaries. Kant is a bit like Banquo in Macbeth—though no political revolutionary or proponent of formalism or art-for-art’s sake, he “gets” such heirs. Kant never traveled beyond his home in Königsberg , East Prussia , but his ideas about humans’ capacity to render themselves and their surroundings intelligible spread throughout Europe and, at least indirectly, went into the making of the French Revolution. Why? Because if the mind is posited as constitutive of reality (not passively receptive of it) and if we are cast as autonomous moral agents, the political implication, at least in the most motivated and optimistic readings, would be democratic revolution against the era’s prevailing monarchism (a kind of determinism by “natural rulers” over the ruled). The French Revolution of 1789 is the dynamic embodiment of this possibility of change.

2. Art: When Kant says that we can know the “phenomenal” world (literally, “that which appears”), his emphasis is on a kind of subjectivism (in the sense that we cannot simply step outside of the perceiving self and know things directly), which nonetheless posits universal faculties or mental capacities. And art, like nature, is part of the phenomenal realm—we see a beautiful object in nature or art and make an aesthetic judgment. So by valorizing and studying it, we are engaging with a realm that has cognitive significance. Kant validates the field of aesthetics as a legitimate branch of philosophy. Further, Kant’s theory of a capacity for disinterested aesthetic judgment—one not based on logic or external moral standards or sensory/sensual gratification, but rather on a felt harmony between the form of natural objects and the mind’s powers—led near-contemporaries to treat art as an autonomous realm of experience, one that could be kept separate from the encroachment of social constraints and corruptive influences like politics and economics. To the romantics, an autonomous realm of art could serve as the basis for societal renewal, with the poets and artists, accessible priests of imagination, as the ones whose claims to speak with authority about human problems should be granted the highest level of authority.

Kant’s significance for 20th-21st century theory.

1. Politics: Kant’s claims about our freedom as rational and moral agents living in a world we ourselves largely render intelligible and livable remain, in one variation or another, central to the argument over the possibility of political consensus and progress implying such assumptions. To what extent, if at all, can humans change themselves and the social and political reality they find around them? Modern theorists can sound cynical about the universality and “freedom” of the mind’s powers, but the questions posed by Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers continue to play a role in shaping contemporary discourse about political consensus and ethics. Is there a common set of human powers and traits that give us some measure of control over our destiny, or is it rather the case that nature or environment or even ideology (our belief systems and institutions, enshrined in social practices and linguistic usage and codification) exercise a determining power over all that we do and think and say, so that moral and intellectual freedom, even political freedom, are little more than humanistic illusions and philosophical sham? Does life boil down to power and ideological determination, to the exclusion of concepts like free will and enlightened, educated humanity? Does insistence on such free agency merely serve repressive political ends, perpetuating distorted views about the way things are?

2. Art: Kant’s positing that there is such a thing as a pure, disinterested, autonomous judgment (as indicated above) implies that art is at least potentially a free and independent realm of human endeavor and experience, and even one with tremendous regenerative power for individuals and societies. Few theorists today would accept that claim directly—they would suggest that art’s production and reception are permeated by ideological imperatives and that the people who make and perceive art are not free in the sense Kant implies they are. Still, none of these criticisms do away with the key questions about art’s social, political, and cognitive value: what is art, can we even ask what art is, what is the social and political significance of such arguments about what art “is”? etc.

Aesthetics has long been a suspect branch of philosophy. The insistence upon an autonomous realm of art is often seen as a form of political escapism into a never-never land free of immediate, real-life consequences; it is seen as implying a naïve model of human subjectivity. In fact, a seemingly escapist doctrine such as “Art for Art’s Sake” owes something to Kant—as manifested in the British Decadent Movement, it shows up as a commodified notion of elitism that can be marketed to the middle class. (That’s true even if we can’t imagine old Immanuel strolling along Piccadilly with a medieval lily in his hand.) But suspicions about aesthetics and aestheticism aside, we should not dismiss all consideration of the central assumptions underlying aesthetics.

One other point of influence about Kant is that although he describes beauty as something that happens in the perceiver, not in the perceived object itself, his aesthetics lead to later formalist theories such as that of the New Critics of the 1930’s-40’s. This is because he claims that the pattern, or arrangement, or form, of a phenomenally given object is a matter of significance. We judge an object beautiful, at base, because our mental faculties feel a certain pleasurable harmony with the formal arrangement of the object, as if the natural world is giving us a sense of its “it-fits-ness” with our own mental structure. The object accords with our powers of perceiving. Kant expressly says that aesthetic judgments about beauty are not dependent on the innate properties of things. Still, aesthetic judgments are the result of the mind’s ability to construct harmony from its own formal organization of sensory data. So does the New Critics’ brand of concentration on the formal properties of a text that they consider autonomous and coherent or whole.

Elaboration:

1. Kant said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in the phrase “Dare to Know.” Humans possess the power of cognition, of reason, and they are responsible for knowing the sources, operational principles, and limits of that power. That is what the three famous Critiques are for: Critique of Pure Reason (how we can perceive and know); Critique of Practical Reason (Ethics); Critique of Judgment (Aesthetics). Kant asserts that we are rational and morally free. We are not determined by our environment or nature but are instead responsible beings who largely render the world intelligible by means of our powerful mental faculties. We give laws to what we call Nature, and our standards derive not from an external source (God) but rather from our own capacity to act morally.

It is important to realize that in Kant’s day much of Europe was split philosophically: Cartesian rationalism asserting that reality is derivable through logical operations or mathematical formulae, Leibnizian claims about a perspectiveless kind of knowledge, dogmatic Idealism asserting that mind alone is real; and the British empiricism of Bacon and Locke, which insists that all knowledge is derived from sensory data acting upon a passive, initially blank mind or “blank slate” (tabula rasa). Kant wanted to find a way to show some relation between human beings and nature without the need to deny the integrity of either. He does not want us to assert blandly that nature doesn’t matter or that we are entirely in the grip of natural laws. The latter option amounts to determinism, and it denies human dignity and free will.

Kant’s solution is ingenious. He says that we cannot indeed know “things in themselves” (the noumenal world, something not accessible through the senses). Ceasing to claim either that we can know noumena or that there simply is no noumenal realm turns out for Kant to be a liberating movement. Why? Without dismissing the possibility of an ultimate reality, Kant works things out so that any alleged ultimate reality ceases to be endowed with determining force over us. Not only is that so, but we can now begin to make a reasonably scientific investigation of the realm that we can know: the phenomenal world, the world of “things as they appear to us through our acts of perception.”

So in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant locates the “reality” he wants to investigate not in things themselves, not in some external realm, but rather in the mind’s own ability to organize sensory data into something intelligible. The most basic way this happens is through the fundamental forms of intuition, space and time. To borrow an analogy from Meyer Abrams and Hazard Adams, those forms are like spectacles we can never remove; we structure the world through them. Kant is implying that at this fundamental level, the mind is constitutive and active; it structures what we call reality. Furthermore, this reality is something we can investigate and come to know; we can know how we construct what we call reality. Kant is no empirical psychologist, but he asks, “how does the mind work?” Objects seem to accord with our perceptions. In that sense, at least, there is harmony between nature and our mental faculties. We are not aliens wandering an earth that we cannot understand or be at home in.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant is concerned to establish the grounds of our moral freedom. Our status as rational and moral beings, he says, lifts us above animal nature and even allows us to connect with Infinity, what is beyond our finite perceptions. Our minds have “legislative power” over nature, so we can adopt an at least partly independent stance towards it without dismissing our existence as beings in nature. Similarly, our morality is not an externally derived or determinant force over us; our morality comes from an innate capacity to generate moral standards that bind us as individuals and as a community. Kant’s categorical imperative says that a moral law must be binding for all: I can’t go out and borrow money not intending to pay it back because that renders the whole moral universe meaningless. Who would lend money if there were no universally recognizable expectation that it ought to be paid back? If we make exceptions for ourselves as individuals, he insists, we put the very possibility of acting morally to shame. (See Francis Bacon’s quip that revenge does violence not only to the offender but also to the law itself; revenge, writes Bacon, “puts the law out of office.”) This kind of ethical “subjective universality,” treated as objective and binding reality, means that we can make a world in which we can live according to rules whose force we all recognize. It’s in our nature to do so.

In The Critique of Judgment, Kant’s claim is that aesthetic experience gives us a palpable sense of our moral and intellectual freedom; it helps us experience the bridging of the gap between the concepts of nature and freedom. Freedom isn’t just meant to be a truth we can understand through abstract philosophical study. Imagination or sensibility, the function of which is to supply the understanding with data that must be synthesized, arrives at a relation of free play and harmony with the understanding (which usually brings data under concepts with a view to action or knowledge, but which in the case of aesthetic judgments need not refer to any determinate concept like “goodness,” “usefulness,” etc.).

This pleasurable experience of the mind’s faculties in harmony makes us aware of our freedom and convinces us that nature is compatible with the mind’s powers. We cannot be alien to a world that gives us pleasure without making any demands upon us. So Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience helps him bring home to us the claims made in the other two Critiques about our status as free, intelligent moral beings. As for the sublime, it’s important because although our experience with vast, powerful natural phenomena exceeds the capacity of our imagination and understanding to subsume it, we do not feel threatened by the “beyondness” of the experience. On the contrary, we are reassured in a very palpable way of the power of human faculties. We may not know the infinitely large in the sense of being able to quantify it or bound it determinately, but we still can think infinity in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm us. Our whole sense of self and of stability in the world doesn’t come crashing down upon us, so the mind must be a very powerful thing indeed.

Page-by-Page Notes on Kant’s Critique of Judgment

503. Editorial introduction. Kant is not concerned with the creation of art. Art is not necessarily created to achieve beauty. It may be made for many purposes—most notably ritual or religious. Or perhaps expression might be the goal of the artist; certainly contemporary art is not about beauty. It seems more like a confrontation with unintelligibility, or with the audience’s value system. It is “disturbing and disintegrating” (Wilde’s phrase) with regard to what we have falsely determined to be serene, integrated, unassailable, and unquestionable. Of course, this gesture can be turned into a style, a commodified act of rebellion. Oscar Wilde says that beauty is just such a disturbing element, given what it opposes. The difficulty lies in opposing the world while being immersed in it, working with and against the world’s rules, forms, and prohibitions.

505. Kant defines imagination as “the power of a priori intuitions”—i.e. the power to synthesize the intuitions given by sensibility. It is the power of exhibition. He defines understanding as “the power of concepts.” The point is that the mind is structured in such a way that its faculties can receive and construe sensory data. See Kant’s summary—subjective universality does not mean “merely subjective” in the non-philosophical sense. Taste is the ability to make aesthetic judgments.

506-07. “Interest is what we call the liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence.” Disinterestedness implies freedom from bias; it means we must have no immediate relation to the object we are contemplating and no sense that it must have an immediate purpose. The author’s intentions, the social implications of the object, and so forth, do not matter when one speaks of aesthetic judgments.

507. “Agreeable is what the senses like in sensation.” We merely like what is agreeable. Pancakes with maple syrup are not beautiful. They simply gratify our taste buds—we like the flavor. We must abstract from such sensory pleasure when making an aesthetic judgment.
We also take an interest in the good—we desire the existence of the object for its own sake (moral goodness) or because it is useful, as a wheelbarrow is useful to someone who wants to do some gardening. We do not take any interest of that sort in a flower or in a fine design. So whether we say that something is good in itself or good for some purpose, both statements involve an interested judgment; we would have to know a definite purpose. Kant refers here as well to what he will later call “free beauties” such as flowers and arabesque designs.

508-09. “For the good is the object of the will (a power of desire that is determined by reason).” Simply put, we want a “good” object to exist. But then Kant moves towards the three sorts of liking and to what constitutes a judgment of taste proper. “A judgment of taste ... considers the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure.” We do not care about the existence of such an object, and taste is the ability to judge objects by means of a liking that contains no interest. Notice that towards the bottom of the page, Kant provides a straightforward summary after all the complex analysis he has offered—”we call agreeable what gratifies us, beautiful what we just like, good what we esteem....” Agreeable / beautiful / good; gratify / like / esteem; incline / favor / respect. So a judgment of the beautiful is “disinterested and free,” as Kant says at the top of 509.

510. “A judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality.” Freedom from interest makes us say that our judgment of beauty is universal and valid.

510. “If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: it is agreeable to me.” My example is passionfruit fudge. It would be boorish to insist that others should like strange flavors or particular baseball teams just because we do.

510. “But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others.” We demand that there be a universal faculty of taste. We assume that an unbiased mind’s judgments will be the same for everyone, or that they ought to be the same for everyone. An unimpaired, free judgment would indicate that this particular painting or this particular flower is beautiful. Kant assumes a universal model of how the mind is structured and how it works, and says (see below) that failure to reach universal consensus in actual life need not destroy our faith in this assumption.

510-11. “There can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful.” Can we prove that our judgment is correct? What if somebody contradicts us? Well, so what? We are not reasoning about the point; we are positing a universal voice, a capacity to make universally binding judgments: “nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts.”

512-13. “If the pleasure in the given object came first....” Pleasure does not arise from mere sensation. What causes the pleasure is a certain set of occurrences in the mind. These result in a “universally communicable mental state” that allows us to say, for example, “this rose is beautiful for everyone.”

513. “Now this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the presentation by which it is given, precedes the pleasure in the object and is the basis of this pleasure, [a pleasure] in the harmony of the cognitive powers.” So pleasure arises from the free play of the imagination and understanding working together harmoniously towards no determinate purpose. We judge an object beautiful before taking pleasure in it—the pleasure comes from harmony between the mind’s powers. The mind engages freely with objects in the phenomenal world, and we feel harmony, a correspondence between mind and nature. Aesthetic encounters offer us a pleasant and easy way to experience our potential freedom. Ethics and philosophy are more difficult, and ordinary perception does not yield us free pleasure—it is too busy, too self-interested.

In aesthetic judgment, our ordinary faculties (the ones that let us construe the world as intelligible) operate in a special way. Beautiful objects of any sort are an oasis; they provide a contemplative encounter that gives pure pleasure. That is, imagination and understanding must work for even general cognition to take place, but in aesthetic experience, they play freely, so we experience our subjective, universally communicable freedom in the presence of an object given us from nature or art. We take pleasure from experiencing our freedom. To borrow from the high-serious realm of gaming, how about a pinball image? Experiencing beauty in nature or art sends us into a recursive scoring loop, racking up pleasure-points. A terminology issue: at the bottom of 513, Kant defines presentation as “the presentation by which an object is given us.” A “presentation” is that “by which an object is given us.” (Bottom of page.)

514-15. “A pure judgment of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotion…and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the form.” Kant defines “form” as shape or play on 515 top. Form is the design or pattern of presentations (not things themselves, but phenomenal “presentations” to our senses).

“Empirical aesthetic judgments are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments); only pure aesthetic judgments … are properly judgments of taste.” Color, musical instrument tones, and so forth, are charms. They please our senses and are agreeable, but they aren’t beautiful. They may even get in our way if we aren’t sophisticated or measured enough in our taste. (Notice the Hellenist term “barbaric” on 515.) Sensation is only the matter or raw material, the facilitator, for pure aesthetic judgment. Form is the determining element: “Design is what is essential” (515). Formalists will later pick up on this claim.

515. “Even what we call ornaments (parerga), i.e. what does not belong to the whole presentation of the object as an intrinsic constituent….” There is ornament and there is mere finery. Kant goes on to say that emotion isn’t involved in an aesthetic judgment; neither is sensation part of an aesthetic judgment: “Hence a pure judgment of taste has as its determining basis neither charm nor emotion, in other words, no sensation, which is [merely] the matter of an aesthetic judgment.

516. On Free Beauty: flowers and designs. “Flowers are free natural beauties.” And “Thus designs à la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on their own….” Kant will need to deal with the issue of imitation when he discusses art as distinct from natural beauty. Below, he writes that “When we judge free beauty … we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to serve the given object, and hence no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent….” Here is the idea of play that Schiller will recast as a fundamental drive, a Spieltreib.

517. At the end of this section, Kant defines imagination as “the power of exhibition.”

518. “We solicit everyone else’s assent because we have a basis for it that is common to all.” The common basis for judgment is the sameness of each mind’s powers, at least the potential sameness.

518. “[I]s taste an original and natural ability, or is taste only the idea of an ability yet to be acquired and [therefore] artificial….? It will be interesting to see how Kant responds to this question. It’s an important one—either taste is innate, or it depends purely on cultural acquirement, or some mixture of the two.

519. “It seems, therefore, that only a lawfulness without a law….” Kant refers here to “purposiveness without a purpose.” If your judgment were referred to a standard such as the original of a portrait, or a firm idea about the object, the judgment of taste would not be pure.

520. “But some significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime are also readily apparent.” Sublimity and its quality of “unboundedness” suggest the possible incommensurateness between mind and nature. Perhaps objects don’t pre-accord with our capacities, and perhaps, as a corollary, nature is not purposive like art, but rather mechanical or simply chaotic. The sublime is reassuring because it “indeterminately” confirms reason’s superiority over sense and imagination, the “power of exhibition” or impregnating intuitions with concepts. What was a threat becomes a hosanna to the highest—Reason. Humanity, like honor, goes before everything. Current theory exploits the same possibility with regard to language and nature, intentionality, and so forth. The sublime suggests some violence to our imagination, underscoring a seeming disjunction between mind and nature. But in the end, the sublime is very important because it leads us towards at least some sense that there's a transcendental order beyond anything to which experience can give us access. What it leads us towards, Kant implies, is faith that there is an order of this sort and a God. Those who go back to Kant from a post-modern perspective are probably more apt to emphasize the unsettling initial moment of the sublime. And those who are interested in aesthetics may be most captivated by Kant's notions about how we judge an object in nature or art beautiful.

520. “[N]atural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment….” The sublime, Kant goes on to write, suggests that the object of sublimity is “contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination….” (Be sure to read this passage. Refer also to the note at bottom about reason and understanding.) When Wordsworth writes in his “Immortality Ode,” “to me the meanest flower that blows / can give thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears,” might we call that an expressive version of sublimity?

521. “For what is sublime…cannot be contained in any sensible form….” A stormy ocean, or indeed any object in itself, is not per se sublime. Rather, we would have to refer this sight to “ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy….”

521. “Independent natural beauty reveals to us a technic of nature that allows us to present nature as a system in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding….” Aesthetic judgment leads us to analogize nature and “purposive” art.

521. “However, in what we usually call sublime in nature there is such an utter lack of anything leading to particular objective principles and to forms of nature conforming to them….” The sublime does not suggest harmony between objects of nature and our powers of perception, so it isn’t as important as the beautiful. Of course, some will later say that this threat of disjunctiveness is very important! (Tentatively, we might say that contemporary theorists interested in aporia and so forth are pursuing a variant of sublime experience, only this time it’s an experience with language.)

522. “[N]othing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime.” Reason demands something that imagination is not able to deal with.

523. “[I]f we are to give an example of it that is fully appropriate for the critique of aesthetic judgment, then we must point to the sublime not in products of art…but rather in crude nature….” So the sublime is a matter of raw nature, not art.

524. “If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a power that is supersensible….” We can think of the world as a totality, but imagination cannot represent it.

525. “[I]n judging a thing sublime it [the aesthetic power of judgment] refers the imagination to reason so that it will harmonize subjectively with reason’s ideas….” Kant writes that “[T]he mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself when it contemplates these without concern for their form and abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason that has come to be connected with it….” Here on this page is the key to the reassuring quality of the sublime: reason’s ideas are greater than imagination, the power of exhibition. The sublime experience exalts our sense of reason’s power. We can think infinity even if we can’t see it or count it or bound it. That is a very special thing to be able to do!

526. “In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated….” This is the opposite of the experience of beauty, where the mind is restful.

527. “Just as we cannot pass judgment on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid.” The sublime requires safety—you can’t be standing on the edge of a cliff.

527. [The sublime] reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.” The sublime shows our superiority over nature. Reason is higher than sensibility in Kant’s scheme, but he seems careful in his praise at this point for the sublime because he doesn’t want us to become arrogant about our powers—self-sufficient and mature, willing to be responsible for our actions, yes, but not arrogant and withdrawn from nature. As mentioned above, though (see comment about pg. 520), this doesn't diminish the value of the sublime.

529. “[T]he fact that a judgment about the sublime in nature requires culture … still in no way implies that it was initially produced by culture….” The sublime, Kant goes on to say, has its foundation in moral feeling. Also, “taste we demand unhesitatingly from everyone, because here judgment refers the imagination merely to the understanding, our power of concepts; in the case of feeling, on the other hand, judgment refers the imagination to reason, our power of ideas….” Reason ranks higher—it is the “power of ideas.” Understanding is only the “power of concepts.” That is, understanding has to do with the ordinary capacity to perceive things.

Perhaps we can see Coleridge and Shelley here—the world of sense is chaotic, and for Shelly, imagination takes on some Kantian functions; it harmonizes sensory input. Faculty psychology seems to get sucked into “imagination” as if it were a philosophical black hole. See also Coleridge’s idea about Primary Imagination, which works like the Understanding, only tinged with the divine. Secondary Imagination is the capacity the poet employs; it is the creative power at work in the making of art.

530. “[W]e must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account…of everyone else’s way of presenting….” This is a key passage on sensus communis. Read also the following: “[W]e compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others….”
530. “[Let us compare with this sensus communis] the common human understanding, even though the latter is not being included here….” Then Kant makes the fundamental claims of the Enlightenment: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; and (3) to think always consistently.” The main thing is to be liberated from superstition. Being human, by definition, involves being able to think beyond the senses. Nietzsche says that consistency is admirable, but false. (One might profitably relate Nietzsche to Kant, Schiller, and Freud on the task of civilization.)

531. But Kant elevates the term sensus communis by saying that taste is more properly called a sensus communis than is common human understanding. He writes further that “We could even define taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept.” The judgment of beauty doesn’t require a college degree—all it requires is that our basic capacities aren’t impaired; it demonstrates the mind’s freedom and nature’s accordance with our primary capacities: the free play of the imagination with the understanding. The sublime has more to do with reason and, to an extent, culture. Yet, the sublime tends to make us arrogant and rationalistic. It withdraws us from nature rather than making us feel at home in its proximity and harmony for us. We are not “aliens” on earth, as the medieval Church says. Yes, the romantics will like Kant—he keeps us rather close to nature.

531. “Art is distinguished from nature as doing…is from acting or operating in general….” Regarding “On Art in General,” we might refer to Coleridge’s statement that the secondary imagination “coexists with the conscious will.”

532. Art is a product of deliberation—the artist intends to make art. But that isn’t the same thing as saying precisely what the characteristics of the finished work will be. Art is a kind of play, so the viewer is able to deal with it as “beautiful” much as with a flower in nature. There is no need to refer it to a definite idea or preconceived conception. The artist needs rules to provide “body” for spirit. The material is the medium for spirit.

532. “Art is likewise distinguished from craft.” Art is not the same as labor. But Kant also says that “there is yet a need for something in the order of a constraint….” Art requires constraints, just as Wordsworth says poetry, while it mustn’t be reduced to meter, requires meter and other constraints.

533-34. “[G]enius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers.” Genius consists in being highly endowed with the free use of mental powers—especially imagination. If I am sculpting a bird, for instance, a free imagination may play with or develop the concept, tease out its possibilities.

Moreover, spirit is transmissible; the artist can express the “mental state” involved in the creative act. That is, the artist can embody the harmony of creation or passion in an image or an idea. Kant is not interested in the claim that art is imitation. He’s close to the Coleridgean remark that genius provides its own intrinsic rules.

534. On imitation—artists shouldn’t strive to imitate genius’ example; the point is to follow genius by way of emulation. Some concluding questions about the difference between art and natural objects: the form of a painting can be beautiful, as can the form of a flower. But what if the painting is an imitation or representation of an object? What if it is a portrait of which, as Aristotle would say, we know the original? Or even if it is only claimed to be a portrait of Lady So-and-So, 1784? Wouldn’t this amount to accessory beauty—adhaerens—something that we would refer to an original? Can a portrait or an image of a flower be matter for a pure judgment of taste?

See the Werner Pluhar edition of Critique of Judgment, page 173, paragraph 45. The fine arts, as opposed to the mechanical arts, seem like nature. We do not think about the artist’s intention to copy something—a face, a rule, etc. As for genius, Kant says, it gives the rule to art. Genius is natural endowment, and it operates like nature. We suspend our consideration of the artist’s intent. Finally, Kant does not capture the entire range of possible values in an encounter with art. He emphasizes the one that allows him to demonstrate our freedom from determination by nature. Notice the contrast here with Aristotle, who pays a great deal of attention to the emotional side of our response to art.

New note for 2005 session: the first page of our selection is a summary of Kant’s aesthetics, so it’s a good passage to analyze in straightforward language. At bottom, Kant is positing an experience that is universally communicable and (at least potentially) valid for all. As individuals, we get a pleasurable, even “easy,” sense of our own mind’s power, and we also might derive from this experience at least the possibility of a universal human community rooted in pleasure—rooted, that is, not just in cold reason or logic, but in feeling. Kant’s notion of humanity is itself based on his faith in the power of enlightenment—we all have a tremendous amount of potential, so we can develop ourselves into fuller human beings and develop communities in which everyone, both together and individually, takes full responsibility for his or her actions. It is well to investigate the mind’s logical and intellectual powers (Critique of Pure Reason), and well also to investigate what is meant by duty (Critique of Practical Reason). But a vital part of Kant’s philosophy is his concern for aesthetics, for the experience of beauty. This experience is, in his view, liberating—we sense our powers in a way that doesn’t leave us enslaved to nature (the world of objects), or cast us as mere thinking machines, or as a set of imperious duties and responsibilities always to be carried out. In a way—and in spite of the difficult vocabulary in Critique of Judgment, Kant is playing Philip Sidney’s “right popular philosopher” when he writes about aesthetic judgment: he is embracing the realm of pleasure and feeling, rather than bracketing it out in favor of absolute philosophical coherence.

Edition:The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 08, Pope and Johnson

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:45:00 +0000

General Notes on Alexander Pope

Nature: nature is structured like the human mind, and it operates in a rational and stable way. The ancients based their works upon Nature, so studying Homer is like going “back to nature.” They’re the same, in fact. So the “rules” are actually based on nature—that’s why we should follow them, and why we should value the ancients. Not to hold them in high regard merely shows that we have gone astray from what Dr. Johnson will call “just representations of general nature.”

Imitation: Notice the predominance in C18 of certain mimetic figures: mirror, speech as dress, ornament. What is to be dressed and finely decked out is “nature,” human nature, or the social and political hierarchy. These are already solid and “there”; the point is to make them memorable and attractive. In this way, poetry is something like elegant rhetoric, whose point is to reaffirm our sense that our ways and understandings are right. “Whatever is, is right.”

The point is that neoclassical critics generally support the principle of hierarchy underlying the social order—so they can conceive of a genial, erudite critic who does justice to the work itself and helps a somewhat broader “public” (gentlemen, not Dickensian kitchen scullions and hookers) understand the work’s complexities to as great an extent as possible. So such a critic serves the text and the public.

Modern formulations, by contrast, betray an anxiety that culture is either a top-down ideological control mechanism or an exercise in commercial vulgarianism: bread and circuses, the nightly news as entertainment, etc.

Analyzing the relationship between author/work/public and criticism calls for consideration of the cultural value of art: does it reflect an already held value system and merely “dress” or adorn it? Or is art a shaping force, a creator of culture, rather than a passive storehouse of normative ideas and aesthetic images? We can see art as establishing and maintaining consensus, or as tearing it down in favor of something new. It seems reasonable to say that it has done all these things—it is interesting to watch how critics and artists have reacted to them (example: romanticism).

Some critics see themselves as guardians of culture—highbrow watchdogs, one might say—while others see themselves as unmasking texts’ claims to normative status, and still others claim they’re more or less operating in a politics-free zone where they are able simply to “see the object as in itself it really is.”

During the C19, the notion of a “public” and even of several levels of public, from the low to the high, really becomes an issue. We see the rise and fall of the “man of letters” and the advent of what George Gissing describes in ‘‘New Grub Street’’ as hack journalists and critics churning out semi-cultured pablum for a quarter-educated public. Pope isn’t really facing this kind of crass commercialization or bourgeoisification of art to the lowest common denominator. But you can see in his admonitions to critics to “know their limits” a flicker of anxiety that criticism may be starting to pander to a paying public. Modern artists have had to try and turn this stricture into a positive thing, but it isn’t easy to do, and to varying degrees it may mean ceding ground on the claims surrounding art’s power to change people and even societies.

a) Is the literary author superior to the critic?

b) Is critic’s task to explain the text, add to it? (Arnold/Wilde)

c) To what extent should authors be familiar with criticism?

d) Today, “theory” asserts something like an independent right to be what it is, and not simply be a handmaid to art. This claim rejects the notion that art innocently exists as an autonomous realm or that it straightforwardly adorns a culture’s values.

e) Rejecting the responsibility to make texts accessible to a broad public by explaining them amounts to an atrophying of the critical function, or at least a narrowing of it to wholly academic circles. This is not necessarily to be condemned since there is much of value that “the public” simply can’t appreciate and yet shouldn’t be hounded out of existence. But if that’s all there is to it, it’s easy to see that the arts are too divorced from just plain folks to have much of a social impact. They look like the products of marginalized, specialized labor—not something vital in which everyone has an interest.

Page-by-Page Notes on Alexander Pope

441. “Too many critics” would be troubling. Pope values criticism for the same reason Horace does—it can notice the best work and make it available for public appreciation and emulation by modern authors. But criticism quickly becomes an industry, almost detached from its object. Consider modern formalism as a looming, institutionalized propagator of artistic standards. Bad critics pander to a vulgar public—this would be a good place to mention Pope’s background as a Catholic and as someone who had to earn his living as a writer.

442. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan….” Here at lines 46-49 is the lesson adapted for critics. You can’t just spin out “rules” from your own head. The great author of classical times isn’t to be condemned because he does something you don’t understand. Homer and Virgil constitute an external, transhistorical, universal set of standards to which you must conform your sensibilities: taste is intricately tied to education. This is an anti-mass way of understanding art—we shouldn’t go up to the work with our hands in our pockets and expect it to please us at first sight or upon first reading.

“Unerring Nature….” Nature is Pope’s sun, source, and end. Mind and nature work analogously; the world follows Reason—it is an intelligential order. Homer follows human nature, which accords with natural process. See page 443, where Pope writes that the rules are themselves rooted in nature. So conventions are natural to humanity, not mere extrinsic ornaments. The artist and critic help us appreciate the intelligibility of the natural order, the compatibility of mind and nature.

443. “those rules of old, discovered, not devised….” Neoclassical authors such as Pope are careful to insist on selection from nature—nature must be “methodized.” They do not say authors should copy nature in the lowest sense. This carefulness is partly due to the moral (pragmatic) demand of neoclassical criticism: art should teach by delighting. But it is also an Aristotelian demand to derive the universal significance from the particular instance.

446. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Pope is against mediocrity for the same reason as Horace: art should reflect our society and values to us elegantly; that is the meaning of decorum. Otherwise, we end up with Plato’s demagogues and critics and artists pandering to the lowest common denominator. In that case, art would not exert any shaping power, and we would be on a degenerative arc with respect to the ancients. At the bottom of the page, Pope insists we must know the whole work, not just the parts.

447. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed.” True wit does not get itself a raised podium or become its own order of things. Some C18 authors distrust words and wittiness because they tend to get in the way of truth, of things as they are, and so forth. Witty language “dresses” nature to advantage. Just as fashion succeeds only when it knows the body well, so art must accord with human nature. Words “clothe” thought, which implies that thought itself refers to a stable order of things prior to language. The emphasis is on coherence, on building and maintaining consensus. True wit is like nature in that both give us back a proper image of our minds.

448. “But true expression, like the unchanging sun….” Pope makes the same point about language here—it should clarify things and “gild them.” But it should not change the object. True felicity lies in apprehending the order of things, and in expressing that order attractively. Later we will see Matthew Arnold refer nostalgically to what he calls “the object as in itself it really is.” He thereby reasserts human values and facts, not scientific objectivity as something opposed to stable human values.

450. “Some foreign writers, some our own despise; / the ancients only, or the moderns prize….” Pope does not simply say the ancient authors are better: the category true-false does not reduce simply to old-new.

454. On achieving consensus in public taste: the term “the public” implies a degree of democracy, at least in the sense understood by a market society. Since the function of the critic is to be positive and to form public taste and morals, the critic must behave in a civil manner. Notice that Pope says pride is the main fault of intellectuals, at lines 631-32. Recall how Sir Philip Sidney describes the way to move people towards virtuous action. That is a typical 18th-century notion, too—literature is better than philosophy. If the critic is an authority, he is a benevolent one, not a tyrant, not destructive because you cannot achieve consensus that way.

General Ideas about the Inestimable Dr. Johnson

Johnson remains interesting partly because he writes at the point where neoclassical precepts are about to be challenged by romantic practice and theory. I think my former professor at UC Irvine, Michael Clark, is right to say that we can find elements of both romantic and neoclassical in Johnson. One the whole, however, he is a fine example of the best sort of neoclassical “pragmatic” criticism – perceptive, flexible, and sound in his comments. His defense of Shakespeare, for instance, still rings true today. (The same could be said about Coleridge’s excellent lectures on Shakespeare.)

Page-by Page Notes on Johnson’s “The Rambler, No. 4.”

Page numbers refer to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Discussing the relatively new and popular genre, the novel, leads Johnson to lay bare his mimetic and pragmatic theories in combination. As with Aristotle and Corneille and Dryden and Pope, the poet’s task is to imitate nature. But as with the same critics, that doesn’t mean simple-minded copying of the environment, human characteristics and habits, or social conventions. It involves SELECTION and arrangement with a PURPOSE—in Johnson’s case a directly moral purpose.

463-65. Johnson was called “the last great critic who understood absolutely nothing about art” because he is straightforwardly didactic in his demands of artists. He is especially worried about the novel in this regard—it reaches a broad audience of semi-educated people. Johnson isn’t as cynical about this new kind of relationship between authors and readership as, say, the late Victorian George Gissing in New Grub Street, but he is determined to lay down some moral rules that the novelist ought to follow.

Novelists are usually realists—”they are engaged in portraits of which every one knows the original” (463). The novelist writes for an audience that knows the world he’s evoking with the stroke of a pen. So they can judge his mimetic performance, but they can also be morally corrupted by a book whose author doesn’t select carefully what ought and ought not be shown to the reading public. After all, the novel in Johnson’s day probably had about as much impact, comparatively, as film today. We have also heard arguments about how corruptive the internet can be to people’s sense of fact, and perhaps to their sense of right and wrong. Older people and culture critics generally still complain sometimes that there’s no “moderator” for internet information—that is, no authority figures step in to make appropriate selections. Indeed, the sheer volume of internet information would seem to make moderatorship an impossible task anyway. This argument, though not close to Plato in terms of a text’s status as a true or false representation, certainly shares his moral concerns about art’s power to corrupt the ignorant by appealing to their basest passions. (Aristotle wasn’t exactly free of this anxiety, either. His theory need not be construed as favoring democracy.)

464. SELECTIVE IMITATION based upon sound moral principles is the key to good art. Johnson is very blunt on this point, more so than previous critics we have read.

465. Literature, says Johnson, should be uplifting. This is basic Renaissance theory: as Sidney wrote, the poet should “lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of” (333). But now the novelist is the “right popular philosopher,” and he reaches bigger audiences than ever. There is some danger that the moral stuffing will go out of the genre and authors will simply give the public what it wants: mere titillation, entertainment without further value. Such entertainment would amount to pandering, not instruction from a position of cultural authority. We might illustrate Johnson’s concern by referring back to our diagram: in terms of the novel. One might draw it as follows:

Work | Critic | Public—as if they’re all on the same level.

Page-by Page Notes on Johnson’s Rasselas

466. “It is commonly observed that the early writers are in possession of nature, and their followers of art....” Johnson makes the same point as Alexander Pope—Homer knows best. But again, that is true of Homer only because he first looked to “nature and life.” Johnson’s philosopher Imlac does the same.

466-67. “To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination....” so much of Johnson’s phrasing shows up in the work of subsequent authors. If we didn’t know better, we would think Johnson was Shelley with that phrase “legislator of mankind.” This is probably where Shelley got the phrase, though he added “unacknowledged” as a qualifier, thus signaling a fundamental temporal and spiritual split between poetic imaginative vision and the utilitarian, bourgeois public of early C19 Britain. Shelley says that the poet is “superior to time and place.” The romantics borrow the rhetoric of universality, but the universal passions are what they emphasize, and there is less emphasis on reason. Oscar Wilde and the modernists will also borrow the idea that nothing is useless to the artistic consciousness.

When Johnson says the poet must not streak the tulip or color his work with the “prejudices of his age or country,” he is making a broad conceptual point, not painting pictures of nightingales singing to please themselves, in total isolation from his society. Rather, the point is that poets themselves should skillfully select from, abstract from, their own age’s customs and manners to present an ideal moral vision that will shore up the moral consensus amongst his contemporaries. This “superiority,” therefore, has to do with the smooth transmission of cultural values based upon a sound hierarchy of education and rank—not with romantic self-isolation and exaltation.

467. “The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species: to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind....” This passage does not mean that Johnson ignores the need for close empirical observation of manners, customs, nature, etc. In fact, close observation is required as the raw material for the selection.

Still, I wouldn’t make a romantic of Johnson—there’s a big difference between most of his statements about “just representations of general nature” and Walter Pater’s claim that “it is only the roughness of the eye that ever makes two things appear alike.” Johnson might say, “you may be right, but who cares about the streaks on the tulip? We want an idea of the tulip, an image we can all recognize—that idea is vital to the reaffirmative function of art.” I believe Johnson would be fully capable of appreciating streaked tulips in nature, but when he writes about art (i.e. representations that send us back to nature armed with an intelligible scheme for comprehending it), such inexhaustible variety isn’t to the point. The phrase “interpreters of nature” clues us in to the element of good Baconian empiricism in Johnson’s pragmatic theory of art. Johnson betrays a certain distrust of particularity at this point—like many 18th-century philosophers, he distrusts words, images, representations that might come at us as if they were the thing itself. A representation that tries so hard to rival physical nature (or human nature, for that matter) that it displaces it might succeed in averting our gaze from “things themselves.”

The poet should bring out what is universal about nature and humanity. Johnson’s poetics are deeply social and pragmatic. Selection is the lifeblood of civilized society. As Oscar Wilde says later, “it is a mark of the civilized man to be profoundly moved by statistics.” That is very different from romanticism—Blake says, “to generalize is to be an idiot.” Of course, that statement is itself a generalization.

Page-by-Page Notes on Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

468. “To works... of which the excellence is not absolute and definite... no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem.” Johnson says only time can test poetic value. Obviously, he projects his culture’s values to an infinite point in the future and links them back to the ancients. Continuity is central to him—we might compare him in this regard to T. S. Eliot’s claims in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

469. “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” Shakespeare has stood the test of time because he offers “just representations of general nature.” He offers us common humanity, the “general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated.” We may be surprised to find Wordsworth using much the same language to describe the poet’s subject matter. He, too, believes that certain “passions” are universal to all humankind, though of course he favors the natural environment and rural speech as the best means of digging down to this bedrock of general human nature. Johnson calls Shakespeare’s characters “species,” not mere individuals. (Don’t we get the sense that Shakespeare’s characters are individuals? What would Johnson say to that? Well, probably that they seem so “lifelike” precisely because we recognize elements of our own common nature, not because Shakespeare’s characters are unique.)

470-71. “But love is only one of many passions....” Shakespeare’s universalism does not come at the price of unrealistic ideals—what we see on the stage is human beings, not heroes. “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men....” No matter what the Beatles say, love is not all you need. Other strong passions may exert just as great an influence upon us. (Madame de Staël makes the same point, by the way.)

471. “Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful....” Shakespeare “mirrors” life—but again, Johnson’s notion of imitation isn’t narrow copying. Shakespeare’s Romans don’t look like Romans. (See Thomas Love Peacock’s hilarious sendup, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” 690 near bottom.) He draws the universal principle from close scrutiny of the accidentals and particulars. So who says he had insufficient Greek? He’s a good Aristotelian natural scientist. We might also say that Shakespeare is the master of metaphor—Johnson’s description of Shakespeare’s ability to make remote things feel close and wonderful things familiar is a pre-romantic way of saying that Shakespeare “strips away the film of familiarity” or, as Shelley writes, that art should teach us to “imagine that which we know.”

472. “All pleasure consists in variety.” Robust appreciation of Shakespeare lifts Dr. Johnson out of the run of neoclassical critics here—the bard’s drama embraces the high and the low, and Johnson, in spite of his moral quibbling, refuses to condemn its variety.

473. “Shakespeare engaged in dramatic poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few....” Shakespeare was a genre-buster. Maybe he wasn’t a follower of strict rules formulated by critics, but he understood human nature so well that at times he gives the effect of being a law unto himself. But he’s really just a good observer of humankind. So it’s okay to have a gravedigger scene in Hamlet: that’s the way life is, the tragic is always next to the comic and ridiculous. King Lear mustn’t be allowed to stray too far from his Fool. Coleridge and others will take this notion much farther, since of course they’re interested in Shakespeare as a sublime example of genius, a capacity that generates its own laws in the process of artistic creation.

But do you agree that Shakespeare put only his skill into tragedy, and his genius or instinct into comedy? Could that be because tragedy is Dionysian, and requires surrender of identity? Or because tragedy requires more stylistic rigor? I don’t know. At any rate, Johnson says Shakespeare is universal, a poet for all ages. Well, so far I’d have to say he’s making good on that claim. Still, forever is a long time.

474-76. Shakespeare’s faults: 1) he sacrifices virtue for the sake of convenience, and generally fails to keep good and evil apart, so sometimes we get too attractive a portrait of vice; 2) he is loose in his plots, as in King Lear’s letter-plot hatched by Edmund; 3) he does not observe the niceties of history—see Thomas Peacock’s satire in “The Four Ages of Poetry” about Elizabethan dealings with history; 4) there are too many faults in his diction—he would give up the world for a quibble, and has tried every style except simplicity (“Tis scarce two hours since the worshipped sun peered forth the golden window of the east,” etc.); 6) he does not observe the unities.

476. “I shall... adventure to try how I can defend him. His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies are not subject to any of their laws....” Johnson’s defense of Shakespearean poetry involves him in a discussion of neoclassical verisimilitude.

477-78. “The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible.” The upshot is that we are not fooled into taking the performance on the stage for reality; rather, it calls to mind reality. As Johnson says on 478, “The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” We know the difference between reality and representation. Imitations “bring realities to mind.” In such and such a way might we feel or act in such and such a well-played situation. The emotion that arises when a mother reflects upon the possibility that death might snatch her child away is real and true to life. We fancy ourselves happy or unhappy—but such a fancy is still an authentic feeling.

It simply isn’t the case that we get so drawn into the whole affair that we feel for the characters themselves or absolutely identify with them. There’s more critical distance here than some neoclassical theorists—especially bad ones—allow. We appreciate fiction as fiction, and we don’t mistake it for life. It is arguable whether or not this kind of claim is fully compatible with Aristotelian catharsis, which some theorists who really like the Dionysian background of tragedy find has a lot to do with genuine emotion getting stirred up in spectators for the characters. But Johnson clearly doesn’t see drama as an opportunity to stir up communal frenzy in the name of Dionysus.

And of course modern dramatic theory like that of Artaud in The Theater and Its Double wouldn’t accept the way Johnson treats engagement with a work of art as something neatly delimitable and reflective, in a kind of mirror relation with real life. For Artaud, we have lost the ability to experience anything in real life or at least to appreciate its full power; the point is to make theater a genuinely unsettling experience, to immerse us in it, stripping us of the everyday ego that helps us make the kinds of firm separations and distinctions Johnson thinks necessary. We must stage events, says Artaud, not petty men wrapped up in themselves. So Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty isn’t like life, it is life. It doesn’t abstractly instruct us about life, it is life.

Notes on Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets: “Metaphysical Wit”

Here Johnson illustrates what T. S. Eliot refers to as the “dissociation of sensibility” that supposedly set in after the 17th century. Eliot, though not free of neoclassical sentiments himself, would surely say that Johnson couldn’t appreciate John Donne because that poet wrote before the dissociation to which Johnson himself had become subject: since he couldn’t think and feel at the same time, he couldn’t appreciate poetry written by anyone who could. All he can say is, “why stands it so particular with thee?” Johnson seems to consider metaphysical poetry overly subjective and even perverse. Amongst the metaphysical poets are Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan.

Refer to John Donne’s poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”:

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Further Notes on Samuel Johnson, from English 212

2331. Johnson says that rational and useful diligence is his hope for himself and others. Since he writes in an early modern period, it would be interesting to mention the subtle analysis he offers of idleness. Much of popular culture has the same effect he describes—one is in a state of action, but not of labor. He also describes accurately how we avoid diligent labor in purely individual terms: we are always preparing to do something, but seldom get around to doing it. Merely being busy is not the same thing as accomplishing something. In terms of style, Johnson writes with considerable wit and good sense; that is the hallmark of his 18th century prose style. This sort of writing is meant to inform an increasingly important public opinion.

Johnson is an educated person trying to exercise subtle influence with his genial ramblings. The periodical title idler is itself a comment on this relationship between reader and journalist. Johnson writes around the time when people began to have more leisure time. And the old Renaissance question from the liberal arts comes to forefront—how are we to make the best use of our leisure time? The mark of an educated person is that he or she knows how to use free time without being completely frivolous. Self-culture is the aim.

You should connect this second work to the tradition of utopian fiction—the prince of Abyssinian dissent lives in a paradise constructed for him by motivated others. ‘‘Fahrenheit 451,’’ Huxley’s ‘‘Brave New World,’’ and other texts might be appropriate to mention. The prince raises the problem of self-consciousness, differentiating himself from the animals. The prince makes a distinction between being fully gratified to the point of saturation and desiring what one does not have. He takes up his old counselor’s idea that he should compare his own state to the miseries of the world. So he comes to desire this new experience in order to return to a state of happiness.

The story about the artist who thinks he can fly with wings is an obvious reference to the ancient Greek myth about Daedalus and Icharus, the boy who soared to high. This man is operating on pure imagination unassisted by experience.

The poet says imitation is not enough. He wants to be like the early poets who were in possession of nature not simply of other poets. Poetry provides a new purpose for perception. That almost sounds like romantic doctrine. But then comes the famous remark about how poets do not “number the streaks of the tulip.” The point is to observe nature accurately and distill the formal excellence and essential outline of the tulip or the forest, with the aim of recalling the original, the type, to every mind.

Behind this program for the poet lies a theory that every mind works the same way, more or less, and that the location of reality is not so much in the human mind as an external objects, the world of physical nature. Language or poetic language must not obscure the relationship we have with thinks or our proper understanding of thinks. Johnson’s remark fits within the empirical tradition.

2686. Again, Johnson says that a poet must be a careful observer of human nature, observing all the passions in their combinations. He must observe the great variety of human civilization and individuality. However, he must not get bogged down in these details. The point is to move beyond them through them and arrive at the general and eternal laws of physical and human nature.

Notice that on this page Johnson writes the words that the romantic Shelley will borrow for his “Defense of Poetry.” The poet is a legislature who writes for future generations. He is in other words the guardian of permanent values and transcendent intelligibility. This is the very point that modern relativistic philosophy finds impossible to accept. And of course modernist literature is based upon the strong suspicion of profound discontinuity between the past and the present and future. Tradition cannot simply be handed down to us in all its glorious continuity and wisdom. We must remake the world. Johnson does not say any such thing; he is ultimately on the side of tradition, and his comments about accurate observation are made in support of traditional transcendent truth.

2687. At first, it sounds like the poet praises Europe entirely—he praises European military power and knowledge. But he goes on to say that knowledge is not in itself sufficient. We do, as Aristotle said, take pleasure in learning. But apparently it alone cannot make us happy.

2688. The prince and his sister leave the Happy Valley, and must put aside their royal dignity, and depend instead upon courtesy. Rank is an artificial way of commanding other people’s obedience. It keeps us from understanding one another.

2689-90. They arrive in Cairo, Egypt, a place where people of all kinds come together to do business. This is a microcosm of the world. The idea is that the prince will be able to make his choice of life, as the poet calls it, by observing everything he sees. Johnson here makes use of Plato’s allegory of the Cave, though in a different sort then Plato himself did. The prince and the Princess have traveled through a tavern to get here, and what they see is ordinary, busy everyday reality. They must, like good scientists, closely observe this world to see what is permanent in human relations and emotions. What is of lasting value in the various kinds of behavior and practices? So again, they must be good empiricists. They must not leap up to quickly to grand theories but rather be patient.

2690-91. The prince deludes himself into thinking everyone else is happy, while he remains restless. The poet explains that the happiness he sees, which appears to be the result of conscious deliberation in the choice of life, is for the most part an illusion. He seems to suggest, as Samuel Johnson himself does in his periodical writing, that much in civilization is busywork, a form of denial, doing anything and everything in order to avoid solitude and self-reflection. The poet even calls this the tyranny of reflection. So the question is, how much faith are we to place in this notion that given a choice of life, it would even be possible to choose a course that would make us permanently happy? Or is even the idea that you can choose your life sensibly? Do we have that kind of freedom in any form of civilization?

Edition for E212 Notes: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, probably the 7^th edition.

Week 07, Corneille and Vico

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:44:00 +0000

General Notes on Pierre Corneille and Neoclassicism

How to Define the Neoclassical Period. Recollect the segment of Annie Hall that shows Woody Allen’s character appealing to “the author” as an argument-ending principle of interpretation, a conventional authority figure that his audience will accept as final. For Allen’s character, Marshall McCluhan is more of a stock figure than a flesh-and-blood individual – McCluhan steps from behind an ad prop, as if he were a cardboard dummy. Allen’s character says, “wouldn’t it be nice if life were really like this?” But in real life, one can’t even find “a sock filled with horse manure” when it’s really needed. We can find this same strong desire to arrive at consensus in social, political, and artistic affairs; strong desires betray strong counter-forces. The C17-18 neoclassical period on the European continent was a violent, unstable one. All I need do is mention the Thirty Years’ War, a religion-based battle that started in Germany and got out of hand from 1638-48, or the decades of civil strife in France before the accession of the Bourbon King Henry IV in 1589, the weakness of Louis XIII’s regent Marie de’ Medici, or the English Civil War in the 1640’s that toppled the Stuart absolutist Charles I. [Louis XIII 1610-43, XIV 1643-1715, XV, 1715-74, XVI 1774-92—the “top Louis” beheaded as a result of the French Revolution, 1789. The Bourbons returned for a time after Napoleon’s defeat, 1814.] What people needed in social and political affairs was a sense of stability and continuity, assurance that there could be a settled order based upon a clear understanding of human nature, itself rooted in nature with a capital “N.”

What’s the implication of all this fighting for art and criticism? Well, neoclassical critics set out to define the RULES for creating and structuring literature, the rules underlying audience response, the social function of art (though not always in a rigidly didactic fashion). We find in C17-18 poetics and drama theory a strong appeal to conventions drawn from the laws of nature. Convention, or to use the fancier and more systemic term “decorum,” is the set of rules by which people live in acceptable ways and engage with art.

We remember that word decorum from the Augustan Roman Horace, where it was also an imperative, and by decorum Horace referred to the social and artistic conventions that educated people had come to find acceptable. The taste of the educated reader or spectator was a central concern for those who made art in the Roman Empire, and the same is true of the Neoclassical Age in Europe and in England.

Let’s just stop here and consider whether our own age might have something in common with C17-18 France: what have been the prevailing trends in art and politics for the last several years? The last several years have hardly amounted to a call to progressivism or individual experimentation, I’d say—in politics, we have a President who uses phrases like “bring it on,” “wanted: dead or alive” and “smoke-‘em-out” in foreign policy speeches. These aren’t the wild, radical, gimme-a-ticket-on-an-aeroplane sixties, they’re the anxious teens of the twenty-first century, a time of uncertainty thanks to September 11, 2001. Of course, this is hardly an age likely to appreciate periwigs and snuff and male manicures, but the point is that the country is in a “neo-moralist” or even “neo-macho” phase. As for art, there’s evidently a high demand for moral representations, black-and-white views that make things absolutely clear, and so the art and politics of the era follow conventions that suit the people’s mood—or what they’re told is their mood, anyway. (And it’s obvious enough that politics involves manipulating a set of conventions, crafting an acceptable image of oneself, etc.—there’s been a good deal of show business in our politics at least since the Nixon-JFK debates of 1960.) After all, this is a democratic republic, not a French absolutist monarchy. And in art, we find many television productions about law-and-order themes and even (until recently) shows like “West Wing,” along with Hollywood’s usual run of neo-westerns, FBI extravaganzas, and war films. Law-and-order authority figures are “in” these days. That’s because there’s a perceived need for authority figures; in good times, people don’t put as much stock in such goings on. Earnestness seems to be in vogue—what would Oscar Wilde say? People look to the Retro Imaginary when they’re uncertain and afraid: so we’ve resurrected John Wayne, J. Edgar Hoover and the G-Men, and maybe even “The Man with No Name,” along with some other less predictable heroes. Well, back to the past, and our texts:

The neoclassical dramatist or poet is no visionary and is by no means concerned with self-expression; rather, the poet’s task is to reproduce reality—that is, human nature and physical nature—in a pleasing fashion. So we are dealing here with a mimetic theory of art, and as usual, where we have a mimetic theory of art, pragmatic concerns cannot be far behind. The refined audience, with its educated taste, can judge artistic representations on the basis of how well they conform to the laws of art and how well they observe and reflect the rules of society.

Moreover, there’s a philosophical angle to neoclassical mimetics: we demand that art set before us the typical and universal, the timeless, in human nature. We demand that nature and human nature be idealized; representation must accurately render the timeless essence of men and things, not their perishing particularities. Even Neoclassical comedy seems to do this—which accounts for the continuing popularity of Moliere’s Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope. Those plays are still funny because they’re not limited to making fun of actual jerks in Moliere’s day—he’s after what is universally ridiculous about us all, and has little trouble finding and representing it. Tragedy, it seems, has even less problem finding what is noble in us, but also what is dangerous at the same time. Racine still plays well, and so do the Greek tragedians. It’s much harder to appreciate Aristophanes because he’s so topical, so local. We may insist that “all politics is local,” but the Neoclassicals would insist that art certainly should not be. Of course, we should be ready to run whenever a culture pushes its ideals and values upon us as “timeless and universal.” One culture’s universal verities might just turn out to be ideological bunkum by another’s lights. That’s one definition of ideology: by various means—art, politics, social institutions and customs—we naturalize our understanding of the world and lose sight of the fact that ideas actually come from someplace and some time.

This naiveté is one risk, while the other risk is that adherence to conventions may cease to be based upon the firm belief that conventions are rooted in nature—and then we are just observing conventions for the sake of observing conventions: sham formalism, in other words. We end up as Thomas Carlyle’s nightmare “universe of flunkies” who just do things because everybody else does them that way and almost always has.

Later, the Romantics will see neoclassical reaching for what is universal in humanity as a blasphemous, empty formalist demand for falsification and abstraction. William Blake said somewhat illogically, “to generalize is to be an idiot.” (The infinitive form of the verb he uses is itself a generalization.) In any case, 17th- and 18th-century readers and viewers wanted pleasing and reaffirming generalizations about human beings and the societies in which they lived. The neoclassical age felt a deep need to represent the world as a stable place, and human actions as based upon a stable set of faculties and passions: the bedrock of human nature. The universal tends to melt into the ideal, which Aristotle might have called the ennobling of the type—this tendency favors theories that say art uplifts us and elevates our moral sensibilities.

Well, the poet conforms and sometimes plays upon the types of human nature and the demands of verisimilitude or lifelikeness in representation. Poets speak for and through cultural norms; they stage them. Neoclassical poetics is by no means revolutionary; its power comes not from its capacity to “disturb and disintegrate” the values of the reader or viewer. Neoclassical poetics, rather, implies a reinforcing and shaping kind of art.

This discussion leads us to Corneille’s views on tragedy and on audience psychology because he seems to be worried about something I mentioned above: a lapse into stupid formalism and empty rule-promoting. The saving grace of neoclassical art and theory has always been its dollop of common sense, the willingness of the best thinkers to remain flexible and see the “rules” as something to be worked within, but not simply to be accepted slavishly. Corneille is not slavish, and his audience is sophisticated. The members of this audience want to be pleased first and foremost. They have nothing against the representation of sentiment and passion, but they remain quite capable of analyzing a plot or character. What has not been well constructed and what is not true to the type risks not pleasing the audience. A rational theory of poetry, as René Wellek says, need not exclude the representation of passion as an important element in audience response.

The most rigid form of dramatic theory would call for strict observation of the so-called “three unities”: the demand for a stable system of representation means that one word must mean one thing, that it must refer clearly to something in the world, and similarly that one stage play must represent one action, in one location, in one very restricted time frame. It’s as if the spectators are birds, and we want them to eat the grapes we have painted on the canvas—we want them to take the stage play for reality itself. Corneille, I think, doesn’t quite go this route, and is concerned that this kind of prescriptiveness may limit the playwright too narrowly at the expense of what is really essential to the production of fine and pleasing art. Rules are good—you need them as funnels for artistic creativity—but you don’t have to be a drooling idiot in the face of them, either.

Page-by-Page Notes On Corneille

An introduction to Neoclassicism: Louis XIV reigned from 1643 to 1715. Corneille writes in the middle of the 17th century, around 1660. This was a turbulent age, an age of war and economic uncertainty. People wanted stability, and they wanted reflections of that stability in their cultural products, their language. In the English context, 1660 is the year of the Restoration following the reign of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell and his “Saints.”

367. “The term unity of action does not mean that tragedy should show only one action on the stage.” So much did they want stability that Corneille finds himself trying to inject some “common sense” talk about the theater into the discourse of critics and the public. The demand for verisimilitude can go too far. Corneille seems to put his faith in the ideal of the “taken-in” spectator because he says that the spectator must be left serene and untroubled. That is, if possible there should be an unbroken logical succession in the action of a play. If you force the spectators to do a lot of double takes, the dramatic illusion will be broken.

373. “Aristotle wishes the well-made tragedy to be beautiful and capable of pleasing without the aid of actors and quite aside from the performance.” The point is that viewers are not to be made to do all the work themselves. The representation must therefore be as logical and seamless as possible. For Corneille as for Aristotle, reality depends upon probability and necessity.

373-74. “The rule of the unity of time is founded on this statement of Aristotle….” Corneille considers observing the unity of time a good idea, but he is flexible.

376. “As for the unity of place, I find no rule concerning it in either Aristotle or Horace.” The unity of place is relative—an entire city can be treated as “unified.” The important thing is to maintain credibility in particular dramatic scenes. Neoclassical authors believe we should follow conventions because they are rooted in nature, and the best of them also understand that we tend to begin treating conventions as extrinsic imperatives divorced from real life. If the rules of art are to render what is universal in human nature and conduct, we must be flexible since life itself calls for flexibility.

Page-by-Page Notes on Giambattista Vico’s The New Science

402-03. Against Cartesian rationalism, which bases the search for systemic truth on “clear and distinct ideas,” Vico offers an approach we might call genetic: how do civil societies become what they are? So his cycles of Gods, Heroes, and Men would be the key to understanding their development. The gentile or non-Hebraic nations have all gone through such cycles or corsi and ricorsi. If we want a true understanding of human societies, we must realize that they are made; i.e. they are a product of human activity and choices. Central to the quest for understanding is a study of language—Vico is an early philologist, and it’s clear that he believes much can be discerned about a people when we study their language closely. Corresponding to the age of Gods and Heroes are forms of language with a predominantly sacred, ritual, imaginative dimension. As Nietzsche (another great proponent of philology) might suggest, primitive language is close to the rawness and freshness of human perception in its infancy, and, at least to an extent, very much attuned to what seems to be the primal instability of all phenomena in the world around us.

In the period of human infancy, the relationship between people and their world is marked by sublimity, by magic, by the wonderful. At 402 bottom, Vico insists that writing isn’t some late-stage invention. Instead, letters codify and reflect the stages of thought and speech, with which they are apparently of twin birth. The written word is a concrete record of human development. Finally, language comes to be more common, and fully conventional in the sense that it is a system of signs with agreed-upon meanings wielded by self-conscious speakers.

404-05. Vico grants much importance to mythology, to the interpretation of fables. These fables are the foundations of nations and sciences, and they stem from “public needs.” Vico’s idea is that we should study “the world of civil society,” not Cartesian foundational deductions or “the world of nature” (empiricism’s focus). This emphasis doesn’t leave aside an eternal history or larger providential pattern: la scienza nuova or the “new science” is, according to Vico, “a rational civil theology.” Providence isn’t an abstraction; it works through human history. There’s a progressive pattern to things, so when a society moves through its cycles, it doesn’t simply return to absolute barbarism. (I’ve read that Vico saw his own age as a return to another “age of men” following a less enlightened medieval period.) Vico isn’t exactly saying that primitive ways and forms were better; he is saying that if we want to understand the development of civil societies, we need to study and appreciate all stages of their development – not simply begin making deductions based on present values in an ahistorical fashion.

414-16. Tropes, writes Vico at 415 bottom., “were necessary modes of expression” arising from primitive imagination and thought. Irony, with its way of looking askance at earnest notions, apparently comes later. Figurative language, in Vico’s scheme, is not a late addition to some earlier and simpler form of speech – it is the primary characteristic of primitive speech and writing. Therefore, the philologist and philosopher shouldn’t discount them as excretions, as “non-serious” language that can be left aside in the quest for clarity and truth.

Vico seems to be an early appreciator of the impasse between French rationalism and English empiricism. One side insists that we can deduce everything we need to from the operations of reason and just leave aside the messiness of human history or the complexity of the natural world. The other insists that we can “induce” larger patterns of meaning by investigating and interpreting the processes of nature. Vico’s grand enlightenment aim is to arrive at a single history that will encompass the workings of Providence as well as the difficult realm of human action, language, and desire. We should understand that God works to connect events and ages causally, and we should arrive at methods appropriate to an understanding of the “content” of those human epochs. I suppose that the big question to answer here is “what is progress, and how has it been made?” How is humanity arriving ever close to a never fully realized potential?

Week 06, du Bellay and Mazzoni

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:43:00 +0000

Joachim du Bellay’s The Defence and Illustration of the French Language (281-90).

281. “For languages are not born of themselves after the fashion of herbs, roots, or trees….” When referring to language, Du Bellay goes beyond the organic metaphor – language is a function of desire and willpower. People shape language even as it shapes them. Culture is a set of reciprocal processes that represent a people to themselves, as something dynamic and present. What is the use of the past? We need past forms to work with. Culture is not natural in the sense of something given and fixed.

282-83. “The Romans called us barbarians….” Roman literature, says Du Bellay, was propaganda. The record it leaves is that of the victor. The Romans defined “civility” along with all non-Roman things as barbaric. They could be inclusive, but only in the sense of co-opting other people’s religious and cultural symbols. Consider our former “melting pot” metaphor of what is American. Language is power. Culture matters because it is the way we represent ourselves to ourselves. The Romans saw culture as a means of maintaining social and political control, and in the process they devalued the language and culture of the Gauls and other subject peoples.

284-85. “But they, in the manner of good agriculturals, did first transplant it [culture] from a wild to a domestic place….” Du Bellay employs the organic metaphor again with regard to culture. He does not imply a sense of wildness. Rather, he says that the Romans grafted from the Greeks the best in their culture. Literary Latin was a self-conscious production, not a lucky accident. Artifice is central to Roman success. We must take what nature gave us as a point of departure, or a “raw material” to be refined. Du Bellay is not offering an inversion of the relationship between humanity and nature; he is making a claim on behalf of going beyond mere necessity. As King Lear would agree, humanity is that which goes beyond the lowest common denominator. Du Bellay implies that poets are the guiding power in shaping the national self-expression of a people.

285-89. Every language is unique – compare Shelley’s “violet in a crucible” or Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect.” But this goes towards the central notion that imitation is not a matter of copying. First, as on 289, Du Bellay says we must know our “natural gifts,” and then imitate the most appropriate ancient authors. This process may involve adherence to or internalization of formal qualities, but the point is not slavish imitation. The point is to take nourishment from the ancient authors, and then do excellent things in our own right. At the best, that is the spirit in which the Renaissance humanists “look back” to their predecessors, treating the products of past cultures as stock, as the source for new grafting. The Romans showed the way in their love of all things Greek.

289-90. See the bottom of the page: “who desires to live in the memory of posterity must, as though dead in himself, sweat and tremble many a time.” Once again, Du Bellay argues that poets shape language, which in itself bears culture. So he insists that merely popular French vernacular forms, while they may constitute basic cultural expression, are not enough. The French must do their homework in the classics. Newness requires the incorporation of something alien. You cannot simply dismiss the past – a remark that is worthy of being considered in light of modernism and postmodernism, which entail arguments over the extent to which the past is valuable.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Page-by-Page Notes on Giacopo Mazzoni’s On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante

302-03. “It is the common opinion of all schools….” Mazzoni offers an Aristotelian classification of the categories of being; while Plato had divided everything into the realm of Forms or Truth and a sham phenomenal world (the one we call “material reality”), Mazzoni gives us “the observable, the fabricable, the imitable,” and tells us that each is worthy of attention.

304-05. Idols are simulacra; they are not solid material things. Icastic imitation, according to Mazzoni, represents simulacra of the things we find in the real world. Phantastic imitation represents simulacra of the artist’s imagination or “caprice.” If I paint a unicorn, I’m engaging in phantastic imitation. Mazzoni doesn’t care to insist that art should try to copy “reality” in what we today might call a photographic sense. Instead, artists copy simulacra or idols that aren’t necessarily tied to the material realm.

307-09. We may recall that when he invokes “probability and necessity” as criteria for an excellent drama, Aristotle insists on logical plot construction and avoidance of anything that would shock the audience’s common sense: a play shouldn’t try to cover a ridiculously long time span, nor should its events be cobbled together haphazardly or piled on to the point of confusion. An intelligible pattern should emerge by the end—otherwise, how is the audience supposed to learn anything; how otherwise will pity and fear be induced and thereby lead to catharsis? Mazzoni’s term for this demand is “credibility.” The Italian critic praises Dante’s ability to deal with the ineffable and with abstruse theological or philosophical concepts in a convincing, accessible manner. How does Dante manage to do it? By means of his genius for phantastic imitation—Dante explores states of the soul, stages of spiritual progress or regression, and he makes us see and feel what’s going on in the spiritual realm. At base, I think Mazzoni is suggesting that Dante is a fine Sophist rhetorician and image-crafter. The author of The Divine Comedy doesn’t work within simplistic oppositions such as true/false or possible/impossible. He gives us credible and persuasive images of things that would not otherwise be representable, things that are far beyond the ability of a merely craftsmanlike painter to deliver on a canvas. Mazzoni’s thinking accords well with the classical way of describing the literary arts: they constitute a species of rhetoric, a pleasing kind of persuasion emphasizing eloquent discourse and imagery to move an audience. The rhetorical tradition, Mazzoni understands, leads criticism in a more positive direction than the Platonic insistence that a work of art ought to (but can’t) copy material reality or stick to simple truth. Plato, that is, judges art by the standard of philosophy’s ontological imperative, and finds it lacking.

310-12. Well, everybody can see that Plato’s condemnation of art is pretty severe, so Mazzoni has his work cut out for him if he wants to enlist Plato on his side. What kind of sophistic did the philosopher condemn? Mazzoni says it’s only the kind that sets forth patent falsehoods with the express purpose of getting us to take them for true. Plato didn’t trust Homer’s morals, I infer, because that artist gives his audience a pleasing and seductive view of Olympus, expecting his hearers to accept it as an accurate depiction of how the gods really behave.

312-13. Good sophists, however, help us to “examine the apparent credible.” To accomplish that, artist and audience must (at least for a while) put aside philosophy’s quest to “teach truth” in some final manner. I believe Mazzoni is suggesting that literature leaves us room to examine life’s more complex aspects, which is, after all, the only way we are going to become able to deal with them. This latter seems like an important point because Renaissance humanist critics such as Mazzoni would agree with Sir Philip Sidney’s injunction that (to paraphrase) “the aim of well-knowing is well-doing.” To treat representations with a view to their “credibility” implies a certain respect for the seriousness and difficulty of things themselves – see Mazzoni’s response on 314 to Aristotle concerning Empedocles. The worthiness of art lies in its manner of approaching the objects it chooses to represent. Some class members may recall that in discussing Gorgias of Leontini, an ancient sophist, I quipped that sometimes not believing in something is the most appropriate way to honor it. The same thing, more or less, might be said about Mazzoni’s mimetics – he seems to be suggesting that one must know how to “game,” to “play,” with complex things, characters, and events. I infer that art is about approaching and coping with sloppy reality. As the modern critic Kenneth Burke wrote, literature might be understood as “equipment for living.” If that’s the case, why should it matter if the representation is literally accurate? It might be argued that the people with the most rigid, surefire sense of what’s real and what isn’t real are the biggest dupes of all because life is, after all, full of uncertainties – much of life is subject to discourse, to the battle of notions and emotions. Mazzoni is of course a good Renaissance humanist, but we can read him as very “modern” in his sophisticated understanding of representation’s complex adequation to a complex “reality.”

315-21. On 315, Mazzoni brings up the “civil faculty.” What is the social purpose of art, its Aristotelian first cause? On 316, we find that central humanist concern for the value of leisure. Art, in Mazzoni’s view, is a species of play. Still, it shouldn’t be divorced from ethics or the civil faculty that discovers those “credible and marvelous” things and events worthy of representation. A key remark is made at 319 middle: Mazzoni favors representations that give restorative pleasure, that work in the service of social utility. The point here is to “order the appetite and submit it the the reason.” Rhetoricians work with the passions—they don’t reject the passions. Renaissance critics show a strong desire to defend poetry (and criticism) for its social utility. Renaissance humanist education prescribes the full development of all faculties with the aim of approaching perfection. Medieval theologians recognized our need for what appeals to the senses (thus Aquinas on the value of metaphor in the Bible), but they also betrayed an obvious distrust of pleasure. Our Renaissance theorists, with some trusty pagans to back them up, begin to recuperate pleasure and link it to social utility. The individual is starting to matter not as an unique entity (i.e. modern bourgeois subjectivity), and not as a stark construct of conscience combined jarringly with a squirming bag of appetites tending towards evil, but rather as a complex aggregation of faculties and capacities, multifarious potential to be developed.

Mazzoni is, therefore, a typical Renaissance humanist. But he’s distinctive, too, because he offers us a sophisticated sense of how art can both please us and help us deal with the complexity of human nature and societies. We are responsible for the world we have at least partly created, and art is a species of play that restores us, a game that helps prepare us to act virtuously in the world. I suppose that Mazzoni, with his emphasis on “credibility,” is a kindred spirit to Philip Sidney, who declares in his “Apology for Poetry” that “the poet nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Mazzoni’s claim is that poets need not “affirm” some narrow set of real-life experiences to accomplish something entirely constructive and uplifting for humanity.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 05, Augustine, Aquinas, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:43:00 +0000

Notes on Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, de Pizan

Page-by-Page Notes on Saint Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and The Trinity

188-89. There are natural signs and conventional signs. An example of the natural sign would be sad faces, animal tracks, and so forth. Conventional signs involve intention and some desire to convey meaning.

190. Signs may be literal or figurative. As Quintilian had already pointed out, even common folks employ metaphor where it seems appropriate—if there isn’t a word for something, mainly. This amounts to a kind of creative literalism. See Augustine’s “ox” example. Conventional signs are literal or point to something, but they can also be figurative when we use a literal sign to mean something else, as is the case when Christians use the word “ox” to refer to an evangelist. Figuration is both necessary and a source of misunderstanding.

191. Augustine has no problem with the figurative language in the Bible, even when it is enigmatic, though sometimes its meaning may become clear with rhetorical analysis. Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas are always concerned to point out that God has his mysteries and that it is appropriate for him to speak in ways that may be understood on different levels, possibly even misunderstood by those who aren’t worthy to understand. “Cast not your pearls before swine,” as Jesus says. An additional thought: modern literary criticism makes the author-principle a useful construction that helps to establish and maintain interpretive control. The author-principle helps control meaning. Language must not become independent of orthodoxy—that is, of the accepted religious, social, and political frameworks. If you can interpret the author’s life as a coherent whole, you have a unifying principle for the work.

Augustine deals with language as conveying a person’s spiritual motions or intentions. For Augustine, figuration and metaphor are valid, but they must be kept under control: God has the same problem as poets in that (given the limitations of his audience) he must liken spiritual things to gross material ones. We cannot hear the celestial harmony of the planets’ movements because of “the muddy vesture of our decay,” as Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice says. Language mediates between human beings and God. That is the significance of Christ as God’s Word; however, human language is a fallen instrument. Faith fills in the gap between spiritual reality and the words that signify it. Some anxiety enters the equation here—as in Wordsworth’s concern in the middle of “Tintern Abbey” over the possibility that his faith in nature is “but a vain belief.” Ultimately, however, we refer truth to Christ, God’s Word made manifest.

192-94. Augustine refers to the language of the heart in his nineteenth paragraph. Something is in reserve here that guarantees meaning: an intimate, interior truth residing in consciousness. Furthermore, we refer this truth ultimately to Christ, God’s Word made manifest. Augustine recognizes the drift involved in ordinary speech and writing, but faith ensures its stability as a signifying system.

193-95. Faith ensures the stability of human language as a signifying system. Ultimately, Augustine anchors the Bible’s meaning and the truth of an individual’s words by insisting that there is an inner language, a “language of the heart,” that precedes external signification (writing and audible utterances). This inner language, Augustine says, gives us some glimpse of Christ’s miraculous power as God’s Word: Christ can make the Father’s meanings manifest without sacrificing their truth or power. As the Word, he does not degrade his Father’s Truth. The inner language Augustine keeps in reserve is connected to this mysterious power of God’s infallible language. Our own language is fallen and can lead us astray, but Augustine does not see cause for despair in this consequence of the Fall. He does not believe that fallen language need result in endless drift or entrapment in a verbal maze. What is closest to our inner consciousness is closest to God and Truth. Words represent or convey our thoughts, but underwriting this is the special language of the heart.

Augustine knows well the persuasive powers of language. After all, he was a professor of rhetoric who became a Christian. He felt the beauty of words, and the pull towards understanding. Nobody likes being confused—a point made by Aristotle in The Poetics long ago. And in The Confessions, he is moved to become a Christian not only by his mother Monica’s example but also by a bishop’s excellent speaking. Through our fallen senses we are drawn towards virtue. Language appeals to our senses. The ear is almost a sensual organ for the ancients, just as the eye may be struck by beauty as if by an outside force or a god.

Page-by-Page Notes on Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica

Aquinas emphasizes the literal element in metaphor—the element of the familiar that makes the unfamiliar less strange. He writes in accordance with the doctrine of accommodation, which says speech must be suited to the understanding of one’s listeners. Aquinas casts God as a speaker who can draw us onwards to salvation through metaphor. God’s obvious delight in figurative language is one of his mysteries, similar to Christ’s generous miracle of the Incarnation—the spirit fusing with a material body. Aquinas’ theology holds that Christ is the manifestation of God, a Sacred Word become visible. Christ is willing to be seen and heard. The doctrines of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit—God as three-in-one) and Transubstantiation (at the Eucharist, wine becomes blood, and bread becomes Christ’s flesh) will influence the romantics’ emphasis on symbol as a vehicle for spiritual significance and for what Coleridge calls “unity in multeity.” For Coleridge, a symbol is a living, complex, consequential entity, not just a literary device as the rhetoricians of old would have it. As he writes in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), a symbol “always partakes of the reality it renders intelligible.”

The complexity of the Bible helps Aquinas. Its variety and scope allow him to defend metaphor both as an anchor for simple readers and as an intellectual exercise for the erudite. There is mystery in the Bible, but there are also passages where the rough places are made plain. Aquinas’ God exploits the multiplicity of language and even, at times, its ambiguity, for the purpose of salvation. It’s also true in both Augustine and Aquinas, I believe, that another function of literary language is guarding access to spiritual truth—as always, the injunction straight from the master is “cast not your pearls before swine.” The Bible can speak in the tones of Milton ’s genial angel Raphael the mediator, or it can come across as Michael with a flaming sword, escorting fallen mankind out of Eden .

244. Notice that Dionysius’ replies have to do with preserving God’s mysteriousness and majesty. We are not to forget that a gap lies between us and the divine. Compare the romantic poets to the medieval philosophers in this regard—Shelley refers to the effect of inspiration as being like prints in the sand, later effaced by wind and wave. In general, the British romantics describe inspiration and language with a sense of profound loss—”we are as clouds that veil the midnight moon,” to borrow a line from Shelley. The material signifier is not Truth, but it leads us to cast our eyes in that direction. God does not need language, but he chooses to reveal himself by means of it. Fallen humanity needs language as an instrument for its own correction.

244. The first argument is that we start with our senses, and can best receive spiritual truth that way. Metaphor uses a material or literal vehicle to convey an underlying spiritual truth. We are fallen, limited, material and earthly beings. As Milton says, “immediate are the acts of God, / More swift than time or motion,” but our limitations demand “process of speech” and figurative language. Notice that Aquinas is a good Aristotelian—we like representations and stories; they are how we learn our first lessons. Figurative language preserves us from error because we know it is figural, and do not take it as merely material. Both the letter and the spirit must be true, and they both require our attention. The second argument is that God is best appreciated by what he is not, so calling him “a burning bush” at certain points helps to remind us that such references cannot in fact capture God. The third argument in favor of figurative language is that vulgar and faithless people will not be able to do harm with their knowledge—the swine will get no pearls. Sometimes, God likes to hide, especially from the unworthy. The Bible’s mission requires figuration—how else could we receive spiritual truth? So on the whole, figuration is both part of God’s mysteriousness and its use is an exigency for the accommodation of the fallen.

245. Aquinas says God writes on various levels, which is appropriate because our limited understandings require this spreading out, separating, and comparing of things. For God everything happens on one track, but not for us. Aquinas says that the Church knows how to interpret the various levels, so it mediates between us and God. One function of metaphor is to use the literal as a means of understanding the spiritual. The interesting thing about Aquinas’ application, I believe, is that in God’s case the spiritual level turns out to be, well, literal since he is pure spirit.

245-46. For Aquinas, the author of the Bible is God, who gives us literally true history but also employs spiritual significations at the same time. By way of allegory, the Old Testament points towards the New Testament, with Moses being a type of Christ, and so forth. There is also the moral sense or level of interpretation—Christ’s life serves as a conduct book for ordinary human beings. Then there is the anagogical level, where the literal events refer to the soul in bliss. So there are four levels of significance. But there need be no confusion since all of these levels are singular in God’s mind; faith that this is so is the ground of intelligibility, and the discursive separation of levels is for our benefit. Neither Aquinas nor Augustine would have much patience with modern notions that language leads to undecidability or aporia, to borrow one of Paul de Man’s key terms.

Page-by-Page Notes on Moses Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed

In Maimonides’ framework, text and interpretation are one process—we shouldn’t go to the text with a rigid interpretive scheme, superimpose it on the text, and extract a permanent kernel of meaning.

Maimonides embraces plurality without giving way to generalized indeterminacy or lax scholarship. He promotes a combination of rigor in attention to the text and openness to the experience of reading polysemous works. Jesus says, “he that will save his life shall lose it.” The rabbi applies this to reading as a spiritual exercise. No risk, no openness, no attention? No gain. Readers must immerse themselves in the process of interpretation, which yields disjunctive “flashes,” not a continuous accumulation of knowledge. This is the main way to attain wisdom. Francis Bacon’s scientific version of humility comes close to this attitude, but with a different goal: amelioration and patient accumulation of knowledge.

Maimonides pursues deep meaning or inner meaning without reifying it. He says that insight appears, flashes, and fades, and implies that this process must be perpetual. The “wisely perplexed” get the most from such engagement with the holy texts, but it’s necessary for all of us on our respective frequencies of illumination.

Our editors say that Maimonides wants a fully elaborated hermeneutic. They’re probably right, but it’s worth pointing out that his orientation towards “system” may differ from what we find in the Classical scientific-rational tradition. Systems allow us not so much to rationalize everything and separate it from all other things; rather, they help us to live wisely in the presence of the multiplicity of experience. The point of reading within a method isn’t to pile up facts as if they were acorns for the coming winter. Perhaps Maimonides advocates “methodicality” and not, strictly, “method”: rigor without rigidity. This emphasis leads to surprising results—honest reading like that of William Empson or Edmund Burke, which seems to say with Whitman, “very well, then, I contradict myself.” Or with Luther, “Ich kann nicht anders” (I can do no otherwise)—pursuing a path of thought where it lists. In modern terms, we might call this an “ethics of reading.”

214-15. Maimonides speaks to the wise, who have come from scientific and philosophical study and become “perplexed” due to their encounter with difficult scriptural language. These people must learn to accommodate their intellects and expectations to the text, and not the other way around. Reading is an authentic life experience, and one must treat it with respect. (A common mistake amongst learners is to want immediate clarity, or to be dissatisfied with anything they don’t already think they know.) But Maimonides promises also that the wise will become “unperplexed,” even if the implication is that the unperplexity won’t last long. (We might compare this to the Buddhist idea of “unconfusing” as a satisfying experience—it’s pleasurable to attain clarity on a point of study when we had been confused: Ah! I see!)

216. Here Maimonides modifies his promise: truth appears, flashes, and fades, leaving us as on a darkling plane and needing to go through the process again. Well, that’s just the way things are, the “human condition.” The great prophets seem to have more frequent illuminations that we, and brighter ones, too. We differ in degree and frequency of enlightenment. [Add that one insight registered in writing, captured somehow, becomes matter for another.]

216-17. Maimonides provides an exquisite description of the learning experience, and of teaching, too. He writes of learning as consisting in a discontinuous series of unconcealings and reconcealings, appearances and disappearances of insight. The source of our illumination isn’t entirely clear, it seems to me, though it appears to come from close engagement with the text. I myself never know where my insights come from, so I’ve always liked statements like those of Maimonides with his “lightning” metaphor, or Shelley with his inspiration theory—imagination as a “fading coal.” He fills the moments of insight Maimonides describes with pathos and romantic wistfulness: “No second motion brings one mood or modulation like the last” to the frail frame of that “lyre” the imagination. But I believe one could say much the same of intellectual work generally, not just poetic creation. Modern theorists who speak of “quoted speech” or “the play of signification” offer similar insights.

One shouldn’t come away from a lecture or a reading with an accumulation of “facts,” even though those so-called facts can be valuable as staging grounds for new insights. But we shouldn’t go to the professors looking only for neatly packaged ideas separable from our own interpretive process; ideas may be commodities in modern times, but it’s worth resisting that status when we’re developing our own. Artists have the added task of wrestling with the fact that modern consumer societies commodify even the productions of the imagination and intellect. They’ve got to try and make something positive of this problem, not just wish it away.

Neither, if we take a lesson from Maimonides, should teachers try to be “too clear.” One should treat students as wisely perplexed. It is good to want to become unperplexed, but not a good idea to help people short-circuit the process of gaining clarity or illumination of understanding. A teacher’s statements should be taken as questions or springboards even when they seem to be answers. Perplexity is the starting point of the wise; one must give oneself over to the text as requisite to attaining clarity. Only fools go to school to learn what they already know—at the least, we must, as Shelley says, “imagine that which we know.” High schools are factories for the production of fools. Reminds me of Derrida’s “The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” which says that any teaching contract will inevitably be violated: you can’t pass on the “body of knowledge” that the university says you’re supposed to. There’s good faith in not keeping faith with this kind of contract. That is, the university expects a mass audience to receive points a, b, c, and d about the romantics. But that’s just not possible: we can’t obtain a one-to-one correspondence between what is taught and what is understood; the ambivalence of the learning situation makes this impossible.

Maimonides implies that transmitting insight directly is impossible and inadvisable in any case. It must be “packaged” in parable and riddle, because they are ways of engaging those who are honestly perplexed. Teachers should therefore pass on matters for engagement, not reified chunks of useful knowledge. Wilde was right: “it is a pity there is so little useless information nowadays.” Maimonides even says that we are drawn to reading or teaching for other than intellectual reasons: emotion has to do with it as well.

Anyhow, Maimonides distinguishes clearly between textual studies and the hard sciences at the top of 217: scientific study is good, but in scriptural study we are after something rather different. It’s a different way of experiencing our condition, and need not be taken as invalidating other ways of experiencing it.

220-21. Parables yield inner and outer meaning, with silver yielding to the more excellent gold. Maimonides is not overly concerned with rigid levels of meaning. Social meanings are external and worthwhile in their own right, but spiritual and moral truths are the best kinds of significance we get during our readings.

As for the first kind of parable, it’s a set of inner meanings that need to be put into productive relationships with other inner meanings. Something like extended metaphor, i.e. allegory. The second kind of parable offers a general moral lesson.

222-23. Maimonides guards his intentions; he doesn’t want his text to become subject to drift, misconstruction by the ignorant, and so forth. So he isn’t simply embracing an “I’m okay, you’re okay” version of reading: there is a strong sense of hierarchy here, and it’s based upon education and wisdom. One should not reveal what needs to remain concealed, especially from the unworthy. It’s easy to get lost in the anonymity of big schools, to study at cross purposes from what is ultimately most beneficial for the individual.

223-24. The 7 Contradictions:

1) Sloppy citations

2) Sloppy thinking on author’s part: failure to register own changes

3) ignoring parables

4) proviso not explicit in its right place

5) accommodation needed for teaching

6) elaborately concealed contradictions , author loses it.

7) Obscure matters may requrei tricky handling of premises, concealing now one or the other.

Conclusion:

Maimonides has good ideas about the value of reading literary texts. He helps us reorient ourselves towards the polyvalence of words, and towards the need for what Paul Celan calls “the natural prayer of the soul”—attention to detail. Maimonides promotes methodicality without rigid method.

Maimonides brings Aristotelianism to his aid, but does not allow his goal or purpose to be completely overwhelmed by science and methodology. Critics haven’t always been so successful at this balancing act—well, especially now that critics perceive science as a dominant world paradigm. They end up both rejecting science and copying its methods and terminology.

Maimonides keeps something always in reserve for interpretation, and we do not see any distrust of one of language’s greatest powers: its suggestiveness, its capacity to serve as the vehicle for imaginative or spiritual engagement. And he does all this without denigrating science or fully giving in to its ways of seeing and saying. That’s difficult to do.

Page-by-Page Notes on Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies

266-69. De Pizan points out that if the misogynists are correct, God has a great deal to answer for—why indeed did he bother to make that female for Adam at all? Pizan is illustrating for us in a movingly personal way the devastating effects of centuries of men’s irrational invectives against women. This argumentative move—that is, pointing out the irrationalism of men who accuse women of being irrational—will become standard in much subsequent writing about women by women. See, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Her enlistment of Lady Reason is also very wise—this Lady is much like Boethius’ Lady Philosophy in The Consolation of Philosophy. It’s delightful to hear her say that men’s diatribes against women “never originated with me” (269). At the bottom of 267, we notice that the City of Ladies is to be founded upon the “field of letters.” That’s de Pizan’s way of recognizing that the patristic tradition of writing has become a source of authority completely divorced from actual experience. Men go to such patristic texts to “learn about” the supposed true nature of women, saving themselves the burdensome task of paying attention to what is right in front of them. The City of Ladies will be constructed with the aid of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, and it is to serve as a defense against the assaults of men's bodies and interpretive batteries (i.e. texts from the patristic tradition), as well as a dwelling place for women. De Pizan's architectural metaphor has to do with identity as well, in the same way that the physical setting of a church “houses” the individual members of the congregation.

Extra Notes: A Guide to Typology, by Alfred J. Drake

The Old Testament containes [Christ] in the Hieroglyphics of Sacrifices, and Types, and Ceremonies; the New, in legible and ordinary characters. (from John Stoughton’s Choice Sermons, 1640, quoted by C. Patrides.)

Typology is an interpretive method developed early in Christian history; its purpose is to relate the events of the Old Testament to the events of the four gospels, i.e. the New Testament. (The basic problem that the Church fathers faced was this: how does one relate a series of texts that speak of god within a militaristic, nationalist setting to the gospels, which describe a god and a Christ who do not seem to fit easily within the older context?) Typology is based upon an idea that one can trace all the way back to Genesis—the idea that the whole world is the work of god and that he spoke the world into existence. If the world came into being as god’s act of language, then, would not the world, and all that happens in it, stand in need of interpretation as a symbol?
Together, Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri give us a concise, if incomplete, account of the typological method. Aquinas says that there are four levels of meaning to be drawn from certain statements in the bible: These levels are:

1) the literal or historical level, which is simply the event itself.

2) the allegorical level, which relates the literal event to events in the New Testament.

3) the moral level, which explains the abstract moral lesson to be drawn from the literal event.

4) the anagogical level, which relates the literal event to heavenly things.

It should be noted that the literal meaning is crucial to the interpreter. Aquinas insists that the bible is a true record of real events. As he says in the Summa Theologica, “it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense” (Adams 117; Critical Theory Since Plato). The spiritual significance of an event presupposes that event’s literal validity. Only through interpreting the true, literal event does one arrive at its spiritual significance.

Dante applies this method not only to the bible but to literary works as well. He, too, says that a work is polysemous; that is, he says that it signifies on more than one level. In his system, a work may be read on at least four different levels of meaning. Here is Dante’s “fleshing out” of the basic method of typology:

“When Israel came out of Egypt , and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judea became his sanctification, Israel his power” ( Psalms 114:1-2). For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us. ( Adams CTSP 121, Revised Edition)

To sum up, I shall refer to C. Patrides’ note on typology in his edition of George Herbert’s The Temple: According to Patrides, the first purpose of typology is to confirm that historical events are non-recurring and irrevers- ible—i.e. that Christ changed history; its second purpose is to confirm that historical events imply providential design—i.e. to show that the created order progresses in accordance with god’s will; and its third purpose is to confirm that historical events are meaningful “only in so far as they are seen to relate to the advent of Christ.” (from The English Poems of George Herbert. ed. C.A. Patrides. London , J.M. Dent, 1974. 26.)

On Typology, by Prof. Vicki Silver

From The Cambridge History of the Bible (eds. Ackroyd and Evans):

[P]rophecy is for Origen a very important link between the two testaments. Its confirma- tory value works both ways. The fulfillment of prophecy in the life of Jesus is not only important evidence for the reliability of the New Testament in the assumption which it makes about his messiahship and his divinity; it is not only the truth of the New Testament which receives support from the fact of prophecies fulfilled. The fact of their fulfillment is valuable confirmation also of the Old Testament in which the original prophecies are contained. Before the coming of Christ men might well have had reservations about the divine inspiration of the Old Testament. But Christ’s coming has served to “confirm for us the message of the prophets” (2 Peter 1.19, NEB ). The concept of the fulfillment of prophecy is therefore both valid and important. But fulfillment in a direct and literal sense is only a very small part of it. Origen makes his point clearly in general terms in the Contra Celsum: “Many prophets foretold in all kinds of ways the things concerning Christ, some in riddle and others by allegories or some other way while some even use literal expressions.” Literal fulfillments of prophecy do exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

If the prophetic link between the two testaments was to be developed with the degree of thoroughness which the Church required, it could only be done with a large-scale use of figurative or allegorical interpretations. But the Old Testament does not consist only of prophecy, even in the more extended meaning which that term bore in Origen’s day. Legal enactments, historical narrative and wisdom literature had also to be shown to be wholly consistent with the teaching of the New Testament. As we have already seen in relation to the Law, this could only be done very incompletely at the level of the literal meaning. Here figurative or allegorical interpretations were even more necessary if the apparent conflicts between the ideas of the two dispensations were to be overcome.

Modern scholarship has tended to draw a firm line of distinction between typological and allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament. The line has not always been drawn in the same way by different scholars, even where they are fully agreed about its crucial importance. The features would generally be regarded as necessary components of a properly typological interpretation. In the first place, it takes seriously the Old Testament law or the historical event in question as a word or act of God directly intended for and appropriate to its original historical setting. Secondly, the further meaning to which it points, that of which it is a type, must have a real connection with the initial but lesser meaning or purpose which it had in its original historical context. A typological interpretation of the Exodus, for example, is one which sees it as a real act of divine rescue of Israel out of Egypt and which also sees it as a type of Christian baptism because that too is an act of divine rescue, though a rescue of a fuller and more perfect kind. To ask whether Origen’s interpretation of the Old Testament is primarily typological or allegorical, commonly though it is done, is to ask the wrong question. . . .However variable his judgments about the lesser, preliminary meaning of some parts of the Old Testament, the deeper meaning is always the full Christian meaning. Whether it involves the reversal of the apparent literal meaning or the fulfillment of it as an incomplete image, the true meaning will always be the meaning of the Christian gospel. . . .we do not have to think of reconciling two Testaments or of showing them to be complementary to one another. At that level they are not two at all but one. There is only the one truth of God, which is eternal and therefore ever new. The expressions of that truth in the Old Testament are hidden and obscure. But we must say more than that those expressions hint at the full truth or look forward to it. The eternal truth of God is the true meaning of every passage of the Old Testament. When Moses gave to the Jews their laws of circumcision and Passover, of new moon and Sabbath, he knew that the real meaning of what he was saying and doing had nothing to do with human bodies and the death of lambs but rather with the human heart and the sacrifice of Christ. John says that “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” ( John 1.17). For Paul, Christ’s relation to the law is primarily that of grace, that of redeeming man from an alien power; for Origen, Christ’s relation to the law is primarily that of truth, of making intelligible what was always the law’s true meaning and purpose. For a thoroughgoing Platonist like Origen, this had to be so. The phenomenal world of historical occurrence might have a certain measure of significance; but the ultimate reality must belong to the changeless truth of the transcendental realm.

Typology as a method is expounded in Paradise Lost: 11.315-54; 12.147-51; 12.238-44, 285-314.

Types of Christ/Messiah Types of Anti-Christ/Satan
Abel (11.429-60) Cain
Sons of Seth (11.556-97) Sons of Cain
Enoch (11.638-710) Giants
Noah (11.712-902)
Patriarchs (12.13-78) Nimrod
Abraham (12.105-51)
Jacob (12.151-63)
Moses/Aaron (12.169-244) Pharaoh
Joshua (12.260-67)
David (12.319-30)
Disciples (12.485-507) Prelatical Church (12.507-50)

All the types of Messiah are fulfilled, as both Michael and the narrator take care to point out, in Jesus (12.285-314, 356-71, 386-466), their antitype. More particularly, Adam himself is the type of Christ, that “one greater man” of PL 1.4. This mode of “figural,” or prefigurative, reading applies to women (Eve/Mary), and to events (for example, the covenant with Noah anticipates the covenant with Abraham, with Moses, and finally with the New Covenant embodied in Christ’s passion and resurrection) or actions (Moses’ bringing the Israelites out of Egypt foreshadows Christ’s universal redemption of man). Still more pertinent to seventeenth-century history and literature, prefigurative reading applies to seventeenth-century persons and events. So Nimrod, in all likelihood, is a type of Charles the First, if not of Charles the Second as well. The Civil War enjoyed numerous expressions in both Testaments, but none are mentioned in Paradise Lost itself.) Perhaps the best example of supra-gospel typology appears in early American literature. America , as conceived by the Protestants who made it their home (I refer to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in particular), was at once New Eden and New Jerusalem; the migration itself became an analogue to exodus, to baptism, and to purification of the church. In the hands of Cotton Mather, the governor of the colony, John Winthrop, became the new Nehemiah, or “Nehemias Americanus.” For seventeenth-century ideologues, reformers, and sectaries, typology becomes a method of reading not only scripture, but secular history and current events. By comparison with Mather, Milton articulates only the most accepted and orthodox correspondences in Paradise Lost. (Note: Samson is a type both of Adam and Christ; cf. Milton ’s Samson Agonistes.)

Week 04, Horace and Longinus

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:42:00 +0000

Horace Notes

We are used to the idea that art is oppositional, a “disturbing and disintegrating force,” as Wilde said individualism and art should be. As post-romantics, we also tend to judge art with an eye towards its “originality,” its source in an individual’s imagination and passions. Horace’s views may not appeal to us if we don’t historicize our sensibilities to the needs of his time and to the Romans’ attitude towards concepts like “genius” and “expression.” For Horace, art’s social function is not opposition but rather urbane adornment; a good poetic craftsman reassures the public’s sense of what is appropriate in speech and conduct, enhancing their sense that they live in a stable world. He delights and teaches them with good verses, ones that make them take pleasure in what is essentially already their own view of politics and their particular social order. Decorum -- delineation and observance of what is fitting -- are central to the Horatian poet’s task.

Horace lived through tough, unsettling times (65-8 B.C.E.). Rome had lived through decades of dictatorships and civil unrest. Horace was around twenty years of age when Julius Caesar was assassinated (44 B.C.E.), and Octavian didn’t take over to become Augustus Caesar until 27 B.C.E. (the reign lasted until 14 A.D., when Tiberius took over). Although Horace at first opposed Octavian, he came around later to accept the Emperor’s vision of post-Republican stability, continuity, and virtue. The political forms had changed, but Augustus wasn’t interested in radically transforming Roman civilization; he seems genuinely to have admired the ancient virtues that made Rome strong, and he tried to promote them every way he could. Horace, then, allies his notions about patient craftsmanship and practical recognition with Augustan political imperatives.

125. Horace would agree with modern people that languages and societies are born, develop, and die or get transformed. He uses the organic metaphor of “leaves” to make this point. So the poet must, in the deep sense, be a follower of fashions, know how the leaves are falling: know your time’s needs, and the words most appropriate to your audience’s aesthetic and moral sensibilities. You can’t teach and delight people who lived 500 years ago, so you have to please those in the here and now.

126. Expression? Well, we need to read Horace carefully here. When he says that you must first weep if you want to make others weep, he isn’t offering a romantic expressivist theory of poetic creation. He is arguing instead that certain kinds of utterances or written sentences most closely “fit” certain character types and certain situations. Notice that he says Nature produces expression by fashioning and shaping our emotions. In ancient times, the passions are figured as coming from without, as an external set of forces that impact us powerfully. Consider Sappho’s brief lyric poem, “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” Words are like tragic masks, validating and “expressing” the emotion that the poet has deemed appropriate to the character and the situation. We should not forget that masks don’t quash emotion or individuality -- they both enhance and validate it, rendering it more permanent. So the fact that emotion isn’t something that comes from within and then is “expressed” shouldn’t make us interpret Horatian expression as stale conventionality. Conventionality itself, handled well, is a powerful artistic element. Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” No doubt he was thinking of Greek drama.

127. Imitation: we don’t imitate nature, but rather human nature and social conventions. The poet finds out from literary tradition and close social observation what the appropriate conduct and language is, and then makes his poetry reflect those standards. The public wants its stable world view reflected and ennobled in poetry and other art forms. So that’s why decorum is important -- well-crafted poetry’s harmony with received notions produces pleasure. Craft itself is important, too, because it is orderly and observant of literary rules. The poet should be a good literary citizen.

129. Horace sees some licentiousness behind tragedy. The Satyr play is a response to the audience’s less noble composition and needs. That’s how Horace deals with the Dionysian element in tragedy. But he shows some pragmatic concern about art’s relationship with an audience. He would agree that we should “preserve and ennoble” character types, not debase our art to the level of lowbrows in the peanut gallery. Art should maintain what is best in a society, and improve what is less than worthwhile.

130-31: The artist should follow Greek models. But Horace also wants to assert Roman independence from the Greeks. His classicism is of the better sort, and his advocacy of Roman literature’s development looks forward to French and Italian advocacy of a modern national literature, not just copying from the Romans. (Cf. Du Bellay and Dante, among others.) The “Children of Numa” have their own literature, and they should keep developing it. So Horace’s view of language and literature is dynamic -- it must fit its public’s sensibilities and needs at any given time. Polish seems to be the Roman form of excellence -- they’re good craftsmen, in the way we think of the French as great chefs and winemakers.

Horace sees literature as a force for shaping culture and morals as well as for accommodating political and social needs, not a vehicle for violent change. He has come to support Augustus’ political values and his enlistment of literature in that cause. See his comments on the degeneration of Old Comedy into mere licentiousness, and the Satyr play as a great lady dancing a bit with the peasants on a feast day because everyone expects her to.

131: Poet and Critic. The critic provides advice on craft and decorum, on how to achieve formal excellence. Horace sees the man of letters as a literary stylist in a rather modern way. The artist measures his success partly by selling his work as a commodity, even if not for a living. The broader point to be drawn from Horace’s practical comments about selling books is that the poet serves a specialized function in Roman society. He pleases and teaches the public, decking out their cultural values attractively. Language clothes morality, serves as ornament. Horace keeps making fun of the “mad poet.” He would probably agree with Wilde that “the origin of all bad poetry is sincere emotion.” A true craftsman knows his duty with regard to the reading public; his “specialized” labor function (cf a modern version of that idea in Adam Smith’s ‘‘The Wealth of Nations’’) should not consist in a fashionable, class-driven pose of alienation, isolated genius, or divine inspiration by the Muse. Byron’s sardonic opening of ‘‘Don Juan’’ -- “Hail muse! etc.” -- isn’t far from Horace’s lips.

So what underlies good writing and craftsmanship? Wisdom -- the wisdom that comes from long imitation of “life and manners,” not the insights or delusions flowing from observing the obscure movements of the psyche.

131: The Romans are businesslike even in art. They appreciate fine craft, orderly and well planned work. The Greeks are wonderful, says Horace, but at times a bit wild. Let them have their divine madness.

132-33. Since the poet adorns values, fitness of speech is of the essence. The buying public won’t tolerate a mediocre poet who lacks eloquence and who violates their sense of decorum, of proportion in all character types and situations. A mediocre lawyer or doctor may be useful, but a mediocre poet’s main function is to adorn our world view, so we demand excellence as integral to that function. We want to be delighted ‘‘and’’ taught -- Horace might well agree with Sidney’s later formulation that the poet “teaches ‘‘by’’ delighting,” even though Sidney’s statement stems from the Christian notion that original sin has adversely affected the will. Moreover, Horace apparently would like to see a greater sense of professionalism amongst poets -- too many equestrian-ranked amateurs are scribbling poetry. Poetasters have been around forever, it seems. Wealth does not give one the crown as poet. See Petronius Arbiter’s ‘‘Satyricon’’ for a sendup of rich art patrons.

133: Art has done humanity great service, writes Horace. It has allied itself with wisdom, helping thereby to establish and maintain the golden mean. It has been vital to civilization, separating, ordering, ranking things and people in the proper way. (See Shelley’s broad definition of the poet -- perhaps his argument owes something to Horace, though the sentiment is much different.)

133-34: Talent and genius are both necessary. Genius, says Horace, may be a gift of nature, but talent must help us develop our genius and our linguistic facility. Artistic labor shapes and directs the force of genius as a builder and enhancer of civilization. Originality, in the modern romantic sense, does not seem to matter to Horace. Still, for all Horace’s love of conventionality, we need not consider him stale and bloodless. An artist can work within established literary and cultural traditions and yet be innovative and fulfill deep cultural and individual needs.” Again, a mask is conventional artifice or a device, but if properly deployed, it enhances expression.

134-35: The “mad poet” enframes and overflows Horace’s text on poetry, as if the text offers itself as “the safe and sane middle ground” on the issue of what poetry is and how one becomes a poet. Horace writes a decorous treatise on decorum. He doesn’t see a need to offer us either Plato’s condemnation of art or Aristotle’s grand and confident defense of poetry. Aristotle, of course, comes late in the line of philosopher-scientists from the Pre-Socratics onward, and he vigorously opposes Plato’s view of the relationship between art and life. One might say Plato was concerned that the ancient mythology lowered over “modern” Greece, promoting an uncomfortably close association between irrational art and everyday life. Under the rule of myth, art was an all-encompassing way of life. Aristotle has more confidence in the advent of the rational, scientific outlook, so he is able to defend art by treating it in a scientific manner. Horace’s argument is less philosophical than either Plato’s or Aristotle’s, but he is responding to the needs of a practical culture embarked upon an imperial project that would span centuries. So he promotes art as a valuable but specialized social practice; the Romans have no problem separating and distinguishing art from life’s other facets. The poet has a well-delineated, limited role with regard to the community. Perhaps this is true in all highly specialized, urban societies: consider the advent of industrial capitalism and its driving class, the ‘‘bourgeoisie.’’ With the coming of the new scientific-industrial paradigm, romantic artists responded with anxious defiance to what they felt as a radical threat of marginalization and even extinction of the human imagination and the art created from it. Horace feels no such anxiety.

Concluding thoughts on Horace: The Greeks understood the forces impinging upon the individual and the human realm as wild and incompatible, while the Augustan Romans treated external forces as more regular and predictable. These different visions of how the world beyond us shapes our identities and social forms are still with us -- you can find in modern philosophy and theory both attitudes. Everyone says forces beyond “us” impact us and at least partly account for who we become and what we do, but people differ concerning our chances of comprehending and controlling those forces.

Today the notion that, for better or for worse, all is regulated by “convention” has come back into vogue. Not so much in an affirmative “neoclassical” or Horatian way, but rather in the sense that contemporary theorists see conventional systems regulating everything from language to power relations in the social and political sphere. There’s a great deal of distrust of any formulation telling us we can strip away conventionality and artifice and get at the essence of something like “meaning,” “language,” “spirit,” etc. The individual is construed as the effect of many forces converging and conflicting, and meaning is often described as an effect generated by the play of elements within a sign system, whether the theorist sees that system as satisfyingly closed and complete or otherwise. Structuralism certainly emphasized the notion that we understand things on the basis of structural relationships, by way of relations rather than fixed inner meanings or roles. All of this acknowledges that we are creatures of both habit and convention, and takes up an attitude towards the fundamental claim that stability of perception and thought is itself a kind of necessary wish-fulfillment on the part of humans.

Longinus Notes

Is Longinus suggesting that we learn something from art, or that it provides us with an ecstatic experience that exalts and uplifts us? Or is there a relationship between sublimity and subsequent learning? Can an ecstatic experience improve us? It seems clear that Longinus thinks it can. From the Renaissance onwards, this positive emphasis on the value of passions generated by oratory and the fine arts has influenced critics. Whatever Longinus’ intentions, his treatise can be made to accord with attempts to recuperate emotion in the service of reason and order.

138-39. Longinus suggests that we all know what the sublime ‘‘is’’ because we can feel it for ourselves, so it need not be defined extensively. Further, the Preface says that the sublime is better than rhetorical persuasion because the former “takes us outside ourselves,” to borrow a modern expression – the audience can’t control the effects of sublime feelings, whereas the same audience is in control of the effects generated by ordinary rhetoric. It seems we respond to that kind of rhetoric with our critical faculties always alert – as when we listen to a political speech like the State of the Union Address. Longinus surprises his reader with his insistence that sublimity can be discussed with some precision even in a textbook treatise of the sort he is writing – it need not be described as an ineffable spiritual effect and left at that mysterious level. Nature is powerful, but nature needs the artist’s understanding of method and craft – so while Longinus praises an effect we might call “Dionysian” and ecstatic, he isn’t really licensing artistic anarchy or anarchic audience response.

139-40. I like the following quotation: “It is our nature to be elevated and exalted by true sublimity. Filled with joy and pride, we come to believe we have created what we have only heard” (139). This idea seems to apply to the audience even more than to the author or orator whom Longinus usually addresses in his treatise. The suggestion here is that the ecstatic experience of sublimity is something deeply rooted in human nature – it’s a similar sentiment to Aristotle’s claim that “learning gives the liveliest pleasure.” Sublime feelings may not in themselves amount to learning, but they seem to move us towards self-improvement, which is just as good. By implication, sublimity (and any art that instills it) is socially beneficial. Further, the reader or hearer, in Longinus’ opinion, gets to share in the author’s privileged perspective – it’s as if (to use a modern example) when we listen to Mozart or Beethoven, we fancy that we ourselves have actually written the music, so powerful is our accord with it. Probably everyone has felt something of this sort – even a critic can feel like a creative genius once in a while.

At the bottom of 139, Longinus attests to the lasting psychological effects of sublimity upon those who experience it – it “contains much food for reflection,” he writes, and anything that pleases people from all walks of life all the time must be sublime. I don’t know if this claim that some art has value that transcends all difference – presumably even temporal difference – holds up completely, but it’s been said many times that the test of art is time and universal appeal. (See Dr. Johnson, for instance – “Nothing can please long but just representations of general nature.”) But a modern criticism of this transhistorical and transcultural claim would be that art is made at a particular place and time, for a particular audience with one set of values and interests. So there’s a chance that even the greatest art will eventually fall out of favor. Will Shakespeare or Beethoven please people a thousand years from now? I suspect they will, but I can’t be certain because I won’t be there. Still, we like Homer even today, and his epics were composed 2700 years ago – that’s a pretty good indication of near-universal appeal, though not absolute proof. There’s also the caveat that claims about art’s “universality” exalt the embedded ideology of timebound works of art at the expense of the present. If you want to play Tom Paine with such arguments, you could snort that we owe nothing to the value systems of the past because we live in the present and must concern ourselves with our own near future. Or you could go the way of Edmund Burke and say that we owe almost everything to the past, so we should not deny its alleged claims upon us. (Paine was a radical supporter of the French and American Revolutions, while Burke opposed the French Revolution as an insane attempt to reconfigure human nature and throw off the ancient ideals that had made civilization possible.)

140-41. Longinus writes discerningly that sublimity is not simply to be equated with intense passion – you can be in an impassioned state that has nothing to do with sublimity or exaltation. Again, we see that he emphasizes the sublime as something that transports, uplifts, and exalts human beings – it is not simple madness or intensity. Many ancient philosophers insist that great effects can be caught and passed on by a superior individual or class – one thinks of Confucius’ “gentleman,” who, in following The Way, shows others the road to virtuous conduct. What we have in Longinus, perhaps, is an aristocratic ideal of this sort, with the great speaker or artist as the aristocrat and gentleman – “sublimity is the echo of a noble mind.” On 141, Longinus shows an almost impressionistic quality in pointing out the sublimity in Sappho’s lyric poetry – the passage at bottom reminds me of Walter Pater explaining in his essays from ‘‘Appreciations’’ what ‘‘exactly’’ is so wonderful about Wordsworth or Coleridge or Thomas Browne. It should be possible to distill the virtues of a particular author and set them down in writing, so we will know what makes their work excellent or sublime. At base, I think Longinus is suggesting that Sappho knew the most striking “elements which are inherent” in her “raw material” (erotic experience), and she knew how to combine them in complex ways that everyone could nonetheless recognize. I like that view of Sappho because her lyric is by no means simple self-expression – her fragments go well beyond individual expression. I don’t suppose Longinus means that sublimity is inherent ‘‘in the subject matter,’’ but rather that certain elements can, if dealt with skillfully, be put together so as to generate sublimity in the creator of art and in the soul of the perceiver or reader or listener.

143-44. Longinus says that great artists of the past can themselves inspire creators and audiences to sublimity. This reminds me of Alexander Pope’s insistence that Nature and Homer amount to the same thing – to go back to the ancients is to return to the root of human nature and to the source of sharp observation of physical nature as well.

144-46. Visualization and figurative language. Longinus recognizes (apparently without cynicism) the great power of images – if an orator can make me see something vividly, chances are that I will be carried along by what I “see” rather than attending closely to the argument. And in general, orators would much rather that their listeners be carried along by passion rather than act as critical judges of what’s being said. A mental picture really is worth a thousand words, it seems. But this whole business of describing the relationship between words and images sounds pretty dubious to me – I don’t easily “see” things on the basis of words. Do we really think in pictures? Even if you were to describe a scene for me in the most excruciating detail, I probably wouldn’t conjure up a detailed picture in my mind – I would probably ‘‘hear’’ what you say and respond on that basis. (Maybe I was at the water cooler when the word-to-image brainchips were handed out.) I can’t get a handle on my own mental processes, so I don’t feel confident describing anybody else’s. But Longinus’ general point is that vivid examples lead to sublimity. We will come across this notion again, for example in Philip Sidney’s promotion of the “speaking pictures” (a Horatian phrase) generated by virtue-inculcating poets – we ‘‘see’’ a good person doing good things, and are inspired to do them ourselves.

152. A key statement about human nature: “The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings.” The idea is that something deep within us responds to the sublime – we were, so to speak, ‘‘made’’ to experience sublimity. So much, therefore, for Platonic distrust of the passions as something that wells up from the lower depths of our divided nature, and threatens to overwhelm the orderly and reasonable qualities that make civilized life possible. This kind of argument runs through modern criticism, not just ancient -- neoclassical and romantic-era criticism and art wrestle with the place of reason and the place of the passions, and generally they try to find room for both, though emphasizing one or the other. It was the C18 philosopher David Hume, after all, who said that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” In C18 philosophy and criticism, much is made of humanity’s almost infinite educability, a capacity that certainly includes the feelings as well as the intellect. Defenses of art in that age often stem from just such faith in the improving power of appropriately directed passion. Where would the “age of sensibility” be without it?

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 03, Aristotle

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:41:00 +0000

Aristotle Notes

An introduction to Greek Theater can be found in the Guides section of my wiki.

Scientific Method: Aristotle is a scientist who treats art as any other thing that can be studied. Why dismiss it? Our topic is poetry, he says, as if it were an organism that can be taken apart and studied. Plato was not interested in that kind of study, and didn’t consider the natural world fit to study; it wasn’t a valid source of knowledge. Aristotle, however, disagrees: we learn our earliest lessons by representation. It is a natural activity, not a matter of hack copying or divine inspiration. An infant mimics things, and learns from that activity. The child begins to make sense of the world, and takes pleasure in learning. We can even see painful events represented and yet take pleasure in the representation. The major difference between Aristotle and Plato is that for the former, the universe is processive, a matter of becoming; for Plato, Being is central, and it cannot be grasped through material perception. (Footnote 1)

Representation: Aristotle says that tragedy is a representation, but we should ask, “of what specifically?” Certainly not everyday affairs since the subject of tragedy is usually mythic – did Oedipus or Medea really exist? Rather, tragedy imitates an ‘‘action’’ -- an intelligible design or pattern that we derive from a well-constructed plot. (Footnote 2)

Plot: As for the construction of plot, Aristotle isn’t interested in what the neoclassical critics called verisimilitude: exact copying isn’t the point. See 114 – even if I paint a female deer with horns, we can excuse the fault somewhat if I did it very well. And the unities of time and place are subject to artistic need; they don’t govern artistic need. Aristotle simply says that a play should be made so that we can “take it in,” maintain a proper sense of proportion with regard to characters and events. (Footnote 3)

Action: Let’s define what Aristotle means by plot a bit more precisely. What’s important isn’t just the plot incidents. See his definition of tragedy on page 95: “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action…” Included in this definition are the key terms “pity and terror” and “catharsis.” Well, the dramatist arranges plot events in accordance with probability and necessity, so the plot events (the “arrangement of incidents,” to be precise) will be able to deliver to us an intelligible pattern – this is what we might call the ‘‘action’’ -- which will have universal cognitive significance. We will learn something from the play.

Consider ‘‘Oedipus Rex.’’ Surely the lesson isn’t simply that you shouldn’t sleep with your mother and kill your father. Those are primal taboos. Perhaps, then, we see the iron law of prophecy brought home to us: Oedipus had tried to flee a prophecy, but the god’s words catch up with him anyway. Even this admirably clever character cannot outwit his own fate. Or perhaps we come to understand the painful process of gaining insight into the nature of things and of ourselves. The play tells us something about the way the world works and how we fit into it. Another example would be Sophocles’ ‘‘Antigone’’ -- there are competing sets of laws and right in the Cosmos. Antigone asserts familial piety, while Creon asserts his prerogative to be obeyed as king. Both are to some extent right. Again, what about Dickens’ ‘‘Great Expectations’’? Characters find out that their hopes are rooted in illusion, and they must let go of the hopes. We can discover a pattern of meaning in material phenomena and events by studying them carefully. The world is an intelligible order that we can learn from and about, so why not, Aristotle seems to be asking, employ the methods of natural science to art? He offers us a very powerful methodology that allows us to derive meaning from any object of study. (Footnote 4)

Catharsis: Why arouse strong emotions simply to purge them? As an old prof of mine used to argue, “that’s like saying, ‘please beat me because it feels good when you stop.’“ Perhaps Aristotle means that we learn something about an action by our emotional response to it, just as the characters in the plays constantly hash out their responses to a sparse distribution of terrible events. The idea that by “catharsis” Aristotle means “intellectual clarification” is an attractive idea, but we need not be rigid and deny the sway of passion as an element in his theory. I believe there’s a way to put the “emotional” and the “intellectual” interpretations of catharsis into a meaningful relationship. I suggest that while tragedy may induce a physiological state, at the same time or as part of the same process it provides us critical distance from life, so it is also a learning experience. This critical distance occurs as a complex reaction during the emotional experience and from the fact that the theater is only partly closed off as a space. (For the Athenians, we might point out, the theater was not entirely an enclosed space as it generally is today.)

Perhaps, then, we should not be too quick to dismiss the notion that by catharsis Aristotle really means “the stimulation and purgation of powerful emotions.” Aristotle always said that arriving at the mean was the best thing to do: keep the middle way in all things. Tragedy, after all, may be viewed in broad social terms as a response to the need to contain primal violence and disturbing emotions that cannot be eradicated from human nature. If we can’t banish them outright, we have to find ways of containing them within the rituals of civic life. The drama staged at annual festivals at Athens and elsewhere developed and remained under the aegis of Dionysus, the orgiastic god of wine and dance, so it might plausibly be said to serve such a function. The cathartic effect isn’t necessarily the poet’s conscious aim; rather, the way he puts together his play generates the effect Aristotle finds desirable. The Greeks had long seen music as a means of curing insanity, and their mystery rituals seem to have involved dancing that induced frenzy giving way to less intense emotions. (This is the distinction between pathos and ethos.) So perhaps Aristotle borrows from this “health-care” framework to a greater degree than proponents of catharsis as a means of intellectual clarification would find comfortable. It may be that the events at the City Dionysia festival were a “controlled overflow of powerful feelings,” which could be aroused and released as part of an overall learning experience. If so, we can have intellectual clarification and emotional release, too.

I’m suggesting that we might be in accord with a “medical” notion of catharsis, and yet draw from Aristotle the idea that art provides us with a degree of formal distance from which to reflect upon life’s events. Without this distance, there is no place for reflection, for learning. Some later critics will agree with this – cf. Wordsworth’s comments in his Preface to ‘‘Lyrical Ballads’’ about what meter does for poetry, though post-modern art would respond in complex ways to the demand for distance. For instance, isn’t some modern art based on the notion that we are already distant from or alienated from our own life conditions? If so, the point might well be to re-immerse us in the flow of life, to present art as more immediate than life itself, not necessarily to force reflection upon us. Maybe we have Hamlet’s disease – conscience “doth make cowards of us all”; Hamlet inhabits a world in which “enterprises of great pitch and moment are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and lose the name of action.” But we can derive from Aristotle the fundamental notion that art requires formal distancing from everyday life, and that this distance is necessary if we are to gain perspective. If you want to play Hegel with that idea, you could mutter something profound about the need for consciousness to lose itself so that it may transcend itself. We need contradictions in order to overcome them and arrive at a higher understanding, a higher level of spirit and intellection. But that’s for later on. The basic idea is that art is a vital kind of artifice, and artifice, if we listen to Aristotle (and Oscar Wilde, and Schiller, and the Symbolists, etc.) is simply part of what it means to be human. Good lord! Stop me before I sound even more like a school catalog description of “humanistic inquiry.” So let me put things in a more Wildean way -- it is unnatural for humans to be caught ‘‘au naturel,’’ unnatural for them not to adorn their sense of reality the better to reflect upon it and gain insight.

It makes sense to register the effects of strong tragedy in your own consciousness. I do not pity King Lear or feel afraid at the spectacle of his downfall. His behavior and his situation move me profoundly, but the “feeling” is strangely intellectual and somehow different than a merely physiological response to real events. From such real-life events, one feels something more like shock and numbness. However, when I watch a tragedy, it seems that my intellect is constantly acting upon or reacting to feelings generated by the play. The term “critical distance” is a plausible one here. Could it be that feeling and intellect are in such a close relationship that we cannot separate them into stable opposites? For the sake of clarity, we need to separate feeling and intellect in a manner that Aristotle himself does, but as usual, the imperative of clarity, as Nietzsche would point out, is terminological sleight of hand, and the drive to obtain clarity muddies the waters. We can certainly value some of Aristotle’s own ideas about imitation because they force us to consider the complexity of the relationship between the intellect and emotion.

Some Final Thoughts: One way of interpreting The Poetics is that in them Aristotle attempts to make tragedy safe for rational philosophy. After all, his work is a culmination of the philosophy-science movement from Anaximander onwards; for its practitioners, the point was to explain things on their natural terms and not by resorting to the divine as a principle of order. However, we could also “go Greek” in our reading of Aristotle. He writes in the awareness of a shift from an all-encompassing “mythology for life” to a more practical commercial way of life. Art and life have become somewhat more distinct by his time. Therefore, when Aristotle goes back to tragedy, the stuff of mythology, though of course in Sophocles and Euripides that mythology has been highly reworked and reinterpreted, he is to some extent to paying homage to the ancient stories that have shaped Greek life and thought. He certainly places great value upon them. He treats the ancient myths as the means of achieving a “usable past,” as “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke might say. Perhaps Aristotle is revaluing the old forms of thought and life, bringing them into his own present day. It may well be, too, that Aristotle well understood the nature of the clarity that Greek audiences derived from tragedy -- one surprisingly ambivalent about their standing with regard to the cosmos and the gods. Aristotle never says “don’t worry, be happy.” I’m not at all convinced that he is simply a scientist who means to turn poetry into a perfectly vulgar “useful thing.” It is even possible that Aristotle is interested in tragedy because of its capacity to make an uneasy peace with the old terrors of early Greece – its tyrannical gods and powerful furies, before the scientific method began to hold sway in intellectual life. Don’t the old gods and myths give us insight into the limitations of our understanding, our powers of reason? This view would make Aristotle a recuperative figure, not merely a sunny analytic scientist. His ‘‘Poetics’’ could be an honest admission of his philosophy’s limitations, an admission that there is more to the human animal than rational philosophy can account for. Aristotle likes to study complicated things, and the human animal is complicated.

In sum, we come to Aristotle laden with other people’s interpretations as well as with our own desire that everything should make sense. This may cause us to misunderstand the nature of the object Aristotle is studying as well as the conclusions he arrives at concerning it. My “perverse” reading of Aristotle could at least lead us to see that his philosophical methods are processive, that they consist in a project of overcoming limitations by recognizing them. In this way, Aristotle begins to look like the kind of system-builder that Friedrich Nietzsche admires; he sees that intuition and abstraction are both necessary, that we cannot entirely separate them without falsifying the validity of each.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: Pleasure and Pain: Aristotle says that we get pleasure from seeing otherwise unpleasurable things represented – we can “enjoy” the sufferings of Oedipus, for example. That’s because it satisfies a fundamental instinct for learning. But what about the pleasure we take in films like ‘‘Silence of the Lambs?’’ Does the pleasure derive from the same source – love of learning? Or is something else at work here? You could argue that we delight in the aestheticization, the making-beautiful, of violence. Why is that? Is it that we are violent creatures, and therefore take delight in the adorned representation of violence? I wonder if there isn’t a “dark side” to Aristotle’s claims about what we get from art – he makes it all sound so rational, so intelligible. All Apollo, not much Dionysus. I’m not so sure. Identification with some other element within ourselves may also be at work – how else did Hitler get all those people to salute at the same time, to identify themselves with the Volk, and so forth? The Reich or the Volk might well be described as a diabolical work of art in which every German could participate. That sort of thing has absolutely nothing to do with reason.

Footnote 2: Aristotle’s view is far more complex than can be rendered by the sometime translation of mimesis as “imitation.” In Aristotle’s view, we can appreciate the formal properties of a work of art even if we aren’t familiar with the original. In this sense the work becomes a “presentation,” an original in its own right – not a representation in the sense of mere copying. That sounds a bit like formalism, but Aristotle isn’t a modern formalist because he insists that art is a representation of something -- we aren’t dealing with a theory that says art is absolutely autonomous, free of any ties to the world outside the text, canvas, or other media. That’s a modern notion.

Footnote 3: Similarly, a character should be constructed so that he or she behave and speaks true to type – otherwise, no intelligible pattern will emerge from the words and deeds of that character.

Footnote: A cruelly Nietzschean caveat -- if things actually ‘‘don’t’’ make sense, then we are enlisting criticism and philosophy to falsify things, not clarify them. Or rather, it may be (sometimes) that to clarify ‘‘is’’ to falsify.

More Aristotle Notes (These are my “post-it” style notes, in case they’re of any interest -- they repeat some ideas found above, but also contain other commentary.)

Page numbers refer to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

91. “Our topic is poetry in itself and its kinds….” Aristotle treats art scientifically, classifying it in terms of medium, objects, and manner. Art is a species of representation, and tragedy as a subspecies of art. Plato wasn’t interested in this sort of natural science method.

93. “Representation is natural to human beings from childhood.” Learning satisfies a primary “instinct” -- we learn by imitating when we are children. Since imitation is a valid way of seeking knowledge, and poetry is imitation, poetry yields knowledge. So much for Plato’s condemnation of poetry on ontological grounds. Since we delight in engaging with representations, Aristotle’s theory at least partly recuperates pleasure, too. Apparently, seeking pleasure is a universal characteristic of human nature. But Aristotle will have more to say about this pragmatic or audience-oriented issue. (Pity and fear lead to catharsis.) The Lascaux Caves suggest that Aristotle is correct about our instinctual need to imitate. Aristotle shows concern for the formal coherence of works of art: a representation need not produce pleasure on the basis of its accuracy. If I haven’t seen the thing or person represented in a painting, I can appreciate it as a presentation. Aristotle isn’t interested in narrow ideas about verisimilitude. See 114 -- if someone paints a female deer with horns out of ignorance, the viewer could still judge the painting good for its formal coherence -- “because of its accomplishment, colour, or some other such cause” -- rather than for its strict accuracy.

95-96. “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action….” The deeper ontological or mimetic argument appears in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the imitation of a complete action. What is the plot “imitating” or representing? Not simply events. The events or incidents themselves are mythological -- you couldn’t imitate them in the strictest sense because they never happened. Rather, Aristotle implies that the dramatist arranges the particulars or incidents of his plot in accordance with probability and necessity so as to present to us a complete action. This “action” reveals something fundamental about the nature of things. Examples: the action of Oedipus the King is that of a man fleeing the truth about a prophecy, but the prophecy getting itself fulfilled in spite of the hero’s best efforts. Antigone’s action involves the clash of competing rights -- Creon’s political order and Antigone’s familial and religious order. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, as Albert Wlecke says, we can see a universal, intelligible pattern emerging in that various hopes are exposed as rooted in illusion. One hopes on the basis of illusions, and then sees the hope frustrated and must give it up. Aristotle says that life’s aim is an action: what we do matters more than our “sort” or our character. Our actions will fit into a larger intelligible pattern, and will render us happy or unhappy.

96-98. “So plot is the origin and as it were the soul of tragedy, and the characters are secondary. Moreover, poetry is more universal than history. A drama links its incidents according to the probably and the necessary. History cannot derive intelligible patterns because it is limited to what actually happened: “poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (98 top). (Well, a modern idea of history is that it, too, requires emplotment.) In a tragedy, if we are to learn anything from it, the protagonist’s slide downhill must occur in a way we can grasp: the action must have a properly linked beginning, a middle, and an end, along with recognition and reversal. A well-rounded plot gives us a complete action. The unities of time and place aren’t very important here. Aristotle doesn’t assume, as Plato does, that an audience needs to be taken in by the play; rather, it is a learning experience that requires critical resistance -- not total immersion. We must explain what he means by “pity and fear” after this point.

98-99. “Among plots, some are simple and some are complex….” Recognition and reversal are logically structured plot-points, events on the way towards self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s standing with respect to the gods. Probability and necessity reign here -- the movement of the plot should seem inexorable, and what happens should develop organically from within the sequence of events. So if all is well done, the audience experiences catharsis, a medical term meaning purgation. See pg. 100.

100. “We must perhaps discuss next what {poets} should aim at and what they should beware of in constructing plots….” Characters are types; they are admirable but not perfect. They must “make a mistake” (hamartano), “miss the mark,” do something by which they become miserable. They will commit an error that we ourselves might commit were we in their position, though of course we know we aren’t in their position. So we will pity Oedipus or Antigone -- might we not do as they did, if presented with the same dilemmas? And this empathy will make us shudder -- something equally bad could befall us. My further suggestion: Aristotle is still interested in the issue of “critical distance” even when it seems we are most immersed in the play. Greek self-control is important to him. He offers perhaps a colder version of Sappho’s “I am prepared to be shaken,” something akin to the Nietzschean quality of openness to experience.

A question posed by Wlecke -- why arouse pity and fear simply to achieve catharsis or purgation of pity and fear? Isn’t that like asking to be beaten because it’s enjoyable when the beating stops? Perhaps it makes more sense to say that we learn something about an action by our emotional response to it, and that we learn something about pity and fear, too.

102-03. “Regarding characters, there are four things at which {the poet} should aim. Character is subject to typification. We should preserve and ennoble the type. Characters should be good, appropriate, life-like, and consistent. Otherwise, if we can’t categorize them, we will draw no lesson from what happens to them -- no pattern will emerge. Aristotle’s formal demands are in the service of his interests as a pragmatic critic: a tragedy succeeds by achieving certain formal effects. If it does that, it induces catharsis.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 02, Gorgias of Leontini and Plato

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:40:00 +0000

Notes on Gorgias’ “Encomium of Helen.”

The word “Sophist” has a bad name—we usually mean by it something like “a selfish liar who uses specious arguments and fine language to gain advantages over the unsuspecting.” Even though Aristotle leveled some criticism at Protagoras along those lines, on the whole it would be a biased way to talk about the Greek Sophists from Protagoras (born around 490 BCE) onwards. Sophism is a product of the Greek Enlightenment that flourished after the Greeks, led by Athens, held off and then sent the Persians packing in famous battles such as Marathon in 490 BCE (an Athenian victory), Thermopylae (the Spartans held a narrow pass for three vital days) and Salamis in 480 BCE (where the Athenians trounced the Persian navy). It is a product of an ancient people’s cultural and economic “upward mobility” in the wake of a great conflict, and it has to do with the professionalization of “wisdom” (in Greek, sophia). In sum, the Sophists taught on the premise that wisdom and virtue of a sort can be imparted to those willing to dedicate the time and resources to such a pursuit. Protagoras’ product was characterized as follows: “good counsel in family matters, namely the expert management of one’s own household, and good counsel in public matters, namely how to contribute most effectively by speech and action in the affairs of the city” (quoted in J. V. Luce, An Introduction to Greek Philosophy, pg. 80). In other words, a Sophist could teach wealthy young men how to manage their domestic affairs advantageously and how to take part in the political affairs of Athens and other thriving Greek cities: practical stuff for practical, optimistic individuals bent on getting ahead in the world. Luce sums up the general orientation of Sophism in the following terms:

1. Humanism. Protagoras’ comment, “Man is the measure of all things” says it all. And as Luce points out, by this Protagoras probably meant “the individual” rather than some collective definition of humanity. But it also means that unlike a number of pre-Socratic philosophers, the Sophists were more interested in studying humanity than in trying to plumb the depths of nature.

2. Relativism. The Sophists said that the sway of custom and opinion is everywhere, so reaching after absolute standards of belief or conduct may be a fool’s errand. Essentially, “truth” and “excellence” or virtue are defined by community consensus. If there are absolute standards for them, we don’t seem able to arrive at such standards.

3. Skepticism and atheism. The Sophists didn’t care much for metaphysical speculation or religion because those promise us knowledge about absolutes. Religious people tend to think they know what god is like or the gods are like, whether or not there’s an afterlife and what that is like, and so forth. A Sophist would say to all that, “I don’t know any of those things, and neither do you, so let’s move on.”

In the area of rhetoric, the Sophists seemed willing enough to admit that argumentation was a tool that could be used for good or for ill: you can use superior argumentational skills to justify some self-interested piece of knavery, or you can use them to defend a sound, compassionate public policy initiative. You can use them to convict an innocent person in court or to exonerate that same person. Either way, good speaking and argumentational skills aren’t to blame, the idea goes: the problem lies with the intentions and motivations of those who wield such instruments.

Perhaps the Sophists’ frankness about the relativity of “truth” as something produced by the community—in essence, they dealt in refined opinion, not metaphysical absolutes or rock-solid scientific facts drawn from observation of nature—is what gives them a bad name. The notion that there may not be any absolutes, or at least none we’ll ever reach, is discomfiting. Freud called religion an “illusion,” but he insisted that it was a powerful one that wasn’t going away anytime soon, if ever. But the Sophists don’t focus on making this negative case so much as they turn relativity to practical account. If we can’t know anything ultimate, then we should concentrate on what we can grasp in some more immediately useful way. They work with relativity in the spirit of public competition, and don’t seem bothered by its deep philosophical implications.

Socrates was sometimes accused of being a Sophist, and it’s possible to see why some people thought that: one pictures him walking about with his often wealthy disciples, speaking with a brand of eloquence all his own, one that seems to go against what the common folk take to be rock-solid truth about morality and the gods. And for all his insistence on human folly, he was a public-spirited man who took part in Athens’ wars, so he may have thought that sharing with well-born young men his method of investigating opinions would do the public some good since, after all, they were likely to take an important part in civic life, given their rank. But unlike the Sophists, it’s clear, he believes in ethical absolutes. Ethics was his central concern, so he had little good to say about the Sophists’ willingness to leave aside the question of whether a course of action or an idea was right, or whether it was just useful in some tangible way. Socrates didn’t care if the whole world operated on such-and-such a principle: if the principle be fallacious or immoral, it’s harmful and should be exposed for what it is. I don’t believe Socrates had a fully developed metaphysics the way Plato did—all that business about the Forms, I mean—but when it came to matters of right and wrong, he was unshakeable, and in matters of truth and falsity, he couldn’t abide people claiming they knew things on contradictory principles drawn from an ignorant populace. No doubt Oscar Wilde’s quip, “public opinion exists only where there are no ideas” is homage to Socrates.

It may be that some of our unease with Sophism is well-founded. Perhaps any attempt to sell wisdom, however you define “wisdom,” is in some sense distasteful and a betrayal of the highest meaning of that hallowed term. But let’s move on to Gorgias and try to give Sophism its due as an intellectual strategy. Perhaps, if I may put the case this way, one can have enough respect for a thing (truth, aleitheia) not to believe in it too simply. Sophism offers pragmatic wisdom, but that offer need not imply complete disregard for the ultimate existence of truth. If everything is a matter of opinion, we are left considering pragmatics. How do we arrive at a way of knowing who wields opinion in a worthy manner? The Sophists think they can proceed. A similar argument has been made recently—Derrida versus the structuralists, who apply social science and science to human phenomena. Their attitude is, well, we don’t need to know the essence of everything before we can learn things and act in the world; we can teach “structure” as a principle of intelligibility, and perhaps there’s only structure after all. But that is to fool yourself, Derrida would say—in such arguments, structure becomes the unquestioned center, so it’s no different from philosophical Truth, or God, or any other metaphysical enabling device taken as absolute reality—all those old metaphysical chestnuts we thought had long since disappeared into the fire. Barbara Collins’s 2005 presentation brought out something interesting about Gorgias—he says people have wielded a version of truth that has damaged a good woman’s reputation; Helen got run down by Allen Ginsberg’s “Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” Call an ambulance! It may be that in praising Helen, Gorgias is taking a swipe at those who wish away the violent nature of Greek civilization’s foundational stories. It’s facile to blame Helen for the whole affair. We might almost give the man credit for something like a feminist argument, though perhaps that’s going a bit far…. But the point is that we might read Gorgias’ praise of Helen of Sparta as an argument against foreclosure on the question of truth. Who was Helen, anyhow? If, that is, there was a Helen at all? Common fairness says that where a matter is uncertain, it’s best to take the most generous view of things—isn’t that what Gorgias is doing with respect to Helen’s character? There is, of course, a less innocent side to Gorgias’ encomium—one that identifies Helen’s seductive power with the seductive power of fine speech. But we’ll consider that in class.

Notes on Plato.

The Republic, Book 2.

49. “The most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning….” Education is vital because young minds must be molded properly—that sounds much like our concept that early learning is the most important kind. Plato says that children’s minds are quite impressionable—the stories we tell them make an impression, most likely a permanent one, too. We will choose apt future guardians or phulakes—agile-minded, teachable children in whose souls we can leave a good imprint that will generate predictable results and a stable society. Everyone will lead an orderly life, do one appropriate job well, and love the Good and Reason as far as possible given his or her capacities as nurtured by sound education. Here we find Plato’s pragmatic emphasis—art can shape morals and maintain social control.

The Greeks generally considered poetry and music the primary instruments of paideia, or education. (See Werner Jaeger’s multivolume Paideia.) Plato doesn’t try to do away with poetry as a means of education since everyone in Greece treated Homer and other poets the way modern Christians treat the Bible—something to be relied on for an apt line or a moral precept, appreciated for its beauties, and so forth. This was the tradition. Still, Plato insists upon reforming poetry as a vehicle of education so that its effects may be controlled more effectively. After all, the State will be in charge of education; it won’t be simply a matter of children imbibing stories about Chronos trying to eat his children or Zeus dallying with nymphs. What we want is to shape minds for a lean, if not mean, Utopian State (one like Sparta)—not the corrupt and luxurious polity that Plato dislikes so much.

50. “Even if these stories are true, they ought not to be told so casually to young people and people who lack discrimination; it’s better to keep silent….” Only philosophers may suppress the truth or even lie because they do it for the people’s good. Philosophers-as-state-planners must restrict scurrilous tales about the gods to the ears of the very few who can avoid being corrupted by them. This is censorship, of course—but Plato’s goal is not freedom for modern bourgeois individuals; it is a sound moral collectivity.

51-55. On page 53, Socrates says “any spoken words or composed works will have to conform to the principle that God is not responsible for everything, but only for good.” The divine realm must be purged of obscene portraits of the gods and made to serve as the source of moral and intellectual integrity. This would be necessary even if the gods actually were just as Homer describes them. I would say that the old religion helped the Greeks to endure in a world that sometimes seemed unjust, but Plato rationalizes religion and expects it to adhere to his notions of ultimate truth. For Plato’s purposes, the Divine Realm must be purged of its rascally particularities—there’s just one Divine (though there may be many gods), and from it flows only good. This Divine Realm or “God” will serve as a principle of moral intelligibility and, at the highest level of Plato’s philosophy, will be closely associated with Reason and the Good. If we were to need a fictional affirmation of this realm’s existence, so be it—the wise must draw the future guardians and auxiliaries onwards to appreciate the Good.

Of course, the issue of making art triumph over the Real and Reason and common human sentiment could be raised at this point: “isn’t that what the Nazis did?” would go the argument. They turned politics into aesthetics—the state was considered a work of art (to borrow a phrase from Jacob Burckhardt), so a fiery defeat in battle might be glossed as The Twilight of the Gods straight out of Wagner, the murder of innocent millions translated into the “purification” of a mythic Herrnrace, and so forth.

An aside—while the old mythology of the Greeks helped people endure a harsh cosmos (as Homer’s Apollo says near the beginning of The Iliad 24, “an enduring heart have the fates given unto men”; τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν), Plato would have it serve as a principle of moral and ontological clarity: a way of claiming that there is an eternal realm of Beauty and Goodness beyond this mess we find ourselves in. The ancient myths dealt with what Christian theology calls the “problem of evil” by not trying to deal with it: the gods did what they wanted to, and were beyond our standards of justice or fairness. But if you claim your god has the status of Jehovah in the Hebrew scriptures, you must directly confront the problem of who is responsible for evil. Plato shares that problem with Christianity and several other religions.

Well, this all leads to a general point for the course: a major use of art has long been identified as the shaping of an audience’s morals, the molding of individuals from their youth up into a unified collectivity that has come to agree about matters of right and wrong. Art can, in this view, partly generate and strongly reinforce moral consensus.

Alternately, some moderns would claim that art should reinforce ethical norms already in existence: we might refer to arguments about, say, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bizarre visual art being shown in galleries receiving money from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Some middle-class people object to tax-funded radicalism. They probably do not see art as a vehicle for challenging values upon which they see little or no need to reflect, and it offends them if you say that art should “afflict the comfortable” or that it should “disturb and disintegrate” (Wilde’s phrase) views and practices they hold dear. Even though I am not exactly a political animal in the classroom, I have sometimes seen this attitude in college students in direct response to assigned material: “I don’t like Dostoyevsky or Freud or Marx; they say things I don’t understand and that sound disagreeable.” My question to them would be, “is education for finding out about new things and ideas, or for getting our prior belief systems validated by people with fancy degrees?” Of course, this “Culture Wars” struggle has been blunted of late, at least with regard to the arts—I recently saw Dana Gioia, a poet and the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, talking about how the most alarming matter for America’s cultural health is that around half of the public doesn’t read literature at all. One might as well add in Wildean fashion that large numbers of the rest of them read it rather badly….The point is, this is baseline stuff—there’s no point talking about art being dangerous if nobody is capable of engaging with it. The Culture Wars focus has shifted to the struggle over the War on Terror, the long-continued Iraq venture, and so forth.

Later “bourgeois” versions of this usefulness-claim would have us all formed into one big consensus-happy public sphere, where right moral sentiment and the normative ways of doing everything prevail. Plato is didactic in the way he handles the value of art as education: it should form us into what we ought to be as members of a collective society, and help us find our proper place to serve others in the community. For him, art isn’t a vehicle for self-development, expression, or free individuality in the modern sense.

The Republic, Book 3.

56-57. “We will implore Homer and the rest of the poets not to get cross if we strike these and all similar lines from their works.” Emotionally effective poetry is especially harmful and contagious. The guardians might think tears and fears are fine, while what we require from them is firm adherence to reason, just as we need from the auxiliaries or soldiers blood, sweat, and obedience. After all, John Wayne isn’t supposed to play Macbeth, is he? (The old Greeks of Homer’s day would find restraining tears downright un-Greek. Homer’s heroes are often wailing about something or other.) Plato might agree with Sir Philip Sidney that art should give us “speaking pictures” of virtuous men and women, so that we will want to think and act like them. Plato insists on what has been called the “contagion theory of art”: when we see something, we will want to do it, too. Look at the way he describes the soul as tripartite in Phaedrus 245ff: the soul’s pilot is reason, and it must control the two horses or steeds that pull it towards an object. Modesty and temperance must prevail if there is to be no wreck. This metaphor construes human beings as powerfully moved by desires of various sorts—and if the lower or sensual desires prevail, we shall be led to immodesty and ruin. Things we see and hear have a strong effect upon us, for better or for worse.

58-59. “Clearly lying should be entrusted to doctors, and laymen should have nothing to do with it.” Lies are dangerous when uttered by the wrong people, by subordinates. Only those whose “craft” is philosophy—who know the good end and the proper way to achieve it while working with the given material—can be allowed to lie. At this point—one shouldn’t take this too far—truth begins to sound like a ruse of statecraft. Order is the first necessity, not truth. Plato isn’t so “un-Greek” as to be less than frank on this point. But ultimately, when he comes around to ontological arguments in Book 10, he returns to the issue of poetry’s truth status, and finds it lacking.

59. Socrates asks, “and aren’t the most important aspects of self-discipline, at least for the general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one’s authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food?” Reason and temperance outrank sensual pleasure and fiction-making. Food, sex, poetry: all are dangerous if handled badly.

61-62: This section resembles The Symposium in its advocacy of education as a leading-out of youth from the senses towards the adult’s fuller appreciation of the beauty of reason and goodness. For political purposes, Plato recognizes that humans are passionate creatures, that they have appetites and bodies as well as the capacity to reason their way to an apprehension of truth. That practical concern leads him not to dismiss poetry from consideration as he builds his word-State, but rather to reform its role in traditional paideia. He says that we must smooth the way from childhood to rational adulthood and citizenship, keeping away from children anything that might impede their progress towards love of the good and right. So we need to attune young minds to harmony in language, music, dance, everything. True craftsmen must surround children with a virtual Sesame Street environment of beautiful objects and harmonious sounds and actions, putting them in a region of health and beauty so complete that when they become adults, they will greet the beauty of reason as an old friend, without, perhaps, even realizing how it came to be so familiar. We move almost imperceptibly from Big Bird to Big Brother: the Good. Plato is a spiritual reformer in education, as Werner Jaeger might say. So the goal in educating children is to smooth their progress from the material to the nonmaterial kind of good, from belief towards knowledge, from the unexamined life towards the examined life.

Cultural education is vital to Plato. As Marcus Aurelius will say in his Meditations, we should come not even to “think in inmost thought” what would offend our fellows. The goal here is temperance and self-restraint in all things. It’s interesting, however, that for all his reputation as a stern banisher of poetry on ontological grounds, Plato seems rather passionate about Reason. Or at least he sees that in practical or pedagogical terms, our early passionate, unreasoning attachment to beauty and harmony is vital to our subsequent development into mature citizens. Ion isn’t a proper craftsmen, but someone working under a philosopher-king could generate quite an effect in the Republic’s children. The teacher must accept our initial dependence on the senses, on ordinary pleasures, and use it as an instrument for our moral and philosophical advancement. It seems we must transcend the senses by first being educated with their aid. Pleasure in material objects will be replaced by pleasure in non-material goodness. Education is vital, and must be reformed: Plato sees “human nature” in a realistic way, but isn’t satisfied with us au naturel. He’s no individualist, but he shows the humanist’s dissatisfaction with what is founded merely upon nature or even “human nature” as is. We seem to be perfectible. Plato’s doctrine, at least in Book 3, is an early version of what Schiller will later call “the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Education includes art, and so art is vital to the task of civilization. But of course Plato will not add “individualism” or “freedom of the individual” or “freedom and variety of situations” to his list of necessaries, as von Humboldt or Schiller and his fellow romantic philosophers would. Still, art is a formative and shaping power, and is integral to being “civilized.” Even in Homer, there is a negotiation between the wild and the civilized.

The Republic, Book 7.

This book is partly about the teacher’s command of truth, of the Forms as opposed to the world of sham and appearance. Education involves an acclimation to “beholding” the Intelligible realm. The Allegory of the Cave’s simple point is that this world of sensible things is a prison. The uneducated adults are in chains, looking only straight ahead. These adults, the ordinary citizens of a democratic commonwealth like Athens (in whom Plato puts little trust), become hostile and threaten to murder the returned Promethean bringer of light. The parallel to Socrates is obvious—he had been executed in 399 BCE, a quarter-century before Plato wrote The Republic.

So Plato offers us an allegory about the power of philosophy and the risks that truth runs when it makes itself available to the profoundly ignorant. He suggests that the world runs on illusions and that it’s no easy matter to disabuse people of their illusions, built as they are upon sensory experience and a deep need for certainty. Plato’s problem with art is that it doesn’t even try to disabuse people of their illusions; only philosophy and “cultural education” crafted by philosophers can disabuse us without bringing the house down on our heads.

One could say that Plato’s sentiment here is genuinely Greek—we must be able to bear the weight of vision, of knowledge. Homer says, after all, that the fates have given us enduring hearts. Still, if you strip away people’s illusions too quickly and you blind them with truth, they will hate you. Our prisoners have built a whole system of reward and punishment, an integral society, out of their own perceptual and intellectual errors. See Nietzsche’s “Truth and Falsity” essay on this power of abstraction-making to stabilize the world and make it seem livable. See page 67: if our truth-seer is so uninterested in coming back to the Cave, doesn’t his reluctance undermine Plato’s attempt to build an ideal Republic? In other words, doesn’t The Republic end on a note of alienation between philosophy and life—one that art has taken on as a mantle, as in Symbolism and romanticism at its most “satanic”?

The Republic, Book 10.

In Book 10, Plato looks at poetry more sternly from an ontological standpoint, so he sounds more dismissive of it here—it turns out that poetry isn’t true craft like the craftsmanship in the lean, healthy state; instead, it merely copies copies, generating something like the effects of the Allegory of the Cave’s “shadows on the wall.” It only convinces people that their illusions are truth and have the gods’ sanction.

67. Now all imitative poetry must go; this is a shock since it was formerly alright to present carefully crafted images of virtue.

68-70. Plato is in full onto-throttle here: there is the Idea of “Bed” (its form or pattern, design), the material object made by the joiner, and the bed represented by the painter, who merely imitates the joiner’s bed. So the painter makes a copy of a copy.

74-76. The painter or imitative poet satisfies the ignorant multitude, who want nothing but copies in any case. He’s a democratizer in the realm of pleasure. He confirms and even multiplies ordinary people’s confusions and contradictions in the sensory realm, where they are content to remain.

76-77. Poetry counteracts reason and public necessity. Notice the panopticon tendency in Plato: the self, as far as he is concerned, should remain a public construct. This public construct is rather like Freud’s “superego,” the power of parental authority and collective wisdom, or what passes for it.

77-78. Poetry appeals to the lowest element of our nature, Plato says. It appeals to the petulant side that gives reason so much trouble, and not to the “intelligent and calm” side. It stirs up the multitude, creating amongst them a bond in their lowest passions. Note that at 78 top, Plato directly links imitative poetry and demagogic ruffians’ control of politics.

78. Worst of all, poetry not only miseducates the young, it corrupts even the good.

79-80. Plato’s Socrates will admit only “hymns to the gods” and “eulogies of virtuous men”—supposedly non-representational poetry that is not made solely for the pleasure of hearers but that instead reinforces a productive moral.

Notes on Plato’s Phaedrus.

Is writing a remedy or a poison? The Greek word pharmakos means both remedy and poison. Also, supplementarity comes into play—either this term indicates the supplying of a lack, or an addition to something already whole. Well, as Derrida says, it means both in philosophical writing, and any attempt to reduce this complexity generates all sorts of mischief, most particularly bogus certainty.

Socrates says that Thamus sees writing as sanctioning forgetting. That’s vital since for Plato learning is anamnesis, an unforgetting of what the timeless soul always knew, or has long known.

Speech, here, is closer to truth, to our own consciousness, which has the capacity to apprehend truth. Speech maintains its relationship to inner consciousness and intentionality, and can always refer back to these realms for validation. Speech is contrasted with the dangerous disseminative power of the written word, which is much more obviously a public code, a set of signs that function in the absence of the writer’s consciousness. A concrete example would be to write a word like “dog” or “umbrella” on the blackboard—how could the word be interpreted unless you don’t have to depend on direct access to the mind of the author? In the case of writing, it’s painfully obvious that meaning multiplies promiscuously with no firm standard of reduction to stability.

Plato says elsewhere that politicians always want to write. He connects writing with democracy: the promiscuous dissemination of power amongst the unworthy. Plato, we should remember, is considerably younger than Socrates, so he has really taken the lesson of Athens’ fall in the wake of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars (431-04 BCE) with Sparta. A democratic-spirited people became too full of themselves, we might say, and their leaders (Pericles foremost) marched them off a cliff. Plato was an aristocrat by birth, it seems, and he simply didn’t trust the common folk to make intelligent decisions. In this sense, his view of human nature is probably much darker than that of Socrates.

On the issue of writing and speech, Derrida’s view is that the privileging of speech, with its supposed link to absolute truth, has been the trick of philosophy for millennia. In the service of unitary meaning and theology-grade stability, philosophical discourse effaces itself as writing, trying to come at us as pure speech conveying systemic truth. But the same thing is true of speech as is true of writing: it can only mean something if we do not rely on direct access to the speaker’s supposed intentions. Speech is a public code, too, subject to the same indeterminacy and unfinality as is writing. The opposition between speech and writing is false; they are both similarly diffuse, sliding, drifting, and cannot give us final meaning or ultimate truth. Rather, they work by potentially endless deferral and difference. That we believe we manipulate speech as a code does not do away with its similarity to writing. I can’t explain my intentions for every sentence I utter—that would in effect privatize my speech in a deferred manner; neither can my gestures take me outside this process of signification since gestures are themselves signs that must be interpreted.

Our view of speech posits a unitary “consciousness” that then links back to and validates speech as true (cf. Derrida on Husserl’s phenomenology). We speak, referring our words back to consciousness for validation or authentication. But consciousness itself is perhaps an effect of speech. Intentionality is an ex post facto construction. If this Nietzsche-like point is valid, perhaps we can test it simply by listening to our own internal dialogue: I don’t believe in intentionality, at least not in the most direct sense: ask “where do my words come from?” and you will be able to perceive that in your own inner dialogue, they don’t seem to come from anywhere or to be commanded in some a priori manner by consciousness. Again, consciousness may well be an effect, not a cause. (This may be an overstatement since research on certain kinds of brain damage, I believe, has sometimes called into question the primacy of speech in the formation of consciousness—I once saw a television segment on a fellow who had sustained an injury and had come to “think” in images rather than words, for example.)

The point is not to condemn “meaning” and “consciousness” as useless illusions, but rather to suggest that illusions are not without consequence even if they are necessary. It’s possible to build systems in philosophy or politics. And it’s dangerous either to leave them in place or to tear them down, especially since you must work with the components of what is in the process of being torn down.

So what has all this talk to do with literature and literary criticism? It offers us insight into certain kinds of literature and methods of interpretation. For instance, take romantic poetry, which tends to efface its status as written word in favor of lyric utterance. With the romantics, this isn’t just a polite convention as perhaps it is for, say, Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt. The romantic symbol or poetic word is supposed to work its magic upon our spirits, carrying alive into the heart the poet’s passions and expressive truths. The therapeutic power of poetry depends in part on their model of consciousness and speech. Words, as in Christian theology, are the bearers of spirit and culture, or at least they point us in that direction. They reinforce or even partly create our humanity in its deepest sense, and have a vital bond with the natural world. Imagination and symbol are beyond ordinary language.

A further point: anybody who claims privilege for a certain kind of consciousness—unified, a sanctuary for truth whether its ultimate source is inside the mind or external to it—must efface the operations of writing, or the link and the spell will be broken. Any act of criticism would separate itself into a unified consciousness or perspective, maintaining a certain distance from the object it creates in the process of positing itself. So it must reduce the operations of textuality, must disclaim participation in or contact with the process of signification that is the text. But surely the relationship is less straightforward than that. (An easy way of putting this, for initial reference, is that “criticism constitutes its preferred object.”) Criticism that ignores the effects of writing ends up repeating or otherwise affirming the ideology and illusions—the project—of the texts it studies. If you go to the text trying to reconstruct the project of the movement, the poem, the author, etc., you must know that you are part of that project, that you are involved in positing a “there” where there’s no fully prior “there.” Carry this insight about effects of the code farther back, and you see that the author, text, movement, did not have a lock on its own “intentions,” no matter what explicit declarations it makes. Intention is a unity-making post hoc construction.

Week 01, Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:39:00 +0000

Welcome to English 491, History of Literary Criticism
Fall 2006 at California State University, Fullerton