chapman e456 literary theory spring 03

Home Page for E456

2003-05-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E456, Contemporary Literary Theory

Spring 2003 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog is a reconstruction of my notes/lectures for E456. I will post them as time permits. In one form or another, most of this material was made available to students at the time, but not always in formal guides. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections was Leitch, Vincent (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294. My wiki site Archive Menu offers a link to the course syllabus. contains the course syllabus and contains addithe 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.

Week 15, Austin and Butler

2003-05-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

This blog is a reconstruction of my notes/lectures for E456. I will post them as time permits me to transcribe my notes. In one form or another, most of this material was made available to students at the time, but not always in formal guides.

Week 14, De Beauvoir and Cixous

2003-05-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

Week 13, Hall and Bhabha

2003-04-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha. Hall’s “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (1895-1910). Bhabha’s “The Commitment to Theory” (2377-97).

Page-by-Page Notes on Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (1895-1910).

1899. Since Hall defines cultural studies, as a “discursive formation,” a definition of that phrase will help: it is “a group of statements in which one may find patterns of regularity defined in terms of order, correlation, position, and function.” Examples would be philology, biology, political economy, Orientalism, psychology (which asks “what is normal?” and “how to treat what isn’t considered normal, and who is to do the treating?”) The point is that knowledge is related to political and social power. Discursive formations come together from discourses; remember that they produce our subject-positions and are not the product of autonomous consciousness but of “archive” texts in the Foucauldian sense. That is, such discourses are referential; they constitute their objects and generate knowledge about them. They relate to non-discursive formations (institutions, political events, economic processes), but are partly autonomous. One can’t reduce psychoanalysis, for instance, or notions about mental health generally, to hospital procedures. Stuart Hall wants to defend cultural studies form the charge of laxness and undisciplined incorporation of theories and poorly defined objects of study, as in “anything anybody does” and “cultural studies is what the critic says it is.” But the question isn’t “who is to be master” when it comes to the field. Cultural studies is rife with tensions, and it can’t claim that its methods offer closure. Hall affirms that the origins of cultural studies are heterogeneous, and says he doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.

1900-01. In what sense are cultural studies “worldly”? First consider the complex relation to Marxism. Hall opposes monolithic, Soviet-style communism, a metanarrative that brooks no dissent. So Marxism was more of a “discursive formation” or point of departure, an enabling formation. We may recall that Foucault describes Marx as a special author along the same lines. Cultural studies as a field embraces the reality, the relative independence and significance, of what Marx didn’t deal with fully enough: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic order. Modern Marxist or Marxist-inspired critics deal with these things more successfully, though: Gramsci and Benjamin, to name a few. The difficult areas just described require theoretical “contestation” with Marxism; there is no unified, easy way to handle them. Marx is dealt with here in Hall as problematic, as a system of unspoken questions that predetermine a range of responses; a close reading of him shows gaps in the “story” Marx tells about history. As Hall writes, “The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency” (1901).

1902-03. Antonio Gramsci offers a model for expanding upon earlier Marxism. Gramsci accounts for cultural hegemony as a condition of economic domination. The “organic intellectual” is an attractive concept, but cultural studies has found it hard to explain what historical movement the it is organically connected to. It must relate its sense of belonging in the optative mode, as a kind of “optimism of the will.” Otherwise, pessimism sets in, and the cultural studies practitioner gives up the responsibility of imparting ideas refined by theoretical inquiry at the highest, cutting-edge levels. The risk is that cynicism leads to elitist intellectualism, an aestheticist attitude that ends up being like Matthew Arnold’s aloof, “disinterested,” stance, with promises to help someday by not helping now.

1904-05. Cultural studies becomes more worldly and expands by means of confrontational “interruptions.” The field becomes more vital because of such interruptions. Feminism in particular (along with criticism having to do with racial discourse) opens up cultural studies to the operations of power on the female body, not just in the public sphere but in a broader, Foucauldian sense. Feminist theory introduces questions of subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and psychoanalysis: in that way, female authors point out the blind spots in cultural studies. Without such interruptions, the men at the center of cultural studies encounter the biases that had been determining what they questions they could ask and what phenomena they could perceive. It seems that whatever doesn’t kill cultural studies makes it stronger, so to speak. This field is the dominant mode of criticism and theory today.

1906-07. Cultural studies has undergone a necessary linguistic turn; it has become imperative to deal with textuality, with representation. Who gets to “represent,” and how is representation linked to power? It is appropriate that this linguistic turn has taken place because “culture” is relatively independent from other areas, just as texts and language present themselves as self-referential, wrapped up in their own workings and devices. Culture resists easy reduction, but it also seems frustratingly involved in non-discursive realms and in the operations of “power.” Culture is displaced, decentered. So how can cultural studies, an interrupted, textualized field, make a difference in the real world? How can theoretical or intellectual work intervene in the political realm? Cultural studies is a set of discursive practices, and by now a very “textual” enterprise that respects the complexities of the objects it constitutes and examines. It is rightly dissatisfied with its failure to reconcile culture to all of the affiliations that affect it, to all of the forces that permeate it. An insistence on textuality must strain against formalization, closure, and mere self-referentiality. Theory and political questions are in tension because theory is a disturbing force; perhaps eventually theoretical examination will disintegrate structures that need disintegrating. The project of cultural studies should not constitute a withdrawal from life, as in Arnold’s aloof prescription for the culture-critic who is enjoined to carve out and protect a space for the free play of the mind. Intellectual practice can’t be entirely divorced from the realm of politics.

1908-09. Why does theory matter in the world at large? AIDS is a good example. It’s more than a disease: it is a site of struggle over the definition of political power groups. In the 1980’s, during the Reagan/Bush 41 era, this disease became a site of cultural and political struggle, with conservatives condemning “sodomites” and even refusing to acknowledge the acronym AIDS. The disease got caught up in the so-called “culture wars,” with the majority using the dreaded illness to isolate and identify its enemies and to consolidate its collective moral identity and political clout. To see this “usefulness,” one need only compare the spread of HIV/AIDS in the American 1980’s to what is now happening in Africa, Russia, and other parts of the world in the early C21, where AIDS isn’t considered a “gay disease,” even though it may be stigmatized in other ways. Other kinds of theory define their objects more rigidly and might have to exclude questions like “how are people with HIV/AIDS represented, by whom, and to what end or effect?” Would formalism or pure deconstruction be able or willing to deal with such questions? How would they define this syndrome as a legitimate object of study? At its best, cultural studies allows for contestation about real-life issues at a theoretical level that should have real-life consequences. It can do this within academic institutions and the intellectual arena generally. There has been quite a proliferation of cultural studies work in American colleges.

1910-11. Hall’s final remarks in our selection might well be compared to Gramsci’s articulation of the “organic intellectual.” Even if no organic point of reference emerges, “optimism of the will” is vital. It is necessary to think of a world in which intervention would make a difference. Avoiding cynicism is also vital since that is one threat posed by institutionalization. When a cutting-edge practice goes mainstream in the academic environment, it risks being tamed and rendered merely fashionable. Genuine insights tend to be turned into “styles,” while ventriloquists multiply and commodify those insights without much depth. Fashion works by co-opting and assimilating what has gone before. It’s best to admit the incompleteness of cultural studies as a project and to avoid complacency about its limitations. It isn’t a discipline that should not really “get comfortable about itself.” Oscar Wilde said that a map with no utopia wouldn’t be worth looking at, and while cultural studies offers no universalist theory or humanistic metanarrative to point the way towards utopian shores, the idea should at least be honored. Cultural studies isn’t opposed to the Arnoldian idea of creating a current of fresh ideas that can be brought to a larger audience’s consideration, but such fresh ideas shouldn’t be derived by means of Arnoldian disinterestedness. Instead, the field’s dissatisfaction with textual analysis as a sole means of advancement should move it forwards. On 1903, Hall had mentioned Edward Said’s idea that texts can be studied in contexts that respect their worldliness. One of cultural studies’ virtues is that it has a chance to share its dissatisfaction with traditional limitations on “appropriate” objects of study. Finally, cultural studies by no means dismisses literature, even if it de-emphasizes literature as a pure formal category or object available to formalist methodology. The “linguistic turn” in cultural studies has led to a strong interest in the analysis of literary works, and there’s no reason to suppose that if someone in that field would read Milton’s Paradise Lost the same way he or she would read a newspaper article.

Page-by-Page Notes on Homi Bhabha’s “The Commitment to Theory” (2377-97).

2379-81. Is theory only the west’s new way of constituting and containing the Other? Does its heterogeneous quality reflect a diverse globalized world? Bhabha says that isn’t necessarily so. Just as artistic media are supple means of altering our perceptions and cultural practices may be more influential than direct politicizing, theory should be acknowledged to have the same potential. The point isn’t to reaffirm a pre-colonial culture or notion of the self—things easily put down by westerners as “primitive”). Hybridity, Bhabha’s interest, doesn’t give in to polarized oppositions that have to do with race, gender, and culture generally. Cultural hybridity occurs continuously in the context of the meeting-grounds between first- and third-world countries, and it leaves neither worlds untouched. We must use the site of hybridization creatively, and in that effort, theoretical writing can help. It is not necessary, either, as Bhabha points out on 2380 (end of first paragraph), to abandon the craftsmanship proper to one’s medium. Sticking with literary methods of analysis in dealing with literary works, for instance, may be more worthwhile than deriving straightforwardly political claims from literary texts.

2383. J. S. Mill’s On Liberty shows an awareness that dissensus is part of any political system: Bhabha writes that “A knowledge can only become political through an agonistic process: dissensus, alterity, and otherness are the discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicized subject and a public ‘truth’….”

2384-85. Bhabha redefines the process that allows cultural hegemony to emerge. But the aim is not consensus amongst the members of some unified group that one has helped to forge. It is “dissensus”; so Mill’s claims on the previous page illustrate Bhabha’s vision of theory. While imagining and engaging with opponents, we find ourselves and our arguments changed, decentered. Culture and the social are not unified. Why, therefore, should we describe progress or liberation as what makes them unified? A unified politics would necessarily leave out many people. The Lacanian terms on this page reinforce Bhabha’s notion of dissensus: imaginaire refers to a phase of identifying with the specular or mirror image of oneself. Identity formation is at the same time alienating, and we never really leave this alienative process behind. Negotiation is a key term for delineating how theoretical writing and speaking can intervene in real life. Theory negotiates between antagonistic cultural forces, allows “hybrid sites” and “hybrid objectives” to emerge. Theory does not subsume cultural struggles in order to arrive at a transcendent political goal or social order; instead it works within the struggles, helping us to see hybrid goals and phenomena as they emerge. So theory is not a grand philosophical narrative, and it offers no Truth to tidy up a complex social scene. In fact, if contestants try to impose such stories, the theorizer should take them down or deconstruct them.

2386-88. The “temporality of negotiation” involves driving, maintaining directionality or movement, but there isn’t an end or beginning to the direction, and such negotiation “uses the subversive, messy mask of camouflage” rather than coming “like a pure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical historicity and pure oppositionality” (2386). See 2386 for Bhabha’s description of this directionality as progressive, socialist. His definition of theory is quite broad: “feminism, Third Cinema, whatever.” What do we realize in the process of negotiation? The many linkages between one demand and others, cross-references, how the demands involve one another. There need not be any one common goal that everyone is pursuing. Such goals tend to be imposed by the already dominant group and may in fact diminish or attenuate other goals, controlling progress in the name of power interests. What theory makes contestants or negotiators know is that there is “no space for the unitary or organic political objective.” It may sound as if Homi-World is a lot like Milton’s Inferno, with hordes of theory-devils separating themselves off and discoursing “in wand’ring mazes lost.” But Bhabha opposes political separatism that would shut down “community of interest and articulation.” Those pursuing “progress” would not, if Bhabha’s Theory has its way, be allowed to isolate themselves into separate camps. The negotiation that occurs as political objectives are represented ensures that such closure will not occur. An example is what Bhabha writes about the miners’ strike on 2387-88. What happened in that instance changed the British Labour Party, or at least suggested a need to change it: it was a “hybridity moment.” The political has an imaginative dimension in that it is a site of continual representation and articulation of objectives, where separatism and closure shouldn’t take place: “Denying an essentialist logic and a mimetic referent to political representation is a strong, principled argument against political separatism of any colour….”

2389-90. Hegemony, says Bhabha, seems in some arguments to be the precondition for governing. Always the imperative question comes up: “what is to be done?” But hegemony is not collective will; its work is iterative, displacing, differentiating (2389 top). Bhabha says that blocs must represent a collective will as their projected future if they are ever to “produce a progressive government” (2389). How do you get there from here, from the present time? What would your world and my world look like? Well, theory, which is adept at the complexities of representation and discursivity, can “perform” (is this similar to working out, educating?) the “problems of judgement and identification that inform the political space of its enunciation” At the bottom of 2389, Bhabha suggests that we consider dialogic rituals that help provide people with a sense of community. (I am not convinced because it seems that he’s being vague at this very important point in his argument.) On 2390, he again says there can be no closure in discourse, theory, or politics.

2391-93. As for post-colonial studies, Eurocentric critical theory tends to constitute non-white people as passive “others”; even in being praised or privileged, such people are “spoken for.” The same goes for the celebration of diversity; such celebration tends to isolate what it praises. But since theory is necessary, how do we avoid making it the province of Europe and the United States Academy? Bhabha argues for the relocation of our attention to historical junctures where the modern west is emerging, defining itself in meeting cultures it has colonized. Neither culture survives this process unchallenged. It’s best not to allow the west to keep promoting its unified image: it was never really so unified, something that studying the history of the colonial process should teach us. An example of the colonial process: British discursive formations meet up with Indian “translation.” The “language of the master becomes hybrid” (2393). Bhabha says that during this process, “The written authority of the Bible was challenged. . . . The Word could no longer be trusted to carry the truth when written or spoken in the colonial world by the European missionary” (2393). These claims are central to Bhabha’s optimism, so they deserve examination. Perhaps Bhabha’s ideas account for the continued ability of Indians to resist the British even as they were changed by them. But it’s also true that the resistance he describes didn’t directly end the colonial presence in India: that took quite a long time. What is the status of Gandhi? This British-trained lawyer understood British morality and held the mirror up to England’s failure to live its morality. His Satyagraha campaigns turned the tide against the imperialists. The point is that Gandhi wasn’t simply reasserting pre-colonial Indian values; he was instead working in an “in-between” space. I recall an example of Gandhi’s hybridity on the order of Wildean wit: he was asked if he liked western civilization, and he suggested that the west should try it.

The history of the British presence in India is that the East India Company went to India around 1600. The India Act of 1784 made the government responsible for India’s political and civil affairs, while the Company controlled commerce and patronage. The Sepoy soldier mutiny of 1857 came about because of British arrogance and quest of expansion of their power. They used to grease the Sepoy’s cartridges with cow fat, which was of course an insult to their Hindu beliefs. British education attacked Hindu customs, and industrialization began to change their lives. Indians became rebellious, and even taking away all of the British East India Company’s political clout didn’t keep nationalist sentiment from increasing. Gandhi came along and was able to work with that sentiment. The 1919 Act granting India further autonomy was insufficient, and independence came in 1947.

2394-95. The object to focus on is cultural difference: “Culture only emerges as a problem . . . at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races, nations.” Cultural difference, explains Bhabha, “focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation” (2394). Multiculturalism and diversity only celebrate and maintain distinctions in the service of an allegedly benign relativism, which in turn serves global late capitalism, a total system. By contrast, those who theorize the key moments of emergent cultural difference are at work undermining claims of supremacy. Such claims can only be produced discursively, in a representational space that takes and alters as much as it gives. Cultural enunciation is crossed by différance: culture, like language in Derrida’s view, is not referential, or at least not simply so. The movement of signification involves cutting off origins and final destinations or full meanings. Bhabha describes iteration as the work of hegemony; it’s not possible to repeat cultural fixities from the past because “repetition” would require an original, stable identity. On 2395, he writes, “The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation—the place of utterance—is crossed by the différance of writing.” On 2394, Bhabha defines Fanon’s “nationalism” along these lines as well: Fanon would probably agree, I believe. Even strong nationalism isn’t simply a referral back to pre-colonial traditions, it is creative, directed, tactical, forwards-looking.

2396-97. Bhabha emphasizes a post-structuralist notion of language based on “enunciation” as third space integral to culture itself. Culture is hybrid; this insight is the key to Bhabha’s internationalism. Final comments: the goal is to “emerge as the others of our selves” (2397). There’s a Nietzschean quality in Bhabha’s argument in that he makes a potentially threatening insight central to his belief in progress. The movement from colonial encounters to a post-colonial present and future is/will be difficult. It’s best not to dwell on lost unities; instead, says Bhabha, we should look forwards, move, embrace change and hybridity. At the end, Bhabha writes, “The native intellectual who identifies the people with the true national culture will be disappointed. The people are now the very principle of ‘dialectical reorganization’ and they construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress. The changed political and historical site of enunciation transforms the meaning of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future.” Perhaps, but some might say that this line of thought seems like the “textualization” that Hall is uneasy with. One could plausibly imagine darker possibilities in first/third-world relations.

Week 11, Fanon and Said

2003-04-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

Week 10, Lyotard, Habermas, Michaels

2003-04-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

Week 09, Michel Foucault

2003-03-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

Week 08, Jacques Derrida

2003-03-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

Week 07, Levi-Strauss and Barthes

2003-03-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

Notes on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes.

Page-by-Page Notes on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques.

1421. “[T]he chief had further ambitions. No doubt he was the only one who had grasped the purpose of writing.” The Nambikwara chief finds writing useful, and his take on this phenomenon seems anything but naïve. His cunning allies him with his European visitors, the “civilized” folk. But he (and therefore Lévi-Strauss) causes irritation as a result of his power play. The author is offering us a conscious agent-style story about how writing developed.

1422. “A native still living in the Stone Age had guessed that this great means towards understanding, even if he was unable to understand it, could be made to serve other purposes.” The author will write later (1424) that this understanding itself also serves the interests of power even though it seems like it should give the possessors more control over their societies.

1422-23. “The possession of writing vastly increases man’s ability to preserve knowledge. It can be thought of as an artificial memory, the development of which ought to lead to a clearer awareness of the past, and hence to a greater ability to organize both the present and the future. . . . Yet nothing we know . . . justifies this view.” Lévi-Strauss undermines one of the main ways of distinguishing between civilization and barbarism. Writing is usually linked to continuity: to a sense of history, progress, cultural values, and community. It’s generally said to offer a way of presencing a civilization.

1423-24. “My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying, or concealing the other.” Lévi-Strauss dismisses the view that writing is merely a neutral or disinterested means of making intellectual progress. There’s no such thing as Matthew Arnold’s disinterested pursuit of culture—at least with respect to literary works of art. What is the implication for literature? Well, we might suggest that literary texts make up part of the means of control: another brand of hieratic written language. Also dismissed is the notion that literacy is primarily about our regard for democratic process and self-government. As in the chief’s example, it isn’t so much what writing means to individuals as what it does within the larger cultural system.

1424. “The villagers who withdrew their allegiance to their chief after he had tried to exploit a feature of civilization . . . felt in some obscure way that writing and deceit had penetrated simultaneously into their midst.” It seems that the natives didn’t buy the chief’s sham. They resisted the hierophant’s power. They linked writing with deceitful use of power. I suppose this real-life “fable” attests to the increasingly sophisticated ways in which the link between the cultural power emblematized by “the written” and social and political control.

1425. Lévi-Strauss’s style usually downplays the presence of an entire expedition group: apparently he wants to minimize contamination so that he seems to be observing the origins of social practices such as writing. At this point, however, he mentions his wife’s presence and the illness she came down with while traveling with the group.

1426. “The Nambikwara rely, then, on the generosity of the other side. It simply does not occur to them to evaluate, argue, bargain, demand or take back.” This tendency runs counter to the cleverness of the chief—the ordinary Nambikwara prefer intuitively an economy of generosity and fair exchange. They oppose the linearity or teleological dimension writing fosters. But what is Lévi-Strauss doing by way of questioning this opposition between the civilized and the primitive, so-called? Is he trying to set forth an alternative to our “corrupt” ways, thereby reasserting the values of primitivism?

General Notes on “The Death of the Author” (1968)

In this essay, Barthes’ terms have shifted a great deal, have even undergone a sea-change from his earlier work. Now Barthes sees the concept “author” as something hostile to modern creativity and understanding. The “author,” writes Barthes, is a concept that some would use for transmitting to us directly the heavy burden of past ideas, past history, and past solutions to problems that still plague us. The “author,” with his stable corpus of “literary works” and his guardian-critics, is the repository of reactionism, of history as lowering authoritarians would have it interpreted. In this way art becomes the handmaiden of repressive political ideology and serves as history’s slave. The “scriptor,” by contrast, is merely “the one who writes,” a function of the text rather than a biological human being in control of his or her own meanings. The scriptor is a synchronic function of textuality, is well explained by the linguist, and does not bring along with it the author’s history or “diachronicity,” to use a fancy term. Rather than provide lots of answers, I’ll just ask you to complete the interpretation: to what extent has Barthes reenvisioned “structure” as something other than a closed set of differential units of meaning? If he has in fact given up on the old idea of structure as such a tidy, closed principle, what might he say is to be gained by this new way of talking in terms of “scriptors” and “texts” rather than authors and literature? Is there still a kind of intelligibility to be gained from “the death of the author” and the simultaneous “birth of the reader”? If so, what kind of intelligibility would it be?

Page-by-Page Notes on “The Death of the Author” (1968)

1466. The author signs his own “arrêt de mort” or death sentence, and the signing is an important event, bringing text and reader into contact. This act situates the text as a public code that can be appropriated only by an equally non-private reader. Barthes keeps using terms of privacy and the personal in a communal sense. He likes the idea of a pleasure-yielding encounter with texts, but wants to avoid reinforcing the social and political hierarchy usually invoked when we talk about the relationship between an individual, pleasure-seeking reader and a closed-off, authoritative literary text. As he writes, “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

1466. “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively . . . the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” Fictive writing, in other words, refers only to itself. At the bottom of this page, Barthes praises Mallarmé for his liberated stance on the disappearance of the author: “Although the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it.” Recall Walter Benjamin’s remarks in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” about aestheticism’s way of turning the text into an occult object, one with the powers of an author. Of course, Benjamin criticizes Mallarmé’s Symbolist doctrine as well. Partly what Barthes opposes is the capitalistic notion that the author of a text is its owner, upon which notion much criticism is based: “capitalist ideology . . . has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs.” And when a work is explained, he suggests, the critic treats the author as “a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.” This is obviously, in Barthes’ view, a notion apt to underlie the hieratic transmission of knowledge and culture in a manner that allows the transmitters to control their reception and use.

1467. “Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process.” The structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and others, that is, have done much to strip away old-fashioned ideas about how language works, in particular the so-called “instrumental” view that posits univocal speakers using language much as they would use, say, a hammer to drive a nail into a wooden block.
1468. “For [the modern scriptor] . . . the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” Barthes discusses the difference between linguistic inscription and expression, and finds inscription liberating. He offers us today an alternative view of 1960’s radicalism as not neo-romantic expressivism (with its emphasis on the transmission—or highly dramatized failure of transmission—of earnest meanings derived from the passionate interiority of the writer’s being), but rather a rejection of the expressive doctrine and the still- hierarchical mode of cultural transmission it implies: the author as genetic origin, pursued by critics and readers as a little god who anchors and limits the text’s meaning. By contrast, Barthes calls for jouissance. Mallarmé and the Symbolistes believed in the power not of the author but of the Word as something almost sacred. Barthes gives us a more open-ended or intertextual version of this ideal: an endlessly dynamic, non-denotative, pleasure-generating lexicon, and a kind of bliss that comes with embracing the play of signification, from reading not messages but rather “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash.” And he continues, “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” A good question might be, is this a viable model for the writer? Or is the pleasure of the text primarily an experience to be had by readers, while the text is produced in another mode? Does is matter?

1469. “[L]ife never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.” Barthes even refers to the language that subsumes the Author as an “immense dictionary.” We notice his use of a textile metaphor: the text as something woven, a tissue or fabric. This is a fine figure and it can be found as far back as Homer, whose nymphs and great ladies seem to be perpetual weavers and unweavers of the very story he tells. But Barthes writes in addition, “historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic.” Criticism seeks its object or even constitutes it, perhaps thereby serving an ideological purpose beyond the immediately literary realm.

1469. “[L]iterature . . . be refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law. So Barthes declares writing (in the new sense he gives it) a revolutionary activity, and in this it reads like a post-structuralist manifesto. But with the hindsight of four decades, this may all sound rather optimistic. Can writing bear such a burden? It’s up against some pretty stiff opposition. Can anyone simply say at a given point in history, “I pronounce the author, the autonomous self, dead”? In Barthes’ view, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The reader is the destination to which he refers. So Barthes is positing a kind of reading practice that would not reinforce any ideological narratives, one that would not make the text anchor us in a time, place, or a politics; there would be nothing to consider but the present field of play as constituted by the text. He puts the reader on what used to be the hierophantic author or critic’s level: we can experience jouissance rather than isolation, democracy rather than subordination of our desires to the imperatives of power and carefully limited meaning. A stirring declaration, no doubt—but the state of bliss Barthes promotes, I think, draws much of its power from that which it opposes, at least in the sense that the exhilaration comes from engaging in a practice that defiantly rejects hierarchy, authorship, and critical hegemony. I’m not so sure that most readers really want to experience a text that way like a fair amount of Continental theory from Barthes’ era (and today, for that matter), what we’re dealing with in “The Death of the Author” is advocacy in the guise of inevitability. Patterns of and expectations for reading surely change over time and in response to broader social, political, and technological factors, but I don’t think they change as quickly or as utterly and permanently as Barthes, writing in that momentous year of radical consciousness and uprising, 1968, implies they can. The conditions of textual production and reception are structured by all sorts of cultural, economic, and political imperatives, and it seems there’s nothing inevitable about the march towards textual jouissance or the death of the author.

1470. “[T]o give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” But again, un-repression, we might say, needs repression as its anterior condition. One might question the stability of such an achievement since it implies a notion of linearity and progress even as it celebrates play and randomness, the floating of signifiers without their settling in the realm of the signified.

Page-by-Page Notes on “From Work to Text” (1971)

1470. “The mutation in which the idea of work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than of a real break.” This is a much more cautious statement, and a less celebratory one, than what we read in the earlier essay.

1471. “The Text is not an object to be thought of as an object that can be computed. . . . the Text is experienced only in an activity of production.” The text, as Barthes characterizes it, is all activity without end; it is not something static that shores up somebody or some group’s particular ideology and interests. A stable “work,” he suggests, always supports rank and privilege, while a “text” refuses coagulations of meaning into ideology: “What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.” Further, he writes, “the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa. . . . Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.” There are other views of textuality as opposed to stable, fixed works: we might consider Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, in which texts are best seen as sites of struggle, not as a vehicle for liberation from determination by power interests. Said consistently writes of literary texts as both remarkably sophisticated and worldly productions, where voices and interests compete and can be profitably argued with by savvy readers. Said’s text is open, but retains its ideological charge, its ties to the interests of power.

1472. “The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified.” As Barthes explains, a work is bound to be thought either obvious in its meaning and therefore subject to the classificatory work of science and philology, or else it is considered mysterious and therefore the province of the various kinds of analysis: Marxist, psychoanalytic, formalist, etc. The work, then, is the ideal object for traditional education, with its need to codify and pass along fields of objective facts. Alternatively, it will require the priestly interpretive skills of the professor and critic. Barthes writes that “The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy . . . .” In this view, he is in accord with the Twentieth Century’s basic insight into the way language operates. His remark that without symbolic energy “man would die” amounts to saying that we are first and foremost linguistic beings. As he says by way of addition, “the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text restored to language . . . .”

1472-73. “The Text is plural. . . . The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.” So the text is disseminative—this idea is in radical opposition to the formalist theory and practice still more or less reigning in American literature departments in 1971, which exalts the autonomous work to the status of Barthes’ Author. The text denies the affixing and limiting qualities of language. A Barthesian text won’t let us settle on fixed concepts or referents. It is an instantiation of symbolic energy, and entails the perpetual explosion of meaning: “The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slacked off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls . . . on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below . . . what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives . . . .” The text isn’t unworldly as Barthes describes it at this point in his essay since it is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages . . . antecedent or contemporary” (1473).

1473. “The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’; the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation.” There’s no return to the originary meaning of the text, and Barthes is not interested in the private, the personal, and so forth: all of this amounts to what he calls “the myth of filiation.” On this page he also contrasts the best metaphor for works (organism) with the best one for texts: “the network.” In a network, you don’t look for a way back to the beginning, and if there’s a way out, it comes in the form of an “extension” perhaps not unlike the “combinatory systematic” of dynamic, living beings in nature. The text is in this way open-ended, and does not, says Barthes, command the “respect” that a work would—a change he considers all for the best.

1474. He writes, “The Text . . . decants the work . . . from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish . . . the distance between writing and reading . . . .” Reading should not be consumption, says Barthes: it should be production. Those trained to consume reading material in a passive manner can’t appreciate or produce texts, in his sense of that term. The advent of the critic testifies to the further progression of readerly passivity. Barthes’ reference to music is interesting in that it provides a different spin on the Paterian saying, “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Barthes is suggesting that the position of listener and producer of music used to be almost non-existent, even though things have now changed in that area of art.

1475. “the reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the ‘boredom’ experienced by many in the face of the modern (‘unreadable’) text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going.” Pleasure in works is limited: one cannot rewrite Proust’s novels. Jouissance, says Barthes, is far different because it does not depend on the author. Ultimately, it is a species of pleasure allied with sexuality: one of the significations of the French verb jouir is, as readers may know, “to experience an orgasm.”

Week 06, Gramsci and Benjamin

2003-03-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

Notes on Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin.

Notes on Antonio Gramsci’s “The Formation of the Intellectuals” from Prison Notebooks.

1138. “Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals . . . .” So each group in a given society will have its own intellectuals, those who come from within that group. Below this quotation, Gramsci suggests that the organic intellectuals of a given group will “specialize” in being generalists when it comes to society at large; i.e. an intellectual has “the capacity to be an organiser of society in general.”

1139. However, every ‘essential’ social group which emerges . . . has found . . . categories of intellectuals already in existence . . . .” So each new ruling class encounters the previous class’ functionaries, who make it appear that continuity reigns. Gramsci identifies the clergy as the “most typical” of these old but persistent classes. They don’t give way easily. Gramsci says that these categories of intellectuals have an esprit de corps; they see themselves as fully autonomous rather than beholden to the now defunct or diminished class the articulation of whose interests was once their function. They see their domain as separate from the class interests that give rise to them. One might imagine them as something like Blake’s “priesthood,” those great proponents of God’s will and promoters of “mercy, pity, peace and love” whose efforts actually prop up an authoritarian government. Except, of course, that Blake generally portrays the priesthood as viciously cynical. Gramsci is suggesting only that the old-line intellectuals have become idealists: they believe their ideas and ideals exist in some Platonic realm free of earthly bonds. Nietzsche—certainly no friend of Marxists—wrote that forgetting is essential to the process of civilization. The phenomenon Gramsci describes is one example of such forgetting: ideals breaking free of materiality.

1140. “The most widespread error of method seems to me that of having looked for this criterion of distinction in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, rather than in the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities . . . have their place with the general complex of social relations.” This view is close to structuralism in its rejection of essentialist definitions and methods. Further down, Gramsci writes that simply being capable of intellection is not the same as functioning as an intellectual professionally.

1141. What kind of organic intellectuals are needed for new proletarian class? Not, says Gramsci, a specialized rhetorician who deals only in “eloquence.” He writes, “The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists . . . in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium . . . .” The new intellectual must be grounded in technical education linked to material kinds of work, and should be “directive (specialized and political)” and not merely “specialized.” Gramsci also says that an ascendant dominant class’s own intellectuals must be available if the older, “traditional” intellectuals are to be most efficiently subsumed. Gramsci comments as follows on education: “Parallel with the attempt to deepen and the broaden the ‘intellectuality’ of each individual, there has also been an attempt to multiply and narrow the various specialisations.” This narrowing depoliticizes those who specialize; it creates a division of intellectual labor that encompasses scientists, technologists, and others who can be grouped into similar “specialized fields.”

1142. Gramsci offers a basic Marxist point about the life of intellectuals: “Naturally this need to provide the widest base possible for the selection and elaboration of the top intellectual qualifications . . . creates the possibility of vast crises of unemployment for the middle intellectual strata . . . .” The classic “contradiction” here is that a given society requires the proliferation of intellectuals so that a wide enough pool of talent will exist, but then the top people fill the necessary slots and mid-level intellectuals aren’t exactly guaranteed a job: a crisis of overproduction. As for the relationship between intellectuals and material production, Gramsci says it is “‘mediated’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘functionaries’ . . . .” Civil society and the State comprise two main levels of the superstructure. The first takes care of the hegemonic function, while the second deals with the need to effect “direct “domination of the populace. I suppose the recent term “soft power” would be a good way to describe the hegemonic operation of civil society affiliated intellectuals.

1143. Gramsci elaborates on the above point as follows: civil society functionaries enjoy a kind of prestige that generates “‘spontaneous’ consent” to the policies and worldview of the dominant group. And for those who don’t offer such consent, there’s always “state coercive power” to make them consent, or at least act as if they do. Gramsci further explains that his goal in thus expanding on Marxist thought by refining our understanding of what intellectuals do is to arrive at “a concrete approximation of reality.” In other words, this paradoxical phrase suggests, the goal is to understanding how the increasing number of people who work mainly with ideas relate to, influence, and are influenced by the material, economic activity that traditional Marxism primarily accounts for. Gramsci sees this as a vital update of traditional Marxism because “hegemony”—indirect domination and manufacture of consensus by soft power—is tremendously important to the success of capitalist societies in his time; it must, therefore, figure heavily in any Marxist account that claims to offer hope for fundamental change. If you want to change a complex reality, you must be able to describe it and analyze it with sufficient complexity. The Law and the State are by no means unimportant, but in comparison with sophisticated hegemonic operations, they are in essence mop-up components. From the administrator on up to “the creators of the various sciences, philosophy, art, etc.,” demand close attention from the critic: they are part of the total effect Gramsci calls “hegemony.”

Finally, I would suggest that the beauty of Gramsci’s scheme is to point out that even those who articulate hegemonic power see themselves for the most part as free-wheeling, independent voices. Consider the process whereby political consensus and consent are generated today in America. Talk radio and Sunday morning punditry, the work of “think tanks” in Washington D.C., and so forth are vital to this process. All you need to do is watch or listen to some of the most popular television programs to see that even when the hosts and guests are speaking what they believe to be true or at least in the best interests of the country, they serve what Gramsci would call an hegemonic purpose. The public is usually presented with a very limited set of positions on key issues, and not much attention or weight is accorded any view that does not support those positions. In effect, the more “with-it” cross-section of the public—unfortunately I can’t improve at the moment on Gore Vidal’s condescending phrase “the chattering classes”—is led (by means of high-toned discussion or bluster, depending on the program) towards certain intellectual frameworks within which to talk about issues like health care, “the war on terror,” “Iraq,” and so forth. Gramsci’s analysis reminds us that a great deal of thought in a modern republic is second-order stuff; it’s manufactured or pre-fabricated for us, and by no means the product of our own hard intellectual labor. Adam Smith, the author of that capitalist bible, The Wealth of Nations, was prescient when he suggested that more and more we would come to pay people to do certain kinds of thinking for us, just as we would pay a cobbler to mend our shoes.

A problem with standard Marxism, it has long been noted, is that it posits a naïve view that wrong will ultimately be set right, that chickens will come home to roost, and that a fraud exposed will not be tolerated. If people know the truth about class interests and their own human potential, the idea goes, they will take the reigns and accomplish their own destiny. But the market, it would appear, has outlasted the Twentieth Century’s Marxist experiments in the old Soviet Union and elsewhere, and now reigns supreme. That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect or even an adequate system if we are talking about alleviating poverty and dealing with injustice of various kinds. But it is persistent to a degree that old-line Marxism can’t deal with convincingly. Gramsci was writing in a time when thinkers such as himself were beginning to see a strong need for what we might call “Marxism 2.0”: a view that could grapple with the impressive persistence of an order Marx had thought would give way to something better in the not too distant future. So the Italian’s concentration on intellectual labor and on “hegemony” is his attempt to provide us with that new view.

Notes on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

„Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.“ (1936)

Benjamin is interested in the potential of new technical media to transform people’s perceptions. Art is a politically relevant social phenomenon in Benjamin’s view; it can serve the interests of the working class. He wants an art for the people, not just for critics and collectors or reactionary highbrows. He sees the potential in modern technical reproducibility for the liberation of art from the tyranny of outmoded ways of thinking and behaving: nostalgia for bygone days can be wiped away. Marx had characterized our enjoyment of ancient art as more or less nostalgic, as if, by implication, we might remain too fond of (and perhaps, therefore, mystified by) the old contexts that produced such classical art but that can never return.

New media that have developed during the capitalist era are better suited to the working class. The big question is whether this transformative potential will realize itself or whether it must give way to forces of assimilation. Who owns culture? In keeping with Marxist arguments against essentialist definitions of human nature, Benjamin opposes a universal, eternal way of seeing, hearing, presenting and receiving art. Our perceptions change over time, and historical experience alters them as well for whole classes. The split or division between science and art is beginning to seem bridgeable. That possibility is important to Benjamin because for him, a completely anti-technological art will probably be reactionary, isolated, bourgeois in its tendencies. The processes of mechanical reproduction of art works seems to play something like the role of Coleridgean imagination: it breaks up old verities and realigns and combines them in vital new ways, transforming perceiver and perceived in the process. Again, who owns culture? Ideally, nobody: it should be a shared experience, not an isolated meditative refuge from life, not a safe House Beautiful for the intellectual offspring of the middle class, those dissenters from within who so often end up as “apolitical” guardians of high culture and the old order for which it stands.

1168. “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.” And further down, “Even the most perfect work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” In The Poetics, Aristotle suggests that we can either appreciate a work of art or representation because it resembles the original or because it is pleasing in its own right. Benjamin uses “reproduction” in a similarly broad sense: our response to art need not be based on its status as a faithful copy or as a material object embedded in its original time and culture. The “reproduced” work of art is free from the tyranny of the original time and place in something like the manner Aristotle ascribes to the pleasing formal qualities of a painting or statue, regardless of how faithfully it represents an object in nature. We may not, as he says, “happen to be familiar with the original” in nature or in the human realm. Imitation ties us closely to nature and makes us forget, we might say today, that art doesn’t have to copy nature at all; to treat something artificial as if it were natural is one definition of ideological mystification.

1169. “The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility.” The authenticity/inauthenticity binary opposition isn’t invoked by the new technical means of reproduction. If you hand-paint a copy of a painting by one of the Old Masters, you’ve perpetrated a forgery; not so if you make an excellent “copy” by mechanical means. Benjamin goes on to suggest that a photo, for instance, doesn’t re-present the copy in a way that calls for mimetic analysis. He says that a photograph or phonograph recording “enables the original to meet the beholder halfway.” What exactly is meant by “authenticity”? Well, says Benjamin, “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” In art, authenticity is not a given. It is part of the historical process: the work is authenticated in relation to a certain tradition. Further, writes Benjamin, “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Plurality of copies replace the original object, for which there is no call to return: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition,” and thereby “reactivates the object reproduced” in a new an perhaps liberating context. Consider an audiotape or CD recording of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik: you don’t have to go to an antiquated (or even new) concert hall, but can instead listen to Mozart’s music in your car or while you work at your computer. (In fact, I’m listening to a Haydn symphony as I type these notes on my laptop.) Conditions of reception can change, for better or for worse: we aren’t tied by iron chains to traditional settings, critical norms of reception, and so forth. Listening to Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven, or viewing a digitized copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper (available at http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/), Benjamin might say, releases the work from original contexts and interpretive frameworks, and makes it possible to see or hear a technically reproduced work of art differently. In its original context or embeddedness, the art object helps to naturalize the sociopolitical order and representational conventions that made it possible for that unique object to be produced. But if detached from that order, it can speak anew.

1170. “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” Perception isn’t merely natural or given, but instead it changes with “historical circumstances.” Further down the page, Benjamin addresses the meaning of the key term, “aura” with an analogy drawn from natural scenery: “We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” So we get the sense of a distance between ourselves and the object. I presume he means something like a halo, which is a matter of acoustics and atmospherics, if we look to etymology. The English and German aura are derived from the Greek noun aura (wind, breeze) and probably from aer(upper air, ether). There’s a connotation of distinctiveness and even mystical quality, in some usages.

1171. Benjamin writes of “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” He is optimistic that “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.” So the common person in Benjamin’s time (the 1930’s, here) wants to bring artistic objects closer, to “make it new,” to embrace change. They want to overcome uniqueness in favor of equality, or what Benjamin calls a “sense of the universal equality of things.” This constitutes a profound democratization of sensory experience and of “sensibilities” more broadly—a shift away, I suppose, from a more primitive mode of perception that endows objects of perception with unique essences and mysterious value. For the Marxist-allied Benjamin, this revolution of perceptions and sensibilities is filled with potential to transform the social sphere. The work of art is beginning to respond to and shape the proletariat’s perceptions; this is a collective and not merely an individual change, as romantic theorists seem to have posited. Of course, it might be said that in the way lie some very powerful obstacles to such transformation, forces that work to maintain the auratic distance-effect.

1172. Benjamin describes aestheticism as an escapist, apolitical “negative theology”: with the advent of photography and the coming-on of socialism in the Nineteenth Century, he explains, “art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.” He identifies Mallarmé as the earliest continental theorist in this vein. Of course, in both the continental and English traditions there’s an anti-utilitarian, anti-moralist line going back at least to the dandies and incroyables, admirably summed up by Oscar Wilde in the statement, “All art is quite useless.” But it’s probably true to suggest that Mallarmé the symbolist poet and critic states the aestheticist credo to its fullest, most theological degree. Benjamin sees all of this as mystery-propagating, cultic priestcraft in an almost Blakean sense: direct perception of truth, even direct experience, must be kept always from the public’s grasp and posited as something distant, auratic, mysterious, to be controlled and doled out in limited amounts, if at all, by a privileged few who share the old order’s social and political power.

We might reflect on the case of English fin de siècle decadence and aestheticism here. Even in a savvy theorist such as Wilde, who saw in art a “disturbing and disintegrating” power that might produce radical change in the sensibilities of those who engage intensely enough with it (just as his old professor Walter Pater would have it—a proper experience of art demands the right temperament, one that allows sufficient openness to intensity of thought and feeling and perception), the question of audience breadth remains. It might be said that while Pater’s and Wilde’s books actually sold quite well, the general effect they exerted amounts to “preaching to the choir” rather than changing the hearts and minds of millions of people. Benjamin would probably say such authors still play an essentially priestly role because they don’t appeal to the collectivity; they appeal only to fairly limited numbers of individuals as individuals, even as bourgeois “consumers.”

1173. At a certain point in the age of technical reproducibility, writes Benjamin, art’s “fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.” Art has gone from being prehistoric magic to “art” to a new, collective field of experience more suitable to ordinary people. The photographic portrait, he suggests, is the last bastion of the old auratic, cultic valuation of art: the countenance shot remains tied to that which it reproduces: the actual human face, often the image of a departed loved one for whom someone may mourn. Benjamin makes a very interesting point when he says that Eugène Atget’s photos of emptied Paris streets remove the portrait’s lingering auratic effect and instead challenge the viewer to contemplate what is presented in a less melancholy, passive way: “exhibition value” now trumps “ritual value,” and Atget captures the moment when this happens, so to speak.

1174. “When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever.” No more theories about art’s absolute autonomy or elite value should have come forwards. However, says Benjamin, the early theorists of film don’t seem able to grasp what has happened, and that’s why authors such as Abel Gance, he says, write of film as if it were a resurgent mode of ancient hieroglyphic writing. Some theorists insist that “you just can’t talk about film” as if it presented some ultimate mystery, an equivalent for pure expression, etc. That kind of talk would make film an experience to be indulged in only by a privileged few, not by the man whose interests Benjamin means to promote. A destabilizing new medium provoked reactionary theories about photography and film.

1175. Now Benjamin turns to film in earnest. He writes, “The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.” Further down, he says that “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.” The medium, then, dematerializes the actor and fragments or detaches the performance given. It seems that a movie camera is inherently transformative and denaturalizing—so much so, suggests Benjamin, that Pirandello is quite right to say that “The film actor . . . feels as if in exile . . . his body loses its corporeality.” (Scorsese’s early film Taxi Driver is intriguing in this regard: the camera shots actually labor to make us identify with the camera, and indeed Travis, the film’s antihero, perceives and registers things much like a camera, taking in almost literally everything as he goes through life.)

1176. According to Benjamin, “for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.” An example: some time ago I attended a performance of King Lear at UCLA’s Royce Hall starring that remarkable Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen. And there’s no doubt of the auratic effect Benjamin imputes to actual stage performances: aside from one’s physical distance from the stage (my seats weren’t the best in the house, but they were adequate), I felt the distance-effect at work. Watching a DVD performance on my bedroom television, I don’t experience the same distancing effect. Paradoxically, a film performance seems more “real” and immediate than a play put on by real, eminently “auratic” actors. I’ve long said that what’s shown on film seems to be happening directly, while what happens on the stage invites a certain aesthetic and reflective distance. But Benjamin at the moment is focusing on the sensibilities of the film actor: “The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances.” Of course, anyone who has ever seen one of those “behind the scenes” documentaries about the making of a film knows this to be true: films are shot in short, fragmented scenes, for the most part, and they don’t generally take place in linear sequence, either. So no, an actor certainly would not get the same sense of acting in a stage play from Act 1 through Act 5: his or her role would be broken up into many “bit parts,” not experienced as an integral performance.

1177. “The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.” Benjamin recognizes that capital has got hold of film already, even in 1936. It promotes a new way of making art special, though not exactly “distant” from the masses: the “film star effect.” The effect is really that of slick packaging: actors become “hot properties” who images and actions may be consumed by an eager public. Thus the aftermarket campaigns of blockbuster films that sell all sorts of trinkets related to the film: caps, clothing, posters, and whatnot. The tabloid and industry presses further promote what Benjamin calls “the spell of the personality.” Whatever can a famous actor (or prominent politician—see Benjamin’s footnote allusion to Mussolini and Hitler, those camera-loving dictators) do to escape the paparazzi? Not much, it seems. We may hope that Wilde’s dictum is some consolation: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”—or photographed, in this case.

1177-78. Farther down on 1177, Benjamin mentions writers: “For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century.” In his extensive footnote, Benjamin refers to Aldous Huxley’s rather Wildean complaint about the supposed proliferation of hack writers producing worthless books, while the number of truly talented authors remains as limited as ever. “The mode of observation is obviously not progressive,” adds Benjamin to fine comic timing at the end of Huxley’s lengthy pronouncement. Indeed, what Huxley says sounds a lot like Wilde’s elitist quip: “In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” In Benjamin’s view, this desire to protect art from the ignorant public is downright reactionary; proponents of it see the increasing availability of literature and other kinds of art as a contemptible effort on the part of “the market” to supply simulacra for works of true genius, thus meeting the demands of an eager but not-too-choosy public. Well, the view described is hardly new: Gissing’s New Grub Street is a delightful instance of it, and we may recall that many a complaint resounded about “Fleet Street Hacks” all the way back to the Eighteenth Century. Periodical literature’s development was long the target of more or less elitist criticisms.

1178. As for film, “In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced.” As we have seen, Benjamin takes issue with “high culture” notions and practices; he sees them not as uplifting but rather as reifying (“thingifying,” lending solidity to) outmoded ways of thinking, doing, and relating. The potential is with ordinary working people, and the medium of film in particular should serve their interests and allow them to participate in the productive processes that goes into the making of modern art.

1178-79. Benjamin points out a radical difference between stage productions and the shooting of a film: if you attend a film shoot, you would never at time be free of the sight of instruments such as cameras, lighting, and staff people. So it would be nowhere evident just how the remarkable “reality” of the finished product was created. Not so with a stage play: “In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary.” I am not certain exactly what is meant here, unless Benjamin is just saying that when we go to a play, we allow ourselves what Coleridge had called a “willing suspension of disbelief” whereby we at least partly allow the play’s dialog and action to wash over us as if it were “really happening.” Well, as Dr. Johnson’s noteworthy tautology goes, the drama is “credited with all the credit due to a drama” (Norton 478). The illusion isn’t complete, (as Johnson’s mimetic language goes on to emphasize), but Benjamin’s point seems to be that we don’t fasten onto the stage trappings like bulldogs and ignore the compelling, integral live performance before us. Its wholeness is itself goes a long way towards generating an illusionistic effect. But in the case of film, we must go to the cutting floor to find out how the reality-effect originates. The slicing and dicing that take place there, says Benjamin, means that “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.” The cameraman “penetrates deeply into [the web of reality],” says Benjamin, and the initial fragments are then “assembled under a new law.” Technological processes work together to generate an all but seamless reality-effect, the one we enjoy at the theater or even, nowadays, on our television screens. It’s as if what had been the function of Coleridgean imagination—namely the dissolving, dissipating, and diffusing of the objects of perception in order to create of them something new—has been taken over by complementary technological processes. The camera and the cut act like the human imagination. New media and new technologies call forth and speak to new ways of perceiving and understanding.

1179. At the bottom of the page, Benjamin says that “The progressive reaction [of the masses to art] is characterize by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance.” In a sense, “everybody’s a critic”: the public obliterates the privileged position of the critic, and the barrier between experts and passive consumers of art breaks down. (Silly aside: I’ve noticed that people today take this “instant expert” business to extremes: at the stage production of King Lear I mentioned above, I was driven to just short of Lear-like howling madness by a number of people around me during the intermission who sounded like rival film directors bent on pseudo-deconstructing Trevor Nunn’s every move. This wasn’t quite right, that was a bit off, such-and-such didn’t work for me, etc. I wanted to shout, “would you just STFU and enjoy the play already?! I suppose that puts me in league with Aldous Huxley....)

Some reflections on Benjamin’s optimism here and elsewhere in the essay: Benjamin’s hopes are attractive, but as he seems to know very well, film and photography, like everything else, are subject to capitalism’s (now we would generally use the term “late capitalism”) perhaps infinitely creative ways of assimilating cultural objects initially endowed with transformative potential: dispersal, deflection, diffusion, spin, co-optational imitation, etc. The market swallows up and renders useful whatever threatens it: new trends in fashion, youth’s innovations in music and culture, new ways of looking at sexuality, etc. Hip-hop and Malcolm X memorabilia, racy images of Che Guevara, and all that sort of thing. Nothing sells like radicalism and rebellion in a consumerist society, nicht wahr? The Internet offers a great deal of promise, I think, in fostering new (as well as real-time, immediate, “non-auratic”) communities not dependent on the political or cultural authorities for validation—though I wouldn’t take that notion to the level of some techno-yea-sayers and John-the-Baptist types who think that the Net is going to transform the world into a democratic paradise. Blogs and other such phenomena are being rapidly, if only partially, commercialized. FaceBook and MySpace—which to this middle-aged fogy seem like a massive and intolerable self-inflicted privacy wound—are no doubt blending the personal with the commercial in ever-new and fascinating ways. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” as Jerry Seinfeld and his crew would say.

1180. Benjamin suggests that the conditions of presentation determine the public’s response: “Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.” The question here is, who “owns” art? Whose reactions are valid? The individual, private response is not likely to promote progressive change, tied as it is to modes of presentation that discourage communal response and encourage hierarchical reception and elucidation. A surrealist painting on display at LACMA has no chance of getting the kind of response a popular film can get at a big theater. It is treated as a precious object, and while the viewer may stand very close to it, there’s always that auratic distance-effect of which Benjamin writes.

1181. Here Benjamin characterizes “the mutual penetration of art and science,” saying, “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So film and photographic magnification can reveal a new nature, and we can immediately explore this new reality. Today’s high-resolution digital cameras are available to anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare, and the effect Benjamin describes is stunningly apparent in the images obtainable with such cameras. The technology Benjamin has been writing about wasn’t developed for the revolutionary purposes he wants to connect them to; they came from capitalist productive processes and developed to the point where they might be enlisted in the cause Benjamin favors. In his view, the new media mean that critical understanding need not be kept separate from ordinary people and their ordinary enjoyment of art. To some degree, Benjamin posits the healing of a rift that widened between technology and human desire at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. (Wordsworth’s rhetoric on Norton 658 testifies to Romantic sensitivity to that rift.) There’s no need, he argues, to cast art as a flight from unpleasant reality, or as the preserver of essences and mysteries. The new kinds of art now emerging can help to align our perceptual processes and sensibilities with change for the better, with progress.

1182. As for the Dadaists, says Benjamin, they “attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.” As a modern rock band used to say, “Stop making sense!” The Dadaists wanted to make radical inroads against the very concepts of “value” and “experience.”

1183. On this page, Benjamin returns to the contrast between elite high culture and the people. It’s common to insist, he says, that while “the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” His comeback to that criticism is “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. . . . In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” The people absorb the non-auratic work rather than being absorbed by or diminished in its auratic presence. (A fun example of this aesthetic absorption effect is Wilde’s Dorian Gray—this young man wishes his soul onto a canvas and into a portrait in exchange for the promise of eternal youth. He aims to live irresponsibly as a private man while yet interacting with others as untouchably superior to them.)

1183-84. Architecture is Benjamin’s prime example in this section: people encounter fine buildings in their daily lives, and use them in a state of “distraction.” That is, they aren’t going to the buildings to contemplate them aesthetically; they have everyday things to do. Further, says Benjamin, “Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight.” This is important because, in his estimation, habit rather than free contemplation is the most important way to accomplish “the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history. . . .” We learn to do new things not all at once but by means of gradually acquiring habits, and the way people deal with buildings is largely a matter of habits formed during their “distracted” life experiences with them. As Benjamin says, “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Criticism (and we might even invoke the old term “taste” here) is part of everyday life; further, it isn’t something primarily individual and rarified but is instead a collective enterprise. Analysis need not be reified or specialized as the province of “the masters of them that know.” And yet it is still, to borrow a Gramscian term, “directive.”

1184-85. At this point Benjamin turns to the Fascist ideology besetting Europe in the 1930’s. Mussolini had long since taken over Italy, and Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933. Benjamin describes Fascism as an expressive theory for the externally organized masses: a carefully stage-managed and directed upwelling of Romantic sentimentality, aided of course by technology. Benjamin writes, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” He goes on to explain that Fascism very effectively aestheticizes political life. Some of us will have seen filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s diabolically brilliant films Die Olympiade (about the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and her 1935 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), which propagates the Führer-Kult view of Hitler and his Nazi Party: “Vor uns liegt Deutschland, in uns marschiert Deutschland, und hinter uns kommt Deutschland!” (“Before us lies Germany, in us marches Germany, and behind us Germany follows!”) Hitler created a command economy in Germany, allowing the big industrial manufacturers to make a profit so long as they made what he wanted them to (mostly guns, tanks, and bombs—forget the “Volkswagen in every garage” promise). He also enlisted talented people like Riefenstahl and whoever designed his torchlight rallies and parades—a little net research reveals that Albert Speer designed the famous “Cathedral of Light” for the 1936 “Party Rally of Honor” (see http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/pt36p.htm, and the home page for the German Propaganda Archive is http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/.) War became the chief organizing principle of German life: war is a wicked thing, but there’s little doubt that it generates lots of employment and gives people a sense of collective purpose. Hitler clearly understood that government could be reduced to a couple of key functions: a protection racket (get behind me, surrender your will and freedoms to me and I’ll protect you from our big bad enemies) and a means of collective aspiration and expression for otherwise depressingly ordinary individuals.

Benjamin explains that Hitler even managed to turn war itself into a work of art. (That goes beyond even Jacob Burckhardt’s notion that during the Renaissance, the state started to become an aesthetic production.) As Benjamin says, “The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ.” His point is that imperialist violence stems from our not knowing how to use our productive potential wisely and efficiently: we don’t put our efforts into benignly improving our natural environment, but instead just start killing one another and fighting over allegedly “scarce” resources. “Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” is Benjamin’s description of Fascist logic: “let there be art, and let the world perish.” The “self-alienation” of humanity, says Benjamin, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” If Fascism has enlisted the photograph and the film into its aesthetic politics, Benjamin’s essay has been about liberating it from that appropriation.

Week 05, Brooks, Wimsatt & Beardsley

2003-02-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt & W. M. Beardsley. Brooks’ “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn (1350-65), and “The Formalist Critics” (1366-71). Wimsatt & Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1371-87) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1387-1403). General Notes on Cleanth Brooks’ “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn (1350-65).

The New Criticism. Our editors mention the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand (1930). John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate were sympathetic with an agrarian and anti-scientific, anti-industrial movement in the South. This kind of philosophy goes way back to the Southerners who opposed the new party of Lincoln—the railroad and banking interests, etc. So the formalism that develops may be in part a way to reassert the old values – states’ rights and artistic autonomy, to put it crudely. These authors oppose utilitarianism’s vulgar notion of language as denotative, and education as immediately useful for all the wrong reasons—making money, for the most part.

If you read through the book mentioned above, you’ll find one of the authors decrying the way Northern capitalists have turned the educational system into a means of churning out factory workers—everybody gets what passes for an education, but it’s the kind of education that only crams facts into people’s heads, and doesn’t teach them in the C18 Enlightenment or Renaissance humanist fashion to make proper use of their leisure. In fact, leisure becomes either time to fill up with competition or mere dissipation—not something productive that envelops one’s entire existence, work included. In this sense, the Brooksian way of experiencing a poem could be traced back to Kantian disinterestedness, Schiller’s play drive, and other formulations that deal with art as an experience of our mind’s freedom from being determined by nature or by our fellows. It isn’t so much that we are free to say anything we like about the poem, but rather that if we approach it with due regard for its connotative workings and formal integrity, we will be granted an authentic experience of a very different kind than we can have in the busy everyday world, where everything is done for some other purpose beyond itself. Poetry is an end in itself, and we are privileged to see that we, too, can exist in this fashion—just as that Southern planter worked only to gain leisure, not to amass a pile of wealth or show off to the neighbors.

The New Critics emphasize connotativeness and figuration. The connotative aspect of language is better suited to human nature, more likely to improve us, than any number of facts. But it is worth keeping in mind that the background of American formalism is Southern Agrarianism. Many of us have been trained to offer “close readings,” so we have been exposed to this kind of idea. Of course, the best formalists are the ones who don’t entirely follow their own prescriptions. That is, they don’t ignore history or biography. Read Abrams’ Mirror and the Lamp, for instance. No method or system humans devise is perfect, after all, so it’s best not to be rigid.

Moreover, the New Critics rebel against purely biographical and historical criticism. I recall the old anecdote about the Harvard professor who ends an analysis-free, history-biography-psychology-filled lecture with “damn fine poem, men, damn fine poem.” But there is something almost scientific about the way formalists describe the critic’s task—which is paradoxical, given their opposition to industrialism and scientism. They find it necessary to theorize in terms that the scientific or modern mind can understand.

The formalists transfer romantic claims about the genesis and value of poetry to the text itself. They want to purge the romantic metaphysics and keep the claims about art’s value to keep humanity together. So we still get a stirring defense of the poetic word, without any romantic talk about inspiration or genius. The poetic symbol is critical; poetry is a site for the recovery of common passions that link people together in a community—it is therapeutic. Brooks insists he does not see poetry as therapeutic, but his theory as a whole belies this claim. Let’s go through the Norton selection “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn; see my page-by-page notes below.

Summary Observations: Brooks’ main points are that a good poem’s formal structure has all the integrity of a biological organism. Poetry is autonomous or self-contained and is not therapeutic in any way that critics need concern themselves with. Poetic language thrives upon connotation, not denotation, and irony and paradox are central to poetic structure because they are the way poetry “warps” and transforms ordinary language into meanings rich and strange. Anglo-American formalism is to some extent humanistic since it transfers the romantic exaltation of poetic imagination to the language of the poem. An irony of formalist discourse is that although it generally tries to carve out a space for the study of literature in a world obsessed with the scientific paradigm, it is compelled to do so mainly in terms acceptable to science.

1355. “Unless one asserts the primacy of the pattern, a poem becomes merely a bouquet of intrinsically beautiful items.” This statement is very similar to what Matthew Arnold says in the “Preface” to his own 1853 Poems. Earlier than that, during the C18, poetry was rhetorical, a matter of formal eloquence: poetry as prescription for what we should believe or do. (Think of Pope’s finely chiseled couplets: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.”) Poetry should not be a collection of isolated, even if excellent, lines. Brooks continues that “The structure meant is certainly not ‘form’ in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which ‘contains’ the ‘content’.” The term “form,” therefore, means structure. The meaning isn’t outside the poem. It is generated within the poem, which is a largely self-sufficient meaning system. As Brooks explains, “The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.” The poem’s structure works rather like Coleridge’s power of imagination: it “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative,” etc. (681). A poem doesn’t cancel tensions or give us reductive propositions; it unifies and harmonizes things otherwise discordant, and preserves the richness and complexity of experience. A poem is a formal object that allows us to understand it only on its own terms, which it generates from within itself. (We may remember Coleridge’s claim that the symbol delivers “multeity in unity.”) Brooks writes, “The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.” All of this is very similar to Coleridge.

1356-1357. Brooks does not agree that poetry makes referential statements. When this claim is set forth, “the critic is forced to judge the poem by its political or scientific or philosophical truth; or, he is forced to judge the poem by its form as conceived externally and detached from human experience.” As the romantics say, genius works according to its own laws; Coleridge declares in “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” “No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form.” Brooks gives us the same claim, the same organic metaphor, without the direct spiritual overtones since he is talking about poetic language, not the mind of the poet. Poetry’s meaning is dependent on its own contexts and connotations—it need not refer to the world of denotation. Whatever the outside context of a poem or play may be, the essentials of that outside context need to be transformed into terms intrinsic to the work itself. As Brooks puts the matter, “[W]hatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the ‘meaning’ of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifying and revising it.” What would have been a scientific or denotative statement must be submitted to the poetic process, which, again to borrow from Coleridge on secondary imagination, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create” (676).

At the bottom of 1356, Brooks writes, “let the reader try to formulate a proposition that will say what the poem ‘says.’ As his proposition approaches adequacy he will find, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to fill itself up with reservations and qualifications—and most significant of all—the formulator will find that he has himself begun to fall back upon metaphors of his own in his attempt to indicate what the poem ‘says.’ In sum, his proposition, as it approaches adequacy, ceases to be a proposition.” So if we try to paraphrase a poem, the paraphrase keeps leading us back to the original situation, to the context, to the connotative aspects of the text’s language. Poetry has to do with metaphor and figure, and it does not refer to the world in utilitarian contexts. It generates its own contexts. Towards the bottom of 1357, Brooks says that we tend “to take certain remarks which we make about the poem …for the essential core of the poem itself…. [Form] and content, or content and medium, are inseparable.” We will see how Brooks continues to make his case in the next few pages, but in general, he (like Wordsworth in his “Preface”) emphasizes how good poetry links disparate experiences vitally, and how it rejects artificial, abstraction-dependent language that doesn’t speak to common human nature. He emphasizes the autonomy and integrity of the text, even to the point where the formalist critic becomes something of a natural scientist, describing how that “acorn-poem” grows into an “oak-poem,” or observes how it holds together as an organic unity. It’s fair to ask, “But how can a poem be a hermetically sealed meaning system? How can it be an autonomous object to the extent that formalists think it can?” For heuristic ease, I suppose, most teachers treat literary works as if the formalist view were more or less correct, but when it comes to “doing theory,” why, notions of organic wholeness are “a whole ‘nother matter”: today, few critics would insist on the completeness and near self-referentiality of an invidual work of art.

1358-59. “To refer to the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside the poem.” Brooks argues at 1359 top that if we try to maintain a distinction between form and content, “we bring this statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology.” We cannot win at that game. Trying to make poetry yield objective knowledge will always fail. It would be best to recognize that literature connects us to another dimension of language, one perhaps most proper to us as human beings. At 1359 bottom, Brooks offers several metaphors for poetic structure: “The essential structure of a poem... resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.” We may see tensions in a building’s structure, but the edifice stands and it is beautiful—consider arches, flying buttresses, and so forth. Perhaps Brooks’ rhetoric here will remind us of John Ruskin’s spiritualized way of interpreting architecture in The Stones of Venice. As for Brooks’ comparison between poetry and music, we don’t take musical notes as representations of anything else; it is obvious that with music we can’t distinguish between form and content. Brooks will develop indirectly another dimension of the music metaphor later on, when he insists that although poetry certainly involves emotion, that quality is embodied in the poem and need not be traced to the author. Music, too, seems to generate its own affective or emotional weather: we all know Beethoven was “a stormy romantic genius,” that he was passionate and moody; but somehow, when we listen to his “Moonlight Sonata” or the Fifth Symphony, there’s no need to get behind the delightful notes and ask, “how do I connect Beethoven’s personal feelings with these notes?” The notes engender and embody feeling, so to speak—we don’t look outside the music for an explanation. Brooks evidently thinks language should be treated with the same respect.

1360-1361. The third metaphor Brooks offers is that of drama. Here again, we feel comfortable not referring opinions and feelings back to the artist, but even more importantly, “conflict” is built right into plays. What the characters say gets its value from how the words relate to other characters and events in the play. As Samuel Coleridge declares, “a willing suspension of disbelief” governs our response to poetry—we do not insist that it refer directly to life. We take it as a genuine experience in its own right. Brooks deals with the notion of unity in poetic composition as follows: “The characteristic unity of a poem... lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet has ‘come to terms’ with his experience.... the conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means—by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not a formula” (1361). The play must resolve its own conflicts within the contexts that it has itself established. Then Brooks considers attitudes and feelings, saying that “the effective and essential structure of the poem has to do with the complex of attitudes achieved.” Again and as Coleridge would agree, a drama or poem “balances and reconciles opposite or discordant qualities.” It does not cancel out the complexity and richness of life, but preserves it in a publicly accessible manner, in the structure of a work of art. What is most worthwhile in terms of thought and feeling should not be allowed to collapse into a private world, a private sanguage (solipsism). Brooks is offering another means of salvaging humanism, one more compatible with scientific demands than were older kinds of humanism.

1362-63. Brooks does not make extravagant claims about poetic language, the power of figure and connotation. He professes, “I have in mind no special ills which poetry is to cure.” Poetry is not therapeutic. On 1363, Brooks renders somewhat more precise what he means by the sort of sea change language undergoes in literature: “[I]rony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in the context receive from the context.” He explains below that the “terms of science are abstract symbols which do not change under the pressure of the context. They are pure (or aspire to be pure) denotations; they are defined in advance” (1363). But in poetry things are different: “When we consider the statement immersed in the poem, it presents itself to us, like the stick immersed in the pool of water, warped and bent.” What would Friedrich Nietzsche say about Brooks’ acceptance of scientific terminology as pure denotation, as language that simply gets out of the way or points to absolute reality? Essentially, Brooks accepts the scientific outlook and its understanding of language. This acceptance combines with the hardening of the binary opposition between poetry and science. The formalist method objectifies emotion in order to preserve it. It flattens out what the romantic critics posited as depth of soul. Feeling is embodied in the poem; feeling does not involve reference back to the human author.

1364-65. Brooks cites John Donne’s poetry as a good example of irony and in general of the warping of language within poetic contexts. Donne employs logic, to paraphrase Brooks, “to fight the devil with fire.” That author “proves his vision by submitting it to the fires of irony—to the drama of the structure—in the hope that the fires will refine it.” In other words, “the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the complexities and contradictions of experience.” (Brooks’ direct quotation from Robert Penn Warren.) He continues that “It is not enough for the poet to analyze his experience as the scientist does, breaking it up into parts, distinguishing part from part, classifying the various parts. His task is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the unity of the experience itself as man knows it in his own experience” (1364-65). Such claims are reminiscent of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Percy Shelley in the way that they contrast the man of science with the poet. (See, for example, Wordsworth’s remark that “The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor” or Shelley’s statement that “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know…we want the poetry of life” [658 and 712, respectively].)

At 1364 bottom, Brooks makes a qualified statement about the experiential status of a poem: “The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an ‘imitation’—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” Archibald Macleish had said much more directly, “A poem should not mean but be.” And on 1365, Brooks tells us that the poet is “giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which, at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern.”

That’s an impressive claim for a critic who insists that poetry is not or should not be therapeutic. It is every bit as grand a claim—again stripped of metaphysical overtones—as the ones made by the romantic poets a century and a half before Brooks. The poet will deliver to us something science cannot give and, perhaps, something we had thought was utterly lost—a sense that all experience is unified. We derive this sense from a species of encounter with language unavailable to us when we use it in other ways. We might ask just how different any of this really is from romantic emphasis on a renewal of spirit and a revivification of language by means of poetic encounters. How much does transferring the concept of “interiority” from the poet to the poem differentiate new critical formalism from romantic expressivism? And does Brooks’ doctrine still seem compelling when it comes at the expense of separating poetic language from the world of reference? Wordsworth had argued that his poetry employed “the language really used by men,” which at least had the virtue of not separating poetic language from ordinary life. (Of course, the concept of selection was vital to Wordsworth—he was not claiming to deliver ordinary language unaltered.) Some critics of Brooks might say that you cannot leave things at this level, that you must reconnect words with the world if your theory is to be compelling. They might say you cannot just claim by means of a discussion of something so two-dimensional as “structure” that poetic language preserves human potential and interiority. Why, the skeptical reviewer wants to know, should we preserve this connotative potential of language if doing so is not somehow good for us?

Oddly enough, Brooks’ New Critic defense of poetry in the name of its formal, structural properties shares a common problem with the art for art’s sake movement of the 1890s. When it comes to authors such as Oscar Wilde, one either “gets it” or one doesn’t. If someone says, “aesthetical poses and shocking forms of art don’t do much for me,” the aesthete will just keep doing the same thing and dismiss that person as a philistine. But obviously, Brooks is writing this essay because he wants to change people’s minds and bring them over to his views about the nature and value of poetry. He is in fact defending poetry, just like a long line of critics and poets before him. That is unarguably a humanistic enterprise. He is interested in poetry as mediating between a modern, scientific way of understanding the world and another, more ancient one that seems to have much going for it. Movements based on shock and confrontation—including modernism, to be sure—share this problem. They’re trying to preserve older, metaphysical, spirit-suffused notions about humanity without really believing in the old philosophical terms that made it possible to “come right out and say it.” A metaphor for meat-lovers: are we getting turkey or tofurkey here? As I suggest in my general remarks and as I learned from Prof. Michael Clark at UC Irvine, the formalists talk about literature as its own place, an autonomous realm that critics, even though they are no scientists, can analyze with much the same precision as a scientific researcher. They find themselves defending literature as relevant in the terminology lent to them by an imperious scientific paradigm, which paradigm or course they say is opposed to or very different from that of the arts. But this maneuver may only further isolate literature as something separate from the main part of life, as something we can study with clinical precision but not really connect with any other area of our lives. So how does such a program of criticism change the way people see their world and their place in it? Of course, those who make such remarks may be expecting formalist critics to accomplish more than they themselves find possible.

Here’s a very simple formulation: “we” (critics, students of art and literature) say that literature and art are worthwhile. But in order to get our point across, we must describe this worthwhileness in terms acceptable to the scientific/academic community. Doing so only makes us look more isolated and tangential, and not relevant to the community at large. True, the public’s notions may be less “romantic” and more “scientific” and compartment-happy than I’m making them sound. But on the basis of my own experience as a teacher, I gather that most of us still go to literary works hoping to derive pleasure from them and to make connections between the fictional characters’ actions and views and our own. In differentiating ourselves from the scientific paradigm, we end up aligning ourselves with that paradigm as just another highly compartmentalized and specialized interest group against the commons. We have our “legitimate object of analysis” and our approved methods of analysis to be used on those objects. There’s much sense in this critique, although I wouldn’t condemn a theory based on the dilemma I am describing. It’s a lot easier to describe a problem in this simple way than to figure out what to do about it. My sense is that many modern theorists still believe in the uplifting power of art, at least to some degree. And many stop listening to them when they insist otherwise and practice what they preach: “long reading” (for example, deriving general claims about the novel from interaction with a gargantuan novel-database), as opposed to close reading of individual texts has its benefits, but being really interesting to read isn’t one of them. I recall reading structuralist stuff in graduate school that more or less reduced literary texts to mathematical equations. With that sort of method, you could hand people the keys to the next universe, and they would still complain. There isn’t an easy way out of the dilemma I’m describing: most of us love “literature,” but we really don’t believe in things like “the autonomous text,” authorial presence, or anything that smacks of essentialism. But then, “literature” as a concept is essentialist and humanistic. Much criticism proceeds in the mode of denial—its latter-day methods still pursue (to an unacknowledged extent) old-fashioned humanistic goals. At what point does co-optation amount to the complete erasure of difference and alternative value? At what point does the dance of believing and not believing take on the dimensions of an Orwellian “this is and is not true” statement? Our cultural studies authors will provide some valuable observations on how to assert and maintain the “worldly” situatedness of literary texts, but they by no means do away with the problems I’ve been trying to describe here.

Page-by-Page Notes on Cleanth Brooks’ “The Formalist Critics” (1366-71).

1366-69. This piece doesn’t make a substantially different case from the earlier essay we have read, but in it Brooks refutes some of the main criticisms leveled against formalism. His list of articles of faith is interesting in that it defines the object of formalist criticism, the “successful work.” He doesn’t say all literature responds equally well to formalist analysis or that formalism is the only worthwhile kind of criticism. On 1368, Brooks rejects a couple of common criteria for judging a text’s excellence: the “author’s sincerity” criterion and the “it gave me an intense reaction” standard. Neither, Brooks insists, tells us much. As for the first one, well, Oscar Wilde said that (to paraphrase) “all bad poetry begins with sincere emotion.” Poetry isn’t simply self-expression. The second criterion is equally objectionable in that it strips poetry of any value other than the emotional wallop it packs. And surely, that’s like saying all music should take as its theme, “I’m so lonesome I could die” just because it’s common. Such notions diminish the range of humanity to what can be encapsulated in a saccharine pop song. Certainly a poem ought to spark some kind of reaction, probably both on the emotional and intellectual level—but Housman’s “bristling beard” standard doesn’t go very far towards encompassing the possible range of worthwhile responses.

1370-71. Brooks acknowledges that literary works may, indeed, have a great deal to do with life experience and with ideas. He insists, however, that whatever real-world complexity and “recalcitrancy of the material” there is must be dealt with in appropriately sophisticated contexts derivable within the text itself. Literature deals with ideas by “involv[ing] them with the ‘recalcitrant stuff of life’,” and “The literary critic’s job is to deal with that involvement” (1371). Brooks takes issue with Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that many “literary ideas” are drawn from areas of life that have nothing to do with literature proper. Authors such as Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner, says Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, benefited greatly from the study of Freud. Brooks counters that “knowing what a given work ‘means’” is a “basic” sort of knowledge (1371); it must be derived from close study of the work itself, not from the application of methods more proper to psychoanalysis. In other words, we shouldn’t put O’Neill’s Tyrones from A Long Day’s Journey into Night on the couch and then call the results the meaning of the play. Well, that returns us to the claim that formalist analysis is foundational because it puts us most directly in touch with what is proper to the realm of literature.

We can imagine that Brooks would have quite a problem with the claims of a cultural studies author who might say, for example, that the “meaning” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest has mostly to do with how the play is scripted by and inflects a nascent western discourse of imperial definition and domination, which claim we propose to validate by referring almost continually to the historical record left us by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and to the writings of historians and critics of our own time. That is to treat a literary text, he would almost certainly say, as if it were just like any other kind of writing, any old historical document or newspaper clipping, rather than as an extraordinary performance that “deals with” this real-life issue (among others) in an embedded, dramatic manner most proper to itself.

My putting it this way doesn’t make the problem of “context” disappear, of course—I’ve read a bit too much Derrida to buy into the notion that you can just delineate a seamless literary or dramatic “object” as Brooks does, and then go to work on it with the tools of formalist analysis, confident that the reading at which you arrive amount to something foundational for any other possible kind of analysis. But at the same time, when you’ve read enough post-everything criticism that avoids close encounters with what you consider sophisticated works of art, it’s easy to see the attraction of Brooks’ formalist imperative: whatever its flaws, it at least encourages us to pay attention to the workings of language. I don’t think it’s entirely old-fashioned and pre-post-literate-age—at least I hope it isn’t, anyway—to suggest that not being able to pay such attention marks a critic as a blockhead and dupe, however sophisticated his conceptual framework may otherwise be. Any brand of criticism that says “attention must be paid” to a text’s actual words can’t be all bad, can it? At the same time, I wouldn’t care to be limited to formalist analysis—I admit that my own way of approaching texts is scandalously impressionistic, though I don’t want to be misunderstood here: a major source of my “impressions” comes from my reading in philosophy, religion, literature, and contemporary theory. It isn’t “personal” in the simplistic sense. An old friend of mine says that good criticism makes readers (whether they be general readers or sophisticated critics) want to go back and re-experience the text first-hand. That makes sense to me—whatever methodology the critic brings to the text (formalism included), it ought to have that effect, or it fails in an important respect. This isn’t in any way to condemn a critic who has determined that, say, dealing with lots of nineteenth-century pulp novels is important because it sheds light on what sorts of books got written, how they got written, and how they were received by diverse publics. It’s only to suggest that a really fine researcher will come up with interesting, enlightening things to say about such material without pretending it is intrinsically meritorious as literature (a common mistake, I think: “this book I’m writing about now has been misunderstood, etc.—or as some wiseguy said about Wagner’s music, “it’s better than it sounds”). If he or she succeeds in this regard, I’ll probably want to go back and read one of those Jane Austen novels on my shelf again thanks to what I’ve learned about and from her “lesser” sister and brother novelists.

Page-by-Page Notes on W. K. Wimsatt & W. M. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1371-87).

1375-77. Section I. I like the mention of causality here; Wimsatt and Beardsley insist, rather in the manner of Friedrich Nietzsche’s deconstruction of that concept, “It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. ‘A poem should not mean but be.’ A poem can be only through its meaning...” (1375). It is true that authors may revise their work, but to this we can apply the wonderful remark by Thomas Hardy’s character, “He’s the man we were in search of, that’s true... and yet he’s not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted” (1376). The authors say that the poem belongs neither to the critic nor to the author; it “belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge” (1376). I. A. Richards, an intentionalist critic, says poetic experience is a “class” of experience rather similar to other kinds. Richards takes as his standard that of “the poet when contemplating the completed composition” (1376). Wimsatt and Beardsley disagree, of course. As for myself, I rather like the idea that the experience of reading a work of art is not easily distinguishable from other sorts of life experience—a notion that takes me somewhat away from either the for or against sides of this argument.

1377-78. Section II. Arguing against Benedetto Croce, Wimsatt and Beardsley discuss the notion that we should employ historical research to understand and reproduce in ourselves how authors saw what they were doing while creating a work of art. On 1378, the authors mention Richards’ “fourfold distinction of meaning into ‘sense,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘tone,’ ‘intention.’” Allen Tate criticizes Shelley for what Wimsatt and Beardsley call a “kind of insincerity” in that this author imposes similes on his material “from above” rather than in a way that comes from within the poem organically.

1379-84. Sections III-IV. The authors have been quoting various others on how poetry gets produced, and they come round on 1380 to the point that “judgment of poems is different from the art of producing them.” We must deal with the work as “something outside the author” (1381). What is “internal is also public,” and “what is external is private or idiosyncratic”; there is also “an intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semi-private meanings” (1381). Wimsatt and Beardsley mention Lowes’ Road to Xanadu as relying heavily on external evidence of the second and third sort for the meaning of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” But this is, by implication and in my phrase, to judge by one’s Baconian private “Idols of the Cave,” by hobbyhorsical and associationist preoccupations rather than by attentiveness to the poem’s words. On 1382, we find the following statement: “There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, especially for the intellectual objects, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context—or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about.” The outside is cut off to focus on the inside, so to speak. Well, that’s how concepts gather their power to describe—by dismissing a great deal that doesn’t fit in order to sharpen our understanding of something as stable and solid. We know that we do this in many life situations, of course, but why should it necessarily be the goal in the analysis of literature? As an example (1383-84), the authors say some critics are mistaken in assessing John Donne’s lines about “trepidation of the spheares” in terms of the latest theories of astronomy. Donne was interested in things like that, but according to Wimsatt and Beardsley based on their understanding of the poem’s internal context, the phrase probably refers to earthquakes, not celestial motions. To suggest otherwise, they argue, is to set forth one’s private preoccupations (i.e. one’s deep interest in Renaissance astronomy) at the expense of the public meaning that can be found within the poem.

1384-87. Section V. Wimsatt and Beardsley consider the allusiveness we find in authors like T. S. Eliot. To what extent, for example, is J. Alfred Prufrock, when he says “I have heard the mermaids singing,” referring to Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star”? We could consult the author as an oracle, but this would not be literary analysis. The question is, “does it make sense to suppose that Prufrock is thinking of Donne within the poem’s context, or that Eliot himself, based on what we find in the poem, was thinking of that poet?” The authors also question how we should treat footnotes like those in “The Waste Land,” which purport to tell us what the poet was thinking when he composed particular lines. It would seem that Eliot couldn’t find a way to incorporate his meaning into the poem clearly, so he relied on extraneous footnotes. In sum, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue throughout their essay that biographical criticism is an updated version of romantic expressivism, and their logical term “fallacy” implies that it must be rejected on scientific grounds.

Page-by-Page Notes on W. K. Wimsatt & W. M. Beardsley’s “The Affective Fallacy” (1387-1403).

1388-96. The authors discuss various attempts to distinguish “between what a word means and what it suggests” (1389). They mention Charles L. Stevenson’s book Ethics and Language. There is in these first few sections an interest in the notion that when it comes to emotions, many critics try to ward off a certain drift to which the realm of feeling is, in their view, subject. Even language that is primarily descriptive may suggest certain emotions. They also disagree strongly with sublimity-based theories that pin the value of poetry to the heightened or intense emotions it is capable of arousing.

1396-99. Section III. The authors quote Thomas Mann: “Art is a cold sphere.” Well, the connection to Immanuel Kant is obvious here. Art should be considered an autonomous realm, one that is free of our merely private feelings and associations. An act of literary criticism resembles Kantian aesthetic judgments in its coldness. The authors say on 1397, “that a poem or story induces …vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague. Feelings, as Hegel has conveniently put it, ‘remain purely subjective affections of myself, in which the concrete matter vanishes, as though narrowed into a circle of the utmost abstraction.’” Talking about emotions the way a biologist would cannot delineate poetry as a specific object for analysis. That kind of discussion pokes a hole in the poem’s formal integrity. The question is whether emotion can be translated into a text or whether it remains untranslatable and vague. That’s a huge point of contention between what the authors call “classical objectivity” and “romantic reader psychology.” They say that “The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an account of what the poem is likely to induce in other—sufficiently informed—readers” (1398-99).

1399-1401. Section IV. A key statement: “it is a well-known but nonetheless important truth that there are two kinds of real objects which have emotive quality, the objects which are the literal reasons for human emotion, and those which by some kind of association suggest either the reasons or the resulting emotion.... The arrangement by which these two kinds of emotive meaning are brought together in a juncture characteristic of poetry is, roughly speaking, the simile, the metaphor, and the various less clearly defined forms of association” (1400). Metaphor brings together these kinds of meanings having to do with emotion. This statement allows Wimsatt and Beardsley to describe how literary critics may deal with emotion and yet maintain criticism as a logical, precise enterprise. In speaking of Macbeth, they say that “a poetry of pure emotion is an illusion. What we have is a poetry where kings are only symbols or even a poetry of hornets and crows, rather than of human deeds. Yet a poetry about things. How these things are joined in patterns and with what names of emotion, remains always the critical question.” And at 1401 bottom comes another fine remark: “Poetry is characteristically a discourse about both emotions and objects, or about the emotive quality of objects, and this through its preoccupation with symbol and metaphor. An emotion felt for one object is identified by reference to its analog felt for another—a fact which is the basis for the expressionist doctrine of ‘objectification’ or the giving to emotion a solid and outside objectivity of its own. The emotions correlative to the objects of poetry become a part of the matter dealt with—not communicated to the reader like an infection or disease... but presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge. Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or when as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value with loss of immediacy” (1401-02). Emotions, say Wimsatt and Beardsley, become associated with certain objects in a given historical context. Poetry preserves in a figurative manner the emotions and attitudes of past cultures, and the formalist critic can help us reconstruct a stable extra-personal “consciousness” from the past. This consciousness isn’t that of the author; the text itself is very much like a being that we can come to know and relate to in terms of its structure.

Wimsatt and Beardsley are suggesting that poetry keeps open a space—the poem as a formal, public object—for the preservation and understanding of universal feelings. It preserves and respects emotion by embodying it in a formal or dramatic structure. The specific conjunctions of words with emotions may change, but the range of human emotions doesn’t change. These ideas might be one way formalist critics respond to charges that the engagement with art they favor is bloodless. Perhaps things are somewhat like that for the critic who is concerned foremost with analyzing works of art, but this same “cold” examination may open up other readers to a “warmer” engagement with poetry that would otherwise have gone uncomprehended. The ordinary reader just might have an experience that is both universally communicable and yet intimate and specific, rather than solipsistic and vague, or simply hollow. Promoting this ideal, satisfying response isn’t the immediate aim of the formalist critic, however, who must stick to his or her primary task of structural and context-based analysis. It’s also probably true that part of the value in reading literary works is the way they teach us that the passions, too, can be objects of our reflection. Such reflection might be described as vital to a well-rounded human being (it’s entirely plausible to read Aristotle’s Poetics this way), although we won’t find formalist critics making such openly humanistic claims or showing such warm and fuzzy regard for the ordinary reader. They must, it seems, be ever so slightly “cruel only to be kind.” (A practical aside—the above notion makes sense, as anyone who has done much teaching in, say, C18 literature should know. Many students, who, like most of us, enjoy “easy” things more than difficult ones, don’t respond immediately to certain neoclassical texts because their language and formal conventions aren’t easily accessible to modern readers. But with patience and some help attending to such texts, they often warm up to reading them. British literature from the romantic period forwards doesn’t have the same problem: most students have no trouble relating to romantic lyric or to Jane Austen’s wry take on her heroines’ position in Regency Britain.)

Macbeth’s supposed feelings as he utters the line, as quoted on 1401 top, “Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rocky wood” should be comprehensible even to readers in some future time who might not utter anything resembling such a line to express similar feelings. If Wimsatt and Beardsley are correct, such readers should be able to discern Macbeth’s feelings from the total circumstance of the poem: he is in a horridly unenviable situation—a man once loyal but now increasingly isolated and bound to follow the course of treachery and homicide that brought him to the throne. The words Macbeth speaks convey what a man of his time and in that situation would feel. We don’t need to ask Shakespeare or his contemporaries to verify that this is so because the poem itself gives us the strongest possible indication that it is. Such a connection would be incomprehensible only to readers in a culture that didn’t associate bloody murder with dread and guilt. Finally, much of what Wimsatt and Beardsley write is entirely compatible, in its somewhat more technical way, with the Cleanth Brooks essays we have read: a poem “embodies” emotion and ideas in its unified, intelligible structure, and we should analyze that structure on its own terms rather than looking directly to other disciplines to help us explain it.

Week 04, Ferdinand De Saussure

2003-02-20T09:16:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Ferdinand de Saussure's Introduction and Part One, Chapter I to A Course in General Linguistics (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 is what one might call an “upbeat,” scientific view of language. It takes the kind of potentially Nietzschean insight into the “arbitrariness” of language and turns it into something positive rather than destructive: they are a little like Kant, at least by analogy: okay, so we can’t get at “meaning” or “things themselves.” But so what? What we can render intelligible is how things work, and that’s a fine thing to understand.

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

a) We humans are the central force and meaning of a world that we can rationally apprehend. Remember the ancient Greek saying: “Man is the measure of all things.” 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 and we can live in it, maybe even achieve mastery over it. Earlier theories had more simply posited a “real world out there,” but they struggled mightily also to establish 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; here’s one:

C17 authors like Bacon and Locke said (along with Aristotle) that words are the signs of ideas, and ideas are the signs of things. This makes language rather dangerous in that it might lead us away from the truth about things themselves. But still, there seems to be an equally powerful insistence that we can strip away layers of error from our language and make it more accurately correspond to our ideas, and thus indirectly to things.

c) Language is linked to our consciousness, our intentions, our meanings. Man, both individually and collectively, is a meaning-making animal: we use language 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.

It’s worth remarking right 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 further we go from our speech, the notion goes, the further we move from truth, self-presence, full consciousness. You don’t even need to be present for what you have written to be read. You can find this idea in Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, and (according to our decon-men) any other western philosopher you’d care to mention. Consciousness and the spoken word is king.

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

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 or intelligibility. One studies 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.

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 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.

A language is a system of signs that consists of signifiers (an acoustic image, an internal impression of a physical sound as opposed to the physical sound itself) and signifieds (a concept, say “horse”). Internally, I “speak to myself” the word horse, or cheval, or equus, and the word is associated with the concept “horse” -- an image or definition of a graminiferous quadruped, runs better when shod, etc.” There is in Saussure some idea about external reality -- the “referent,” but the point is that there isn’t a vital link between sign and referent. The effect we call meaning arises only because of the differences and similarities between linguistic units within an overall linguistic structure. Functionalism in its fullest definition says that the meaning of a unit is the function it performs within a signifying system.

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

Week 03, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche

2003-02-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

Notes on Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche

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’s The 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.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (759-67); The German Ideology (767-69); from The Communist Manifesto (769-73); Grundrisse (773-74); “Preface to A Contribution...” (774-76); Capital’’, Vol. 1 Ch. 1 “Commodities” (776-83).

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (759-67).

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 Karl Marx’s The German Ideology (767-69).

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.

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.

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 Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto of 1848 (769-73).

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 Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (773-74).

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 Karl Marx’s “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (774-76).

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 Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 1., Section 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (776-83).

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.

General Notes on Karl Marx: 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.

Page-by-Page Notes on Friedrich Engels’ “Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch” (783-84).

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

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

Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure.

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.”

Week 02, Immanuel Kant

2003-02-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

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.