In this paper, recently given at the "Phases of Thought" scholar symposium at UCD, I attempted to provide a
sketch of an emerging larger (dissertation) project and then a possible segment of that
project.
Overall, I am concerned with how in late-Victorian
England the conduct of the groups or populations was conducted through localized
configurations of liberal pastorship or governmentality – that is, how the
conduct of purportedly “free” subjects was (potentially) conducted in certain locations.
The lack of attention to the space of pastorship has limited other approaches
to nineteenth-century British liberalism, pastorship, conduct, and
counter-conduct such as those of Lauren Goodlad, Amanda Anderson, and Elaine
Hadley. I argue that “milieu” provides one way of historicizing
specific, localized struggles over liberal pastorship. The milieu, Foucault
tells us in Security, Territory, Population,
consists of a configuration of artificial elements and natural givens – a
potential model for reading the composition and operation of pastorship and
counter-pastorship, conduct and counter-conduct in spaces as disparate as
Walter Pater’s Brasenose College (Oxford), the virtual middle-class home of
Mary Haweis’ interior decoration guides, or the socialist utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The milieu’s
artificial elements are those “objects” constructed by a regime of pastorship,
while the natural givens are everything present in a location but not
constructed by that regime. According to this understanding multiple milieux
can operate and contest each other within a single location. The milieu’s conducting
artificial elements are what Foucault and later Agamben define as the “dispositif”
(apparatus): anything coupling living beings with a larger field by orienting,
intercepting, or securing their behaviors, thoughts, or discourses. Although
only one node through which conduct is conducted and by which that desired
conduct is resisted, the dispositif is useful for understanding localized
liberal pastorship because it is a medium for “free” contact, exchange, and
circulation between individual bodies and regimes of power. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
offers not only what I argue is a late-Victorian theory of the dispositif, but
also a program of counter-conduct: Hellenic subjectivity.
Pater’s aesthetic criticism 1) locates the
aesthetic object’s medium-specific “sensual element” and 2) estimates “the
degree to which a given work of art fulfills its responsibilities to its
special material.” Rather than focusing on art’s intellectual content as does
Ruskin (great art provides the greatest number of great ideas, therein
orienting the proper conduct/morality they imply – think reading “The
Definition of Greatness in Art” coupled with “Of Queen’s Gardens”), instead Pater’s
aesthetic critic focuses on a work’s sensual element in order to understand its
operations upon the individual at a sensual and affective level – “How is my
nature modified by its presence.” Art, Pater argues, operates through its
proper materiality in order to reach the viewer’s “imaginative reason” via the
senses. The gap between art’s materiality and imaginative reason’s
immateriality is bridged by the sensuous element, the artist’s “mode of
handling” proper a given medium. Although rooted in art’s materiality, the
sensuous element is irreducible to materiality and is instead a sort of
spectrality hovering between the two. According to Pater, an aesthetic object’s
sensuous element delights the senses in part to “become the vehicle of whatever
poetry or science may lie beyond the intention of the composer.” Pater locates
in the sensuous element the medium through which an individual comes into
“contact” with a regime of liberal pastorship – again, think Ruskin’s criticism
its attendant conduct: the sensuous element is that medium or condition of
possibility for art’s greatness, its ability to conduct “free” conduct.
Yet, this contact
with liberal pastorship worries Pater, who wishes to theorize the ideal
aesthetic object, which should be an end in itself: “Art, then, is thus always
striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure
perception.” That is: if the aesthetic object via its sensuous element threatens
to place the viewer into relation with some regime of liberal pastorship, it
becomes more efficacious the more independent of that pastorship it can get.
Of course this tendency is an
idealization. As Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Grey tells us, all aesthetic objects partake in a milieu and therefore
serve to conduct conduct for better or worse. Nevertheless, we see in Pater’s
schematization of the aesthetic object’s operations a model of the dispositif as
a one mechanism of pastorship. Insofar as it tends towards autonomy, the aesthetic
object serves as the node with which a certain counter-conduct, Hellenic
subjectivity, orients itself. The proper comportment demanded by the pure aesthetic
object is one of suspension of content/pastoral baggage and attunement with the
autopoietic sensuous element – a two step counter conduct (im)famously promoted
in The Renaissance’s conclusion, one
that renounces the hallmark “disinterestedness” of the classic liberal subject.
Supine reflection “suspends” one’s comportment to the “cohesive forces” and
“the action of those forces extending beyond us” in order to experience the
ecstatic “weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The Hellenic subject, constituted
by its blithe repose and its concentrating breadth/attunement, names the
counter-conduct seeking only “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to
maintain this ecstasy” – opened by the suspending or profaning dispositif, the
aesthetic object indifferent to everything but its own sensuous element.
The
intersection of dispositif, Hellenic subjectivity, and pastorship offers an
opportunity for a series of “strategic” displacements: from object of analysis
to field of truth engulfing it, from institution to general order, from function
to general economy of power – all ways to consider the class, race, and gender
exclusions making Hellenic subjectivity possible.
