In
defining the aesthetic experience as hazarding oneself within a desubjectifying
aesthetic-object relation, Walter Pater’s speculative aesthetic criticism short
circuits the Ruskinian liberal subject (predicated on art’s near-sublime
ability to convey the greatest number of great ideas) and its condition of
possibility (the mastered/mastering human-world correlate) by overwhelming it
with a field of bipolar tensions. Pater, having worked Kantian aesthetics
backwards from the “subject” to the aesthetic object, confronts the material
conditions of possibility for pure aesthetic experience. While the lineage of
Victorian Kantians (Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold) had pursued the
transcendental dimension of aesthetic experience as a way to construct an
autonomous, self-willed, distanced, and disinterested liberal subject, Pater
sought to strip the aesthetic experience of all external relations or ends.
Scandalous to 1870’s England and blasé to post-New Criticism literary scholars,
Pater’s peculiar rootstock of “art for art’s sake” deserves reappraisal on
ontological and ethical grounds. Rather than reading Pater as a historical
anomaly, I propose an approach treating his aesthetic criticism as a
speculative philosophy capable of providing a model for how contemporary microbiopolitical
apparatuses operate upon living beings and how an efficacious subjecthood can
be constructed vis-à-vis those very apparatuses.
Pater’s sketch of the aesthetic experience,
which maps the force field stretched between the aesthetic object and the
critic’s imaginative reason, not only inverts then-conventional Kantian
criticism, but also pushes aesthetics to its ontological and epistemological
horizon: the pure aesthetic object. If the aesthetic object and aesthetic
critic enter into intimacy through the aesthetic encounter, and if this
intimacy short circuits the production of a liberal subject (a harnessing of the
material autonomy of art for immaterial, human ends – meaning, ideation,
morality), then the danger lies in the aesthetic object’s indifference to the
critic’s comportment. The horizon between matter (or content) and form becomes
for Pater the primary locus of the aesthetic encounter, the site where the
aesthetic object withdraws from access and the site to which the critic is
irresistibly drawn. Such a fissure, I argue, becomes a site of mastery – the
object over the viewer or the viewer over the object – motivating Pater’s
insistence that “it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (90).
Matter and form must, for Pater, operate through a curious immanence within
which “this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should
penetrate every part of the matter.” Resolutely non-Platonic (or non-Kantian?),
Paterian form remains grounded in materiality as the trace of the artistic
gesture or signature. Form’s penetration of matter is that which subverts
Ruskinian subject-formation by suspending the force of external relations
manipulating the aesthetic object for other ends.
Nevertheless,
the zone of indistinction rendered by form’s penetration of matter also serves
as generative force for meaning – and the liberal subject’s formation via art.
The form-and-matter zone of indistinction is, therefore, a particularly fraught
region for Pater wherein “meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly
traceable by the understanding” (91). Meaning serves as a sieve through which
living being is captured and passed along into other fields of force – an
ideological terrain of Victorian liberalism, for instance. Meaning, arising out
of form-and-matter, is an apparatus – a “thing” capturing, orienting, modeling,
controlling, intercepting, securing the behaviors, gestures, opinions,
discourses of living beings for ends outside themselves. And yet if meaning, as
an apparatus capturing and jettisoning some capacity of the viewer into another
field (a process Agamben calls sacredization), arises out of form and matter’s
indistinction, then form-and-matter also holds the potential to subvert that
process. An over-penetration of form into matter could render inoperative
meaning’s capturing force. For Pater, art inherently tends to this suspension:
“Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence,
to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to
its subject” (92). As an aesthetic object withdraws into its constitutive zone
of form-and-matter, it simultaneously severs itself from ends outside itself,
while still retaining its force of
capture. As The Picture of Dorian
Grey warns, the pure aesthetic object never ceases to exert capturing,
modeling, control, or orienting force over its viewer. Rather, in the aesthetic
object Pater discerned the bare condition of an apparatus’s possibility, its
unceasing force of capture independent of ends – the aesthetic object as black
hole.
The horizon marking the aesthetic
object’s force is useful in thinking through the operations of what Nigel
Thrift defines as microbiopolitics: practices and techniques of power operating
“in the half-second delay between action and cognition” (71). This
microbiopolitical domain teems with apparatuses capturing living beings at an
ontological level indifferent to thought. If biopolitics could be thought
through a correlationist lens (Foucauldian power-knowledge), microbiopolitics
demands a speculative philosophy because it operates entirely independent of
thought. Certainly the “operators” of such apparatuses can and should be
thought; nevertheless the very operations of microbiopolitics demands approach
other than the Foucauldian. Pater’s aesthetic object offers such an approach. By
mapping the domain generating an object’s capacity to capture (its condition of
possibility as an apparatus), Pater’s criticism concerns itself with the
ontological conditions of capture indifferent to thought: the half-second delay
between action and cognition.
This isn’t to argue that
Pater’s aesthetic objects are microbiopolitical apparatuses (which would be to
stretch the definition too far, as if all art were microbiopolitical because it
works on the senses), although the incense-laden procession opening his Marius the Epicurean could gesture
towards contemporary pheromone apparatuses. Rather, Pater’s aesthetic
criticism, if read as speculative philosophy, not only offers a way to think
the ontological conditions of microbiopolitics, but also provides a
form-of-life constituted by the reparative or profaning appropriation of apparatuses:
Hellenic subjectivity. Explicitly a renunciation of Ruskin’s valorization of
the Gothic, Hellenic subjectivity profanes the liberal subject’s constitutive
characteristics and puts them to new use. Like the liberal subject, the
Hellenic subject is self-willed (“They are ideal artists of themselves” [143]),
autonomous (“that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself”
[145]), and disinterested (“the absence of any sense of want” [144]). However, such
a subject arises out of an entirely different relation to the world. Whereas
the liberal subject attains its self-will, autonomy, and disinterestedness from
a detachment or transcendence from the world (from sensation into mind, for
instance), the Hellenic subject emerges from a radical immersion into the world:
the “Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, his physical
nature, with the outward world.” As Johann Winckelmann’s life (Pater’s
prototype Hellenic subject) indicates, the Hellenic subject is constituted
through an intimacy with the aesthetic object, a being “in touch with it; it
penetrates him, and becomes a part of his temperament” (127). It is in
connection with the aesthetic object, understood as a pure apparatus, that we
should read Pater’s (in)famous definition of success in life. “To burn always
with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” of “that strange,
perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves” is to profane the apparatuses of
“the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests,
distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations” (148), severing their
external ends (claims, interests, sorrows, preoccupations) and repurposing
their force of capture for new ends. Pater’s “speculative culture” (154) offers
a model for Thrift’s microbiopolitical counter-conduct – an art or cultivation
of the self attuned to “the kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics that
take place in this realm which is increasingly susceptible to new and sometimes
threatening knowledges and technologies” (71).
No comments:
Post a Comment