Walter Pater's Speculative Aesthetics and Microbiopolitics

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).

How Art Kills: Pater's Speculative Aesthetics

The recent speculative turn in continental philosophy offers not merely a return to philosophical realism, but also a reparative resurrection of dormant thought designed to push philosophy outside a correlationist shadow cast since, arguably, Kant. While most efforts have focused on revising of the contours of the Western philosophical canon, attention could also be paid to marginalized figures in England’s literary history, figures that, like Walter Pater, offer a speculative genealogy confronting issues of realism from within certain strands of Kantianism. While no means speculatively realist avant la lettre, Pater’s aesthetic criticism warrants reappraisal within the emergent discourse of the speculative turn primarily because of his curious reformulation and development of a realist tendency present but unthought within Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

            Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry begins with a polemical warning not to define “beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it” – a warning against, in other words, an English tradition of Kantian aesthetics (1). Without naming names, Pater gently chides the practitioners of this dominant aesthetic paradigm by quoting without citation Matthew Arnold’s famous 1861 aesthetic dictum, “To see the object as in itself it really is”  (64) – a line consistent with that other grandee of Victorian aesthetics, John Ruskin, whose criticism centers on sight, “the most important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching” (“Inaugural Address” 94-95). But what type of sight, Pater cautions, does Arnoldian or Ruskinian criticism demand, and, more to the point, for what end? For Ruskin the greatest art is “that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas” (“Definition of Greatness in Art” 12); great art, which presumably moves the viewer through such greatness, is eminently transcendental, transporting the viewer outside himself (there are so few “herselves” in Ruskin’s mind) and into communication with universal truths whose efficacy is proportional to their capacity to resonate with “a higher faculty of the mind.” Beautiful greatness, in this sense, is akin to the Kantian sublime, the experience of reason’s infinite scope seemingly independent of natural or aesthetic objects: “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things in nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus over nature without us” (Judgment 94). Ruskin and Arnold are heirs to the idealist-tendency of Kant’s analytic of the sublime via a genealogy that runs through Coleridge and Carlyle.

            Pater, however, resists the analytic program’s privileging of art’s capacity to elevate reason at the expense of its subtending haecceity: “To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestations of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics” (1). Whereas the dominant line of Kantian aesthetic criticism takes Kant at his word – sever sublime art from its materiality – in an effort to examine the synthetic a priori conditions making aesthetic experience possible, Pater turns his attention in the opposite direction and towards the historical a posteriori conditions of aesthetic pleasure’s possibility as arising from contact with the aesthetic object in-itself. With his four central aesthetic inquiries (What is aesthetic object to me? What is its effect on me? How does object give me pleasure? How does it modify my nature? [1]), Pater effectively snubs his nose at English Kantianism while ingeniously resurrecting a latency in Kant’s critique of judgment. Without denying the operations of the sublime, Pater asks the painfully obvious question raised by Kant’s correlation of the aesthetic object and the sublime: if the sublime “must be thought only in the mind of the judging subject” (Critique 86) and if that subject’s disposition towards the sublime is triggered by yet irreducible to aesthetic or natural objects, what are the conditions of possibility for the sublime’s arising out of a judging subject’s relation to a given type of object? To address this impasse in Kant’s analytic of the sublime Pater turns away from the a priori conditions so fascinating for English aesthetic criticism, and instead focuses on the “relative” experience of aesthetics (1).

            Contra Ruskin, Pater defines beauty as “relative,” a term embracing both the critic’s subjective pleasure and the critic’s relation to the aesthetic object; the stress ultimately falls on the later dimension: “the definition of [beauty] becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstraction” (1). And while critic and aesthetic object arise in their modalities (Pater-as-critic, canvas-as-aesthetic-object), Pater’s repeated prepositional phrases (to me, for me, etc.) indicate an irreducibility that subtends both critic and aesthetic object and gives rise to the particular pleasure of the aesthetic encounter. Provocatively, Pater defines the pleasure-producing operations of aesthetics as “the stir” (3).

            In the supplemental 1877 chapter “The School of Giorgione” Pater maps the “stir” through a sly translation of The Renaissance’s by then infamous and retracted conclusion. Here we no longer have the simplicity of the aesthetic object–critic relation, but rather a bipolar force field traversed by waypoints  – aesthetic object’s materiality <> sensation <> sensual element <> imaginative reason – that momentarily check and relay the unidirectional “delight of the sense,” which is the “vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer” (88). Pater warns against focusing on art’s ideational content and instead points his readers towards the condition of that content’s possibility: “the sensuous material of each art . . . is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism” (87). By attending to this special materiality, the critic enters into an undue intimacy not directly with the aesthetic object, but rather vicariously with an artifact’s “special mode of handling its material” (89). Because the aesthetic object and the critic never enter direct contact, but remain instead suspended within a force field, Pater’s privileged sensuous element, which marks the historical a priori (to take a phrase from Foucault) of the aesthetic encounter, is located within the critic as the sensuous object within which imaginative reason vicariously connects to the aesthetic object. The sensuous element, spectrally arising from art’s special material, separates the critic’s imaginative reason and sensation from within in order to plunge him/her into the uncanny aesthetic encounter – a desubjectification subverting the Ruskinian and Arnoldian liberal subject’s the desire for transcendence. What remained disturbingly opaque in The Renaissance’s conclusion – “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (154) – Pater here gives operational clarity. To burn with such a gem-like flame is to hazard oneself within a relation that dissolves the fantasy of a transcendental subject and leaves behind the margin of an individual’s irreducible gem-like haecceity. For Pater art kills by obliterating the phantom liberal subject. The question is, then, what remains?

Walter Pater's Theory of the Dispositif: Countering Liberal Pastorship with the Aesthetic Object

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. 

Catholic Bio-Governmentality vs. Post-Biopolitical Form-Of-Life

  Some brief musings. 

     If one formation of Catholic governmentality (how the Catholic church seeks to conduct the conduct of humans 1. through any means possible, 2. throughout the largest possible population, 3. and by the most efficient means) takes shape much as Foucault discusses in History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (through the dispositif "sexuality" as propped upon the "pervert's" body and the hysterical female body -- and which current conservative biopolitical legislation redeploys across the homosexual body [anti-gay marriage], sexually active female body [contraception]) is another formation of Catholic governmentality possible? 

   The dominant form of Catholic governmentality it radically biopolitical in its structure, logic, and deployment. That is:

• ·      The Catholic Church operates through sacraments
• ·      Because a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace it requires not simply "manifestation" in signs, but surface upon which it operates
• ·      Being in history, these surfaces are contingent (they can not be) and therefore shift over time
• ·      The dominant surface through upon which the current formation of the sacrament of marriage operates is a certain modality of "sexuality" (a marriage is only a marriage with sexual activity that aims at procreation)
• ·      The Church then employs this modality of sacrament as a dispositif of governmentality. Hence the American Church's furor over contraception, which is the attempted use of legislation to ensure a model of Catholic governmentality.

Yet, this being all contingent, what if there were another sacramental modality, one that was not biopolitical? My hunch is that Walter Pater and other aesthetic movement writers' conversions (Oscar Wilde) indicate the possibility of such a possible sacrament. Further, the Church at one point held the potential to offer a politically and ethically efficacious space outside of biopolitics and modern bio-governmentality, but it instead deployed/deploys its power through the same medium of biopolitics, etc. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” is as misguided an attempt to forge a lived ethical “program” resistant to biopolitics as Foucault’s (im)famous call for a new economy of bodies and pleasures as the anodyne for biopolitics. Both take the “body” – a biopolitical construct – as their post-biopolitical surface of deployment. 

What Pater’s Hellenic subjectivity (a comportment of centeredness and blitheness which proceeds through the profanation of apparatic relations) offers is a possible alternative to biopolitics that remains deeply invested in material reality. It is, perhaps, a sacramental form-of-life (a life at grace with its Umwelt, or a zoe that is its own bios) that escapes the traps of biopolitics and a transcendental renunciations of this thing we designate “life.”