An Undeleter for CriticismAuthor(s): Simon JarvisReviewed work(s):Source: Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 1, Rethinking Beauty (Spring, 2002), pp. 3-10+12-18Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566358 .Accessed: 15/06/2012 17:16

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AN UNDELETER FOR

CRITICISM

SIMON JARVIS

Is there experience of beauty, or is it only that we sometimes choose to sort and name certain experiences by using a set of terms, originating often in ancient and medieval philosophy and theology and by a long process of mutation and manipulation arriving under the disciplinary heading of "aesthetics"? This question asks for at least two kinds of information. It does not only ask for information about the history of the formation of the concepts of aesthetics; it also asks for information about experiences. But information about experiences is hard to come by. This is not only, perhaps, for the large reason that "information is concerned with alien objects," rather than with experiences,' but also for the more local one that "aesthetics" does not often attempt to describe any experiences with determined fidelity.2

I can illustrate this with reference to a branch of aesthetics in which I have a particular interest, the aesthetics of prosody. A good deal of subtle and sometimes brilliant work exists in this field. It is rare, however, to find writing which describes in any detail the particular experiences which a particular living individual has had in relation to a line of poetry.3 One is much more likely to find such descriptions in works of fiction (or, rarely, in brief reviews) than in professional writing on the topic of prosody. There seem at first to be some obvious and good reasons for this. Professional writing demands not that we merely report our own subjective experiences, but that we produce knowledge. Critics are not paid to be artists but to be a kind of scientists of art. But what if there is no such science? What if "there is no science of the beautiful" [Kant, CJ 172]? Would that mean that the whole subject area should simply be-deleted?

That this is a possibility is confirmed by the fact that in one area of thinking about aesthetic experience, it has almost happened already. While there are still a number of paid professionals who understand part of their vocation to be bound up with investigating the experience of the beauty or other value of works of art, there are few paid aestheticians of nature.4 There have been historical periods in which numbers of printed nonfiction

1. Hegel, The Difference 85. Here it will be evident that this essay, in the company of a number of theories of knowledge, but especially those represented by Adorno, Negative Dialektik, and Michel Henry, Ph6nomenologie mat6rielle, does not take that "linguistic turn" sometimes regarded as a universally necessary feature of advanced thinking. For an especially powerful critique of many of the assumptions connected with that turn, see Ruthrof I wish to acknowledge the influence of work undertaken by Ross Wilson toward his doctoral thesis on subjective universality in Kant; it has been of central importance to the line of thinking behind this article, though I alone am to blame for the particular direction it has taken here.

2. For a notable exception, cf De Bolla, Art Matters. 3. Some important work which discusses the need for a more phenomenologically detailed

account of prosodic experience can, however, be found in Grimaud, Oliver, and Scott. 4. For a justification for continuing to use the word "nature" despite the culturalistic

prohibition on it, see Jarvis, "'Old idolatry'" 28-36. Readers who know of the existence of paid aestheticians of nature are urged to contact the editor with evidence.

diacritics / spring 2002 diacritics 32.1: 3-18 3

texts were devoted both to experiences of natural beauty and also to the relative propensity of natural appearances to occasion such experiences. Such descriptions are now thought to be, insofar as they are of interest at all, the province of artists.5 This is indeed a consequence of something like an acceptance that, in the sphere of experiences of nature, at least, "there is no science of the beautiful." Most agree that "an ideal of a beautiful view is unthinkable" [CJ 80]. Yet few, perhaps, would now argue that an ideal of a beautiful poem is quite thinkable either.

We are thus returned to the question posed above. If there is no science of the beautiful, must claims to experiences of beauty be treated as fictional-in the specific sense that they are matters for fiction, and not for science? Why should the concept not be altogether eliminated?

Perhaps for this reason. Let us imagine that I think I have had an experience. I have been walking along a street at night, say, head down as though scrutinizing the quite complex surface of tarmacadam, kerbstone, painted parking and motoring instructions, drain covers and grilles, although perhaps in distraction I may have been allowing my eyes simply to pass lightly over all this while I think about a mortifying remark addressed to me at a recent committee meeting, or attempt to identify the catalogue number relevant to a fragment of piano music which has come into my head; may, for example, as if startled by a call or a cry of pain have raised my look from the wet pavement-which I now possibly "see" for the first time (since it is the soul which sees, and not the eye [Descartes 1: 172])-and now indeed see at a great distance ahead of me, almost at the horizon of my vision, a small line of white points of light making a slight curve up just a little above the rest of the horizon and then stopping apparently in midair, a little like a rope ladder leading nowhere and supported by nothing; an awe which is not quite the same as fear, a strange pleasure or a delightful horror comes over me; a minute, an almost imperceptible change to my heartbeat and breathing, certainly, but at the same time a minute, an almost imperceptible change to my thinking; perhaps it feels not only as though I have had a feeling but as though I have had an idea; perhaps it feels as though something has happened to me. I stop walking. Let us imagine further that you are my good friend. Our affectionate intimacy allows us candidly to differ without giving offense. You are walking by my side and at the moment when I stop and say, "Look at that!," you look up, too, and reply, "What, do you mean the bridge?" "Oh, it's a bridge. It's beautiful." "What do you mean?"

How can I answer your last question? If I simply tell you a story about everything that I have experienced I have not really answered the question at all, because what I said was that the bridge was beautiful. But if I simply tell you something about the bridge, I have not really answered the question either, not only because what I said was that the bridge was beautiful, but because I may not have meant the bridge at all.

Another way of putting this difficulty is this:

No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful. We want to submit the object to our own eyes, just as if our liking of it depended on that sensation. And yet, if we then call the object beautiful, we believe we have a universal voice, and lay claim to the agreement of everyone, whereas any private sensation would decide solely for the observer himself and his liking. [CJ 59-60]

What is being pointed out here is that judgments about beauty have a peculiar philosophical grammar. They are not judgments of knowledge, because it is foolish for

5. For valuable reflections on the demise of explicit reflection upon natural beauty, cf Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 61-78.

4

me to think that I can by reasoning compel anybody to find something beautiful-for the very reason that to find something beautiful is not to know a fact about it, but to place a value upon it. Yet they are not (this view goes on) merely reports of a purely subjective experience either, because when I make the claim that this or that appearance is beautiful, the form of my claim makes no reference to any experience of mine, but claims something about the appearance.

According to this view, then, most theories of judgments about beauty go wrong from the beginning, because they resolve such judgments into one or another of these categories. The fragile and equivocal middle which opens up in this thought of Kant's has been closed time and again ever since. Every time a debate gets underway on "whether" aesthetic evaluations can be proven, or "whether" they are on the contrary merely subjective, the possibility of hearing the peculiar grammar of this kind of judgment has already been foreclosed. When I say that something is beautiful I am--despite Kant's language-making a claim that is oddly resistant to being sorted into the machinery of

subject and object as that machinery is usually set up. Because it is not really a claim about an object, but not really a claim about a subject either, it has a peculiar status. It is not really a claim to know something-I could not compel you by argument to feel what I feel, and thus judge as I judge-yet it is not simply a report of a subjective preference either: in claiming that what I have seen is beautiful, I am making a claim about something, a claim that asks for your assent. That is, when I make a judgment that takes the form that something or other is beautiful-or wondrous, sublime, amazing, etc.6-I am bound to claim an assent that I can never compel.

But perhaps I have a duty or a contract to make only those claims to which I can compel assent. In that case I (and all bound like me) must profess those hopes derided in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads: the foolish hope of reasoning the reader into approbation [Wordsworth 742]. Or, insofar as I am unable so to compel others, I am bound to fall silent on the entire subject. Then, since I can never compel others to share this kind of experience, to feel as I feel, I must profess what I think it may be in my power to compel others to believe: that, for example, a certain pattern of phonemes or graphemes "has" a certain effect upon "the" reader.

Let us return to the experiment of imagining that I have had an experience or a series of experiences. I am not going to describe an imaginary experience here-since I contend not only that the phenomenology of aesthetic experience still barely exists, but also that its absence cannot be supplied in a day [Jarvis, "Prosody as Cognition"]-but to sketch it. Suppose that, in the course of a long meeting, I find myself in a state of dejection. A phrase from a poem comes into my head: "No worst, there is none," say, or "A grief without a pang, dark, void and drear," or "The eldest have borne most." How little of our most critical experience of poems in fact comes when doing what is called "actually reading"-the reader facing the text, for all the world as though her eyes were a microscope and the book a specimen-and how much of it comes in recollection, voluntary or involuntary! But suppose I am to write about one of the poems from which one of these lines emerges. I of course wish to begin from the experience which I believe I have had. If not to bore any possible readers with the detritus of my own life, I am to delete from this experience everything that is merely personal: not merely that which is obviously so-the meeting, the mild melodrama of implicitly comparing boredom in a

6. It will be clear from this that this essay comprehends under "the beautiful" wonder in general. In Longinus 's treatise Of Loftiness the systematic distinction later proposed by theories of taste, supported by various philosophical anthropologies or by transcendental-idealist categorial separations, between "the beautiful" and "the sublime" does not yet pertain; likewise, that philosophical anthropology and those categorial separations no longer pertaining, the distinction no longer pertains in this essay.

diacritics / spring 2002 5

meeting to real dejection or religious crisis or national disaster, etc.-but also anything that cannot also be proven to be an experience that all right readers of these lines should have. So I must replace the lines in their context, within the concept of the entirety of a poem; I must replace that poem within the concepts of the entirety of a book, a genre, an authorship, a historical period-and so on through all the four-and-twenty horizons of philological totality. Now I have done all this, and I may think that I have made knowledge, of a kind. This making has depended upon the deletion of everything idiosyncratic about my experience and, with it, upon the deletion of everything that makes that experience an experience. In its place sits a grinning or moping mannequin, the reader: the placeholder for my self-disowning, my idea of what "they" will allow to be what "everyone" must feel.7

What has happened here? The field of criticism has been deleted. The field of criticism: that field which lies between or beyond a rationalism which can prove what is beautiful, and a relativism which knows what it likes [Caygill, Art of Judgment]. The troubling equivocality of this field demands that it be carved up among evaluative aesthetics (wherever a head like that still surfaces) and the descriptive sciences of culture. None shall start from the singular in search of the concept, unless happy to be put in the creative writing program.8 And here we indeed find one important reason why (at the very hour when "thick description" of historical-material specificity and otherwise crunchy stuff is a professional desideratum) thick description of experiences of beauty is strictly for the poets.

Few things are less tolerable to modem protocol than equivocality; and since this

equivocal field, the field of criticism, was first discovered, its fate has usually been to be

destroyed. This is by no means because of the indolence, foolishness, or poor scholarship of those who have come afterwards (it could more properly be thought of as the result of the way in which a busy and learned cleverness needs to suppress some fundamental

questions in order to get on with its job) but rather because it is an essential characteristic of any field that is equivocal that it cannot be preserved by being turned into a "position." It must be renewed in order to be preserved.

The essays collected in this volume offer resources for such a renewal. They do not adhere to any single program; but in each case, I believe, the attempt is made to think what the relation between the aesthetic and the cognitive might be-if it be neither sheer unlikeness, nor perfect identity, nor, on the other hand, an analogy supposed to

bridge a gulf which has already been assumed. Which is to say that all the essays in different ways interrogate the way in which these terms, "aesthetic" and "cognitive," have been used to discipline certain kinds of experience. This interrogation may be explicit, as it is in Peter De Bolla's attempt to work through key elements of the tradition of aesthetics toward a missing dimension, "the materiality of aesthetic experience"; or implicit, as it is in Howard Caygill's rereading of one aspect of the contours of a single critical authorship, Roland Barthes's-a rereading which in its understated manner opens up fundamental questions about what is known in art and in writing about art. The collection addresses once more the question as to why aesthetics should have so narrowed its attention as to consider as its eminent subject the results of human work: why it should have so lost the world. Denise Riley's thinking about the beauty of faces adds a new development to her recent work [Riley]: it looks steadily into a joyful or painful border region between the made and the unmade. The length of the respective texts-

7. Here I wish to acknowledge the influence of Keston Sutherland's work toward his doctoral thesis, "J. H. Prynne and Philology," to some aspects of which this essay represents preparation for a possible response.

8. Where "the singular" means not "particular datum" but "unique and indubitable duration of qualitative affectivity." Cf section 2 below.

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and all the more so because this is a collection in which beauty is in question-has been determined not by an idea of that bulk which a good-sized unit of professional production ought to possess, but by the space needed in each instance to unfold the central thoughts. One size could not possibly fit both Drew Milne's tenacious rethinking of the idea of the "beautiful soul" and Jay Bernstein's acute renewal of Adorno's aesthetic theory.

Paragraphs like the one above have the ugliness of a brochure-say, "a Piece of

Machinery of Points of light to be put into a dark hole" [Blake 599]-because they select from each essay only that whereby it contributes to the cover-concept prosecuted for some local purpose. Everything peculiar about each, that in which its essential value resides, is lost when it is made to fit the agenda. If it is the case in any branch of inquiry that the important thing is to get together with people who agree with you about

everything, it is certainly not the case in aesthetics. Accordingly this introductory essay threatens readers with no further paragraphs of this kind. It forgoes the usual procedure, by which the editor of a collection of essays twists himself and them into a position of false reconciliation. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are very few beliefs that all the contributors to this volume share. But perhaps one small doubt is common to all: the doubt as to whether questions about art and beauty are adequately dealt with simply by being referred to the rubrics of "ideology" or "symbolic capital." Suppressing the question of art, we suppress the ability to think how our own making may be anything but

"production." Suppressing the question of beauty, we suppress the ability to think how our own experience may be anything but "consumption." Paid thinkers have a particular responsibility to challenge the mistransfiguration of production and consumption into the permanent and universal lineaments of experience.

1

For Kant himself the thesis I have just been describing, that the pure aesthetic judgment of beauty is subjectively universal, could not without damage be detached from a number of other claims. Here I want to focus on two of these in particular.

1. When I claim that an appearance looks beautiful, I can't help implying that everyone else ought to agree with me. Kant thinks that this must mean that I am conscious that I make such claims only when I am aware of feeling a pleasure that does not depend upon any merely private interest. For Kant, the pure aesthetic judgment of taste is a

subjective universal if and only if I am conscious that I like without any merely private gratification [CJ 53-54].

As soon as we take this step, however, we are in Kant up to our necks. We are committed to a radical distinction between pathological feeling, feeling that can only be understood as part of a determining chain of causes and effects and that is consequently necessarily perfectly distinct from cognition, on the one hand; and, on the other, a troubling and difficult category of "disinterested" feeling, feeling that is of the only kind that can give rise to the only "free liking" [CJ 52], since it is not only not determined by the interests of the flesh, but also not determined by moral interests. This category of

feeling stands in an ambiguous relation to cognition since, while it produces no knowledge, it is inseparably accompanied by the play of those faculties whose cooperation is necessary to the production of knowledge, imagination, and understanding. With this commitment is implied another, a commitment to that whole conception of subjectivity developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which the step from cogito to sum is treated alternately as a paralogism, a species of false reasoning [CPR 411-58].

The true objection to this is not the one familiar from ideology critique, viz. that the very idea of disinterestedness is ideological. That line of argument fails for two reasons

diacritics / spring 2002 7

which I have set out at length elsewhere: firstly, that perfect interestedness and perfect disinterestedness are twinned and mutually dependent concepts, emerging historically together and each reliant on the other for its own intelligibility [Jarvis, "The Gift"]; and secondly, that the application of the concept of ideology to this problem misconstrues the ironic and restricted concept of ideology as a literal and universal one [Jarvis, "'Old Idolatry'"]. The problem lies, rather, in the decision that has already been taken here- not by means of a phenomenology properly speaking, but rather by means of a legal "deduction" of categories-about the radical separateness of thinking and feeling and, accordingly, about the expulsion of all affectivity into an object for a thinking which is presumed, insofar as it is thinking, to treat affectivity as what it thinks about.

2. More broadly, this idea, that the pure aesthetic judgment of the beautiful is subjectively universal, is determined in Kant's work by the central architectonic assertion: that the good, the true, and the beautiful are perfectly distinct from each other.9 This categorial separation of these three orders, which is of course by no means Kant's invention, but a station on a long path of disenchantment or enlightenment, conceals, moreover, a hierarchical asymmetry. Since "there are only two kinds of concepts," "the concept of nature and the concept of freedom" [CJ 9]-the former proper to understanding and the latter to reason-the beautiful, unlike the true and the good, has no concepts proper to it. Not only is this why "there is no science of the beautiful," but it is precisely because of this that judgments about the beautiful can be described as subjectively universal. They are subjectively universal because, unlike judgements about theoretical knowledge or practical reason, they cannot begin from the universal, the concept. Instead they always begin from an appearance and search for a concept-a concept, however, that can only be provided from one of two arrays, the only two arrays of concepts available, those of nature and freedom. The way the categorial separation of true, good, and beautiful is specified is both what deprives beauty of any concepts of its own and what requires that beauty be explained by analogies with the only two sources of concepts available.'0 Since both these features of Kant's treatment of beauty are dependent on the way he specifies the categorial separation, it becomes clear that the constitutive equivocality of the field of aesthetic judgment discussed above is intimately connected not only to the categorial separation itself, but also to its internally hierarchical character.

Of course there are also many other ways in which Kant would consider the very idea of subjective universality to imply a series of other Kantian commitments; but these two are pivotal. If an idea of subjective universality can be framed that does not rely on the belief that I must be conscious that my pleasure is free from interest in order to occasion such a judgment; if an idea of subjective universality can be framed that does not rely on the belief that the true, good, and beautiful are constitutively separate

9. Central to an assessment of the importance of this separation for art and aesthetics is Bernstein.

10. Especially skeptical commentary on the role of analogy in the Critique of Judgment can be found in Derrida. Insofar as its objection to analogy conjures (whether as quoted and disowned or as directly believed and upheld) a sharply insuperable difference between the logical and the nonlogical, that treatment deletes, rather than renews, Kant's insight. "Kant thus imports this table, this tableau (Tafel), this board[, ] this border into the analytic of aesthetic judgment. This is a legitimate operation since it is a question of judgments. But it is a transportation which is not without its problems and artful violence: a logicalframe is transposed andforced in to be imposed on a nonlogical structure, a structure which no longer essentially concerns a relation to the object as an object of knowledge. The aesthetic judgment, as Kant insists, is not a knowledge- judgment. The frame fits badly" [69]. But it is just the point that subjective universality cannot readily be classified either as logical or as nonlogical. So what is here diagnosed as an alien "importation" and as "artful violence" might no less properly be understood as what the critique openly confesses and exposes as its own central problem.

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orders of judgment, among which the beautiful is the only one lacking concepts proper to it; then there is a good chance that this central equivocality, which I have earlier described as characterizing the terrain of criticism itself, does not require Kantian epistemology and Kantian antimetaphysical metaphysics to sustain it.

Thus, (1) Can the claim that aesthetic judgments are subjectively universal be detached from another, that they are prompted by a feeling of disinterested delight? Perhaps so, if affectivity is not an object. Then I would no longer imagine that I really am split into a communicable and an incommunicable part. Then the judgment of beauty would no longer be my attempt to give utterance only to those feelings which I must suppose that others will approve, but, instead, to "that secret which is known to everyone."" (2) Can the claim that aesthetic judgments are subjectively universal be detached from others, that they are not cognitive but are analogous to cognition; that they are not moral but analogous to morality? Perhaps so, if the pattern of participation is other than the categorial separation suggests; if it is not only, in that separation, the beautiful that is indigent and that must borrow or smuggle its concepts from the true and the good, but also the true and the good, in this separation, that cannot help appealing to the beautiful. Then theory and practice would no longer be able to suppress, conceal, or delete their own artifices of articulation. The next two sections of the essay explain these propositions in attempting these two detachments.

2

I am in pain, with toothache or melancholy. How certain am I of that? Perhaps uncertain of what melancholy means, I may not be uncertain of my pain. It would be good to be a lot less certain of being in pain; it is possible to think of certain varieties of skepticism as would-be analgesics. But what kind of certainty is this? Is it the kind of certainty I

experience when I am asked to assent to the proposition 7 + 5 = 12? Is it, that is to say, something that is brought before a consciousness, a consciousness that is not previously aware of it, for assent or denial? Not at all. It is already whatever would assent or deny. Pain is not an object. It is not something I know when it is referred like a set of data given from outside to a "consciousness" that is inside and considered as in advance perfectly purged of such affectivity; it is already and immediately the most certain knowledge I can have-or rather, be. It is knowledge so certain that however hard my skepticism tries to help me out, I am incapable of doubting it.

Is this, then, a variant on the familiar complaint about "dualism," "Cartesian" or otherwise? So little so that it completely rejects this complaint. The problem with what is usually referred to as Cartesianism-and which in fact takes up with only one aspect of Descartes's thinking-is not its dualism but the way in which the (illusory) duality is drawn up. When affectivity is awarded to "the body" and when "the body" is made a transcendent object whose reality I am at leisure to doubt; when freedom-from-affectivity is awarded to the mind and when freedom-from-affectivity is made into a condition of the possibility of experience, instead of, what it would more nearly be, the condition of its impossibility; then this mischaracterization can in no way be obviated by yet another bridging or overcoming or subversion of "binary oppositions."'2 Instead, we are to

11. Viz., life. Jarvis, "The Future of Monologue" 30. 12. Caygill, in "Life and Aesthetic Pleasure," makes an intriguing argumentfor traces (only)

of the possibility of a "materialist aesthetics" in Kant's Third Critique. It is intriguing because "materialism" is imagined there not as a moment of perfect disenchantment and disfiguration [de Man, Aesthetic Ideology 70-90 and 119-28, esp. 82, 88, and 90: "The bottom line, in Kant as well as Hegel, is the prosaic materiality of the letter" For a discussion of this in the context of an

diacritics / spring 2002 9

understand the radical gulf between two bodies: the subjective and the objective body, between that thinking body the last singular hue or odor of whose experience I cannot possibly doubt, since it is what I am, and whatever that body points at or refers to or surmises about. Would we bridge, overcome, or subvert that difference, we would, so often as we make the attempt, add nothing to nothing so as to make something: the evacuated subject, whose apriority can be secured only at the price of its having no affectivity and finally no substance-which is to say, whose apriority can be secured only at the price of its annihilation-is to be added, or forced, or blurred into the phenomenalized object, whose reality is permitted permanently to be suspended by that other nothing, the evacuated subject. What is essential here, that is, is not the number, whether it be 1, 2, 3, or more. What is essential, instead, is to keep open a difference which can only ever be closed in favor of one of the terms. The difference between life and death can only ever be closed in favor of death. "Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself' [Blake 585].

We are here on the path of a material phenomenology. This is not to be confused with merely "hyletic" phenomenology, as that was understood by Husserl, for the reason that hyletic phenomenology constitutes its hyle, its matter, as a pole opposed to the pole of intentionality: and therefore as a moment not properly phenomenological at all [Henry, Phenomenologie materielle, 13-59]. It does so by a self-misrecognition of what the original insight of phenomenology meant. The phenomenological reduction suspends no detail of what is perceived, nothing at all of its concretion. It suspends only its transcendence. But in the way in which Husserl comes to understand what he calls "hyletic" phenomenology, as the only material phenomenologist of our era has demonstrated,

"Sensible data are given as matters with respect to intentional formations or to donations of meaning of different degrees. .. ." Matter is not the matter of the impression, the impressional, and impressionality as such, it is the matter of the act which informs it, a matter for that form. The disposition of that matter does not belong to it any longer: it is not matter itself which gives, which itself gives itself, by virtue of what it is, through its own impressional character. It gives itself to form, that is to say by form. It gives itself to form to be in-formed, constituted, apprehended by form. But to constitute, even if we abstract from transcendent apprehensions, means to make visible, to make

account of the birth of the concept of ideology out of that of idolatry, cf Jarvis, "'Old idolatry' "] but as a moment of corporeal knowledge, in which the body is not opposed to knowing as its only possible object. Caygill comments that Kant's use of the term Gemiit in section 29 of the Critique of Judgment implies a model of the body at variance with that often implied in his thinking: "The body is no longer external dead materiality, fit only to be expelled by life, but the site of the movement of life in receiving and expelling, a movement distributed topologically in terms of an identical inside/outside. While further specification of this concept of the Gemiit must be sought outside of the Critique, in the Lectures on Metaphysics from the 1790s, it is clear that it is quite distinct from any view of the representational 'mind' or 'soul' as the site of commercio between opposed material and intelligible substances" [Caygill, "Life andAesthetic Pleasure" 89]. From the point of view of my argument, however this variance, while it certainly introduces complexity into Kant's ontology of the body, is of no help, since what is argued here is that no movement "distributed topologically in terms of an identical inside/outside" can capture the materiality of affectivity. Only when the age-old prejudice that what is real must be displayed as an object is broken can affectivity be granted the ontological dignity proper to it. A willingness to break the logic of identity [Adorno, Negative Dialektik] or the ontological monism [Henry, L'essence de la manifestation] effective even in many supposed radical dualisms is instead indispensable here. My thanks to Ross Wilson for drawing my attention to this article.

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advance into the condition of phenomena, means to give. "Sensible givens, sensible data" must be understood in this sense, in the sense of that which, "giving itself as matter with respect to intentional formations," is in fact given in such a way that an intentional look crosses it and, throwing it before itself gives it to be seen. [Henry, Phenomenologie materielle; my trans.]

In the original insight of phenomenology, matter, as affective concretion, is phenomenologically fundamental. It is not a "content" which is processed by an intentional form; it is not given to intentionality but is itself that which gives and to which anything can be given. As soon as this matter is turned into data, its phenomenological character is lost. What has happened here is that the character of the reduction has been subreptitiously twisted. The idea of "hyletic" phenomenology serves the function of locking affectivity back into that context of exteriority-the body as data for intentionality-handed down by tradition. And for this reason, the eminently phenomenological gesture of suspending all transcendence comes to be blurred and in the end identified with an eminently unphenomenological gesture, the suspension of all affectivity.

Perhaps at first this must feel to many of you like merely technical talk: the kind of "nicety of detail" which "disgusts the greatest part of readers," and which, in thinking about aesthetic experience in particular, one can take or leave.'3 Perhaps this account feels as though it is concerned with such supertechnical questions that nothing about so fundamental an aspect of experience as aesthetic experience could possibly depend upon it. In truth, the opposite is the case. Phenomenology is not epistemology. All "readings" appeal to phenomenologies, whether consciously or not. But currently they do not really appeal to phenomenology proper, but instead to that placeholder of phenomenology which serves up the dummy subject, the subject from which all singularity has been predeleted. Until affective impressionality is recognized as the substance that most certainly exists, it will continue to be ruled out of court as merely idiotic, as singular, as personal, as subjective, and it will continue to be the case that the first move in any account of aesthetic experience will be to cross out, to fail accurately to listen to, the experience the inquirer has actually had, in favor of an experience she thinks she ought to have had, because she thinks other people are likely to have had it. Material phenomenology does not so much demand that we assent to a complex line of argument, as it demands that we stop disowning the complexity of our own experience.

Let us return, then, to the question: Can the claim that aesthetic judgments are subjectively universal be detached from another, that they are prompted by a feeling of disinterested delight? If the subject is no longer to be understood as defined by being what affectivity and substance are given to, then what the claim describes would also change. The true judgment of beauty, the moment at which shock or awe break into utterance, will no longer be the expression of a subject which has first checked that no pathological or moral feeling is at work and which therefore must suppose that others will share this judgment; it will be instead more like the half-involuntary expression of an impression whose singularity or universality can never be known in advance. It will be, that is, truer to Kant's own insight into the structure of reflective judgment than is his account of "disinterested delight": whereas there the particular searches for a universal that it thinks its own consciousness of disinterestedness ought to have secured in advance (even though it has not the force to compel this universal), here the singular searches for a universal that is not only not guaranteed to appear, but not even promised to it. Its proper measure will no longer be the conceptual arrays provided by nature and freedom,

13. Johnson [109]. Johnson went on to offer a qualified defense of disgusting detail.

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but the neither perfectly voluntary nor perfectly involuntary cry of pain or delight: provided that one remember that pain and delight are among the most subtle and complex phenomena known in us and that such a cry may take the form of a four-hundred-page philosophical composition.

3

But now we are already broaching our second question. Can this claim, that aesthetic judgments are subjectively universal, be detached from others, that they are not cognitive but are analogous to cognition; that they are not moral but analogous to morality? The material phenomenology outlined above necessarily gives an apophatic role to language. Language could not be, in such a phenomenology, the medium guaranteed to speak the truth, but rather the very element of difficulty, what strives, both in its eloquence and in its stammering toward mimesis of an affectivity it can never perfectly either be or copy. The question of the fidelity or otherwise of language to experience can only even be raised if it is not presupposed in advance that nothing is hidden, that the truth cannot run away from us. It is a phenomenology in which, although we cannot run away from our own experiences, the truth can very well run away from us: in which, indeed, only this possibility of flight makes it possible for language to be more or less faithful to our experience. "Faithful" already gives the clue that the model of truth at work here is one in which supposedly "aesthetic" and supposedly "ethical" elements are in fact ineliminable from the very concept of truth itself. As a clue, though by no means as the decisive fact, they are embedded in that word's long career and in our most intimate experiences of it. We speak as readily of a true virtuoso or of a true labor activist, as readily of being true to an ethical commitment or to another person, as we do of a true proposition: and thus a notion of authenticity often thought of as "aesthetic" and a notion of fidelity often thought of as "ethical" are already part of what truth means.

It is not necessarily correct to claim that only one of these senses, the correspondence of a proposition to a state of affairs, is the fundamental or literal sense and that the others are only analogies or metaphors. The long trajectory [cf. Detienne] by which Kant arrives at his determined separation of the true, good, and beautiful is an ambivalent one. From one point of view some such separation is what makes possible our freedom from certain presuppositions which would now seem quite obviously superstitious: the idea that personal beauty might be a sign of moral worth, for example. Without the categorial separation, it is hard to avoid theodicy of one kind or another: the categorial separation makes it possible for ugly truths to be told. Yet, from another point of view, this separation is not without its own superstitions: the superstition, for example, that the formal and rhetorical and prosodic articulation of a scientific work form no part of its truth properly so called, but are rather, as it were, mere clothing to a body, body to a soul, ornament to semantic content.

Here it will be useful to consider in more detail one example of a way in which an area of experience is remade by the repeated imposition of different aspects of the categorial separation: of a way in which an area of experience is, on the one hand, opened up in such a way as to allow it to be investigated to proceed in detail, and without the consideration of various currently insoluble philosophical problems getting in the way; and, on the other hand, to have questions fundamental to it closed down by precisely the same maneuver. The area in question is experience of prosody.

When Lord Kames got around to "Versification" in his Elements of Criticism, he considered himself to be embarking, not upon a dryly technical topic, but upon one which would test the critic's highest intellectual powers. "This subject is intimately

diacritics / spring 2002 13

connected with human nature; and to explain it thoroughly, several nice and delicate feelings must be employ'd" [Kames 2: 98]. For Kames versification has an intimate connection with a most philosophically perplexing and difficult subject, human nature. Thinking about versification will therefore continually be to think about fundamental questions of psychology and perhaps of philosophy.'4 His contemporary counterpart can remark, by contrast, that "[a]lthough people read and write verse, human beings are not in the metricians' loop because metricians do not know how to include them. Language in the main literary and linguistic traditions remains uncognitive; . . . mind-free rather than cognitive and mindful" [Grimaud 236]. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, "a philosophy of meter is almost altogether lacking in our age" [Agamben 34]. But another more obvious difference between Kames and the contemporary metricians is that Kames is trying to tell us how to write good verse, something thought of as falling largely outside the job description arrived at by contemporary metrics. Are these two developments connected? Might the shift from an openly prescriptive practice of writing about versification to an insistently descriptive practice of writing about versification be in some way connected to the way in which fundamental philosophical questions- not only aesthetic but also ethical, epistemological and metaphysical-are at once (1) conceived of as only a marginal part of my job as a metrician and (2) nevertheless continually present in the form of only partially investigated presuppositions?

Imagine that I am writing an attempt to formulate the rules of English meter. It is already contained in the vocational idea of such a task at this date that I am not trying to say what the rules of English meter ought to be, but to describe what they are. I may, for example, draw an analogy (which I may admit is a loose analogy) between grammatical and metrical competence. To formulate the rules of English meter, in this analogy, will not be like writing a treatise on usage. It will be like what one does when one writes an account of grammar: to make explicit the knowledge that everyone who is a grammatically competent speaker of that language already implicitly has. Just as I do not need to be able to formulate the rules of a grammar in order to be able to read or to speak or write grammatically, so I do not need to be able to formulate the rules of a metric in order to be able to read or compose metrically.

The equivocal word here is "competent." Although it comes forward as though it were merely descriptive, it is also ineliminably evaluative. Claims to be grammatically competent in a language may founder for many reasons. The claimant may be judged illiterate, foreign, a poet, or mad. Certainly, the vocational protocol of pure descriptivism has widened the circle of the permissibly competent. Claims to competence will not now usually founder, as they might once have done, because of the claimant's class or

geographical location. Nevertheless, it is clear that the account of what language ought to be is not so easily deleted from the account of what it is as would be convenient for normless attempts at linguistic description. In practice (a phrase that appears with telling frequency in the study of prosody, as if to say: stop rocking the boat) this has caused few

problems for, e.g., generative grammar. If we move to the analogy with metrics we can see that the problem becomes, if not more acute, more visible. Here, for example, is a passage from an outstanding work which remains by some distance the best attempt at the currently no doubt impossible task (for reasons set out in Jarvis, "Prosody as Cognition") of an account of the rhythms of English poetry:

A metrical form which became very popular in the sixteenth century, at a time when rhythmic regularity was at a premium, and has been used sporadically

14. Although it cannot quite be said that Kames lives up to this demand, his analysis of versification is nevertheless of real interest-much more so than one would have any idea offrom, for example, Fussell.

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since then, is the "fourteener"; this is exactly the same pattern, manifested as couplets of seven beats each, and exhibiting a strict syllable count (yielding fourteen syllables per line):

No image carved with cunning hand, no cloth of purple dye, B B B B B B B

No precious weight of metal bright, no silver plate give I. B B B B B B B

Here one can feel the strong pauses after four beats, corresponding to the line- ends in the four-line form.

Do all these examples represent a rhythmic form distinct from the 4 x 4 structure? Careful introspection as one reads reveals that the answer is no. If one chants ["Mary had a little lamb"] very rhythmically, beating time as one does so, one finds that it is much more natural to follow the second line with a beat in silence, giving the line four beats, than to go straight on to the next line; and the final line obviously follows the same pattern, making up the full 4 x 4 structure. [Attridge 87].

When I first read this passage I was delighted, since I had been making-in a much less lucid way, no doubt responsible for my failure to persuade-much the same point about one of Cowper's hymns to a skeptical teacher of practical criticism. The teacher's careful introspection clearly did not produce the same results as mine. What was I then to do? If this were science, I could show her the evidence. But "careful introspection" is not science. It is, of course, phenomenology. A phenomenology is presupposed in all writings about rhythm and meter, whether it is, as quite often, kept quiet about, or whether (as here and elsewhere in Attridge's study) its indispensability, under the term "careful introspection," is admitted. The very attempt to describe a metrics places a value, then, upon the critic's own introspection. It makes the experiment of supposing that the results of this introspection will be shared by that of all competent introspectors. It is by no means wrong to do this. Only, a certain diformationprofessionelle has already determined that this careful introspection will not be phenomenology proper, because it will decide in advance that only those features of what is found in introspection which I can expect to be what others find when they too introspect will get into the book; because it will decide in advance that only those aspects of introspection falling under a given vocational demand are relevant introspection. The good and the beautiful are held at the limit. They show up only at the frame that holds the inquiry in place: competence and judgment are their placeholders. This just because the good has already shrunk or hardened to vocational reason; a narrowing or a specification to contest which, it has already been admitted, may possibly in a given case be merely superstitious. This organized instrumental rationality, however, is aporetic. Any account of prosody now which did not take into account the work of twentieth-century linguistics, in many of its various departments, would be manifest myth-making. Yet who really believes that the truth about our experience of verse is to be obtained by adding up the labors of the phonologist and the phonetician with those of the philosopher and the psychologist? Work proceeds under the rationale that these departments are all ultimately in cooperation, whereas everyone knows that the fields are just as much constituted by mutual antagonisms.

Kant's categorial separation raises an aspect of modemrn common sense to a concept, and produces more modemrn common sense in its turn. But what if truth is not susceptible to this kind of architectonic placement? What if it is internally constellated, so that mimetic, intersubjective, and systematic demands are each equally important moments of it? What if it participates in those other orders with which it is not identical, the good

diacritics / spring 2002 15

and beautiful, rather than being merely inertly separated from them only then to "bridge" this separation by analogy? In that case truth makes a different demand upon our writing and thinking: one that, as I shall now go on to suggest, has led to the most unexpected kinds of shelter for the vulnerable equivocality of the critical field.

4

"So, what's next? Let's assume I give you all this: yes, we can think that the judgment of the beautiful is subjectively universal without believing that it must be occasioned by an

experience of disinterested delight; yes, we can think that the judgment of the beautiful is subjectively universal without thinking that it must be noncognitive but analogous with cognition. Then what? What's our method in this case?" But it is precisely method- wherever that means a procedure invariantly applied to differing objects-which would delete just the equivocality that has here been argued to be constitutive of the field of criticism. Method, that fear of error hardened into an imaginary guarantee against making mistakes, is in this case the error itself. An essay, just insofar as it is not a treatise, does not start from presuppositionlessness, but from an experience. What I have so far been

calling the "equivocal" character of criticism could equally be called its "speculative" character. Although Kant's Third Critique has been shown to have had a central role in the formation of Hegel's idea of the speculative proposition [Wohlfart], it is not

speculative in the sense that it, for example, asserts the identity of identity and nonidentity. It is, in fact, speculative in a sense closer to that which has become primarily pejorative: as wherever speculation is opposed to certain knowledge. There is a long history to this, a history by which a word that at certain times and in certain places has named a higher form of cognition has become (above all in nominalist and then Protestant and then

Enlightenment polemic) twinned with credulity or superstition [Ebbersmeyer]. Criticism is speculative: in the eminent sense that, starting without any guarantee or even promise of truth, it looks (out) for truth.'5

"Isn't all this just going to end up with more paragraphs in which Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch examines his own slippers? Is that the kind of stuff you want?" No; just the reverse. Certainly, the diagnosis here is that a belletristic element to the essay has been

partially justified in that it shelters, in an epoch of scientism, the equivocal character of the field of criticism itself: a field the protocols of scientism would ignore, suppress, or delete. Hence it is that the most important critics of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries were by no means those who forced everything that was once implicit to become explicit, nor even always those who were able to give detailed reasons for every judgment. One trait critics otherwise so quite unalike as Hazlitt and de Man and Adorno share is a weakness for the indemonstrable (or even perhaps for the demonstrably false) large claim: "Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry"; "The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence"; "After Auschwitz all culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage" [Hazlitt 165; de Man, "Shelley Disfigured" 122; Adorno, Negative Dialektik 359]. The scrupulous reading which replies that these claims cannot really be proved, or which shows that there is a good chance of disproving them, is less than scrupulous as a reading

15. Before Latin speculari was recruited into philosophical lexicons, its first sense was "to look out from or reconnoiter from a watchtower or point of vantage" [Ebbersmeyer 1355].

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of these claims, because it mishears what might be described, not as their literally syntactical, but as their cognitive, mood. They are not really propositions offered as

corresponding adequately with a state of affairs. They are a kind of disenchanted echo of performative or apotropaic speech: they describe a certain state of affairs as already existing, in order to bring it about or avert it. In this as in all magnanimity there is a hidden cost. Yet the criticism that takes care to delete all indemonstrable claims may also have taken care to delete the field of criticism itself.

The point of the attempt in this essay, to set out the equivocal or speculative character of the field of criticism itself, is by no means to pretend to have invented a new method for guaranteeing that criticism will be true, nor even a new way of writing criticism. It is not a new set of protocols but an undeleter: its sole hope is to introduce some small doubts about some of the falsely absolutized prohibitions by which critics may come

unnecessarily to preevacuate the content, the materials, the experiences; the ideas, the

concepts, the wishes; the form, the moods, the eloquence-allowed place in their critical

writing. It by no means seeks to object to the circuit of violent or performative or

apotropaic assertion under which the equivocal character of criticism has sheltered. Indeed it suggests that almost all modem criticism of value has been characterized by its entry into this circuit. It asks, however, under what conditions such armor might be doffed. If criticism were no longer to rule nugatory all propositions other than those to which it can compel assent, might its mood have less need to be defended in assertion, more often subjunctive or hypothetical or optative or interrogative? If that were so, we should no longer have to accept the way in which the vocational personae carve up what is in truth "one and the same territory of experience" [CJ 13]. Keston Sutherland, in a recent study of one of our most intellectually adventurous contemporary poets, has drawn attention to the marriage of phenomenology and philology in that poet's work. There could be worse models for criticism itself, always remembering that marriage, "not a contractual relationship as far as its essential basis is concerned," is not seamless cooperation, but at once supersedes and preserves antagonism in love [Hegel, Elements 203]. Such a criticism would by no means imply a retreat from the minute particularity of works of art or of nature. Instead, it would no longer need to insist that access to the

complexity of phenomena arises in proportion to the deletion of everything singular about my response to them.

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