Marc Redfield. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism.
Clark, David L.
Marc Redfield. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender,
Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xi+255, 3
illustrations. $55.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.
"Waving, not drowning": On the Lives of Theory
Notwithstanding repeated reports of its death, theory written in or
after a certain de Manian register is alive and well in the North
American academy. From Frederic Jameson's patient historicization of its postmodern cultural location to Cathy Caruth's influential
investigations into the nature of trauma, from Thomas Keenan's
reflections on technicity and atrocity in Bosnia to Deborah Esch's
book on journalistic discourse and the nature of the event, theory
remains complexly attentive to the problems and the possibilities of de
Man's later work, and thus to the myriad consequential ways in
which the "materiality" of language is irreducible to
perception and cognition. It is the burden of this mode of theory to
interrogate the nonsemantic self-differences and self-resistances that
uncertainly characterize language, and that disfigure in advance the
claims to knowledge, experience, and action that are made in its name.
The delayed publication of Aesthetic Ideology in 1996, a collection
whose title evokes de Man's fascination specifically with
historical, political, and ethical modes of language power, made the
already over-determined reception of his thought more complicated; while
it helped re-inscribe the identification of his work with what is called
theory, the deferred appearance of these essays also served to throw
into relief the degree to which critical writings indebted to de
Man's writings have also branched out into wholly new areas of
concern. Looking at the efflorescence of texts ranging from Material
Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, a recent collection of
essays by thinkers as intellectually divergent as Judith Butler and J.
Hillis Miller, to Memoirs: For Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida's
powerful affirmation of the futures of theory after the death of de Man,
to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, which Gayatri Spivak dedicates to
de Man, neither theory nor de Man's legacy shows any sign of being
relegated to the dustbin of intellectual and institutional history.
The reasons for this "afterlife" are many, but they
include not only that de Man was an irreducible part of that history but
also that he was among its most perceptive analysts, a thinker who
devoted a great deal of his critical energy to exploring the opacities
quickening the itineraries and genealogies of "contemporary
criticism." Frank Lentricchia could therefore not have been more
anxiously wrong when--in 1983--he declared that the "war between
traditionalists and deconstructors" would "draw to a close by
the end of this decade," with Paul de Man "rediscovered as the
most brilliant hero of traditionalism" (After the New Criticism
96). If he had bothered to read his Kant, Lentricchia would have known
then what is obvious to us now, in a post-9/11 world: declarations of a
future perpetual peace are too often dreamy alibis for the aggressive
prosecution of a present war, a war whose outcome is anything but
certain. Reading Kant, Lentricchia might even have grasped the ways in
which his move on what he denounced as "deconstructors" and
"traditionalists"--both violently reductive figures for the
complex phenomenon of "theory" in the North American
academy--was itself an example of the aesthetic politics he thought he
was critiquing and that he imagined was the secret root of
"deconstruction." By indulging in the fantasy that history has
a comfortingly redemptive shape, building towards a denouement of
critical homogeneity and transparency in which all forms of false
consciousness are outed, all warring dialectical passions spent, it is
Lentricchia, not de Man, who most resembles a "hero of
traditionalism." The fact is that theory handily survived the end
of the twentieth-century, and that it did so in a variety of ways that
no one could--or should--have predicted twenty years ago. Theory work
answerable to what Jameson calls de Man's "unique
'rhetorical' system" (Postmodernism 240) proliferates;
and books that unabashedly evoke the reading strategies and critical
vocabulary of Allegories of Reading or Aesthetic Ideology continue to
win significant prizes (for example, Marc Redfield's Phantom
Formations won the MLA's prize for a first book, while Ian
Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy was awarded, among
other prizes, the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for
Comparative Literary Studies). Despite or perhaps because of the
irrefutable evidence of theory's vitality, death-sentences still
get pronounced, albeit in a mostly mechanical fashion. The rote uptake
and reproduction of these sentences becomes a kind of indolent shorthand
for an imagined critical competence, the sign shared by
initiates-in-the-know that confirms the putative superiority of their
clear-eyed "rigor" to the false "rigor" that was
once attached to the name de Man and to his supposedly mystified students: they know, or think they know, how to distinguish the quick
from the dead. They are, in a phrase, pro-life.
Hearing these declarations made repeatedly over the last twenty
years, and grasping how important they are to the idealized
self-representation of a certain academic class, one sees that John
Guillory was not entirely right to characterize theory as the limit case
of technobureaucratism in the humanities; it is the scholar who mimes
his or her authority by the denunciation of theory who has now taken on
the qualities of routinized and insular self-authorization for which
Guillory once castigated literary studies in de Man's wake. At a
large conference in New York City in the summer of 2003, for example,
Jerome J. McGann, in an otherwise affable plenary address about, of all
things, the problems of adapting Thomas Lovell Beddoes'
Death's Jest Book to the contemporary stage, felt it necessary--in
an aside, and with a casualness that quite mistakenly presumed universal
assent in his audience--to observe that "theory is of course
dead." Of course? McGann's rift on theory--by which he meant
"aesthetic ideology"--was intended to be normatively
prescriptive, a foreclosure of the future but couched yet again in the
guise of an unwarranted surety about the past. Amid a crowd of Romantic
scholars, however, for whom theory has an especially important
intellectual and institutional significance, it only raised rather than
suppressed resistant questions: Why does theory, for which "de
Man" and "aesthetic ideology" are compelled to stand as
mutually implicated figures, continue to excite such symptomatic
renunciations? And at what point do the reiterated declarations of the
death of theory become an avowal of its ongoing life? The repetitiveness
of the proclamation of the end of theory is telling; each reiteration,
as a reiteration, reminds us that it is a performative utterance that
can only pretend to be a referentially stable description. In other
words, the claim to be passing along the news of the death of theory
tropes--hides and discloses--a bellicose proclamation of death to
theory. Is it any surprise then that Derrida's recent untimely
passing has been greeted in some quarters with disgraceful glee
(Jonathan Kandell's and Emily Eakin's smugly taunting
obituaries in the New York Times being two cases in point)? Whence comes
this warring, uncivil, and thoughtless mood, this coarse reliance on a
sacrificial logic in which the demise of one body of thought--or what is
hallucinated, according to a certain aestheticizing logic, to be
"one" body--forms the necessary condition for the
"life" of another imagined scholarly community? (And what is
the figure of "life" and what is "theory" that it
can be said to have none of it, or to have it only in the spectralizing
manner of "being-after"?) Considering the unapologetic nature
of a wide spectrum of books that today speak to and from de Man's
body--or bodies--of work, passionately argued and deeply informed books
as different in subject matter and focus as Deborah Elise White's
Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History, Sheila
Teahan's The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James, and Lee
Edelman's Homographesis ... considering these books all one can say
is that if they are "dead," they are dead--and loving it. In
the face of irrefutable evidence of theory's thrumming
"afterlife," the ritualistic declarations of its extinction
are at best a sign of intellectual laziness, and at worst a thwarted and
conspicuously territorializing wish that it were dead.
That reports of the demise of theory are greatly exaggerated is
perhaps no more powerfully evident than in the recent publication of
Marc Redfield's The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender,
Romanticism--a capacious, elegant, and learned book whose substantial
critical introduction is animated by these very questions and problems,
but which manages throughout to refrain from either the "fear and
repression" or the "idealization and identification" (97)
that Redfield sees characterizing too many responses to de Man. A more
judicious, searching, and cogently articulated book on aesthetic
discourse and its implications for contemporary theory does not,
I'll wager, exist. Rigor and clarity unfailingly characterize every
page of this landmark study. Both in its overall argument and in its
closely argued and fine-grained readings, this is a book that quite
surpasses, for instance, Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the
Aesthetic. Written as the updated history of an idea, Eagleton's
much cited book tends towards familiarizing generalizations; it is this
very quality that has made it a useful primer on the matter. Like Jerome
J. McGann's influential The Romantic Ideology, however,
Eagleton's book mostly presupposes what needs to be queried, namely
the doxa that, for the purposes of contemporary theory, there is but one
ideology in the orbit of the aesthetic. Redfield dwells instead on all
that is unfamiliar, opaque, and heterogenous about the aesthetic, the
fantastic if irregular ways in which it functions both as the source of
modernity's most cherished ideals about the progress of culture and
the nature of humanity and as the irrepressible site of the wrenching
dislocation of those ideals, the convocation of rhetorical,
epistemological, political, and ethical disturbances that are as
unpredictable in their appearance as they are insistent and long-lived
in their cultural and textual effects. Theory is here not an evasive
alibi for aesthetic ideology; Redfield rather argues that each
interrogates the other, the two discourses bound up in an intricate and
unresolvable dialectic that informs the question of the function of
" criticism" at the present time, while also yielding up a
critical rhetoric with which to analyze the philosophemes of
romanticism, gender, and nationalism. The "politics" named in
the book's title refers in part to Redfield's probing interest
in the broad cultural consequences of aesthetic discourse, how it
quickens and disorganizes the gendered articulation of the social body,
the impulse towards nationalist self-understandings, as well as the
claims of reading and understanding romanticism in the lively aftermath
of de Man's writings. Romanticism is the study's framing
context, but it is a term that Redfield makes stand for an
epistemological and ontological incertitude that is irreducible to the
historical periodization that it nevertheless convokes. For as Redfield
brings out through a series of attentive readings of Schlegel, Shelley,
and de Man, romanticism is not one period metaphor or disciplinary field
among many, but the very matrix of periodization and disciplinarity
itself--i.e., the origin of the foundational gestures that give literary
and cultural history an intelligible shape, and that make it available
to an aesthetic education (including the education now known as
"cultural studies), but never without also disclosing how every
foundation is itself founded in violence, and is by definition unable to
justify itself. In the mode of romanticism, the imagination of form must
compete with a radical arbitrariness for which there is no form--and
thus nothing but forms, a plethora of figures that rush in as if
abhorring the utter desertification of meaning at the anonymous and
autonomous heart of language. As Redfield says, under these profoundly
eccentric conditions, romanticism is "'uncontainable' ...
and that uncontainability is nothing more or less than a predicament of
reading--reading a text within which we are inscribed, and an event that
claims us" (34).
Since its appearance on the European philosophical landscape two
and a half centuries ago, the aesthetic has meant trouble. Initially
associated with judgments about the beautiful, and thus with the
discovery and the production of the harmony that obtains between
individual perceptions and universal principles, aesthetics quickly
became a crucial part of how European modernity talked not only about
the nature of representation but also the concept of the human. These
are monologues and dialogues, as Redfield suggests, that are still
taking place, and because of that they have never been more pressing,
nor more difficult to parse. In his hands, we are reminded of the degree
to which the aesthetic--whether in the eighteenth or the twenty-first
century--is neither a "discourse about the body" (as Terry
Eagleton's influential argument has it [13]), nor a case of venal disinterest in social and historical life (as McGann claims), but an
inherently unstable figure for the vexed communication between mind and
world, sensation and idea, phenomenality and cognition. It is through
that contagious rapport, which is to say through the mercurial and
substitutive movement of the figure "itself," that aesthetics
helps effect the appearance of the identification--the transport--of the
individual into the larger social and cosmic order. As Redfield argues,
aesthetics is thus the discourse that allows late eighteenth-century
thinkers to define "art as the sign of the human, the human as the
producer of itself, and history as the ongoing work of art that is
humanity" (11). Although sometimes characterized as the engine
whose objective is the end of history, aesthetics is a historical
discourse through and through, a word not only for "culture"
as an ideal abstraction but also for the process, unfolded incrementally
in time and often at the behest of state-sponsored institutions, of
acculturation by which the human at once claims and invents itself as
human. Not surprisingly, then, the aesthetic survives and remains
problematically at stake in our own history, this, in a variety of ways
that recall the importance and material impact of narratives of culture
and acculturation: from the privileged enclaves of the universities,
where lip service is paid to the importance of the humanities to the
formation of the citizen; to the museums, galleries, libraries, and
other cultural apparatuses constituting the infrastructure of any state
that makes claims to "modernity" and any society that
characterizes itself as "civil"; to the current dominance of
cultural studies in the academy, in which "culture" becomes
the globally ubiquitous content of a properly educated imagination, a
term that means all things to all people ... or rather to those cultural
critics who claim to speak, in a move that is nothing but aesthetic in
nature, exemplarily on behalf of the "culture" they are
studying.
As Redfield suggests, though, the aesthetic continues to make its
vexed presence felt quite beyond the university, and in vastly more
important realms, not in spite but precisely because we live in an age
of mechanical reproduction and the simulacra. Our stubborn consumptive attachments to the "sheen" of visual textures and images
represents only one way in which "auratic" experiences
continue to play out in social and psychic life, forming the unlikely
residue of what once was called "taste." But Redfield brings
his fullest interpretive efforts to bear on what he calls the phenomenon
of "the aesthetic national body"--a powerfully totalizing and
seductive figure that haunts our own age (including some American
reactions to the attacks on Washington and New York), but whose origins
can be traced to Kant's notion of "the sensus communis, to
which aesthetic judgment testifies and that it works to produce."
As Redfield writes, inasmuch as they rely on idealizing figures of
self-forming wholeness and commonality (for example, the commonality of
a shared cultural idiom), "all European-style nationalisms have an
aesthetic component" 06). But the aesthetic national body is a
curious creature, at once the pleasing image of a well-made socius, and
the scene of a perfect crime, whose inherent if hidden exclusionary
violence is directly proportional to the beautiful Schein it
instantiates.
For the sake of brevity, we may consider Redfield's
extraordinary reflection on Benedict Anderson's work as
paradigmatic of the book's overall concerns and interpretive
strategies. Anderson's book remains one of the most important
recent reflections on the nature of nationalism, even if, as Redfield
says, it is more often cited than read. But read it Redfield does, not
only bringing a kind of unblinking poet's eye to the text's
rhetoric and argument, but also treating it as the narrativization of
the unstable erasure of the figurality by which its claims--and the
claims of nationalism--are constituted. With this text, as with each of
the others to which he brings his considerable critical power, Redfield
refuses to foreclose the meaningful ambiguities and occlusions that
unsettle and energize Anderson's writing, this, even if elements of
Anderson's own text seem anxiously designed to do just that. For
Anderson, a national community is "imagined" to the degree
that its otherwise anonymous constituents co-exist in a virtual public
sphere, joined to a common cause via a network of communicational
technologies like newspapers. Yet a curious tension exists in his
account: on the one hand, Anderson privileges communities that invent
their coherence through what feel like spontaneous and affective
expressions of continuity. These are societies that are said
specifically to emerge in excess or to the side of state-sanctioned
nationalisms, the nationalisms that are, as it were, imposed from
without rather than produced from within. Yet as Redfield demonstrates,
the distinction between the two kinds of national bodies proves
remarkably unstable; the imagined community is just as reliant on
technical supplements, whether in the form of mass-media or educational
institutions, as its state-sponsored opposite. Anderson recuperates this
diversion of society into its communicational structures by figuring
language as a tool put into the service of the imaginations of the
subjects making up a community, even though, as Redfield's close
reading vividly attests, it remains uncertain whether language is an
instrument of a national subject or whether national subjects are
themselves "instrumentalized" by language. As Derrida has said
elsewhere, "I have only one language, yet it is not mine"
(Monolingualism 2). The aestheticizing figure of a community rooted in
acts of a collective imagination both smooths over this flickering
indeterminacy, this antinomy of possession and dispossession, and marks
its indelible trace. Anderson's argument thus evokes the
irreducible functioning of a technic "older" than any
particular communicational technology yet it does so without naming it,
as if the text's rhetoric remembers what its argument would prefer
to forget. But this amnesia and misrecognition at the heart of
Anderson's aesthetic national body is constitutive in nature, for
it is the blindness that accounts for his insights into the nature of
nationalism. The sublation of the differences between individuals in a
community repeats a prior erasure, namely the erasure of the difference
between literality and figurality--or, to say this in an altogether
different register, between difference and identity--that lies at the
heart of language and that enables thinking about any kind of
difference--for example, in theoretical discussions narrating the
distinction between nation-states and imagined communities--to happen at
all. As Redfield points out, Anderson's use of the term
"imagined" is therefore telling. For "imagination"
is the rhetorical means by which he psychologizes and thus humanizes
what is radically in-human about the operation of figures in the
formation of culture and community.
By unworking the aesthetic discourses underwriting an astonishing
range of texts, from Kant's Third Critique to contemporary new
historicism, Redfield explores the scenes of missed encounters,
unclaimed experiences, and other signal losses that characterize the
enigma of the historical productions of language power. In each case,
rhetoric is shown to mask a prior "rhetorical" violence,
producing the inherently unstable conditions that render a text as a
readable text; without this instability, reading would be reduced to a
perfectly programmatic calculation; with it, reading is an interminable
process without the consolation of a beginning or an end. When that text
is the aesthetic national body, as is the case in two more of
Redfield's objects of analysis--Fichte's Addresses to the
German Nation and Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism
at the Present Time"--the stakes could hardly be higher.
Fichte's essay, once considered to be formative in the development
of a certain Teutonic nationalism, evokes a community of past, present,
and future Germans who are present to each other in the way that a
speaker is imagined to be present to his or her auditor. Yet this scene
of "unisonance," of Germans discovering and affirming their
national identity through a shared "voice," suffers the
dislocations of anonymity that at once enable the fantasy of a shared
idiom and disfigure it in advance. "Voice" is a but a figure
for literality, thereby dooming nationalist speech acts to the
displacement and difference they would elide. Fichte summons forth an
imagined community of Germans as if speaking in the form of an
irrefutable broadcast of Germanismus, which Redfield smartly compares to
the operation of a ghostly (and ghastly) radio program--a teletechnical
trope that captures the desire for proximity driving the
philosopher's nationalist argument, while also insisting upon the
incalculable interior distances--the static-filled interludes or dead
air--that prevent those scenes of perfect audition from ever happening
as such. The "Germans" in Fichte's imaginings are nothing
if not a linguistic entity, as his own philosophical rhetoric suggests
at every turn, and because of that they are subject to the vicissitudes
of the figures with which they wish themselves into being. In a
remarkable reading of Matthew Arnold's "The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time," the locus classicus of
nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse, Redfield turns his attention to
the figure of "Wragg," the abject mother whose ghostly
presence haunts Britain's pretensions to civil society while also
operating as the grotesque exception that proves the role; in the
newspapers of her day, Wragg's imagined redemption is posited as
the sign that the aesthetic state has come to England's green and
pleasant land. Yet in what amounts to an interpretive tour de force,
Redfield demonstrates that Wragg also functions as a kind of linguistic
pharmakon; her curious name is the means by which Arnold attempts to
"bear away language's figural excess" (91) only to have
that excess return to haunt his meliorist argument all the more. What
makes this reading both rigorous and memorable--and it is but one of
many in this book--is the way in which Redfield delicately holds out
several possibilities at once: it is impossible, finally, to know which
is the ground and which the figure, whether Wragg is a displaced
metaphor for language's unmotivated self-resistance, or whether the
unruly connotations of her epithet figure forth the divisions that
trouble the notion of "culture" from within and that make it
the aestheticizing figure par excellence.
Redfield's book is anchored in its subtle close readings,
which attend not only to the aesthetic discourses in Arnold, Fichte, and
Anderson, but also to the entanglements of irony and sexuality in
Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, and to Percy Shelley's
denegation of the aesthetic ideology, without which no future, no
ethics, decision, or political action would be possible. More generally,
in Redfield's capable hands, aesthetic discourse is a peculiarly
persistent and insistent language that enables subjects to invest
politically and psychically in figures promising phantasmatic forms of
presence where radical absences in fact obtain, or rather, more
precisely, where it is impossible to determine the difference between
absence and presence with any certainty. From what vantage point could
such referential certainty be established, when, as Redfield argues,
referentiality presupposes the very difference it is trying to name?
Under these indeterminate conditions, we could say that presences take
on a certain spectral quality, while the absence and loss that they both
conceal and reveal constitute a "materiality" of sorts; we
could say this, except for the fact that the very distinction between
presence and absence, like that between immateriality and materiality,
as well as literality and figurality, always already posits the
operation of the opening of language, the "event" of an
archaic differentiation that can be called a materiality without matter.
Aesthetics, like theory, is the narrative unfolding of this endlessly
unstable (de)materialization (or even "deconstruction") of
texts at the hands of language, or what de Man calls allegories of
reading. What Redfield's readings bring out are the different ways
in which aesthetic discourses and the receptions they anticipate each
register the impossibility of thwarting this indeterminacy--while also
proving unable, often in the name of nationalism, gender, and
romanticism, to give up trying. No wonder then, that themes of
deprivation and incomplete disavowals haunt both these discourses, for
they are sites of a melancholic loss that is, as Derrida says,
"nonsubjectivizable" in nature, a "law of thought ...
beyond interiorization" (Memoires 37). A great part of
Redfield's book is taken up with dwelling thoughtfully on these
unnerving locales: the tomb of the unknown soldier in Anderson,
Wragg's dead child in Arnold, the aftermath of the Peterloo
massacre in Shelley, and finally, in the book's moving last pages,
the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. These scenes, these
portraits of grief, differently but implacably call for the work of
reading, which, in Redfield's book, is an uncanny double of what
Kant called "reflective" as opposed to "determinate judgement." As Tilottama Rajan explains, in inventing a rule from
particular cases for which there is no rule, reflective judgment is
"our only way of accommodating the unfinished and the unthought ...
what is still becoming" ("From Restricted to General
Economy" 9). Just so with Redfield's book, which is
irrepressible in its desire to do justice to the limits of legibility at
the precise point at which the promise of legibility seems most
alluring. To recall his remarkable discussion of the Medusa in Shelley,
the event-like inscriptive force of language is, in effect, a face into
which one cannot look, and one cannot not look. This is the aporia that
The Politics of Aesthetics patiently and thoughtfully traces, a mirror
in which the sites and sources of our pathos are much closer than they
appear--but for all that, no less opaque, no less resistant to theory.
Redfield's indispensable book casts new and important light on what
impedes modernity in the region of the aesthetic, and, by its brilliant
example, demonstrates what comes of responding to that occlusion with an
ethics of reading.
David L. Clark
McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
