This is the text of a paper given at the conference Radical Aesthetics: The Work of Isobel Armstrong, organised by the Institute for English Studies by Anne Janowitz, Sally Ledger, Jo McDonagh and Laura Marcus on 21 June 2002.
I draw the phrase material
imagination from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe
two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material
world is imagined, not just by scientists and engineers, but by
everyone, all the time: poets, children, footballers, cultural
analysts, cabdrivers, medics and mad Hatters: the material
imagination, then, as the way in which matter is imagined.
In an age of conventional scepticism, in which the mind is
always, as a Beckett character says, on the alert against
itself, the prescribed move to make at this point is to
doubt whether one can ever look steadily at anything other than
ones own conceptions or categories. But where do these
conceptions and categories come from? For there is no way of
imagining the nature of the material world which does not draw on
and operate in terms of that material world, its spaces,
substances, stresses, processes. Imagination is itself always
prepossessed by the world that it attempts to imagine, made up,
like the gingerbread-man enquiring into the question of his
dough, of what it makes out. So the phrase material
imagination must signify the materiality of imagining as
well as the imagination of the material.
Isobel Armstrongs work is a the most richly significant
extension we have seen in recent decades of what might be called
a Hegelian materialism of signification. Perhaps that work is, as
a result, sometimes caught in the fix that Hegel bequeathed to us
all, whereby one cannot imagine any kind of object except as dead
and other to us, even as we also cannot help wanting to take that
object into epistemological custody, making it our own, making it
us, by flooding it with feeling and concept. We either leave the
object out in the cold of our objectifying, or we kill it with
the kindness of our identification. Wherever you look, whether
within the recesses of the subject, or at the object, the same
subject-object pingpong is always about to start up.
And yet, Isobel has always been disinclined to let such
predicaments bake into impasses. Indeed, the effort of her entire
work has been to show the vitality of such predicaments,
predicaments which are largely epistemological in Language as
Living Form and political in Victorian Poetry. The
problem which keeps generating and regenerating the living
form of nineteenth-century poetry is that of how to marry
the self-forming contemplations of Hegel, in which the mind risks
overwhelming its own world by taking itself as its own other,
with Marxs insistence on relationship. It is only when
there is a relationship between the material act of mind
represented by a poem and sets of material circumstances that
relations can really exist, that time can be inhabited as well as
merely unfolding, and that the poem can act and work (1982,
48-9).
The most significant moments in Isobel's virtuoso readings of
nineteenth-century poetry are often those where a certain field
of material possibility is isolated, rotated and worked. There
is, for example, the moment in which she reflects on
Hopkinss use of the phrase glassy peartree,
saying that [t]he idea emerges through the particular
physical nature of glass and one might say that the notion of
transparency is given a soul because it is incarnate in the
specific irreducible and particular qualities of glass
(1982, 8). Or there are these reflections on the idea of an
air in Victorian Poetry:
An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an influence, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs, where they are figured as a responsive, finely organised feminine creativity, receptive to external influence, returning back to the world as music that has flowed in, an exhalation or breath of sound. (1993, 326)
Another example would be the reading of a passage from Shelleys Prometheus Unbound in Language as Living Form which concludes that
Everything is moving through everything else and the kinship of exhalation and winds, rain and aerial dew, which are all offered as separate entities and actions, is such that forms and functions merge, reverse and exchange. With it circles round, it is not merely either the original exhalation or the aerial dew but every element in the passage. Exhalation, winds, blooms, fruits, flowers, stems, leaves, dew, as a totality, a unity, circle round. The rapidity, the flux of syntax, the capacity of Shelleys words to make things dematerialise into aery thinness, is extraordinary. (1982, 45)
These passages have in common the
fact that they are reading poems which are themselves at these
moments reading aspects of the material world, the world of
nonhuman objects, substances, organisms, and processes, dew, air,
transpiration, evaporation and, in the process, perhaps also
trying to become these objects. In the last quotation, Isobel's
argument is that Shelley can do anything, because the mind of his
poem makes everything over into itself. At this point in her
argument, she is instancing Marxs critique of Hegel, that,
in the latters philosophy, Man cannot create himself
in terms of a meaningful and evolving relation with externality;
he can only create himself anew as an entity of thought.
(1982, 43) But, in evoking Shelleys dematerialising power,
Isobel seems also to limit or partly to revoke it: if there is
evaporation, coalescence, there is also work in Shelleys
writing, if only the work of dissimulating work. Isobel's own
working out of the process whereby work is dissimulated in
Shelleys poem restores the sense of an encounter, a
striving, a resistance, an abrasion, a transforming, a
surpassing. At moments like these, Isobel is borrowing a
poems encounter with material objects or processes to
release and disclose the nature of the poem as a worked object
for her.
All of this might come down, as is suggested at the opening of Language
as Living Form, to a question of digestion. You cannot eat
the idea of a cabbage; but equally you cannot have your cabbage
and eat it except by taking in the idea of a cabbage along with
the object itself. Isobel shows the poem wrapping itself round
what lies outside it. She similarly wraps herself round or
assimilates to herself the poem which lies initially outside her
own powers of assimilation. In reflecting upon the struggle of
the Romantic poem to find and secure its objects, Isobel is also
reflecting on her struggle not simply to swallow up the actuality
of her object, the poem. She is trying to protect herself from
becoming an entity of thought, that grows thinner and
more spectral the more it consumes. For this reason, she will
seem to want to fail to some degree, will want to reveal that
Shelleys poem does not quite bear out her argument, cannot
fully be assimilated to its reading, lest she convict herself of
taking the poem into custody, as she is saying it does with
natural process. She will want, to borrow the term she borrows
from Gillian Rose in a chapter of The Radical Aesthetic,
to tarry, with a judicious anxiety, somewhere in the broken
middle between world and word. Hence a certain rhetoric of
approximation and curtailment, a cordon sanitaire that the
critical act seems sometimes to want to throw around its object
of analysis, as it were to protect its objecthood, and thus to
allow the continuing possibility of relationship between
object-poem and subject-critic. Significantly, this chapter in Language
as Living Form begins and ends with Hopkins, and his
sustained attempt to prevent the world of objects from
disappearing (1982, 51). There are two kinds of
disappearance: the disappearance into objecthood uninterpreted,
unrelated, untransformed; and the evaporation of objects into
mind. Between these two alternatives, allegedly, there is labour,
love, life, the life of the worked poem, its corporeal, living
form.
Michel Serres suggests that every metaphysics is governed by a
physics, that a specific form or theory of the material world
bears upon every theory or philosophy. What kind of materiality
could be said to be at work in Isobel Armstrongs writing
through the poetry of the nineteenth century during the 1980s and
1990s? It is conspicuously a materiality that makes itself known
through struggle, strain, stress, and other similarly stringent
terms evoking prodigious labour and strongarm tactics. One of the
commonest words of description in Isobels analyses is also
almost always a word of commendation: the word
strenuous. The cogito of Isobel Armstrongs work
is a cogito not of knowing, but what Bachelard, following Maine
de Biran, has called a cogito of striving (1948, 78).
What does one strive for, or, better perhaps, against? The answer
is a thoroughly Victorian one, even, should you choose, a
thermodynamic answer, since Victorian physics bequeathed its
terms to twentieth-century aesthetics, via Freudian energetics.
One strives against death, in all its forms, which is to say
against the lowering or degradation of energies. And what is
death, but depletion of energy available for work? What is death
but the incapacity to strive? Death is entropy, indolence,
indifference, randomness, chaos, unrelatedness. Without critical
striving, with and athwart its poetic objects, there is either
the deadness of fixed canonical truth, or the gaseous Brownian
motion of mere ludic energies. Running through the
aesthetics of living form, there is the parsimonious impulse not
to let energy escape or become unbound, to keep the potential for
work high.
And yet the materiality at work in much of Isobels writing
about nineteenth-century poetry can also become paradoxically
abstract and null, as it is often is in the work of Marx, the
great idealist of the material. The most striking feature of this
materiality is that it is without form and void, a mere mute,
insensate impediment to the striving and form-giving actions of
mind. Reading Blakes Jerusalem in a later chapter of
Language and Living Form, for instance, Isobel finds him
at one moment locked or tonguetied in the enumeration of names:
The listing here is arbitrary and incoherent. The successive items have no meaningful progression or order, neither defined against one another nor related to one another. Repetition is random. It is a landscape of dispersal. Since each item has no existence but in itself it is a landscape of pure matter. Correspondingly words here have become pure matter. If fire, snow, sand, have no meaning but in themselves they are meaningless, and so the voids, the solids are equivalents and collapse into one another. (1982, 107)
The assumption that governs this
thinking about energy, matter and form, is of a fundamental,
energising duality between dark and unreflexive matter and lucid
mind. Without this jagged fissure running through things, there
can be no struggle, no possibility of charging matter with life,
no mastery or winning over of matter to the side of mind.
Interestingly, the last completely Victorian
discussion in Victorian Poetry is of the work of James
Thomson, who is seen as a materialist poet, where materialism is
the name for a theory in which all the customary energising
distinctions between man, nature, God, mind and matter itself
have been obliterated. In the end, Armstrong tells us, the
dissolving freedom of Thomsons atheist
epistemology becomes frozen into negativity (1993, 475).
One cannot help but feel that Thomson is not only a forerunner,
but also a representative of those modernist and postmodernist
writers (she says that Thomsons is the Nietzschean
predicament of the deconstructive sublime) who have abandoned the
struggle to create living form out of substantial and intractable
social and political content.
For two centuries, the aesthetic has been assumed to be the
necessary, sometimes desperately necessary alternative to
mechanism, that willed subjugation of life to rationalised
matter. Without the flickering, cryptic powers of the aesthetic,
we have become accustomed to think for the last couple of hundred
years, there would be only blind utility, a life lived according
to the imperious, rationalised, calculative logic of the machine.
Adorno makes an occupation out of the aesthetic fixes into which
this gets him. Either there is not enough form, and the aesthetic
becomes mere distraction and frivolity, a mere spume upon the
surface of things; or there is too much form and the aesthetic
hardens into a kind of machinery, powerful but inert. The
specific form of the material imagination at work here is perhaps
Bachelards cogito pétrisseur, with the
aesthetic as what he calls the ideal paste between
the alternatives of the soft and the hard (1948, 78).
Do these categories, of form, life and mind, that continue to
drive discussion of the aesthetic, and determine the ways in
which the relations between the aesthetic and the political are
thought about, belong to a classical physics founded upon form
rather than information, and a set of ideas about the nature of
form, energy and life that no longer seem universally to hold?
The interest of the passages such as the ones I have isolated
from the two books about nineteenth-century poetry is that in
them materiality is never pure, and so starts to breathe, to
breed, to work, becoming therefore less abstract, more complex
and differentiated, and less merely massy.
Two remarkable departures characterise the distinctive work that
Isobel has been doing over the last decade. First of all, there
is her remarkable investigation of the cultural history of glass.
Isobel began her work before the current rise in the stock of
things, which has made us accustomed in popular
cultural history to biographies of subjects such as cod, nutmeg,
salt, dust, TB and the colour mauve. Isobels apprehension
of what it might mean to read the cultural poetics of
a produced substance goes far beyond this work, while also
holding back from some of the places it goes. Where her earlier
work on nineteenth century poetry showed matter either being
wrought and wrestled into meaning, or falling away exhaustedly
into cindery residue, her work on glass implies the active
participation of the substance itself in forming consciousness:
glass consciousness (2000a), a phrase which is meant
to evoke not just the heightened awareness and sensitivity to
glass in the new culture of lustre and transparency that grew up
in the nineteenth century, but a kind of thought and awareness
into which vitreous form and organisation have entered and begun
to operate.
Isobels continuing work on glass has become a kind of
mythic endeavour: being a colleague of hers at Birkbeck during
these years has been not unlike what it must have been like to be
around Walter Benjamin when he was at work on his Arcades project
- with the difference, one profoundly hopes, that it will not end
its days being lugged in a suitcase over the Pyrenees. Even
before it has been finished, and perhaps partly because of this,
the very idea of what she has been doing and her many ways of
speaking about and characterising it have created rich
possibilities for new work at Birkbeck and beyond. Her
nonce-characterisation of her work as a cultural
phenomenology has given me a name for some of the
semi-farcical investigations I have tried to undertake of the
status of magical objects in the modern world. It has inspired
students in Birkbeck to undertake work on different aspects of
the cultural life of material forms and processes: a cultural
history of gravity, a poetics of air and odour, a philosophy of
tremor. Suddenly, and because of Isobels allowing,
materiality has a tellable history, other than as the raw, primal
stuff on which art and culture go puffing to work.
This seems to come at just the right time, at a time at which
scientific thinking about the nature of life, matter and form has
become unignorable, even by literary critics, and at which the
relations between the mental and the material have become so much
jumpier and more interesting. How can one any longer Hegelwise
counterpose matter and form in the era of DNA, when it becomes
apparent that there has never been any wholly uninformed matter
except in human fantasy? Information now overflows the gap
between form and matter. Previously blind and insensate material
forms prove to be alive with information. How will an aesthetics
founded upon the laborious, in-forming confrontation of the
material and the mental help us to manoeuvre in which the
prerogatives of life and the living seem so little assured and in
which material processes, from viruses to hurricanes, have come
to seem so richly and unnervingly lively? A physics, and an
aesthetics formed in its terms, which is based upon work, one-way
transformation and determinate output (heat, light, poetry) is
giving way to a physics of interfaces, ecologies, probabilities,
reciprocities, probabilities and the turbulent circulation of
energies. Following the curious temporality of science, from now
on, for the time being, this will have been the way it always
was.
Nevertheless, I think that what I take from Isobel
Armstrongs work is not altogether what she has put into it.
In the end, her work turns to and on specific kinds of object,
specific kinds of outputs and integrations. I take from her work
an attention to systems and substances and processes - always
linguistic, sensuous, actual, material, affective even when they
are also theoretical, generalised, abstract - that run through
and spill beyond these holding-stations or resting-places, of the
poem, the poet, the work. Not that nothing remains to be said
about such things; but more remains, at least now for me, to be
said about processes of cultural work, about the meteorology, the
epidemiology, the natural history of culture. Isobel Armstrong
has begun to make available to be thought a world in which matter
has its own living form, and in which
life is no longer concentrated at the thinking end of
matter.
At the same time, and even, as a sort of planned digression from
the historical investigation of glass, serving both to detain and
prepare for it a little, there has been for Isobel the work which
makes up the masterly Radical Aesthetic. Just as the work
on glass offers a new way to think about and with the cultural
history of matter, the struggle with intransigent and alien
materiality seems to drop out of the picture when it comes to the
new arguments about the force of the aesthetic deployed in The
Radical Aesthetic. In place of struggle, there is now
regulated play. Here, for example, the work of André Green helps
her to a new stress on the agonistic broken middle between
conscious and unconscious and the melancholic moment
of scattering, of unassimilated material, not the reconciled
symbol of completed mourning, (2000b, 132). In the
brilliant and resourceful diversification of the notion of the
aesthetic of The Radical Aesthetic, she shows how
idealistic, abstract and fixated most other accounts are. Like
John Dewey, to whom she devotes a discussion, she wants to be
able to see the many ways in which experience is art-work, as
well as furnishing the raw material for works of art. Hence a
notion of the aesthetic which must find a way of having to do
with dreams, dancing and gunfire as well as odes and sculptures.
Like Dewey, however, she also shrinks - and I will say, like
Dewey, not quite intelligibly - from a complete deregulation of
the idea of the aesthetic. The aesthetic will be preserved as the
name of the form-giving propensity lifted up into its highest
form. As such, it will be what quite simply keeps us
alive (2000b, 19). I hope I would have Isobels
warrant to point to the many other things, from safety-belts to
streptomycin, that keep us alive, while noting, in the spirit of
the Auden who decided his line We must love one another or
die would be better revised to We must love one
another and die, that ultimately of course, nothing
does. For Isobel, for whom the work of Klein and Bion have become
important, the aesthetic is important partly because it is a way
of holding play and disintegration together; but perhaps we will
be able to hold on much better to the sheer diversity of ways of
being and staying alive that she awakens us to in The Radical
Aesthetic by letting the aesthetic go. Yes, I suppose I am
saying that I will want to have been led by her radical aesthetic
further than she herself will at this moment go with it, to
somewhere radically beyond even its rainbow: clean out of the
aesthetic.
Armstrong, Isobel (1982). Language
as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Brighton:
Harvester Press.
---------------------- (1993) Victorian Poetry: Poetry,
Poetics and Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
--------------------- (2000a). Technology and Text: Glass
Consciousness and Nineteenth-Century Culture. In Culture,
Landscape and Environment: The Linacre Lectures 1997, ed.
Kate Flint and Howard Morphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
149-75.
-------------------- (2000b), The Radical Aesthetic.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Bachelard, Gaston (1948). La Terre et les rêveries de la
volonté. Paris: José Corti.