Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).
Altieri on affect
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).