Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics 9780300255713

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PRACTICAL FORM

T H E L E W I S WA L P O L E S E R I E S I N E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R Y C U LT U R E A N D H I S T O R Y

The Lewis Walpole Series, published by Yale University Press with the aid of the Annie Burr Lewis Fund, is dedicated to the culture and history of the long eighteenth century (from the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Queen Victoria). It welcomes work in a variety of fields, including literature and history, the visual arts, political philosophy, music, legal history, and the history of science. In addition to original scholarly work, the series publishes new editions and translations of writing from the period, as well as reprints of major books that are currently unavailable. Though the majority of books in the series will probably concentrate on Great Britain and the Continent, the range of our geographical interests is as wide as Horace Walpole’s.

PRACTICAL FORM ABSTRACTION , TEC HNIQ UE , AN D BE AUT Y IN E IGH TEEN TH - C EN TURY AE ST H ET I C S

Abigail Zitin

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Copyright © 2020 by Abigail Zitin. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Baskerville type by IDS Infotech Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934233 ISBN 978-0-300-24456-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CON TEN TS

Author’s Note, vii Introduction, 1 chapter one “A Rough Unsightly Sketch”: Empiricism and the Senses of Form, 28 c ha pt er t wo The Figure of Practice, 54 chapter thr ee The Analysis of Beauty, I: Practical Formalism, 84 c ha pt er f our The Analysis of Beauty, II: Feminist Formalism, 117

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CONTENTS

chapter fi ve Making Art in the Third Critique, 145 Epilogue, 172 Notes, 183 Acknowledgments, 221 Index, 225

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AU THOR’S NOTE

All of the images in this book come from the two engravings Hogarth made to accompany The Analysis of Beauty. I have found it necessary, for clarity’s sake, to distinguish the sequence of images I refer to in my argument from Hogarth’s own system of numbering. In his text, he refers to his numbered images as figures. Consequently, I use the word illustration to refer to the six images reproduced here. For example, Illustration 1, which appears on p. 110, is the image Hogarth describes in his text as follows: “Let figure [14, plate I top (see Ill. 1)] be consider’d, which represents the eye, at a common reading distance viewing a row of letters.”1 As this quotation shows, I have retained Ronald Paulson’s convention of using square brackets to indicate the incorporation into the body of the text of what was a marginal notation in the 1753 edition of the Analysis.

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PRACTICAL FORM

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INTRODUCTION

When David Hume writes, in Book 2 of his Treatise of Human Nature, that “beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain,” it may seem as though form is already fixed in place as a concept around which aesthetic theory revolves.1 At base, Hume seems to say, beauty is form and even vice versa, inasmuch as beauty’s opposite is deformity.2 The idea that form is the quality of an object in which its aesthetic value inheres is so familiar, so fundamental, that it may seem not to have a history; it seems simply, universally true, and this apparent truth galvanizes criticism and its methods in those humanistic disciplines concerned with the arts. My purpose in this book is to challenge this understanding of form, to argue that form does have a history as a concept in and for aesthetics, and to flesh out that history as it was shaped over the course of the century that gave us aesthetics as we know it: the field of philosophical inquiry into beauty, taste, and judgment. Form’s importance for aesthetics, I argue, was not immediately manifest; it emerged over time and, more important, through the techniques of perception employed by artists and artisans. By “techniques of perception” I mean, first and foremost, abstraction, which 1

INTRODUCTION

I understand as the schematic simplification of some complex image or idea. Artistic practice requires this kind of abstraction: strategic abstraction, abstraction instrumentalized, bound to material ends. Practical form so defined anchors a new genealogy of formalism, a genealogy that links formal abstraction with craft and technique. This is a book about the role of artistic practice in the theorization of aesthetics, which is to say, in the philosophical investigation of beauty. When we assume, as we are conditioned to do, that form must be a significant term in Hume’s definition, then his account of beauty seems consistent with what Kant has to say about form in his “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” fifty years later: “what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases through its form.”3 Though they sound similar, Kant’s “merely” is a little different from Hume’s “nothing but.” Kant is introducing a distinction; where by Hume’s definition anything that produces pleasure is beautiful, Kant distinguishes aesthetic pleasure—“what pleases through its form”—from another, sensual kind of pleasure, which he chalks up to “the addition of charms and emotions.”4 The “mere” attaches to form; what’s beautiful pleases by means of its mere form, its design or drawing, a “structure of parts,” to borrow Hume’s phrasing, stripped of that which “gratifies in sensation” (Kant’s favored examples of the latter are color and tone). Aesthetic judgment is distinguished, for Kant, by being grounded in form rather than the blandishments of sense. Kant’s distinction draws attention to the inertness of form in Hume’s definition. The significant term for Hume is not form but rather pleasure. For Hume, form bears no special emphasis by comparison with other pleasing qualities of objects. He uses the word form as a means of framing a functional claim—beauty produces pleasure—as a definition: beauty is that which produces pleasure. Beauty is nothing other than that which pleases; it has no further qualifications, formal or otherwise.5 My aim in beginning with these two canonical statements is to illustrate that what looks like a constant is actually a variable: aesthetic form is not the same, in the 1790s, as it was in the 1740s. This book addresses the question of what changed. In the Introduction, however, I pose a different and more incredulous question: how could this be? How could it be 2

INTRODUCTION

that form might at one time not have mattered for aesthetics? For literary scholars today, form is an article of faith. Consider the frequency with which we claim that the salient feature of a text—or an artifact, image, or performance—is not (or not only) its content but rather (or also) its form. It’s difficult, then, to imagine a criticism that doesn’t invoke form—more specifically, formal complexity or, putting it more minimally, formal interest—as the defining trait of a text’s literariness (and, broadening out, the trait that disposes an object toward aesthetic evaluation: “what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste”). In order to establish that such a criticism could and once did exist, I turn to what may seem like an unlikely example: Alexander Pope’s 1711 “An Essay on Criticism.” Pope’s poem gathers and memorably hones the articulation of a whole series of ideas about literary quality. Is it, therefore, necessarily a meditation on literary form? I do not think that it is, and before I explain why, I want to take a moment to head off an alternative framing of my point. I could take the position that form is an inert concept in the poem because the poem’s formal qualities limit Pope’s ability to use the term “form.” The claim here would be that form is not an easy word to rhyme, which limits its appearance in the important terminal position in Pope’s lines. There might be a satisfying “gotcha” aspect to that argument—but I think it’s more accurate, not to mention interesting, to notice that he avoids characterizing literature in terms of its form not because of the formal constraints of the verse, but rather because the concept form means, and does, something else in the conceptual unfolding of the poem. So: does Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” have a functional idea of literary form? An affirmative answer to this question is likely to focus on those well-known passages in the poem that distinguish between the content of an utterance and the particular features of its expression, a distinction felt even, or especially, in the commandment to match expression to meaning, as in “The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.”6 Here, as elsewhere, Pope subscribes to the decorum of fitting form to content. Certainly one of form’s uses today is to distinguish the sonic or lexical or rhetorical or grammatical features of an utterance from its meaning. Pope does not use the word form to make this distinction, however. Instead, Pope calls meaning thought, and its outward features expression 3

INTRODUCTION

rather than form. He establishes this precept in a passage beginning around line 285, encompassing his censure of those critics misled by their “Love to Parts” (l. 288) to forget what he has previously called both “the Whole” (at ll. 252 and 264) and “the Writer’s End” (l. 255). (The virtuoso sound-echoing-sense passage is both apotheosis and conclusion of this part of the poem.) A few lines from this section bear out the idea that Pope’s thought/expression dichotomy corresponds to what we might now characterize as content/form, including the famous couplet “True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (ll. 297– 98; the distracting “part” at which he takes aim in these lines is “Conceit” [l. 289]; conceit or false wit appears in verse in the guise of undermotivated ornament [l. 296]). Again, though, Pope’s preferred metaphor to characterize thought’s concrete manifestation is not form bur rather dress, a metaphor he extends through the verse paragraph that follows: Others for Language all their Care express, And value Books, as Women Men, for Dress: Their Praise is still—The Stile is excellent: The Sense, they humbly take upon Content. (ll. 305–08) Again, if I were making the “gotcha” version of my argument, that the idea of form is a casualty of poetic form, I might remark on the presence of a word that looks like the absent content but doesn’t sound like it.7 Instead, I’ll note that the dichotomy of expression and thought is here recast as sense and style. Evidently, then, Pope’s critical lexicon differs from our own, but the absence of a terminological form/content motif in the poem need not entail the absence of these concepts. So, again: does this passage endorsing expressive decorum justify thinking of “An Essay on Criticism” as a meditation on literary form? I am skeptical. In this case, terminology matters; Pope does not use the word form to mean expression, or sound, or style, because he uses it to mean something else.8 What form means for Pope has everything to do with its verbal corollary, form meaning “to make” or “to shape.” Twice, Pope uses form as a verb: “Be Homer’s Works your Study, and Delight, / Read them by Day, and meditate by Night, / Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring” (ll. 124–26); “Thus Critics, of less 4

INTRODUCTION

Judgment than Caprice, / Curious, not Knowing, not exact, but nice, / Form short ideas; and offend in Arts / (As most in Manners) by a Love to Parts” (ll. 285– 88). It’s worth noting that the object of this forming action is, in each case, critical judgment rather than literary art. Nonetheless, as a general orientation toward action rather than essence, Pope’s use of the verb seems apt.9 No ideologue of romantic inspiration, Pope conceives of judgments about poems, like poems themselves, as made things. Analytical expertise in the domain of verse applies alike to composition and to criticism, whose relation is fundamentally reciprocal, even (ideally) cooperative. (We are, after all, talking about an essay in verse, whose place in the canon is cemented by its show-don’t-tell ethos of performing what it prescribes.) The how-to sensibility of “An Essay on Criticism” militates against the conception that there is anything given about a verbal artifact; it is an assemblage of parts, a record of strategies and choices that could have been settled otherwise. The word form appears only twice more in Pope’s poem. But even where form does appear as a noun, it doesn’t serve the function modern critics might expect, which is to mark the special quality of literary artworks that elevates them above ordinary utterances; form is not, for Pope, the difference between poetry and mere verse. (This, apart from its nonsynonymy with expression or style.) In addition, it is in neither instance of its use the property of a verbal artifact. Instead it belongs to spatially extended objects of visual and tactile perception. In the first instance, it appears as part of an extended metaphor. Pope illustrates his comments on poetic rule-breaking (“a Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” l. 155) with the analogy of a sublime landscape: “In Prospects, thus, some Objects please our eyes, / Which out of Nature’s common Order rise, / The shapeless Rock, or hanging Precipice” (ll. 158–60). In what is not quite an extension of this simile—or, more strictly speaking, in a metaphor that obscures the relation between literal and figurative established via the simile—Pope returns to the realm of human activity: “I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts / Those Freer Beauties, even in Them, seem Faults” (ll. 169–70; the referent for the pronoun “them” is “the Ancients,” credited with breaking rules to sublime effect). The lines that follow this couplet both obscure a literal referent and restore the visual orientation of the simile: 5

INTRODUCTION

Some Figures monstrous and mis-shap’d appear, Consider’d singly, or beheld too near, Which, but proportion’d to their Light, or Place, Due Distance reconciles to Form and Grace. (ll. 171–74) The identity of these monstrous figures is not entirely clear: are they the shapeless rocks of the prospect simile? This would stand to reason considering how a prospect is constituted as an object relative to the location of its spectator. They are clearly not figures in the sense of tropes; Pope is not here talking about a poem. He is talking about visual experience, and the distance of the beholder from the object, along with the quality of the lighting, makes the difference between form and deformity. So form here not only is not an attribute of a verbal artifact; it also gains an evaluative component, connoting proper or even beautiful form. Form, with its coordinate, grace, exists in relation to a spectator. But the key point, I think, is not that form (or grace, or beauty) is therefore subjective—though that is of course the proposition motivating much of the debate around aesthetics in the eighteenth century—but rather that form’s essential meaning, for Pope, arises in opposition to formlessness; the word form refers to the fact of having been formed. That formation may, and in the above passage does, inhere in the relation to a spectator; the spectator composes a prospect by conferring a framing perspective on a congeries of objects and figures. Much has been written about the spectator as an organizing figure for Enlightenment thought and for aesthetics specifically. What happens, though, when we turn our attention from the figure of the spectator to what this idea of framing as making means for our understanding of form as a critical concept? Pope’s second use of form as a noun in “An Essay on Criticism” exemplifies this relation of form to formation without depending on the catalyzing presence of a spectator. In Pope’s potted history of the rise and fall of European culture, the Renaissance is that period when “Sculpture and her Sister-Arts revive; / Stones leap’d to Form, and Rocks began to live” (ll. 701–02). Form is, here, opposed to brute matter (formlessness, not necessarily deformity). Again, it is an attribute of objects that take up space, objects that are both visible and tangible. A stone that has a form is one that has been subjected to a principle of design; it has been shaped. Still,

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INTRODUCTION

form in this sense is not a special quality that elevates certain objects above others, marking them out for aesthetic evaluation. To be an object at all, to be an object of perception, is to be formed, either by material modification or by perceptual framing. The alternative is to remain unformed: formless. To recap: Pope’s poem inflects the word form in four ways that prove surprising and instructive for the project of understanding what form meant in relation to aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain. First, form is a verb; more precisely, it is as much a verb as it is a noun, which directs our attention to forming as an activity. Second, in relation to the criticism of poetry, it is a metaphor. It is a property of the spatially extended objects that Pope uses as figures for how we perceive verbal texts without implying that our visual and tactile perception of those texts works—or matters—in the way that seeing and touching a rock formation or a statue does. Third, it is evaluative: a return to form is also, in Pope’s usage, a return to grace, just as, for Hume, deformity is beauty’s opposite. But form can also be, fourth, the opposite of formlessness. This sense exists in some tension with the previous, evaluative sense (where form unmodified implies good as opposed to bad form); plenty of formed things are not by that token beautiful, including the artworks whose formation Pope alludes to. At the same time, this final inflection returns us to the first: forming is an action, and the objects of that action therefore possess, at minimum, the property of form. All of these inflections of form will be salient for my analysis in what follows, but what truly activates my argument is the closure of this circuit, linking the action of forming to form as a property or, better yet, a quality of objects. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory discovers a usable version of form in artistic practice, more specifically in the cognitive techniques of abstraction that enable, for the visual arts, the manipulation of matter in space. Before I situate this argument in its historical and critical contexts, I want to explain its central claim about form with reference to an example to which I will return in the book’s central chapters. I have thus far suggested, with reference to Hume and Pope, that form was not a particularly salient concept for those writers in the first part of the century who were interested in thinking about the nature of aesthetic pleasure in general and about literature specifically, as an art in which one might take 7

INTRODUCTION

pleasure (not least, in this latter case, because form was identified with spatial perception and therefore with the visual arts). Between these thinkers and Kant, who singled out form as the particular quality of an object to which its beauty is attributable, came William Hogarth, whose reputation as a painter and printmaker was well established when he published The Analysis of Beauty in 1753. In this short treatise, he resolves to settle a question whose apparent ability to baffle “mere men of letters” he finds both laughable and infuriating (AB, p. 1). Visual artists, he argues, have long known that beauty is the property of certain spatial forms, certain shapes—specifically, sinuously curved lines and the masses they contain and define. What Hogarth calls “the line of beauty” is, however, less crucial for my argument than his account of how and why the line pleases, which is also to say, how and why we recognize beauty in certain spatial forms. This recognition inheres in abstraction as a perceptual activity. The perceptual reduction of what we see into lines and spatial relationships is itself pleasing, in the way it holds the attention of the engaged perceiver. It is not, however, an activity we undertake for its own sake. Instead, we learn from visual artists how to resolve what we see into spatial form—artists, who do so for the express purpose of making images in two and three dimensions, in any number of different media. Recognizing beauty is therefore not disinterested, according to Hogarth and contrary to most other eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists, but rather purposive—for the purpose of making art, even if a beholder only participates in this kind of perceptual activity virtually, in order to learn how to see.10 To make this practical version of formal abstraction a bit more concrete, consider the example Hogarth offers of an engraver reducing, or a painter enlarging, an image by means of a grid. This is a technique undertaken in order to focus the practitioner’s attention on the abstract spatial forms that compose the image, to make those spatial relationships more evident to perception than the content of the image, the figures represented. Hogarth describes this technique in order to ground— indeed to familiarize—the somewhat more esoteric thought-experiment he offers the reader presumed to lack the specific vocational training requisite to “painting cielings [sic] and cupolas” (AB, p. 23). This more esoteric thought-experiment involves “considering objects thus merely as 8

INTRODUCTION

shells composed of lines, . . . that by these means we obtain the true and full idea of what is call’d the outlines of a figure, which has been confin’d within too narrow limits, by taking it only from drawings on paper” (AB, p. 22). The point of the exercise is to understand three-dimensional as well as two-dimensional objects as defined by outlines, outlines that shift and multiply as a viewer moves around an object (or turns it around in her mind), making every view a virtual or a potential drawing composed of discrete strokes. In order to develop the acuity and sensitivity of his readers’ aesthetic judgment, Hogarth wants them to understand how to think as artists do, strategically, about form—even if those readers never put pencil to paper or chisel to stone. The pleasure of the mental activity of abstraction itself (its searching quality, answered by the satisfaction of a new aspect of visual experience coming into focus) becomes the meeting point between artist and beholder or, put differently, between the ordinary appreciator of beauty and the specialist trained in techniques not just of artisanal making but also of the perception on which such making depends. What I am calling practical formalism recognizes continuity between domestic, industrial, and so-called high arts as repositories of technical knowledge, in which abstraction is a means to a material end rather than a mode of transcendence. The immanence of practical formalism recasts the politics of the aesthetic by taking as its exemplary subjects women and artisans. By identifying aesthetic perception with artistic practice, and artistic practice with abstraction as a technique in the visual arts, I am taking up a complicated position in relation to both a short and a long tradition of thinking about abstraction in the Enlightenment. Abstraction, that is, in relation to theory and practice as paired terms: in the longer tradition of which I speak, Enlightenment as an epoch or a phase in the history of ideas is characterized as a pendulum-swing toward theory, toward rationalization, toward abstraction. The emblematic version of this characterization by Horkheimer and Adorno casts it in a tragic light: theoretical abstraction is Enlightenment’s hubris, the overconfidence in reason that overlooks or, worse, justifies violence directed toward the stubborn material particulars that resist assimilation into a neatly rational world view.11 The shorter and more recent tradition recovers the practical side of Enlightenment empiricism: the method of Enlightenment reasoning is inductive, attentive to 9

INTRODUCTION

matter’s particularities, even in the name of remaking rather than dismantling the comprehensive systems on which Enlightenment thinkers trained their skeptical attention.12 This approach first took root among historians of science but has also influenced art history, if not aesthetics proper.13 The argument I make in this book draws on the more recent tradition of thinking about practice in order to reevaluate abstraction as a strategy (rather than a tragedy). The tragic view of abstraction holds that its dangerous ethical consequences result from its erasure of particulars. But we have already seen how abstraction employed as a perceptual technique in the visual arts does not necessarily erase particulars but rather sees them under another aspect, the aspect of spatial form. It is a philosophical conception of abstraction based in a theory of language that equates it with the cognitive process of generalization, following Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.14 The equation of abstraction with generalization certainly can operate in the visual arts—and did, influentially, in the eighteenth century, particularly under the rubric of a neoclassicism associated, in England, with Joshua Reynolds.15 And of course the category of abstract as opposed to figurative artworks was not yet available to eighteenthcentury thinkers. Still, abstract artworks are not abstract by virtue of a generalizing mode of representation; they are abstract in the sense that they are nonrepresentational.16 Abstraction understood by contrast with figuration was an idea available to eighteenth-century minds through the kind of formal reduction Hogarth recommended his readers adopt by modeling their perceptual practices on the material techniques of visual artists. But as such it was a cognitive process rather than a representational style. These divergent conceptions of abstraction trace a rift between visual and verbal media. Words do not allow for an equivalent perceptual aspect-shift in which spatial form defeats representation (or reference), however temporarily or contingently. Generalizing abstraction, as the philosophers describe it, may not belong exclusively to language, but language cannot be rendered abstract in any other way (or at least not in the same way that spatially extended forms can be). The perceptual abstraction of spatially extended forms takes place in the mind’s eye prior to and apart from its potential materialization in works of art. This opens up a second rift, within the visual arts, between process and product—a rift that surely has a corollary in the verbal arts, but whose verbal corollary draws 10

INTRODUCTION

differently on the cognitive resource of abstraction. (And indeed this is a situation in which the problem with generalizing abstraction makes itself felt: it is impossible to generalize about the many possible kinds of relation between process and product in any medium in this way. How is any poem, or novel, or painting a monument to the process of its creation? A question so rarely or tenuously answerable in a single case becomes plainly unanswerable in the plural.) To retreat, then, to the more local matter of nongeneralizing formal abstraction, leveraged for practical ends: I am interested in the way Hogarth describes this kind of abstraction as a perceptual activity and a source of pleasure. Even he is skeptical about its concrete manifestation in art works, specifically in the engravings he made to illustrate the ideas he develops in The Analysis of Beauty. These images, he suggests, may well fulfill their purpose—teaching the reader how to see the line of beauty in a variety of visual contexts—without therefore being beautiful themselves: “My figures, therefore, are to be consider’d in the same light, with those a mathematician makes with his pen, which may convey the idea of his demonstration, tho’ not a line in them is either perfectly straight, or of that peculiar curvature he is treating of,” where the ideal straightness alluded to but not reproduced in a mathematician’s drawing corresponds to beauty as the quality under scrutiny in the Analysis (AB, p. 17).17 Hogarth is skeptical about the conjunction of the activity of abstraction, its material trace, and that third element essential for an analysis of beauty, namely, pleasure. Others might be content to write off this third element as a je ne sais quoi, but Hogarth is not.18 Still, it is fair to object that the caution Hogarth offers here about correlating product (image) with process (formal abstraction) applies not to artworks in general but, more self-consciously, to his attempts to illustrate his theory. He does not want the theory to stand or fall on the evidence of the images (which is itself an interesting claim for an artist to make about the relation of image and word). However, the illustrations are meant “to point out to the reader what sorts of objects he is to look for and examine in nature, or in the works of the greatest masters,” suggesting that lines of beauty evident in those works are traces of the process of formal abstraction, and that the trained spectator’s abstracting activity in the process of her visual analysis will mirror the artist’s own (AB, p. 17). 11

INTRODUCTION

Hogarth’s early interpreter Georg Christoph Lichtenberg applied a similar logic to his explication of Hogarth’s graphic works. Attentive in particular to printmaking processes, Lichtenberg, according to James Grantham Turner, “reflects upon the expressive movement of eye and hand, peels back the narrative surface, reconstructs meaning from how Hogarth makes his mark.”19 In this book, I follow Hogarth rather than Lichtenberg, heeding the cautionary note the artist himself sounds about his illustrations and extrapolating a similar caution about the method of reading process onto or into a finished image. If Hogarth offers his illustrations as a course of instruction in how to see, and specifically in support of the thesis that visual pleasure inheres in the cognitive activity of spatio-formal abstraction, then the illustrations, considered as a subclass of visual artworks more generally, are in an important sense beside the point. The point is not to see beauty in lines and images but to see lines as pleasure’s concrete traces. On these grounds, I maintain that Hogarth’s words tell us more about his aesthetic theory than his images do, notwithstanding the grounding of the theory in his image-making practice. The practical orientation of the theory, I argue, leads Hogarth to understand beauty in terms that were, in the 1750s, unusual, but that have become commonplace: that is, in terms of form. Iconology on Lichtenberg’s model gives insight into Hogarth’s practice—more precisely, his process—but in so doing it diverts our attention from his theory of the beautiful. Hogarth wrote The Analysis of Beauty because images do not speak for themselves in the specific sense that they do not articulate the theory by which we find certain kinds of visual experience pleasing. And this is the case because the pleasure inheres in practice, in its abstracting cognitive component, which eludes encapsulation in an end product, a work of art. We are more accustomed, I think, to the inversion of this idea—that an artwork, or more specifically our aesthetic experience of an artwork, eludes (in the sense that it transcends) an accounting of its component parts and the process of its assembly. Hogarth uses words to articulate the aspects of artistic practice that are not made manifest in the objects and images produced by that practice. Viewed in this light, he is a phenomenologist of vision, more specifically of the circuit of eye, hand, and mind in the activity of drawing.20 This phenomenology is his contribution to aes12

INTRODUCTION

thetic theory, a contribution that resolves ultimately, I argue, into a different outlook—a practitioner’s perspective—on what we know as form. Hogarth’s sentences testify to those elements of practice that a finished artwork conceals. Still, they testify imperfectly, and that imperfection is important. On a sheerly biographical level, Hogarth is and understands himself to be a visual rather than a verbal thinker. Writing about his early childhood, he speaks of “the natural turn I had [for] drawing rather the [sic] lear[n]ing a language.”21 He incorporates this self-perception into not only the framing but also the argument of his aesthetic treatise. By turns brash and halting, conversationally plain and grammatically convoluted, The Analysis of Beauty betrays its author’s discomfort working outside of his customary media. He does not conceal the effort required to capture in words something that does not lend itself to verbal articulation. However, this resistant something encompasses not just visual ideas but also craft knowledge, which is to say, the expertise by which he authorizes his own dissident approach to questions of taste and beauty. Hogarth’s frustrated sense of what he cannot do as a writer has conceptual implications. Describing the problem of writing about artisanal expertise, Paola Bertucci explains how, “as a nonverbal ability, embodied skill could not be fully captured in textual or visual representation.”22 She goes on to define “writing about making as a process of intersemiotic translation, predicated on the impossibility of fully communicating everything.”23 A verbal theory of visual practice does not risk failure so much as court it; failure shows what parts of visual and tactile experience are incommensurate with verbal articulation. In an early draft of the Analysis, Hogarth seems to understand verbal inarticulacy as a badge of artisanal distinction, correlating with a fluency beyond words (the “embodied skill” of which Bertucci speaks). The artists he refers to as “great Italien masters” were by virtue of their “excellency” spared “the trouble of enquiring into the Phisical causes of their effects and therefore incapable of communicating any regular account in words, any more than the cabinet maker who daily practices the use of the waving line which gives such excellency to his chairs and tables.”24 In a later draft, the confidence with which he associates “excellency” with the flagrant failure of verbal communication gives way to a more conventional correlation of inarticulacy with rote mechanical labor. His analogy descends the social ladder: rather 13

INTRODUCTION

than using the cabinet maker to elaborate on the painter’s reticence, he instead sarcastically compares that same craftsman’s ability to account for the waving line “as a principle Just as a day labour [sic] who uses the leaver every day would give of the Machanical Powers.”25 Hogarth here seems to move in a similar direction to what Bertucci describes in the French context as the appropriation by theoretically ambitious artisans of “discriminating motifs formulated by the savants.”26 Like the French artistes, Hogarth establishes his own authority by distancing himself from other practitioners. “Discriminating motifs” like this implicitly reject the pluralist logic of craft expertise as embodied knowledge, only partially translatable into words. Instead they operate on the principle that verbal coherence is the single standard for the communication and understanding of theoretical knowledge. Tied to Hogarth’s derision of the day-laborer, however, is a more pronounced, even tortured, sense of his own writerly shortcomings. His derision is conventional, to be sure, but it’s also defensive, adopted to deflect attention from his own felt inadequacy to the task he undertakes. In yet another draft, this one of the introduction, Hogarth describes his attitude as he confronts drafting the Analysis: “I was so conscious of . . . acting out of my own sphere,” he writes, “and so sensible of my inability.”27 Consoling himself with the prospect of supplementing his “deficiencys in writing” with drawings (“like one who makes use of signs and jestures to convey his meaning, in a language he is but little master of ”), he concludes the passage with another analogy to artisanal labor: Hopeing, that as the mechanick at his Loom is as likely to give as satisfactory an account of the materials, and composition, of the rich Brocade he weaves (tho uncouthly) as the smooth Tongue’d Mercer {with all his parade of showy silks about him} I may in like manner, make myself tolerably understood, by those who are at the pain of examining my Book, and prints together.28

This time, the proposition that a craft worker might give an intelligible verbal account of his labor, however “uncouthly,” seems scrubbed of irony. A hint of derision clings instead to the mercer, with his smooth tongue and “parade of showy silks.”29 The artisan’s imperfect verbalization, his halting words, reflect his superior practical understanding of the “materials, and composition” of the work he produces.

14

INTRODUCTION

My approach to reading Hogarth remains oriented to the idea that Hogarth’s “discriminating motifs” encode an underlying commitment to practice as embodied knowledge, impervious to full verbalization. In this sense, my approach is literary; if verbal imperfection corresponds to a submerged claim in Hogarth’s argument, then his particular verbal and rhetorical choices should repay close scrutiny. From the claim of untranslatability follows Hogarth’s sense that words are bound to fail him in roughly the same measure that he will fail them, that is, fail to accomplish what he imagines a real writer, one for whom words are the material of his craft, would be able to do with the ideas he wishes to convey to a reader. In that mutual failure, I argue, lies the potential for a practitioner’s aesthetics. Hogarth’s prose draws attention to the ways in which the perceptual and cognitive abstraction engaged by the practitioner defies both verbal description and retrospective reconstruction from finished artworks. One surprise yielded up by the process of writing this book has been the portability of its method. I had thought that the uniqueness of Hogarth’s position as a practitioner-theorist in an intellectual field dominated, in the eighteenth century, by “men of letters” afforded a singular opportunity for the kind of close tropological attention with which I approach his prose. Instead, as I have sought to locate The Analysis of Beauty in the course of a larger tradition of aesthetic writing stretching from Shaftesbury to Kant, I have learned that the figural logic of other, more confidently philosophical writers might shed light on way they manage the idea of practice both within and beyond the visual arts, extending, reflexively, to the writing of philosophical prose. So, for example, when Shaftesbury uses the hand as a metonym for talking about skill in the moral exercise of self-reflection, he rehearses the Platonic ambivalence about figure (as unreliably attached to matter, and yet at the same time indispensable) that elsewhere in his work seems to secure his transmission of an ancient theory of Forms into modern aesthetics. A more familiar approach to the development of aesthetic thought in this period has been to focus on its political implications—indeed, to explicate accounts of beauty as determined by the class-based prejudices of their authors, and often to argue, following Bourdieu, that the function of aesthetics was to codify certain kinds of class distinction and recruit the 15

INTRODUCTION

discourse of taste as a sorting mechanism. One way of defining Hogarth in relation to Shaftesbury, for instance, is to emphasize how his program for aesthetic education finds beauty in ordinary objects and thereby affirms the capacity of ordinary people to exercise aesthetic judgment, rather than restricting that exercise as a mode of cultivation for a powerful elite. Focusing on the perspective of the practitioner complicates the question of what’s at stake in examining the politics of aesthetic theory. The eighteenth century saw various efforts by artisans to elevate the public perception of their labor. Writing about midcentury France, Bertucci fills in an argument analogous to John Barrell’s account of how eighteenth-century English artists sought to reclassify painting as a liberal rather than a mechanical art, elevating their status as citizens along with that of the prestige of their craft.30 In the context of the Société des Arts, Bertucci writes, “artistes circulated a discourse on their own distinctive ways of knowing. It was an inherently political discourse, as it concerned the artistes’ relevance to the French state and the role they could play in projects of improvement.”31 Artisanal expertise is political to the extent that it comes to count as knowledge under the governing ideology of civic humanism, in the case Barrell describes, and in the institutional administration of state power, according to Bertucci. Hogarth’s Analysis helps show how this understanding of the political implications of artistic practice has the peculiar effect of sidestepping beauty. While his argument, too, credits craft expertise as an underappreciated kind of knowledge, this claim is only a means to the end of better understanding the beautiful through the pleasure it imparts, a pleasure Hogarth associates with the form-making perceptual practices of artists. The politics of the Analysis, accordingly, is not a politics of recognition, a politics whose end is the elevation of the artisan. Instead, there’s a leveling logic to his theory; practical formalism is not the special attainment of the artisan, but rather part of the cognitive equipment of ordinary people. We all already know how to perceive and enjoy beautiful form in the world around us. In this way, Hogarth’s theory anticipates Kant’s claim in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that judgment qualifies as aesthetic only when it excludes conceptual knowledge. This aspect of the politics of Hogarth’s aesthetics—the leveling tendency, that is, of its prioritization of beauty over knowledge—is most readily evident in the way he recruits 16

INTRODUCTION

women into his exposition of practical form. The Analysis of Beauty is not just about women, however much attention it devotes to the female body as an example of beautiful form. It is also for women: addressed to them as readers, calling on their fluency in the embodied language of form. The norms governing women’s self-presentation and self-fashioning in patriarchal culture require that they too, like artisans, become fluent practical formalists. Still, women are not invited, exactly, to model themselves after craft workers. Rather, in Hogarth’s explanatory framework, women and artisans occupy analogous positions, having cultivated through a practical education (or socialization) the abstracting powers of mind that everyone possesses in potentia. They are aligned with one another through a vocational or social association with beauty. Just as a focus on beauty orients my approach to the politics of aesthetics, so too does the aesthetic orient my understanding of form. While new formalisms, variously conceived, have attracted considerable attention in the discipline of literary studies over the last twenty years, the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics is a heretofore unwritten chapter in the history of ideas.32 Our customary conception of the aesthetic as concerned with form derives in part from the familiar juxtaposition of formalism to historicism as competing critical programs. Notwithstanding the tendency to polarize the two only in order to reconcile them in a higher-order synthesis (tracing, for instance, the historical determination of literary form), a contest between historicism and formalism almost always absorbs the aesthetic into the latter. I am thinking, in particular, of Marjorie Levinson’s important 2007 survey article “What Is New Formalism?” in which Levinson distinguishes an “activist” new formalism from its “backlash” counterpart, a bad (old) formalism that rejects history in favor of an unreflective commitment to the aesthetic values enshrined in the canon.33 This book recounts, instead, how the very idea of form as a nexus for aesthetic judgment emerged out of a particular historical conjunction of aesthetic theory and artistic practice. A side effect of conceiving of form as history’s methodological counterweight is to cast it as unvarying and also unvaryingly relevant if only we know how to look for it. To be clear, demonstrating that form has a history is not the primary aim of this book. More precisely, historicizing form is not an end in itself, especially insofar as the claim that form is 17

INTRODUCTION

subject to historical forces might be mistaken for a declaration of victory of history over form, in the binary structure of their customary polarization: “See, even form has a history; historicism wins again!” My aim, instead, is to show that aesthetics—the philosophical inquiry into beauty and its perception—is more than accidentally connected to the understanding of form that counts in the discipline(s); when we bracket off the aesthetic to preserve a sense of rigor or burnish our politics, we relinquish an important critical perspective on form and its uses. This book examines how the project of philosophizing about beauty generated a particular account of form that turned out to be important for the self-understanding of literary study as an academic discipline The form/history polarity contributes to a default understanding of aesthetics and form as interchangeable antagonists to history on the grounds that it’s not necessary to know anything about the context of an artwork’s production or reception in order to subject it to formal analysis or to have an aesthetic response to it. On this view, formal analysis, unlike aesthetic response, might at least lay claim to the rigor of method, whence the motivation for a new formalist criticism.34 Scholars in the humanities are justifiably hesitant to rally under the banner of aesthetics; we are not in the business, we say, of parceling out value, and critical theory has taught us to suspect the social and political agendas, mostly conservative if not reactionary, that lurk behind a conception of the aesthetic as a repository of value to be conferred—or, more worryingly, withheld.35 But when we contemplate—and, more often than not, defend—the centrality of form in humanistic thought (which is also to say, when we defend the humanities), we displace rather than answer the question of value. The politics of form may seem more benign than the politics of aesthetics insofar as it consists in the defense of a method, not a canon, yet the argument is circular: formal salience defines the objects of humanistic thought, and humanistic thought is valuable because it perceives the salience of form. A closely related claim is that form is so hard to pin down precisely because it matters so much; its definitional elusiveness is taken as evidence of its conceptual indispensability. Angela Leighton concludes a survey of form’s meanings for literature by noting how “this plethora of definitions from a century and more suggests the extent to which form has always been a word needed by the arts. It is volatile, evasive yet resilient, surviving the 18

INTRODUCTION

fashions which bring it to prominence and constantly recovering forgotten meanings.” It is on this basis, Leighton claims, that form “comes close to expressing the mysterious, self-justifying nature of the literary itself.”36 More recently, Caroline Levine grounds her argument in Forms in a similar identification of multifariousness with indispensability: we call so many things by this one name, they all must share something. But what they turn out to share, on Levine’s account, reaches well beyond the aesthetic, and that’s precisely her point: “ ‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping. Here, then, is where my own argument begins: with a definition of form that is much broader than its ordinary usage in literary studies. Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and all configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference.”37 In this sense, her argument runs opposite to Leighton’s, which identifies form’s extensive reach with the literary as such. For Levine, form reaches beyond the literary while granting special distinction to an originally literary kind of formal analysis. Her pluralist account of form is a jumping-off point for her real claim: if form is an ordering principle, as is politics, “then there is no politics without form.” Form, then, is never confined to the aesthetic, much less defined by it, and the momentum of Levine’s argument, accordingly, always pushes past aesthetics. And the stakes of the argument are ultimately about knowledge production in literary studies: if politics always has a formal element, we literary scholars, schooled in reading for form, have a previously undervalued kind of expertise to offer those who care about matters of social arrangement beyond mere aesthetics.38 In “Form and Explanation,” Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian begin from the claim that current debates about form always come back around to “the place of the literary humanities in the contemporary division of knowledge.”39 They follow Leighton and Levine in correlating form’s ubiquity, never mind its conceptual consistency, with its definitional centrality to humanistic thought, but they part ways with other critics in laying out the normative consequences of that correlation.40 They distance themselves from what they describe as a fundamentalist strain in new formalist thinking, an impulse to contain form’s many meanings in order to bring more rigor to the disciplinary arguments made under its aegis, offering instead a defense of “inquiry relativity,” whereby form need only be defined in relation to its local critical uses.41 19

INTRODUCTION

Their attention to the disciplinary stakes of the form debate enables their identification of pluralist accounts of form’s importance as totalizing in ways that undermine the methodological claims it is meant to support: “Since interdisciplinarity need not be our endgame, we would add that bringing the principle of inquiry relativity to bear on literary interpretation has the potential to clarify criticism’s authority and its rationale and to help it avoid unnecessary polemicism.”42 The point is not to downplay crisis conditions in the discipline but rather to argue that packaging formalism as internally consistent—and so exportable on the basis of its interdisciplinary value—is counterproductive for a disciplinary defense of the literary humanities, a project that should not embarrass literary critics as much as it seems to. It is a bit too simplistic, albeit not entirely inaccurate, to understand this book as an argument that aesthetics must be part of this disciplinary defense because it is part of the history of the discipline. After all, my analysis has its own fundamentalist leanings where the definition of form is concerned. I focus on the kind of form whose ultimate importance for aesthetic theory highlights its prior marginality in early eighteenth-century inquiries into taste and beauty, namely, abstract form as a property of spatially extended objects and, on a slightly broader view, form as contrasted with content. My fundamentalism is not prescriptive; I do not claim that this is what form should mean or is the only way we ought to use the term. We have already glimpsed one alternative conception of form in the sentence from Hume’s Treatise with which I began: “beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain.” In contrast with deformity, beauty is not just a form (that produces pleasure) but form; this is different from saying that the aspect of an object that produces pleasure is its form. Similarly, in the “Essay on Criticism,” monstrosity can be “reconciled to form.” This evaluative or normative understanding of form is certainly a viable conception of form in and for aesthetics, especially in the eighteenth century, but it is not the one on which literary scholars today stake our disciplinary identity and the value of what we do. I am interested in the prehistory of the idea (usually identified with Kant) that form grounds the claim “this is beautiful”—form as analytically separable from content. How should we make sense of this idea? I argue 20

INTRODUCTION

that Hogarth gives the most compelling explanation, from the standpoint of the practitioner. I do not think of myself as a proponent of a new formalism—that is, as advocating for any particular kind of formalist method in literary criticism. But if the discipline’s ongoing conversation about what form is and why it matters for us is at root a conversation about disciplinary knowledge and its production, then the history of aesthetics, and specifically of eighteenth-century aesthetics before Kant, matters because it challenges the quarantine on concepts that often defines the aesthetic in its current usage. New formalist critics may not be able to or even want to agree about what form is, but they do seem united in framing their project as a response to some version of historicism, defending literary study on the grounds that it too can produce knowledge, and that it does so by means of its attention to form. Often this defense invokes the (merely) aesthetic as the foil or limit to its knowledge claims. But eighteenth-century aesthetic inquiry is often expressly epistemological, understanding aesthetic judgment as a kind of knowledge about objects in the world and asking what kind of knowledge it is and how we come by it. Approaching these questions from the practitioner’s perspective, as Hogarth does, brings together aesthetic judgment and artistic practice, framing pleasure as a kind of knowledge about form, attained through practice. And this version of aesthetics is no more an abdication of politics than it is an abdication of knowledge. Setting aside its use as a term of opprobrium— aesthetics as a bad formalism or as mere appreciation, blind to the forces that shape taste or the production of artworks—we might instead approach it in the spirit of the eighteenth-century writers, artists, and philosophers who pioneered its theorization for the modern world. The book’s early chapters reckon with the concepts of form and of practice as they appear in the emergent discourse of aesthetic inquiry in the first decades of the century. Even before the word aesthetics was coined, the tradition to which it later referred was devoted to questions about the subjectivism of taste—about the relations among seeing, liking, and knowing.43 This focus on subjective perceptual experience—the organization of the aesthetic around the problem of taste—suspended formal considerations as belonging to the world of objects and the particular material practices objects embody. Form did, of course, have a philosophical legacy, one that made it a target for empiricist skepticism. The arc I trace 21

INTRODUCTION

through the book begins with John Locke, who criticized the word form as a channel for smuggling scholastic obfuscation into modern thought. In the first chapter, I show how Locke, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, seeks to equate form with pattern in order to curtail its use as a synonym for essence. Locke himself has little to say about beauty, but his attenuation of form’s traditional meaning was influential for other early taste theorists in eighteenth-century Britain. Both Joseph Addison, in the “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays, and Francis Hutcheson, in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, draw on a Lockean understanding of the theory of primary and secondary qualities in their accounts of aesthetic pleasure. Both are concerned to examine whether beauty really inheres in objects; both conclude that the variability of aesthetic judgment locates beauty in the encounter between an object and a perceiving subject. This use of empiricism drives a wedge between form, understood as a primary quality that resides in an object, and beauty, understood as a secondary quality that emanates from it. Ultimately, the relation between knowledge and the senses is the empiricist question carried forward even by moral sense theorists, like Hutcheson, who seek in aesthetics a palliative for Lockean constructivism. What matters is the fact that we have a sense for beauty, rather than the objective features of those things we find beautiful. Where the first chapter investigates the role of form in those early versions of aesthetic theory influenced by empiricist thought, the second chapter argues that the idea of practice occupies a central position in the writing of Antony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury stands at the head of a tradition of aesthetic theory that conceives of itself as a rejoinder and a corrective to the mechanistic tendencies of empiricist natural philosophy. Against Locke’s tabula rasa he develops a defense of innate moral feeling that he works out with reference to a Platonic fusion of the beautiful and the good. Practice enters the picture by way of his commitment to Stoicism and its moral exercises (his is the kind of aesthetic inquiry Hogarth would later disparage for following the “beaten path of moral beauty” [AB, p. 1]). I argue that Shaftesbury gives his Stoicism a Platonic inflection by using artistic and artisanal practices as metaphors, in his writing, for the development through exercise of one’s moral capabilities—Platonic, that is, in disavowing the materiality of the 22

INTRODUCTION

figure on which effective communication of meaning relies. I turn to James Porter and David Summers to consider some of the ways in which the classical world and its early modern interpreters understand the relation of material practice to ideal form before considering how Shaftesbury’s most modern attributes—his aspiration to philosophical worldliness through a characteristically eighteenth-century conception of sociability and his development of disinterestedness as a criterion for aesthetic judgment—have the peculiar effect of discounting and marginalizing the practical expertise of artists and artisans, specifically, their interested and materially determined understanding of beauty and its pleasures. The third and fourth chapters show how this materially determined understanding could produce an aesthetic theory organized around the perceptual practice of formal abstraction. The Analysis of Beauty is my case study. Despite drawing heavily on its author’s vocational expertise, Hogarth’s book is not a treatise on art. My third chapter returns to Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” to consider how radically Hogarth revises the role of representation in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Addison identifies a special, even a superior, kind of aesthetic pleasure in the comparison of a representation with the idea or object it is supposed to represent. Hogarth recognizes no such special pleasure of comparison, invoking Aristotle’s idea that human beings are by nature prone to practice and enjoy imitation only to cast aside this pleasure as elementary, a mere precursor to a “superior love of variety.” He goes on to argue that representation always takes place by way of formal abstraction, alienating the object from its image. The craft method he invokes as evidence for this claim is the reproduction and enlargement of an image by means of a superimposed grid. By recommending the virtual adoption of this method as an everyday thought-experiment for his reader, Hogarth models his theory of aesthetic judgment on the technical know-how of the practitioner. Artistic techniques for perfecting the two-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional perception become, for Hogarth, tools, both real and virtual, for understanding form in space. Given his investment in practice as a model for perception, then, Hogarth is especially sensitive to the advantages and obstacles of language as an expressive medium. He is aware that when he takes up the pen, he is trespassing in the territory of 23

INTRODUCTION

critics who are as fluent in their (verbal) medium as he is in the wordless visual language of spatial form. The chapter closes by exploring Hogarth’s treatment of verbal media—discussions of letter forms, protestations of his own writerly ineptitude, decoding of painters’ jargon—and arguing on that basis for a nascent conception of medium-specificity at work in the Analysis. Chapter 4 continues my close examination of Hogarth’s practical formalism by considering the role of gender in his argument. Many critics, Ronald Paulson chief among them, have emphasized the association Hogarth makes between the line of beauty and the female body, understanding this association in terms of an aesthetics of desire by contrast with the antimaterialist misogyny of the moral sense school. According to this way of thinking, Hogarth’s focus on the beauty of female bodies is the ground for his democratic aesthetics (female beauty is the kind of beauty “everyone” already knows how to recognize). But Hogarth is explicit in addressing his treatise to female as well as male readers, calling on their familiarity with everyday deployments of practical formalism in ways that echo and complement the technical expertise of the artisan. In a well-known turn of phrase, Hogarth characterizes visual pleasure as “a wanton kind of chace.” Against the assumption that this phrase casts aesthetic pleasure as a variant on seduction or even sexual predation, I understand the wanton chase as a mode of regulated self-abandon. I conclude by casting Hogarth’s Analysis as a riposte avant la lettre to Michael Fried, who disparages as literal modern minimalism’s preoccupation with the shape of objects. Attention to literal shape—objecthood, in Fried’s lexicon—is a central feature of the procedural abstraction Hogarth advocates as a way of perceiving beauty. Adapting Fried’s concepts of both objecthood and absorption, I argue that technical self-loss—absorption in objecthood—is both like and unlike erotic self-loss; abandon holds them together, but the nature of the pleasure each entails holds them apart. Wantonness, as Hogarth adapts the concept, abhors consummation, and this account of visual pleasure coincides with the epistemological claim that grounds the treatise: we know beauty by the quality of attention it produces in us as spectators. The final chapter enquires into the fate of practice in the text responsible for making form central to the theorization of aesthetics: Immanuel 24

INTRODUCTION

Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. On its face, the prospects look dim; Kant’s is an aesthetic theory that sidelines the practitioner. In general, Kant’s Third Critique is no more a philosophy of art than any of the other eighteenth-century treatises we now group under the heading of philosophical aesthetics. When he does turn to art, it appears as a special case, not fully within the purview of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And the artist, in this special-case framing, emerges as a contradictory, even an uncanny, figure. In order to mirror the logic of his claim that judgments of taste are made without reference to concepts, Kant requires that artists remain in the dark regarding the works they create: “the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan, and to communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products.”44 How, I ask, might Hogarth’s theory of aesthetic judgment guide us toward a cogent interpretation of this Kantian dilemma from a practitioner’s point of view? To answer this question, I examine how Kant gives form a role to play in his theory—not coincidentally, in conjunction with the exclusion of concepts from aesthetic judgment in the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” an exclusion that will resonate through his later consideration of genius. Much of this chapter is devoted to a careful examination of Kant’s discussion of the meaning of form and its relation to ends, in particular the production of artworks as an end somehow obscure to the producer. Kant, like Hogarth before him, connects the pleasure in aesthetic judgment with a kind of cognitive activity that might be understood in terms of formal abstraction. This unexpected convergence allows for a speculative reading of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” from the perspective of a practitioner. In making this argument, I am not seeking to demonstrate a line of influence that shaped Kant’s thinking, or his theory. And while I am not prepared to categorize my approach to Hogarth as a recuperation— doing so would seem at odds with his canonical status and enduring popularity—it is true that I am more interested in understanding The Analysis of Beauty as an overlooked resource for current thinking about aesthetic experience than I am in proving that Hogarth’s theory influenced his contemporaries to a greater degree than historians of philosophical 25

INTRODUCTION

aesthetics have recognized. In this book, I hope to bring out the deep coherence of some of the less readily apparent aspects of Hogarth’s theory, chiefly the way it correlates practice with pleasure, in order to show how a practical formalism conceived along these lines resonates with recent developments in aesthetic theory (for instance, with cognitive approaches like those outlined by Gabrielle Starr in Feeling Beauty) and might help refine our understanding of what we are arguing about, especially in the discipline of literary studies, when we orient ourselves in relation to form, to history, and to the aesthetic.45 Accordingly, the book closes with a consideration of what a formalism attentive to practice, and to abstraction as an element of practice, might look like in literary studies. The conclusions I draw there are modest; I do not have a new method to offer literary critics. What I do have is a theoretical interest in how we understand the practice of writing—again, not so much its reconstruction from the texts we read, which seems to me both a dubious undertaking and a not particularly rewarding one, but instead as an interpretive and pedagogical strategy. Such a strategy is necessarily speculative and therefore less useful when pursued as an end in itself than when oriented to its local context: how might some aspect of a text have been handled differently? What would have been its effect if it had been handled in some other way? What, then, is the effect of the way it was handled? To articulate the theory question behind this practical set of interpretive procedures: if language is less material than other media, closer to the transparency of ideas, why is it that the act of writing still behaves like a confrontation with a resistant medium? Why is writing not simply the transcription of thought?46 The author to whom I turn in order to pose these questions is Laurence Sterne, whose allusions to Hogarth in Tristram Shandy suggest the possibility of a literary formalism that takes its bearings from The Analysis of Beauty. Sterne’s often ironic attention to the materiality of language and the materiality of books complicates this expectation, however, and I read his references to Hogarth as a meditation on the limits of different media and modes of sensory perception. Form as a term salient for aesthetics, I argue, arises out of a practical understanding of the uses of abstraction for the making of images. I don’t think a corollary exists for the making of sentences, or stories; you don’t diagram a sentence before you write it. 26

INTRODUCTION

Formal abstraction of this kind—diagramming a sentence, mapping a plot—occurs from a critical, readerly perspective, even when an author engages with her own work. Put otherwise, spatio-formal strategies for the abstraction of narrative, and of verbal artworks more generally, are used to comprehend and analyze rather than to generate those same artworks. This claim is behind my skepticism about reading Sterne as an evangelist of practical formalism, tempting though it might be to make Hogarth’s insights so readily available for thinking about the novel. There’s no good warrant, I argue, for defining literary form as that which can be visualized, even if there is a robust tradition of spatio-formal visualization running from Sterne through to structuralism. Practical formalism does not operate in language in the same way it operates in visual aesthetics, I argue, because perceptual abstraction operates differently in literary and visual practice. In those differences there is an opportunity to think again, with the perspectival depth of the history of ideas, about where aesthetics belongs in the discipline of literary criticism.

27

CHA PTER ONE “A R O U G H U N S I G H T LY S K E T C H ” Empiricism and the Senses of Form

Modern aesthetic theory, the story goes, comes into being around the turn of the eighteenth century thanks to a shift in scrutiny from the objects of aesthetic experience to its subjects.1 After all, writing about artworks was not new, nor was the analysis of the particular attributes of artworks revered for their ability to move or strike or merely please a spectator; that was called criticism.2 What was new was a sustained interest in the phenomenon of being struck or moved or pleased, along with a relative indifference to the cause of those effects. The writing we now think of as belonging to this tradition certainly includes and perhaps originates with Joseph Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” series of Spectator papers, which Peter Kivy calls “the inaugural work” in “the discipline of aesthetics, as practiced by professional philosophers today.”3 I begin, then, with a new take on an old story, offering a reading of Addison’s “Pleasures” essays in order to demonstrate how a turn from objects to subjects is a defining feature of what comes to be known as “the aesthetic.” My goal in unfolding this familiar premise from within a very familiar text is to bring out its deep logic and consistency with its philosophical context, British Enlightenment empiricism, with the further aim of emphasizing that 28

“A ROUGH UNSIGHTLY SKETCH”

what’s most empiricist about empiricist aesthetics is not its commitment to sensory evidence and observation so much as skepticism about what we can ever hope to know about objects by perceiving and observing them. And my central investment is in the obverse part of the claim: that what repays our careful attention to skeptical epistemology’s spotlight on subjectivity is what it concedes, what it circumscribes as unknowable, namely, objects. My ultimate purpose in rehearsing two uncontroversial ideas—that subjectivity (especially the subjectivity of taste) is at the heart of the aesthetic and that empiricism is anchored in skepticism—is to make the case that the resulting circumscription of the object reflects the constitutive antiformalism of aesthetics in its modern inception. The first problem with this claim practically announces itself: how does a turn away from objects amount to antiformalism—or, put differently, what justifies the elision of form and object? How does a worry about the perceptual availability of objects imply a rejection of form? Whether we take form in the sense of Aristotelian formal cause or, less strictly, some structuring aspect of an object, after all, form might be understood as that which survives or, indeed, enables perception; the coincidence of an idea with the thing out there an idea represents is as justifiably called form as anything else we might call it.4 But John Locke rejected the term as conceptually misleading; it was not, for him, a word as good as any other for approximating this difficult idea. In what follows, I will argue that Locke’s terminological objection reflects precisely his skepticism about what kind of knowledge about objects (or, more precisely, substances) is available in perception. So in reading Addison for the familiar claim that eighteenth-century British aesthetics focuses on subjects rather than objects, my real purpose is to demonstrate that aesthetics was constituted by its rejection of form. Aesthetic formalism came later (with Kant) and out of left field (with Hogarth), and it’s that “left field” formalism, Hogarth’s formalism, that occupies my attention in the chapters that follow this one. Here, I am interested to track some of the intellectual prehistory of Hogarth’s intervention. The term I use as shorthand for Hogarth’s account of the formal determination of beauty is “practical formalism”—that is, a theory of the formal determination of beauty anchored in, and generated out of, Hogarth’s vocational artistic practice. What’s more, it is also, arguably, a kind of empiricist formalism. So why not just call it that, and make explicit the debts 29

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Hogarth owes to his intellectual and ideological context? “Practical” and “empirical” are certainly affiliated terms, and yet I want to mark a difference between them. “Practical” resonates especially with less technical, broad-tent empiricism: learning by doing, by observation, proceeding by induction rather than deduction. But, as it circulates in my argument, as a historical point of reference, empiricism evokes epistemology first and foremost; it belongs to a skeptical tradition in the theory of knowledge and need not, therefore, conjure an image of rolled-up sleeves, of hands-on activity. That image, by contrast, corresponds to the practice I mean to evoke with the term practical formalism. At stake in my argument is the identification of rival empiricisms from within the discourse of aesthetics.5 There’s an empiricism oriented in skepticism about securing perception with reference to its objects—an antiformalist empiricism—and an empiricism oriented in practice rather than epistemology, which in Hogarth’s hands is a formalist empiricism, or a practical formalism. To map it out as minimally and schematically as I know how: Addison’s empiricist aesthetics, which spawns the discourse of taste that runs from Hume to Burke to Kant, posits that we don’t know what things are, but we know what we like. Hogarth’s empiricist aesthetics says that that we don’t know what things are, but we make them anyway. In this, Hogarth gestures back toward, precisely, Locke’s particular strain of antiformalism—or perhaps just “antiform.” In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke repeatedly, and rather irritably, condemns form as the jargon of scholasticism. Why does Locke want philosophy to stop talking about form? It is a technical point: he’s talking about the use of the word form in a philosophical tradition derived from Aristotle to mean something close to what he calls the “real essence” of a substance, the “substratum” that grounds its perceptible properties. He anticipates Hogarth by making his point with reference to the practical expertise of the craftsman, writing, “ ’Tis the ordinary Qualities, observable in Iron, or a Diamond, put together, that make the true complex Idea of those Substances, which a Smith, or a Jeweller, commonly knows better than a Philosopher; who, whatever substantial forms he may talk of, has no other Idea of those Substances, than what is framed by a collection of those simple Ideas which are to be found in them.”6 That is, there is no “other idea” supplementary to the properties of a substance that confers or confirms its 30

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true identity; we can only know it by how we perceive it, as those charged with its practical manipulation know best.7 The scholastic use of the word form, for Locke, conveniently identifies the obfuscation by which real essence is imagined as a supplement to a substance’s qualities: “When I am told, that something besides the Figure, Size, and Posture of the solid Parts of that Body, is its Essence, something called substantial form, of that, I confess, I have no Idea at all, but only of the sound Form; which is far enough from an Idea of its real Essence, or Constitution” (II.xxxi.§6, p. 380). In this light, a surprising precision can be seen in Locke’s apparently dismissive claim to have “no Idea at all, but only of the sound Form” when form is used to denote a substance’s essence. Locke divides essence into real and nominal, driving a wedge between what we talk about when we talk about substances (nominal essence) and what gives a substance its identity (real essence). The smith and the jeweler are conversant in the language of nominal essence. Whereas, while the philosopher might pretend to a knowledge of some inner truth of the substance and label it form, in fact he too is limited to identifying substances in the same way that the craftsmen do: by their qualities. The word form, in the philosophical use to which Locke objects, is a rhetorical bid to constitute as a separate thing, and thereby presume to know, that unknown “constitution” from which perceptual qualities emanate; it’s—precisely—a name for “no Idea.” So what has any of this to do with the “Pleasures of the Imagination”? Particularly in connection with the beautiful (as opposed to the novel or the grand), Addison makes a point of acknowledging doubt about the identification of objects with their perceptual qualities: There is not perhaps any real Beauty or Deformity more in one piece of Matter than another, because we might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsom to us, might have shewn it self agreeable; but we find by Experience, that there are several Modifications of Matter which the Mind, without any previous Consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or Deformed.8

Experience shows that something about objects (Modifications of Matter) gives rise to aesthetic feelings, but the nature of that causal relation is unaccountable. It’s worth noting that Addison’s skepticism does not attach to the baseline idea that qualities occasion subjective responses; this is what

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“we find by Experience.” Instead he doubts that “Beauty or Deformity” operates as, or on analogy with, a primary quality (they are not “real”— that is, really in one or another “piece of Matter”).9 We respond to qualities, but something about those qualities, as well as the motivation of our response, remains obscure. The subsequent paper elaborates on that obscurity: Though in Yesterday’s Paper we considered how every thing that is Great, New, or Beautiful, is apt to affect the Imagination with Pleasure, we must own that it is impossible for us to assign the necessary Cause of this Pleasure, because we know neither the Nature of an Idea, nor the Substance of a Human Soul, which might help us to discover the Conformity or Disagreeableness of the one to the other; and therefore, for want of such a Light, all that we can do in Speculations of this kind, is to reflect on those Operations of the Soul that are most agreeable, and to range, under their proper Heads, what is pleasing or displeasing to the Mind, without being able to trace out the several necessary and efficient Causes from whence the Pleasure or Displeasure arises.10

Now, I’m not the first to hear Locke in these passages, but bound up with this allusion to Locke, I want to argue, comes form—or rather no form, a proscription on form-talk.11 All we can do is catalogue our pleasures, without being able to assign them to their causes. And that’s because, returning to the skepticism articulated in the previous passage, beauty and deformity are more like secondary qualities. That is, according to Locke, “Such Qualities, which in truth are nothing in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensations in us by their primary Qualities, i.e. by the Bulk, Figure, Texture, and Motion of their insensible parts, as Colours, Sounds, Tasts, etc.” (II.viii.§§9–10, p. 135). For Addison, beauty may be formally determined, but those forms consist in the “insensible parts” of the objects of our perception; they are sealed off from our scrutiny.12 To be scrupulous, Locke’s theory posits that primary qualities are in some instances imperceptible, but not that they are by definition unknowable; that is, I don’t want to confuse primary qualities with real essences. But Addison approaches this conflation in his account of beauty, in his most sustained and explicit invocation of Locke in the “Pleasures of the Imagination,” which concludes Spectator 413. I quote this extraordinary passage at length, in part to show that I’m not being speculative in hold32

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ing Addison to a Lockean standard; this is where he, himself, acknowledges that intellectual debt. Here, Addison is moving beyond a functional/reproductive account of beauty’s “final cause”: In the last place, [God] has made every thing that is beautiful in all other Objects pleasant, or rather has made so many Objects appear beautiful, that he might render the whole Creation more gay and delightful. He has given almost every thing about us the Power of raising an agreeable Idea in the Imagination: So that it is impossible for us to behold his Works with Coldness or Indifference, and to survey so many Beauties without a secret Satisfaction and Complacency. Things would make but a poor Appearance to the Eye, if we saw them only in their proper Figures and Motions: And what Reason can we assign for their exciting in us many of those Ideas which are different from any thing that exists in the Objects themselves, (for such are Light and Colours) were it not to add Supernumerary Ornaments to the Universe and make it more agreeable to the Imagination? We are everywhere entertained with pleasing Shows and Apparitions, we discover imaginary Glories in the Heavens, and in the Earth, and see some of this Visionary Beauty poured out upon the whole Creation; but what a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear, and the several Distinctions of Light and Shade vanish? In short, our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the Enchanted Hero of a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams, but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart.13

In what I think it’s fair to call this flight of fancy, Addison really does assimilate beauty and its objective causes to secondary and primary qualities, respectively. He imagines the “proper Figures and Motions” of things in explicit contrast with their pleasurable “appearance to the eye.” Beauty is a “delusion,” an “apparition”; it emanates from, but does not inhere in, “Objects themselves.” What we ostensibly can’t see about an object, or are spared from seeing unadorned, are those “proper Figures and Motions,” the “rough unsightly Sketch” that would be left over should light and color vanish. This is odd because of course not all primary qualities are invisible; it’s strange to imagine such a strict dichotomy

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between the sources of visual pleasure (light and color) and the tangible, spatial qualities of objects (bulk, motion, and figure). Addison doubles down on this dichotomy, though, and attributes it to Locke: I have here supposed that my Reader is acquainted with that great Modern Discovery, which is at present universally acknowledged by all the Enquirers into Natural Philosophy: Namely, that Light and Colours, as apprehended by the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind, and not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter. As this is a Truth which has been proved incontestably by many Modern Philosophers, and is indeed one of the finest Speculations in that Science, if the English Reader would see the Notion explained at large, he might find it in the Eighth Chapter of the Second Book of Mr. Lock’s Essay on Human Understanding.14

Of course, that’s not quite right either: secondary qualities have material existence, but that material existence does not resemble our idea of a given quality. What exists in the object is a power to produce our ideas of sensation. Still: my point here is that Addison’s adoption of Lockean concepts—his idiosyncratic adaptation of primary and secondary qualities for an account of beauty—consigns form to the realm of “insensible” primary qualities, ruling it outside the bounds of aesthetic evaluation. I want to pause here for a moment to make note of an important distinction. While Addison’s adaptation of Lockean terminology around primary and secondary qualities grants insight into his thinking about form, it should not be confused with a more original and more consequential aspect of his theory, namely, the identification of primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination. This primary/secondary pairing is more consequential insofar as it structures the progression of Addison’s argument. Numbers 412 to 415 establish the basic categories of beautiful, grand, and novel with reference to pleasures “which entirely proceed from such Objects as are before our Eyes,” while the remaining papers in the series “speak of those Secondary Pleasures of the Imagination which flow from the Ideas of visible Objects, when the Objects are not actually before the Eye, but are called up into our Memories, or formed into agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious.”15 Roughly speaking, this is a distinction between representations (which give rise to secondary pleasures) and nonrepresentational artworks and natural phenomena

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(which give rise to primary pleasures). The terminology implies a relation to Locke’s theory of qualities, and the logical basis of that relation seems clear enough: if our ideas of primary qualities resemble the qualities such as they inhere in “Objects themselves,” then primary pleasures too imply a more immediate relation to an object, while secondary pleasures, like secondary qualities, involve a degree of separation between object and perceptual experience. The analogy, however, ends there; as the “Shows and Apparitions” passage from Spectator 413 makes clear, Addison understands all pleasures of the imagination, primary and secondary alike, to arise from secondary qualities of objects. Beauty is the power to produce pleasure in a beholder; that pleasure does not resemble the qualities that gave rise to it any more than sweetness resembles the molecular arrangement that determines it. In Chapter 3, I argue that Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty is premised in important ways on an implicit rejection of Addison’s division of pleasures into primary and secondary. I have postponed, therefore, a full discussion of Addison’s theory of primary and secondary pleasures so as not to obscure the main focus of the current discussion, which concerns the invisibility of form in an aesthetics that borrows its conceptual structure from the Lockean theory of qualities. This notion of form’s aesthetic invisibility is implicit in the first empiricist claim Addison makes, at the outset of the “Pleasures” papers—indeed, in the essay’s point of departure. What I’ll be attending to now is the relation between the senses of vision and touch, and the ramifications of that relation for thinking about empiricism and form. The pleasures of the imagination originate with the senses: this consideration of beauty takes its bearings from modern natural philosophy, not Platonist metaphysics. Spectator 411 begins this way: Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. The Sense of Feeling can indeed give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but at the same time it is very much streightned and confined in its Operations, to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular Objects. Our Sight seems designed to supply all these Defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind

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of Touch, that spreads itself over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe.16

Addison goes on to reiterate the strict correspondence of imagination (as a faculty, distinct from sense and understanding) to its object, the image (as the datum of visual perception) in each of the two following paragraphs: “It is this Sense which furnishes the Imagination with its Ideas; so that by the Pleasures of the Imagination or Fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible Objects”; “by the Pleasures of the Imagination, I mean only such Pleasures as arise originally from Sight.”17 It matters that Addison limits the scope of his aesthetics to vision; even with his stated goal (in 409) of discovering “what it is that gives a Beauty to many Passages of the finest Writers both in Prose and Verse,” his conception of the beauty of literature (or, to be less anachronistic, of verbal description) has only to do with what it allows you to see with your mind’s eye, and how it enables that virtual seeing.18 There is more to be said about that, but suffice it to observe, for now, how very far away we are from a conception of literary aesthetics that defines the literary as such—as “imaginative” or “creative” writing—on the basis of something called its “form,” by contradistinction to its “content.” What we have here, instead, is an aesthetics of imagery. To stay with Addison and the senses: his move to locate palpability at the root of visuality is part of the empiricist program he’s laying claim to. We can see things we are prevented from touching, but in theory tactile perception should render up most of the same information about objects that visual perception can; as he puts it, “The Sense of Feeling can indeed give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but at the same time it is very much streightned and confined in its Operations, to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular Objects.” Addison describes touch as receptive to the same stimuli as vision—that is, to “Extension, Shape, . . . number, bulk, and distance”— but less expansive in its operation. He also singles out color as imperceptible to touch. In these ways, he is invoking the primary/secondary quality distinction, defining (in a kind of rough-and-ready adaptation of Locke) primary qualities as those perceptible by touch, if only hypothetically, sec-

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ondary as those perceptible by vision only. The existence of primary qualities “in the Bodies themselves” make them theoretically, if not actually, tangible. In Locke and in Addison, a quality’s location “in the Objects themselves” seems to correlate with availability to tactile perception, in qualities such as bulk, figure (what Addison calls “shape”), and texture. In his account of touch as vision’s inferior other, then, Addison implies a complementary fantasy of touch as the guarantor of an object’s true nature; if we could only touch all the things we can see, we would really know them— the things themselves, composed of qualities, as Locke puts it, whose “Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves” rather than the sensations they produce in us.19 Both Addison and Locke, more and less explicitly, bring visual and tactile sensation into relation in order to distinguish the identity of an object from our perception of it. Touch and sight overlap in several of the primary qualities that evoke form’s more limited and concrete applications—chiefly, extension and figure. Seeing brings us closest to those aspects of touching that, if we were granted tactile access to an object, in turn would bring us closest to knowing the object as the object, so to speak, knows itself. But that’s not where beauty lies. Knowledge is based on the “rough unsightly Sketch” that beauty, mercifully, conceals.20 Recasting Addison’s expansiveness and enthusiasm in the melancholic light of the “pleasing delusion” passage: vision is “the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses,” but only insofar as none of our senses is very perfect at all. What we come to understand by this fantasy of tactile perception is something like the pathos of empiricism in its skeptical guise. Vision approximates what’s untouchable, revealing to us limitations of our senses, and so of our understanding. The pleasures of the imagination, which lodge somewhere in between the two (“not so gross as those of sense, nor so refined as those of the understanding”), provide, at best, some measure of compensation. It’s worth recalling, though, as Scott Black puts it, that “the pleasures of the imagination . . . are specifically pleasures. They are not substitutes for understanding.”21 What’s constrained by healthy empiricist skepticism is not pleasure itself but knowledge claims about pleasure, and that’s what makes taste so fascinating to eighteenth-century thinkers as a proxy for subjectivity. That is, in other words, what makes aesthetics, full stop: 37

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what brings it into being—and, arguably, determines the structure of its values. On this account, it makes a virtue of necessity or, alternatively, teaches us to love our own ignorance. What we can’t know about objects underwrites the celebration of imaginative freedom, as, for instance, Paul Guyer argues in tracing Kant’s “free play of the faculties” back to Addison’s celebration of “the activity of the mind”: reflexivity, the subject’s feeling of the mind’s powers of perception and apprehension. But what if there’s an alternative response to this epistemological limitation—celebrating not the freedom of the mind so much as the obduracy of the inscrutable object? And here’s that other empiricism: the effort to approach in practice what you know you can’t know in theory. For Hogarth, the practice of the arts is specifically a matter of touching something you might otherwise only see. At the end of The Analysis of Beauty, this is concretized as a move toward deportment: not just making a beautiful object, but making your body into a beautiful object. Here’s just one version of Hogarth’s program for returning vision to touch: We now come to offer an odd, but perhaps efficacious method of acquiring a habit of moving in the lines of grace and beauty. 1. Let anyone chalk the line . . . on a flat surface, beginning at either end, and he will move his hand and arm in a beautiful direction, but if he chalks the same sort of line on an ogee-moulding of a foot or two in breadth . . . his hand must move in that more beautiful direction, which is distinguished by the name of grace. (AB, pp. 106–07)

How might you get close to the form of an object you know you can’t really know? You make it. You touch it. Perhaps—and if this isn’t apparitional, I don’t know what is; a willful delusion complementary to Addison’s—perhaps, in the best-case scenario, you become it. Locke’s references to form in the Essay, of which the instances I’ve enumerated here are representative, are overwhelmingly negative. Despite all of Locke’s accumulated contempt for form, though, he concedes that it may not be entirely dispensable. Form admits of a legitimate use, Locke opines, in reference to pattern: I would not here be thought to forget, much less to deny, that Nature in the Production of Things, makes several of them alike: there is nothing more obvious, especially in the Races of Animals, and all Things propagated by

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Seed. But yet, I think, we may say, the sorting of them under Names, is the Workmanship of the Understanding, taking occasion from the similitude it observes amongst them, to make abstract general Ideas, and set them up in the mind, with Names annexed to them, as Patterns, or Forms, (for in that sence the word Form has a very proper signification,) to which, as particular Things existing are found to agree, so they come to be of that Species, have that Denomination, or are put into that Classis. (III.iii.§13, p. 415)

Even this concession is backhanded, alluding in the very act of approving form’s “very proper signification” to its improper signification when used to denote (and mystify) essence. What is more, Locke is clearly trying to attenuate the meaning of the word, to tamp down the semantic richness that makes it so appealing to later literary critics—so promiscuous of application, so broadly evocative.22 Locke’s concession is an exemplary moment in the rejection of a pluralist appeal to form. I’m hesitant to assert a necessary alignment between this rejection and an empiricist commitment to sense perception—hesitant, that is, because in the case of Locke, empiricist commitments determine this and every other consequence for a philosophy of mind. And yet, insofar as pluralist defenses of form tend to embrace the ambiguity around pattern and essence (according to Caroline Levine, form “can indicate essence, but it can also mean superficial trappings, such as conventions—mere forms”), a refusal to countenance both—a rejection of essence—does tend to refer consideration of form to the perceptual surface of things, to sensation without knowledge of essence.23 And this is one way of describing the aesthetic, in its broad application (that is, not limited to the arts); the aesthetic refers to that category of subjective responses (prototypically, pleasures) whose objective causes remain undetermined by concepts. It is not my aim here to reconcile the aesthetic with any particular account of form; my self-imposed mandate, instead, is to avoid eliding the two, at least on an exploratory basis. Still, a question about determination seems to me a helpful way to think through the consequences of Locke’s attenuation of form, namely: to what extent is an object determined by its form if form, speaking strictly, means pattern?24 We might be able to say what kind of object it is. After all, Locke revises his stance on form in order to apply it to questions of species. But aesthetically oriented formalisms—that is, formalisms that make claims about objects of 39

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aesthetic experience—do not generally lodge at the level of classification. (Some do, but it seems uncontroversial to observe that theories of genre do not exhaust the category of aesthetic formalisms.) Instead, aesthetically oriented formalisms understand form in relation to the particular features of objects perceived in their singularity: not just “the sonnet,” therefore, but “Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West,” which has an octave and a sestet but otherwise does not share its constituent parts with every other poem that shares its denomination. Locke’s account of form would, then, authorize the formal analysis of particular objects (not that it’s my aim to appeal to Locke for authorization— more on that in a moment—and not, perhaps, as comfortably as it would authorize discussions of genre). Analysis, in this light, I take to mean the description of an object’s constituent parts and of their arrangement, ergo the pattern of a single thing rather than a category comprising many. But how might this analysis relate to the question of determination? What is determined in and by a formal analysis of this kind? At this point, I have only a negative answer to this question, inspired by but (I hope) not beholden to Locke, who entreats us not to mistake formal analysis (a reckoning of qualities) for knowledge of essence. Formal analysis in this sense does not commit us to claim that in describing some aspect of an object as formal, we have therefore identified something about how it works, much less what it is. Formal analysis only authorizes claims about how an object’s qualities present themselves to our perception. To temper this level of abstraction, we need to recall at the same time that Locke’s skepticism was not directed at texts, it was directed at substances. Moreover, it would be absurd to claim that literary critics should abjure the category of form because Locke took issue with it in 1690; in part, the story this book aims to tell is the story of how the subsequent century’s (not to mention centuries’) worth of philosophical speculation revises Locke’s account. But his skepticism is a reminder not to become complacent with a pluralist defense of form. The problem of the relation between form and essence is exacerbated rather than resolved by the ontological ambiguity of the literary text, an ambiguity at stake in the implicit contest between an Addisonian and a Burkean analysis of literary effects: are the objects of our readerly pleasures images? feelings? or rather, the verbal medium of their communication? More programmatically stated, empiricist 40

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questions for a theory of literature might include the following: in what does the object of perception consist? By what sensory means is it made available to perception? And how much does the arrangement of its parts, by whatever means they are available to perception, account for its effects? Alexander Nehamas indicates the potential for questions like these to unsettle an equivalence between formalism and the aesthetic, writing of the noncoincidence of the aesthetic and the perceptual that the two “may overlap when we are concerned with objects that are themselves perceptual but not otherwise, and for that reason most theoretical discussions of aesthetic qualities center on painting, where vision is central, and are embarrassed by literature, where sound and sight—assonance, alliteration, rhythm, and, perhaps, a poem’s shape—are only a very small part of what matters.”25 If these are the data of form-as-pattern, then the effort to identify form with literature’s aesthetic qualities still has some explaining to do. When formal analysis calcifies into an ism, it often relies on a covert essentialism, whether or not its account of what a text is reverts to tautology (what it is, on account of being subject to formal analysis, is literary). Lockean skepticism offers a counterpoint, not, I want to emphasize, a corrective. The question of what can and cannot be determined by formal analysis invites a reexamination of Addison’s agnostic stance on the formal determination of beauty. Here again is the passage from Spectator 412, with its continuation: there is not perhaps any real Beauty or Deformity more in one piece of Matter than another, because we might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsom to us, might have shewn it self agreeable; but we find by Experience, that there are several Modifications of Matter which the Mind, without any previous Consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or Deformed.

Rereading this passage, I am struck that it does make a quiet appeal to form. Addison’s skepticism does not apply to the determination of beauty by the qualities of objects; indeed, he asserts that “there are several Modifications of Matter which the Mind, without any previous Consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or Deformed.” His skepticism lodges in two places (and the resulting doubleness remains, to my mind, somewhat ambiguous): whether “Beauty or Deformity” operates as,

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or on analogy with, a primary quality (are they real—that is, really in one or another “piece of Matter”?) and whether the determination of the human sensorium is in any way motivated. That is, according to this passage, the human sensorium could have been otherwise disposed, its positive and negative poles reversed, but the structure of its determination remains. What produces aesthetic pleasure or displeasure is, after all, “Beauty or Deformity,” whether those qualities are thought to inhere in the object or in the constitution of human perception (“we might have been so made”). Form surfaces unexpectedly, via its negation: deformity. If beauty and deformity correspond, ultimately, to “modifications of matter,” then is Addison a formalist after all? Maybe so, but with an important caveat. If beauty in this statement is code for form, then it’s a normative version of form. Addison is not weighing whether form per se inheres in objects or is motivated; he’s weighing those questions in regard to a form that pleases. When form is invoked in early eighteenth-century aesthetic contexts as a synonym for beauty, it is construed not as a neutral quality but rather as a value. Form might be considered the property of an object to the same degree that beauty might be, which is to say, the object might be more, or less, or not at all beautiful, that is, possessed of the quality of beauty. The distinction I mean to draw is between this evaluative understanding of a property and a categorical, descriptive one, according to which all objects are possessed of, and can be described in terms of, form. The question of what sort of quality beauty might be (if it is a quality, in the Lockean sense, at all) occupies Kivy’s attention in his reading of the first treatise of Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) (the first treatise focuses on aesthetics, the second on ethics). Kivy credits Hutcheson with recognizing “the kind of double-aspect phenomenology of beauty which has made it seem to some both a ‘subjective feeling’ and an ‘objective quality’—as the fusion theory puts it, a feeling objectified. Thus, beauty described as a pleasure emphasizes the subjective,” while the attempt to locate the objective source for that pleasure orients us again to the Lockean account of qualities so influential for later empiricists like Hutcheson.26 In attempting to bring Shaftesbury’s moral-sense theory in line with Locke’s system, Hutcheson filled a crucial gap between the claim that hu42

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mans must have a sense of beauty because we are immediately pleased with instances of it, and the analysis of those beauties enumerated as proof of this idea. Because of the ultimate orientation of moral-sense theory toward goodness, its proponents (including Hutcheson himself) could downplay the question of what beauty actually was, that is, what were the properties of beautiful objects that made them identifiable as such. Still, Hutcheson contributed to the developing discourse on beauty an answer to this question in his formula “Uniformity amidst Variety,”27 a formula Kivy writes off as “nothing new, encapsulating, as it does, the aesthetic taste of Neoclassicism.”28 Kivy rightly refuses to celebrate the novelty of Hutcheson’s hypothesis in relation to a history of artistic styles, but viewed from the standpoint of the history of form in aesthetics, Hutcheson’s question, along with his proposed answer, repays careful scrutiny. “Since it is certain we have Ideas of Beauty and Harmony,” he posits, “let us examine what Quality in Objects excites these Ideas, or is the occasion of them” (p. 28). In this light, “uniformity amidst variety” is interesting not for being novel or original but for being abstract. It can apply to almost any kind of arrangement, with the minimal stipulation that the object or assemblage under scrutiny be understood (even provisionally) as a whole composed of parts. It is even possible, I think, to interpret Hutcheson’s formula as an intimation of free play, in the sense that the fundamental relation it names is one of tension or suspension between opposite poles; the ultimate predominance of either uniformity or variety would diminish the tendency of the figure to appear beautiful. Even short of free play, though, “uniformity amidst variety” sounds very much like an appeal to form, and not just because the word is embedded in “uniformity.” (No more so than was the case with Addison’s or Pope’s invocations of deformity, and arguably less so, given the oppositional tension that characterizes Hutcheson’s formula.) In any event, the word form does gain some currency in Hutcheson’s first treatise—in an important moment of summation, for instance, he claims “that Men may have different Fancys of Beauty, and yet Uniformity be the universal Foundation of our Approbation of any Form whatsoever as Beautiful” (p. 66). Here, though, “form” could plausibly be replaced by “object.” Hutcheson is not asserting, at least not explicitly, that it is proper to identify beauty with an object’s form, where form itself 43

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is a quality of the object—as Kant will later do. Suffice it to say, for now, that Hutcheson’s inclination toward form in the treatise’s later sections is closely tied to an argument about (ultimately providential) design that proves detachable from an account of beauty’s causes and occasions. In section II, Hutcheson’s exposition of uniformity amidst variety, he prefers the word figure: “That we may more distinctly discover the general Foundation or Occasion of the Ideas of Beauty among Men, it will be necessary to consider it first in its simpler Kinds, such as occurs to us in regular Figures; and we may perhaps find that the same Foundation extends to all the more complex Species of it” (p. 28). What I am suggesting is that in correlating beauty with a property of an object, even or especially an abstract or broadly applicable property, Hutcheson broaches a formalist aesthetics in all but name. Beauty is identified with uniformity amidst variety—a property of an object that is not, necessarily, therefore a primary quality (more on that in a moment)—and therefore is understood to have an objective origin (as opposed to being identified with a feeling in the beholder). In a sense, this is the opposite of what I have earlier labeled a pluralist or nominalist defense of form; it refers to a very specific (if, again, broadly applicable) understanding of the term—the disposition of an object’s component parts—without asking the term itself to bear much weight in the argument. But what then is the relation between the disposition of an object’s component parts and the kind of quality that beauty might be? More starkly, if it is a formalist aesthetics in all but name, what does Hutcheson’s theory tell us about form in relation to beauty, as a value and therefore as a specific quality (one that can be more or less manifest, or absent altogether)? Kivy’s answer to this question is that beauty is like a Lockean secondary quality, with one important difference. This answer matters for my purposes because form (in the uniformity-amidst-variety sense) is entailed in this difference. Taking color as his paradigm case of a secondary quality, Kivy describes how beauty doesn’t quite fit the mold: Although the sensation of redness is produced in us by an arrangement of primary qualities, it is not an arrangement that can be perceived by us, independent of our sensation of redness, for it is an arrangement of insensible particles. The primary qualities that produce the idea of beauty are gross: we can perceive them independently and conclude such-and-such an ar44

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rangement of primary qualities causes the idea of beauty. . . . A person who is having the idea of beauty may indeed be in the same position as the person who is having the sensation of redness; for one can have the idea of beauty and be ignorant of the causal law that “The idea of beauty is caused by uniformity amidst variety” and, even if not ignorant of it, may not in this particular instance be aware of what particular uniformity amidst variety is causing one’s idea of beauty. But there is also the case of the person who is having the idea of beauty and knows the causal law as well as the particular fact that his idea of beauty is being caused by such-and-such an arrangement of primary qualities which possess uniformity amidst variety. (Hutcheson envisions both cases.)29

Beauty is unlike a secondary quality, therefore, in that its objective cause admits of both perception and analysis. That to perceive uniformity amidst variety is, necessarily, to engage in analysis marks it as a complex idea.30 If it couldn’t be analyzed in this way, it would be no different from a secondary quality. Note, though, that in Hutcheson’s account, beauty can be perceived without being analyzed. “We may have the Sensation without knowing what is the Occasion of it; as a Man’s Taste may suggest Ideas of Sweets, Acids, Bitters, tho he be ignorant of the Forms of the small Bodys, or their Motions, which excite these Perceptions in him” (p. 35). (And here “Forms” would seem to refer to figure, based on the parallelism with “Motions”; shape and motion are primary qualities.) If beauty’s objective cause rises to the level of analysis, then that cause is not properly called beauty; from a technical standpoint, beauty is not synonymous with (good) form. But the nontechnical conflation of the two is not a worry for Hutcheson, who “sometimes speaks with the vulgar in calling the quality of unity amidst variety ‘beauty.’ ”31 Here again, as with Locke’s smith and jeweler, is an appeal to the wisdom of ordinary usage. Beauty might not be identical with form, but their close causal relation matters, and is reflected in the slippage between the mainly subjective simple idea (beauty) and the complex idea (unity amidst variety) that Hutcheson proposes as its objective cause. What comes into view when, in a Hutchesonian system, a beholder attends to beauty’s causes in addition to her own feeling of pleasure? What comes into view is the object itself, as a whole composed of parts, on

45

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analogy with a primary quality. As Kivy observes, the terms of this analogy constitute a crux in the theory. For it is central to Hutcheson’s Lockean account that beauty, like other secondary qualities, “denote[s] the Sensations in our Minds, to which perhaps there is no resemblance in the Objects, which excite these Ideas in us, however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception” (p. 27). And yet, he continues, “the Ideas of Beauty and Harmony being excited upon our Perception of some primary Quality, and having relation to Figure and Time, may indeed have a nearer resemblance to Objects, than these Sensations, which seem not so much any Pictures of Objects, as Modifications of the perceiving Mind” (p. 27). This passage prompts Kivy’s close scrutiny because at first it seems so improbable that Hutcheson would restrict the idea of beauty to primary qualities in this way. After all, if beauty were itself a primary quality, taste would not be so variable, and we are, I repeat, still far removed from the Kantian identification of beauty with form as opposed to any other objective cause of pleasure.32 Indeed Hutcheson is ecumenical in his account of what might be considered beautiful, including, most surprisingly, theorems—to which he devotes an entire section—but also, and more to the point here, not excluding color or fitness to a purpose, criteria characteristically excluded from later theories (Kant’s in the first instance, Burke’s in the second). Hutcheson’s thought can only be reconciled, Kivy argues, by recognizing how “primary quality” functions here as an analogy, designating not a quality after all (figure versus color, say) but the resemblance between an object (specifically, the arrangement of its parts) and its availability to perception: “If we could not have this complex idea of unity amidst variety, unity amidst variety would be as imperceptible to us as the arrangements of insensible primary qualities which cause our sensations of redness. And this complex idea of some particular instance of unity amidst variety resembles it: that is, resembles the complex arrangement of primary qualities which occasions the idea.”33 In Kivy’s reading, the bare fact that the quality of an object identifiable with beauty—“uniformity amidst variety”—is subject to analysis is the very thing that makes beauty comparable to a primary quality. Form in this highly abstract (or at least potentially abstract) conception—as a “complex arrangement”—orients beauty to its objective pole, if not, precisely, in its object. 46

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Forms, understood this way, matter to Hutcheson in the context of his hypothesis of uniformity amidst variety—but for the Inquiry as a whole, like the hypothesis itself, they don’t matter all that much. Hutcheson is willing to jettison a strong account of the determination of aesthetic judgment in order to rationalize the internal sense that perceives beauty (in the way that the sense of smell perceives odors); it is a faculty for detecting and appreciating design, which is also to say, the principle of unity that distinguishes variety from mere chaos. His criteria for “the Universality of the Sense of Beauty” are permissive precisely because his formalism is so abstract, and by the same token anodyne, admitting “ ‘that there may be real Beauty, where there is not the greatest; and that there are an Infinity of different Forms which may all have some Unity, and yet differ from each other.’ So that Men may have different Fancys of Beauty, and yet Uniformity be the universal Foundation of our Approbation of any Form whatsoever as Beautiful” (p. 66). Anything goes: if “some Unity” might justify some person’s judgment of beauty, then any complex arrangement—any object—might be beautiful to someone. Kivy provides a different logic for Hutcheson’s nondeterminist stance, arguing that Hutcheson never goes farther than to correlate unity amidst variety with beauty by induction: “uniformity amidst variety is contingently connected with the feeling of beauty. I can know X is beautiful without knowing that X has uniformity amidst variety, just as I can know that a canary is yellow without knowing about wavelengths and spectra. Nor am I incorrect if I say ‘X is beautiful’ even though X does not possess uniformity amidst variety; I am merely surprising.”34 On either account, Hutcheson’s move toward aesthetic formalism is marginalized by his commitment to a moral sense argument in the Inquiry; it is ultimately, simply, beside the point. As I have indicated, that point involves the way in which humans might be equipped to intuit moral virtue by their sensory attunement to providential design. And this argument accounts for the shift from “figure,” in Hutcheson’s early chapters, to “form” in the later ones, where form no longer pertains to qualities (in the categorical or the evaluative sense) but simply to objects, entities that coalesce from mere matter. The Aristotelian overtones are not accidental; in this vein of his argument, Hutcheson’s professed debt to the Neoplatonist Shaftesbury cuts against 47

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his allegiance to Lockean empiricism. This form is ontological (recall Pope’s phrase “Stones leap’d to Form,” redeemed from formlessness) rather than aesthetic (figures “reconcile[d] to Form and Grace” from deformity and monstrosity). And he admits as much: Let it be here observ’d, “That the preceding Reasoning from the Frequency of regular Bodys of one Form in the Universe, and from the Combinations of various Bodys, is intirely independent on any Perception of Beauty; and would equally prove Design in the Cause, altho there were no Being which perceiv’d Beauty in any Form whatsoever,” for it is in short this, “That the recurring of any Effect oftner than the Laws of Hazard determine, gives Presumption of Design.” (p. 51).

It may be that beauty, for Hutcheson, is always traceable to some kind of unity, some organizational principle, but what he’s really after is the idea that every unity (“the Frequency of regular Bodys of one Form in the Universe”) can be imputed to some design—rendering the question of beauty moot. Hutcheson is working with an older, philosophically unfashionable version of form at this point in the treatise, one he recognizes to be finally incompatible with his fledgling account of aesthetic form (uniformity amidst variety as beauty’s objective cause). Like Addison before him, Hutcheson is agnostic about the formal determination of beauty, despite his innovation of the unity-amidst-variety formula. In Spectator 413, which follows the paper in which he opined that “we might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsom to us, might have shewn it self agreeable,” Addison elaborates on the unaccountability of the objective grounds for aesthetic pleasure. He pronounces it futile to attempt “to trace out the several necessary and efficient Causes from whence the Pleasure or Displeasure arises,” however it may be true that “Final Causes lye more bare and open to our Observation.”35 It is, I think, a surprising but revealing claim, one whose basic import is felt in Hogarth’s reaction against the philosophical tradition he inherits; how can it be, the artist protests, that we can confidently assert what beauty is for, and at the same time profess so little certainty about what it’s like? And again, it’s symptomatic that this part of his argument has Addison invoking the Aristotelian vocabulary of the four causes, in seeming conflict with his earlier empiricist pose.

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There is a corresponding passage at the end of the first treatise of Hutcheson’s Inquiry, in which he observes that there does not appear to be any necessary Connection, antecedent to the Constitution of the Author of Nature, between regular Forms, Actions, Theories, and that sudden sensible Pleasure excited in us upon observation of them. . . . And possibly, the Deity could have form’d us so as to have receiv’d no Pleasure from such Objects, or connected Pleasure to those of a quite contrary Nature. We have a tolerable Presumption of this in the Beauty of various Animals; they give some small Pleasure indeed to every one who views them, but then every one seems vastly more delighted with the peculiar Beautys of its own Species, than with those of a different one, which seldom raise any desire but among Animals of the same Species with the one admir’d. This makes it probable, that the Pleasure is not the necessary result of the Form it self, otherwise it would equally affect all Apprehensions in what Species soever; but depends upon a voluntary Constitution, adapted to preserve the Regularity of the Universe, and is probably not the Effect of Necessity but Choice in the Supreme Agent, who constituted our Senses. (p. 80)

“The Pleasure is not the necessary result of the Form it self ”: an important check on the idea that aesthetic formalism is coextensive with aesthetics per se as it consolidates in the early eighteenth century. Hutcheson adverts to the logic of animal speciation in order to demonstrate the detachability of beauty’s objective occasions from its attendant pleasures; if beauty were formally determined in a strong sense, he insinuates, bestiality would be rampant. (This approach would be undermined, in fairly short order, by Edmund Burke, who sequesters sexual desire from more decorous pleasures of the imagination. Under this later dispensation, the species boundaries of sexual desire will no longer count against the formal determination of aesthetic pleasure—although Burke himself was no formalist.) Instead, Hutcheson redirects his analysis to the question of final cause, arguing that beauty manifests in the particular ways it does for no more (or less) binding reason than that God ordained it so. In sum, Hutcheson’s uniformity amidst variety is an early version of aesthetic formalism, but this formalism, such as it is, is compatible with the skepticism about form that characterizes the empiricist theory of substances and, more specifically, qualities. That compatibility corresponds with Hutcheson’s retreat from a claim of causal necessity linking form 49

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with beauty and its pleasure. In the philosophical tradition that included Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, and eventually Hume, the phenomenology of beauty was ultimately a subsidiary concern, overshadowed by the problem of taste, on the one hand, and the theory of moral sense, on the other. Only by making contact with a discourse not originally included in the aesthetic would the concept of form become vital for thinking about beauty—namely, the discourse around artistic practice. What might this account of form’s philosophical attenuation have to do with the artistic practice so closely identified with this period in British letters, namely, a newly realistic kind of prose fiction? Helen Thompson takes on this question in her book Fictional Matter, asking what the emergent genre of the novel—its conventions and innovations—owes to the natural-philosophical theory of qualities understood as a specific modality of the empiricist project of pursuing knowledge by means of observation. Thompson’s project is to advance a new theory of novelistic realism founded on the logic of the secondary quality. This realism is “not mimetic but productive,” generated in the act of perception—which is to say, constituted in the relation between text and reader, a relation in turn modeled on that between a physical phenomenon and a human observer (who may or may not be an experimental scientist).36 She describes the influence of the corpuscular hypothesis in the new science of the seventeenth century on the narrative fiction of the eighteenth, explaining, among other things, how Locke’s philosophical theory of qualities emerged from and elaborated on Robert Boyle’s innovations in chemistry. Against Ian Watt’s referential understanding of both empiricism and the novelistic realism to which it gave rise, Thompson argues that “eighteenth-century novels make explicit the production of sensational understanding as the reader’s encounter with forms and powers that enable empirical knowledge,” an encounter codified in corpuscular chemistry.37 Her use of the word forms here is characteristic and noteworthy, reflecting a thoroughgoing separation of literary form from the scholastic substantial form that Locke, following Boyle, was determined to refute (the two kinds of form have separate entries in the book’s index). Thompson explains how “corpuscular chemistry is driven by a deep refusal of scholastic or neo-Aristotelian essence,” the version of essence that goes by the name substantial form: 50

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The corpuscle instantiates this denial of essence by refusing to embody humanly known qualities. Such qualities—for example, warmth or sweetness— do not flow from a substance locked inside or a supervening influence visited upon matter. Rather, non-elemental corpuscles provoke human sensation because they amass into changeable structures, which Boyle names textures. In eighteenth-century science and empiricism, it is neither essence nor elements but changeable texture that engenders the perceived identity of things. By denying ontology a secure home in matter, chemistry defines an empirical world whose sensed endowments compel articulation of the textures, forms, and relations that produce them.38

Corpuscular chemistry replaces Aristotelian or scholastic form-as-essence with a theory of form as structure/texture—form as a physical arrangement perceptible only by virtue of the sensed qualities that arrangement produces. In Thompson’s account, it is a theory of form in all but name, a point she drives home by using that word instead of structure or texture to establish the representational logic linking literature and science: “I use the word ‘form’ to signify not an ideal blueprint imposed on matter but modes of experimental and representational access to matter.”39 In arguing that Boyle’s scientific revolution renders neo-Aristotelian form obsolete, Thompson emphasizes not form per se, which is for her a more capacious concept that transcends this particular technical use, but rather the legacy of a hylomorphic account of the pairing of matter and form. A theory of form in all but name: Mary Helen McMurran makes this premise explicit in her introduction to a recent volume of essays. “If form, as a causal principle, becomes a mere figment in eighteenth-century thought, this ought to be reckoned with the many circumlocutions for form on offer.”40 “Causal form” is, once again, a reference to Aristotle, and specifically to the doctrine of the four causes. Locke may “explicitly negate the Aristotelian principle of form, and yet, connecting the ‘organization’ with ‘fitness,’ which is a necessary condition of life, retains some idea of form as a blueprint.” McMurran and Thompson differ in placing the term “blueprint” on opposite sides of the scholastic/empiricist divide: in Thompson’s account, empiricists reject the idea of form as a blueprint, while in McMurran’s, the blueprint remains a useful metaphor with reference to an empiricist account of form because it evokes design without implying essence. Their claims, however, are similar: form as an idea encompassing 51

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pattern or structure endures even in its refutation. More specifically, it endures as an idea important and useful for literary critics in a way that exposes its scientific and philosophical rejection as merely nominal, a verbal taboo. McMurran further bolsters Thompson’s account in aligning the persistence of form (in all but name) with the processes of perception. “Form has a second, but no less important, conceptual role in Aristotelian philosophy, which is also reworked in the early modern period. In addition to being the principle of change, form is also the principle that governs how the external world is mediated by the mind.”41 Form is epistemological as well as ontological—perhaps all the more so in its adaptation, under various alibis, for empiricist use. I depart from these analyses in considering the rejection of form in aesthetic discourse—to adapt Locke’s terms—as nominal but also real. This departure represents a strategic rather than a substantive divergence from Thompson’s account; by bracketing rather than recuperating the term form, I recategorize its epistemological dimension under the heading of practice. In the main, this impulse remains compatible with Thompson’s approach to prose fiction. She argues against a rigorous separation of novels, considered as artworks, from the works, both literary and experimental, of scientists like Boyle and philosophers like Locke.42 But the novel’s uptake of empiricist thought nevertheless differs from the elaboration of empiricism in and through philosophical debates about beauty. This is not to miss Thompson’s point and conceive of novels as representing rather than actually doing epistemology; her book argues that critical accounts of the novel’s so-called rise have been impoverished by their inattention to this performative conception of epistemology, a conception that unites rather than divides narrative fiction and experimental practice. Still, aesthetic theorizing that takes its bearings from Locke is different in part because it doesn’t seek to produce knowledge in the same way. The “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays, to take one example, are more descriptive than performative, more lab report than experiment. What’s more significant, though, in distinguishing a real rejection of form in aesthetics from its nominal rejection in other domains of eighteenth-century culture are the motivating questions that its leading figures take as their point of departure. They are categorically uninterested in how primary qualities produce the secondary qualities we recognize as aesthetic 52

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(paradigmatically, beauty), so they do not seek to translate an analysis of the formal—which is to say, the structural and textural—causes of beauty into an idiom uncontaminated by scholasticism. Instead, they are interested in the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment and in the philosophical consequences of that subjectivity. This is, in short, the inauguration of aesthetics as an exploration of the problem of taste.43

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In the last chapter, I argued that British empiricism at the turn of the eighteenth century produced an account of aesthetics organized not around form but around the theory of qualities. Beauty, the thinking went, was not a formal property located in an object but rather an effect produced by that object in the act of its perception by a beholder. This reorientation from object to subject redefined aesthetics as the philosophy of taste—or rather, defined it as such even before the name aesthetics was coined. In this chapter, I shift my focus from form (and more specifically, its rejection in empiricist thought) to practice as a defining concept in aesthetics. Practice comes to the fore in the kinds of aesthetic inquiry that take their bearings from scientific and philosophical empiricism. Empiricism, after all, is defined by its commitment to experience, to understanding the world from the standpoint of human perception, including the fact of intervention in the world observed: by experimental manipulation, by optical instruments, the ways embodiment distorts and beguiles. Observation is a practice, as is description; empiricism takes into account the ways in which we make the world we see.1 Empiricism also earns its reputation for practicality insofar as its methods are induc54

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tive; reasoning doesn’t start with general principles but rather with local observations that must be made, compiled, compared, and integrated. At the same time, a parallel conception of practice defines another strand of aesthetic inquiry as a challenge to empiricism. This parallel conception is ethics understood as practical reason, the translation of ideals into actions, and it anchors a version of aesthetics that challenges mechanistic accounts of human behavior associated with empiricist natural philosophy. Its figurehead, Antony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, will be the focus of my analysis in this chapter. I begin by exploring how Shaftesbury incorporates reflection on practice into his philosophical writing. While his defense of moral freedom against the potential incursions of a deterministic new science might seem to position him against the kind of practical aesthetics I have just described as an outgrowth of empiricism, he nevertheless remains committed to an idea of moral feeling that allows for cultivation at a relatively granular scale of contemplation and behavior. Shaftesbury conceives of philosophy as a method for living an ethical life and for developing what he calls character, and so philosophical writing as he practices it models the methods that are, in his view, its subject matter. Still, Shaftesbury’s writing about method shows the complicated influence of the Platonic tradition he inherits. He invokes artistic and artisanal practices, not because he’s an aesthetic theorist as we might now understand the term, but rather to serve as metaphors for techniques of moral self-examination. But these figures of practice, I argue, displace the kinds of craft knowledge from which they are drawn, making sensuous experience instrumental to its own renunciation. Shaftesbury clearly influenced later writers in the British aesthetic tradition, but the nature of that influence is not always easy to pin down. Or rather, even when the lines of influence are clear, it remains uncertain how, or whether, Shaftesbury’s own writings taken together can be classed under the heading of aesthetic theory. The larger question that motivates this chapter, then, is how to account for Shaftesbury’s role in the development of the modern aesthetic tradition in which he is often cited as an originator. What is the nature of his founding claim? In what sense is the practical orientation of his moral philosophy a contribution to philosophical aesthetics? 55

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Many commentators identify Shaftesbury’s founding claim in conceptual rather than practical terms, nominating disinterestedness as the aspect of his thought that disposes later thinkers on the subjects of beauty and judgment to follow in his wake.2 Other historians of aesthetics emphasize his grounding of ethics in feeling as antecedent to reason, i.e. the theorization of a moral sense.3 His allegiance to ancient thinkers, in particular the Socratic tradition and the Stoics, is widely recognized; nevertheless, scholars associate his influence with eighteenth-century conceptions of sociability, with modern philosophy as engaged with rather than withdrawn from politics and polite culture.4 He was, famously, the student—but hardly the disciple—of John Locke. Far from patterning his aesthetic theory on Locke’s epistemology, Shaftesbury pairs aesthetic and moral feelings as evidence against the tabula rasa. There are some things we just know, he argues, because God could not fail to avail himself of innate knowledge (or innate capacity for feeling) as a feature in his creation that would insure against human selfishness, divisiveness, and perhaps most important, atheism. This resistance to Lockean empiricism has been cast as a critical link in the chain that binds Neoplatonist idealism with Kant’s transcendental critique. An alternate view holds that Shaftesbury’s version of moral-sense theory is a friendly amendment to empiricism and his worldliness a variation on, rather than a rebuke to, the empiricist project.5 My own view is that Shaftesbury’s relation to modern aesthetic theory comes into better focus through the lens of practice. An account of British aesthetics would be incomplete without Shaftesbury, whose use of a Platonic vocabulary invites reflection on the transformation of classical ideas about form and about beauty in eighteenth-century thought. I am limiting my focus here to Plato and Aristotle; a full accounting of classical influences in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is well beyond the scope of this book. In the middle part of the chapter, I turn to James Porter and David Summers to understand what it might mean to approach Platonic and Aristotelian traditions from the standpoint of modern aesthetics. Porter and Summers each describe versions of formalism as an antiaesthetic tendency within aesthetics itself, which is to say, a tendency to replace material practice and sensuous experience with broadly applicable concepts. I apply this framework to Shaftesbury, arguing that he combines a focus on moral self-cultivation as practical with an idealist vocabu56

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lary around beauty and goodness and, more to the point, form. He never achieves a synthesis between them, although arguably this was the aim of his unfinished Second Characters. Far from anchoring the eighteenth century’s version of the aesthetic, Shaftesbury’s conception of form is a vestige, a source of friction within his theory. The chapter ends with a return to the question of artistic practice, this time not as a figure for moral selfexamination but as a necessary but instrumental element in Shaftesbury’s conception of art as a training ground for the cultivation of civic virtue. Here, it becomes clear that art’s role in Shaftesbury’s thought is entirely about the communication of ideas; however important a vaguely Platonic notion of form is in his lexicon, it remains essentially separate from those aspects of his thought that are influential for the later theorization of aesthetic judgment (to say nothing of pleasure—as I have not, thus far, in this chapter).

“It is practice which makes a hand” Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, is often—though not always—cited as a founder of British aesthetics.6 Notably, Shaftesbury’s foundational status is oblique to his thinking on beauty. Beauty becomes significant, in his writing, because of what it demonstrates about moral goodness. This correlation of the beautiful and the good places Shaftesbury among those thinkers whose engagement with aesthetic judgment constitutes a challenge to “the reductive account of motivation in empiricism” rather than, first and foremost, an elaboration of empiricist epistemology.7 The essays and treatises that comprise his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times—a collection of his published works supplemented by five “miscellaneous reflections,” assembled two years before his death at age forty-one—tend together toward a defense of the disinterested appreciation of virtue, a defense, that is, against a Hobbesian psychology of self-interest. Beauty plays a demonstrative role in this defense, its pleasures modeling approbation based in feeling rather than calculation. God, the argument goes, made good things pleasing so we would like them immediately (and thereafter, potentially, be inspired to investigate the reason for our liking); this kind of pleasure suggests that our actions may be motivated otherwise than by self-interest. We don’t calculate whether the sunset is good for 57

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us; we don’t expect to possess it. We can admire something without desiring it. So that we can act in the interest of a general or higher good, we have to be able to separate liking from wanting; we have to be capable of disinterested pleasure. And so disinterested pleasure is, in turn, evidence of the intelligent design of a benevolent creator. Incorporated into a Neoplatonic system of moral philosophy, beauty manifests the benevolent design of created nature; it draws the eye, and with it the mind, toward the good.8 Shaftesbury’s “Soliloquy; or Advice to an Author,” first published in 1710, recommends a method of personal moral housekeeping designed to correspond to this theory in which beauty is the manifestation of goodness, a method for estranging the moral actor from her own desires in order that she might identify a truer set of interests by which she should guide her actions. It is not obviously an aesthetic treatise, which is to say, it is not concerned with beauty or its recognition by the faculty of taste. However, artistic practice provides Shaftesbury with the central example on which he models his advice: the soliloquy of the essay’s title. In this section, I will argue that the peculiar strain of Shaftesbury’s Platonism is therefore legible not just in his moral theory, which posits an ascent out of material contingency and toward an ideal fusion of goodness, beauty, and truth, but also in his rhetoric, where craft—in this case, the craft of dramatic writing—serves the essential purpose of concretely representing an abstract idea, and yet cannot be valued for its own sake but only as a figure. Despite its titular appeal to soliloquy, the practice with which the essay is centrally concerned is not writing for the stage but rather ethical selfappraisal. In advising that his reader—“an author”—be more reflexive in his moral practice, Shaftesbury recommends a convention of theatrical performance as a model for living, effectively erasing what some might call the aesthetic framing of that convention, by which I mean something closer to its mimetic embeddedness, not to mention its levels of mediation. Shaftesbury’s advice has the peculiar effect of introducing a division between one author—the addressee of the treatise’s subtitle—and another, namely, the dramatist whose recourse to the technique of soliloquy is held up as a model. The latter author turns out an artifact that serves the former as an example, but the artifact—the soliloquy performed on stage—is 58

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not itself an instance of the ethical self-appraisal recommended to the reader because it is generated at a fictional remove from the moral life of its author, the dramatist. And this division between author and author in turn makes the reader aware of a further level of mediation, wherein the stage actor performs the soliloquy scripted for him by the dramatist. It is this practice, as performed, that Shaftesbury offers as a model to his reader. Recommending, early in the treatise, what he will later call “the wholesome regimen of self-practice,”9 Shaftesbury exhorts: Go to the poets, and they will present you with many instances. Nothing is more common with them than this sort of soliloquy. A person of profound parts, or perhaps of ordinary capacity, happens on some occasion to commit a fault. He is concerned for it. He comes alone upon the stage, looks about him to see if anybody be near, then takes himself to task without sparing himself in the least. You would wonder to hear how close he pushes matters and how thoroughly he carries on the business of self-dissection. By virtue of his soliloquy, he becomes two distinct persons. He is pupil and preceptor. He teaches and he learns. And, in good earnest, had I nothing else to plead in behalf of the morals of our modern dramatic poets, I should defend them still against their accusers for the sake of this very practice, which they have taken care to keep up in its full force.10

“Go to the poets” is really an exhortation to go to the theater: to go see an actor perform a speech written for him by another.11 Mimetic representation, in Shaftesbury’s conception, always presumes that design is to be sharply distinguished from its rote counterpart, execution, as his writings on painting make clear. What is the object of emulation in this passage? It would appear to be the self-divided “person of profound parts,” but that person is strictly speaking an impersonation. The deliberation the actor models in his performance is a “practice” kept up by the poet who wrote the soliloquy, a practice ultimately detached from both of the persons, actor and author, who give it material existence. The self who is dissected in the practice of soliloquy, as Shaftesbury describes it here, is the character portrayed by the actor; it is his moral dilemma that inspires the exercise, not the actor’s or the author’s. And yet Shaftesbury’s remarks are framed not as general ethical advice but as advice to an author. It is the author, he suggests, who stands to gain 59

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from the adoption of this practice—not so that he will write better plays, but so that he himself will develop the skill of moral self-scrutiny modeled by the dramatic character in the stage convention of the soliloquy. Why, then, does he direct his advice to authors specifically? And what kind of author does Shaftesbury have in mind? At the outset, he opines that “in early days poets were looked upon as authentic sages for dictating rules of life and teaching manners and good sense.”12 Now, though, they have lost this exalted reputation and do well to smuggle their teaching under the cover of pleasure. But poets, it emerges, are just one sub-class of the category of authors whom Shaftesbury addresses. This category restriction recapitulates the argument singling out authors among “all men” within whose articulation it is nested: We might now proceed to exhibit, distinctly and in due method, the form and manner of this probation or exercise as it regards all men in general. But the case of authors in particular being, as we apprehend, the most urgent, we shall apply our rule in the first place to these gentlemen, whom it so highly imports to know themselves and understand the natural strength and powers as well as the weaknesses of a human mind. For without this understanding, the historian’s judgment will be very defective, the politician’s views very narrow and chimerical, and the poet’s brain, however stocked with fiction, will be but poorly furnished as, in the sequel, we shall make appear. He who deals in characters must of necessity know his own, or he will know nothing.13

This statement is important both for its inclusive definition of authorship, comprising politicians and historians along with poets (in implicit counterpoint to Aristotle and Sidney), and for the light it sheds on Shaftesbury’s overarching title, Characteristics. Shaftesbury is less interested in comparing regimes of poetic truth than he is in defining authorship as a channel for moral philosophy, that which “deals in characters.”14 What he repeatedly calls the “exercise” or “practice” of soliloquy is not the artifact authorship produces—that which is delivered over to a reader—but rather its enabling precondition, the “form and manner” of private meditation that underwrites whatever value might inhere in an author’s judgment. There is, however, still another figural layer in play that bears on the politics of practice in Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Leery that the proffering of advice as such amounts to an imposition, Shaftesbury pro60

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tests “that my pretension is not so much to give advice as to consider of the way and manner of advising.”15 His counsel of self-division (or, in the terms of the above-quoted passage, “self-dissection”) is a method for taking one’s own advice, and (by the same token, of course) acting as one’s own advisor. Advice giving itself assumes the reflexive structure of soliloquy, an idea he develops with recourse to another metaphor (and an interpolated interlocutor): “My proposal is to consider of this affair as a case of surgery. It is practice, we all allow, which makes a hand. ‘But who, on this occasion, will be practiced on? Who will willingly be the first to try our hand and afford us the requisite experience?’ ”16 The speaker’s answer to the interlocutor’s question is, of course, that we must practice on ourselves. What interests me most, though, is the compounding of the figure in the metonym of the hand. The hand that practice makes is a proxy for skill as such, but in this case the skill of surgery specifically (a manual practice), which is in turn a metaphor for the writerly practice of self-scrutiny.17 Shaftesbury uses bodily and medical figures—surgery, dissection, remedy, healing—throughout the essay. His verbal playfulness around hands, specifically, is more local; a comment about “legerdemain in argument” precedes his proposal of the figure of surgery, and he then goes on to describe the “tenderness of hand” required of the moral surgeon.18 The use of “hand” as a metonym for the surgeon’s skill bespeaks a certain displacement; no allusion is made to the hand(s) of the writer to whom Shaftesbury addresses his advice, despite the availability of the metonymic hand to signify not only handwriting but, in a further figurative extension, artistic style or skill. Shaftesbury’s management of these figures in opening pages of “Soliloquy” suggests a certain amount of anxiety about the intellectual pedigree of the self-scrutinizing practice he recommends. The philosophical improvement of one’s character is a delicate business to the extent that it is more art than science: “Men . . . can bear a master in mathematics, in music or in any other science, but not in understanding and good sense.”19 Demurring from giving advice, he concedes, modestly, that “my science, if it be any, is not better than that of a language-master or a logician.”20 The surgeon of the figure, with his tender hand, is an artist because he is not a theorist; his practice is responsive to the matter of the bodies he touches. What Shaftesbury means 61

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by “science” is closer to what we recognize as the classical liberal arts (note that music is included beside mathematics and logic, grouped together as knowledge-systems rather than, in this context, technical skills developed by means of repetitive, embodied practice). Painting, of course, is not among them, for the same reason that Shaftesbury addresses himself to an author and, pointedly, not a writer, thereby avoiding mention of writing’s material mediation. Rhetoric is a liberal art, and authorship bound up with authority in a humanist conception of the public good; writing, like painting, is a mechanical art.21 So it is that painting, along with other plastic arts, enters the treatise as an analogy, and corresponds to those moments in which Shaftesbury selects the word writer in preference to author. The exercise of technical skills, of the artisan’s craft, is, like the exercise of moral self-scrutiny for the author, a private practice; the solitude of private study is compared with the near-occult transmission of artisanal knowledge in the closed community of a guild or atelier. And thus poetry and the writer’s art, as in many respects it resembles the statuary’s and the painter’s, so in this more particularly, that it has its original drafts and models for study and practice, not for ostentation, to be shown abroad or copied for public view. These are the ancient busts, the trunks of statues, the pieces of anatomy, the masterly rough drawings which are kept within, as the secret learning, the mystery and fundamental knowledge of the art.22

Still, Shaftesbury notes the likeness only to follow it with a stronger distinction: painters, perfecting their techniques for representing the visible surfaces of bodies, “can never, with all their accuracy or correctness of design, be able to reform themselves or grow a jot more shapely in their persons.”23 Writers, on the other hand, whose solitary study is directed toward a general understanding of character, can hardly “fail of being themselves improved and amended in their better part.”24 In sum: close attention to the figural logic of “Soliloquy” reveals the influence of Platonist habits of mind on Shaftesbury’s philosophical project, habits of mind all the more subtly woven into a text more concerned with method than doctrine. Artistic and artisanal practices—the actor’s performance, the surgeon’s hand, the “masterly rough drawings” of the painter—

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stand in for and give material, sensuous shape to more abstract moral-philosophical exercises of self-cultivation. Shaftesbury luxuriates in the ambivalent status of those material practices in a wonderful sorry/not sorry moment at the beginning of the treatise’s final section, apologizing “for my frequent recourse to the rules of common artists, to the masters of exercise, to the academies of painters, statuaries, and to the rest of the virtuoso tribe,” presumably because such artists fail to exemplify the ideal reflexivity of the author qua moral philosopher. “But in this I am so fully satisfied I have reason on my side,” he continues, “that, let custom be ever so strong against me, I had rather repair to these inferior schools to search for truth and nature than to some other places where higher arts and sciences are professed.” Truth and nature, knowledge of character, are developed in practice; Shaftesbury is Stoic enough to endorse exercise and discipline even when the anti-idealism of such conceptions of method comes into conflict with that other asceticism, the Platonic hunger for renunciation that can only work itself out in and through sensuous, material experience.25 In suggesting that the figure of practice displaces its own (manual, material) referent, I don’t mean to imply that moral reasoning should not itself, quite legitimately, be considered a practice.26 If we fail to appreciate the aptness of understanding moral self-fashioning as a practice, we cannot take the full measure of the Stoical Shaftesbury, the worldly Shaftesbury, even the empiricist Shaftesbury. Still, I contend that the logic of figuration as such makes art seem at once essential and dispensable for Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Shaftesbury’s debt to Plato is manifest in his figuration of ideal, abstract philosophical practices by means of low, concrete, artistic and artisanal ones. Art then turns out to be important for Shaftesbury’s philosophical project, but not in the way we might expect of a foundational figure in philosophical aesthetics. Vivasvan Soni observes something similar in his reading of “Soliloquy,” which focuses on its implications for the theorization of judgment. Soni connects the oblique quality of Shaftesbury’s reflections on beauty to the practical orientation of his writings: Although Shaftesbury is often considered to be one of the first architects of modern aesthetics, one would be hard pressed to find anything like a conventional aesthetic theory in the Characteristics. Shaftesbury’s reflections on

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beauty are scattered throughout the text, and interwoven with his thoughts on moral action, religion, benevolence, the social contract, and so forth. This is not simply an effect of his allergy to systematic philosophizing. Although Shaftesbury is forging concepts that will be indispensable for a subsequent aesthetic tradition—like sensus communis and aesthetic disinterest—his own writing resembles earlier treatises on the arts like Aristotle’s Poetics, which took the form of technical advice for practitioners rather than mediations on the beautiful as such.27

As we have seen, however, the practitioners in question in “Soliloquy” are not dramatists but authors broadly defined—educated influencers of public morals—and the technical advice offered applies less to writing than to the fashioning of ethical character. Soni recognizes this: “When the discussion does turn to beauty late in the essay, what is in question is the constitution of the self—its projects and ends, its capacity to resolve and act morally.”28 What Soni describes here is the persistent difficulty of assimilating Shaftesbury’s writings to an understanding of the aesthetic based on its later historical development, away from moral feeling and toward the arts (or, from one to the other based on the idea that art produces not knowledge but feeling in its audience). If Shaftesbury’s writing resembles the Poetics, Soni seems to suggest, it does so because it offers an analysis of a phenomenon geared toward the question of how to replicate it. But this how-to mentality would constitute a strange criterion for any traditional account of what qualifies a text as aesthetic in its focus— especially, I want to emphasize, if the analysis on offer takes something other than the arts as its object (as is the case in “Soliloquy”). Soni’s allusion to the Poetics raises another, genealogical question. I have thus far named Plato as the major classical influence channeled in Shaftesbury’s thinking and writing, but it is customary, I think, if one were intent on seeking classical origins for modern aesthetics, to trace that inheritance back to Aristotle, precisely because of the influence of the Poetics.29 (Plato, by contrast, produced no “treatises on the arts,” and indeed the verdict on the arts most prominent in the Socratic literature is the expulsion of the poets in Republic 10.) In “Soliloquy,” it is true, Shaftesbury seems committed to an Aristotelian model of analysis oriented to practice, and yet the practice in question is meditative rather than mimetic. In other texts in the Characteristics, as we will see, Shaftesbury writes 64

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in a more obviously Platonic style, adopting the Socratic dialogue as a mode of philosophical argumentation. In “Soliloquy,” when he flaunts his recourse “to these inferior schools”—“the academies of painters,” et cetera—“to search for truth and nature,” how should we understand the gesture of false humility (they are “common artists,” he is breaking the rules in looking for such a low example)? Is this an homage to Socrates, to the conceit of knowing nothing and stripping an argument back to its most basic presuppositions, or is he modulating his Platonism by conceding that technical expertise, grounded in the material world, has a role to play in the elaboration of philosophical knowledge (even if that role is ultimately figurative)? To answer this local question, I think both characterizations of Shaftesbury’s approach are plausible. Posing such a question is one way of approaching the broader issue of the relation between an emergent eighteenth-century theory of aesthetics and the classical precedents that it both adapts and challenges. One way of understanding the legacy of Platonic and Aristotelian thought for modern aesthetics has been in terms of a dialectic between form and practice, a dialectic that, as I have begun to outline with reference to “Soliloquy,” runs aground on the use of practice as a figure. In the next section of this chapter, I will explore the treatment of form and practice as competing tendencies in two recent studies that seek to locate Plato and Aristotle in the prehistory of aesthetics as a modern field of philosophical inquiry.

Classical Legacies In arguing that eighteenth-century aesthetics begins as an outgrowth of rather than an alternative to empiricist scientific theory and practice, Michael McKeon touches on the complicated legacy of Aristotle— specifically, Aristotle’s Poetics—in an intellectual culture that associated his name with scholastic precepts newly vulnerable to the evidence of experiment. McKeon observes, regarding the doctrine of the unities, that “the substance of that doctrine seemed to support, as the scientific Aristotle did not, a rigorously empirical approach to the dramatic representation of nature that was fully compatible with the nascent principles of natural philosophy.”30 McKeon’s implication is that the doctrine of the unities mattered 65

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to seventeenth-century dramatists—to practitioners—as a principle of composition; they singled out a practical principle, he suggests, by contrast with an ontological one: plot understood as the essence of tragedy, which is the aspect of the Poetics that would, after all, align with “the scientific Aristotle.” The larger point, as McKeon insists throughout his essay, is that “a rigorously empirical approach” is by definition an approach to practice rather than a set of principles. An aesthetics that begins as part of a new science oriented around experience, experiment, and perception— the activities they consist in, the tools and instruments they employ to augment the senses—is, quite simply, a practical aesthetics. And this conception of aesthetics can accommodate a different understanding of the legacy of classical aesthetics as it is embodied by the two major figures of Plato and Aristotle—a different understanding, that is, both of the relation between ancient and modern and of the relation of the two figures to one another. On this view, a more holistic understanding of Aristotelian philosophy—not just the Poetics—corresponds with the modern formulation of the aesthetic, and the novelty of that formulation: its focus not on art but on a mode of perceptual encounter, a kind of experience. David Summers takes this view in his characterization of aesthetics in the Renaissance: “If we regard allegory and idealization of both forms and relations of forms as Platonic (as many do), then these Platonic characteristics were realized in deep accommodation with characteristics stating the necessity of the determination of particular works by individual judgment and point of view. The language justifying such opinionative judgment was predominantly Aristotelian.”31 This approach combines some of the moral concerns of the eighteenth-century thinkers who were to follow—aesthetic experience theorized in relation to practical reason— with an understanding of Aristotelian philosophy as oriented to matter even in its conceptualization of form, and as such more compatible with empiricism than Boyle or Locke might admit. Summers continues, For Aristotle . . . humankind finds itself from the outset in the light of the physical world, in which it is always active and to which it is adequately fitted. This fit begins at the very basis of the apprehension of the world, at the level of sensation. . . . The development of art based on point of view at the dawn of the modern period was deeply bound up with the Aristotelian notion that the human soul, from sensation upward, is suited 66

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to its world, and with the further notion that the beautiful itself is conformity to human sense before it is evidence of transcendental value.32

For Summers, Plato and Aristotle represent opposite poles, locked in something like a competition for dominance in the later framing of aesthetic theory in modern Europe. Historically, he argues, the philosophy of beauty has emphasized Platonic idealism at the cost of Aristotelian materialism—a phrase that, from the perspective of the eighteenth century, sounds oxymoronic. My point in turning to Summers’s materialist Aristotle rather than focusing on a formalist reading of Aristotelianism is not to perpetuate the concept of form—by whatever name—as a through-line defining what comes to be known as aesthetics. Instead, I mean to observe how practical experience rather than form (and indeed rather than the form/matter pairing) might hold together a conception of what the aesthetic is and encompasses, in the long early modern period (that is, from the Renaissance in Summers’s telling to the new science in the seventeenth century and on to the literary and philosophical fruit it bears in the eighteenth). And perhaps in the ancient world, as well—or at least, this is one argument of James Porter’s indispensable study The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece. Compared with Summers, Porter is less interested in understanding Aristotle as a corrective to Platonic tendencies in the history of aesthetics, instead emphasizing “Aristotle’s refinement of Plato” as the consolidation of an antimaterialist tradition.33 This refinement united the two figures in what, for Porter, is a highly but negatively influential formalism, a formalism that has had the effect of obscuring, precisely, the varied practices of ancient art grounded in sensuous experience. In this orientation, his argument resonates with that of Summers, whom he cites approvingly in the book. Porter’s approach is therefore revisionist in its aims, and he takes aim, specifically, at form (“that most suspect of entities”), both in its modern and ancient manifestations. After a brief discussion of Russian Formalism and New Criticism, he concludes that it is likely best “to cast away form and formalism in favor of a more productive set of terms.”34 He then turns to the Platonic and Aristotelian “varietals” of formalism, arguing that Plato’s “aesthetics of purity” works by separating beauty from the senses.35 Notably, his analysis depends on a thoroughgoing distinction between 67

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form and formalism that, in the case of Plato, is not just a distinction but a polar opposition: formalism salvages meaning from form. Plato’s formalism, the principle of separation inherent in the theory of ideal Forms, manifests as a rejection of art’s formal features, as opposed to its content. “Plato is following a form/content distinction in which matters of form—modes of expression, such as harmonic mode (tuning) and rhythm—are to be subordinated to meaning (logos). Whether we reckon these features as form or matter makes little difference in the end.”36 The separation of beauty as a pure idea from its formal or material modes of expression affords “glimpses of Forms”—which is to say, again, that in Porter’s analysis of Plato, formalism delivers Forms from contamination by material form.37 The main change Porter tracks in moving from Plato to Aristotle, then, is the migration of form from one kind of entanglement with matter (the merely formal, an obstacle to meaning) to another, one that enables cognition while still permitting, indeed inviting, the logical isolation of form as essence. “In the Poetics,” he writes, Muthos (plot) may be the “soul” of tragedy, but then soul has to be understood in its non-“aesthetic” and “actively intellectual” functions. Like soul, muthos is separable in definition . . . , the principle in virtue of which alone, viewed per se, a tragedy is “what it is” . . . and this is because muthos is the principle of a tragedy’s intelligibility and the criterion of its identity as well. And while it is true that Aristotle’s efforts are directed, ultimately, at the synthesis of matter with form (resulting in so-called “enmattered” form), in reaction to the Platonic “separation” of Forms, at least as much effort is spent in the Aristotelian corpus at isolating that which within these compounds (or predicated of them) gives them their essence and identity. In making these sorts of moves, Aristotle is unsparingly formalistic: essence is logically divorced from matter. . . . And the trait of logical separatism is deeply ingrained.38

Hylomorphism does not abandon the analytical separation of form from matter even in its pursuit of an ontological synthesis. This analytical or logical separation constitutes, for Porter, Aristotle’s formalism: “the identification of an aspect and its abstraction from a totality as such.”39 That having been said, Porter’s reading of Aristotle’s aesthetics as formalist ends up in a surprising place. It is a mistake, he argues, to conceive of classical formalism as continuous with, much less authorizing, its modern counterpart: 68

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Ancient formalism here shows itself to be a precursor to modern intuitions about literary wholeness and coherence—but not about form. Modern formalists might seek an ally in Aristotle, but if so they won’t have looked hard enough at his treatise. Aristotle’s logic of the poetic whole has to do with a synthetic unity, a compound that is made up of parts. The idea of form as “a discernible . . . isolable element in or aspect of ” a work of art that one can point to, never mind as the dominant pattern of the work, is entirely foreign to his thinking—thankfully so, as no such entity exists in the world.40

Aristotelian formalism, according to Porter, is a principle of abstraction with no objective correlative: “no such entity exists in the world.” This brings him close to Thompson, or rather, to the empiricists she champions: as a cognitive process, formal abstraction may be inevitable, but form itself—substantial form—is a fetish. And yet even then Porter is not defending formalism any more than he is advocating for form. His analysis of the influence of Plato and Aristotle on the conceptual vocabulary of a later tradition exposes an anti-aesthetic tendency internal to the discourse of aesthetics; formalism, in the sense of formal abstraction, “is a defense against the perceptual nature of the aesthetic act—its very own.”41 I will return shortly to this conception of defensive formalism in relation to Shaftesbury’s adaptation of Platonic theory and rhetoric. For now, I merely want to observe that Porter provides, in the ancient Greek context, a precedent for an approach to aesthetics that is skeptical of form not just on nominal but indeed on conceptual grounds. To return to the eighteenth century by way of the Renaissance: if “Aristotelian” refers, for Summers, to a focus on the act of perception and its worldly orientation, a focus too often repudiated in aesthetic theory, then Porter’s skepticism about form and formalism, especially in their Aristotelian guise, corresponds to the same critical impulse to restore a practical dimension to the history of aesthetics. In the eighteenth century, this practical dimension comes to the fore in the kinds of aesthetic inquiry that take their bearings from scientific and philosophical empiricism. At the same time, as we have seen, practice is important for Shaftesbury’s Stoical ethics, a system that correlates the beautiful and the good as part of a challenge to the atheist potential of empiricist natural philosophy. It’s a complicated intellectual genealogy, and a definition of the aesthetic grounded on this divided conception of practice risks instability at its root; risks, more precisely, being 69

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stretched too thin in order to accommodate both empiricism and its ethical critique. Still: it is, I would argue, an instability and a stretched-too-thinness justified by the history of aesthetics as it developed in the early eighteenth century. It is a constitutive complication, evident in the analogy Summers makes between artistic practice and practical reason: “The kinds of judgments made about works of art in their fashioning were like ethical judgments in that both of them were finally ‘right’ or ‘good’ only in the face of an actual state of affairs; and the kinds of judgments about works of art already made—‘taste’—involved the faculties necessary to make the judgments about actual states of affairs that made ‘right’ action—even the application of ‘true principles’—possible at all.”42 What secures a likeness between ethical and aesthetic judgments is the necessity of evaluating principles in practice and, conversely, their unavailability to human perception as mere ideas. Aesthetics, on this view, awaits empiricism for its constitution as a mode of philosophical inquiry because empiricism expands the conceptual purchase, and the significance, of “actual states of affairs.” I turn back now to Shaftesbury and his role in the history of aesthetics by paying attention to the rhetoric of practice and, specifically, the tension that results when an analogical claim for the importance of aesthetics—aesthetic judgment matters because it is like ethical judgment— is grounded in an idea of practice. An idea of practice: the problem, not to say contradiction, is that its idealization has the tendency to make practice into a figure, a tendency Shaftesbury adopts from the Platonic tradition. Porter notes how “Plato’s experience of Forms borrows, precisely, from the realm of experience, and is conveyed, after all, in language. For all its transcendental yearnings, it remains marked by its origins in the empirical, phenomenal, and material realms. Its asceticism and anorexia in the face of the senses are, oddly (and betrayingly) insatiable.”43 An insatiable asceticism would amount to a desire to keep renouncing, an erotic short circuit wherein renunciation itself becomes the object of longing, endowed with the power to enthrall.44 But I’m less interested here in the psychology of asceticism than in the figural logic at stake in the articulation of a theory of ideal Forms, as, for instance, David Halperin has analyzed in his reading of the Symposium.45 In the next section, I situate Shaftesbury’s adaptation of a Platonic theory of Forms in relation to his larger framing of philosophy as worldly self-cultivation. 70

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Shaftesbury and Worldliness Shaftesbury constructs his early version of what will later be recognized as modern aesthetics on an ambivalently Platonic foundation, modifying but not ultimately rejecting a Platonic theory of art in which the function of images is to convey ideas, to deliver truth (or untruth in a seductive guise), and then fade from view—or, more precisely, to be seen through. This ambivalent Platonism, crossed as it is with Stoic and empiricist influences, has made it difficult for intellectual historians to settle on a story where Shaftesbury is concerned. I have suggested that we understand Shaftesbury’s investment in practice as integral to the moral framing of his philosophical project. Shaftesbury construes moral philosophy as a theory of self-fashioning, consigning the world beyond the self to what Ernst Cassirer, writing in the early 1930s, would call “the periphery of the beautiful.”46 And yet Cassirer nevertheless champions Shaftesbury as the founder of modern aesthetics, calling him “the first for whom the problem of aesthetic form becomes an all-embracing and fundamental problem.”47 Unlike later intellectual historians who associate Shaftesbury’s aesthetics with his modernity, or at least with the transformation of his classically inflected ideas under the pressure of modernity, Cassirer construes “the problem of aesthetic form” as a prescient critique of empiricism that nevertheless takes its bearings from the classical past. “English empirical philosophy created no systematic aesthetics,” Cassirer declares. “It is not without scattered observations of the sense of the beautiful and the sublime; but these were confined entirely to the field of psychology.”48 This pronouncement reflects Cassirer’s Kantianism, according to which a fully developed philosophical aesthetics is defined by contradistinction to psychology, which is empirical. But a Kantian definition of the aesthetic looks idiosyncratic from the standpoint of the early eighteenth century, when Shaftesbury wrote and published. Shaftesbury may not have been much interested in the psychology of perception, but the aesthetic theory he produced was hardly systematic and still less transcendental (at least not in a Kantian sense). Even so, Cassirer’s claim that Shaftesbury foreshadows the transcendental critique because he held out against materialist psychology places his interpretation at odds with more

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recent scholars who find in Shaftesbury’s worldliness a kind of alternative empiricism.49 Dabney Townsend is the main proponent of this view, finding in “Soliloquy” “a healthy scepticism about self-examination and a recognition of the infinite possibilities of self-deception.” Townsend regrets that this skepticism “could be called a kind of empiricism had that term not been co-opted as the opposite of ‘rationalism.’ It is not the empiricism of simple ideas and sense impressions, but it is a dependence on experience and verifiable observation none the less.”50 Townsend’s reading counteracts Cassirer’s tendency to cast Shaftesbury as an idealist on the grounds that he is not a materialist. What’s really at stake in defining Shaftesbury’s relation to empiricism is his orientation toward experience—not necessarily the world beyond the self but at least the self in relation to the world. Townsend is right to say that empiricism is the wrong word to describe Shaftesbury’s intellectual affiliation; Lawrence Klein’s focus on Shaftesbury’s worldliness is more helpful.51 And noticing this worldliness is important because it is counterintuitive from the standpoint of Shaftesbury’s Platonism. “Shaftesbury’s language is firmly NeoPlatonic,” Townsend writes, “but he requires the testing of judgments in a way which gives his Platonism a new content.”52 Particularly in his later writings, intended as a sequel to Characteristics but left unfinished at the time of his death in 1713, Shaftesbury seeks the material manifestations of the forms of beauty and goodness, reversing the ascent out of matter more typical of Platonic thought.53 According to Townsend, Shaftesbury’s criticism is worldly insofar as it remains oriented toward the cultivation of character: “No where do we find Shaftesbury’s moral and aesthetic speculation moving from the individual in the direction of contemplation or an escape from the self. Its moral objective is consistently to discover and improve the individual; the aesthetic objective is to discover and represent the true form instead of the fancied form or outward appearance. . . . Instead of being led away from such plastic forms and weaned from the world, Shaftesbury is content to provide instruction for finding the forms within the world.”54 Shaftesbury’s worldliness can be difficult to locate, though, when his writing takes a particularly Platonic turn. If “Soliloquy” and “Sensus Communis” represent one pole, articulating a philosophical method grounded in sociability (the latter essay frames itself as “a defence of rail72

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lery”), writings more concerned with doctrine than with method conceal the worldly project of moral cultivation behind the language of form.55 In “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” composed as a dialogue, Shaftesbury has his stand-in, Theocles, assert “that the beautiful, the fair, the comely, were never in the matter but in the art and design, never in body itself but in the form or forming power.”56 One recognizes the beautiful in its material manifestation, but also knows not to identify it with (or in) matter but instead with form. And still, the design and forming power of which the beautiful form grants a glimpse does not belong to some human artist—a mere technician, so unimportant as not to merit a mention in “The Moralists.” Instead, creative human intelligence is celebrated only as a conduit, a manifestation of “that third order of beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form.”57 (Having lingered in the last chapter over the taboo Locke imposes on the word form, it’s worth noticing the contrary force of this incantatory repetition, which makes the word’s relative absence in empiricist writing seem all the more pointed.) It would be a mistake, in Shaftesbury’s philosophy, to locate beauty in matter. At the same time, though, he does not condemn the material world as corrupting or illusory. He is not that kind of Neoplatonist. Characteristics teaches its reader how to learn from the world rather than, in Townsend’s words, be weaned from it. It is Shaftesbury’s use of a Platonic vocabulary in texts like “The Moralists” that leads Cassirer to conclude that his founding claim on the aesthetic is a claim about aesthetic form. The aspect of modern aesthetics that can be understood as Shaftesbury’s legacy, though, is not this vestige of Platonist thought, in which form is the immaterial and enduring essence of the transient appearance of beauty in decaying bodies: ‘The beautifying, not the beautified, is the really beautiful.’ ‘It seems so.’ ‘For that which is beautified is beautiful only by the accession of something beautifying, and, by the recess or withdrawing of the same, it ceases to be beautiful.’ ‘Be it.’ ‘In respect of bodies therefore, beauty comes and goes.’ (p. 322)

The concept of form in Shaftesbury’s philosophy—Platonic Form, form as essence—interrupts its worldly orientation, inviting the reader to defer

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contemplation from what he perceives (the beautiful) to what he must intuit: the beautifying. Left behind in Shaftesbury’s invocation of form is the relation between perception and beauty. Shaftesbury’s founding claim on the aesthetic involves the mere fact that there is a role for the beautiful in his moral philosophy. The beautiful matters because it is not distinct from the good.58 What about this idea of the beautifying, though? Why shouldn’t this understanding of beauty in action, along with the corresponding idea of a “forming power,” constitute a convincing basis for an aesthetic theory unfolded from the standpoint of practice, articulated under the aegis of form? This is Cassirer’s view, which he articulates in relation to the same passage in “The Moralists,” doubling down on the idea that aesthetics arises as a mode of resistance to empiricism: Aesthetics is not a product of the general trend of English empiricism, but of English Platonism. The underlying reason for this is that the psychology of empiricism, with all its exactness of observation and subtilty of analysis, does not go beyond the sphere of receptivity, and that it possesses the tendency throughout to transform all psychic spontaneity into receptivity. Such an approach has no instrument to cope with the creative process. Aesthetics could develop only where a stern opponent of psychological sensualism arose, where not merely a philosophy of impression, but a philosophy of expression, was in request. . . . This transition is represented by Shaftesbury. For he seeks the beautiful not in the realm of the finished product, but in the activity, in the creative principle of the forming process: ‘the Beautifying not the Beautify’d is the really Beautiful.’59

Cassirer’s invocation of creativity is jarring, making Shaftesbury sound, unconvincingly, like an evangelist for a romantic conception of the creative imagination that was still nearly one hundred years in the future at the time Characteristics was published. And yet he makes the compelling point that an aesthetic theory grounded in the psychology of perception— a theory of taste—largely ignores the perspective of artistic practitioners. Once again, though, the holistic nature of Shaftesbury’s project—its incorporation of the beautiful into a moral philosophy oriented toward worldly experience—argues against the reading of “forming power” as a byword for artistic creativity. In another take on the very same passage, Jerome Stolnitz explains that “the experience of beauty . . . is not primarily, 74

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let alone solely, of some object, already formed and harmonious. It is itself plastic and creative. In Shaftesbury’s striking phrase, ‘the beautifying, not the beautified, is the really beautiful.’ The ‘beautifying’ here is of one’s own life.”60 As Stolnitz and Townsend both make clear, “forming power” becomes reflexive, finding its most influential articulation not in the atelier but in the self-cultivation of the “man of taste”: his opinions, his judgments, his wit—in short, his character.61 Shaftesbury’s philosophy, understood as foundational for aesthetics by virtue of its incorporation of beauty into a worldly theory of moral cultivation, ends up segregating its account of form from its theory of the artwork, which focuses almost entirely on what we now call content.

Art, Rhetoric, Politics Shaftesbury understands philosophy as practical and oriented to worldly experience. At the same time, he is committed to an antimaterialist project of seeing through mere appearance to discern the essence of the good. Beauty manifested in matter helps train the moral subject to love and admire the “forming power” behind the material manifestation. Art, then, has an instrumental role in this regime of moral instruction; the artwork— and the artist, by extension—is an aid to the self-cultivation of the man of taste. But the plastic form of the artwork remains beside the point. Artworks come to matter in Shaftesbury’s philosophy to the extent that their manufacture can be delegated to a technician whose own moral cultivation doesn’t merit a thought. The painter exercises a “forming power” when he uses the materials of his trade to make an image on a wall or a canvas, but this mechanical kind of form, concerned with spatial composition, color, line, texture, does not rise to the level of philosophical consideration. Shaftesbury’s theory of painting, as John Barrell has shown, concerns itself entirely with the depicted content of images. This way of thinking about art opens onto a broader conception of cultural politics in early eighteenth-century England: who makes art, who sees and judges it, who critiques it, and what its social purpose is held to be. In this section, I will describe how material practice, manufacture, is pushed to the margins of art theory in order for the latter to gain philosophical respectability. When it fails to dignify practice, art theory makes a casualty of form. 75

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Shaftesbury advocates a way of thinking about art in which the primary concern is what, and how, an artwork communicates to its audience. Barrell characterizes this conception of painting as “rhetorical,” analyzing it as an essential component of the critical and philosophical effort to advocate for art’s public function.62 On his account, writers on art from Shaftesbury to Reynolds aimed to elevate painting from its classical status as a merely mechanical craft by adapting to it a set of values corresponding to the political theory J. G. A. Pocock has labeled civic humanism.63 When brought to bear on painting, this theory held that “the most dignified function to which painting could aspire was the promotion of the public virtues; and the genres of painting were ranked according to their tendency to promote them.”64 History painting held first place in this ranking because, in theory at least, its depiction of canonical moments of moral choice could inspire and inform the behavior of qualified spectators— qualified, that is, by their “independent” status to be entrusted with “the security and the survival of the state.”65 If the purpose of depiction is to inspire a disposition to a certain kind of virtuous action, then its aim is to persuade; in Barrell’s words, If painting, or if the worthiest branch of it, the heroic kind, addressed the spectator as the active citizen of “a civil State or Public,” and attempted not only to instruct him in the virtues necessary to that identity, but to “inflame,” to persuade him to exercise them, then it followed for traditional humanists among writers on painting that it must address him rhetorically.66

And as Barrell goes on to argue, the idea that viewing a painting can persuade a spectator to emulate its subject presupposes a primary emphasis on narrative content rather than material form. As an exemplary theory of neoclassical art, Barrell’s work dovetails rather neatly with Jacques Rancière’s “three major regimes of identification” of art and the arts, and underlines the status of the eighteenth century as the crux of any historical recounting of art in relation to the aesthetic.67 The clearest point of critical correspondence is between Rancière’s second or transitional regime, “the poetic—or representative— regime of the arts”—transitional, that is, between “the ethical regime of images” and “the aesthetic regime of the arts.”68 This regime is transitional but also remarkably stable, in historical terms, seeming to encompass all

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European art theory beginning with Aristotle and leading up to Kant. It is classical and neoclassical, breaking with the Platonic stigma on images in order to admit a legitimate role for representation, within limits—that is, provided it does not deceive. In Rancière’s analysis, recognition of mimesis (by virtue of and in tandem with the imposition of limits) precedes the very idea of a domain of “arts”: I call this regime poetic in the sense that it identifies the arts—what the Classical Age would later call the “fine arts”—within a classification of ways of doing and making, and it consequently defines proper ways of doing and making as well as means of assessing imitations. I call it representative insofar as it is the notion of representation or mimesis that organizes these ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging. Once again, however, mimesis is not the law that brings the arts under the yoke of resemblance. It is first of all a fold in the distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in social occupations, a fold that renders the arts visible.69

The point I want to emphasize here is Rancière’s insistence that mimesis is not a “law” that picks out and confers status on one kind of art among others. By this he means that there is no ensemble of practices classed under the name “fine arts” from within which a subset, the mimetic arts, comes to prominence; mimesis does not rise to the top of the heap of the so-called fine arts. Instead, from the heap of all the “ways of doing and making”—the archaic sense of poiesis—a subset, the making of representations, gives rise to what we recognize as the domain of the arts (and not— yet—the aesthetic). In turn, the “fold that renders the arts visible” precedes and conditions the further fusion and autonomization of art— not as the product of a particular set of (imitative) practices but as the object of a new kind of experience (the aesthetic, at last).70 The part of this story that Barrell tells in The Political Theory of Painting is the move to dignify painting as a liberal art by downplaying its mechanical aspect and endowing it with a public function. In this view, images might educate rather than deceive, but only through the responsible communication of content. Shaftesbury’s argument presumes mimesis; representation is the only kind of artistic practice that matters, and matters, as a practice, precisely as “a fold in the distribution of ways of doing and making.” The idea that attention to representation as a phenomenon has something to

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do with the visibility of the arts as such in the eighteenth century receives support from the nascent aesthetic theories of Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays are texts more squarely devoted to the discernment of artistic beauty than anything Shaftesbury published. Representation is the primary division that structures each theory. Like Addison, whose primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination divide aesthetic experience into “such Objects as are before our Eyes,” on the one hand, and their representations, on the other, Hutcheson speaks of absolute and comparative beauties.71 But what’s so obvious that it risks escaping our notice altogether is the other familiar division of aesthetic experience that Addison’s and Hutcheson’s categorizations cut across: the division between nature and art. For the purposes of these early theorists of aesthetic experience, whether or not something is an artifact of human manufacture is a less salient distinction than whether it represents some other, absent object or idea. (Of course, the cut is not symmetrical: there are no purely natural secondary pleasures; all representations are the product of artifice. But art and artifice are divided between primary [absolute, in Hutcheson’s terms] and secondary [comparative], with music and architecture, for instance, in the first category, as nonmimetic arts.) That an art/nature opposition recedes into the background of theories such as these—or rather, hasn’t yet made itself felt as the first division of aesthetic experience— corroborates Rancière’s analysis by filling in a stage of its concrete historical development. The aesthetic, as an emergent category of analysis encompassing both art and nature, is not yet a byword for the philosophy of art. If mimesis is “a fold in the distribution of ways of doing and making,” then the aesthetic comes into being, discursively speaking, as a fold in the distribution of ways of perceiving. For thinkers like Addison and Hutcheson—and, later, Hogarth—art is a means of understanding the aesthetic, not its reason for being. And when early aesthetic theorists do talk about art, they talk about it in terms governed by the art theory of the day: that is, in terms of mimetic representation. Rancière’s schema calls our attention to mimesis as the essential ground for the more local transformations described by Barrell and others. In Barrell’s case, the elevation of painting from a mere craft to a liberal art 78

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takes place by means of a particular refinement of mimesis as rhetoric: representational content sharpened to a point, a message to be conveyed to an audience (and this elevation thereby draws on the prestige of an ethical regime of images, in which what matters is the content of a representation, its pedagogical quotient—a fitting manifestation of Shaftesbury’s Platonism). Mimesis as rhetoric—dialectically in tension with mimesis as illusion—also structures Joseph Roach’s history of stage acting as a craft and an art in eighteenth-century Britain and France.72 Roach, Barrell, and, in his way, even M. H. Abrams recount how the rhetorical moment in eighteenth-century art theory both perfects and destabilizes the mimetic regime that is its precondition. While a mimetic theory of art is relatively homeostatic, whence its identification with classicism, its development in the direction of rhetoric—that is, an increasing emphasis on its orientation to an audience—correlates with the shift toward an aesthetic theory of art, a theory of art elaborated out of the subjective responses of a spectator. But this shift presumes the convergence of art theory and aesthetic theory, two things that remain distinct, or at least disjointed, in Shaftesbury’s writings. Barrell focuses on the art theory side, holding up Shaftesbury’s Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules as a template for art’s rhetorical function. In this late text, first published in French the year before its author’s death, Shaftesbury does not lay down the tenets of a rhetorical theory of painting so much as exemplify it through a hypothetical instance of its realization. His essay is ekphrastic, a design for an image to be executed by the trained hand of a technician. The content of the image is a parable of moral judgment, recommending to the viewer the merit of choosing a course of action based on the principle of the public good rather than private self-interest. Under this construction, painting is an entirely instrumental practice, the bodying forth of an idea that is held to be the real “forming power” behind a material array of visible figures.73 Rancière’s description of a mimetic regime of the arts, unfolded from an Aristotelian premise, is again helpful. Images serve a sanctioned purpose when contained by rules: “The representative primacy of action over characters or of narration over description, the hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of their subject matter, and the very primacy of the art of speaking, of speech in actuality, all of these elements figure into an analogy with a fully hierarchical vision of the community.”74 To 79

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transcend the merely private or decorative functions of portraiture and still life, the history painter selects and frames his subject matter with an eye to narrative conventions of intelligibility as well as those hallmarks of dramatic action, reversals and recognitions. Rancière, too, recognizes a rhetorical component—“the very primacy of the art of speaking”—in an art theory organized around representation. If rhetoric, in Barrell’s formulation, is language made instrumental, called into service to produce ethical action, then action provides the rhetorical aesthetic with a link between the subject matter represented in a painting (the equivalent to an Aristotelian plot) and the hoped-for effect of the painting on a viewer. The primacy of action in the Poetics serves as a legitimating subtext, lending classical prestige to the claims of the civic humanist art theorists (and complementing the status they accord Aristotle’s Politics).75 Another kind of politics is in play, however, beside the rhetorical conception of painting as contributing to a vision of the public good. The material and spatial components of a painting—what it is literally made out of, by a painter—are dismissed as indifferent to its rhetorical function when everything that counts about the painting can be conveyed as a series of verbal instructions. Only its translation across media, its semantic reanalysis as a picture, serves the persuasive function that civic humanist art theory prescribes. The entity that matters under this critical regime is not the painting but a synopsis of the painting. What goes missing are formal and material considerations relative to the art object, which is also to say, the activity of the artist in bringing the representation into being. This is the state of affairs that occasioned Hogarth’s intervention, as a practitioner-theorist, into the debate about beauty and judgment: a debate about what beauty is and who is entitled to judge it, which is to say, a debate about the politics of aesthetics, taking up questions of qualification and authorization. In thinking in this way about the politics of painting— thinking, that is, about its purpose in relation to a viewer and about its maker’s role in shaping that purpose—we have traveled some distance from Shaftesbury’s thinking about practice (directed toward moral selfexamination) and form (aligned with concepts of providence and design in the deist rebuttal to Hobbes). This chapter has been motivated in no small part by the desire to disarticulate the different strains in Shaftesbury’s 80

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work that come, variously, to be claimed under the heading of the aesthetic—claimed as precursors in confusing and overlapping ways. The politics of painting, as it gets worked out in the Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules, has little to do, in the broadest evaluation, with Shaftesbury’s place in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. Even so, it bears mention, as I bring this chapter to a close, that Hogarth was not the first practitioner-theorist to challenge Shaftesbury’s hostility to material practice in his effort to recuperate painting as a liberal art. Jonathan Richardson drew on his training as a painter to ground the arguments of his several treatises on art and its evaluation, published in the late teens and twenties.76 Richardson kept faith with Shaftesbury’s general project of dignifying painting as a liberal art, but unlike Shaftesbury he sought to vindicate its mechanical aspects. In An Essay on the Theory of Painting, he stops just short of defending painting as a liberal art on account of the mechanical expertise it requires, instead pointing out how absurd it seems that such mechanical expertise should be thought to detract from its dignity as an intellectual pursuit: Here I must take leave to endeavour to do Justice to my Profession as a Liberal Art. ’Twas never thought unworthy of a Gentleman to be Master of the Theory of Painting. . . . ’Tis strange if the same Gentleman should forfeit his Character, and commence Mechanick, if he added a Bodily Excellence, and was capable of Making, as well as of Judging, of a Picture. How comes it to pass, that one that Thinks as well as any Man, but has moreover a curious Hand, should therefore be esteem’d to be in a Class of Men at all inferior?77

“Bodily Excellence” plainly seems like an attainment; why, then, Richardson asks, should it diminish the status of the man, even if it should be thought to raise the status of the work he produces? Here, as in Shaftesbury’s “Soliloquy,” the hand operates as a metonym for skill exercised in practice, a figure Richardson elaborates in ways that measure his distance from Shaftesbury in one direction and from Hogarth in the other.78 The curious hand, as a metonym for mechanical skill, resurfaces as a technical term in Richardson’s analysis of painting, which follows his apology for painting in the Essay. Richardson devotes sections of the essay

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to the following components of the painter’s art: “Invention, Expression, Composition, Drawing, Colouring, Handling, and Grace, and Greatness.” Despite his defense of the painter as “a Mechanick” over and above his achievements as “a Poet, an Historian, a Mathematician &c.” Richardson subordinates “Handling” to those aspects of painting concerned with narrative representation, such as invention and composition. Richardson defines handling as “the manner in which the Colours are left by the Pencil upon the Picture; as the manner of using the Pen, Chalk, or Pencil in a Drawing is the Handling of that Drawing. This consider’d in it self abstractedly is only a piece of Mechanicks, and is Well, or Ill as ’tis perform’d with a Curious, Expert; or Heavy, Clumsey Hand.”79 Drawing, in Richardson’s account, is concerned with the apt representation of form. Handling is simultaneously epiphenomenal, nonessential to that representation, and the most intimate aspect of style, close to the body, having to do with lightness or heaviness of touch and therefore legible in the physical mark left behind. Richardson employs an analogy to express the relative importance of handling in the evaluation of an artwork: “to say a Picture is justly Imagin’d, well Disposed, truly Drawn, is Great, has Grace, or the other good Qualities of a Picture; and withal that ’tis finely Handled, is as if one should say a Man is Virtuous, Wise, Good natured, Valiant, or the like, and is also Handsome.”80 Handsomeness in the sense of physical appearance is clearly meant to register as superfluous to the qualities of character Richardson enumerates here, and yet at the same time the verbal playfulness evident in his alignment of handling with handsomeness has the effect of enlivening a nearly dead metaphor.81 Hands matter, for Richardson, even as he is unwilling to identify painting’s prestige with its “Mechanicks.” The long middle section of An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, the first of his Two Discourses of 1719, is devoted to “the Knowledge of Hands,” that is, the identification of characteristic styles. Still, paintings derive their value fundamentally by analogy with literary representation; fine handling might enhance the excellence of a particular artwork, and does not detract from the status of painting as a vocation, but it is, finally, accessory to painting’s value as an art form. What goes unquestioned in Richardson’s effort to vindicate the material aspects of artistic practice is the idea that thought—that which is expressed 82

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as the content of an image—is verbal, and that words are not themselves a medium of expression. This identification of words with thoughts structures his defense of the painter as liberal artist and mechanic by contrast with writers, on the one hand, and artisans, on the other: “An Author must Think, but ’tis no matter how he Writes, he has no Care about that, ’tis sufficient if what he writes be Legible: A curious Mechanick’s Hand must be exquisite, but his Thoughts are commonly pretty much at liberty, but a Painter is engaged in Both respects.”82 “How he writes” refers not to the author’s use of language but to his handwriting; the thoughts he transcribes are already words. By implication, the inverse instance, in the case of the “curious Mechanick,” contrasts exquisite handiwork—sheer medium, on analogy with legible handwriting—to the free thoughts that go unexpressed in and have no relation to the work in question. Hogarth’s approach to the vindication of craft knowledge in The Analysis of Beauty unsettles this assumption about the transparency of thought as a verbal medium. Unlike Richardson, Hogarth does not merely aim to redistribute the value accorded material practice in the visual arts. His practical formalism, I will argue in the two chapters that follow this one, is vested not in the metaphor of the hand alone, but rather in an account of formal abstraction that understands thought as a visual and specifically a spatial mode of encounter with the world outside the mind. What he innovates is not a consideration of material form per se but rather the abstraction of form in practice, the idea that formalism need not be a matter of analytical separation of the kind Porter identifies with the Aristotelian tradition, but may instead be a matter of practical immersion. This innovation comes into better focus when we attend to the figuration of practice, and to the use of practice as a figure, in the writings to which Hogarth responds. In this chapter, I have explored how Shaftesbury, in particular, for whom practice seems so philosophically important in the sense of moral exercise, may yet be so obtuse about the kind of material practice he seeks to harness to an emergent political aesthetics in his writings about painting. Shaftesbury has plenty to say about form and about practice, but he remains nevertheless a tangential figure in the genealogy of practical form.

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In 1982, Lawrence Weschler published a “midlife portrait” of the American minimalist artist Robert Irwin. The book bears an aphorism for a title, the wonderfully evocative Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, “a title that paradoxically, in this instance, said it all.”1 Weschler describes how, having written this book, he became a kind of conduit for a longstanding debate between Irwin and David Hockney, a debate apparently spurred by the aspiration to pure abstraction channeled in Weschler’s title. Weschler reports of Hockney’s reaction to the book that “though he disagreed with almost every single thing in it, still, he couldn’t get it out of his head.”2 The earlier book is, on Weschler’s account, a survey of “all the things that Robert Irwin . . . had had to bracket out of his practice—figure, image, line (which is to say associations of any kind), focus, any made or permanent object, signature, and presently even exhibition itself—before he was able to arrive at what he came to comprehend as the true subject of art: the sheer wonder of perception itself or, as he sometimes parsed matters, ‘all the marvels inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.’ ”3 Rejecting the solipsism of this near-mystical vision, Hockney countered that

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cubism was precisely about saving the possibility of figuration, this ages-old need of human beings, going all the way back to Lascaux, and saving that possibility at the moment of its greatest crisis, what with the onslaught of photography with all its false claims to be able to accomplish such figuration better and more objectively. It was about asserting all the things photography couldn’t capture: time, multiple vantages, and the sense of living and lived experience.4

Figuration, for Hockney, is essential in the way that perception is for Irwin; it is a human need, it is the root cause of art. Moreover, the kind of figuration he opposes to photography’s “false claims” would seem to encompass some aspect of Irwin’s “sheer wonder of perception itself,” valuing as he does “the sense of living” over the achievement of representational objectivity. I need hardly mention that Hockney is one of the preeminent modern acolytes of William Hogarth, having reinterpreted A Rake’s Progress as a series of autobiographical prints in the early 1960s and, later, designed the sets for a Glyndebourne production of Stravinsky’s opera. And Hogarth’s representational practice, too, was informed by a revolution in visual media comparable to the one Hockney describes, one we could identify with a term like “print capitalism.” But this is not the chain of influence I’m interested to trace here. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which this argument between twentieth-century artists illuminates some recurring themes in visual aesthetics, namely, the way that perception—and, specifically, a mode of perception associated with artistic practice—might modulate an apparent conflict between abstraction and figuration. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: this would have made a fine alternate title for Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. The deep logic of the aphorism accounts for Hockney’s inability to set aside the book that announces itself under its banner, even as he resists its more overt claims. It is my contention that the aphorism that provoked Hockney’s fascination and ire reflects the central claims of Hogarth’s aesthetic theory, and that, instead of bespeaking an entrenched opposition between mimesis and abstraction, it shows their underlying alliance in an aesthetics of practice. Hogarth derives a theory of beauty based in formal abstraction from a vocational commitment to the making of visual representations that refer beyond “ourselves perceiving” to the world in which that perception takes 85

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place.5 These terms, borrowed from Weschler’s account of two twentiethcentury artists working out, in practice and in theory, their respective solutions to the question of abstraction and figuration, remind us that a discussion of abstraction in eighteenth-century art needn’t be considered anachronistic.6 Indeed, abstraction is more anachronistic from the standpoint of theory, which is to say, as a matter of what art is; as a matter of practice, of the technical process of making visual artworks, formal abstraction both uses instruments and is itself a virtual instrument, a conceptual tool for seeing and for making. What I seek to describe in this chapter is how Hogarth makes this instrumental abstraction the cornerstone of an aesthetics, a theory of beauty that builds on the empirically inflected investigations of Addison and Hutcheson earlier in the century. In the previous chapter, I argued that in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, artistic practice operates in complicated ways as a figure for how to live a good life rather than a way of understanding the beautiful as such. In what follows here, I show how, for Hogarth, the artisan furnishes the model for the aspiring aesthete, generating an approach to aesthetic judgment—a method—that I refer to as practical formalism. I’ve begun by invoking Weschler’s titular aphorism because it highlights (at least) three important features of Hogarth’s thought. First, it pits visual aesthetics—“seeing”—against mimesis. Actually, it’s more sweeping than that. It pits seeing against referentiality, full stop—the very idea that things correspond to their names; representation, after all, depends on reference. What’s left in the category of vision when reference is excised is form—specifically, form as shape, the spatial array encompassed within a visual frame. But—the second feature—the aphorism casts the excision of reference as a temporary, or at least a temporal, phenomenon: if seeing is forgetting the name of the thing, then it would appear the subject who sees once knew that name and (I’m extrapolating) might indeed remember it in the future. On this account, seeing, the kind of seeing at stake, is aspective; it can be switched on and off.7 This seeing is not vision per se but a particular kind of vision or of visual activity. In its orientation to the formal aspect of visual experience, the theory Hogarth lays out in The Analysis of Beauty carries with it an antimimetic and indeed antireferential strain. The claim about Hogarth’s formalism is not 86

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an original one on my part. Introducing his modern edition of the Analysis in 1955, Joseph Burke called it “the first work in European literature to make formal values both the starting-point and basis of a whole aesthetic theory.”8 In context, Burke’s comment registers the paradoxical quality of this consummately literary artist generating a formalist aesthetic theory, but while he feels the force of the paradox, he also rejects its terms: “Form and content can no more be separated in Hogarth than in the work of any other great artist, for each reinforces and is reinforced by the other.”9 Burke’s defense of Hogarth’s originality nevertheless depends on the idea that “formal values” might be distinguished from the representational content of images. His essay implies that this distinction is what we call formalism, that it represents an innovation in aesthetic theory, and also that it’s a provisional rather than an absolute distinction. In line with what I’ve just called the aspective quality of “forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” form and content can, in Burke’s view, be strategically separated, but only in recognition of higher synthesis in the work of art. Burke’s holistic position is eminently reasonable and should sound familiar to most of us trained in the critical analysis of artworks, especially literary texts. Whereas we are all, I think, familiar with an integrative account of literary form and content, in which a merely analytical separation of the two is compatible with an achievement of aesthetic synthesis, I’m proposing that we at least experiment with setting aside this integration— especially when we think about the difference visual media make to our understanding of how form and content divide up the representational field. It’s important, then, that “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” stakes its claim for a specific, aspective kind of form-perception on an opposition between the visual and the verbal; what you forget (however temporarily) when you engage in this visual activity is a word, a name. And this is the third feature of the aphorism that matters in regard to Hogarth: this particular kind of seeing is, to use the lingo of twentiethcentury modernism, medium-specific. This specificity ties it more closely to practice: seeing understood as forgetting the name of the thing one sees is a perceptual discipline oriented to art making. It is seeing for drawing or, conversely, understood as the cornerstone of an aesthetic theory, drawing for seeing. Hogarth’s practical formalism applies to the visual perception of form, not to the perception of form by other senses. It therefore marks a 87

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boundary within the aesthetic (although in eighteenth-century terms this might be better characterized as a limitation on the aesthetic, given the restriction, beginning with Addison, of aesthetic pleasures to “such as arise from visible Objects”).10 Seeing as formal abstraction (as temporary aphasia) need not entail an absolute distinction between form and content; Burke’s idea of mutual reinforcement is legitimate. But there is a consequential exception to be made regarding the formalism of the practitioner, which does, for some part of the process of artistic making, suspend and repudiate referentiality and, with it, representation. My claim is that the antimimetic strain in Hogarth is a moment in the process of artistic making, a strategy, in fact, for making better, more accurate, and more beautiful depictive artworks. And it’s a strategy that disappears into the finished product, like invisible ink, but that he wants to reintroduce into the discourse of taste and perception that’s coming to define what will later be identified as aesthetics. He wants to initiate his reader, a generalist, into a technical way of thinking about form, a way that requires, or is at the very least enhanced by, the strategic bracketing of mimesis, the bracketing of an awareness of what the artwork depicts, the representational end of the perceptual/creative act. In other words: seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. I am asking, then, not only that we come to grips with the idea of Hogarth, who was not an abstract expressionist, articulating an abstractly formalist theory of beauty. I’m also asking that we entertain the idea that his version of formalism is in some degree hostile to mimesis. This leaves me open to the objection that the mimesis to which formalism is hostile is a straw man; that formalism’s idea of mimesis is naïve, understanding mimesis as “just” a copy, lacking the autonomy, the internal cohesion, associated with artistic form—lacking, in short, formal unity. Again, Joseph Burke’s 1955 introduction is helpful in framing this thought with reference to Hogarth’s Analysis. Burke connects Hogarth’s promotion of an S-shaped line as the paradigm of beauty with the mnemonic techniques for pictorial composition that he wrote about elsewhere, in notes toward an (unpublished) autobiography. “Memorizing,” Burke writes, “was helped by a natural impulse to abstract the salient.” He goes on to assert that Hogarth’s “repeated denunciations of copying take on an added significance in an age when copying was a normal part 88

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of the artist’s training. For the copyist need not exercise the power of abstraction at all”—presumably because the copyist is working in two dimensions, from a two-dimensional subject that stays still, that doesn’t need to be captured or composed.11 On this reading, Hogarth himself heals the breach between form and mimetic content by opening a different breach—between naïve mimesis (mere copying) and mimesis that channels “the power of abstraction” (and it is, explicitly, formal abstraction: what the artist memorizes are lines and shapes). This sounds promising, but I think it smooths out some important ambivalence in the way in which Hogarth denounces copying. In the Preface to The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth devotes several pages to considering why he should be the one to elucidate a principle of beauty— the serpentine line—that can be observed to be operating in the great works of his artistic predecessors. That is: having dispatched the “mere men of letters” and their moral sense theories, he wonders why, among the practitioners—the painters—no one has yet given verbal expression to a visual principle with which they are, as their works attest, clearly conversant (AB, p. 1). This consideration takes the form of a brief art historical survey, which he interrupts to name among his detractors such “others, as common face-painters and copiers of pictures” who “denied that there could be such a rule either in art or nature” (AB, p. 6). “But no wonder,” he continues, that these gentlemen should not be ready in comprehending a thing they have little or no business with. For though the picture copier may sometimes to a common eye seem to vye with the original he copies, the artist himself requires no more ability, genius, or knowledge of nature, than a journeyman-weaver at the Gobelins, who in working after a piece of painting, bit by bit, scarcely knows what he is about, whether he is weaving a man or a horse, yet at last almost insensibly turns out of his loom a fine piece of tapestry, representing, it may be, one of Alexander’s battles painted by Le Brun. (AB, pp. 6–7)

Here, Hogarth seems to be separating the men from the boys, the (liberal) artists from the rude mechanicals; he seems to pit true artistry against mere hackwork. But there are some notably strange things going on in this passage that undermine his apparent intent. First, he’s introducing a

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third person—the journeyman-weaver—complicating the artist/copyist binary. His point about the genius and superior knowledge of the original artist is supposed to be carried by the claim that the inferior artist, the picture copier, is no better than an even more inferior artist, a mere technician who “scarcely knows what he is about.” He is self-evidently even more inferior because he is a craftsman and a journeyman, an instrument for the execution of someone else’s design. But here already—and here’s the second strange thing to make note of—Hogarth has opened himself to misreading by way of an unintended ambiguity of reference. “The artist himself,” the subject of the main clause, is plainly supposed to refer back to the picture copier, he who is no better than the even more inferior weaver, but it admits of a nearly opposite interpretation: the true artist, as opposed to the hack picture copier, indeed also requires no more ability, genius, or knowledge of nature than the laborer who occupies a position even further down the prestige hierarchy. The phrasing, characteristically for Hogarth, is multistable; it supports the reading Burke derives (“the copyist need not exercise the power of abstraction at all”), as well as something very much like its opposite: the copyist, like the weaver, exercises nothing but the power of abstraction, that power which is supposed to distinguish the artist, the maker of “originals.” To make sense of this admittedly wrenched reading, look again at what exactly it is that the journeyman-weaver does—or rather, doesn’t do. The journeyman-weaver, “in working after a piece of painting, bit by bit, scarcely knows what he is about, whether he is weaving a man or a horse, yet at last almost insensibly turns out of his loom a fine piece of tapestry, representing, it may be, one of Alexander’s battles painted by Le Brun.” Both main verbs in the clause, paired with their accompanying adverbs, testify to the unconscious nature of the weaver’s action: he “scarcely knows” what he’s doing, and yet he “insensibly turns out” a depictive artwork. What the journeyman-weaver doesn’t know, or comes close to not knowing, is that his own practice is mimetic. He can do his work without reference to its representational content by manipulating fibers based on an understanding of their textural, spatial, and tonal properties. Indeed, he might be able to do his work better by virtue of this near-unknowing, what we might reimagine as a strategic ignorance. That is to say, formal 90

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abstraction is itself the technique of copying, inasmuch as it is the foundation of visual acumen in general. And this seems to be precisely what Hogarth proposes to his reader in the Introduction that follows the Preface. After discounting the claims of both connoisseurs and fashionably educated painters to judge accurately of beauty, he recommends a thought-experiment to facilitate smarter seeing: let every object under our consideration, be imagined to have its inward contents scoop’d out so nicely, as to have nothing of it left but a thin shell, exactly corresponding both in its inner and outer surface, to the shape of the object itself: and let us likewise suppose this thin shell to be made up of very fine threads, closely connected together, and equally perceptible, whether the eye is supposed to observe them from without, or within; and we shall find the ideas of the two surfaces of this shell will naturally coincide. The very word, shell, makes us seem to see both surfaces alike. The use of this conceit, as it may be call’d by some, will be seen to be very great, in the process of this work: and the oftner we think of objects in this shell-like manner, we shall facilitate and strengthen our conception of any particular part of the surface of an object we are viewing, by acquiring thereby a more perfect knowledge of the whole, to which it belongs: because the imagination will naturally enter into the vacant space within this shell, and there at once, as from a center, view the whole form within, and mark the opposite corresponding parts so strongly, as to retain the idea of the whole, and make us masters of the meaning of every view of the object, as we walk round it, and view it from without. (AB, p. 21)

In Hogarth’s thought-experiment, the object’s mass—its “inward contents”—corresponds to its representational content; the one is divested with the other, so that as the object is reconceived as a set of contours, it is unnamed. Virtuosic seeing is achieved by way of spatio-formal abstraction. As Ruth Mack has observed, though, this mental exercise in abstraction reveals its origins in craft knowledge through Hogarth’s fiberarts metaphor; his (imaginary) shell is made out of (imaginary) threads, not unlike the ones the journeyman-weaver manipulates in his picturemaking practice.12 What’s more, the model for such abstraction is derived specifically from the practice of copying that Hogarth seems to disparage in the earlier passage. Elaborating on the thought-experiment of the scooped-out

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shell, Hogarth suggests that his reader might recognize as comparable the artist’s “known method, many years made use of, for the more exactly and expeditiously reducing drawings from large pictures, for engravings; or for enlarging designs, for painting ceilings and cupolas (by striking lines perpendicular to each other, so as to make an equal number of squares on the paper design’d for the copy, that hath been first made on the original).” When a grid breaks an image into meaningless shapes, “the situation of every part of the picture is mechanically seen, and easily transferred” (AB, p. 23). Hogarth’s point is that an artist drawing from life would be well served to model his practice on that of a picture-copier, who sees “mechanically” rather than mimetically. But his broader point, oriented to the reader of the Analysis, is that even a nonartist aspiring to aesthetic acumen and visual literacy would be well served to model her habits of visual perception on those of the practitioner. So far, then, my account of an antimimetic strain in The Analysis of Beauty is based on the claim that it’s incumbent on the artist (from the original genius down to the journeyman-weaver) to bracket representational considerations in order to render figures well. Hogarth’s innovation is to recommend this antimimetic mode of visual engagement to the nonartist, too, suggesting that beauty is found in the formal contours the eye traces rather than in the images the mind comes to recognize. At this juncture, in order to characterize Hogarth’s intervention more precisely, I want to take a step back to reflect on the nexus of pleasure, beauty, and mimesis in the aesthetic debates of the early to mid-eighteenth century. To do so involves focusing on a defining question for aesthetic theory that was nevertheless often subordinated to the standard-of-taste question in eighteenth-century thought. My question, and I think it was Hogarth’s too, concerns the nature of aesthetic pleasure, that is: what kind of pleasure does beauty (or novelty or sublimity) give rise to in a spectator? According to earlier theories, aesthetic qualities give rise to two kinds of pleasure. Both Addison and Hutcheson divide aesthetic pleasure into two categories: absolute and comparative (categories that Addison designates primary and secondary). Hogarth reduces these two to one, specifically, a pleasure in the perception of abstract form. What he’s departing from, in this formalist claim, are theories that would locate a special kind of aesthetic pleasure in the contemplation of mimetic representations. From his perspective as a prac92

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titioner, every drawing is representational at the same time that it is produced through the cognitive exercise of formal abstraction, a procedure that is distinct from the cognitive exercise of comparison. We need, therefore, to examine how Hogarth conceives of mimesis. We’ve already looked a bit at the complicated status of the copy, which hangs over the more general question not least because the word Hogarth uses to talk about mimesis is imitation. Mimetic representation—or depiction, or imitation—has a peculiar status in The Analysis of Beauty; it is not a positive value, but, by the same token, it is indispensable. Under the neoclassical dispensation that Jacques Rancière calls “the poetic—or representative— regime of the arts,” the arts are wholly identified with their representational function; there is no alternative account of what an artwork is or does.13 Mimesis is a given, even though the mimetic techniques that provide Hogarth with a new means of understanding beauty in spatio-formal terms are abstracting techniques: techniques for seeing shapes instead of things. To restate: the account of practice that I’m working with here, insofar as it is artistic practice, is also mimetic practice; technique, for Hogarth, is always in service to representation. But in the Analysis, he uses it to articulate a theory of beauty that doesn’t distinguish between representations and their models. Hogarth is not much interested in the beauty of artworks as qualitatively different, a special kind of beauty. This may seem a little surprising because he does make a clear and value-laden distinction between art and nature (not necessarily organic nature, but rather objects in the world by contrast with representations). In the journeyman-weaver passage, for instance, one of the things the copyist lacks is “knowledge of nature.” A little later, Hogarth criticizes connoisseurs for studying imitations rather than “perfecting the ideas they ought to have in their minds, of the objects themselves in nature” (AB, p. 19). Moments like these, when Hogarth extols something he calls “nature,” may give the impression that The Analysis of Beauty anticipates a later, arguably romantic, preference for nature over art. But this is not an impression I am eager to endorse. While there may be a very minor frisson of contrarianism in an artist’s scorn for art, in fact Hogarth is channeling a conventional celebration of nature in order to disparage hackwork. More interesting, and less conventional, is his departure from the consensus view that art—specifically, representational art—gives rise to a 93

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qualitatively different kind of pleasure than that attendant on the beauties of nature and of nonrepresentational artifacts, both. This consensus view is the one propounded by Joseph Addison and by Francis Hutcheson after him. Because of the influence of this view, and its assimilation into aesthetic discourse, I am going to take some time to elaborate its logic in order to make explicit the stakes of Hogarth’s demurral. “I divide these Pleasures into two kinds,” Addison pronounces in the first of the Spectator papers devoted to the “Pleasures of the Imagination”: My Design being first of all to Discourse of those Primary Pleasures of the Imagination, which entirely proceed from such Objects as are before our Eyes; and in the next place to speak of those Secondary Pleasures of the Imagination which flow from the Ideas of visible Objects, when the Objects are not actually before the Eye, but are called up into our Memories, or formed into agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious.14

Hutcheson adapts this schema in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725, using the terms “absolute” and “comparative or relative beauty”: We therefore by Absolute Beauty understand only that Beauty, which we perceive in Objects without comparison to any thing external, of which the Object is suppos’d an Imitation, or Picture; such as that Beauty perceiv’d from the Works of Nature, artificial Forms, Figures, Theorems. Comparative or Relative Beauty is that which we perceive in Objects, commonly considered as Imitations or Resemblances of something else.15

As I observed in Chapter 2, an art/nature distinction in neither case constitutes the primary division of the field of aesthetic experience. Instead, representation performs that role. And although Addison doesn’t use the word in Spectator 411, likely because he is more intent on channeling Locke’s ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, it is implicit, indeed conceptually foundational, in the claim that secondary pleasures arise from the making present of “absent” objects. (Indeed, when you set about looking for “representation,” the whole passage begins to read like circumlocution.)16 To remain with Addison for the time being, what’s the motivation— and the payoff—for dividing his subject in this way? In what way is a distinction of primary and secondary pleasures significant for his aesthetic 94

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theory? This distinction matters because it grounds a hierarchy and a telos; far from taking a subsidiary or supporting role, as the word secondary might imply, the whole series tends toward the elevation of secondary over primary pleasures, and the principle of that elevation reveals something about the fundamental logic of Addison’s theory. That principle, according to Michael McKeon, is reflexivity based in the virtualization of mere sense experience. For McKeon, the value of reflexivity corresponds to the identification of the aesthetic with autonomy and disinterestedness; he describes in Addison’s “Pleasures” papers a three-stage “refining process that distances aesthetic response from the empirical ground of sense perception.” First, Addison designates the sense of sight as the most “delightful” of our senses because it “converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance. . . .” Second, he distinguishes between the “Primary” and the “Secondary” pleasures of the visual imagination[. . . . ] Addison finds the latter, virtual pleasures to be “of a wider and more universal Nature than those it has, when joined with Sight” because of that “Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves. . . .” Finally, of these virtual pleasures Addison favors those that “proceed from Ideas raised by Words” or “Description,” which “runs yet further from the thing it represents than Painting” or the spectacular aspect of dramatic presentation (Spectator, no. 411, 21 June 1712; no 418, 20 June 1712; no. 416, 28 June 1712).17

I don’t dispute that Addison’s essay seems to move in the direction of those aspects of aesthetic experience on which it places the most value: secondary succeeds primary, reflective distance takes precedence over sensory immediacy, verbal over visual images. But I am skeptical that the same kind of distance is at stake in the first and third steps in the progression McKeon lays out (the distance of the eye from its object, in the first instance, and the notional distance of a verbal description from a visual depiction of the same image, in the third). I am equally skeptical of the logic of the intermediary step, which conflates the physical distance of eye and object with the mediatic difference that gives rise to the pleasure of comparison. It is possible, I will argue, to describe the same trajectory according to a different logic. Rather than conceiving of secondary pleasure as an extension and a refinement of primary pleasure, thereby correlating 95

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distance with aesthetic detachment, Addison draws a sharp distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of pleasure, pleasures that are experienced differently because they have different sources in perceptual and cognitive experience. In the first chapter of this study, I demonstrated how Addison’s conception of aesthetic qualities reflects the epistemological caution of empiricist natural philosophy. On that account, distance, which elevates sight over touch (and, in McKeon’s reading, judgment over sense) has epistemological as well as moral value; that is, it matters not only because it extricates the spectator from the “gross,” even “Criminal” immersion in “the unrelieved rudeness of sensible things,” but also because it registers the limits of sense perception.18 In this light distance is not so much a value as a fact: vision, as much as any of the other senses, is an imperfect means of knowing objects, but it has the compensatory merit, as compared with touch, of more extensive range. As I argued in that chapter, the aesthetic comes into focus as a dimension of experience—not to mention, becomes philosophically interesting—when it legitimates disagreement on matters of taste by holding the space between knowledge and pleasure. Empiricist epistemology makes the aesthetic a matter of reconciling pleasure with an awareness of the limits of perceptual knowledge. The values McKeon understands as structuring Addison’s theory of the aesthetic—distance, reflexivity, virtuality—are as much determined by the empiricist underpinnings of the inquiry as they are productive of its innovations. Addison has to celebrate these principles; he’s committed to an epistemology that understands sensory immediacy as illusory—wherefore mediation becomes a needed corrective. As McKeon says, “Addison prefers sight to feeling (in part) because of its mediatory qualities”—but distance is not as such a source of pleasure.19 What, then, is the pleasure principle at work in “Pleasures”? And, to maintain my central claim, why and in what way does its primary principle of pleasure require supplementation? Distance and mediation are among vision’s affordances, to employ a term Caroline Levine adapts from J. J. Gibson and Donald Norman.20 Distance expands the scope of the sense, multiplying what it can take in. In a rather literal way, it increases the surface area of the object-world available to the human sensorium. It gives more pleasure because it 96

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grants us access to more things that we might take pleasure in. Recall the beginning of Spectator 411: Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. The Sense of Feeling can indeed give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but at the same time it is very much streightned and confined in its Operations, to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular Objects. Our Sight seems designed to supply all these Defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch, that spreads itself over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe. (Spectator 411 [21 June 1712], 3:535–36)

Distance is part of a trio of affordances, alongside variety and duration; Addison’s point is that vision works longer and farther and encompasses more than any other sense. That same basic principle, of taking in more, is at work in the final sentence of the paragraph: it encompasses multitudes, comprehends immensity, extends remotely. Before virtuality emerges as a value, there is plenitude, quantity, muchness. Addison’s first principle of pleasure, then, is simply additive (recall that for Locke, pleasure is a simple idea, not admitting of analysis).21 The principle of primary pleasure is that there can be more or less of it, and that more is always preferable.22 There are different modes of magnification; the model is spatial, but there’s also, for instance, the “nobler and more exalted kind of Pleasure” belonging to grandeur (that which is elsewhere, and later, called the sublime).23 Distance correlates with pleasure, in the first instance, because the farther you can see, the more beauties come, potentially, within your view. Addison’s “more equals more” logic is explicit in his discussion of architecture: Among all the Figures in Architecture, there are none that have a greater Air than the Concave and the Convex; and we find in all the Ancient and Modern Architecture, as well in the remote Parts of China, as in Countries nearer home, that round Pillars and Vaulted Roofs make a great part of those Buildings which are designed for Pomp and Magnificence. The

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Reason I take to be, because in these Figures we generally see more of the Body, than in those of other Kinds. There are, indeed, Figures of Bodies, where the Eye may take in two Thirds of the Surface; but as in such Bodies the Sight must split upon several Angles, it does not take in one uniform Idea, but several Ideas of the same kind. Look upon the Outside of a Dome, your Eye half surrounds it; look up into the Inside, and at once Glance you have all the Prospect of it; the entire Concavity falls into your Eye at once, the Sight being as the Center that collects and gathers into it the Lines of the whole Circumference: In a Square Pillar, the Sight often takes in but a Fourth part of the Surface, and, in a Square Concave, must move up and down to the difference Sides, before it is Master of all the inward Surface.24

Here, spatio-formal values coincide with the quality of aesthetic responsiveness; seeing “more of a Body” correlates with the desired effect of “Pomp and Magnificence.” What’s more, as Paulson has noted, Hogarth likely drew upon this passage in recommending that his reader conceive of all spatial forms as concavities that they might “as from a center, view the whole form within” (AB, p. 21). Hogarth’s aim, to “make us masters of the meaning of every view of the object,” is quite close to Addison’s (personified) conception of sight as “Master of all the inward Surface.” Even I was surprised, however, to find this quantitative/geometric principle of pleasure at work at precisely the juncture that ought to mark its subordination to the comparative principle of pleasure—that is, the ostensible transcendence of primary by secondary pleasures in the second stage of the progress of detachment McKeon tracks through Addison’s series. This occurs in Spectator 418, when Addison, as McKeon observes, proclaims secondary pleasures of the imagination “to be ‘of a wider and more universal Nature than those it has, when joined with Sight.’ ” But before Addison goes on to examine the comparative principle in greater detail, he defines the scope of his hierarchical claim; the sentence continues, “for not only what is Great, Strange or Beautiful, but any Thing that is Disagreeable when look’d upon, pleases us in an apt Description.”25 Representation, that is, makes even ugly things potentially pleasing to the imagination; here again, what counts as a value for Addison is that which increases the surface area of the aesthetically available world (and what counts, therefore, are not necessarily—but rather, contingently—its mediatory qualities).

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Secondary pleasures are “wider and more universal” because representation brings more stuff within the purview of our aesthetic delectation, and the “new Principle of Pleasure” Addison is interested to identify, the comparative principle, matters because it accounts for the transformation of disagreeableness into its opposite. None of this is to ignore or deny the fact that Addison is indeed identifying “a new Principle of Pleasure, which is nothing else but the Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves.”26 The action of comparing is both a mechanism for converting disgust into delight and a source of pleasure in its own right. My objective is merely to observe how, paradoxically, Addison calls upon the primary pleasure principle—more—to explain his elevation of secondary over primary. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it an expansion rather than an elevation, to respect the lateral orientation of his metaphor; secondary pleasure is “wider and more universal,” but not, in this instance, nobler or even more pleasing than “mere”—by which I mean simple and immediate—pleasure, the kind that can be pointed to but not analyzed. Secondary pleasure is not a refinement of primary pleasure; it is instead a pleasure of a different kind. Description has the potential to refine a disagreeable object into a pleasing representation, but the pleasure it affords is not itself more refined than the pleasure of an unmediated encounter with a beautiful object. To the extent that the action of comparing is itself pleasurable and not merely a catalyst for the conversion of disgust into delight, it is, genuinely, “a new Principle of Pleasure.” It is also, by the same token, more genuinely secondary, a supplementary pleasure that adds the pleasure of comparing onto the simple pleasure of perceiving the beauty, novelty, or grandeur of some object, whether immediately present or represented. To take Addison’s own example, it’s difficult to imagine that “the Description of a Dung-hill” would admit of anything more than secondary—in this sense, distinctly inferior—pleasure, pleasure at a degree of remove: the attenuated appreciation of an apt representation rather than any kind of immediate delight.27 Secondary pleasure without primary pleasure is a pleasure that remediates rather than reinforces; it might compensate for a primary deficiency, but it can’t supply, let alone enhance, what isn’t there, namely, beauty, novelty, or grandeur. 99

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But the dunghill is an extreme case, a hypothetical meant to demonstrate the analytical distinction of secondary from primary pleasure. More intuitive is the case where the appreciation of likeness does in fact supplement the pleasure of an aesthetic quality latent or evident in the represented object, or, as Addison himself puts it, “if the Description of what is Little, Common or Deformed, be acceptable to the Imagination, the Description of what is Great, Surprising or Beautiful, is much more so; because here we are not only delighted with comparing the Representation with the Original, but are highly pleased with the Original it self.”28 Still, in its analytical distinction from primary pleasure, and so in both of these cases (more and less hypothetical), secondary pleasure qualifies as “a new Principle” in part because it activates a different faculty: the Description of a Dung-hill is pleasing to the Imagination, if the Image be represented to our Minds by suitable Expressions; tho,’ perhaps, this may more properly be called the Pleasure of the Understanding than of the Fancy, because we are not so much delighted with the Image that is contained in the Description, as with the Aptness of the Description to excite the Image.29

To the extent that the advantage of secondary over primary—its “more universal nature”—corresponds to an elevation of reflection over sensation, it ceases to be, strictly speaking, aesthetic, if it’s fair to apply an anachronistic term to Addison’s (conventional) distinction of the imagination from the senses on the one hand and the understanding on the other. If we take him at his word here, if secondary pleasure “may more properly be called the Pleasure of the Understanding,” then the pleasure of the imagination may more properly be identified with what he calls primary pleasure. And this is the position I’m ascribing to Hogarth in my assessment of his position on mimesis: if there are two principles of (what we now call) aesthetic pleasure, but one is specific to the contemplation of representational likeness, then that supplementary pleasure ceases to be, properly, aesthetic. It is, instead, a pleasure of the understanding (to draw on a Kantian vocabulary, it relates to a concept of what the image should represent), specifically, the pleasure of analysis. The comparative principle of pleasure involves both the recognition of likeness and the identification of

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difference. Hogarth, it should be said, does not set out to police the boundaries of the aesthetic as cognate with the imagination, and as distinct from the senses and the understanding. It’s Addison himself who registers boundary crossing among the faculties as a complication of his theory (though he doesn’t return to this point). For Hogarth, by contrast, the pleasure specific to recognizing likeness loses its distinction as a “new Principle,” supplementary or otherwise, to the extent that his entire theory revolves around the correlation of beauty with a pleasurable “Action of the Mind”—that is, with the perception of form construed as a kind of nonconceptual cognition, not just as sensation. The pleasure of comparison, among other mental activities, ceases to stand out, and so mimesis enjoys no special distinction in the context of Hogarth’s formalism— thereby circumventing the problem that secondary pleasure, in Addison’s formulation, appears to involve the impingement, indeed the infringement, of the understanding upon the imagination’s domain. A final thought about Addison before I examine the difference a practitioner’s view makes in the theorization of mimesis and its pleasures. Despite Addison’s choice to structure his theory according to the distinction between primary and secondary pleasures, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in his handling, they become hopelessly intertwined—and not just in the claim that secondary pleasure at best compounds and enhances the pleasure of beholding “the Original it self.” Before he comes to consider the “wider and more universal” appeal of secondary pleasure in Spectator 418, he first identifies it with “that Action of the Mind, which compares” in 416.30 Here too, however, his account of mimetic aesthetics owes more to the principle of primary pleasure (more is more) than to the comparative principle he invokes as the distinguishing characteristic of representations: Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves. The Reader often finds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe. In this Case the Poet seems to get the better of Nature; he takes, indeed, the Landskip after her, but gives it more vigorous Touches, heightens its Beauty, and so enlivens the whole Piece, that the Images, which flow from the Objects themselves,

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appear weak and faint, in Comparison of those that come from the Expressions. The Reason, probably, may be because in the Survey of any Object we have only so much of it painted on the Imagination, as comes in at the Eye; but in its Description, the Poet gives us as free a View of it as he pleases, and discovers to us several Parts, that either we did not attend to, or that lay out of our Sight when we first beheld it.31

The poet’s description provides a vantage point that is like looking at the inside of a dome: the reader’s (virtual) view is unobstructed. Moreover, the pleasure associated with vividness seems not to have much to do with comparison; here we have the aesthetics of imagery carried to its perfection, but not by means of the reader’s appreciation of the verbal medium, what Addison in Spectator 418 calls “the Aptness of the Description to excite the Image.” The free view the poet can grant via description results, again, in the unfolding of an object (or objects) beyond that which “comes in at the eye”; virtualization amounts to multiplication, proliferation. And this logic reaches its apotheosis in the final paper of the series, in Addison’s paean to the figurative powers of verbal art. In 421, he does invoke the comparative principle of pleasure to note that “different Kinds of Allusion are but so many different Manners of Similitude.”32 Still, he goes on to praise the power of metaphor as “the Life and highest Perfection of Poetry” on the grounds that “it has something in it like Creation; it bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to the Reader’s View, several Objects which are not to be found in Being. It makes Additions to Nature, and gives a greater variety to God’s Works.”33 Here is Addison sounding, suddenly, like Coleridge; the imagination is not just receptive but, at its best, creative—following out the logic that if compounding views of nature is pleasing (more things to take pleasure in), then compounding nature itself must likewise dilate and extend the pleasures of the imagination. But if representations, especially verbal ones, operate in part on the principle of primary pleasure, then so too do nonrepresentational phenomena appear to occasion the pleasure of comparison. Indeed, Addison’s first mention of a pleasure in comparison appears in Spectator 414, in the midst of a discussion of natural beauty: we find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art: For in this case our Pleasure arises from a double Principle;

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from the Agreeableness of the Objects to the Eye, and from their Similitude to other Objects: We are pleased as well with comparing their Beauties, as with surveying them, and can represent them to our Minds, either as Copies or Originals.34

By the terms of Addison’s original, structuring distinction between primary and secondary, the works of nature should not give rise to the pleasures of comparison, because they do not represent or describe other objects; they cannot be copies, except to the extent that we “represent them to our Minds . . . as Copies,” in the phenomenon Frances Ferguson has labeled “reciprocal quotation.”35 Addison’s account of reciprocal quotation and its pleasures helps to explain his avoidance of a categorical art/nature distinction. From the standpoint of the perceiver, the one can easily be taken for the other, and the aesthetic qualities of both are, on this account, heightened by such confusion. On the one hand, then, for this reason, a distinction between representations and originals serves his argument better than an art/nature distinction. On the other hand, as a distinction, it doesn’t hold up much better. What it does, perhaps, is maintain the empiricist focus on faculty psychology: the distinction is not in the object (is it found, or made?) but rather in the subject (which principle of pleasure is in play?). What happens, then, if we take seriously Addison’s own skepticism about the principle of secondary pleasure fitting into its broader category, namely, the pleasures of the imagination as opposed to the pleasures of the senses or the understanding? This is one way, I maintain, of characterizing Hogarth’s approach to mimesis—more pointedly, his reduction of two kinds of pleasure down to just one, jettisoning comparison as he sharpens his focus on formal pleasure. According to Hogarth, natural and depictive objects are beautiful, if they are beautiful, in exactly the same way—which is to say, they are pleasing to the same faculty. But he makes this point obliquely, in a chapter called “Of Uniformity, Regularity, or Symmetry.” I mention the chapter title because it’s so strange that Hogarth conceives of mimesis in these terms—but he does. His logic is, in fact, Hutchesonian; Hutcheson identifies beauty with a kind of golden-mean formula of “Uniformity amidst Variety,” so that when he comes to consider the beauty of

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representations, he writes that “this Beauty is founded on a Conformity, or a kind of Unity between the Original and the Copy.”36 Hogarth follows Hutcheson in grouping resemblance among other kinds of sameness (symmetry, regularity) under the umbrella term uniformity. Where Hogarth does not follow Hutcheson (or Addison) is in the idea that the pleasure of contemplating resemblance might be equal to, or even commensurate with, another “action of the mind”: that of formal abstraction. On the contrary, the pleasure of contemplating resemblance is, for Hogarth, highly overrated (not least by Aristotle): We have, indeed, in our nature a love of imitation from our infancy, and the eye is often entertained, as well as surprised, with mimicry, and delighted with the exactness of counterparts: but then this always gives way to its superior love of variety, and soon grows tiresom. (AB, pp. 28–29)

We are mimetic animals, he concurs, but he blithely dissents from the authority of the Poetics by claiming that the pleasures attending mimesis as such are short-lived and immature. Again, Hogarth seems indebted to Hutcheson for the strange assumption (it seems strange to me, at least) of an identity between two dispositions of uniformity: “the exactness of counterparts” within an object, which is to say, the patterning that makes it regular or symmetrical, and the resemblance of a mimetic representation to its counterpart in the object-world. Calling resemblance uniformity would, I think, support a naïve theory of mimesis; it’s a theory of the copy. But, to my mind, the upshot is that Hogarth the draftsman, and therefore Hogarth the formalist, doesn’t have much time for the ostensible pleasures of resemblance because, recall, for him even naïve mimesis depends, for its execution, on the suspension of mimetic aims (a suspension I’m also calling “formalist abstraction”). He invokes the Hutchesonian idea of resemblance as unity only to dismiss its pleasures as, precisely, naïve, which is to say, in this instance, childish. For Hogarth, then, there’s no special pleasure of comparison; there is only the pleasure of form. And the formal abstraction associated with artistic practice, whether directed toward production (seeing for drawing) or toward honing judgment (drawing for seeing), upends the most basic condition of mimesis: that a representation refers to (even if it never exactly reproduces) some object in the world, even an ideal object. That is, Hogarth doesn’t

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admit of a special principle of mimetic pleasure because, on some level, he doesn’t believe in mimesis. Resemblance pleases on the (childish) level of mimicry, but this pleasure is quickly exhausted. The making of representational artworks, by contrast, gives the lie to the very idea of resemblance. On the one hand, the merest copy requires an exercise of formal abstraction. On the other, an “original” marshals that formal abstraction for the invention of an object—or, more precisely, a composition—that never existed to be copied. Even, or especially, in the middle ground—making a study from life—every mark on the page is a departure from, a betrayal of, the model; the techniques and the conventions that allow for figuration in two dimensions require on the draftsman’s part a deliberate self-estrangement from the referential knowledge of what he sees. Hogarth’s theory of visual pleasure comes newly into focus when we recognize its construction on these grounds. He disqualifies the purported pleasure of resemblance as an inert and uninteresting kind of unity, and he finds unity itself interesting only as an ingredient in variety. “When the eye,” he writes, “is glutted with a succession of variety, it finds relief in a certain degree of sameness; and even plain space becomes agreeable, and properly introduced, and contrasted with variety, adds to it more variety” (AB, p. 27). This sentence starts out sounding like an endorsement of “uniformity amidst variety,” but by the end variety has colonized its opposite. Taking note of this in his own twentieth-century edition of the Analysis, Ronald Paulson observes how Hogarth “reverses Hutcheson’s order of priority” by subordinating uniformity to variety—which has the effect of making everything into variety. To this end, Hogarth cites Shakespeare, who, having “the deepest penetration into nature, has sum’d up all the charms of beauty in two words, infinite variety” (AB, p. 10). Emphasizing the process of formal abstraction over its product construes its pleasure as a renewable resource. Practice, therefore, is the context in which it is most viable to think of variety as “infinite”: not held in check by unity, not locked into a game of likeness, but extending indefinitely beyond, departing from, the very relation of resemblance, so that mimesis becomes something like a pretext for form, which is also to say, for beauty. Variety’s infinitude is an important concept for interpreting The Analysis of Beauty because it illuminates a distinction that’s otherwise easy to overlook. If it’s difficult to accept the idea of Hogarth as a theorist of formal 105

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abstraction, that’s in part because of his reputation as a literary artist—which is to say, more specifically, as an artist known best for the composition of graphic narratives (the Rake’s and Harlot’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode, Industry and Idleness, and The Four Stages of Cruelty, to name a few). Critics like Burke and Paulson have made it their business, understandably, to reconcile the aesthetic theory of the Analysis with the pictorial oeuvre that is Hogarth’s major legacy. But, just as I am rejecting the reconciliation of form and content, I maintain that Hogarth’s theory resists easy integration with, or application to, his graphic works. This claim depends upon a distinction between oeuvre and practice; the one is finished, the other a process that can be speculatively reconstructed but has, arguably, disappeared into the works themselves. It is this process to which the Analysis testifies, in its account of aesthetic pleasure. What I seek to demonstrate—and I admit it’s a counterintuitive thought—is that Hogarth denies the application of his theory of beauty to narrative art (by implication: the kind at which he excels and makes his name). He does this by subtly opposing the kind of pleasure he thinks we derive from the perception of beautiful form to the kind of pleasure we take in seeing (or reading, or hearing) a story unfold. It’s subtle because it seems at first as though Hogarth is equating rather than distinguishing the two. He sets out his theory of pleasure in the fifth chapter of the Analysis, entitled “Of Intricacy.” In order to explain why serpentine forms are beautiful, he equates the pleasure they produce with stimulation of the cognitive faculties. His argument is built around the notion of pursuit. The chapter begins like this: The active mind is ever bent to be employ’d. Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure. Every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and makes what would else be toil and labour, become sport and recreation. (AB, p. 32)

Hogarth lays considerable stress on the idea that pursuit is an end in itself, even as it is the means to other, more practical ends. He goes on to give a conventional instance of this thought, with reference to the pleasure of hunting: “how joyless does the sportsman return when the hare has not had fair play? how lively, and in spirits, even when an old cunning

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one has baffled, and out-run the dogs!” It is with this preamble that Hogarth sets up his definition of intricacy, which is in his view the most beautiful of beautiful qualities: The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines. Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful. (AB, p. 33)

The beauty of an object is deduced from a certain kind of mental pleasure produced in a perceiving subject by the object’s form. That is: we know what’s beautiful by the quality of attention it produces in us, as spectators. Beauty is that formal quality that keeps the eye moving, thereby sustaining the pleasure of seeing indefinitely in time. In Hogarth’s Analysis, pleasure is understood as properly aesthetic when the goal of consummation is not just deferred but obviated: think of the hunter, “lively, and in spirits” even when the hare “has out-run the dogs.” And that avoidance of consummation is what’s wanton about the “wanton chace”; readers often fixate on the sexual connotations of “wanton,” but that distracts them from its more functional meaning, wherein to be wanton is to abandon yourself heedlessly to a singleminded pursuit, not caring where it leads you (and, indeed, whether you catch what you’re chasing). In the same passage, Hogarth offers narrative as—apparently— another instance of the experience of pleasure in pursuit: It is a pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most difficult problems: allegories and riddles, trifling as they are, afford the mind amusement: and with what delight does it follow the well-connected thread of a play, or novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens, and ends most pleas’d, when that is most distinctly unravell’d? (AB, p. 33)

But this example is different because narrative pleasure expects the fulfillment of an ending—even if that ending is deferred. Rather than assimilating formal beauty to narrative suspense, Hogarth locates pleasure in the cognitive activity prompted by each. And that’s where the analogy ends; the pursuit of narrative closure (the unraveling of plot) is unlike the 107

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eye’s diversion by (and into) abstract spatial complexity. And it’s the undetermined and counterteleological qualities of abstract spatial complexity (or, to use Hogarth’s word, intricacy) that come to define what Hogarth means by beauty. The word wanton marks the difference, describing a subject who is disposed to be diverted by whatever gets in the way. In narrative, that diversion is only ever provisionally in operation. And certainly as Hogarth describes it, narrative pleasure is thoroughly end-directed: novels and plays do not seem, in the Analysis, to be entitled “to the name of beautiful.” The pleasure associated with the perception of formal intricacy, by contrast, is (at least hypothetically) infinite. To recap: Hogarth identifies intricacy as the formal quality responsible for visual pleasure, a pleasure that is the basis for judgments of beauty. The difference between the pleasing experience of beauty and the other kinds of pleasures Hogarth associates with pursuit is the end-directedness of the latter. The pleasure of beauty, by contrast, involves joyful selfabandon in a wanton chase. In his comments on novels and plays, as well as a few citations of poems, he seems to think that literature can represent beauty, and can itself be compelling and exciting—but he doesn’t seem to think of words or the works they compose as themselves beautiful. For Hogarth, then, the perception of beauty, understood as the happiest aspect of a special disposition of seeing, is defined in contrast to the pleasures associated with narrative and, more broadly, verbal media. This contrast—an argument for mediatic distinction and against mediatic synergy, or, in more familiarly eighteenth-century terms, sister-arts discourse—should sit uncomfortably alongside Hogarth’s aforementioned reputation as a literary artist, even a proto-graphic novelist. Less than a decade following Hogarth’s death in 1764, Horace Walpole pegged Hogarth as a hybrid, drawing on the trope of referring metonymically to different media by means of the graphic implements employed in each: writers take as their emblem the pen, visual artists, the pencil. In his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1771), Walpole explains that he has “reserved to a class by himself that great and original genius, Hogarth; considering him rather as a writer of comedy with a pencil, than as a painter.”37 For a long time, this turned out to be a problem; Hogarth’s characterization as a literary artist left him in a disciplinary gray area, between art history and literary criticism (the downside of being in a class 108

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by himself). But the so-called cultural turn as it resonated in literary studies in the 1970s and after made this curse into a blessing; suddenly, Hogarth’s contextually dense images, and particularly the narrative series, were exemplary objects for critical interpretation. They lend themselves well to being read as texts, under the aegis of textuality in an expanded field. More broadly, the study of graphic narrative is grounded on the principle that images, too, are texts amenable to close reading. Thierry Smolderen begins his book on the history of comics with the observation that we now understand drawing “as if it were a form of writing, an écriture.”38 He doesn’t say this, but the inverse proposition has been nearly as important, the idea that graphic narrative recoups writing as a form of drawing. Hogarth, perhaps surprisingly, anticipates this idea in his treatise—once again, in the chapter on intricacy. To illustrate his claim that it’s the movement of the eye that conveys pleasure to the mind, Hogarth takes as his example the very thing his own reader’s eyes are moving across on the page: letters. Let figure [14, plate I top (see Ill. 1)] be consider’d, which represents the eye, at a common reading distance viewing a row of letters, but fix’d with most attention to the middle letter A. Now as we read, a ray may be supposed to be drawn from the center of the eye to that letter it looks at first, and to move successively with it from letter to letter, the whole length of the line: but if the eye stops at any particular letter, A, to observe it more than the rest, these other letters will grow more and more imperfect to the sight, the farther they are situated on either side of A, as is express’d in the figure: and when we endeavour to see all the letters in a line equally perfect at one view, as it were, this imaginary ray must course it to and fro with great celerity. Thus though the eye, strictly speaking, can only pay due attention to these letters in succession, yet the amazing ease and swiftness, with which it performs this task, enables us to see considerable spaces with sufficient satisfaction at one sudden view. (AB, p. 33)

Is his example truly a scene of reading, though? Nowhere in the passage does Hogarth imagine his row of letters assembling themselves into words. Instead, he wavers between imagining the scenario as one of reading and of viewing. If the hypothetical reader (for so she must be called; the 109

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illustration 1. “The eye, at a common reading distance viewing a row of letters”: Hogarth’s figure 14 (Plate 1 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

passage attempts an optical account of what happens “as we read”)—if the hypothetical reader zooms out “to see all the letters in a line equally perfect at one view,” her eyes move “to and fro,” producing something static and instantaneous (an image of a line of text) out of a rapid succession of glances. The pleasure of intricacy involves a cumulative alternation between stasis and succession, the cognitive game of amassing a whole from its parts even as each part is coming into view: now you see it—but what’s next? But the ocular version of this little perceptual drama as Hogarth describes it here flouts the logic of narrative time, and narrative suspense, to just the same extent that it flouts the spatial succession of reading. This metonymic “eye” has forgotten how to read, because, while (“strictly speaking”) readerly attention tracks with (left-to-right) succession in order to discern the words letters compose, Hogarth’s example of an eye coursing “to and fro” testifies to a different “satisfaction,” one that doesn’t turn on suspense and its resolution in time. This pleasure is (literally!) a kind of perceptual radiance (or radiant perception?) in which spatial oscillation alternately produces and dismembers a “sudden view.”39 Hogarth stubbornly avoids transforming this perceptual drama into a hermeneutic one, in which the succession of letters would resolve into words whose meaning must be seen through rather than on their literal surfaces.40 Now, Hogarth’s objective in the intricacy chapter is not to produce a theoretical commentary on his sequential artworks, and yet his recourse, by way of illustrative example, to the graphic aspect of reading comple110

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ments his account of narrative pleasure, reminding the reader that the intersection of media in comics admits traffic in both directions. Not only do we read images, we also see letters—that is, we see letters as shapes that might be, and indeed have been, in each of our personal histories as readers, drawn (when children learn to write, they are, in Lynda Barry’s phrase, “drawing the portrait of each letter”).41 Reading is forgetting the shape of the words one reads.42 Hogarth would rather we forget—strategically—how to read in order that we might remember how to see. That’s why the hermeneutic pleasure of solving a puzzle, or of getting to the end of a good story or arriving at a scenic overlook, is adjacent to but ultimately distinct from visual pleasure as Hogarth describes it: a wanton chase, a winding walk, the coursing ray that turns words back into letters and lines of text. For Hogarth, interference with narrative progression is in the nature of visual pleasure, which is also to say, the nature of beauty. And he registers the demand that we replace reading with seeing not just by returning language to its physical and spatial form—letters—but also by reflecting on his own limitations as a writer, specifically, his belated and possibly misguided undertaking of a project of learned verbal composition. From the first page of the Preface, rather than concealing his disqualifications for writing a treatise on beauty, he trumpets them: “It is no wonder this subject [that is, beauty] should have so long been thought inexplicable, since the nature of many parts of it cannot possibly come within the reach of mere men of letters; otherwise those ingenious gentlemen who have lately published treatises upon it (and who have written much more learnedly than can be expected from one who never took up the pen before) would not so soon have been bewilder’d in their accounts of it” (AB, p. 1). Recall Walpole’s epigram about writing comedy with a pencil; Hogarth lets on that he’s uncomfortable with the pen he’s just picked up, but it’s the “mere men of letters” who have actually overstepped the bounds of their medium. And the tactile metaphor does some further work to make this point: beauty is beyond the reach of mere men of letters because what they should be reaching for, but don’t know how to wield, is a pencil. On the other hand, Hogarth is not always so proud of his avowed illsuitedness to his task. If, in the published Preface, he lets slip his writerly 111

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insecurity (“one who never took up the pen before”) in order to allude to his expertise as a draftsman, he is revising the defeatist tone that emerges in earlier drafts: As all the times of setting down to business have been necessarily appropriated either to the Graver or the pencil the Pen grew an Implliment I was affraid to take up. . . . but as the Motliness of the Stile of one who never wrote before if it may [be] call’d any stile at all could not be set to rights without new writing the whole book which as neither the work deserv’d or time would permit must be submitted with the utmost resignation to the mercy of the critics.43

In the manuscripts, Hogarth seems less inclined to consider his deficiency a strength (and, concurrently, to remake the fluency of the learned into a sign of practical inexperience). Instead, the only remedy for his inadequacies as a writer, other than resorting to the help of learned friends, is his proficiency as a draftsman: “like one who makes use of signs and jestures to convey his meaning, in a language he is but little master of, I, as an expedient, to make up for my deficiencys in writing, have had frequent recourse to my Pencil.”44 Here, Hogarth refers to the plates he engraves to illustrate the text, and yet the graphic supplement, which ought to be his home turf or (to keep the metaphor more consistent) his native tongue, also proves a source of some anxiety. In the first paragraph of the published Introduction, Hogarth worries that the “design” of his essay, “as well as the prints, may seem rather intended to trifle and confound, than to entertain and inform” (AB, p. 17). But he assures us that the prints serve their purpose in illustrating the concepts in the text, as well as supplementing the reader’s visual memory (indeed, “the reader’s imagination,” in a gloss that hearkens back to Addison’s secondary pleasures: “when the original examples in art, or nature, are not themselves before him”). In the second paragraph, though, even the assurance receives a qualification: I hope my prints will be consider’d, and that the figures referr’d to in them will never be imagined to be placed there by me as examples themselves, of beauty and grace, but only to point out to the reader what sorts of objects he is to look for and examine in nature, or in the works of the greatest masters. My figures, therefore, are to be consider’d in the same light, with

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those a mathematician makes with his pen, which may convey the idea of his demonstration, tho’ not a line in them is either perfectly straight, or of that peculiar curvature he is treating of. (AB, p. 17)

Even though he relies on his drawings to supply what’s missing from his inexpert writing, he worries that drawings (or prints) made in the service of a demonstration will lack precisely the thing he means to demonstrate: beauty. Put another way, while practical expertise underwrites Hogarth’s understanding of visual pleasure, the expression of that understanding—even in the visual rather than the verbal medium—is fraught. Because indirection is fundamental to his aesthetics, as emblematized by both the serpentine line and the wanton chase, a direct and intentional representation of beautiful form must, he tells us, fail. It can’t be done— not because beauty is a je ne sais quoi, but rather because of its heuristic nature, where identifying beauty is minutely intervolved with the process of discovering the contours of an object in the act of perception. Hogarth suppresses some of his anxiety in the published text, converting, as I have indicated, an acute awareness of his shortcomings as a writer into an unconventional kind of qualification as a theorist: he knows his subject better than those presumptuous men of letters precisely because he is not one of them. Still, he owns up to his insecurity in a disclaimer. Recounting how he was dissuaded from employing a ghostwriter by his consciousness of “the difficulty of one man’s expressing the ideas of another,” he “was therefore reduced to the attempt of finding such words as would best answer [his] own ideas, being now too far engaged to drop the design. Hereupon, having digested the matter as well as I could, and thrown it into the form of a book I submitted it to the judgment of ” a group of trusted friends (AB, p. 13). Hogarth aims to convert his insecurity into a kind of bravado, but its traces remain in the self-deprecating cast of these remarks: writing is a mode of expression to which Hogarth has been “reduced.” Alienated from the sphere of his own true expertise, the best he can do is cut his losses, fitting a strategy of haphazard approximation to his own unsystematic knowledge: “having digested the matter as well as I could, and thrown it into the form of a book.” Interestingly, though, this verb recurs later in the treatise, in a different context and with a rather different connotation. Describing the limitations of symmetry considered as an aesthetic principle, Hogarth observes that “it 113

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is a constant rule in composition in painting to avoid regularity.” He reports that painters prefer to represent buildings “on the angle rather than in front” for this reason, but should the painter be “of necessity obliged to give the front of a building, with all its equalities and parallelisms, he generally breaks (as it is term’d) such disagreeable appearances, by throwing a tree before it, or the shadow of some imaginary cloud, or some other object that may answer the same purpose of adding variety, which is the same with taking away uniformity” (AB, p. 29). Here, the figurative throw signifies casual mastery rather than a capitulation to inadequacy, as it did in the Preface; the painter knows his or her craft so well that the job of lending visual interest to a dull composition is a simple matter, tossed off, as it were, without the effort of careful study. But “throwing” isn’t the only verb in the sentence that bears special emphasis; the other is “breaks,” marked off by Hogarth’s explanatory parenthesis, “as it is term’d.” What does this parenthetical hedge tell us? That we—which is to say, nonspecialist readers— shouldn’t mistake the eminently ordinary word break for the word we might think we understand; it is, instead, a technical term: painters’ jargon. In fact, Hogarth peppers his treatise with bits of professional jargon, marked out and glossed for his reader. These instances cluster in the chapters on composition, where, for instance, he notes the preponderance of waving and serpentine lines in the musculature of the body. Commenting on the image-within-an-image, in the first illustrative plate, of a series of anatomical sketches, he distinguishes the most subtly rendered and “elegant” of three versions of a human leg from another “also taken from nature, and drawn in the same position, but treated in a more dry, stiff, and what the painters call, sticky manner, than the nature of flesh is ever capable of appearing in, unless when its moisture is dryed away” (AB, pp. 53–54). (That’s sticky as in wooden; like a stick.) Cast on the ground in front of the anatomical drawing is an object that looks at first like a boot but turns out instead to be a shod, severed (or perhaps prosthetic?) leg, illustrating how “legs much swoln with disease, are as easy to imitate as a post, having lost their drawing, as the painters call it; that is, having their serpentine lines all effaced, by the skin’s being equally puffed up, as figure [68, plate I]” (p. 54). But Hogarth’s ear for professional jargon isn’t limited to painters. He describes the appeal of “a long-establish’d ornament in the carvings of frames, 114

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chimney-pieces, and door-cases; and call’d by the carvers, the stick and ribbon ornament” (p. 34). Justifying the popularity of the pineapple as a design motif, he admires its shape, “which nature has particularly distinguish’d by bestowing ornaments of rich mosaic upon it, composed of contrasted serpentine lines, and the pips, as the gardeners call them, are still varied by two cavities and one round eminence in each” (p. 31). Typically, when we as readers or teachers or critics notice jargon, we do so in order to disparage its use: it’s ungainly, it’s unthinking, it excludes. One might expect Hogarth to take this view, given his populist tendencies; indeed, he comes close to it in the Introduction: I would fain have such of my readers be assured, that however they may have been aw’d, and over-born by pompous terms of art, hard names, and the parade of seemingly magnificent collections of pictures and statues; they are in a much fairer way, ladies, as well as gentlemen, of gaining a perfect knowledge of the elegant and beautiful in artificial, as well as natural forms, by considering them in a systematical, but at the same time familiar way, than those who have been prepossess’d by dogmatic rules. (AB, p. 18)

But his method is not to avoid “hard names”; instead, he’s a tireless translator of the jargon he introduces, and he does this so as to honor craft knowledge as it gets expressed through the use of specialist language. It’s an unusual strategy but an effective one: enlisting jargon to combat philistinism. What I have been trying to emphasize in my reading of Hogarth’s text is his special sensitivity to language as a medium, a sensitivity that manifests both as anxiety (he’s not a writer, he’s an artist; he’s working “out of his sphere”) and as heightened attention to the ways in which verbal expression encodes material practices in nonverbal media. We shouldn’t forget, too, that this encoding is often itself a species of failure: jargon is often metaphorical, a figurative approximation of an arcane sort of knowledge that doesn’t lend itself to concise articulation, which shows that material practices must respect their media; sometimes those practices will evade the representational strictures of verbal language. But it’s practice as a kind of knowledge that Hogarth seeks to dignify throughout The Analysis of Beauty: specifically, practice as knowledge about beauty in the visual realm. Though I’ve dwelt at some length, in this chapter, on

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words (and also narrative as a mode of mimesis that unfolds in time), language is ultimately beside the point I want to emphasize; more specifically, I have been describing how Hogarth’s ostentatious and anxious attentions to words serve to denaturalize their use as the conduits of a visual theory. Language contaminates a theory that nevertheless cannot be communicated, or recognized as a theory, except by verbal means. My main point is, rather, how Hogarth construes formal abstraction: as already implicit in the navigation of our everyday lives through and in three-dimensional space. No great leap is required to derive an aesthetic theory from this conception of spatial practice. Thinking like an artist draws on this everyday knowledge for a particular end—art making—an end that can, and according to Hogarth should, be reintegrated back into ordinary life as a means. A means for what? Honing one’s visual sensitivity, distinguishing beauty from “stiffness and meanness on one hand, and clumsiness and deformity on the other” (AB, p. 49), increasing one’s yield of visual pleasure, and, as the title page puts it, “fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste.”

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CHA PTER FOU R T H E A NA LY S I S O F B E A U T Y , I I Feminist Formalism

When Hogarth makes his case for formal abstraction as a practical method for seeing beauty—that is, for approaching perceptual experience aesthetically—he does not frame that method as a specialist practice, a heretofore protected trade secret.1 I have just argued that his use of professional jargon, which includes the lingo not just of painters but of gardeners and carpenters too, belies a sensitivity to the deep imprint of aesthetic practice as kinetic habituation. Professionals use jargon as a shorthand, to approximate nonverbal (in this instance spatial) concepts or relations. It’s not that translating those professional vocabularies for the lay reader exposes the secrets of the guild, to which we are then invited to apprentice ourselves; rather, the existence of such vocabularies points to the aspects of perception, and of spatial form, that defy verbal expression. They defy verbal expression, but they are not therefore arcane. One of Hogarth’s polemical aims in The Analysis is to wrest the discourse of beauty away from the elite cultural arbiters who had, to that point, dominated that discourse. He includes craft workers in his argument not to replace one specially qualified group (gentlemen-connoisseurs) with another (artisans trained, as he was, in the guild system), but rather to indicate 117

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how beauty understood formally, by means of practical immersion, opens aesthetics to subjects and classes of people it might otherwise have excluded. The democratizing tendencies of Hogarth’s treatise are well known, but they have often been articulated through a masculinist focus on the female body as an exemplary object of aesthetic delectation. In this chapter, I take a new approach to understanding the politics of Hogarth’s aesthetics, its orientation to a broader and less elite public than the writings of his predecessors, by considering the treatment of sex and gender in The Analysis of Beauty. Specifically, I take seriously its address to women, arguing on the basis of this address that women are the exemplary subjects, and readers, of Hogarth’s aesthetic theory. In a prepublication advertisement he placed in multiple London newspapers during the second half of 1752, Hogarth wrote of his forthcoming book that “he has endeavoured to render it useful and interesting to the Curious and Polite of both Sexes, by laying down the Principles of personal Beauty and Deportment, as also of Taste in general, in the plainest, most familiar, and entertaining manner.”2 In a passage from the treatise’s Introduction that I quote above, at the end of Chapter 3, Hogarth reiterates both the gesture of inclusion and the mildly patronizing rhetoric of entertainment and ease from the advertisement: “I would fain have such of my readers be assured, that however they may have been aw’d, and over-born by pompous terms of art, hard names, and the parade of seemingly magnificent collections of pictures and statues; they are in a much fairer way, ladies, as well as gentlemen, of gaining a perfect knowledge of the elegant and beautiful in artificial, as well as natural forms, by considering them in a systematical, but at the same time familiar way, than those who have been prepossess’d by dogmatic rules” (AB, p. 18). “Such of my readers” are those “whose judgments are unprejudiced”: aspirants to artistic literacy without access to a connoisseur’s education. Hogarth’s “over-born” reader has a better chance of coming to appreciate beauty, and to have confidence in her judgment, to the extent that she (or he) is an unprejudiced viewer, not yet cowed into submission by received ideas. To be clear, I am not trying to claim that the book is addressed exclusively to women, or that inclusion on its own reveals Hogarth to be a protofeminist. The instances just cited extend the treatise’s address beyond its expected male audience, suggesting that there might be something in it for 118

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women, too. Even so, the manner in which the address is extended warns against reading feminist potentiality into inclusion alone. The slightly smarmy chivalry of “ladies, as well as gentlemen” (“please, after you!”) corresponds to a certain amount of special pleading in the argument as it unfolds over the course of the Analysis. Addressed as imagined or exemplary readers, women—ladies—are called on to represent naïve selfabsorption. The argument has to be brought home to them by addressing their self-interest, aligned in the advertisement with “personal Beauty and Deportment.” Alongside this appeal to female vanity, the imagined female reader is invoked in metonymic relation to the craftsman. Both are included in Hogarth’s address because they are excluded from the elite education of the connoisseur. Their inclusion, therefore, can seem merely polemical, directed against the antagonists Hogarth conjures in the introductory parts of the treatise: connoisseurs, men of letters, and moral-sense theorists. In what follows, I will attend to the limits of these explicit gestures of inclusion in order to locate a different kind of feminist potentiality in the argument of the Analysis. This potentiality follows from the claim that the relation between women and craftsmen is metonymic rather than metaphorical. Neither party stands in for the other; instead, both, interchangeably, manifest a particular orientation to aesthetic judgment through embodied practice. What I mean in calling their inclusion merely polemical is that Hogarth, in railing against gatekeepers, at times seems to care little about the affirmative capabilities of artists, and still less about what it’s like to be a woman; he gestures in their direction on the basis of what they are not (gentlemen, theorists) rather than what they are. But this limitation does not foreclose the elaboration of a more substantive affinity between the two groups, even if all they have in common on the surface of Hogarth’s rhetoric is their inclusion on the basis of a parallel marginalization. Hogarth’s address to women is intermittent and ambivalent; nevertheless, women remain the exemplary subjects of his theory of aesthetic judgment because their conventional cultural positioning is perilously close to that which is judged. Why perilous? Because discretionary agency belongs to those who judge rather than the objects of their judgment, so that proximity to objects curtails agency (or rather, limits and obstructs the recognition of agency). Artists and artisans are closer to the objects they produce 119

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than are the beholders of those objects; they handle and fashion and imagine them. For this reason, critical convention disqualifies the artist as a judge of his own work. He is too close to it; he is not impartial, or, in the language of eighteenth-century aesthetics, he is not disinterested. Women’s proximity to the position of that which is judged is slightly different. The problem, for a woman, is not that she has a vested interest in the object of judgment—that it belongs to her—but that it is her. A familiar name for this problem is objectification, a term with jarring resonances in the era of Atlantic-world slavery. Hogarth lived and worked in a time when British culture and the wealth on which it depended were propped up by the systematic, genocidal dehumanization of people of African and Native American descent.3 For this reason, I am leery of an overliteral application of the word objectification to the situation of white women in the context of British art and aesthetics. In general, though, we do not credit women with a superior theoretical understanding of beauty on the grounds that they are culturally positioned as its embodiment. Hogarth is an outlier in this regard, which is surprising given his participation in the tradition of associating human beauty with women’s rather than men’s bodies. Still, Hogarth thinks of women and artists in a similar way: as practitioners, first and foremost. And he does not understand interestedness—an investment in the beauty of that which one produces— as disqualifying for a practitioner’s exercise of aesthetic judgment. He imagines women’s relation to ideals of feminine beauty along the lines of grammatical reflexivity. A woman is both subject and object of her self-fashioning, fine-tuning her presence in and movement through her environment. The advertisement alludes to this sort of reflexivity in correlating the treatise’s interest for readers “of both Sexes”—which is to say, for women—with its attention to “personal Beauty and Deportment.” The logic of this statement reflects a cultural expectation that women will want to know how to judge beauty so they can be more beautiful themselves. To be beautiful, and to carry themselves beautifully: the shift from beauty to deportment is helpful because it suggests how a feminist approach to Hogarth might be better articulated in terms of spatial orientation than ontology. This framing opens some space, however narrow, between agency and subjectivity. In this conception of the aesthetic, women are agents even when their subjection to patriarchal expectations 120

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renders them object-like or object-adjacent (in the mere fact of being judged as to whether their surfaces, contours, and gestures—their faces and bodies—are visually pleasing to a beholder).4 Deportment links agency with movement, with spatial orientation, and therefore with practical formalism understood as an attunement to form in space. This chapter moves from politics to phenomenology; more precisely, it uses an analysis of Hogarth’s politics to better understand his phenomenology. The politics of The Analysis of Beauty, as I see it, are wrapped up in its address, in the value it implicitly accords the people it speaks to and speaks of, and so my reading focuses on the way Hogarth’s rhetoric around class (craft workers) and gender (“ladies”) reflects how he imagines a convergence in the constitution of women and artisans as aesthetic subjects. What they have in common is an orientation toward embodied knowledge, and so the second half of the chapter teases a theory of embodied knowledge from Hogarth’s textual and visual representations of bodies in the Analysis: bodies admired and dissected as well as bodies dancing and wearing clothes and making art. I realize it may at first seem backward to derive phenomenology from politics; it’s an outside-in trajectory, moving from address to embodiment. A principal aim of the chapter, however, is to witness how Hogarth’s aesthetics troubles the distinction of outside and inside, of surface (not to say form) and content. Accounting for his treatment of women in the text is, I argue, essential to understanding his most radical philosophical claim: the reorientation of a theory of the beautiful around aesthetic practice. To begin, then, with the politics of address, the Analysis grounds its inclusivity in a two-pronged rhetorical appeal. As we have seen, the exemplary subjects of Hogarth’s aesthetics are not connoisseurs but artisans; making is prerequisite to judging. The central role Hogarth assigns to technique rejects the classically grounded restriction of the aesthetic franchise to purportedly disinterested citizens, those whose don’t depend on craft and trade for their economic survival. The artisan’s disqualification as a citizenaesthete is based on the Aristotelian political philosophy that underwrites civic humanism, which excludes practitioners of the “mechanical arts” from the political life of the city-state. Because such pursuits, on John Barrell’s account, “are concerned with things, with material objects, they do not offer the opportunity for exercising a generalising rationality: the 121

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successful practice of the mechanical arts requires that material objects be regarded as concrete particulars, and not in terms of the abstract and formal relations among them.”5 But The Analysis of Beauty drives a wedge between “abstract and formal relations” and “generalising rationality.” In Barrell’s usage, “abstract” and “formal” are contrasted with that which is material, concrete, and particular. As Hogarth shows, however, with regard to the plastic arts, formal abstraction can also complement concrete particularity. Undertaken as a process—reproduction of an image by means of a grid or of a performance as a series of sounds and gestures—the evacuation of semantic content (abstraction) allows for a more precise rendition of forms (shapes). This strict-constructionist reading of “abstract” and “formal” as spatial terms threatens to dignify artists only by shrinking art’s sphere of influence, construing artisans as mere technicians whose particularizing rationality lacks any mimetic relation to civic judgment or political action.6 This is the standpoint from which Barrell describes women and artisans as bearing the brunt of a parallel exclusion. Barrell calls on Mary Wollstonecraft to make the same point in reference to gender: “the power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations . . . has not only been denied to women; but writers have insisted that it is inconsistent, with a few exceptions, with their sexual character.”7 In a civic humanist accounting, women, like artists, are barred from political participation because they are bound to the everyday, the particular, and the material—which, in their case, extends to and is emblematized in the corporeal and the sexual. This affiliation bolsters the importance of Hogarth’s notional female reader to his aesthetic argument. But how might we go beyond associating women with artists on the basis of what is denied to each rather than on the basis of any qualities they might share? The logic of Hogarth’s appeal to the craft knowledge of artisans, I argue, extends to and also draws upon his treatment of women. The democratic implications of practical formalism begin in its recognition of the inextricability of civic life from material life. Hogarth’s appeal to artisans is one manifestation of his democratic aesthetics, one mode of including formerly disregarded subjects. Against civic humanism, Hogarth holds up artisans and craft workers as best suited to 122

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model aesthetic judgment in practice due to their immersion in matter, which is spatially arrayed. In the Analysis, “form” is the disposition of matter in space—as, for instance, when Hogarth offers as a guide for his reader the aim “to acquire a true idea of the word Taste, when applied to form” or, just after, when he objects to vague definitions of beauty as proportionality as “doctrines not belonging to form” (AB, p. 59). On the other hand, though, artisans are not the only adepts in practical formalism; artistic practice is just one kind of formal practice that counts. Hogarth avoids vesting all the authority of his inverted aesthetic hierarchy in the artisan class. The complement to “we happy few” is “anyone can whistle.” And one purpose of this chapter is to show how Hogarth’s “anyone” is not just incidentally but necessarily and consequentially female. Hogarth’s investment in the beauty of female bodies has tended to obscure the parallel and entirely obvious fact that the treatise is intermittently addressed to female readers, or imagines its reader as female. It’s as though an aesthetics that appears to objectify women in its conventional recourse to a male gaze must not therefore be able to imagine a female gaze, and by extension a female subject, that can comfortably coexist and accomplish the same rhetorical work, namely, broaden the sphere of the aesthetic beyond an elite corps of gentlemen, as imagined by civic humanist and moral-sense theorists. And yet Hogarth himself makes the parallel explicit; his outreach takes in, first, men of the laboring classes and, second, to reinforce the same point, women. Calling on the native formal intelligence of his readers, Hogarth posits that “perhaps by mentioning two or three known instances it will be found that almost every one is farther advanced in the knowledge of this speculative part of proportion than he imagines” (AB, p. 67). His first example is heartily masculine and frankly class-conscious. An aficionado of boxing, he explains—especially one with money on the line—can speak with expertise about the bodily proportions of the contestants: especially he who hath been used to observe naked figures doing bodily exercise, and more especially if he be any way interested in the success of them; and the better he is acquainted with the nature of the exercise itself, still better judge he becomes of the figure that is to perform it. For this reason, no sooner are two boxers stript to fight, but even a butcher, thus skill’d, shews himself a considerable critic in proportion, and on this 123

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sort of judgement, often gives, or takes the odds, at bare sight only of the combatants. I have heard a blacksmith harangue like an anatomist, or sculptor, on the beauty of a boxer’s figure, tho’ not perhaps in the same terms; and I firmly believe, that one of our common proficients in the athletic art, would be able to instruct and direct the best sculptor living, (who hath not seen, or is wholly ignorant of this exercise) in what would give the statue of an English-boxer, a much better proportion, as to character, than is to be seen, even in the famous group of antique boxers, (or as some call them, Roman wrestlers) so much admired to this day. (AB, p. 67)

There are two things worth mentioning, by the wayside, in regard to this passage. First, while Hogarth is here concerned with matters of proportion and so of functionality (“proportion, as to character”), he does not exclude such matters from aesthetic consideration; what’s at stake is “the beauty of a boxer’s figure” all the same, a point consistent with Hogarth’s commitment to fitness as a component part of visual pleasure.8 Second, he is not satisfied merely to liken the blacksmith to a sculptor, in a simile that may come off as tongue-in-cheek. Instead, he goes on to imagine the blacksmith as “able to instruct and direct” the artist (though not, in parallel terms, the scientist—the anatomist—with whom he is similarly compared). In this instance, one specialist formalism (the blacksmith’s knowledge of boxing) has something to offer the putatively “higher” one (the artist’s rendering of the boxer as a character or type). Immediately following his discussion of the boxer’s body, Hogarth concedes that not all bodies are as susceptible to the judgments of lay anatomists as those whose occupations require exposure. Still, those parts of the body that are normally left uncovered generally admit more acute commentary than those that are concealed. This proposition is borne out by two examples, one specifically feminine and one gender-neutral (or, it may be, masculine; “every one” may have opinions about legs, but presumably only men’s legs are regularly on view): as stockings are so close and thin a covering, every one judges of the different shapes and proportions of legs with great accuracy. The ladies always speak skillfully of necks, hands and arms; and often will point out such particular beauties or defects in their make, as might easily escape the observation of a man of science. (AB, p. 68) 124

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Ladies are anatomists just as blacksmiths might be; Hogarth’s democratic aesthetics extends its franchise across both class and gender lines. The encompassing idea is that we should trust our own eyes and our own judgment, so long as we have consulted experience in making those judgments (in what is, really, a classically skeptical and empirical procedure). Where beauty is concerned, especially in the higher echelons of the art world, viewers need only extrapolate from the secure realms of their everyday aesthetic expertise in order to evaluate the forms, figures, and compositions they may encounter. There is a difference between these two scenarios, however. When “the ladies” demonstrate their critical prowess, they are applying a different standard from that of the blacksmiths, who evaluate the boxer’s body on functional grounds: is he strong enough? quick enough? Even “the beauty of a boxer’s figure” might ultimately be understood as a functional consideration, though the pleasure of spectatorship can surely accommodate grace as a purely aesthetic criterion. In the case of the ladies, though, what functional criteria would obtain beyond the purely aesthetic? This is not an entirely rhetorical question. Evolutionary theories of aesthetic judgment explain beauty by correlating it with reproductive fitness.9 The logic of reproductive fitness lends itself to oversimplification, authorizing the explanation of female beauty as functional for sexual attraction as it might be analyzed from the (vastly oversimplifying, falsely unitary) perspective of heterosexual men.10 For women to count as the subjects rather than the objects of evaluation, as they do in juxtaposition with the connoisseur-blacksmiths, they must identify with their own objectification. That is, they might stand in judgment as to the norms of sexual attraction not because they are themselves selecting other women as mates, but because they are charged with internalizing or, better, manifesting those norms in order to maximize their own reproductive success. This, in fact, would be a reasonably good approximation of how adaptive aesthetics might work in a Hogarthian frame, shifting emphasis to the practice and process of constructing an object, in this instance a sex object; like the artisan, the archetypal woman who judges is immersed in such processes, and she is, reflexively, object and subject of her own fashioning. Still, as I will explain further on, I think Hogarth’s immersion in artistic practice argues for a distinction between sexual and aesthetic pleasure. The adaptive 125

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illustration 2. Stays: Hogarth’s figures 1–7 (Plate 1 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

argument as I’ve extrapolated it might work on analogy with the logic of Hogarth’s appeal to artisans, but by the same token that appeal invites some skepticism about the totalization of the adaptive argument, in which all pleasure is erotic and all beauty maps onto sexual attractiveness. After all, analogy as a structure requires both similarity and difference. Women and artisans may be united in their identification with matter, form, and object, as well as in their exclusion from the civic humanist franchise. At the same time, not every artist, let alone every woman, is courting the desiring gaze of a hedonist with a Y chromosome. Still, it is true that Hogarth identifies beauty with femininity. The proof he offers for the appeal of the serpentine line he favors, the so-called line of beauty, proceeds by reading it off of women’s bodies—a somewhat ironic formulation given that his example is that of the corset, which, rather than conforming to flesh, notoriously reforms and even deforms it (see Ill. 2). But a well-turned whalebone, he argues, proves the merit of his theory by demonstrating “at the same time how much the form of a woman’s body surpasses in beauty that of a man” (AB, p. 49). In a similar vein, concluding the chapter “Of Compositions with the Serpentine Line,” he observes, There is an elegant degree of plumpness peculiar to the skin of the softer sex, that occasions these delicate dimplings in all their other joints, as well as these of the fingers; which so perfectly distinguishes them from those even of a graceful man; and which, assisted by the more soften’d shapes of the muscles underneath, presents to the eye all the varieties in the whole figure of the body, with gentler and fewer parts more sweetly connected together, and with such a fine simplicity as will always give the turn of the female frame, represented in the Venus, . . . the preference to that of the Apollo. (AB, pp. 58–59) 126

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And at this juncture, he anticipates his later claim about women’s expertise in the evaluation of “the female frame” by asking, “Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women, that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate?” (AB, p. 59). Necks, hands, and arms: what ties this instance to the later one is not the gender of the evaluator but rather the body parts evaluated. The larger commonality, though, is the focus on “living women,” on beauty embodied in everyday experience. I do not think the key distinction is that between art (as representation; the Grecian Venus) and nature (the living woman), although that distinction is in play. Likewise the distinction between male and female, though there are grounds for reading “necks” as a polite synecdoche; recall Edmund Burke’s notorious reverie concerning that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.11

But Hogarth is not likewise carried away. Instead, the comparably cool contemplation of necks, hands, and arms by women themselves suggests that erotic reverie may be the wrong frame, or at least not the only frame, in which to interpret Hogarth’s comments on women’s bodies. Another interpretive frame must be Hogarth’s understanding of bodies, and of corporeality, in general. As I have already begun to indicate, the specific understanding of female beauty in relation to reproductive functionality is insufficient to account for the sexual politics of Hogarth’s aesthetics. By the same token, though, I don’t want to abandon too quickly a specific focus on women, and on femininity, by adopting a broader focus on corporeality in the Analysis as asexual. My argument, after all, depends on the claim that Hogarth’s rhetorical appeal to women as imagined readers and as exemplary aesthetes is not merely strategic. Instead it is a manifestation, a precipitation, of the deeper commitments—I don’t think it’s wrong, despite the anachronism, to label them feminist—of Hogarth’s aesthetic theory as such, specifically, Hogarth’s aesthetics conceived as a theory of practice.

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We have already seen how the Analysis generates an epistemology of judgment out of the pleasure of paying attention. I am thinking again of the “wanton chace” passage, in which what “intitles” formal intricacy “to the name of beautiful” is “the pleasure that [the eye being led on a chase] gives the mind” (AB, p. 33). Beauty, Hogarth suggests, gives rise to a kind of thinking that is pleasurable, and it is on the basis of such felt pleasure that we identify the beautiful in objects. This pleasure in paying attention might include the experience of sexual attraction, but it is not limited to or defined by eroticism. In the passage, in particular, the specific mechanism of the eye’s captivation is “that peculiarity in the lines, which compose” formal intricacy. The formal abstraction of the line ties Hogarth’s epistemology of judgment to the artistic practice of which he is a master and suggests how an amateur too might hone her sense for beauty: by habituating herself to everyday formal abstraction (or recognizing that she is already so habituated)—by learning to see and draw, or to see as if to draw. This is not to define Hogarth’s formalism as a practice of sublimation, in which sex is too “gross” (to use Addison’s term) to lie at the heart of the beautiful and so must be refined and elevated into form. Rather, it is form itself that lies at the heart of the beautiful, accessible by means of the cultivation of a perceptual practice that locates form in matter, the senses in the body. The fundamental adjustment entailed in a practical aesthetics involves the relation between subjects and objects, wherein she who exercises aesthetic judgment does so via immersion in, even emulation of, the shape of what she sees. Hogarth’s formalism is feminist not because it seeks to reposition women as subjects rather than objects of the gaze. Instead, it makes the object-position normative for aesthetic judgment, albeit through activity (practice, askesis) rather than passive perception. Still: I think there is a wrong way, or perhaps an insufficient way, to claim the Analysis as a feminist aesthetic theory, even in this frame. That insufficiency consists in seeking throughout the treatise amplifications of what I have called its intermittent address to female readers in passages that address themselves specifically to what we might characterize as women’s concerns. The comparison of a woman’s familiar expertise with a blacksmith’s might be considered the mildest instance of what I have in mind here; a more emphatic instance appears in chapter 6 of the treatise, 128

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in which Hogarth pauses to revisit the six principles of formal beauty (“fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity”) he has just finished explaining in detail (AB, p. 23). He rounds off the presentation of these principles with a short refrain in which he illustrates each in regard to “the way they are daily put in practice, and may be seen, in every dress that is worn; and we shall find not only that ladies of fashion, but that women of every rank, who are said to dress prettily, have known their force, without considering them as principles” (AB, p. 38). The sartorial sense Hogarth attributes even to unsophisticated women includes decorum, or dressing your age (fitness), artful ornamentation with lappets and other winding shapes (intricacy), and wearing the same color shoes on both feet (uniformity). Even this argument works by way of a submerged analogy to male artisanal labor. In a manuscript draft of the Analysis, Hogarth had used similar language contrasting the “daily” application of formal principles to theoretical recognition of those ideas “as principles”—but in that context, the practitioners are not ladies but craftsmen: “in answere to the nature of lines being understood sufficiently by those who have daily put it in execution in their works let any one only question a cabinet maker about it and hear what account he will give of it as a principle Just as a day labour who uses the leaver every day would give of the Machanical Powers.”12 In each instance, Hogarth casts himself as able and willing to elucidate the theory latent in the practice. Still, the problem with reading his elucidation by means of sartorial examples as feminist is that it manages to patronize the women readers it seems to want to bring on board at the same time and by the same means that it sustains a recourse to the male gaze. An aspiration to familiarity underwrites the sartorial elucidation; he undertakes it, he says, “in order to make [the foregoing principles] more familiar to us” (AB, p. 39). It’s no accident when, in his most carefully plotted and sustained exercise in familiarization, Hogarth situates himself in the ladies’ dressing room. What’s familiar to the reader for whom Hogarth writes? Women’s attire, apparently. Presuming to engage a female reader by flattering her skills of self-adornment construes women as aesthetic subjects—as practical formalists, even—only to the extent that they already occupy the status of aesthetic objects, their interest in beauty 129

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as such limited to, or dependent upon, the motivation of appearing beautiful in the eyes of others. For this reason, I am leery of identifying such moments of pointed address with what I am arguing are the feminist commitments latent in Hogarth’s formalism. Twice in the course of the long passage on fashion that ends chapter 6, Hogarth imagines the stakes of women’s sartorial choices in terms of their effects on a male spectator, observing in the first instance that “a lock of hair falling thus cross the temples, and by that means breaking the regularity of the oval, has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent” (AB, p. 39). In the second instance, he describes how the formal principle of intricacy “recommends modesty in dress, to keep up our expectations, and not suffer them to be too soon gratified.” Here, he simultaneously assumes the perspective of the male gaze (“our expectations”) and identifies nakedness as an aesthetic problem—simply put, a bore. Therefore the body and limbs should all be cover’d, and little more than certain hints be given of them thro’ the cloathing. The face indeed will bear a constant view, yet always entertain and keep our curiosity awake, without the assistance either of a mask, or veil; because vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and the mind in constant play, in following the numberless turns of expression it is capable of. How soon does a face that wants expression, grow insipid, tho’ it be ever so pretty?—The rest of the body, not having these advantages in common with the face, would soon satiate the eye, were it to be as constantly exposed, nor would it have more effect than a marble statue. But when it is artfully cloath’d and decorated, the mind at every turn resumes its imaginary pursuits concerning it. Thus, if I may be allow’d a simile, the angler chooses not to see the fish he angles for, until it is fairly caught. (AB, p. 40)

It is easy to see how this passage corroborates interpretation of the Analysis as an aesthetics of desire. But the slightly odd, tentatively expressed simile of the angler shows how bodily exposure represents a kind of consummation and, as such, the boundary of aesthetic experience. The pleasure of angling is opposed to the pleasure of seeing, which stands, in the terms of the simile, for possession, satiety, the terminus of the pursuit. Here, as in the “wanton chace” passage, aesthetic pleasure diverges from other pleasures in regard to a question of aims. Solving a riddle, reading a novel, watching a striptease: all of these activities unfold in 130

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relation to an end point—unraveling or exposure—whereas the perceptual pursuit of the beautiful (specifically, of formal intricacy) is something that “the mind at every turn resumes.” Unlike the angler, the aesthete takes pleasure in continuing to see (and by extension, perhaps, choosing not to touch).13 This is all to say that it is important to balance the acknowledgment of an aesthetics of (male, heterosexual) desire, in the Analysis, with a recognition of the limits Hogarth imposes on that model—and, indeed, of the countervailing model that interrupts its teleology, associating the experience of beauty with continuation rather than consummation. All three are at stake in the conclusion of the somewhat leering discussion of feminine adornment with the directive to keep your clothes on, even if this directive reflects a not entirely surprising identification of sartorial allure with what clothes conceal rather than what they reveal. The more surprising outcome of Hogarth’s aesthetic phenomenology (by which I mean his account of what it’s like to take pleasure in the beautiful) comes into view when we recall his tutorial for training the eye. If the beautiful comes into focus, or comes to consciousness, when we perform, virtually or actually, the perceptual abstraction that enables spatial form to mediate between an object and its representation in a visual medium, then that abstraction might allow for, or even demand, a new conception of the body’s role in perceptual activity. Bodies are not just objects of perception; because the senses are corporeal, bodies are also its agents. But Hogarth’s orientation toward practice allows for an even more thoroughgoing interpenetration of bodies as objects and agents. As objects of perception—in Hogarth’s conception, as outlines and surfaces—bodies delimit perception. And the best way for the subjects of perception to understand that shaping is to enter into it, to imagine becoming mere form in order to see mere form. This is the more radical reading of Hogarth’s sartorial elucidation, a reading that applies more broadly to the Analysis understood as a theory of practical formalism: formal abstraction, Hogarth contends, is already encoded into the navigation of our everyday lives through and in threedimensional space. Addressing women and workmen, he says: you know how to think aesthetically about spatial form the same way you know how to wear clothes, the same way you know how to inhabit your own skin. That’s a deliberate provocation, eliding the distinction between 131

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clothing and skin, but it respects the way Hogarth himself conceives of bodies, human bodies among others (both animate and inanimate). Bodies, in this conception, are containers, surfaces whose coverings (skin, clothes) enclose their contents. From the outset of the treatise, Hogarth writes this conception of the body as an enclosing surface into his account of formal abstraction as a method. As I discussed in Chapter 3, he proposes that “every object under our consideration, be imagined to have its inward contents scoop’d out so nicely, as to have nothing of it left but a thin shell, exactly corresponding both in its inner and outer surface, to the shape of the object itself ” (AB, p. 21). He goes on to propose a variety of applications and permutations of this thought-experiment in a long passage that concludes the introduction to the Analysis and resonates throughout its exposition. The shell, he said, should be imagined “to be made up of very fine threads, closely connected together,” available for (virtual) view from any angle, whether the mind’s eye be placed “without, or within” (AB, p. 21). Such a practice, Hogarth argues, will hone a viewer’s ability to project a view of unseen surfaces, and thereby to develop her visual memory; cultivated as a habit, it “will be of infinite service to those who invent and draw from fancy, as well as enable those to be more correct who draw from life” (AB, p. 22). Finally, Hogarth remarks on the similarity between his thought-experiment and the known method, many years made use of, for the more exactly and expeditiously reducing drawings from large pictures, for engravings; or for enlarging designs, for painting cielings [sic] and cupolas, (by striking lines perpendicular to each other, so as to make an equal number of squares on the paper design’d for the copy, that hath been first made on the original; by which means, the situation of every part of the picture is mechanically seen, and easily transferred). (AB, p. 23)

His program of visual training has a ready analogue in a technique long in use among practicing artists. It’s worth noting that Hogarth does not attempt to depict his thoughtexperiment in the illustrations that accompany the treatise. An illustration, arguably, would undermine what he’s trying to teach, namely, a process for seeing rather than something that is seen. If he invites the reader “to assist his imagination as much as possible, in considering every

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illustration 3. Wax torso: Hogarth’s figure 2 (Plate 1 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

object, as if his eye were placed within it,” then the illustration of any particular object, so imagined, from the singular (if virtual or impossible) perspective of the object’s interior, fails precisely to represent this pedagogy as a practice (AB, p. 22). What comes closest to illustrating the thought-experiment is a drawing (see Ill. 3): It represents the trunk of a figure cast in soft wax, with one wire pass’d perpendicularly through its center, another perpendicularly to the first, going in before and coming out in the middle of the back, and as many more as may be thought necessary. . . . Let these wires be so loose as to be taken out at pleasure, but not before all the parts of them, which appear out of the wax, are carefully painted close up to the wax, of a different colour from those, that lie within it. By these means the horizontal and perpendicular contents of these parts of the body (by which I mean the distances of opposite points in the surface of these parts) through which the wires have pass’d, may be exactly known and compared with each other. (AB, p. 23; emphasis in original)

Here, knowledge of so-called contents is once again knowledge about surfaces; both in fact represent knowledge about spatial form abstracted 133

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illustration 4. Belvedere Torso: Hogarth’s figure 54 (Plate 1 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

from the human figure. At the same time, the human figure that grounds the demonstration is a penetrated male body, juxtaposed with the iterated female carapace—the series of corsets—at the bottom of the frame. Nor are these the only important torsos in the first of the two illustrative plates; a rendition of the Belvedere Torso anchors the framed image of a sculpture yard (see Ill. 4). I mention this to remark on the way that artistic technique might manifest as a violation of the body’s integrity. This headless, limbless figure, run through with a pike and marked with stigmata, is in fact the best kind of artist’s model, one that cannot suffer actual harm as measure is taken of its “contents.” This is what I had in mind earlier when I spoke of Hogarth’s account of corporeality in general; technical expertise may entail a kind of intimacy with the body that is, nevertheless, not (or at least not obviously or primarily or normatively) directed toward sexual pleasure.14 In the chapter “Of Compositions with the Serpentine Line,” Hogarth meditates at some length on the pleasures of this technical-anatomical gaze: There is scarce a straight bone in the whole body. Almost all of them are not only bent different ways, but have a kind of twist, which in some of them is very graceful; and the muscles annex’d to them, tho’ they are of 134

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illustration 5. Ossa innominata: Hogarth’s figures 60 and 61 (Plate 2 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

various shapes, appropriated to their particular uses, generally have their component fibres running in these serpentine-lines, surrounding and conforming themselves to the varied shape of the bones they belong to: more especially in the limbs. Anatomists are so satisfied of this, that they take a pleasure in distinguishing their several beauties. I shall only instance in the thigh-bone, and those about the hips. The thigh-bone fig. [62, plate 2 right], has the waving and twisted turn of the horn, 58: but the beautiful bones adjoining, call’d the ossa innominata [fig. 60, plate 2 bottom (see Ill. 5)], have, with greater variety, the same turns and twists of that horn when it is cut; and its inner and outward surfaces are exposed to the eye. How ornamental these bones appear, when the prejudice we conceive against them, as being part of a skeleton, is taken off, by adding a little foliage to them, may be seen in fig. [61, plate 2 bottom (Ill. 5)]—such shell-like winding forms, mixt with foliage, twisting about them, are made use of in all ornaments; a kind of composition calculated merely to please the eye. (AB, pp. 52–53)

While Hogarth explains his choice to add foliage to the pelvic bones in figure 61, he does not mention an arguably stranger choice: that of drawing an urn-shaped vessel in between the hipbones in the ostensibly more anatomically accurate figure 60 (a faint representation of the top of one femur is visible on the lower right). If he were going to elaborate on the 135

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correlation of beauty with reproductive functionality, surely this visual allusion to the internal organs would provide him an opportunity—but he chooses instead to emphasize by embellishment the beauty of the bones themselves, downplaying their functional and proximal relation to the reproductive organs and genitalia. Continuing on the theme of anatomical beauty, Hogarth goes on to admire “the serpentine forms and varied situations of the muscles, as they appear when the skin is taken off. . . . The figures of the muscles, with the variety of their situations, must always be allow’d elegant forms: however, they lose in the imagination some of the beauty, which they really have, by the idea of their being flayed” (AB, p. 53). It’s hard not to hear in this passage an echo of Jonathan Swift’s epigrammatic understatement: “Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.” Hogarth, wonderfully, inverts the sentiment, regretting the decorum by which the mind denies itself full visual enjoyment by virtue of its ethical duty to respect the bodily integrity of other persons.15 Shortly after he expresses his admiration for exposed musculature, Hogarth risks contradicting himself when he extols the virtues of skin— no longer as that which hides the body’s inner scaffold, but as that which reveals it: “The skin, therefore, thus tenderly embracing, and gently conforming itself to the varied shapes of every one of the outward muscles of the body, soften’d underneath by the fat . . . is evidently a shell-like surface (to keep up the idea I set out with) form’d with the utmost delicacy in nature” (AB, p. 55). In Chapter 3, I made note of Ruth Mack’s reading of the “threads” in the scooped-out shell passage as a textile reference.16 Here, though, the shell is reclaimed as a fleshly metaphor, again marking the strange fungibility of clothes and skin. Hogarth’s phenomenology literalizes metaphors about living in one’s body—as if the outer surface of the skin were in fact a container, for organs and muscles but also for consciousness. The thought-experiment of the scooped-out shell implies the reflexive exercise of imagining one’s own skin as a shell-like surface, but not to such a degree that it dissolves the subject of the thought-experiment into the object, the mere form, imagined. After all, Hogarth himself describes the subjective payoff of this exercise in terms of mastery: 136

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the imagination will naturally enter into the vacant space within this shell, and there at once, as from a center, view the whole form within, and mark the opposite corresponding parts so strongly, as to retain the idea of the whole, and make us masters of the meaning of every view of the object, as we walk round it, and view it from without. (AB, p. 21)

Imagining the eye as disembodied allows for a fantasy of the sovereign subject. At the same time, however, the importance of technique throughout the Analysis has the power to counteract such a fantasy. Invoking a different corporeal emblem, the hand, technique returns this roving eye to the body of which it is a part. And technique, in Hogarth’s treatise, is not confined to the arts, just as bodily habituation in the techniques of everyday life is not limited to one of the sexes (or to attire only). The Analysis of Beauty concludes with a chapter entitled “Of Action,” which moves from advice on comportment to a discussion of dance and ends with a brief discussion of theatrical gesture. Hogarth describes this chapter as aiming “to particularize the application of these principles to the movement of the body, and therewith finish this system of variety in forms and actions” (AB, p. 104). It is the moment in the text that veers closest to the generic province of the conduct book, but not the sort of conduct book directed exclusively to females. In a noteworthy divergence from the logic of the digression on ladies’ dress, in which Hogarth appeals to an implied female reader’s already acquired familiarity with his aesthetic principles, his precepts for graceful movement are addressed to men as well. He defaults to masculine pronouns, as when he notes that “there is no one but would wish to have it in his power to be genteel and graceful in the carriage of his person” (AB, p. 104). He makes masculine his example of a graceful hand gesture, discussing the presentation of “a snuffbox, or fan . . . to a lady,” and goes on to give equal time to bowing and curtseying (AB, pp. 107, 108). Just where we might expect the fulfillment of Hogarth’s promise to make his book interesting to women, then, we get instead a set of precepts on deportment balanced between the sexes. Even more telling, with regard to the sexual politics of Hogarth’s aesthetics, is his subsequent turn, or rather, return, to the subject of dancing. Dance comes up first in the chapter on intricacy, as a latter-day analogue to his childhood fascination with the spiral motion of a curling worm against a worm-wheel: 137

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I can never forget my frequent strong attention to it, when I was very young, and that its beguiling movement gave me the same kind of sensation then, which I since have felt at seeing a country dance; particularly when my eye pursued a favourite dancer, through all the windings of the figure, who then was bewitching to the sight. (AB, p. 34)

It may at first seem as though this “favourite dancer” reconfirms the standard reading of the Analysis as an aesthetics of desire; here, the bewitching object of Hogarth’s own pursuing gaze is indeed a woman. (The dancer’s sex is made explicit in a subsequent clause, in which Hogarth envisions an “imaginary ray,” which he had previously devised as a hypothetical trope for picturing the eye’s movement, “dancing with her all the time” [p. 34].) But Hogarth’s return to dance in the chapter on action complicates this reading. There, he emphasizes not a single individual but the country dance as a formal composition: The lines which a number of people together form in country or figure dancing, makes a delightful play upon the eye, especially when the whole figure is to be seen at one view, as at the playhouse from the gallery; the beauty of this kind of mystic dancing, as the poets term it, depends on moving in a composed variety of lines, chiefly serpentine, governed by the principles of intricacy, &c. (AB, p. 111)

It is the movement itself that beguiles, not a particular body in motion. Hogarth’s discussion of country dancing centers on the pleasure an onlooker takes in an abstracting view from on high, locating that pleasure in a “figure” invisible in the dancing itself—which is to say, in the movement of bodies—but capable of visualization in the form of a diagram: “The figure of it altogether is a cipher of S’s, or a number of serpentine lines interlacing, or intervolving each other, which suppose traced on the floor, the lines would appear as fig. [123, plate 2 top (see Ill. 6)]” (AB, p. 111). The pleasure implicit in, but elided from, Hogarth’s description, however, is the pleasure of the dancers themselves. This thought seems just beyond the scope of his practical imagination—for if you can derive an idea of the beautiful by enacting some kind of transfer between the visible and the tangible, surely the bodies drawing, virtually, his “cipher of S’s” on a dance floor experience a version of the onlooker’s pleasure in

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illustration 6. “A cipher of S’s”: Hogarth’s figure 123 (Plate 2 [detail], AB. Courtesy of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

tracing the figure. Bodily enactment, actual or virtual, has thus far in the Analysis served as a heuristic for Hogarth’s concept of the beautiful. Consider, for instance, his claim that “the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more, being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing, insomuch that the hand takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil,” or, in the chapter on action, the suggestion that one hone the gracefulness of one’s gestures by chalking a waving line on an ogee molding (AB, pp. 42, 106–07). Dancing, similarly, involves an enactive amplification of the basic lineaments of everyday bodily action: The ordinary undulating motion of the body in common walking (as may be plainly seen by the waving line which the shadow a man’s head makes against a wall as he is walking between it and the afternoon sun) is augmented in dancing into a larger quantity of waving by means of the minuetstep, which is so contrived as to raise the body by gentle degrees somewhat higher than ordinary, and sink it again in the same manner lower in the going on of the dance. (AB, p. 109)

If the movement of the hand in drawing a waving line, in two and in three dimensions, demonstrates the principle of visual pleasure to which 139

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Hogarth is committed, then it would seem to follow that the dancer too would know beauty by means of her own pleasure in the shapes her body makes in space (not to mention, as Hogarth does not, the musical and rhythmic dimension of dance’s form and its pleasures). Hogarth comes closest to conceiving of dance as pleasurable to the dancer in a parenthetical aside. Admiring Italian and French theatrical dances “that represent provincial characters,” he notes that “these sort of dances a little raised, especially on the woman’s side, in expressing elegant wantonness (which is the true spirit of dancing), have of late years been most delightfully done” (AB, p. 111). There’s some tension between the claim that dancing expresses wantonness and that wantonness is dancing’s essence. The expressive claim keeps dance in the realm of theatrical representation; he seems to be saying that these dances are an appropriate vehicle for the depiction of flirtatiousness or even, to state it more strongly, female sexual desire (not that Hogarth was particularly prudish, but the stipulation of elegant wantonness raises sex to the level of art, places it on a footing with beauty rather than bawdy). The essential claim, though, points in a different direction, specifically, back to the “wanton chace” of the intricacy chapter. If elegant wantonness is the true spirit of dancing, not just expressed but also enjoyed “on the woman’s side,” then what is wantonness, exactly, as Hogarth mobilizes it in the Analysis? Wantonness is a kind of freedom; specifically, a bounded and pleasurable kind of freedom, reflexively enjoyed. I have written elsewhere about Hogarth’s concept of wantonness as an adaptation, indeed a quasifeminist reading, of Paradise Lost.17 Twice, Hogarth quotes Milton’s uses of “wanton”; both instances allude to Eve.18 As Milton commentators have noted time and again, “wanton” connotes both sexual and nonsexual notions of luxuriance, connotations that are detachable but incompletely so. To be wanton in the erotic sense is to abandon oneself to sexual pleasure, and it’s the abandonment that carries over to the nonsexual sense, which thereby implies an ethics of action: singlemindedness, full commitment to one thing to the exclusion of all others.19 This latter, nonsexual sense predominates in the passage from the Analysis quoted to illustrate sense 8.b. of the OED entry for “wanton.” The dictionary’s definition reads, “Of movement (esp. of a horse or rider): Headlong, impetuous.”20 The Hogarth quotation in the OED entry, like 140

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the characterization of dancing as “elegant wantonness,” comes from the chapter on action—fittingly, as the dictionary entry separates the use of the adjective to describe motion from its use as an attribute of objects that move.21 Hogarth asserts that “whoever has seen a fine Arabian war-horse, unback’d, and at liberty, and in a wanton trot, cannot but remember what a large waving line his rising, and at the same time pressing forward, cuts through the air.”22 No moral or sexual meaning transfers from the horse to the linear pattern of his movement; wantonness retains its sexual connotation only to the extent that the headlong manner in which one might pursue an erotic aim describes the headlong manner in which one might pursue any aim—or no aim at all, in the case of a dancer absorbed in her own activity or (and this seems noteworthy) a horse whose spatial trajectory is more evident to an onlooker for being “unback’d.” A riderless horse goes his own way, as does a wanton person, whether or not in pursuit of a particular aim. The idea of pursuit recalls again the wanton chase, a collocation that spotlights the paradoxical nature of the freedom associated with wantonness. The chase, because it is a pursuit, is extremely focused, highly motivated, end-directed; the manner of that pursuit is headlong and impetuous. It’s a freedom contingent on, and bound to, channeled commitment. I have talked about the difference “wanton” makes to the notion of pursuit. It is the difference between pursuit understood in terms of its terminal aim and pleasure understood as the propensity to be indefinitely diverted from that aim, and so to avoid termination. It is also, in the context of Hogarth’s intricacy chapter, the difference between narrative pleasure and visual pleasure. You don’t seek, finally, to get the picture in the way that you seek to unravel a plot; you seek instead the engagement of your attention in the picture’s levels, its composition, the techniques of its execution, its colors and textures and shapes. This is captivation by form. All the more so in the case of the dancer, whose enjoyment is reflexive; her own movement is the object of her spatio-formal perception and delectation. She chases nothing, but she is elegantly wanton, abandoning herself to the graceful movement of her own body. To the extent that it expresses wantonness, what dancing might be said to express is absorption—which dismantles the distinction between inside and outside upon which expression depends. To speak of absorption, especially in an eighteenth-century 141

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context, is of course to invoke Michael Fried’s enormously rich and influential idea that most important French paintings from the 1750s onward make absorption the central trope in their expressive repertoire—that is, represent a vast range of emotional states by means of a certain orientation of depicted figures toward their own emotional experience, that of intense concentration, the single-minded devotion to a given activity or feeling, obliviousness to threatened distractions. The relation of absorption to expression is oblique, however. In paintings characterized by absorptiveness, a depicted figure’s absolute commitment to one activity is expressed as obliviousness to any number of other things, ultimately the painting’s beholder herself. While some critics have tried to assimilate Hogarth into Fried’s model, that is not what I am proposing to do.23 Hogarth’s version of absorption functions very differently from the concept Fried develops in reference to the iconography of French painting. In The Analysis of Beauty, wantonness describes how you look at something beautiful; absorption, in Fried’s lexicon, describes the refusal of a painting to look at you—to acknowledge its orientation toward a spectator. Wantonness in Hogarth has less in common with Friedian absorption than with the mode of visual rhetoric to which Fried opposes it. But it is not theatricality I want to claim as a feature of Hogarth’s aesthetic theory so much as objecthood, the term Fried uses to name the particular kind of perniciously theatrical tendencies he sees in mid-twentieth-century minimalist art.24 Hogarth’s wantonness—his version of absorption—does not arise as a rhetorical strategy to combat the theatricality endemic to the structural norms of spectatorship; indeed, for Hogarth, wantonness is not a mode of pictorial rhetoric at all. Rather, it is an attribute of the perceiving subject’s response to a beautiful object, contingent on the very relationality whose open acknowledgment in an artwork, for Fried, compromises the integrity of that artwork. My vocabulary converges with Fried’s, but I am describing something different. On the one hand, this difference respects a claim in Fried that is often ignored: the claim that the dynamic he describes is a product of a specific time and place: France in the 1750 and 1760s. On the other, my identification of another absorption at work in eighteenth-century art theory challenges Fried’s unremittingly negative evaluation of objecthood. This other absorption, Hogarth’s, is not depicted. Instead it is enacted in the encounter between beholder and 142

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object—the encounter that comes increasingly to colonize aesthetic experience in the twentieth century, according to Fried, exposing the pictorial essence of painting to a kind of existential threat.25 A theatrical artwork— in the twentieth-century context, an artwork that behaves as an object rather than as a picture—solicits the spectator by demanding a bodily response; it achieves its effects relationally, in space. For Hogarth, though, an artwork achieves its effects when the beholder looks at it as if to make it, or unmake it—and keeps looking. As he suggests in describing the thought-experiment of the scooped-out shell, seeing form involves imagining oneself into the object, a reorientation in virtual space that merges with the social position of women and artisans, those people mired in matter and so excluded from full political subjectivity. Hogarth’s beholders strive toward objecthood themselves in their attempt to attain an equal footing with the objects that occupy their attention, drawing on their own experience of objecthood in the process. When this activity of formal abstraction that I’m renaming objecthood yields pleasure, invites continuation, then, Hogarth tells us, we are in the presence of the beautiful. Dancing makes a little allegory of visual pleasure, enlarging and enacting the process by which coordinated movements of eye and hand function for the visual artist as a kind of embodied judgment, abstracting spatial form by tracing and retracing it, a process complemented by the beholder’s reciprocal reanimation of the kinetics of practice—that this reanimation is what she does when she takes pleasure in looking. What’s manifest in the dance is absorption, the dancer’s commitment to the activity in which she is engaged. “Commitment” is already too much of a psychological idea to be of use here, though, projecting as it does an intention rather than a disposition, legible on the surface. The beauty of dancing, for Hogarth, is its presentation of the body as a medium in motion. In this way, the dancer is like the painter, or, perhaps, shows us something about the painter that is hard to read off the painting itself—without Hogarth’s interpretive assistance, that is. Technique is the provisional abdication of self, the aspiration to become a recording device; mimesis is the end, formal abstraction the means, beauty the dividend—and the temporal extension of its enjoyment, then, another end—I’m tempted to say, in itself. Dancing is also the sanctioned public performance, and at least potentially the enjoyment, of 143

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bodily pleasure, of oneself as waving line; it is the body’s experience of itself as spatial form. What it is not, I believe, is the person’s experience of herself as a self, a container for subjective experience. Dancing, in Hogarth’s account, expresses no inner life, and Hogarth’s dancer has no interiority. It may seem counterintuitive to understand this mode of bodily existence, and corporeal pleasure, as feminist, but I am proposing that Hogarth’s Analysis, in its figuration of gender vis-à-vis artistic practice, carries just this implication. In making this argument, I follow Sandra Macpherson, who worries about the way in which interiority construed as a positive criterion for full personhood depends on a masculinist model of liberalism.26 She reads eighteenth-century literature against the grain of interiority, describing how allegorical modes of representation might “offer the objecthood of human persons precisely as an escape from sentimental modes of being and belonging, including the sentimentalism (and de facto humanism) of economic materialism.”27 Hogarth’s aesthetics, similarly, provides models for imagining “the objecthood of human persons,” albeit chiefly as a mode of perception rather than representation, a mode that is not so much escapist as strategic, a way of displacing subjectivity in favor of action, or—even less subjectively—of movement. That the treatise ends with dancing is a way of making good on the advertisement’s promise that its attention to “Deportment” ensures its interest for “the Curious and Polite of both Sexes.” More than that: it transfigures the utilitarian premise that women’s interest in understanding beauty is self-interest merely, suggesting instead that the truest understanding of beauty manifests not as appreciation (or even judgment) but instead as a way of moving through the world. The reflexive pleasure of the dancer absorbs the spectator into the activity, the practice, of the dance; in the end, she becomes the exemplar of embodied knowledge. Hogarth’s phenomenology, its apotheosis in dance as the reflexive experience of “elegant wantonness,” reflects the feminism that is its enabling condition. The Analysis of Beauty is a feminist phenomenology because it begins—and ends—with being a body in the world.

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When we think about form in the theorization of aesthetic judgment, we think about Kant. But it’s not so obvious how one would go about locating form in practice in the Third Critique. What happens if we read Kant on the aesthetic with the practitioner in mind? Can we make room for practice? If we were to do so, what difference might it make? In the two chapters preceding this one, I argued that Hogarth, in The Analysis of Beauty, develops a theory of form—an aesthetic formalism— rooted in artistic and perceptual practice. Beauty, for Hogarth, is a formal property, which is to say, a property of spatial arrangement, of shape, that can be known only in the activity of abstraction, and even more specifically in the pleasure to which such abstraction gives rise. It’s unusual, perhaps, to associate abstraction with pleasure; we tend, I think, to assume that abstraction is austere, ascetic, because it imposes distance. But Hogarth’s account of formal abstraction challenges this assumption by virtue of its functional determination. That is: the abstraction of form in The Analysis of Beauty is determined by, and exists in service to, the making of artworks (or the enterprise of training everyday perception as if directed toward the making of artworks—as if one were to draw whatever one sees, or 145

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whatever one looks at with sufficient care). The end goal is not to denude objects, to shear away particulars, or to dissever pure ideas from their material embedding. It is instead to improve the accuracy of visual perception. This aim is art’s share in the broader empiricist project of correcting for the distortions of situated observation, the visual and conceptual stereotypes that warp the beholder’s view when it focuses on the what—what am I looking at?—at the cost of the how. The question “How do I draw it?” demands formal abstraction, the strategic mental isolation of spatial relationships to guide the movement of a drawing hand. But that abstraction is provisional; it does not render a more distant or generalized view of the thing seen.1 When the shapes your eyes and hand trace invite lingering attention, reward attention with pleasure, that, in Hogarth’s account, constitutes a judgment of beauty: a practical judgment, a judgment rendered in practice and made possible by the subject’s intentional engagement in making (or, short of that or more virtually, a mode of perception shaped by making). In this chapter, I recruit Hogarth as a guide in interpreting Kant’s account of the relation among form, pleasure, and aesthetic judgment (specifically, the judgment of beauty). I propose that an orientation to practice, in the spirit of Hogarth’s Analysis, can help illuminate the role Kant grants to formal abstraction in his aesthetic theory. Abstraction remains something of an enigma in the Third Critique because Kant does not specify how powerful a mechanism it may be for bringing objects under the scope of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgment, in Kant’s theory, is a notoriously austere affair; to qualify as beautiful, a subject’s apprehension of an object must be purged of “mere” charm and sensual liking, on the one hand, of determinate concepts born of intellectual understanding, on the other. At times, it appears that the ability to mentally manipulate one’s perception of objects (by disregarding everything other than their form) can bring those objects back into the purview of aesthetic judgment. Abstraction might therefore help to mitigate the austerity of Kant’s restrictions on aesthetic experience, especially where art is concerned. Under the most severe interpretation, no work of human manufacture— and art of course falls within this category—can ever be purely beautiful because it retains the imprint of conceptualization, of the intentionality that guided its making. However, by abstracting from what we may know 146

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about an object (what it’s supposed to be, how it came to be, or how it may or may not function) to hold in the mind only an image of its form, we may yet experience it as beautiful.2 Kant’s theory assigns a crucial role to a broadly conceived power of abstraction—and yet Kant never fully commits to the conception of abstraction his theory seems to stipulate.3 In this chapter, I describe how Hogarth’s account of abstraction as a technical tool, a practice for refining aesthetic perception, supplements and clarifies what Kant leaves unresolved. Furthermore, I describe how the complementary accounts of formal abstraction in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” (the first section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment) and Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty rest on a more fundamental similarity in their arguments about the nature of aesthetic pleasure. Hogarth’s is an account of aesthetic pleasure that hinges on cognition rather than ruling it out of bounds, as Edmund Burke would do in his intervening Philosophical Enquiry.4 Kant understands aesthetic pleasure in ways that evoke Hogarth, a point that matters because Kant’s conception of pleasure as entangled with cognition is crucial to his distinction of aesthetic judgment from other kinds of human knowing. This distinction, in turn, sums up his quarrel with Burke: whereas an empirical aesthetics can only distinguish aesthetic judgment by purging it of reason, leaving only sensation in its place to do the work of discerning beauty, a transcendental aesthetics seeks out the intersubjective scaffolding that secures some meaning for the experience of beauty. The account of pleasure contained in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty anticipates precisely this feature of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. To be sure, Kant and Hogarth are an odd couple, defying comparison on every level from the biographical and intellectual-historical to the temperamental and stylistic. And to be clear, I am not grounding my argument in any claims of influence, either direct or indirect (for example, via Burke or Lessing, both of whom read the Analysis and are cited in the Third Critique).5 Instead, I am identifying a surprising affinity and speculating as to how that affinity might open up a new aspect of the more canonical of the two texts. From the first, it pays to remember that the two authors address themselves to different problems. For Hogarth, beauty has been poorly understood by philosophers because they are bad judges of it, lacking as they do his vocational expertise.6 Taste interests him not 147

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as a philosophical problem but as an achievable consensus of which we have so far fallen short: “So vague is taste,” he laments, “when it has no solid principles for its foundation!” (AB, p. 20)—and then goes on to institute such principles as he believes to apply (chiefly: the serpentine line). Such is the ambition announced in the book’s subtitle, which declares the Analysis to have been “written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste” (AB, title page, p. lxv). To propose that the vagaries of taste might be fixed is to deny that taste is itself a problem, in the philosophical sense. For Kant, by contrast, the problem of taste is the difficulty we face in reconciling the integrity of beauty as a concept with the evident differences among reasonable people’s judgments about what they perceive to be beautiful. How can beauty mean different things to different people and yet still mean something, coherently, to everyone? When the problem is framed this way, Hogarth’s faith in “solid principles,” to be discovered through analysis, falls short: “To seek a principle of taste that would provide the universal criterion of the beautiful through determinate concepts is a fruitless undertaking, because what is sought is impossible and intrinsically self-contradictory.”7 In this framing, Kant’s critical project invalidates Hogarth’s analysis. Nevertheless, Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” restores to the history of aesthetics one of Hogarth’s stranger and more subtle ideas: that the pleasure we feel when we experience beauty is a pleasure belonging to cognition. My argument proceeds in three phases. First, I recount how, in the logic of Kant’s argument, the problem of taste generates a theory of aesthetic form as part of its solution. Second, I examine some passages in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” that bear, more and less directly, on art and its making. The purpose of this section is to unfold some of the ways in which art, far from motivating Kant’s aesthetic theory, troubles its coherence: how can Kant reconcile his elevation of pure aesthetic judgment— the judgment of beauties free from determination by concepts—with the basic proposition that art might be beautiful, if art is also always, in the broadest sense, determined by concepts? Third, I return to the common feature of Hogarth’s and Kant’s accounts of aesthetic pleasure—namely, its entanglement with cognition—to test the idea of abstraction as a practice, bound up with art making but also, for that reason, informing the practice of aesthetic judgment. This view aligns formal abstraction (as dis148

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tinct from generalizing abstraction) with the cultivation of taste, insofar as the perceptual exercise of formal abstraction, undertaken as a practice, corresponds to the kind of cognition involved in aesthetic pleasure.

Form and the Problem of Taste The problem of taste poses the following question: how can the statement “This is beautiful,” whatever its object, be meaningfully different from the statement “This appeals to me”? If we don’t require a meaningful distinction between those two statements, then “beautiful,” naming only individual preference, loses its descriptive purchase on objects. If, however, we do believe beauty to correspond to a particular kind of pleasure to which certain objects give rise, then how do we account for what would seem to be legitimate disagreements about which objects are beautiful? Shaftesbury, Addison, and Burke (and Hogarth and Hume with them) all set their arguments in opposition to the relativist aphorism de gustibus non est disputandum, the banner for the position George Dickie identifies as “taste skepticism”: “the view that there can be no principle or set of principles of taste and that it is fruitless to dispute about taste.”8 Taste is irreducibly subjective, according to this way of thinking. The burden, then, for critics and philosophers dedicated to the proposition that “beautiful” is a predicate with intersubjective meaning, is to describe the nature of the commonality among judging subjects that allows us to measure our reactions against those of others without, however, resorting to logical proofs. In technical terms, this is what Kant is after when he tasks himself with “the deduction of synthetic a priori judgment.”9 If, as a consequence, the discipline of aesthetics comes to orient itself around taste as a proxy for a set of questions about subjectivity, then it seeks for that set of questions in pre-Kantian texts that investigate beauty and taste. Those texts may be found wanting to the extent that they do not (or do not recognize the need to) deduce synthetic a priori judgments as the root of any coherent aesthetics. This, after all, is Kant’s own critique of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, which he singles out as the best representative of its kind. Kant admires Burke’s recognition that rational proofs will never convince anyone to revise his judgment of the sublime or the beautiful. However, in relegating those judgments entirely to the senses (which is also to say, the 149

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body) and insulating them from the understanding, Burke becomes a taste skeptic in spite of himself, providing no basis for the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment as distinct from sensual pleasure. As Kant sees it, when Burke argues that there is nothing more to beauty and sublimity than their corporeal manifestations, he in effect concedes that one must not expect of others that they will assent to the aesthetic judgments that we make; for about that everyone is justified in consulting only his own private sense. In that case, however, all criticism of taste also ceases entirely; for one would then have to make the example that others give by means of the contingent correspondence of their judgments into a command for assent from us, in opposition to which principle, however, we would presumably struggle. (CPJ, §29, p. 159; boldface in original)

The “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” with its central tenet of subjective universality, is, on this reading, Kant’s answer to Burke’s inadvertent taste skepticism. Kant outlines his solution in the second moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” Taste ceases to be taste—ceases to be aesthetic—if it must submit to objective proofs. But without a reference beyond the subject, judgment appears to be nothing more than liking. Kant deals with this problem by detaching the reference beyond the subject from the object being judged. As an a priori principle, it is literally prior to any investigation of the object’s qualities. If what she feels in the presence of a beautiful object is, properly, aesthetic pleasure (more on this below), the subject expects or demands an identical feeling of pleasure from anyone else who comes into contact with the object. This demand makes the judgment intersubjectively valid, but proleptically, in potentia. In this way, a universal postulate (“this is beautiful”) can remain merely subjective; if it were to be scrutinized for objective validity, it would cease to be an aesthetic judgment.10 Subjective universality is not, of course, Kant’s only innovation in the Third Critique. As Paul Guyer explains, when he introduces the idea of formal purposiveness in the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant does so in an “attempt to bring his abstract analysis of aesthetic response and judgment closer to the level of actual rules for criticism characteristic of his century by means of several formalist constraints on the objects of taste.”11 In other words, Kant tries here to fill in

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his account of the judging subject by deducing its complementary implications for objects, an effort aimed at redressing the tendency of Burke’s skepticism to overshoot its mark. The empirical position leaves no room for debate on matters of taste, which is to say, on the question of whether given objects belong under the heading “beautiful.” If the principle of subjective universality justifies such discussion—indeed, makes the possibility of agreement into a postulate for the validity of beauty as a concept—then, Kant seems to say, the discussion itself (What kind of objects are beautiful? In what does their beauty inhere?) should have a place in a theory of aesthetics. What is Kantian formalism? Form is, for Kant, the answer to a question about the communicability of aesthetic judgment. If, as he concludes in the second moment of judgments of taste, “that is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept” (CPJ, p. 104), what sort of objects can fit that description? In order to answer this question, however, we have to know what counts as pleasure—specifically, as aesthetic pleasure, as distinct from sensual pleasure (“this appeals to me”). And here we encounter an important but difficult idea, namely, that aesthetic pleasure belongs to cognition and yet must be uncontaminated by it—must be “without a concept.” Recall that Kant’s derivation of the aesthetic rests on a fundamental distinction between cognition and pleasure: To grasp a regular, purposive structure with one’s faculty of cognition . . . is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation with the sensation of satisfaction. Here [that is, in the latter case] the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life, under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which grounds an entirely special faculty for discriminating and judging that contributes nothing to cognition. (CPJ, §1, pp. 89–90)

This special faculty addresses itself to pleasure, a subjective sensation that helps us not at all to know or understand objects; for this reason, the aesthetic is opposed to the cognitive. What could it mean, then, to say that aesthetic pleasure—the pleasure we take in beauty—belongs to cognition? Aesthetic judgment (and the pleasure to which it corresponds) is characterized by the subject’s satisfaction in becoming cognizant of the activity of

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her own thinking mind. I have chosen an elliptical construction—a pleasure belonging to cognition—rather than simply speaking of cognitive pleasure in order to accommodate Kant’s distinction of aesthetic judgment from cognition. Aesthetic pleasure is not the satisfaction of having understood something but rather the awareness of one’s own mind as a complex of powers (understanding, imagination) that comes when an object (or, to be precise, a representation: the mind’s image of an object) activates those powers. On encountering an object she finds beautiful, the judging subject effectively objectifies her own thinking, taking her state of mind as the basis for the judgment. Kant describes this state of mind as the “free play of the faculties of cognition” (CPJ, §9, p. 103). The subject’s judgment of beauty is identical to her awareness, however inarticulate, of how it feels to think about the object—namely, that it feels pleasurable.12 It is difficult to describe this perceptual process without making misleading claims about its temporal unfolding. In this instance, I have artificially slowed the phenomenon into stages by speaking of the subject’s objectification of her own thinking as a basis for judgment. That characterization makes the judgment sound (inappropriately) as though it were formulated in a rational, cognitive deliberation. Addressing precisely this problem, Kant is obliged to point out that the subject becomes conscious of the free play of the faculties through sensation rather than cognition. After all, if she actually objectified her own thinking—made it into the object of a cognition—then she would have breached the conceptual quarantine Kant imposes on the aesthetic as a special faculty of judgment. The end of §9, where Kant makes this clarification, consists in nothing more than epistemological housekeeping, specifying how we know our own minds when it comes to judgments of beauty. Still, it matters that the restriction Kant makes there—we can only know beauty via sensation (how it feels to think about the object)13—does not mean that a judgment of beauty is therefore merely subjective. (If it did, we would be back in the territory of empirical psychology.) He is not talking about the sense data of how objects make us feel;14 the sense data in question is how it feels to think, how it feels to be made conscious of one’s own mental activity in a way that elides the particularity of whatever stimulated it. This is what Kant means in characterizing the aesthetic as the threshold of the peculiar category he calls “cognition in general” (CPJ, §9, p. 104). Indeed, the aesthetic is im152

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portant enough to form the basis of a third critique precisely because it provides an epistemological mode of access to this otherwise elusive idea.15 The pleasure associated with beauty is not just a cognitive pleasure; it is the pleasure of cognition tout court, the sense in which it is pleasurable to be a thinking mind. Even then, the pleasure associated with cognition in general meets the requirements of a transcendental aesthetics not for the reason that thinking feels good (though it may) but because it gives us an intuition of the basic framework of human consciousness. Guyer glosses Kant’s claim as follows: If a given pleasure can be attributed to the harmony of the faculties rather than to any mere sensation, interest, or other private condition, then it can be attributed to a condition which may indeed be presupposed in every person, as a mental state which may be expected to occur in others, at least under ideal conditions. Thus although aesthetic response can be neither produced nor inferred from the subsumption of an object under any determinate concept, it is linked to a universally valid state of our shared cognitive faculties, and hence is subject to a valid imputation to others.16

The kind of pleasure at stake in a judgment of beauty matters a great deal to the integrity of Kant’s analysis of beauty (and by “kind of pleasure” I mean not the quality of the sensation but the nature of its source).17 We may know beauty only by way of the senses, but what we sense when we render a judgment of beauty (the harmony of the faculties) transcends pleasure in any given object to touch on the shared architecture of human mindedness, the shape of thinking itself. How, then, is form involved in the relation between aesthetic pleasure and its communicability as entailed in §9? The question Kant seeks to answer as he moves from the second to the third moment of a judgment of taste is what gives rise to the free play of the cognitive powers, if that free play defines that which we may expect to please “universally” but “without a concept” (CPJ, p. 104). He cannot constrain his definition to any class of objects because any such definition would introduce concepts and hence endanger the purity of the aesthetic. Instead, he fashions a definition around the aspect of any object that presents itself to aesthetic judgment, namely, its form. Form imposes no restrictions on the kind of object that can be deemed beautiful, because all objects have form.18 However, objects also have other aspects and components that may obscure an 153

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observer’s perception of their form. Chief among these are matter and content, which the observer refers, respectively, to her senses or her understanding. Only form mediates between these (in the state of free play). However, the observer must engage in a certain kind of perceptual work—call it abstraction—in order to attain a view to form; she must meet the form of an object’s representation halfway. (One might even say she has to make it, insofar as it exists as a representation in and by virtue of her cognitive power of imagination.) Kant summarizes this process later in the text, explaining how formal abstraction becomes a test of the communicability of a judgment of beauty. The mechanism of communicability allows him to reconcile his theory with a nontechnical account of taste as common sense (sensus communis), i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment. Now this happens by one holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgments of others, and putting himself into the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that contingently attach to our own judging; which is in turn accomplished by leaving out as far as is possible everything in one’s representational state that is matter, i.e., sensation, and attending solely to the formal peculiarities of his representation or his representational state.19

The role of “everyone else” in a judgment of taste is not to weigh in after the fact—a referendum could only confirm an empirical account of beauty—but rather to be conjured as a projection of the judging subject, who discovers the free play of her own faculties by stripping from her apprehension of an object any personal feelings that those virtual others would not necessarily experience on being confronted with the same object. Formal abstraction is that stripping, understood as a habit of mind, a cognitive practice. It’s how we achieve the mental state of free play. Returning to the third moment, however, the situation turns out to be more complicated. Kant’s conception of form in §§10–12 has little to do with form as a property all objects manifest, an aspect of representation that can be isolated from matter by means of abstraction in the act of percep154

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tion. There, Kant occupies himself with the form of one thing (or, more precisely, of one idea) only, the form of purposiveness, which can be present to consciousness even while the particular purpose or purposes of an object remain, indeterminately, in a kind of suspension. He conceives of formal purposiveness as a minimal criterion objects must fulfill in order to be available to aesthetic judgment (it is “that in virtue of which objects are beautiful, and that in them to which aesthetic judgment is properly limited”), but without thereby determining those objects according to concepts.20 Kant’s discussion of formal purposiveness follows directly upon, and is entangled with, a discussion of the role of pleasure in aesthetic judgment. Compare the following two sentences: The consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject, for maintaining it in that state, can here designate in general what is called pleasure. (§10, p. 105) The consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject in the case of a representation through which an object is given is the pleasure itself. (§12, p. 107)

In each case, pleasure is equated with consciousness—specifically, consciousness of “merely formal purposiveness in the cognitive powers of the subject,” in the second case, which serves as a convenient gloss on “the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject,” in the first. This causality is distinguished from “the causality of a concept with regard to its object,” which would be objective purposiveness: that which determines an object to be what it is (§10, p. 105). Merely formal purposiveness, by contrast, is also called subjective purposiveness: the apparent determination of “a representation through which an object is given” to give rise to a subjective state of mind—in the case of beauty, the free play of the cognitive powers. When Kant runs the explanation in the other direction, it becomes a little clearer how subjective purposiveness is merely formal or, as he puts it in the passage below, is “the mere form of purposiveness” without regard to any particular purpose: Nothing other than the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object without any end (objective or subjective), consequently the mere form of purposiveness in the representation through which an object is

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given to us, insofar as we are conscious of it, can constitute the satisfaction that we judge, without a concept, to be universally communicable, and hence the determining ground of the judgment of taste. (CPJ, §11, p. 106)

(A subjective end, he explains, would be an interest in the object based on its agreeableness to sensory perception.) What remains unclear, however, is how or indeed why this “mere form,” of which we might become conscious as the cause of our state of mind, corresponds to the more familiar kinds of form we think of when we consider the various aspects of the objects of aesthetic judgment: form as opposed to content, on the one hand, and as opposed to matter, on the other.21 Kant makes the switch from one kind of form to the other in a parenthesis, without further remark: “yet charms are not only often included with beauty (which should properly concern merely form) as a contribution to the aesthetic universal satisfaction, but are even passed off as beauties in themselves” (§13, p. 108). There, he no longer seems to be specifying that beauty should concern merely the form of purposiveness, as confirmed in the following paragraph when he concludes that “a judgment of taste . . . which thus has for its determining ground merely the purposiveness of the form, is a pure judgment of taste” (§13, p. 108; my emphasis). He seems to mean that form, as opposed to “charm and emotion,” is purposive for the state of mind that grounds a pure judgment of taste, but, in that case, his terms have shifted. Furthermore, the section that follows contains the well-known distinction of form as “shape or play” from “the charm of colors or the agreeable tones of instruments” (§14, p. 110).22 This kind of form, “understood in ordinary spatiotemporal terms,” no longer bears a clear relation to the subjective purposiveness, consciousness of which constitutes aesthetic pleasure—or, if there is a clear relation, Kant does not explain it.23 There’s a sense, then, in which the invocation of form in the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” does not correspond to the account of form that emerges from it. Kant leaves an explanatory gap to be filled, giving rise to a host of questions. Is there a way to integrate purposiveness and spatiotemporal form? What does form have to do with ends—with purposes, that is, or purposiveness—anyhow? How does pleasure triangulate these concepts? What role might there be for the abstraction of form from matter and content? I am not going to attempt to solve

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these problems directly; rather, in the next section of this chapter, I jump to a later section of Kant’s text to inquire how some of these problems around the meaning of form and its relation to ends look from the perspective of artistic practice. If one meaning of “the form of purposiveness” is the mere appearance of purposiveness—referring to the object’s relation to a perceiving subject rather than to the object’s own purpose—then artistic practice churns up problems around knowledge and intentionality that further complicate the already complicated relations of form to matter, content, and pleasure.

Knowledge, Pleasure, Practice One way of understanding formal purposiveness is in terms of intentionality. Kant takes stock of this understanding in a footnote to the definition of beauty the third moment yields:24 It might be added as a counterexample to this definition that there are things in which one can see a purposive form without cognizing an end in them, e.g. the stone utensils often excavated from ancient burial mounds, which are equipped with a hole, as if for a handle, which, although they clearly betray by their shape a purposiveness the end of which one does not know, are nevertheless not declared to be beautiful on that account. Yet the fact that they are regarded as a work of art is already enough to require one to admit that one relates their shape to some sort of intention [Absicht] and to a determinate purpose. Here there is also no immediate satisfaction at all in their intuition. A flower, by contrast, e.g. a tulip, is held to be beautiful because a certain purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not related to any end at all. (CPJ, p. 120)

The point of this footnote is to insist that intentionality and purposiveness are not identical, at least for the purposes of aesthetic evaluation. Kant is describing a tool whose use is unknown. It’s true, he suggests, that this phenomenon—recognizing an object to have been designed as a tool, without knowing what the tool is for—bears comparison with the merely formal purposiveness that defines beauty. But this kind of recognizable intentionality is not sufficient to a judgment of beauty: such objects are “not declared to be beautiful on that account.” In the case of the tulip, the purposiveness that is sufficient to such a judgment is related to pleasure; it 157

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is subjectively purposive, directed only, it would seem, in the beholder’s experience of it, toward the activation of the free play of her faculties of cognition.25 I’m interested in the fact that Kant uses a nearly identical example (a prehistoric tool) later in the “Analytic,” in a way that reopens the question of form. But in that context, his focus has shifted from beauty to art. “If someone searching through a moorland bog finds, as sometimes happens, a piece of carved wood, he does not say that it is a product of nature, but of art; the cause that produced it conceived of an end, which the wood has to thank for its form [die hervorbringende Ursache desselben hat sich einen Zweck gedacht, dem dieses seine Form zu danken hat]” (CPJ, §43, p. 182). It doesn’t matter, here, whether the artifact is beautiful or not (and here it seems we are indeed dealing with the purposiveness of form rather than the mere form of purposiveness—which would conduce to beauty, whereas purposive form does not). What matters instead is that the form it takes is directly related, through art, to its end, however opaque that end is to the bog walker who finds it. The archaeological anecdote works in both instances because it meets the difficult dual criteria of an intentionality evident in the object’s form that is nevertheless unknown to its perceiver. But the later version underlines, through the use of a double personification, the difficulty art poses for Kant’s theory of beauty. The more conventional personification is that of the wood, indebted “for its form” to an end that is knowable, but unknown to the bog walker. The subtler and more telling personification is that of “the cause that produced” the artifact, which conceives of the end that gives the wood its form. The wood thanks; the cause thinks—the cause, not the human sculptor, though we know this carving is the action of a human and not of erosion or some other natural process. Art poses a difficulty for Kant’s theory of beauty because in order to be judged beautiful, according to his rules, an artwork must present itself to a beholder stripped of the intentionality it has to thank for its form.26 And where does this leave the artist, she who, presumably, conceives of the artwork as an end, whatever that end may be, psychologically or culturally speaking? The artist has to remain in a contradictory state, a state of unknowing—whence the personification of the hervorbringende Ursache, the cause that brings forth the artifact, a formulation that diverts the reader’s 158

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attention away from the end-conceiving capabilities of the person who carved the wood. Because of the quarantine on concepts that allows Kant to theorize pure judgments of taste, his discussion of art is a compendium of constraints on what artists can know about their own practice. He articulates the logic of constraint most directly in his account of purposiveness as a kind of crux or hinge linking nature to art, albeit—it appears—from the implicit standpoint of a beholder: In a product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the purposiveness of its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature. On this feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive powers, which must yet at the same time be purposive, rests that pleasure which is alone universally communicable though without being grounded on concepts. Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature. (CPJ, §45, p. 185)

We have already seen, in Addison, the paradoxical structure Kant describes here, wherein beautiful nature looks like art and beautiful art looks like nature. What Kant originates is the paradox’s logical underpinning in his account of the free play of the cognitive powers, the pleasure of which corresponds to its communicability (the common structure of human mindedness underwrites a correspondence among pleasure, communicability, and free play). Judgments of beauty manifest in subjective perception, specifically, how it feels to have one’s thoughts sustained by the nonconceptual contemplation of an object; aesthetic pleasure is how a certain kind of thinking feels. That feeling is a feeling of freedom that is nevertheless contained and directed by the sense of some end (purposiveness); purposiveness is a constraint that nevertheless feels free, like an artwork that might be mistaken for “a mere product of nature.” But there is, it seems to me, a built-in irony, in the sense that we know the situation to be other than what we perceive. What Kant describes in this passage is, after all, a gap between being and seeming (nature seems designed; the artwork seems organic, generated without adherence to rules or a plan). My question is whether this irony of art, the cloud of unknowing through or in which it must be enjoyed, extends to the artist. Can her own work seem to her like “a mere product of nature”? And if so, when exactly—that 159

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is, upon its completion, or in the process of its making? Is an artwork, according to Kant’s argument, ever beautiful—ever pleasing—to its maker? Could it be that a beautiful artwork is beautiful only to its beholders and not to its maker? For her, perhaps, the work is like a tool whose purpose she knows, but others do not; the artwork’s purpose, from her standpoint, is to please them. The problem with this reading is that Kant distinguishes beautiful from merely agreeable art along precisely these lines. Both are kinds of aesthetic art, which he distinguishes from mechanical art.27 But intentionality is again at stake in the way Kant elaborates on his own distinction between sensation (agreeable art) and cognition (beautiful art): “Agreeable arts are those which are aimed merely at enjoyment [Angenehme Künste sind die, welche bloß zum Genusse abgezweckt werden]” (§44, p. 184)—not that they produce merely enjoyment, but that enjoyment is wrapped up in their aim. “Beautiful art, by contrast, is a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication” (§44, p. 185). Again, as in the case of the wooden tool found in the bog, it is the art rather than the artist that “promotes the cultivation of the mental powers” by virtue of its reflexive purposiveness. In both cases, a human agent is written out of the scenario, but the grammar of that circumscription differs in each: the passive construction in the first hides the agent who aims her activity “at enjoyment,” whereas beautiful art becomes the subject of its own activity in the second. Or perhaps it is activity itself that is obscured in the repetition of the verb is: “Beautiful art . . . is a kind of representation that is purposive in itself,” implying that such art is given rather than made, or matters only, for the purposes of a critique of aesthetic judgment, as given. What cannot happen, in any case, is that the artist cannot conceive of a purpose for the work. My reading so far suggests that, insofar as art poses a problem for the consistency of Kant’s theory of beauty, his account of artistic practice is flawed. But that diagnosis seems neither useful nor terribly interesting. Instead, I’m interested in the way that the logically necessary omission of a fully articulated theory of artistic practice nevertheless allows for a web of implications to manifest in its place. My aim is to show what this web might look like, were we to look for it, and to speculate a bit on its integrity, aided by the example of Hogarth’s practical aesthetics. Kant’s theory of judgment 160

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does underwrite an account of artistic practice, but it’s an account that erupts through the cracks in his discussion of art. He carries the minimally personifying mode I have remarked on into §45, noting that “art always has a determinate intention of producing something [Nun hat Kunst jederzeit eine bestimmte Absicht etwas hervorzubringen]” (§45, p. 185). This instance seems especially ambivalent: whose intention is possessed by art? Is this in fact a personification, describing art as having an intention in the way that people have intentions, or is it possible that the artwork has (holds or manifests) the artist’s intention of producing something? Either way, the grammar and figurative logic of these moments, taken together, suggest that an artwork’s purposiveness diverges from the artist’s purpose. And one way to account for this divergence is to extrapolate some catalyzing effect of practice itself, the making that is obscured when judgment is theorized only from a beholder’s perspective that takes the artwork as given. The generation of purposiveness from an artist’s practice, rather than her conception of an end, also helps to explain the uncanny quality Kant conjures in his discussion of genius. Think again of the tulip: the artist’s position is not exactly like that of the botanist, who “knows what sort of a thing a flower is supposed to be,” namely, “the reproductive organ of the plant,” but brackets that knowledge “if he judges the flower by means of taste” (§16, p. 114). The kind of formal abstraction involved in Hogarth’s thought-experiment of the scooped-out shell may indeed be in play, and would mirror the botanist’s bracketing of his own knowledge about flowers, but the very willfulness of such abstraction means it is again insufficient for explaining how the judgment of beauty features in the making of beautiful art. Merely having a spatial form that can be abstracted in this way does not make an object beautiful; if it did, all objects would be beautiful if viewed under the aspect of abstract form. Instead, the artist’s position in regard to the work is more like that of nature itself in regard to the tulip. The botanist “recognizes [erkennt]” the flower’s “natural end [Naturzweck]” as a reproductive organ, but that recognition depends on the manifestation of that end, which in turn implies its formulation. The purpose of plant reproduction organizes the flower’s functional existence, but not, on Kant’s account, its beauty. By analogy, whatever the purpose for which an artwork is made—profit, decoration, persuasion, devotion, the list goes on—such beauty as it manifests is another 161

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purposiveness, a merely formal purposiveness, generated in the activity of making—a purposiveness of which the object, and not the agent, is somehow the author. Or rather, the maker’s process, which is bound to the object and to the history of such objects. At first glance, the comparison of the artist to nature itself may look peculiar, or grandiose. But Kant is explicit about it, and its stipulation from within the theory corresponds to the paradox that beautiful art “looks to us like nature.” What I will explore in the next few pages is how reading with the practitioner’s perspective in mind may help modulate the strangeness of the apparent demand that the artist not know anything about her own work’s purposiveness. Nature, after all, occupies a central position in Kant’s definition of genius: “Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (§46, p. 186). Kant states most directly the constraint on the artist’s knowledge of her own practice in his development of this idea, arguing that genius cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its products into being, but rather that it gives the rule as nature, and hence the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan, and to communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products. (CPJ, §46, p. 187)

Kant’s theory of judgment yields an account of what artists cannot do: describe, know, think up, plan, communicate.28 The understated outline of a theory of practice emerges most insistently in the following two sections, where Kant seems to grapple with the implications of his theory. What is it like to be the unwitting instrument of nature? How can a person make an artwork that is so totally alien to her thought process? How can this account of genius as uncanny comport with the cultural styles, traditions, histories of art making with which we are empirically familiar? He broaches the idea of practice itself taking a generative role when he needs to explain how nature might give a rule to art without that rule operating as a prescription and therefore a concept that determines the work. “The rule,” he writes, “must be abstracted from the deed, i.e. from the product, against which others may test their

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own talent, letting it serve them as a model not for copying but for imitation. How this is possible is difficult to explain” (§47, p. 188). There is something appealing about Kant owning up to the limits of his competence here. The difficulty he registers also, of course, recapitulates the artist’s inability to communicate rules for the production of beautiful artworks. Such communication is embodied not just in “the product” but also in “the deed [der Tat].” The language of practice as a kind of testing is echoed near the end of §48, in a passage I will examine in some detail by way of returning to the question of form. For here it is that form comes to trouble the neat analogy by which Kant organizes his account of artistic practice, where genius is to making as taste is to judging.29 And yet: taste has a role in making, too, and not a minor one. Form returns to preserve the quarantine around concepts. Kant opposes art to nature again, remarking that in judgments of beauty in nature, “the mere form without knowledge of the end pleases for itself in the judging” (§48, p. 190). This mere form only survives in art, he argues, as “the form of the presentation of a concept by means of which the latter is universally communicated” (§48, p. 191)— introducing a surprisingly conventional division of form from content. We already know, from the third moment of the “Analytic,” that the beautiful is defined as “the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end” (CPJ, p. 120). But in §48, the emphasis has moved from the act of perception, which seems able to bracket or disregard “the representation of an end” when that end is knowable (think of the botanist), to the act of artistic representation, in which form is redefined as a vehicle for concepts. This repurposing of form gives taste a role in representational practice, as attested in the continuation of the passage: To give this form to the product of beautiful art, however, requires merely taste, to which the artist, after he has practiced and corrected it by means of various examples of art or nature, holds up his work, and after many, often laborious attempts to satisfy it, finds the form that contents him; hence this is not as it were a matter of inspiration or a free swing of the mental powers, but a slow and indeed painstaking improvement, in order to let it become adequate to the thought and yet not detrimental to the freedom in the play of the mental powers. (§48, p. 191) 163

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[Diese Form aber dem Produkte der schönen Kunst zu geben, dazu wird bloß Geschmack erfordet, an welchem der Künstler, nachdem er ihn durch mancherlei Beispiele der Kunst oder der Natur geübt und berichtigt hat, sein Werk hält und nach manchen oft mühsamen Versuchen, denselben zu befriedigen diejenige Form findet, die ihm Genüge tut: daher diese nicht gleichsam eine Sache der Eingebung, oder eines freien Schwunges der Gemütskräfte, sondern einer langsamen und gar peinlichen Nachbesserung ist, um sie dem Gedanken angemessen und doch der Freiheit im Spiele derselben nicht nachteilig werden zu lassen.]

The claim that taste rather than genius produces that aspect of a beautiful artwork accountable for its beauty (namely, its form) comes as a surprise after the section’s opening alignment of genius with production and taste with judgment, attenuating, as it seems to do, any connection of genius with beauty. This claim is all the more surprising in light of all the work Kant has done up to this point to protect genius from contamination by concepts in order to defend art’s availability to aesthetic judgment, however impure. If, in the final analysis, genius corresponds to the conception of an artwork as opposed to its mere form, why do all that work to align it with the beautiful? It may be a shift in Kant’s argument, or an outlier moment; recall that in §43, the wooden tool in the bog has the conception of an end “to thank for its form,” while here, form is rigorously segregated from ends—which can’t be avoided, in art—in order to allow art to be beautiful.30 In my view, the shift from genius to taste and the concomitant discussion of form here registers the perspective of practice on the question of beauty. The passage represents an effort to come to grips with how genius works, that is, what habits and strategies the artist cultivates in order to get her work done, to get work made. It ventures an inside view of artistic labor to supplement and also correct for the distortion around the genius as uncanny, unknown to itself. The process Kant describes as, precisely, “laborious [mühsamen]” belies the identification of artistic practice with genius as an effortless channeling of some natural power. The language of effort, continuing with the assertion of “slow and indeed painstaking improvement [einer langsamen und gar peinlichen Nachbesserung],” hearkens back to Kant’s distinction of art from handicraft in §43, highlighting a subtle shade of meaning present in that discussion.31 164

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Art, Kant writes, “is regarded as if it could turn out purposively (be successful) only as play, i.e., an occupation that is agreeable in itself,” whereas handicraft “is regarded as labor, i.e., an occupation that is disagreeable (burdensome) in itself and is attractive only because of its effect (e.g., the remuneration), and hence as something that can be compulsorily imposed” (§43, p. 183). At first glance, this distinction along the lines of play and compulsion would seem to contradict what comes later in §48, where the artist engages in a slow and painstaking process in order “to give . . . form to the product of beautiful art.”32 What has the potential to resolve this apparent contradiction is another ironic gap between seeming and being, this one further resolvable into variant perspectives. For in §43, art “is regarded as if it could turn out purposively (be successful) only as play [Man sieht die erste so an, als ob sie nur als Spiel . . . zweckmäßig ausfallen (gelingen) könnte],” while craft “is regarded as labor [die zweite so, daß sie als Arbeit]” (my emphasis). The distinction between work and play is realized only under a certain aspect, a seeing-as or seeing-as-if, which ironizes the claim. Art is no more without compulsion than it is the product of nature. The section ends by acknowledging this irony, transgressing its own initial alignment of art with play, craft with compulsion, and in so doing looking ahead to §48 and its engagement of the practitioner’s perspective: It is not inadvisable to recall that in all liberal arts there is nevertheless required something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism, without which the spirit, which must be free in the art and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate (e.g. in the art of poetry, correctness and richness of diction as well as prosody and meter), since many modern teachers believe that they can best promote a liberal art if they remove all compulsion from it and transform it from labor into mere play. (CPJ, §43, p. 183)33

Clearly, in Kant’s view, the teachers are in the wrong, but this criticism underlines the illusory nature of the distinction he has just made, according to which art, unlike craft, is free from compulsory elements, from mechanism, from anything that makes it unfree. The essential point is that it is regarded as free, as play—not, presumably, by the artist herself, who toils to make the form adequate to her thought.

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But this irony has one more aspect to unfold, which is that the artist’s toil eventuates in his pleasure—not just the alleviation of a burden, but a feeling of satisfaction in the free play of his faculties as activated in the practice of art making. After all, the work of refining form in the making of art turns out to be, according to Kant, a judgment of taste. The artist recognizes the form he has made as “adequate to the thought” through a feeling of pleasure, just as the beholder recognizes beauty in the feeling of pleasure that attends the free play of her cognitive faculties. After having “practiced and corrected [geübt und berichtigt]” his taste in an imitative training that corresponds to the testing [prüfen] of talent against the rule abstracted “from the deed” in §47, the artist “finds the form that contents him [diejenige Form findet, die ihm Genüge tut]” through his “many, often laborious attempts.” Pleasure is the meeting point between the beholder’s judgment of an artwork as beautiful and the artist’s recognition of the beautiful form he makes, a pleasure that materializes out of the rigors of practice (the pains taken by the artist are converted into a “form that contents him” at last); beauty is the purposiveness generated in and through practice that diverges from the conception of an end with which the artist sets out. The association of art with play and freedom from constraint is only apparent—art too demands the kinds of constraint and compulsion that give structure to any product of human manufacture and design—but practice does, finally, come back around to vindicate the conjunction of beauty and pleasure and indeed to make that conjunction experientially available through rather than in spite of the work of art making.

Abstraction and the Pleasure of Form In the previous section, my reading of Kant reflects an underlying assumption that Hogarth’s approach to aesthetic judgment in The Analysis of Beauty might bring out a new aspect of Kant’s, insofar as the Critique of the Power of Judgment bears on questions of artistic practice. I begin from the observation that Hogarth, forty years before Kant, saw a connection between pleasure and thinking in relation to beauty, and here I return to abstraction as a crucial node in the array of ideas linking the faculties of cognition, pleasure, beauty, artistic practice, and, finally, form. 166

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In this chapter’s first section, I remarked on the discontinuity between the formal purposiveness Kant installs as the minimal criterion an object must fulfill in order to be considered beautiful, on the one hand, and the further attribution of that purposiveness to the form (shape or play) of the entity under consideration, on the other. According to Guyer, formal purposiveness is so general a notion that it cannot meaningfully develop or delimit Kant’s classification of the aesthetic, not least because the word formal is a little misleading, in this context.34 Kant uses it as a byword for what he elsewhere calls subjective purposiveness, which, of course, stands opposed to objective purposiveness. Formal purposiveness is “merely” formal in opposition to the determinacy implied in objective purposiveness, which can always be pinned down to the particular content of some purpose to be fulfilled in and by the object. Merely formal subjective purposiveness supposedly avoids this determination by referring only to the mental state of the subject. It stipulates nothing about the object of perception other than that it admits of being perceived; it is amenable to thinking.35 Form-as-shape, by contrast, is the property of an object. On Hogarth’s account, however, this property becomes aesthetically salient only in relation to a beholder and, further, through the activity of the beholder’s perception (in contrast to a passive model whereby perception merely registers a feature of the object). The eye’s movement through form gives rise to cognitive pleasure; the judgment of beauty is made on the basis of that pleasure. Hogarth describes the nature of that pleasure on analogy with the pleasure of pursuit: “Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful” (AB, p. 33). As I began to suggest in my discussion of this passage in Chapter 3, the salient issue in this conception of pleasure is the duration of the viewer’s attention.36 Kant makes a similar proposition when he defines “the pleasure in the aesthetic judgment” as “the consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject in the case of a representation through which an object is given . . . because it contains a determining ground of the activity of the subject with regard to the animation of its cognitive powers” (CPJ, §12, p. 107). As we have seen, the animation of the subject’s cognitive powers is precisely that which can be imputed to other subjects as a demand for universal assent. 167

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Pleasure, for Kant, amounts to consciousness of cognitive animation. His description, in §48, of an artist’s form-giving activity as the transfiguration of effort recalls Hogarth’s claim that to “the active mind,” even “every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and makes what would else be toil and labour, become sport and recreation” (AB, p. 32). And the pleasure so generated has, in both accounts, the epistemological function of helping us to recognize beauty.37 The subject conscious of the animation of her cognitive powers, when her mind is spurred into action, identifies beauty in the object as the occasion for the pleasure associated with its contemplation. According to Kant, this pleasure “has a causality in itself, namely that of maintaining the state of the representation of the mind and the occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim. We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself ” (CPJ, §12, p. 107). Sensual pleasure, by contrast, is periodically exhausted and so can only be iterated, which is why it gives rise to an interest in the object; the response requires the application of the stimulus (whereas pleasure belonging to cognition, because it reproduces itself, achieves a kind of disinterested autonomy).38 It is tempting to remark on Kant’s emphatic use of the evocative verb weilen (to linger), but the term’s essentially temporal orientation is consistent with Guyer’s claim that a functional (rather than a phenomenological) definition of pleasure is adequate to Kant’s purposes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. “A pleasurable state of mind,” Guyer concludes, “is simply any state of mind that one endeavors to preserve or renew,” so the free play of the cognitive powers pleases to the extent that it is “an engaging, self-sustaining form of mental activity, one which—subject to appropriate qualifications—we want to preserve or repeat independently of any other interests in or benefits expected from the object that produces this state.”39 The pleasure both Hogarth and Kant attribute to beauty involves the tendency of a state of mind (the free play of the faculties, as opposed to sensual fulfillment) to fuel its own continuation—which involves, in some sense, remaining unconsummated (remaining in pursuit). Such is the point of another of Hogarth’s proto-Kantian moments, at the end of chapter 6, “Of Quantity,” where Hogarth writes of the human face that “vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and the 168

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mind in constant play, in following the numberless turns of expression it is capable of ” (AB, p. 40). Beauty, according to Hogarth, does not “satiate” (as would, in his example, the sight of an unadorned naked body). The defining feature of aesthetic pleasure, for Hogarth and Kant alike, is a mind in continued pursuit, metonymically represented in Hogarth’s writing by an eye that has not yet finished roving over its object. How, then, might this revamped understanding of pleasure (as defined by cognitive activity and measured by duration) yield a differently inflected formalism, Kantian or otherwise? Importantly, it assigns a more active role to the judging subject (the beholder). By contrast to sensual satiety, “where the mind is passive,” aesthetic pleasure demands mental activity (and, arguably, nothing else: when the understanding settles on a determinate concept, when the imagination—the mind’s eye—rests, assured in its final apprehension of an object, free play has run its course).40 Why not, then, demystify form by aligning it with the mental activity requisite to a judgment of beauty? Beauty is what keeps you thinking in such a way that the thinking itself is pleasurable, and that pleasure reflects a fit between the world and the mind. Thinking one’s way beyond the accidental complex of appearances requires an exercise of the power of abstraction. When we reinterpret an object as a linear composition, we abstract its form from its matter and its content. Hogarth’s book is rife with thoughtexperiments that propose this kind of mental abstraction: understanding a picture as a series of points plotted on a grid or imagining oneself inside an object reconceived as a hollow shell in order to focus on its spatial contours. On this account, form as shape is more than just an accidental or conventional answer to the question, What property of an object is responsible for the beauty of its appearance? If aesthetic pleasure is the kind of thinking that continues to replenish itself—that is not used up in the formulation of an idea—then the pursuit of form by an effort of abstraction constitutes the orientation of the mind to the state of free play. Form as shape trains the mind away from the determinacy of ideas. Abstraction, therefore, simply is the self-sustaining mental activity that manifests as pleasure and forestalls the determination of the object by concepts. I am, in effect, proposing to reanalyze free play as a verb on the grounds that when we practice formal abstraction—when we attune our perception to spatial relationships—we invite the understanding and the 169

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imagination into the dynamic relation that, for Kant as for Hogarth, defines aesthetic pleasure. That reanalysis gives rise to an obvious problem, as I have already indicated in rejecting the implication that merely having an abstractable spatial form qualifies an object as beautiful. It would be obviously wrong to argue that any object at all, viewed under the aspect of abstract form, becomes therefore beautiful through the mere exercise of abstraction. If aesthetic pleasure and consequently judgments of beauty were the products of a certain kind of mental effort, then it would seem that they could attach to the formal or spatial aspect of any object whatsoever—indeed, of all objects, everywhere. I say this is obviously wrong, and yet it is true that the language of volition recurs in my account of practice, especially in terms like exercise, effort, and work. It cannot be right, then, to say that abstraction always amounts to or results in the free play of the faculties. But the free play of the faculties may yet thrive on abstraction, and it may be that abstraction helps dispose the mind to an awareness of beauty. (For this reason, it is, for Hogarth, a component of a visual pedagogy, oriented specifically to the cultivation of aesthetic pleasure.)41 It may even be right to say that while abstraction doesn’t always amount to free play, free play always involves some element of abstraction. After all, if the cognitive powers remain bound to determinate concepts, the unbounded thinking that makes free play free cannot take place. In his advocacy of this mental discipline of formal abstraction, Hogarth contributes to a richer understanding of Kant’s aesthetics. For Hogarth, abstraction serves technique in the practice of the arts but also in their evaluation. He does not aim to train all of his readers as professional or even amateur artists, but he does believe that coming to understand an artist’s virtual toolbox of perceptual maneuvers helps us all to see better, more precisely and more searchingly. This scope and precision depend upon abstraction because abstraction disabuses the mind of its entrenched habits of vision, its attachment to pat ideas about what it sees. Abstraction is the practice of discerning form-as-shape, seeing spatial relationships instead of conceptual entities. It is the discipline of unnaming objects. For this reason, the pursuit of form mimics the free play of the faculties, engaging the shift of aspect (content to form) to postpone the final capture of an object by the understanding. Formal abstraction may not always be 170

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free play, full stop, but its exercise multiplies the occasions for the subject to experience beauty by expanding her perceptual repertoire. Using this insight to read against the grain in the Third Critique, one might even say that art has a central rather than a peripheral or exceptional role in aesthetics to the extent that it trains the power of aesthetic judgment. For Kant as well as for Hogarth, the artist might be understood as she who models free play as a practice that can be cultivated. Thinking like an artist means exercising the perceptual capacity for formal abstraction. When we analyze the Kantian account of aesthetic form with the practitioner, instead of the spectator, in mind, we get a map of what might have been: an aesthetics that begins with art making as an exercise of the cognitive faculties in order to render up an account of the immersive pleasures of paying attention.

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In this book, I have argued that the development in the eighteenth century of a distinct field of inquiry that we now know as aesthetics was slow to produce a concept of form that now seems central to humanistic study. Because of my training and my institutional position, my approach to this argument is literary. I use methods of interpretation associated with literary texts—but the texts I spend the most time with in this book are not literary in the most familiar sense, not plays or novels or poems. And arguably, my focus on form as a problem is just as much a product of my literary orientation; we in literary studies have been arguing about form for years. (We seem never to tire of calling formalism “new,” or of declaring that form is over.) But our form problem does not necessarily define the other humanistic disciplines that fall under the domain of the aesthetic. Moreover, my literary orientation does not mean that the understanding of form that I develop in this book lends itself easily to literary use, integrally related as it is to the practice of the visual arts. Should it, though? More fundamentally: could it? In the last few pages of this book, I speculate a bit in response to these two questions.

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Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty offers a theory of how abstract spatial form produces visual pleasure. It does so, I argue, by means of the mental activity of abstraction, but a kind of abstraction specifically bound to material practice, best understood in terms of the techniques used to render form in space, chiefly in the activities of drawing and dancing. What I can’t find a literary analogue for is the idea that pleasure inheres in the activity of abstraction. In literary aesthetics, instead, we usually associate pleasure with particularity as opposed to abstraction, not necessarily particular content but particular relations between form and content—if it is indeed possible to generalize even that far. And I am, for the most part, content not to seek analogies between literary and visual aesthetics; why, in the name of formalisms new or old, should we mold our criticism into a sister-arts model? But Hogarth, it will be objected, was himself a profoundly literary artist, a narrative artist. He was committed to narrative structure and logic in his best-known works, the modern moral subjects—stories told across a succession of depicted moments, invested in meaning and in causes and their effects. For this reason, he seems a strange figure onto whom to project a formalist argument, still less one grounded in the idea of abstraction (if one were to understand abstraction as the opposite of figurative art). And yet, to carry this observation a little further, the commitment to meaning evident in his narrative artworks seems equally at odds with beauty, as a predominating aim, as it does with nonfigurative or nonrepresentational form. Hogarth’s artworks invite the beholder to interpret, not to admire, suggesting that the critical project of the Analysis was oblique to the artworks he produced. Still: is this disjunction between artworks and treatise sufficient to lay to rest the search for a Hogarthian theory of literary aesthetics? Why shouldn’t we at least try to imagine what it might look like to extend his argument in the Analysis into a literary domain? Hogarth’s literary affiliations manifest in three ways: in his own visual oeuvre, in particular the illustrations and the Progress series; in his influence on and adoption by writers in his own historical moment; and, less directly, in his uptake by literary scholars in the second half of the twentieth century as providing a visual cognate to major genres of the early eighteenth: satire and the realist novel. In order to think about the

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usefulness of Hogarth’s aesthetics for a critical account of literary practice, I will concentrate mainly on the second of these three possibilities. The eighteenth-century author most readily associated with Hogarth, and more specifically with The Analysis of Beauty, is Laurence Sterne.1 Sterne alludes to the Analysis more than once in Tristram Shandy, a novel whose prodigious inventiveness includes the use of visual and material effects to expand the expressive possibilities of the printed text.2 One such effect appears at the end of the novel’s sixth volume (published in 1762); there, five lines represent the first five volumes of the novel as a series of irregular trajectories, characterized by the spikes, blips, and other excrescences of Tristram’s narrative style. The ostensible aim for the volumes to follow is strict regularity in the form of a horizontal “drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler, (borrowed for that purpose) turning neither to the right hand nor the left.”3 This aspiration—for the narrative to flatline (to import a modern visual idiom)—threatens to undermine the whole enterprise of diagramming the novel’s plot. Of course the reader doesn’t wish for a narrative ironed into submission. Is Tristram’s self-disciplining practice of plot mapping, then, just a Sternean joke, showing how profoundly his narrator misunderstands and mismanages the project of telling his life’s story? Certainly its aim (to flatness) is ironic, but this irony does not necessarily debunk the visual analysis of narrative that Tristram employs as a means to his (impossible) end. What’s Sterne up to when he engages ironically with the limits of what words—more specifically, printed words—can express? Thomas Keymer observes that his “creative deformations of print conventions . . . all embody the same reminder, that, both as an object in its own right and as a representation of a fictional world, the novel rests on conventions and assumptions that, once visually or verbally realized, start to look shakily arcane.”4 In this play of conventions, neither the visual nor the verbal is capable of supplying what the other cannot convey, or of securing its meaning; depiction unsettles description and vice versa. Keymer notes how the “engraved plotlines” of volume 6, despite appearing to adopt Hogarth’s linear analysis of spatial form, simultaneously push him aside. Included in the diagram is Tristram’s signature, “ ‘Inv. T. S | Scul. T. S’ (6.40.570), as though to imply that the designer and engraver of the earlier plates (‘W. Hogarth inv.t . . . S. Ravenet Sculp.t’) have now been sacked.”5 174

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“Earlier plates” refer to Hogarth’s frontispiece images for the first two installments of the novel (the second edition, in 1760, of volumes 1 and 2, and the first edition, the following year, of volumes 3 and 4, respectively). W. B. Gerard comments extensively on the first of these, which depicts Trim reading a sermon to Walter, Uncle Toby, and the sleeping man-midwife, Slop, concluding that “Hogarth’s illustration presents literary and historical critics alike with a hall of mirrors, a nested reflexivity of originating text and picture that continually defies comprehensive analysis: the illustration must be considered in light of the text, which mysteriously seems to contain references to the illustration, and the picture, in turn, seems to refer to this referentiality.”6 The scene, included in the 1759 first edition, embeds an allusion to Hogarth in its absurdly, minutely precise description of Trim’s posture: “the foot of his left leg, the defect of which was no disadvantage to his attitude, advanced a little,—not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them;—his knee bent, but not that violently,—but so as to fall within the limit of the line of beauty.”7 If the description of Trim conjures a visual image in an ironic mode, forcing the reader to contend with the thousand words a picture is worth, the illustration opens a gap between the analysis of beauty and a judgment of beauty. Both the description and its visual realization are as ungainly as they ought to be, because the analytical attention paid to Trim is misapplied. Certainly the narrator’s lingering attention does not make him more beautiful. In this moment, words are more than sufficient to convey an image— more than sufficient, Sterne implies, because the image has no particular distinction to warrant its extensive particularization. Its visual analogue is less illustration than superimposition, a mode of depiction that obscures rather than illuminates. This stands in marked contrast to a later visual representation of—or perhaps by—Trim, the famous flourish of his stick in volume 9 (published in 1767). The line Trim traces in the air with his stick seems to echo, and arguably to vindicate, Tristram’s diagrammatic method of literary analysis in volume 6. Here too is a linear representation of an abstract idea (liberty or, as glossed in Tristram’s narration, celibacy)— though Trim’s line describes the shape of lived experience, not the shape of a story as it has been recorded in writing.8 Here again we seem to have arrived at a limit of what words can successfully convey—in this instance, a concept that can be denominated but might defy description (whereas 175

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Trim’s posture can be described, but its description serves no principle of utility or pleasure). But in contrast with Tristram’s plotlines in volume 6, Trim’s line has no normative counterpart to discipline its exuberance, no ostensible regression to a baseline. It is easy to encounter it in the spirit of the Analysis as unironically beautiful, pleasing to the eye that traces it and so engaging to the mind of the reader, and thereby supporting rather than undermining Trim’s thought. In the previous four paragraphs, I have attempted to catalog some instances, in Tristram Shandy, of what might be called narrative visualization, ranging from verbal description to linear notation. Sterne’s diverse strategies for visualization combine with his allusions to Hogarth to suggest this novel as a starting point for the literary uptake of Hogarth’s formalism.9 It is challenging to speak of Tristram Shandy as endorsing a unified critical approach not just because of Sterne’s irony but also because of the novel’s composite nature (serialization is another of Keymer’s themes). Trim’s flourish in volume 9 reflects on and enriches the reader’s understanding of Tristram’s plotlines in volume 6, just as Tristram’s signature (itself a flourish of sorts) complicates Sterne’s appeal to Hogarth’s authority in the description of Trim in volume 2, an appeal that extends beyond the narrative to generate the frontispiece engravings, after the fact, as another of the novel’s composite parts. Still, these varying modes of visualization, taken together, imply that verbal narrative can be—and perhaps ought to be—understood with reference to spatio-formal abstraction. This implication attaches most forcefully to the plotlines in volume 6, notwithstanding the satire directed at Tristram’s haplessness in seeking to flatten out his narration. This moment of metacommentary, after all, proposes a very specific relation among material texts, their fictional content, and their readers. The linear mapping of narrative implies a visual model for conceiving of literary form. An object of visual perception, the line is nevertheless different from letters and words. This difference registers the fact that literature is visually mediated and encountered, and yet is not exactly a visual medium (it is visually apprehended, not visually comprehended—except when it is aurally apprehended, which is a subject for a different book). What takes linear form is something about the text that escapes its literal materialization (by which I mean the letters on the page) and yet something that is 176

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ostensibly recognizable to a reader. Reflexively, the novel introjects its own formal analysis, its own visualization. This, I think, is a proposition we can make apropos of Sterne, Hogarth, and form without having to take a position on questions of irony or reflexivity. This proposition raises a further question, namely, what does visualization, as a mode of literary analysis, tell us about literary form? What makes Tristram Shandy so compelling for many readers as a literary-critical analogue for The Analysis of Beauty is its implication that form can be visualized—or rather, that that which can be visualized might be what we can define as form, what supports an understanding of narrative as having a formal aspect. And if beauty is recognized by means of the pleasure one takes in the perception of form, then this visualization of an only contingently visual medium—literature—allows for the extrapolation of a literary aesthetics from the logic of the Analysis: that the same sort of line might connect visual and narrative experience, might work as an interchange for the translation of spatial extension into temporal extension and vice versa. Read in this light, Sterne’s lines invoke Hogarth’s authority to support a pan-mediatic conception of spatial form. Further, Sterne’s endorsement of Hogarth projects back onto the Analysis the implication that Hogarth’s kind of formalism (its linear orientation, its articulation in terms of spatial abstraction) must extend to verbal narrative. What has gone missing from this conception of form as visualization, I wish to suggest, is practice. This is not a simple claim. My initial response to the argument that Sterne shows how an aesthetics of literary narrative follows from Hogarth’s theory is to note the conceptual challenge posed by visualization as a model for literary form. In a sense, this model corresponds to Caroline Levine’s and Nick Gaskill’s ideas about form: that anything that is understood as a thing (especially an intentional thing, a made thing, unified by design) can be analyzed in terms of its organization, its arrangement. But why should visualization be the standard for this kind of analysis? What kinds of formal arrangement might we miss when we approach literary artworks as diagrams waiting to be drawn? Is this model conceivably reversible? What would it mean to translate a visual object into literary form, to diagram it according to a linguistic rather than a spatial idiom? If this is hard to conceive of, then to what should we attribute that failure of reversibility? 177

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Recall, though, that the conception of practice with which I have been working is perceptual before it is material; the practice of formal abstraction is a habituation of vision, a way of seeing. It may be objected, therefore, that the difference between diagramming a painting—abstracting its spatial form from its referential content—and diagramming a narrative is one of degree rather than kind. Both are acts of translation; the abstracted linear form is not in the object. Rather, it is disentangled from, even lifted off, the object, like a study on a piece of tracing paper. The major difference is in the senses and faculties by which the original object is perceived. In The Analysis of Beauty, however, aesthetic pleasure inheres not in the form as such but in the activity of its abstraction. In the case of literature, the transposition across media—from words to spatially extended representations of their signification, at any scale: the sentence, the novel— makes a difference in this account of pleasure. It is certainly possible to visualize literary artworks, to plot them in space in a variety of notational idioms, but why would performing this abstraction be the source of a reader’s pleasure in the verbal medium—still less the writer’s pleasure? What does visualization have to do with the pleasure we might take in things made out of words? Tristram Shandy is a deceptive case because of its reflexivity; its mapping of narrative form is not a critical approach imposed from outside (think of structuralist diagrams of literary works) but part of the novel’s own expressive repertoire—not to mention, a technique generated from within the fictional world of the narrative. It appears, that is, analogous to the artist’s abstracting practice of seeing and drawing, abstracting the structural armature of the image as part of the process of rendering it. But it is not clear, in the case of the plotlines in volume 6, that their abstraction correlates with any pleasure on Tristram’s part—anxiety, more likely—while the line in the novel that does correlate with pleasure, the flourish of Trim’s stick, supplants language rather than translating it. It marks the spot where words fail; it is not, then, a visualization in the same sense. It makes visible on paper the movement of the stick in three-dimensional space rather than translating invisible verbal meaning into a visible, material shape. And to the extent that it does the latter, we cannot reverse the procedure; we cannot put words to it. That, it seems to me, is precisely the argument represented by its inclusion. 178

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The aesthetic part of practical aesthetics—what makes artistic practice relevant for judgments of beauty—is the pleasure to be taken in the activity of making. In Hogarth’s account, that pleasure is bound to the cognitive activity of formal abstraction. If we take Tristram Shandy to suggest that form is the common ground of visual and literary aesthetics on the understanding that form is that which can be visualized, then we disregard the lesson of the practitioner’s perspective. We ignore the idea that the pleasure of practice may be, at least in part, that which leaves no trace: the pleasure of a kind of thinking that doesn’t take material form in a realized work. We caught a surprising glimpse of this understanding of practice in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where Kant describes the artwork’s production and reception as irreconcilable and yet complementary in respect to the judgment of beauty: the activity of making seems free and pleasurable to the beholder, but constrained and laborious to the practitioner, who nevertheless judges the work’s completion by means of the pleasure she takes in its form (as opposed to its concept, which remains uncannily alien to her because it doesn’t appeal to the faculty of taste). The “Analytic of the Beautiful” is mostly indifferent to practice until we arrive at the sections on genius, with their speculative view from inside the activity of making—an account intriguingly at odds with Kant’s beholdercentered theory of aesthetic judgment. How might a writer, rather than a painter, express this view from inside the activity of practice? We have seen how Hogarth reaches outside the toolkit of his medium, using language to tell what cannot, on his account, be shown and thereby tapping into a kind of performative indirection to demonstrate the resistance of the perceptual techniques of the practitioner to visual manifestation. I have suggested that Sterne, by contrast, uses techniques of visualization to expose some limits of linguistic representation—but not necessarily with the aim, or the effect, of granting insight into the perspective of verbal practice, let alone literary aesthetics. For all of Sterne’s metacommentary on how novels or narratives or books or written texts work, his references to visual art in general and to Hogarth in particular do not seem to operate in a complementary vein; they do not, that is, afford insight into how a writer works, how the verbal medium resists the idea imposed on it and in that resistance generates the particular techniques that define the practice. 179

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I close this study with a glance at a literary text that more nearly approaches Hogarth’s practical aesthetics, or rather, the phenomenology of practice that anchors The Analysis of Beauty. In book 2 of The Task (1785), William Cowper takes seriously the practitioner’s pleasure in the activity of making by denying its expressibility. The practitioner’s pleasure makes the work but, he argues, does not make its way into the work; it does not convey to the reader. There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know. The shifts and turns, Th’ expedients and inventions multiform To which the mind resorts, in chace of terms Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win— T’arrest the fleeting images that fill The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, And force them sit ’till he has pencil’d off A faithful likeness of the forms he views: Then to dispose his copies with such art That each may find its most propitious light, And shine by situation, hardly less Than by the labor and the skill it cost, Are occupations of the poet’s mind So pleasing, and that steal away the thought With such address from themes of sad import, That lost in his own musings, happy man! He feels th’ anxieties of life, denied Their wonted entertainment, all retire, Such joy has he that sings. But ah! Not such, Or seldom such, the hearers of his song. Fastidious, or else listless, or perhaps Aware of nothing arduous in a task They never undertook, they little note The dangers or escapes, and haply find There least amusement where he found the most.10 Like Kant, Cowper suggests that the practitioner’s pleasure is not accidentally but rather integrally connected to labor and difficulty; the 180

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pleasure he describes is a pleasure the poet takes “in poetic pains,” not in spite of those pains (recall that Kant describes the process of perfecting the form of an artwork as an incremental labor of “painstaking improvement [peinlichen Nachbesserung]” that eventuates in a feeling of contentment at the achievement of a fit between form and content). Like Hogarth, Cowper figures artistic practice as a kind of pursuit, a “chace.” And yet he figures verbal composition metaphorically, by likening it to drawing. This metaphor marks a failure of translation across media; how, after all, is finding an apt word like capturing on paper the contours of a mental image? The metaphor is itself a species of visualization, one that traces the limits of different media and modes of perception: it compares an invisible process to a visible, and visual, one. The grammar of the passage is also worth remarking on. The long central sentence enacts the ease with which a stated concern for the pleasure of practice is forgotten, absorbed into the effort of describing practice, giving shape to an elusive process. The first three and a half lines of the sentence, before the dash, seem to meander into a dead end of sense or syntax or both; here, perhaps, is a failed chase, an instance of the coyness the speaker laments. The initial list of nouns (“shifts and turns . . . expedients and inventions”) exhausts itself in a relative clause rather than finding its verb. Instead, the speaker reboots the sentence after the dash, replacing the nouns with a series of infinitive verbs (“t’arrest . . . and hold . . . and force . . . then to dispose”) comprised in the predicate nominative “occupations.” Can the speaker be lamenting the coyness of the apt terms, though, either in itself or for hijacking the grammar of his sentence? His point, after all, seems to be that the difficulty of composition is its pleasure. But the sentence struggles to keep its focus on this thought, sidetracked first into relative clause and then into metaphor before the speaker recollects, in line 299, that the pleasure of the activities of composition was to be his subject, not the activities themselves. And even then the pleasure, unlike the activities themselves, threatens to evade description altogether. It is asserted in an apostrophe (“happy man!”) but described negatively: thought is diverted from sadness, anxieties are denied (even more precisely, they are “denied / Their wonted entertainment”— so that the language of pleasure is associated, in the passage, with personified anxieties rather than the poet himself who, however happy he may 181

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be, is also “lost”—or is only happy on account of being lost, having abandoned himself in his work). “Such joy has he that sings”: such joy, it seems, as defies description, joy that we the readers must take on faith. The poem tells us, rather sadistically, that this joy is not ours to feel. But that’s not quite right, for the poem doesn’t tell us anything in this passage; the speaker refuses to address the reader. The “hearers” are spoken of as though they—we—are not privy to the expression of this sentiment, as though we are not here at all, and therein lies the sadism. And yet here we are undertaking not just “a task” (l. 307) but The Task. It seems worth remarking that I am discussing only the passage’s content, not the poem’s form. The message, as I see it, of the lines themselves and of the withheld address is a stubborn insistence that the “pleasure in poetic pains” does not manifest in the poem, no matter how much we may wish for it to. This to me seems very much in the spirit of Hogarth’s Analysis: if a reader or beholder hopes to experience beauty from the standpoint of a practitioner, she has to think like a practitioner; she has to meet the artist halfway.

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Author’s Note 1. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (1753; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 33. Henceforth abbreviated AB and cited parenthetically.

Introduction 1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 299. 2. A structure of parts that conveys pain, a.k.a. deformity, is the opposite of a form that produces pleasure, a.k.a. beauty. There’s a potential circularity here; even as Hume avoids the redundant phrasing “deformity is a form, which conveys pain,” his definition skirts the complementary implication that form is, itself, beauty. That which produces pain is deformed; that which produces pleasure is formed. 3. “Nicht, was in der Empfindung vernügt, sondern bloß was durch seine Form gefällt, den Grund aller Anlage für den Geschmack ausmacht.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (2nd ed., 1793; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §14, p. 110. When I include the German text in parentheses or, as here, in a note, I refer to the Academy edition: Kritik der Urtheilskraft, vol. 5 of Kants gesammelte Schriften, Herausgegeben von der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2nd ed. (Berlin:

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Georg Reimer, 1913). In accordance with standard practice, Guyer and Matthews provide page-number references to this edition in the margins of their translation. 4. Ibid., §13, p. 108. 5. Paul Guyer makes a similar point about Hume’s understanding of beauty in the Treatise. Quoting Hume, he begins: “ ‘Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.’ However, Hume immediately undercuts the suggestion that we respond only to purely formal features of the ‘order and construction of parts,’ such as Hutcheson’s ‘uniformity amidst variety,’ with examples that suggest that we respond with pleasure and pain to a range of associations that we make with those formal features, or interpretations that we place upon them.” He goes on to conclude that, for Hume, “the imagination plays a central role in aesthetic response, as the source of associations and appearances that cannot be directly equated with the mere order and structure of the parts of the objects” (Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 1:130, 131). See also Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 51–53. 6. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” The Poems of Alexander Pope, A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 155, l. 365. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically by line number. 7. Content—scanned as an iamb, glossed as “satisfied”—appears again at line 741: “Content, if hence th’unlearn’d their wants may view.” 8. Another literary category that often goes by the name of form, one that Pope seems notably uninterested in, is genre. Despite the talk of part and whole in the lines that set up the decorum passage, the essay is not a taxonomy of genres, still less an anatomy of criticism. It doesn’t deal with form in the sense that some use it to refer to kinds or species of literary text. The identification of “the Whole” with “the Writer’s End” shows, or at least suggests, that Pope seeks not so much a theory of literature, in which form and forms would index, respectively, literature’s essence and function, as a standard of judgment. In the “Essay on Criticism,” the standard is explicitly intentionalist: “A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit / With the same Spirit that its author writ” (233–34) and “Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see, / Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be. / In ev’ry Work regard the Writer’s End, / Since none can compass more than they Intend” (253–56). It’s the writer’s end that matters to Pope, not the generic category to which the text belongs. Expressive decorum is one criterion indicating the achievement of that end. 9. Once we begin reading for form v. by contrast with form n., it seems to surface everywhere. Case in point: in Hume’s “Of beauty and deformity” chapter, form v. appears four times; form n. twice. Counting instances of “deformity” would tip this balance in the other direction, to be sure—though at the same time, deformity’s keyword status in the chapter seems only to draw attention to the frequency and inflection of its root, as in the following extract: “If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been form’d either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity,

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we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness” (Hume, Treatise, p. 299). 10. Ronald Paulson also draws attention to Hogarth’s divergence from the consensus around disinterestedness, but he emphasizes interestedness as desire over and above interestedness as purpose (end-directedness) grounded in activity and, more specifically, vocation. See Paulson, Art and Politics, 1750–1764, vol. 3 of Hogarth (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 74–75. 11. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 12. Some recent studies in this vein include Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 13. See, for instance, Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700– 1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), Carol Gisbon-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 14. “If every particular Idea that we take in, should have a distinct Name, Names must be endless. To prevent this, the Mind makes the particular Ideas, received from particular Objects, to become general; which is done by considering them as they are in the mind such Appearances, separate from all other Existences, and the circumstances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other concomitant Ideas. This is called ABSTRACTION, whereby Ideas taken from particular Beings, become Representatives of all of the same kind” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], II.xi.§9, p. 159). 15. See Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 16. For an intellectual history that connects nonrepresentational art of the twentieth century with an eighteenth-century understanding of abstraction as generalization, see Charles A. Cramer, Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006). 17. On images whose primary function is to represent processes or ideas rather than objects (and on the importance of such images in eighteenth-century Europe), see John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 18. See AB, p. 4.

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19. James Grantham Turner, “ ‘A Wanton Kind of Chace’: Display as Procurement in A Harlot’s Progress and Its Reception,” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 40. 20. On Hogarth and the phenomenology of vision, see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 26–27. 21. Hogarth, “The Autobiographical Notes,” The Analysis of Beauty, with the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 204. 22. Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 145. 23. Ibid., p. 146. 24. BL Eg. MS 3011, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 168. 25. BL Eg. MS 3013, in ibid., p. 181. 26. Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, p. 26. Later, she elaborates, remarking that “the most common theme in the artistes’ rhetoric about other artisans was their blind attachment to routine” (p. 153). 27. Add. MS 27992, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 191. 28. Ibid., p. 192. 29. And yet: this analogy turns once again into a “discriminating motif ” in the published text, in a passage in which the “mechanick at his Loom” becomes an avatar for the idea of inarticulate expertise: knowledge that, by virtue of being embodied, cannot be verbalized. For further discussion of this passage, see chapter 3 (ibid., pp. 117–19). Ultimately, what interests me is the instability of Hogarth’s thinking on the correlation of embodied knowledge and verbal articulation. 30. See John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 31. Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, p. 147. 32. James Noggle does evaluate new formalism in relation to the eighteenth-century conception of aesthetics as a theory of taste, though his reflection on form as a concept remains focused on the formalist tendencies of his own critical approach rather than the possible meanings of form in the eighteenth century. See James Noggle, The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 204–11. 33. Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122.2 (March 2007): 559. What Levinson calls “backlash new formalism” is defined, on her view, by its commitment to form “regarded as the condition of aesthetic experience as traced to Kant”; further, “it assigns to the aesthetic norm-setting work that is cognitive and affective and therefore also cultural-political.” 34. Whitney Davis issues a persuasive challenge to this claim to methodological rigor in his investigation of art-historical formalism. See Whitney Davis, “What is Formalism?,” chapter 3 of A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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35. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, Noggle rejects the idea that a taste-centered conception of the aesthetic “can be meaningfully separated from those things typically seen as oppressive about aesthetic ideology—the bourgeois cultural mentality, class distinction and domination, the hegemonic projects of the Enlightenment” (Noggle, The Temporality of Taste, p. 206). See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 36. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19. 37. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 3. 38. Several of the essays in a PMLA forum bringing together responses to Levine’s book make important points along these lines. Anahid Nersessian elegantly parses the “powerfully syntactic,” even syllogistic, nature of Levine’s conjunction of form, order, and politics (Anahid Nersessian, “What Is the New Redistribution?,” PMLA 132.5 [Oct. 2017]: 1222). Michael Clune identifies a similar kind of interpretive closure in the generalizing tendency of Levine’s account of form, arguing that the purchase of her brand of formalism on phenomena outside of literature comes at the cost of form itself in its literary guise: “the forms on which her argument hinges are not forms at all but ideas” (Michael Clune, “Formalism as the Fear of Ideas,” PMLA 132.5: 1194). (Levine anticipates this criticism when she notes in her book that her method reverses Hayden White’s: “rather than hunting for the buried content of the form, I propose here to track the forms of the content” [Levine, Forms, p. 16].) Sandra Macpherson doubts the efficacy of Levine’s political claims, observing how those claims are grounded on a depreciation of merely aesthetic experience to which literarycritical methodologies owe their existence (Sandra Macpherson, “The Political Fallacy,” PMLA 132.5: 1214–19). And Langdon Hammer brings these political questions back around to their disciplinary and institutional context, suggesting that Levine’s ultimate indifference to literary form—breezing past it on her way to the formal lineaments of social experience—undermines her argument for the portability of literary method: “The idea of doing political work in the world by imagining ‘thoughtful relations among forms’ is a disciplinary fantasy of empowerment that reflects the continuing crisis conditions of our profession and the resulting demand for literary scholarship to do more than it is commonly supposed to do. A side effect is to minimize the activity and interest of literary authors” (Langdon Hammer, “Fantastic Forms,” PMLA 132.5: 1204). 39. Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Spring 2017): 652. This essay, like Levine’s book, prompted its own forum of responses in a subsequent number of the journal (44 [Autumn 2017]). 40. Kramnick and Nersessian sound not unlike Leighton or Levine when they write that the history of literary study “includes the frequent and indelible use of what critics have variously identified as form, in a manner that is usually inseparable from the explanatory work of reading or argument or interpretation. Form is just particularly rich with

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respect to its yield because it is caught up in and founds so much of the competence required by the discipline itself ” (ibid.). 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. On the history of the term, see Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, pp. 1–3. Noggle comments on the late adoption of the word into English while arguing for a more rigorous conceptual distinction of the taste tradition from the later development of aesthetics in a Kantian vein; see Noggle, The Temporality of Taste, p. 18. Important accounts of the specific relation between taste and the aesthetic include Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 44. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §46, p. 187. 45. G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 46. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt frames the problem this way: “Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be ‘made,’ that is, written down and transformed into a thing among things” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 170). Arendt correlates orality with the transparency of thought, writing with thingly materiality; she describes music and poetry as “the least ‘materialistic’ of the arts because their ‘material’ consists of sounds and words” (p. 169). One might query the notion that sound is immaterial, and that therefore only the written word is a material thing. But even apart from the matter of sound, and on that basis the grouping-together of music and poetry, it remains possible to ask whether and how it makes sense to think of language as the matter of thought.

Chapter 1. “A Rough Unsightly Sketch” 1. Of course, “aesthetic experience” would be an anachronism, as both a term and a concept. The word “aesthetic” came into modern use with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the 1740s and 1750s; see, for instance, Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3, on the history of the term’s adoption into, first, German and, later, English. But even the concept of the aesthetic as a category of experience rather than a class of objects is an effect of the shift I’m describing. Jerome Stolnitz notes that “ ‘aesthetic experience’ provides the conceptual generality and unity which was lacking in earlier thought,” a unity leveraged on the category of experience as, necessarily, subjective—indeed, constituting subjectivity as empiricism understands it. That unity is manifest in part in the way aesthetic experience gathers nature into its purview: “natural

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objects have comparable effects” on their viewers as paintings and poems do, so “nature is, in respect of its aesthetic worth, grouped together with the fine arts and studied along with them” (Jerome Stolnitz, “ ‘Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22.2 [Spring 1961]: 188). Stolnitz’s article is an important statement of the principle that aesthetics coincides with an inward turn in philosophy, a turn from objects to perceiving subjects (see, for instance, “ ‘Beauty,’ ” pp. 194, 200). Michael McKeon cites Stolnitz to ground his assertion that eighteenth-century aesthetics is distinguished by its “concern not, as traditionally, with the nature of the beautiful object but with the singular way we know it: with our perception of, our somatic response to, and our subjective attitude toward, aspects of experience that we deem aesthetic” (Michael McKeon, “The Dramatic Aesthetic and the Model of Scientific Method in Britain, 1600–1800,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel, vols. 6–7, ed. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice [New York: AMS Press, 2009], p. 198). In an article that develops the central insight of McKeon’s essay in a somewhat different direction, Sean Silver concurs in defining aesthetics in terms of a turn away from objects: “David Hume and Edmund Burke, as theorists of taste in its cultural sense, were consciously working in a post-Lockean tradition which turns away from the objects of its own contemplation as part of its foundational gesture. . . . empiricism, in its foundational moments, is a study not of some valorized world out there, but of what is knowable within its rigorously acknowledged epistemological ambit” (Sean Silver, “Locke’s Pineapple and the History of Taste,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 49.1 [Spring 2008]: 51). Silver coincides with McKeon in bringing together the inception of aesthetics with the history of science and, more specifically, with empiricist epistemology. As McKeon claims, “the guiding principle by which the aesthetic was separated out in this fashion is epistemological”—that is, separated out as “an autonomous discipline” both indebted and opposed to the empiricist tradition that also spawned the scientific method (p. 197). For his part, Silver observes that “inasmuch as empirical science and aesthetic criticism partly depend for their rhetorical force on disavowing the mutuality of their vocabularies, they are partly depending on a mutual misrecognition of their own shared historical roots” (p. 44). 2. “When he announced the ‘Pleasures,’ Addison promised to offer more than the ‘Mechanical rules’ of criticism and rather ‘shew . . . the several Sources of that Pleasure which rises in the Mind upon the Perusal of a noble Work’ (#409, 3:530). . . . Aesthetics is a method of self-knowledge” (Scott Black, “Addison’s Aesthetics of Novelty,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 [2001]: 273). See also Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, p. 2. 3. Peter Kivy, “The Logic of Taste: The First Fifty Years,” The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 240, originally published in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and Richard Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 626–42. The claim for inaugural status is hedged somewhat in Kivy’s phrasing; he writes that “most philosophers who worry about such things seem to agree . . . that Addison’s Spectator papers On the Pleasures of the Imagination is the inaugural work, if any single work is.” He does not, however, elaborate

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on any alternative views in that essay. Elsewhere, he disqualifies the other obvious contender, Shaftesbury, writing that “the most prominent feature of Shaftesbury’s early theorizing with regard to the aesthetic and moral sense, however, is the lack of a feature: there is no theory of critical judgment at all. Nowhere in the Inquiry does Shaftesbury refer to a faculty of artistic judgment or a faculty of judgment whose object is natural beauty, nor is there any significant discussion of critical theory” (p. 17). Despite later forays by Shaftesbury into what Kivy calls critical theory (we would now, I think, call it simply criticism), Kivy argues that the protagonist of his narrative, Francis Hutcheson, calls on “Shaftesbury the moralist” rather than Shaftesbury “the aesthetician” (or critic) as source and authority for his 1725 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (ibid., p. 25). 4. Mary Helen McMurran, in this vein, argues that Enlightenment antiformalism can’t do without some version of the concept of form that it deplores: “For Aristotle, the object is in one’s mind as form without its matter or material attributes. We come to know forms by a process of abstracting the object from these particulars. In this way, the mental form relates essentially to the object, and the act of cognition is no less than an identity with or becoming of the forms of things in the mind. . . . Later, the empiricists developed the causal thesis by claiming that objects make impressions on a tabula rasa and that the subsequent ideas are not forms in the mind, but resemblances of objects’ qualities. This empiricist view negates the principle of form, but replaces it with the mental imprint” (Mary Helen McMurran, Introduction to Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. McMurran and Alison Conway [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016], p. 6). McMurran continues, “I am not arguing that form endures, but rather that the early modern philosophers who wish to evacuate its scholastic meaning substitute other terms that we now recognize as synonymous with form” (p. 7). Her appeal to current usage—“terms we now recognize”—risks minimizing the conceptual content of those early modern objections, collapsing conceptual differences into mere terminological distinctions. 5. Sean Silver invokes Bruno Latour’s identification of competing empiricisms, arguing that the “new” empiricism Latour calls for is ultimately not so far from Locke’s epistemological empiricism and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century affiliates. See Silver, “Locke’s Pineapple and the History of Taste,” pp. 43–44. 6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.xxiii.§3, p. 297. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 7. This account of qualities has a great deal in common with Caroline Levine’s use of the term affordances in her recent book on literary form. She adopts the vocabulary of design studies, advancing the idea that there’s little point talking about what something is apart from what can be done with it. See Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 6–11. 8. Joseph Addison, Spectator 412 (23 June 1712), in Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:542. Subsequent citations are to this edition.

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9. A primary quality Locke conceives to be actually present in the object, and therefore identical to a perceiver’s idea of it; these ideas include “Solidity, Extension, Figure, Motion, or Rest, and Number” (II.viii.§§9–10, p. 135). Of secondary qualities, by contrast, he cautions that “whatever reality we, by mistake, attribute to them, are in truth nothing in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensations in us, and depend on those primary Qualities, viz. Bulk, Figure, Texture, and Motion of parts; as I have said. From whence I think it is easie to draw this Observation, That the Ideas of primary Qualities of Bodies, are Resemblances of them, and their Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves; but the Ideas, produced in us by these Secondary Qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our Ideas, existing in the Bodies themselves” (II.viii.§§14–15, p. 137). 10. Addison, Spectator 413 (24 June 1712), 3:544–45. 11. At the same time, it has not escaped my notice that a proscription on form-talk still allows for the use of derivatives like “deformity” and “conformity.” In the case of “deformity,” an important term in the early British aesthetic tradition, I believe its use implies the synonymy of its opposite—beauty—with form, and therefore a normative rather than descriptive use of the term. 12. For his part, Locke defines beauty as a complex mode “consisting of a certain composition of Colour and Figure, causing delight in the Beholder” (II.xii.§5, p. 165). 13. Addison, Spectator 413 (24 June 1712), 3:546–47. 14. Ibid., 3:547. As Locke puts it, “the Ideas of primary Qualities of Bodies, are Resemblances of them, and their Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves; but the Ideas, produced in us by these Secondary Qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our Ideas, existing in the Bodies themselves” (II.viii.§§14–15, p. 137). 15. Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), 3:537. 16. Ibid., 535–36. His conclusion is false, of course; the sense of feeling cannot convey “all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours.” Depiction in two dimensions would elude perception by touch, as would effects of light, for instance. Addison acknowledges this later in the series, comparing sculpture to painting: “let one who is born Blind take an Image in his Hands, and trace out with his Fingers the different Furrows and Impressions of the Chissel, and he will easily conceive how the Shape of a Man, or Beast, may be represented by it; but should he draw his Hand over a Picture, where all is smooth and uniform, he would never be able to imagine how the several Prominencies and Depressions of a human Body could be shewn on a plain Piece of Canvas, that has in it no Unevenness or Irregularity” (Addison, Spectator 416 [27 June 1712], 3:559). 17. Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), 3:536, 3:537. 18. Addison, Spectator 409 (19 June 1712), 3:530. 19. Locke, Essay, II.viii.§§14–15, p. 137. In framing the matter thus, Addison again mistakes Locke’s point, which is not that touch grants an epistemological certainty unavailable to sight; the possibility of an epistemological relation between these two senses is what’s at stake, and indeed what’s ultimately denied, in the various debates around Molyneux’s question. As Neil Chudgar has argued, however, the imagined relation of

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touch to sight maintains a hold even on Enlightenment skepticism, which “establishes the limits of its own epistemological competence . . . by grounding the purity of its vision on the blind certainty of touch” (Neil Chudgar, “The Sense of Touch in Augustan Letters” [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, August 2009], p. 26). At the limit of epistemology, that is, tactile experience is imagined as the threshold of ontology: “While vision gives us knowledge and metaphors for knowledge, we need the sense of touch to convince us that, despite our modern skepticism about the grounds of certainty, there is something in particular to know” (ibid., p. 28). On Molyneux’s question, see Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch, and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chapter 1; and Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 147–55. 20. On Addison and “tactile vision,” see also Kramnick, “Presence of Mind: An Ecology of Perception in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter, p. 52. 21. Black, “Addison’s Aesthetics of Novelty,” pp. 273–74. 22. See, for instance, Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19. 23. Levine, Forms, p. 2. 24. Levine, for her part, echoes this attenuation, but in her articulation, it’s a general truth; “all of the historical uses of the term, despite their richness and variety, do share a common definition: ‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Forms, p. 3). 25. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 100. 26. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, pp. 57–58. 27. “The Figures that excite in us the Ideas of Beauty, seem to be those in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety” (Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold [1725; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004], p. 28; cited parenthetically in the remainder of this chapter). 28. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, p. 59. 29. Ibid., p. 60. 30. It’s worth noting Kivy’s insistence that Hutcheson considers beauty itself, as distinct from its objective cause, to be a simple idea: “In sum, then, Hutcheson believed that the word ‘beauty’ refers to a simple, pleasurable sensation or idea, which is produced in us by an ‘internal’ or (in later writings) ‘reflex’ or ‘subsequent’ sense. The ‘objects’ which stimulate this sense to produce the simple idea or sensation are complex objects—complex ideas, in fact—which possess uniformity amidst variety, the Lockean ‘power’ that produces the sensation of beauty, the way the powers of primary qualities produce ideas of the secondary ones” (Kivy, “Hutcheson’s Idea of Beauty: Simple or Complex?,” The Seventh Sense, p. 265; originally published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50.3 [Summer 1992]: 243–45).

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31. Ibid., 61. 32. For a glimpse of what Hutchesonian formalism looks like when remade as a central tenet of aesthetics, we need look no further than §14 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” Speaking of the normally merely sensory pleasures afforded by tone and color, Kant makes an exception; in cases when “the mind does not merely perceive, by sense, their effect on the animation of the organ, but also, through reflection, perceives the regular play of the impressions (hence the form in the combination of different representations) (about which I have very little doubt), then colors and tones would not be mere sensations, but would already be a formal determination of the unity of a manifold of them, and in that case could also be counted as beauties in themselves” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews [2nd ed., 1793; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], §14, p. 109). Kant’s “unity of a manifold” is here quite close to Hutcheson’s “unity amidst variety.” And indeed Hutcheson’s invocation of figure and time as the objective qualities pertinent to aesthetic perception bears comparison with Kant’s nonpluralistic definition of the kind of form that counts in a pure judgment of taste: “All form of the objects of the senses (of the outer as well as, mediately, the inner) is either shape or play: in the latter case, either play of shapes (in space, mime, and dance), or mere play of sensations (in time)” (p. 110; boldface in original). 33. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, p. 61. 34. Ibid., p. 76. Kivy reformulates this claim in a later essay: “there is nothing in Hutcheson’s account which in any way explicitly connects unity amidst variety with the notions of correctness or justification: merely with normality. Someone who calls X beautiful, in spite of the fact that X does not possess unity amidst variety, may be abnormal—but not mistaken. Having unity amidst variety may be good evidence of X’s being beautiful, but it is neither the necessary nor sufficient condition for its being so” (Kivy, “The Logic of Taste: Reid and the Second Fifty Years,” The Seventh Sense, p. 313; originally published in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp [Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs, 1976]). 35. Addison, Spectator 413 (24 June 1712), 3:544–45. 36. Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), p. 6. 37. Ibid., p. 17. 38. Ibid., p. 2. For a fuller elaboration of Boyle’s challenge to Aristotelianism, see pp. 29–30, where Thompson also notes that both the scholastic tradition and its critics in their own ways distort the understanding of form and essence that can be traced in Aristotle’s own writings (see p. 286, n. 12). 39. Ibid., p. 15. 40. McMurran, Introduction to Mind, Body, Motion, Matter, p. 5. 41. Ibid., p. 6. 42. “In Fictional Matter, I do not take science as factual backdrop for the novel’s fictional play. Both scientific discourse and prose fiction, I argue, elaborate modes of figural, formal,

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and experimental access to imperceptible things, crossing the epistemological pretenses of empirical knowledge with the awareness that such knowledge is produced” (Thompson, Fictional Matter, p. 3). 43. See Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Chapter 2. The Figure of Practice 1. See Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). On the relation between experimental practice and the early tradition of aesthetic inquiry in Britain, see also Michael McKeon, “The Dramatic Aesthetic and the Model of Scientific Method in Britain, 1600– 1800,” in The Eighteenth-Century Novel, vols. 6–7, ed. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice (New York: AMS Press, 2009), pp. 197–259. 2. See Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20.2 (Winter 1961). Paul Guyer disputes Stolnitz’s identification of disinterestedness as the hallmark of early eighteenth-century British aesthetic thought; see Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1:30. 3. See Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 11–21. Moral-sense theory takes a backseat to “classical virtue ethics” in Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Modern Problem of Virtue,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15.1 (Winter 1998). 4. See Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. See Dabney Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41.2 (Winter 1982). 6. Peter Kivy treats Shaftesbury in a chapter on “British forerunners” to Francis Hutcheson’s “aesthetic sense doctrine,” ultimately labeling him “a transitional figure” (Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], pp. 3, 20). Paul Guyer includes Shaftesbury somewhat grudgingly, on the basis of “the tremendous influence of [his] work throughout the century,” while at the same time denying “disinterestedness to be the defining idea or at least one of the central ideas of modern aesthetics”—the usual claim made on behalf of Shaftesbury’s importance (Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 1:30). Guyer follows Kivy in granting originary status to Hutcheson, relegating Shaftesbury (along with Addison) to a chapter entitled “Prologue.” Timothy Costelloe includes Shaftesbury in his genealogy on the grounds that he, along with Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, stakes a claim for an “internal sense” that perceives the beautiful and the good; see Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, esp. pp. 19–21.

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7. Vivasvan Soni, “How to Hit Pause: Language, Transcendence, and the Capacity for Judgment in Shaftesbury’s ‘Soliloquy; or, Advice to an Author,’ ” in Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History, ed. Soni and Thomas Pfau (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), p. 7. 8. This reflects a commonplace understanding of Shaftesbury’s philosophical project: compare, for instance, Paul Guyer’s observation that “Shaftesbury linked the sentiment of pleasure in beauty to apprehension of the rational order of creation and the reason of its ultimate creator” (Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 1:31) and also Paul Kelleher’s elegant characterization: “Shaftesbury fashions a convergence of aesthetics, morality, and philosophy that asserts a forceful ideological vision: when rightly perceived, felt, and understood, the beautiful, the good, the virtuous, and the true are one and the same” (Paul Kelleher, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature [Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015], pp. 27–28). 9. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 76. 10. Ibid., p. 72. 11. For an influential reading of Shaftesbury’s recourse to drama, see David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), Part I. 12. Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” pp. 70–71. 13. Ibid., p. 85. 14. From another vantage, the same preference for the knowledge of character over something like the factual—or fictional—content of a text sounds eminently Aristotelian. One might say, as Michael McKeon does, that Shaftesbury groups history and poetry together in order to emphasize the rhetorical importance of the poetic truth of historical writing. Historical (or political) writing does not serve its didactic (or persuasive) function unless it is saturated by an understanding of human nature. Poetry may miss the mark, “however stocked with fiction,” just as history may fall short, however stocked with fact. “For facts unably related, though with the greatest sincerity and good faith, may prove the worst sort of deceit. And mere lies, judiciously composed, can teach us the truth of things beyond any other manner” (Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” p. 154; quoted in Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 2002], p. 117; see also pp. 118–20. 15. “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” p. 71. 16. Ibid. 17. It is further compounded in the sense that soliloquy as a stage convention already analogizes, rather than directly embodies, the moral self-practice Shaftesbury recommends, so that self-surgery becomes a figure for a figure. 18. “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” p. 71. Paola Bertucci helpfully draws attention to “the etymology of the word ‘surgery’ as the work of the hand (from the Greek words

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kheir for hand and ergon for work)” (Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017], p. 158). 19. “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” p. 70. 20. Ibid., p. 71. 21. The last paragraph of the essay makes explicit the link between authorship and authorization: “To conclude, the only method, which can qualify us for this high privilege of giving advice, is in the first place to receive it ourselves with due submission where the public has vouchsafed to give it us by authority” (ibid., p. 162). 22. Ibid., p. 92. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 93. 25. His Platonic orientation is evident in the distinction of inward and outward beauty and the disparagement of “mere imitation” in a passage like this one: “Even in the arts, which are mere imitations of that outward grace and beauty, we not only confess a taste but make it a part of refined breeding to discover, amid the many false manners and ill styles, the true and natural one, which represents the real beauty and Venus of the kind. It is the like moral grace and Venus which, discovering itself in the turns of character and the variety of human affection, is copied by the writing artist” (ibid., p. 150). 26. Douglas Den Uyl devotes considerable attention to the importance of practice for Shaftesbury, whom he describes as a “classical virtue ethicist” committed to the formation of character above and beyond the analysis of ethical obligation, where “the ‘self ’ was more of an achievement than a ‘given’ ” (Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Modern Problem of Virtue,” pp. 276, 280). Den Uyl maintains that “Soliloquy” is “the central text for Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy” because of its practical focus on philosophical method (ibid., p. 283); see also pp. 287–94, where Den Uyl develops the argument that “classical virtue ethics replaces the moral ‘theorist’ with the person of practical wisdom” (p. 293). 27. Soni, “How to Hit Pause,” p. 28. 28. The passage continues: “For Shaftesbury, long before Nietzsche, the aesthetic object of greatest interest is the self. Poised between a Stoic virtue ethics, which needed no recourse to the aesthetic, and a Nietzschean aestheticism purged of any relation to virtue or morality, Shaftesbury can help us understand how the discourse of the aesthetic comes into being as an unsuccessful attempt to establish a notion of judgment and value in the wake of empiricism” (ibid.). 29. Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews shows how entrenched and even reflexive a critical reliance on the Poetics must have been, in its adaptation of an Aristotelian anatomy of genres, but this reliance is also perceptible, for instance, in Pope’s “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” written, as Pope notes in the Twickenham edition, when he was “sixteen years of age,” in a passage that has the feel of a classroom exercise: “A Pastoral is the imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or narrative, or mix’d of both; the fable simple, the manners not too polite nor too rustic: The thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and passion, but

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that short and flowing: The expression humble, yet as pure as the language will afford” (Alexander Pope, “A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” The Poems of Alexander Pope, A OneVolume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963], pp. 119–20). Pope’s unusual use of the word form here corresponds to what most modern translations call mode or manner. 30. McKeon, “The Dramatic Aesthetic and the Model of Scientific Method in Britain, 1600–1800,” p. 232. McKeon explains his focus on drama by calling it “the first artistic mode to be conceived in aesthetic terms,” but it is worth observing that other lenses are justifiable on other grounds—for instance, focusing on philosophical investigations of taste as preceding the conception of art itself as aesthetic (ibid., p. 198). 31. David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 2. 32. Ibid. Summers, like Thompson and McKeon, distinguishes the historical Aristotle from the tradition of thinking that comes to be associated with his name: “For Aristotle, real things are unions of form and matter, and mind somehow apprehends the forms of things, which are thinkable. As Aristotle’s psychology was adapted over the centuries to Platonism, his symmetry between matter and form yielded to a decided imbalance in favor of the latter. That is, form, as the thinkable, was associated with mind, and what we apprehend was thus progressively spiritualized as matter withered into the merely necessary hypothesis of pure potentiality” (p. 26). 33. James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 117. Defining the aesthetic in materialist terms, as indicated by his subtitle, Porter goes so far as to claim that “Plato and Aristotle are not the beginning of aesthetic inquiry in antiquity by any means; they are merely one of its more prominent derailing moments” (p. 10). Further, on the relation between them, he writes, “Together, Plato and Aristotle build up a powerful argument for formalism that neither philosopher could quite control. In isolating (if only to disparage) the formal techniques of poetry, such as mimesis and diegesis, Plato paved the way for their independent analysis, and thus earned a place for himself in the history of literary theory. Aristotle refined Plato’s insights, in part extending them and in part reversing them. A further powerful distinction the two philosophers of the fourth century made is easily overlooked. It consisted in abstracting, aspectually, the sensuous dimensions of poetry. Only here, the contrast is no longer between form and content, but between form and matter” (pp. 84–85). 34. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, pp. 70, 83. His indictment is sweeping: “Formalism is a plastic term with a checkered history that has run the full gamut of possible stances, from the rejection of materialism to its embracement. Part of the reason for this vacillation lies in the incoherent aspirations of formalism, and above all the underlying desire of a great many of the critics associated with formalism to reify form. . . . No sooner is form located in an aesthetic object than it is banished again into remote abstraction. Formalism is truly of two minds” (p. 83).

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35. Ibid., pp. 83, 87. 36. Ibid., p. 85. 37. See also Porter’s comparison of Platonic and Kantian aesthetic formalisms, ibid., p. 95. 38. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Even in describing Aristotle’s formalism as “deeply ingrained” and consistent “across the various branches of Aristotle’s thinking” (p. 112), Porter remains torn. On the one hand, he makes note of “the (too-little-explored) parallelism between tragedy’s essence (ousia) and the equivalence of essence and eidos (form) in other of his writings” (p. 96, n. 90). On the other, Porter’s skepticism about the utility of form as a term in aesthetic discourse leads him to note “that nothing strictly corresponds to ‘form’ in his treatise”—that is, in the Poetics—“and that the label is, as it were, more for our benefit than it is for Aristotle’s” (p. 96). 39. Ibid., p. 115. 40. Ibid., p. 118. The quoted text is Richard Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59.2 (Spring 2001): 133. 41. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, p. 72. 42. Summers, The Judgement of Sense, p. 30. 43. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, p. 19. 44. This seeming paradox bears comparison with Eve Sedgwick’s account of addiction as the emblematic pathology of late capitalism, beginning from the observation that “if exercise was addictive, nothing couldn’t be.” She goes on to argue that “like exercise, the other activities newly pathologized under the searching rays of this new addiction attribution are the very ones that late capitalism presents as the ultimate emblems of control, personal discretion, freedom itself. . . . As each assertion of will has made voluntarity itself appear problematical in a new area, the assertion of will itself has come to appear addictive” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993], pp. 132, 133). It would not be off the mark, though it may be a little glib, to characterize the Platonic asceticism Porter describes as, after all, a species of exercise addiction. 45. Halperin characterizes Diotima’s figurative transformation of pregnancy as the reanimation of “a dead metaphor,” arguing that “what Plato did was to take an embedded habit of speech (and thought) that seems to have become detached from a specific referent in the female body and, first, to reembody it as ‘feminine’ by associating it with the female person of Diotima through her extended use of gender-specific language, then to disembody it once again, to turn ‘pregnancy’ into a mere image of (male) spiritual labor” (David Halperin, “Why Is Diotima a Woman?,” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love [New York: Routledge, 1990], pp. 138–39). 46. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 316. 47. Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), p. 166.

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48. Ibid. 49. Cassirer is consistent in pitting aesthetics against empiricism: “If, nevertheless, English aesthetics succeeded in breaking the spell of empiricism and in extricating itself step by step from the empirical approach, this is because English aestheticians could appeal directly to and draw inspiration from a philosophical doctrine which had not been formed under the general predominance of empirical thinking. The real leaders of English aesthetics in the eighteenth century draw their sustenance from Shaftesbury” (Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 312–13). 50. Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” p. 207. See also Klein’s comments on the worldliness of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, whose moral method he describes as “practical” and “therapeutic” (Lawrence E. Klein, Introduction to Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, p. viii). 51. “Worldly” encompasses Klein’s description of Shaftesbury’s moral method as both “practical” and “therapeutic” (Klein, Introduction, p. viii). Other keywords for Klein include “polite” and “sociable.” See Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. 52. Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48.2 (Spring 1987): 288. See also Preben Mortensen, Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 107–18. 53. A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules was published in French in 1712 and incorporated into the second edition of Characteristics in 1714. “Plastics, or The Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art” exists only in the form of manuscript notes. See Benjamin Rand, Introduction to Shaftesbury, Second Characters or The Language of Forms, ed. Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1969), p. xii. 54. Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” p. 207. Townsend’s view differs from that of Jerome Stolnitz, who, in a trio of essays published in 1961, cemented Shaftesbury’s place in modern histories of British aesthetics. Stolnitz is concerned to demonstrate that Shaftesbury’s argument against Hobbesian self-interest does not boil down to a celebration of benevolence, but what he really means in stating that “Shaftesbury will not identify virtue with benevolence” is that Shaftesbury’s ethics are not consequentialist. According to Stolnitz, it is this stance against consequentialist interpretation that makes Shaftesbury’s ethics essentially aesthetic: “Shaftesbury not only gives up consequences— he also gives up the traditional preoccupation with action generally. On his account, the moral life is far less a matter of choosing and executing one’s decision, than of ‘liking’ or ‘loving’ the ‘view or contemplation’ of virtue. . . . Shaftesbury’s ethical theory thus turns out to be very nearly indistinguishable from an aesthetic theory” (Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” p. 133). Stolnitz derives Shaftesbury’s aesthetics from a rejection of, or at least an indifference to, action; when characterized in this way, Shaftesbury’s aesthetics can resemble an unworldly asceticism. Townsend, by contrast, finds the same aestheticization of ethics—appreciating virtue for its own sake rather than

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for its effects in the world—compatible with a concern for the cultivation of virtue through art and criticism. At the same time, and quite rightly, I think, Townsend worries about the circuitry of Stolnitz’s argument, deriving as he seems to do the distinction of the aesthetic as a field from the aestheticization of ethics (see Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly 11.43 [April 1961]: 98). But how can it make sense to conceive of this disinterested appreciation of virtue as “aestheticization” in advance of the historical development of disinterestedness as a criterion for a specifically aesthetic kind of judgment (or attitude, or experience)? For Townsend, Shaftesbury’s ethics are not aesthetic so much as undifferentiated from a general, totalizing conception of the good and its various gratifications. 55. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, p. 30. 56. Shaftesbury, “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, p. 322 (emphasis in original). 57. Ibid., p. 323. 58. Denying that, in the Characteristics, “there is anything which can be distinguished as ‘the aesthetic,’ ” Stolnitz redescribes Shaftesbury’s Platonist commitments as the identification of a single principle of positive value: “ ‘Harmony is all there really is.’ Faithful to its Idealist forebears, his philosophy is essentially a celebration of the surpassing goodness of the world-order” (Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” p. 104). For Stolnitz, disinterestedness is the hallmark of a philosophy that is properly aesthetic in focus. On his account, Shaftesbury inaugurates the process whereby the aesthetic separates itself off as a distinct field of philosophical investigation chiefly as an outgrowth of his quarrel with Hobbesian self-interest: “When he describes morality and religion as the ‘love’ of their respective objects ‘for its own sake,’ the term no longer has to do with choice and action but with a mode of attention” (Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” p. 133). Stolnitz is explicit that it’s autonomy— admiration of the object “for its own sake”—rather than beauty that distinguishes aesthetics as such in the history of ideas. See also Stolnitz, “ ‘Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22.2 (Spring 1961): 185–204. On the oneness of beauty and goodness, see also Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Modern Problem of Virtue,” pp. 296–97. 59. Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, p. 197. 60. Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” p. 103. 61. See Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” p. 207. 62. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Barrell’s concept of a “rhetorical aesthetic” aligns with M. H. Abrams’s schematic for describing epochs in the theory of literature. Neoclassicism espouses what Abrams calls “a ‘pragmatic theory,’ since it looks at

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the work of art chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting something done”; Abrams goes on to make note of classical traditions around rhetoric as an important tributary to this way of thinking (M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition [London: Oxford University Press, 1953], p. 15). 63. Civic humanism in its canonical formulation posits a republican polity created and upheld by the exercise of public virtue on the part of its citizens. Public virtues are those attitudes and actions exclusively motivated by concern for the endurance and the benefit of the state; their exercise is predicated on “independence,” which is to say, land ownership as a guarantee of elevation above “the menial occupations of a mechanical or mercantile life” (Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, pp. 6, 7; for Barrell’s account of civic humanism more broadly, see pp. 3–10). 64. Ibid., p. 1. 65. Ibid., p. 6. 66. Ibid., p. 23. 67. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 20. 68. Ibid., pp. 21, 22. 69. Ibid., p. 22. 70. “In the aesthetic regime, artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself: a product identical with something not produced” (ibid., pp. 22–23). Rancière is at pains to stress the objective character of the aesthetic—at the cost, I would argue, of sufficient attention to the complex transition, in eighteenth-century theoretical writing, from criticism concerned to anatomize the means by which disparate objects and media achieve their discrete and dissimilar effects, to an interest in aesthetic subjectivity (“sensibility, taste, and pleasure,” which trio Rancière specifically excludes from his definition of aesthetics), and finally to the reification of this aesthetic subjectivity as potentiated in a formal quality of art objects. He passes over this complicated transit in part because he is describing an “aesthetic regime of the arts” (my emphasis), whereas aesthetics, philosophically speaking, was indifferent to the art/nature distinction before it came to identify aesthetics with the philosophy of art as such—indeed, preparatory to that identification. 71. Joseph Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), in Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:537. For absolute and comparative beauties, see Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (1725; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), p. 27. 72. Whereas Barrell describes a rhetorical aesthetic gaining prestige in the world of painting, Roach tracks its declining fortunes in the theater. Persuasive speech served as an important—and classically pedigreed—model for seventeenth-century actors, whose task was imagined in terms of convincing an audience of the pathos of a character’s situation.

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But by the 1740s, Roach argues, mechanistic natural philosophy and a taste for spectacle had conspired to replace this style of acting, whose gestural vocabulary had ossified into a “custom-bound” declamatory style, with a more naturalistic, expressive style achieved, paradoxically, through studied modulations of facial, vocal, and bodily comportment (Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985], p. 56). 73. See Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, pp. 27–33. 74. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 22. 75. See Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967). 76. On Richardson, see Carol Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 77. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 2nd ed. (1725; Menston: Scolar Press, 1971), pp. 26–27. 78. Hogarth knew Richardson personally (Richardson died in 1745) and makes an admiring, if fleeting, reference to the Essay on the Theory of Painting in The Analysis of Beauty (see AB, p. 94). 79. Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, pp. 37, 24, 164–65. 80. Ibid., p. 165. 81. On eighteenth-century alertness to the root meaning of the word handsome as an aesthetic quality, see Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), esp. pp. 74–77. 82. Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, pp. 25–26.

Chapter 3. The Analysis of Beauty, I 1. Lawrence Weschler, “A Prefatory Note on David Hockney and Robert Irwin,” True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. xvii. The aphorism comes not from Irwin himself but—loosely translated—from Paul Valéry’s writing on Degas: “Pascal lui-même n’a pas manqué de s’y tromper, qui traita de cet art avec suberbe, et le réduisait à la vanité de poursuivre laborieusement la ressemblance des choses dont la vue d’elles-mêmes est sans intérêt, ce qui prouve qu’il ne savait pas regarder, c’est-à-dire oublier les noms des choses que l’on voit” (Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin, 4th ed. [Paris: Gallimard, 1938], p. 178). 2. Weschler, “A Prefatory Note,” p. xvii. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. xix. See also p. 50 for another articulation of this thought about cubism. 5. The abstraction/figuration crux manifests even as a contest of titles: Weschler’s Hockney book, after all, is called True to Life. 6. For another, rich account of this claim, see Charles A. Cramer, Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006).

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7. On “aspect-seeing” and aesthetics, see Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. pp. 32–42. 8. Joseph Burke, Introduction to The Analysis of Beauty, with the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes, by William Hogarth, ed. Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. xlvii. 9. Burke, Introduction, p. xlvi. He gestures toward synthesis having just observed that “Charles Lamb’s true and memorable phrase, ‘other pictures we look at, his prints we read’ . . . provided fuel for those critics to whom the epithet ‘literary’ was the final term of denunciation.” 10. Joseph Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), in Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:536. Subsequent citations are to this edition. 11. Burke, Introduction, p. xxxix. 12. See Ruth Mack, “Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 29. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 21. Music, it seems to me, challenges the claim that neoclassical art theory understands all art as mimetic—but sticking with the visual arts (with the possible exception of architecture, easy enough to bracket off as an applied art), the claim holds. 14. Addison, Spectator 411 (21 June 1712), 3:537. In fact the structuring importance of representation precedes and anticipates Addison’s explicit division of his subject. Grouping together what he divides in the subsequent paragraph, Addison specifies that “by the Pleasures of the Imagination or Fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion” (3:536–37). Alluding to Locke and the tabula rasa, he remarks that “we cannot indeed have a single Image in the Fancy that did not make its first Entrance through the Sight.” Sense experience, that is, furnishes the fancy with its images, just as it furnishes the other mental faculties with their ideas of sensation. Ideas of reflection, while not necessarily mimetic, involve the re-presentation and recombination of ideas of sensation; Addison continues, “we have the Power of retaining, altering and compounding those Images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of Picture and Vision that are most agreeable to the Imagination; for by this Faculty a Man in a Dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with Scenes and Landskips more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole Compass of Nature” (3:537). 15. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (1725; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), p. 27. 16. Having commented at some length on Addison’s debt to Locke in Chapter 1, I don’t mean to belabor the same point here except to note that, despite the superficial

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terminological analogy, primary and secondary pleasures do not correspond to primary and secondary qualities. Instead, as I hope I made clear earlier, Addison (like Hutcheson after him) holds that all aesthetic qualities—beauty, greatness, and novelty—are properly speaking secondary qualities, emanations inherent in our perception of objects rather than in the material objects themselves. He imagines bare primary qualities—objects seen “only in their proper Figures and Motions”—as “a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature” (Spectator 413 [24 June 1712], 3:546). This is not to discount entirely the terminological borrowing; Donald Bond observes that “in adopting the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ pleasures Addison probably has in mind Locke’s distinction between the primary and secondary qualities” (3:537, n. 2). Addison uses his terminology to evoke Locke, certainly, but he does not analogize the two concepts (qualities and pleasures), considering how much important and specific work he is asking each to do on its own. 17. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 366–67. McKeon seems to understand autonomy as a criterion for the aesthetic when he concludes that “this striking progression toward the most detached—which is to say the most disinterested— conditions of imaginative experience implies that imaginative pleasure is so deeply embedded in sensible pleasure that several stages of separation out are required to permit its flowering ‘as such’ ” (p. 367). 18. Ibid., p. 361. “Gross” and “Criminal” are Addison’s terms, quoted by McKeon; see Spectator 411. 19. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, p. 361. 20. See Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 152, n. 15. 21. Peter Kivy makes a similar point, quoting Spectator 412: “With regard to the pleasure of beauty, Addison gives us no explanation, but, rather, a description of its effect, which immediately suggests the French school of taste, as well as Hutcheson’s aesthetic sense. . . . The pleasure of beauty is a ‘secret satisfaction’—essentially a je ne sais quoi. Its effect is immediate, without ‘previous consideration’; thus it operates in the manner of Hutcheson’s internal senses in this regard” (Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and EighteenthCentury British Aesthetics, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], p. 31). 22. Similarly: “Pleasure is a state that we would rather prolong than end—that, in a way, is the only possible definition of pleasure” (Paul Guyer, “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], p. 94). 23. Spectator 414 (25 June 1712), 3:551. 24. Spectator 415 (26 June 1712), 3:557. 25. Spectator 418 (30 June 1712), 3:566. 26. Ibid., 3:566–67. 27. Ibid., 3:567. 28. Ibid.

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29. Ibid. 30. Spectator 416 (27 June 1712), 3:559–60. In this earlier paper, he proclaims it “impossible for us to give the necessary Reason, why this Operation of the Mind is attended with so much Pleasure, as I have before observed on the same Occasion; but we find a great variety of Entertainments derived from this single Principle” (3:560). 31. Spectator 416 (27 June 1712), 3:560–61. 32. Spectator 421 (3 July 1712), 3:578. 33. Ibid., 3:578, 3:579. 34. Spectator 414 (25 June 1712), 3:549–50. 35. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 74. The complementary piece of reciprocal quotation is the quotation of nature by art, a.k.a. verisimilitude. Here’s Addison: “If the products of Nature rise in value, according as they more or less resemble those of art, we may be sure that artificial works receive a greater advantage from their resemblance of such as are natural” (Spectator 414 [25 June 1712], 3:550). 36. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, pp. 28, 42. 37. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with Some Account of the Principal Artists; and Incidental Notes on other Arts, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (1771; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1862), 3:721. “As a painter,” Walpole goes on to say, “he had but slender merit” (3:727). 38. Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), p. 3. 39. Although he doesn’t discuss reading directly, Peter de Bolla takes a similar position on what he calls Hogarth’s “phenomenology of the eye” when he uses it as the epitome of an anti-iconographic “regime” in eighteenth-century visual culture (“the regime of the eye” as opposed to “the regime of the picture”). See Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 25–27. 40. Hogarth’s peculiar understanding of the verbal medium would mark him as the very model of a surface reader, in the currently fashionable sense—were it not for the fact that he can only embody this role by virtue of his orientation toward visual and tactile experience (which is also to say, the plastic arts of which he is a practitioner). Hogarth’s surface reading shows where and how surface reading falters in its approach to verbal texts which, arguably, have no surface to speak of. Or, perhaps, their literal surfaces are not the sites of the manifest meaning that antihermeneutic readers seek to champion. In their Afterword to the special issue of Representations that gave us “surface reading,” Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood issue a disclaimer of sorts, remarking that “literal reading is of course a metaphor: we cannot stick to the letters of the text, even metaphorically. The aspiration to take the text as manifestly manifest is as close to the letter as we can get and still be able to see anything. It is perhaps also material, in that the various ‘presences’ of the text, rather than its absences, are investigated as nearly physical or fully physical: deictically here, in and on the text” (Representations 108 [Fall 2009]: 139). What proves slippery

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is the meaning of words like “manifest” and “physical”; approaching this passage in the spirit of Hogarth’s surface reading, one might say that it’s possible to get quite close to the letter, but only at the expense of the semantic coherence of the word. And if such coherence is what Apter and Freedgood invoke by using the letter—and physical proximity, too—as a metaphor, then it’s not seeing in the visual sense that’s at stake at all but, instead, understanding. If Hogarth proves himself, in moments like these, to be a literal surface reader, or a reader of literal surfaces, it’s because he sticks to letters so tenaciously that what he loses sight of is how words mean—or even that words mean, full stop. 41. “The Art of the Graphic Novel,” 5 December 2010 (panel discussion, The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination), YouTube https:// youtu.be/zvgZB-V_2_c (8/12/16). Barry’s comments bear comparison with the following passage from Hogarth’s unpublished Autobiographical Notes: “I drew the alphabet with great ease and when at school my exercises were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorn’d them than for the Exercise itself I found Blockheads with better memories beat me in the former but I was particularly distinguished for the latter. {Beside the natural turn I had [for] drawing rather the lear[n]ing a language I had before my Eyes (?) the precarious State of authors and men of learning I saw not only} the difficulties my father got went through whos dependance was cheifly on his Pen, the cruel treatment he met with from Bookseller[s] and Printers particularly” (Hogarth, “The Autobiographical Notes,” The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 204; the language in curly brackets, according to Burke’s editorial note, is a marginal addition to Hogarth’s original draft). 42. Barry’s comments are informal but apropos: “when we learned how to do the alphabet—you’re drawing the alphabet when you first learn how to do it, at some point it turns into writing, but prior to that you’re drawing the portrait of each letter.” The idea is that drawing letters is a necessary but transient stage in one’s acculturation as a reader, a stage whose passing comes at a cost; you become a more fluent reader and writer by forgetting the mediation of the alphabet. So when Lynda Barry talks about the importance, for comics, of recovering this stage when letters have not yet turned into writing, she talks not just about drawing letters but also about making books: she says “when I was a kid—I would never think of writing a book without making the book first to write it in.” Think how daunting a task it is to become fluent in the cultural forms of mediation that constitute literacy. To achieve that fluency, the mediation has to become invisible—but this can happen only after you work out its function by making it your own. And that invisibility is an important hallmark of the print medium, one that matters in accounts of the literary marketplace and its innovations in the eighteenth century. Graphic narrative has the critical potential to turn back the clock, both developmentally and culturally, on this sort of forgetting. 43. BL Eg. MS 3013, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 186 (I’ve elided part of this passage in which he acknowledges the encouragement and assistance he received from a “gentleman of distinction”). In a subsequent draft, Hogarth again casts his writerly reluctance as fear. In material excised from the published version, he recounts being “fearfull of the danger of acting out of my own sphere, in becoming an author” and

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then, having pushed through that anxiety, “again growing fearfull of mistakes in point of writing” (Add. MS 27992, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 193). 44. Add. MS 27992, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 192.

Chapter 4. The Analysis of Beauty, II 1. See, for instance, Ronald Paulson’s comments on Hogarth’s “cocky preface”: “Along with his talk of ‘nature,’ ‘the eye,’ and the ‘familiar,’ another discourse emerges and the offending phrases roll out: ‘so entirely new’—Hogarth versus ‘mere men of letters’— ‘system’—‘principle’—‘mystery’—‘hieroglyphic’—‘secret,’ even ‘the grand secret’ and the ‘key’—, and finally ‘mysterious to the vulgar’ and ‘secret from those who were not of their particular sects’ ” (Ronald Paulson, Art and Politics, 1750–1764, vol. 3 of Hogarth [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993], p. 124). 2. This particular advertisement appears first in the London Evening-Post 3870 (6–8 Aug. 1752): 2; Paulson cites its subsequent appearance in the General Advertiser on November 16 (AB, Introduction, p. xvii). The inclusive gesture—“both sexes”—makes the address to women seem pointed. More typical would be a statement of purpose like Jonathan Richardson’s, in 1719, offering to “open to Gentlemen a New Scene of Pleasure, a New Innocent Amusement; and an Accomplishment which they have yet scarce heard of ” (Jonathan Richardson, A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure, and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur [London: W. Churchill, 1719], p. 7). 3. On the connections between enslavement and aesthetics, see Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Hogarth’s own racial attitudes are largely a matter of conjecture. Writing in 1987, David Dabydeen called out the paucity of commentary on the black people represented in Hogarth’s paintings and prints, concluding that Hogarth included such figures as “satirical signposts . . . used to point our attention to white deficiencies,” and further that “Hogarth’s sympathy for the ‘nobodies,’ that is, the lower classes, obviously extends to a sympathy for black people who belong in the same category” (David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987], p. 131). Dabydeen’s “nobodies” include women, too, anticipating my claim here that Hogarth’s democratic politics works in part by seeing analogies among different categories of disempowered people: laborers and artisans, women, and servants, including those whose servitude was compelled. Still, Dabydeen passes quickly over one of the most flagrant instances of racism in Hogarth’s oeuvre: a passage from the unpublished drafts of The Analysis of Beauty proposing that black beauty is an oxymoron, and as such testifies against the relativity of taste. Hogarth casts doubt on the relativist position by citing as its most absurd conclusion the idea that “the Nigro who finds great beauty in the black Females of his own country, may find as much deformity in the european Beauty as we see in theirs” (Add. MS 27992, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, p. 189). This divergence of opinion is, to Hogarth’s way of thinking, an error crying out for correction rather than a

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legitimate testament to the power of culture in the formation of taste. There is no known explanation for the omission of this passage from the published text. It may seem, however, to be counterbalanced by the discussion of race that does make it into the final version, in discussion of complexion in the chapter “Of Colouring.” There, Hogarth makes no judgment as to the relative beauty of white, black, or brown skin, drawing on “modern discourses of physical science” to demonstrate “that human beauty is literally only skindeep” (David Bindman, “ ‘A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe’: Hogarth’s Africans,” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p. 268). Drawing on that chapter in the Analysis to comment on Hogarth’s depiction of an African boy in his 1742 painting Lord George Graham in his Ship’s Cabin, Bindman remarks that the “touching grace” of the portrayal “offers no clue to his attitudes toward slavery, though it says a great deal about his seriousness as a painter” (ibid.). One way of accounting for the apparent contradiction in attitudes between the omitted manuscript passage and the published treatise is to posit a different order of consistency: the science Hogarth draws upon supports his conviction that form is aesthetically essential, while color is epiphenomenal. A more generous but also more speculative reading might suggest that Hogarth thought better of the gratuitousness of the draft passage. I am, like David Bindman, skeptical that there are grounds for thinking of Hogarth as a crypto-abolitionist. Instead, it seems likely, as Sara Schotland has written, that “Hogarth surely opposed the possession of Africans as objects. It is an open question whether his motivation was concern for the degrading effect on the slave, or rather for the pernicious effect on the English owner of accumulating endless costly possessions” (Sara D. Schotland, “Africans as Objects: Hogarth’s Complex Portrayal of Exploitation,” Journal of African American Studies 13.2 [June 2009]: 162). 4. In taking this approach, I position myself to the side of the robust tradition of feminist theory and activism that associates sexism with the objectification of women, advocating by contrast for the recognition of women as subjects. Much of this tradition in feminism traces its way back to Simone de Beauvoir. Touchstones for the elaboration of a critique of objectification include Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18, and Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). My approach aligns instead with Linda Zerilli’s contention that “the political formation of the ‘we’ in a feminist practice of freedom seems wholly contingent upon the subject’s capacity for agency, thus forever returning the subject to the vicious cycle in which it plays out the drama of its subjection.” Zerilli goes on to ask, “What if instead we, together with Arendt, were to shift the problem of freedom outside its current subject-centered frame?” (Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], p. 12). Still, I want to distinguish what looks like a cautious endorsement of objectification—a suspension of judgment, at least—from object-oriented ontology (OOO), which frets about extrapolating from the object-adjacent experiences of humans in order to outline a philosophy that centers nonhuman beings and nonliving things. That

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feminist critique of objectification has proved something of a stumbling block for OOO, which has tended to dismiss or avoid the objectification of persons as a bad metaphor, an instance of the kind of anthropocentrism against which it is framed. On OOO and the objectification of women, see Katherine Behar, “An Introduction to OOF,” in Object-Oriented Feminism, ed. Behar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). For a concise overview of OOO, especially in relation to the problem of anthropocentrism, as well as for the failure to meet the challenge feminism poses to OOO that Behar takes as her starting point, see Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 5. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 8. 6. For a related argument, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). Roach describes how mechanistic natural philosophy in the eighteenth century contributed to the reimagination of the stage actor as an instrumental body rather than a rhetorician (under a classical conception in which rhetoric is counted among the liberal arts). 7. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), quoted in Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, p. 66. 8. It is indeed the first principle he treats in the exposition: “Fitness of the parts to the design for which every individual thing is form’d, either by art or nature, is first to be consider’d, as it is of the greatest consequence to the beauty of the whole” (AB, p. 25). Hogarth can entertain a distinction between what he calls “beauty to the mind” and “to the eye” while preserving an understanding of both as, properly, beautiful. Edmund Burke, for his part, would rule fitness out of bounds in the determination of beauty, contingent as it is on cognition as opposed to mere sensation; see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (1757, 1759; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). 9. Elsewhere, I have argued against the assimilation of Hogarth’s Analysis to adaptive accounts of aesthetics that seek to understand beauty in terms of evolutionary psychology; see Abigail Zitin, “Fittest and Fairest: Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin,” ELH 82.3 (Fall 2015): 845–68. 10. While he’s not especially committed to evolutionary psychology as such, Paulson tends to understand Hogarth’s sexual politics in terms that lend themselves easily to its application. On his account of the Analysis, the female body epitomizes beauty, and desire, implicitly male, detects it; lust is dignified as a kind, indeed as the prototype, of judgment, in a move that appears populist (this is “natural,” “healthy” sexuality, what any redblooded man would feel, etc., etc.), but is of course more precisely just masculinist. It seems almost unfair in this light to note that Paulson’s own invocation of “practical aesthetics,” in the Introduction to the Analysis, appears in a sexualized context—not, in this instance, describing artistic practice, but, rather, underlining a contrast between mere theory and real (bodily, straight, male) life: “Hogarth is attempting to create an aesthetics

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that acknowledges that if we place a beautiful woman on a pedestal we will inevitably and appropriately desire her and may discover, moreover, that she is not strictly virtuous. This is an anti-aesthetics, or a practical aesthetics, in relation to the theoretically pure aesthetics of Shaftesbury, where the human body can only be beautiful if divorced from function, fitness, and utility” (Introduction to AB, p. xxxiii; see also pp. xxv–vi). What Paulson conceives as a democratic riposte to the ideology of disinterestedness is a functionalist argument that reduces function to sex and women to objects. Perhaps needless to say, I believe the Analysis sanctions a very different interpretation; understanding Hogarth’s practical aesthetics as a practical formalism allows for the decoupling of functionality and sexuality, of judgment and gender. 11. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 115. In the second edition, Burke adds just after this passage a reference to Hogarth: “It gives me no small pleasure to find that I can strengthen my theory in this point, by the opinion of the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth; whose idea of the line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just.” 12. BL Eg. MS 3013, in Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Burke, pp. 181–82. In the published version of the passage, the cabinetmaker is replaced by “painters and sculptors,” and the word “principle” disappears (AB, p. 6). 13. Paulson recognizes this divergence, too: “interestedness and physical desire, however, stop short of gratification: they do not spill over into the sexual act, precisely because the ‘pleasure’ is in the pursuit and not the fulfillment.” Picking up on the reference to the hunt in the “wanton chace” passage (which of course corresponds to the angler in the later passage), Paulson concludes that the Analysis “explodes the myth of Shaftesburian (and Hutchesonian) disinterestedness by advocating interestedness (the pursuit of a woman or fox); but only in order to distinguish between interestedness and action, knowledge and possession” (Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], pp. 44, 45). I discuss Paulson’s reading at greater length in “Fittest and Fairest,” pp. 862–64. 14. Peter de Bolla and Scott Juengel have developed this idea in nearly opposite directions. For de Bolla, the Analysis epitomizes the “regime of the eye” in eighteenth-century aesthetics, by contrast with an iconographic “regime of the picture.” Hogarth gives us a “phenomenology of the eye in terms of the eye’s independence of the seeing subject, or the subject-in-sight. Agency in the matter of vision is handed over to the ocular,” with the effect that Hogarth’s treatise represents “the most disturbing account of the regime of the eye proposed during the period because it leads to the acceptance of a nonagential subjectivity that is beholden to the materiality of outward forms” (Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], pp. 26, 27). Despite calling it disturbing, de Bolla seems attracted to the phantasmagoria of the roving eye. Juengel, by contrast, is less sanguine about what’s portended by the figure of the mind’s eye, specifically, its ability to penetrate and occupy objects: “to insist that . . . form is best understood by means of its evacuation

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is to hazard an aesthetic desire never sufficiently distanced from a radical disregard for the object” (Scott Juengel, “Of Beauty, Cruelty, and Animal Life: Hogarth’s Baroque,” differences 16.1 [May 2005]: 36). 15. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 112. Hogarth takes a somewhat different view of the elegance of subcutaneous surfaces in one of the late chapters, on color: “It is well known, that the fair young girl, the brown old man, and the negro; nay, all mankind, have the same appearance, and are alike disagreeable to the eye, when the upper skin is taken away” (AB, p. 88). Even here, the distinction between skin and clothing is incomplete: “The cutis is composed of tender threads like network, fill’d with different colour’d juices” (ibid.). 16. See Ruth Mack, “Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 29. 17. See Zitin, “Wantonness: Milton, Hogarth, and The Analysis of Beauty,” differences 27.1 (May 2016): 25–47. 18. The title-page epigraph to the Analysis is a quotation from Book 9 of Paradise Lost in which Satan “curl’d many a wanton wreath, in sight of Eve, / To lure her eye” (9.517–18). In the intricacy chapter, Hogarth cites Eve’s “wanton ringlets” as an instance of the serpentine line in motion (4.306; AB, p. 35). 19. “Wanton” has long been a watchword in readings of Paradise Lost. For Christopher Ricks, it is the exemplary anti-pun, a term Ricks coins to identify the use of a multivalent word in a context that disavows one of its meanings: “Whereas in a pun there are two senses which either get along or quarrel, in an anti-pun there is only one sense admitted but there is another sense denied admission” (Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], p. 266). Ricks describes a double movement whereby Milton used the negative, postlapsarian connotation of a word like “wanton” to emphasize by contrast its hypothetical prelapsarian simplicity: “When Milton described something in Paradise as ‘wanton,’ his meaning did not just forget about the fallen sense of the word; it invoked it but excluded it, so that Eve’s hair was ‘wanton (not wanton)’ ” (ibid., p. 174). For Stanley Fish, “wanton” is the exemplary instance of the kind of Miltonic wordplay that reflects, specifically, on the fallen and unfallen conditions of language. Any postlapsarian reader (which is to say, every reader) of Milton’s epic is supposed to perceive in the word “wanton” the connotation of sexual dissipation, even as we recognize its strictly denotative innocence. The pathos of this double consciousness is the pathos of fallenness, the impossible wish to be uncontaminated by connotation: wantonness can be, could have been, mere playfulness (but the reader is left to imagine what it would be like to think this thought without the “mere”). See Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 92–103. 20. OED Online, s.v. “wanton, adj. and n.,” 3rd ed. (March 2014), http://www.oed.com. 21. Sense 4.c. of the entry for the adjective defines a poetic use of “wanton”: “of an object: moving as if alive; free, unrestrained, playful, sportive.”

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22. AB, p. 105. 23. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Critics who have applied Fried’s concept of absorption to Hogarth include John Bender and Joseph Roach; see John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 232–33, and Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 156. 24. To be clear, my aim in comparing Fried with Hogarth is not to demonstrate that each pole of Fried’s binary can collapse into its opposite. What may sound like a deconstructive insight is actually a key structural element in Fried’s theory as he himself formulates it; theatricality is “the very condition of spectatordom” (Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], p. 104), the fact of an object or utterance being oriented toward an audience. Absorption is the rhetorical means by which paintings aspire to neutralize or deny this orientation; it is a development out of theatricality, not simply its opposite, and its neutralization of theatricality is never complete. 25. See Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” pp. 151, 161, 163. 26. “I have suggested in this chapter, and throughout this book, that norms of interiority are masculinist norms” (Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010], p. 172). For a full development of this idea, see the book’s Introduction, especially pp. 2–3 and 18–24. A complete bibliography of feminist critiques of liberalism, and of contract theory in particular, would be vast; necessary points of departure include Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) and The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). See also the collection Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27. Macpherson, Harm’s Way, p. 173.

Chapter 5. Making Art in the Third Critique 1. The choice to expand this kind of strategic abstraction into a stylistic principle might, however, pitch abstraction into the territory of generalization. The aesthetic value of generality—as elevation, which is also a version of distance—is asserted in Joshua Reynolds’s endorsement of a “grand style” in his lectures to the Royal Academy in the final decades of the eighteenth century. See Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 2. Paul Guyer indicates as much, asserting that “our response to fine art can be free and thus genuinely aesthetic in spite of the layers of intentionality characteristic of our produc-

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tion of art and the layers of conceptuality characteristic of our reception of it” (Paul Guyer, “From Jupiter’s Eagle to Warhol’s Boxes: The Concept of Art from Kant to Danto,” Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], p. 294; originally published in Philosophical Topics 25.1 [Spring 1997]: 83–115). It is worth noting, however, that in this essay Guyer rejects a strictly formalist interpretation of Kant’s theory of art. Still, the ability to alter one’s view of an object, to bring certain aspects of its mental representation into sharper focus while willing others into fuzziness, would seem essential if it is to be possible to circumvent or set aside the “layers of intentionality” artworks comprise. 3. Guyer observes that, for Kant, “abstraction appears to be a power of mind by which it can free itself from the constraints of both sensation and concepts, and thus at least set the stage for a free play between imagination and understanding. But Kant’s examples of dependent beauties and his remarks on the necessity of judgments of perfection in the case of art suggest that the mind is not always free to abstract, at least from the concepts which apply to objects” (Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 223). 4. Burke restricts the criteria of beauty “to the merely sensible qualities of things,” considering only “the direct force which they have merely on being viewed” (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton [1757, 1759; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958], p. 91). He then employs this restricted definition to support his argument in ten sections devoted to proving “Proportion” and, subsequently, “Fitness” and “Perfection,” “not the cause of Beauty” (ibid., section headings, pp. 92, 104, 110). This anticognitive stance in Burke goes by the name “sensationism” in most modern commentary. See, for instance, Tom Huhn, Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 48. 5. Kant knew of Hogarth and even admired his engravings but left no indication of having read or engaged with his aesthetic theory. See Manfred Kuehn, Introduction to Zergleiderung der Schönheit (1754), trans. Christlob Mylius, vol. 2 of The Reception of British Aesthetics in Germany: Seven Significant Translations, 1745–1776, ed. Kuehn and Heiner F. Klemme (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), p. ix. 6. “Mere men of letters” who take up the topic of beauty, he writes, “have been bewilder’d in their accounts of it, and obliged . . . to turn into the broad, and more beaten path of moral beauty” (AB, p. 1). 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (2nd ed., 1793; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §17, p. 116; hereafter cited parenthetically by section and page number as CPJ. When I include passages in the original German, I refer to the Academy Edition: Kritik der Urtheilskraft, vol. 5 of Kants gesammelte Schriften, Herausgegeben von der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913). In accordance with standard practice, Guyer and Matthews provide page-number references to this edition in the margins of their translation. On the inadmissibility of principles and formulae for determining taste, see also §34.

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8. George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 125. 9. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 1. 10. “The universal voice is thus only an idea” (CPJ, §8, p. 101). For further discussion of the status of agreement in Kant’s argument—as “normative” or as empirical—see Linda M. G. Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 56–57. 11. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 186. In his chapter on formal purposiveness, Guyer argues that Kant fails to accomplish what he undertakes to do: “his attempt to move beyond the analysis of disinterestedness to a delimitation of special aspects or types of aesthetic objects, falling under a concept or concepts of aesthetic form, is seriously flawed” (ibid.). 12. “The consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject in the case of a representation through which an object is given is the pleasure itself” (CPJ, §12, p. 107; my emphasis). Further, on the feeling of pleasure and the epistemological importance of this feeling: “the aesthetic power of judgment rather than the intellectual can bear the name of a communal sense, if indeed one would use the word ‘sense’ of an effort of mere reflection on the mind: for there one means by ‘sense’ the feeling of pleasure” (CPJ, §40, p. 175). 13. “The animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) . . . is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste. Of course, an objective relation can only be thought, but insofar as it is subjective as far as its conditions are concerned it can still be sensed in its effect on the mind; and further, in the case of a relation that is not grounded in any concept (like that of the powers of representation to a faculty of cognition in general), no other consciousness of it is possible except through sensation of the effect that consists in the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding), enlivened through mutual agreement” (CPJ, §9, p. 104). 14. The question he takes up in §9 concerns the relation between the sensation of pleasure and judgments of beauty—specifically, which comes first. If I were to deem an object beautiful only after perceiving that it gave me pleasure—if I were to make the sensation of pleasure the ground of my judgment—then Kant’s analysis would have failed to open any distance between the aesthetic and the sensuous. To qualify as aesthetic, pleasure must wait on the criterion of universal communicability: “it is the universal capacity for the communication of the state of mind in a given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence” (CPJ, §9, p. 102). The pleasure in question here, the pleasure that waits, is pleasure in the object as distinct from the sensation of free play of the cognitive powers. Still, free play of the faculties is not itself pleasurable (agreeable). The sensation of free play is simultaneous with and equivalent to the judgment “this is beautiful,” but only the universal communicability of that sensation conveys pleasure. And even then, Kant is careful to bracket off the gratification of communicability from the judgment of beauty as such: “That being able to communicate one’s state of mind, even if only with regard to the faculties of cognition, carries a pleasure with it, could easily be established (empirically and psychologi-

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cally) from the natural tendency of human beings to sociability. But that is not enough for our purposes. When we call something beautiful, the pleasure that we feel is expected of everyone else in the judgment of taste as necessary, just as if it were to be regarded as a property of the object” (CPJ, §9, p. 103). Sociability may be pleasurable, but Kant (unlike Burke) does not derive his account of beauty from that claim. It’s what the expectation of universal assent suggests about the alignment of mind and world that matters for Kantian aesthetics. 15. Guyer identifies “the disanalogy between aesthetic judgment and ordinary empirical investigation” as that which “inspires the enterprise of the Analytic. This is the fact that our consciousness of pleasure in the beautiful is our sole direct consciousness of the ground of this pleasure” (Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 193). 16. Ibid., p. 136. 17. See Guyer, “From Jupiter’s Eagle to Warhol’s Boxes,” pp. 305–07. 18. See Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 396, n. 5. 19. CPJ, §40, pp. 173–74. The continuation of the passage elaborates on the ordinariness of the kind of abstraction Kant has in mind here, the sense in which “merely” abstracting is a low bar to clear: “perhaps this operation of reflection seems much too artificial to be attributed to the faculty that we call the common sense; but it only appears thus if we express it in abstract formulas; in itself, nothing is more natural than to abstract from charm and emotion if one is seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule” (CPJ, §40, p. 174; boldface in original, here and below). 20. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, pp. 187–88. Guyer elaborates: “The merely formal or subjective finality of an object consists in the fact that it can dispose the faculties of imagination and understanding to the state of free play, itself internally causal in producing feelings of pleasure. A representation which causes aesthetic response may be called final because it is in fact related to a general objective—not a specific interest, but the general aim of knowledge itself ” (ibid., pp. 193–94). 21. On the meaning of form in the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” see Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 7–8 and chapter 3. 22. “But drawing [Zeichnung] in the former and composition in the latter constitute the proper object of the pure judgment of taste” (§14, p. 110). 23. Translators’ footnote, CPJ, p. 369, n. 29. Guyer and Matthews are remarking on Kant’s switch from “form of purposiveness,” which they gloss as “the appearance of purposiveness in the absence of a concept of a specific purpose served by an object,” to “purposiveness of form, where form is to be understood in ordinary spatiotemporal terms. Perhaps because the second thesis is introduced into the argument in this less than explicit manner,” the footnote continues, “Kant does not pause to offer any proper definition of form” (ibid.). For an alternative account, see Rachel Zuckert, “The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (Oct. 2006): 599–622. Zuckert defends Kant’s use of the concept of purposiveness to relate the subjective dynamics of aesthetic judgment to the formal qualities of the objects of that

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judgment. Moreover, she uses Hogarth’s Analysis to supply examples of each of the formalisms she considers to be at stake in the Third Critique. 24. “Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end” (CPJ, p. 120). 25. The example of the tulip harkens back to Kant’s discussion of free and adherent beauty as grounding, respectively, pure and impure judgments of taste. The category distinctions Kant draws in the course of that discussion open up all sorts of questions, but the nonadherent character of the tulip’s beauty does seem essential for the coherence of this later moment in the footnote, where the idea is that the tool’s purposiveness is directed toward an unknown purpose, whereas the tulip’s purposiveness “in our perception of it . . . is not related to any end at all.” In what sense is a tulip a free beauty? The criterion for adherent beauty is “a concept of what the object ought to be,” so “the beauty of a human being (and in this species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty” (CPJ, §16, p. 114). Conversely, Kant’s examples of free beauty include birds, “a host of marine crustaceans,” “designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpaper,” and “all music without a text,” in addition to flowers (ibid.). Of flowers, specifically, Kant observes that “hardly anyone other than the botanist knows what sort of a thing a flower is supposed to be; and even the botanist, who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste” (ibid.). It is possible, then, to render a pure judgment of taste by setting aside a concept one already possesses: willfully, it would seem, unknowing some piece of knowledge related to “what the object ought to be” and therefore judging something under one or another aspect of its presentation to the beholder. Still, the distinction between things that carry with them a concept or an “ought,” and those that don’t, seems shaky. The categories do not map onto an art/nature distinction; not all free beauties are naturally occurring, and not all adherent beauties are artifacts of human design. Real flowers are more like wallpaper flowers than they are like horses. Why is a tulip more like a crustacean than like a horse? And why are tulips and crustaceans more like the patterns on wallpaper than they are like other organisms (horses, humans)? Representation is not limited to mimesis in this account: a beautiful horse is representative not mimetically, but in the sense that it is an instance of a type—that is, it represents the best of its kind. But then even within mimesis, some objects are more representational, or more representative, than others. For instance, one assumes that “foliage for borders” mimetically represents foliage on living trees, but does so without referring to “any kind of perfection, any internal purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold is related” (ibid.). Does “foliage for borders” not “represent anything, no object under a determinate concept,” because its purpose is ornamental, whereas the representation of other objects—horses, humans—occurs under the organizing sign of what Kant elsewhere calls an aesthetic idea (§49)? The passage in question is well known not least be-

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cause of its prominent role in Jacques Derrida’s commentary on the Third Critique; it appears at the end of Kant’s discussion of form. “Even what one calls ornaments [Zieraten] (parerga), i.e., that which is not internal to the entire representation of the object as a constituent, but only belongs to it externally as an addendum and augments the satisfaction of taste, still does this only through its form: like the borders of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings. But if the ornament itself does not consist in beautiful form, if it is, like a gilt frame, attached merely in order to recommend approval for the painting through its charm—then it is called decoration [Schmuck], and detracts from genuine beauty” (§14, pp. 110–11). Derrida presses on the stability of the distinction between frame and ornament, and more specifically frame and border (Einfassungen—the same word appears in §14 and §16). See Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 26. “On Kant’s own theory of art, every work of art has some purpose. Even nonrepresentational works such as abstract paintings or wallpapers and music without themes have purposes—to cover walls, to earn livings for their composers, and so on. If simply having any purpose with respect to which a judgment of perfection may be made insures that something cannot be the object of a judgment of free beauty, then no work of art could be the proper object of a pure judgment of taste. Only natural beauties could be genuine objects of taste” (Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 222; see also pp. 211–20). 27. “If it has the feeling of pleasure as its immediate aim, then it is called aesthetic art. This is either agreeable or beautiful art. It is the former if its end is that pleasure accompany the representations as mere sensations, the latter, if its end is that it accompany these as kinds of cognition” (CPJ, §44, p. 184). 28. Ferguson comments on this aspect of Kant’s thought: “While the production of art had once been seen as largely a matter of following rules and copying successful past achievements, Kant’s emphasis on the apprehension rather than the production of beauty meant that artists were in a sense the last to know about the rules they should be following, the keys to the hearts of their audiences” (Frances Ferguson, “Now It’s Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading,” Critical Inquiry 41.3 [Spring 2015]: 522). 29. “For the judging of beautiful objects, as such, taste is required; but for beautiful art itself, i.e. for producing such objects, genius is required” (CPJ, §48, p. 189). 30. “If the object given is a product of art, and is as such supposed to be declared to be beautiful, then, since art always presupposes an end in the cause (and its causality), a concept must first be the ground of what the thing is supposed to be” (CPJ, §48, p. 190). 31. Werner Pluhar’s looser translation of Nachbesserung is “touching the form up”—“the artist is, instead, slowly and rather painstakingly touching the form up in an attempt to make it adequate to his thought,” which emphasizes the practitioner’s perspective by adding a tactile, painterly figure to the expression of the argument (Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987], pp. 180–81). 32. Guyer registers a different kind of problem with this passage. He worries that “the third condition listed in §43 makes it sound as if the pleasure aimed at in the production of

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art is the pleasure inherent in the act of production itself, that is, the pleasure of the artist rather than of the audience” (Guyer, “From Jupiter’s Eagle to Warhol’s Boxes,” p. 297). How can the artist—the worker behind the scenes—become the barometer for aesthetic judgment? Guyer’s answer to this question is both pragmatic and speculative: “precisely because there can be no rules for the production and therefore the judgment of beauty, Kant may mean to suggest, the artist’s pleasure in her own production of her work . . . may be her best or even only grounds for a reasonable expectation that her work will fulfill its objective of pleasing her audience. The artist may not aim to please herself by her work but may have to put herself in the place of her intended audience in order to judge whether she is succeeding in her aim of pleasing them” (ibid., p. 298). Guyer’s solution to the problem he identifies is fully compatible with mine in imagining a role for the artist in Kant’s theory, but in framing the displacement of the beholder as itself the problem, he ignores the language of aspect in the passage (indeed, he omits it from his quotation on p. 294). Furthermore, he makes only one reference to §48 in this essay—a glancing and critical reference, at that (see p. 301). 33. Compare with this Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the relationship between thought and fabrication in the making of artworks: “Works of art are thought things, but this does not prevent their being things. The thought process itself no more produces and fabricates tangible things, such as books, paintings, sculptures, or compositions, than usage by itself produces and fabricates houses and furniture. The reification which occurs in writing something down, painting an image, modeling a figure, or composing a melody is of course related to the thought which preceded it, but what actually makes the thought a reality and fabricates things of thought is the same workmanship which, through the primordial instrument of human hands, builds the other durable things of the human artifice” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958], pp. 168–69). The idea that, in art, freedom from material solidity and its mechanisms is only ever apparent matters for Arendt because it connects artworks with “other durable things of the human artifice.” This continuity is what makes her turn to aesthetics noteworthy. Rather than transcending the domain of ordinary things by virtue of its being permanent as opposed to merely durable, art retrains our attention on ordinary things, reveals a new aspect of fabrication common to artworks and ordinary things alike. While this might sound like an anti-Kantian take on aesthetics, I am suggesting that the sections on art in the Third Critique, read with an eye to the practitioner’s perspective, support Arendt’s reading of artistic making as transformative for understanding the politics of work. I am drawing here on Patchen Markell’s powerful reading of Arendt, in which he argues that “the meaning of ‘work’ itself changes over the course of the chapter that bears its name, as Arendt turns her attention from the distinction between labor and work to the articulation of work and action—a joint that she explores in the dense but crucial final section of that chapter, on the ‘work of art.’ And these aspects of Arendt’s treatment of work, in turn, cast surprising new light on her critique of the ‘substitution of making for acting.’ Far from merely reflecting Arendt’s hostility to the supposedly anti-political characteristics of fabrication, I’ll propose that critique is undertaken as much in the defense of a rich,

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non-reductive understanding of work and its objects, and of their significance for action and politics, as in defense of action itself ” (Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition,” College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]: 18–19). 34. See Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, pp. 194–99. 35. “Since the formal purposiveness of the object is merely subjective, it attributes nothing to the thing itself but instead asserts something about the state of the faculties of representation and cognition: namely, that the cognitive faculties relate harmoniously in the minimal relation necessary for there to be a possible cognition” (Gasché, The Idea of Form, p. 81). See also Guyer: “The form of finality in an object consists precisely in its tendency to produce the harmony of the faculties, or its suitability for allowing this state to result from the contemplation of it” (Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 192). 36. For alternative versions of aesthetic value defined with reference to duration, see Michael W. Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), and Amit Yahav, Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 37. Vivasvan Soni asks, with some alarm, how this recognition of beauty merits the name of judgment. In Soni’s very persuasive reading, Kant’s reorientation of aesthetics from objects to subjects substitutes recognition (of the subject’s state of mind, in the form of pleasure) for judgment (a claim about the object): “The judgment of beauty, then, is not a judgment about the object at all, but a judgment about the universal communicability of the state of mind occasioned by the object. That state of mind, the free play of the understanding and the imagination, is, as we have seen, the state in which judgment about the object has been suspended. To judge an object beautiful, then, is to recognize and affirm our paralysis of judgment when confronted with this object” (Soni, “Introduction: The Crisis of Judgment,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 51.3 [Fall 2010]: 277). What Soni describes as a suspension of “judgment about the object” is akin to what I seek to describe as the key intersection between Hogarth’s and Kant’s aesthetic theories—albeit as a positive account of how both thinkers characterize pleasure rather than an indictment of their mutual abdication of the category of judgment. The problematic of judgment has focused an important tradition of thinking about the aesthetic, particularly in relation to the political and to Kant’s larger critical project. See, for instance, Arendt, The Human Condition, Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment, and Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 38. I take this (iteration vs. self-regeneration) to be the distinction implied in the last sentence of §12, where Kant describes contemplation of beauty as “analogous to (yet not identical with) the way in which we linger when a charm in the representation of an object repeatedly attracts attention, where the mind is passive” (CPJ, §12, p. 107). 39. Guyer, “From Jupiter’s Eagle to Warhol’s Boxes,” pp. 306, 307. Guyer revisits this issue in a more recent essay; see Guyer, “Seventy-Five Years of Kant . . . and Counting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75.4 (Fall 2017): 357, and Zuckert, “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Pleasure,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.3 (Summer 2002): 239–52. 40. CPJ, §12, p. 107.

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41. Kant’s own reference to cultivation in §44 is surprising. “Beautiful art, by contrast” with agreeable art, “is a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication [geselligen Mitteilung]” (§44, p. 185). This is surprising because it implies that “sociable communication” (as distinct from universal communicability) has some relevance for defining the domain of the aesthetic. Elsewhere in the argument, he discusses sociability as an eventual consequence of the universal communicability of judgments of taste, a consequence to be desired, but in its very desirability excluded from the logical definition of aesthetic judgment (which must be disinterested).

Epilogue 1. Other obvious candidates are Henry Fielding and William Blake. Fielding invokes Hogarth in the preface to Joseph Andrews to support his distinction between the comic and the burlesque, a distinction more clearly in the domain of characterization than of form. Fielding died barely a year after the publication of the Analysis and did not take up its arguments in his late writing. 2. See, for instance, Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). 3. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 426. 4. Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, p. 74. 5. Ibid., p. 78. 6. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination, p. 59. See also Gerard’s discussion of the letter in which Sterne expresses to Richard Berenger his wish for Hogarth to illustrate the already-published scene of Trim reading the sermon, which contains a reference to the line of beauty. Can Sterne be straight-faced in his proposition that Hogarth might want to provide a visual representation of this scene because “it wd mutually illustrate his System & mine” (quoted in Gerard, p. 54)? More likely, I think, that Sterne already understood mutual illustration as a hermeneutic abyss. 7. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 107. 8. See ibid., pp. 549–50. 9. The difficulty of Tristram Shandy as a starting point for anything; more broadly, the difficulty of placing it in literary history: this is Keymer’s central topic. See, for instance, his discussion of Sternean irony dividing those critics who describe his narrative strategies as anachronistically postmodern from those who characterize his work as a last hurrah of Renaissance and Scriblerian satirical traditions. See Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, pp. 4–5. 10. William Cowper, The Task, in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), Book 2, ll. 285–310.

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“The general impression left by the drafts is one of intermittent accretion and painful replanning.” This sentence is not a description of the genesis of this book, though it could be; instead, it comes from Joseph Burke’s introduction to his 1955 edition of The Analysis of Beauty. I first came across it in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago while writing my dissertation on William Hogarth, and I filed it away as a fitting epigraph for use in some indefinite future. If I was in the Regenstein, then it was at least ten years ago, meaning that my progress from dissertation to book has been intermittent indeed. That it has not been especially painful is a testament to the many friends who have supported this book and its author over the years. Most immediately, I am grateful to Sarah Miller, Ash Lago, Harry Haskell, and Jeffrey Schier at Yale University Press, and to Steven Pincus and Jonathan Kramnick, editors of the Lewis Walpole Series in EighteenthCentury Culture and History. The comments that two anonymous readers for the press provided on the prospectus and a couple of early chapters were instrumental in helping me to shape the full manuscript, which in turn benefitted from the scrutiny of an additional reader at a later stage. I thank Alexander Trotter for creating the index. But before any of that took place, 221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

it was Jonathan who took an interest in the project, which bears the marks of his astute vision of its scope and its potential. And Jonathan was advocating on my behalf at a still earlier stage, when I was weighing the pros and cons of a move from Texas to New Jersey to fill the vacancy he had left upon his departure from the Rutgers English Department. I still can’t believe my luck in having landed in the midst of such brilliant, warm, and witty colleagues. For their advice and support, I am particularly grateful to Ann Coiro, Elin Diamond, Andrew Goldstone, Chris Iannini, Doug Jones, Ann Jurecic, Stacy Klein, David Kurnick, Jeff Lawrence, Meredith McGill, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, Carter Mathes, Jacqueline Miller, Andrew Parker, Stéphane Robolin, James Swenson, Nancy Yousef, and the much-missed Margaret Ronda and Nick Gaskill, as well as a collection of extraordinary chairs: Carolyn Williams, Jonah Siegel, Michelle Stephens, Colin Jager, and Rebecca Walkowitz (to whose number I add Victoria Aarons, at Trinity). I owe a tremendous debt, too, to the staff of the department, especially Courtney Borack and Cheryl Robinson. Martin Gliserman occupied the unusual double role of colleague and landlord with grace and good cheer. Sarah Novacich deserves special mention as a collaborator and confidante. And I would have been lost without the expert guidance of my mentors: Michael McKeon, who urged me to think harder about Addison; Lynn Festa, whose smart strategic advice has helped me frame more persuasive arguments, write better sentences, and navigate the more confusing passages of life in this profession; and William Galperin, whose enthusiasm for and advocacy of the project have buoyed me for as long as I have known him. Lynn’s and Billy’s invaluable mentoring was amplified in the “Arts and Aesthetics” seminar at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, where this book was incubated through a year of intensive and rewarding discussion. I am grateful to Billy and to Henry Turner, who convened the seminar, and to all of its participants, in particular Elisabeth Camp, Manu Samriti Chander, Amy Cooper, Bakary Diaby, Jocelyn Rodal, and Jane Sharp. I was fortunate, also, to participate in “Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty,” the 2014–15 seminar at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, as a postdoctoral fellow. Thanks to convenor Marc Redfield and participants Hannah Freed-Thall, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Kane, Ellen Rooney, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, and Elizabeth Weed. 222

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks also to Donna Goodnow, to Denise Davis at differences, and especially to Deborah Weinstein, for helping me through a hard time. I am grateful to graduate students at Penn, Princeton, and Columbia for inviting me to present work, and to audiences at those institutions and at Parsons and Northwestern for helping me make the work better. It’s been an exciting time to work in eighteenth-century studies among such smart and generous people as the following, who have, variously, offered to read drafts, asked important questions, and expressed encouragement and solidarity: Al Coppola, Jenny Davidson, Helen Deutsch, Marcie Frank, Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Aleksondra Hultquist, Sarah Tindal Kareem, Heather Keenleyside, Jess Keiser, Paul Kelleher, Kathy Lubey, Ruth Mack, Courtney Weiss Smith, Vivasvan Soni, Dustin Stewart, and Kate Thorpe. I am looking forward to further conversations with Sean Silver now that he is my colleague at Rutgers. So many of the ideas in this book have been refined in the classroom, and for that I thank my students, in particular Nicholas Allred, Katie Blakely, Stephanie Diehl, Kirsten Martin, Isabel Stern, and Bakary (again). Jennifer Comerford was my eminently capable research assistant; she answered even the most mundane queries with intelligence and curiosity far beyond the call. For company at the Regenstein, and for making the University of Chicago such a congenial as well as a rigorous place to study, I thank Melissa Barton, Kasia Bartoszynska, ´ Andrew Broughton, Neil Chudgar, Kate Gaudet, Andrea Haslanger, Elizabeth Hutcheon, Michael Meeuwis, Anahid Nersessian, and Tom Perrin. I received an unofficial but indispensable education while working for Jay Williams at Critical Inquiry. And as for my official education: I am lucky to have encountered the inimitable Frances Ferguson in my first year of grad school. I could do worse than make a career out of unsuccessful, if ardent, imitation. James Chandler let me write the dissertation I wanted to write (even though it wasn’t about Wordsworth) and taught me the value of asking good questions. Robin Valenza shepherded me through my first reading of Clarissa and helped me see myself as a scholar. I fear I can only fall short in measuring Sandra Macpherson’s long shadow. Call it polymorphous exemplarity: she is a model of exacting scholarship, contrarian brilliance, scrupulously ethical pedagogy, and unapologetic feminism, both in and out of school. I admire her intellect, of course, but also her courage. And, after all, this book had its origins in her seminar. 223

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prior to Chicago, I had the great good luck to be taught and mentored by David Levin, Charlotte Gordon, and Charles Newman. I am grateful for the category-defying friendship of Charley Gibney, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Wendy Lee, Sarah Grossman, James Marra, Kristin Gill, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Imri Schattner-Ornan, Thomas Cathey, and Donald Silver. The Rufos and Teppers have been steadfast in their support of Lucius and me (and I gather Joseph Tepper will be among my first and most thorough readers). I asked Lucius to hit “send” when it was finally time to return the revised manuscript to the Press. We couldn’t have reached that milestone, and I couldn’t have gotten through the last five years, without the aid and good will of our Highland Park people, including Julie Amodeo, Mark and Rose DeLorenzo, Carrie Dirks, Andrew Lagermasini, Andrea Lorincz, Francesca Maresca, Rachel Hoffmann, Daphne Robinson, Jay Ruggieri, the Tanner-Riccardis, Marilyn Rye, Tracey Maiden, Shawn Sobkowski, Barbara Menzel, the Jager family (especially Olivia), our three generations of upstairs neighbors, and James Keene. Jeff Dolven kept company with me and shared all kinds of practical and writerly wisdom as the project neared completion. I am grateful to him, and to Brita Zitin for patiently putting up with me her whole life (well, so far), not to mention helping me become a mother. Speaking of which: Lucius said to me, when he was six, “I like it when you finish important things.” There are lots of reasons for finally letting go of this book, but you, Lucius, are the very best of them. I love you. Finally, and first of all, I thank my parents, Melinda and Barry Zitin, who have in every sense made it possible for me to do this work.

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I NDEX

Abrams, M. H., 79, 200n62 absorption, 24, 119, 141–43, 212n24 abstraction, 1–2, 23, 26, 40, 69, 131; cognitive, 7, 15; copying and, 91; of narrative, 27; as opposite of figurative art, 173; perceptual, 8, 15; pleasure of form and, 166–71; as practice, 148; tragic view of, 10 abstraction, formal, 8, 11, 83, 85, 86, 104; as cognitive process, 25, 69, 93, 154; craft and technique linked to, 2; free play of the faculties and, 169, 170–71; generalizing abstraction distinguished from, 148–49; Hogarth as theorist of, 85, 105–6, 116, 117, 132, 145, 161; mimesis and, 89; objecthood and, 143; representation and, 23; vision and, 88, 91; visual

pleasure and, 12, 105; as way of seeing, 178 Addison, Joseph, 22, 50, 88, 128, 149, 159, 189n2; on absolute and comparative beauty, 92; aesthetic theory of, 96; on beauty and deformity, 41–42; empiricist aesthetics of, 30, 35; on “final cause” of beauty, 33, 48; Lockean terminology adapted by, 32–35, 36–37; on nature quoted by art, 205n35; on perceptual qualities of objects, 31–32; on pleasure of comparison, 102–3; on primary and secondary pleasures, 94–95, 98–100, 101; on representation, 78; on senses as origin of aesthetic pleasures, 35–36, 191n16. See also “Pleasures of the Imagination” Adorno, Theodor, 9

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aesthetics, 1, 7, 88, 172; antiformalism and, 29, 52; class distinctions codified by, 15; classical legacies and, 65–70; empirical, 147; formalist, 44; history of, 21; importance of form, 1; of Kant, 170, 215n14; literary and visual, 173, 179; as method of selfknowledge, 189n2; politics of, 17, 18, 80, 187n35; in the Renaissance, 66; reoriented from objects to subjects, 219n37; role of representation in, 23; as theory of taste, 53, 54, 186n32 aesthetic theory, 23, 25, 26; of art, 79; classical influences on, 56; formalist, 87; of Hogarth, 85, 118, 127, 142; phenomenology of vision and, 12–13; practice and, 74; shift from objects to subjects of aesthetic experience, 28, 188–89n1 agency, 119, 120–21, 208n4 allegory, 66 Analysis of Beauty, The (Hogarth, 1753), 8, 12–14, 23, 105, 142, 178, 182, 202n78; on abstract form and visual pleasure, 173; Addison’s aesthetics rejected in, 35; aesthetics of desire in, 130–31; antimimetic strain in, 86, 92; Burke’s introduction to 1955 edition, 87, 88–89, 2023n9; “Of Compositions with the Serpentine Line” chapter, 126–27, 134–35; craft knowledge vindicated, 83; democratizing tendencies of, 117–18; on female body and beautiful form, 17, 24; feminist phenomenology in, 118–19, 127–30, 144; on form, 123; graphic works of Hogarth and, 106, 112–13; Hogarth’s engraved illustrations for, 11, 132–35, 133–35; Hogarth’s preface to, 89, 111–12; on imitation (mimesis), 93; “Of

Intricacy” chapter, 106–11; Kant and, 145–47, 166; on making the body into beautiful object, 38; overlooked by current scholarship, 25; on pleasure of “wanton chace,” 107, 128, 130, 140, 168, 210n13; “Of Quantity” chapter, 168–69; on race and beauty, 207–8n3; “regime of the eye” and, 210n14; sex and gender in, 118; six principles of formal beauty, 129; technique in, 137; tradition of aesthetic writing and, 15; Tristram Shandy as literary-critical analogue for, 177; women addressed in, 17, 24, 118–23, 127, 129, 131–32 Anecdotes of Painting in England (Walpole, 1771), 108 Apter, Emily, 205–6n40 architecture, 78, 97–98, 203n13 Arendt, Hannah, 188n46, 218n33 Aristotelian philosophy, 47, 48, 66, 193n38; epistemological form and, 52; formal cause, 29; form-asessence, 51; neo-Aristotelianism, 50, 51; Platonic idealism in competition with, 67 Aristotle, 23, 51, 56, 60, 77, 193n38, 198n38; Platonism and, 197n32; Poetics, 64, 65–66, 104, 196n29; Politics, 80; prehistory of aesthetics and, 65 artisans, 9, 186n26; guild system and, 117; as model for aspiring aesthetes, 86; practical experience of, 30–31; verbally inarticulate expertise of, 13–14, 186n29; women identified with, by Hogarth, 119–21, 122, 125–26, 128–29, 131, 143 authorship, 60, 62, 196n21 autonomy, as criterion of the aesthetic, 95, 204n17

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Barrell, John, 16, 75–80, 121–22, 200n62, 201n72 Barry, Lynda, 111, 206nn41–42 beauty, 20, 31–32, 123, 145; absolute and comparative, 94; abstraction and, 85; analysis and, 45; decay of, 73; encounter of object and perceiving subject, 22; femininity identified with, 126; as form, 1, 20, 42; formal determination of, 29, 41, 48; fusion with goodness and truth, 58; Hogarth’s six principles of formal beauty, 129; judgment of, 146, 152, 153; Kant’s definition of, 157, 216n24; phenomenology of, 50; pleasure associated with, 1, 2, 20, 183n2; primary and secondary qualities of, 33, 34–35, 46; race and, 207–8n3; reproductive functionality and, 127, 136, 210n10; uniformity amidst variety and, 44–45, 46. See also “line of beauty” Bertucci, Paola, 13, 14, 16, 186n26, 195n18 Bindman, David, 208n3 Black, Scott, 37 Blake, William, 220n1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 187n35 Boyle, Robert, 50–51, 66, 193n38 Burke, Edmund, 30, 46, 127, 189n1, 209n8; on Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” 210n11; Philosophical Enquiry, 147, 213n4; on sexual desire and pleasures of imagination, 49; taste skepticism and, 149–50 Burke, Joseph, 87, 88, 90, 106

Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury), 57, 60, 63, 72, 73, 199n53, 200n58 chemistry, 50, 51 Chudgar, Neil, 191–92n19 civic humanism, 16, 80, 121, 123, 201n63; painting elevated in status by, 76; women and artisans excluded from, 126 class distinctions, 15, 187n35 Clune, Michael, 187n38 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 102 color, 2, 33, 82, 193n32; charm of, 156; imperceptibility to touch, 36; as secondary quality, 44–45; as a source of visual pleasure, 34; uniformity and, 129 content, 3, 75, 83, 91, 157, 184n7, 187n38, 190n4; formal purposiveness and, 167; mimesis and, 77, 79, 90; shift of aspect to form, 170; spatioformal abstraction and, 176. See also form/content relation copying, 88–89, 91–92, 163. See also imitation; mimesis corporeality, 127, 134 Costelloe, Timothy, 194n6 Cowper, William, 180–81 critical theory, 18 criticism, 1, 5, 20; formalist, 18; form invoked by, 3; literary, 21, 27, 108 “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (Kant, 1790), 2, 25, 150 Critique of the Power of Judgment [CPJ] (Kant, 1790), 16, 25, 166, 167, 168; agreeable and beautiful art distinguished, 160, 217n27, 220n41; “Analytic of the Beautiful,” 147, 148, 150, 156, 158, 163, 179; on art and nature, 159; beauty defined, 157, 216n24; on form and taste, 150; on

canon, 5, 17, 18, 76, 147; of civic humanism, 201n63; Hogarth’s canonical status, 25 Cassirer, Ernst, 71–74, 199n49

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INDEX

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 10, 22, 30, 38, 185n14 “Essay on Criticism, An” (Pope, 1711), 3–7, 20 Essay on the Theory of Painting, An (Richardson), 81–82, 202n78 Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, An (Richardson), 82 essence, 5, 32, 39, 40, 193n38; form as “real essence,” 30–31; pattern as synonym for, 22; real and nominal, 31; substantial form, 50–51 essentialism, 41 ethics, 42, 196n26, 199–200n54; of action, 140; moral sense and, 56; as practical reason, 55; Stoical, 69, 196n28

Critique of the Power of Judgment [CPJ] (cont.) free play of cognitive faculties, 152, 153, 214n12; on genius, 161, 162, 217n29; on intentionality, 157; on relation of pleasure and cognition, 151. See also Third Critique cultural turn, 109 Dabydeen, David, 207n3 Davis, Whitney, 186n34 de Bolla, Peter, 205n39, 210n14 deformity, 6, 31–32, 43, 183n2, 184n9; as opposite of beauty, 7, 42, 190n11; pain associated with, 1, 20 Den Uyl, Dennis, 196n26 Derrida, Jacques, 217n25 design, 2, 6, 44, 47, 51 desire, 126, 130, 185n10 Dickie, George, 149 “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry” (Pope), 196n29 disinterestedness, 8, 56, 95, 120, 185n10, 194n2, 200n58; as a central idea of modern aesthetics, 194n6; as criterion for aesthetic judgment, 23, 200n54; myth of, 210n13; reflexivity and, 95

Feeling Beauty (Starr), 26 femininity, 126, 127 feminism, 118–19, 127–30, 144, 208n4 Ferguson, Frances, 103, 217n28 Fictional Matter (Thompson), 50, 193n42 Fielding, Henry, 196n29, 220n1 figure, 32, 33, 36; aesthetic perception and, 46, 193n32; “forming power” and, 79; spatial form abstracted from human figure, 133–36, 133–35; uniformity amidst variety and, 44. See also form Fish, Stanley, 211n19 form: abstraction and pleasure of, 166–71; beauty as, 1, 20, 42; centrality to humanistic thought, 18, 19; definition of, 19, 20; formal complexity, 3; “forming power,” 73, 74–75, 79; form/practice dialectic, 65; as genre, 184n8; history and, 17–18; ideal, 23; judgment grounded in, 2; literature and, 18–19; matter paired with, 51, 128; meaning in

Eagleton, Terry, 187n35 empiricism, 21, 22, 38, 70, 190n5; aesthetics at odds with, 71–72, 74, 199n49; Enlightenment, 9, 28–29; Lockean, 48, 56; practicality and, 54–55; sense perception and, 39; skepticism as anchor of, 29; theory of substances and qualities, 49 Enlightenment, 6, 9–10, 187n35, 192n19 epistemology, 29, 52, 153, 191–92n19; empiricism and, 30, 189n1; of judgment, 128; Lockean, 56

228

INDEX

Freedgood, Elaine, 205–6n40 Fried, Michael, 24, 142, 212n24

relation to formlessness, 6, 7; patterns and, 38–39, 192n24; pluralist defense of, 39–40, 44; politics of, 18; practical, 17, 83; purposiveness and, 156–57, 215n23; singularity of objects and, 40; taste and, 149–57; “uniformity” and, 43; as verb and as noun, 5, 6, 7, 184n9; women and embodied language of, 17. See also figure; shape formal analysis, 18, 19, 40, 41 formalism, 20, 39–40, 49, 172; as antiaesthetic tendency within aesthetics, 56; historicism and, 17; new formalism, 17–19, 21, 186n32; Platonic and Aristotelian “varietals” of, 67; Porter’s critique of, 67–68, 197n34 formalism, practical, 9, 26, 86, 121; abstraction and, 131; democratic implications of, 122; empiricism and, 29–30; language and, 27; visual perception of form, 87; women and, 17, 24, 129 form/content relation, 3, 20, 68, 88, 173, 182, 187n38, 197n33; aesthetic judgment and, 156; artistic practice and, 121, 157; form abstracted from content, 169, 178; free play of cognitive faculties and, 154; integrative account of, 87; Kant’s conventional view of, 163; literary aesthetics and, 173, 187n38; mimesis and, 89; Nachbesserung (“painstaking improvement”) and, 181; process of formal abstraction and, 122; reconciliation of form and content, 106; Shaftesbury’s aesthetics and, 75; shift of aspect from content to form, 170 formlessness, 6, 48 Four Stages of Cruelty, The (Hogarth), 106

Gaskill, Nick, 177 gaze, female, 123 gaze, male, 123, 129, 130 genius, 25, 164; Kant’s definition of, 162; making of artwork and, 163, 217n29; of original artist versus copier, 89, 90, 92; purposiveness and, 161 genre, 40, 184n8 Gerard, W. B., 175, 220n6 Gibson, J. J., 96 Guyer, Paul, 38, 194n2, 194n6, 212–13n2, 213n7; on formal purposiveness, 167; on Kant’s aesthetics, 153, 215n15, 215n20; on pleasure of artist versus pleasure of audience, 217–18n32; on Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, 195n8 Halperin, David, 70, 198n45 Hammer, Langdon, 187n38 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 106 harmony, 43, 46, 200n58 historicism, 17–18 Hobbes, Thomas, 80 Hockney, David, 84–85 Hogarth, William, 8–9, 11, 88, 160, 161, 173–74; on abstraction, 11; Addison’s conception of visual sense, 98; artisans in aesthetic theory of, 13–14, 17, 122–23; attitudes toward race and beauty, 207–8n3; on beauty of female body, 126; bodies as objects and agents, 131; on boxing, 123–24; on copiers versus true artists, 89–90; on craft knowledge, 114–15; on dancing, 137–41, 143–44, 173; on eye movement, 109–10, 110, 138;

229

INDEX

30; Treatise of Human Nature (1739– 40), 1, 20, 84n5 Hutcheson, Francis, 184n5, 22, 42–43, 50, 94, 192n30; on absolute and comparative beauty, 78, 92, 94; as a founder of British aesthetics, 194n6; on relation of form to beauty and pleasure, 49–50; shift from figure to form, 47; on unity/uniformity amidst variety, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 103–4, 193n32. See also Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An hylomorphism, 51, 68

Hogarth, William, (cont.) graphic works in relation to aesthetic theory of, 106; influence on contemporaries, 25–26; Kant in comparison with, 166–71, 219n37; language as medium and, 115–16; on “line of beauty,” 8; on mimesis, 100, 101, 103, 104; on philosophers (“mere men of letters”) and beauty, 8, 89, 111, 147, 213n6; practical formalism and, 29–30, 87; practice as model for perception, 23; as practitioner-theorist, 15, 21, 80, 81; as protofeminist, 118, 127, 128; sexual politics in aesthetics of, 127, 137–40, 139, 209n10; Shaftesbury compared with, 16; on taste, 147–48; Tristram Shandy frontispiece images by, 175, 176; on uniformity and beauty, 103–4; verbal media and, 23–24; on visual and tactile sensation, 38; visual pleasure and, 105, 113, 116, 124, 139–40; visual training program, 132; women in aesthetic theory of, 16–17, 24; writerly insecurity of, 111–12, 113, 206n43. See also “line of beauty”; serpentine line Hogarth, William, works of: Autobiographical Notes (unpublished), 206n41; The Four Stages of Cruelty, 106; A Harlot’s Progress, 106; Lord George Graham in his Ship’s Cabin (1742), 208n3; Marriage A-la-Mode, 106; A Rake’s Progress, 85, 106. See also Analysis of Beauty, The Horkheimer, Max, 9 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 188n46 humanities, literary, 18, 19, 20 Hume, David, 50, 149, 189n1; on beauty and deformity, 1, 7, 183n2, 184n5, 184n9; discourse of taste and,

imagination, 34, 36, 184n5, 214n13; correspondence to object, 36; creative, 102; free play of, 169 imitation, 23, 93, 104, 163, 196n25, 196n29. See also copying; mimesis Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An (Hutcheson, 1725), 22, 42, 47, 78; on absolute and comparative beauty, 94; on relation of pleasure to form, 49 intentionality, 146, 157, 158, 159, 212–13n2 Irwin, Robert, 84, 202n1 jargon, trade/professional, 24, 30, 114–15, 117 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 196n29, 220n1 judgment, 1, 5, 96, 128, 184n8; artistic practice and, 161; conceptual knowledge and, 16; ethical and aesthetic, 70; form as grounding of, 2; pleasure-cognition relation and, 147 Juengel, Scott, 210n14 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 15, 38, 77, 145, 180–81; abstraction and, 147, 213n3,

230

INDEX

physical and spatial form, 111; rhetoric, 80 Latour, Bruno, 190n5 Leighton, Angela, 18–19 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 147 Levine, Caroline, 19, 96, 177, 187n38, 190n7; on form and essence, 39; on form as patterning, 192n24 Levinson, Marjorie, 17, 186n33 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 12 “line of beauty,” 8, 11, 24, 106–7, 139, 210n11. See also serpentine line literary studies, 17, 18, 19, 26, 109, 172 literature, 3, 41; beauty of, 36; definitional elusiveness of form and, 18; pleasure and, 7–8; science linked to, 51 Locke, John, 10, 22, 42, 66, 185n14, 190n9; on essence of substances, 31; on form and pattern, 38–39; form criticized by, 30–31, 38, 73; on knowledge and perception, 29; on pleasure as simple idea, 97; on primary and secondary qualities of objects, 32, 34–35, 191n9, 191n14, 204n16; skepticism of, 40; tabula rasa of, 22, 56, 203n14; theory of qualities, 50; on visual and tactile sensation, 37, 191n19. See also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An Lord George Graham in his Ship’s Cabin (Hogarth, 1742), 208n3

215n19; aesthetic formalism of, 29; on art as play and craft as work, 165; on colors and tones, 193n32; discourse of taste and, 30; on form and the problem of taste, 149–57; form as condition of aesthetic experience, 186n32; on form as quality of object, 43–44; on “free play of cognitive faculties,” 38, 152, 153–54, 158, 159; Hogarth in comparison with, 66–71, 219n37; on pleasure and cognition, 147, 151–52, 214–15n14; practitioner sidelined in aesthetic theory of, 25; on taste, 148; transcendental critique, 56. See also Critique of the Power of Judgment Kelleher, Paul, 195n8 Keymer, Thomas, 174, 176, 220n9 Kivy, Peter, 28, 46–47, 189–90n3; on beauty as uniformity amidst variety, 45, 192n30; on color as secondary quality, 44–45; on founders of British aesthetics, 194n6; on Hutcheson’s “unity amidst variety,” 47, 193n34; on phenomenology of beauty, 42–43; on pleasure of beauty, 204n21 Klein, Lawrence, 72, 199n51 knowledge, 13, 55, 83, 157; beauty and, 37; conceptual, 16; craft knowledge, 91; division of, 19; embodied, 15, 121; empirical, 50; knowledge-systems, 62; limits of perceptual knowledge, 96; of nature, 93; practice as, 115; production of, 19, 21; self-knowledge, 189n2 Kramnick, Jonathan, 19, 187n40

Mack, Ruth, 91, 136 MacPherson, Sandra, 144, 187n38 Markell, Patchen, 218n33 Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth), 106 masculinism, 118, 144, 209n10, 212n26 mathematics, 11, 61–62, 113 Matthews, Eric, 213n7

Lamb, Charles, 2023n9 language, 23, 27, 83, 115–16, 178, 188n46; materiality of, 26; in

231

INDEX

of objects, 34; wantonness and, 141, 211n21 music, 62, 78, 188n46, 203n13, 217n26

McKeon, Michael, 65–66, 95, 96, 189n1, 195n14, 204n17 McMurran, Mary Helen, 51, 52 meaning, 3, 12, 68 medium specificity, 87 metaphor, 51, 82, 102, 181; Addison and, 99, 102; Hogarth and, 83, 91, 111, 112, 115, 119, 136; Pope and, 4, 5, 7; Shaftesbury and, 22, 55, 61 metaphysics, Platonist, 35 method, 12, 15, 21, 26, 115, 132, 175, 196n21; empiricism and, 55–56; of Enlightenment inductive reasoning, 9–10; formal abstraction as, 117; formal analysis and, 18; formalist, 21; philosophy as, 55; portability of literary method, 187n38; scientific, 189n1; Shaftesbury’s method of soliloquy, 58, 60–61, 62, 63, 72–73, 196n26; superimposed grid as craft method, 23, 86, 92 metonymy, 15, 61, 81, 108, 110, 119, 169 Milton, John, 140, 211n19 mimesis, 77, 78, 92, 100, 101, 197n33; copying versus “power of abstraction,” 89; dancing and, 143; Hogarth’s formalism against, 88; as imitation, 93; Kant’s theory of beauty and, 216n25; naïve, 89, 104; painting as liberal art and, 78–79; visual aesthetics against, 86. See also copying; imitation minimalism, 24 Molyneux’s question, 191n19 “Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, The” (Shaftesbury), 73, 74 moral philosophy, 58 moral sense theory, 24, 47, 50, 123 motion, 32, 137, 138, 139, 143; as primary quality, 45; as spatial quality

natural philosophy, 34, 35, 50, 65, 202n72, 209n6; aesthetic invisibility of, 35; empiricism and, 22, 69; epistemological caution of, 96 nature, 65, 101, 188–89n1; artist compared to, 161, 162; division between art and nature, 78, 93–94, 159 Nehamas, Alexander, 41 neoclassicism, 43, 93, 200n62 Nersessian, Anahid, 19, 187n38, 187n40 New Criticism, 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 196n28 Noggle, James, 186n32, 187n35, 188n43 Norman, Donald, 96 Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules (Shaftesbury), 79, 81 novel, realist, 50, 173 objecthood, 24, 142, 143, 144 objectification, 120, 152, 208n4 ontology, 48, 51, 52, 120, 192n19 Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, The (Porter), 67 ornament, 4, 114, 115, 217n25 painting, 41, 75, 189n1; absorption as trope in French paintings, 142; centrality of vision to, 41; elevation from craft to liberal art, 78–79; as liberal art, 16, 81; as mechanical art, 16, 62, 76, 82; politics of, 81; sense perception and, 191n16; viewers/ audience of, 80 Paradise Lost (Milton), 140, 211nn18–19 patriarchal culture, 17, 120–21

232

INDEX

knowledge claims about, 37; mimetic, 105; pleasure of the understanding and, 37, 100, 101; practice and, 26; primary and secondary, 22, 34, 35, 36, 78, 92, 94–95, 98–100, 101, 203–4n16; of pursuit (chase, hunt), 106–7, 108, 111, 113, 128, 130, 167, 169, 210n13; representation and, 23; sensual pleasure distinguished from, 2, 151, 168; sexual desire and, 49, 125, 134, 140. See also visual pleasure “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Addison), 22, 23, 31, 52; as inaugural work of aesthetics, 28, 189n3; on primary and secondary pleasures, 94; on virtualization of sense experience, 95; on vision versus touch, 96, 97 Pluhar, Werner, 217n31 Pocock, J.G.A., 76 Poetics (Aristotle), 64, 65–66, 104, 196n29 poetry, 5, 60, 102, 165, 188n46, 195n14 Political Theory of Painting, The (Barrell), 77 Politics (Aristotle), 80 Pope, Alexander, 3–7, 48, 184n8, 196n29; “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” 196n29; “An Essay on Criticism,” 3–6, 20; thought/expression dichotomy, 3–4 Porter, James, 23, 56, 67–69, 83, 197nn33–34, 198n38 psychology, 71, 152 purposiveness, formal, 150, 157, 159, 161, 219n35; of artwork separate from artist, 161–62; Kant’s definition of the beautiful and, 163; pleasure in aesthetic judgment and, 155, 167

patterns/patterning, 19, 38–39 Paulson, Ronald, 185n10, 24, 98, 105, 106, 210n13; Hogarth criticized by, 207n1; on Hogarth’s sexual politics, 209–10n10 perception, 7, 26, 38, 54, 74, 84, 144; abstraction in act of, 154–55; cognitive pleasure and, 167; empiricism and, 30, 39; judgments of beauty and, 159; knowledge about objects/ substances and, 29; lines and spatial relationships, 8; novelistic realism and, 50; object of, 41; practice as model for, 23; shaped by making, 146; spatial, 8; spatio-formal, 141; tactile versus visual, 36–37, 191–92n19; techniques of, 1–2; visual perception, 36, 87, 92, 146, 176 Philosophical Enquiry (Burke), 147, 149, 213n4 Plato, 56, 63, 64; Aristotle’s refinement of, 67, 197n33; prehistory of aesthetics and, 65; Symposium, 70, 198n45 Platonism, 58, 62, 65, 71, 197n32; aesthetics and, 74; metaphysics of, 35; Neoplatonism, 47, 56, 58, 73; Platonic Form, 73 pleasure, aesthetic, 7, 11, 20, 39, 48, 183n2, 204n16; absolute and comparative, 92; of abstraction (abstract form), 9, 92, 145, 178; angling simile, 130–31; beauty versus deformity, 1, 42; cognition and, 147, 148–49, 151–52, 214n12; comparative principle of, 98–103; of comparison, 23; concrete (material) traces of, 12; in free play of cognitive faculties, 166; Hogarth’s theory of, 106–7; judgment of beauty and, 214n14; as knowledge about form, 21;

qualities, theory of, 35, 50, 54

233

INDEX

sex/sexual desire, 49, 128, 140 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Antony Ashley Cooper), 15, 16, 23, 73, 149; “beautifying” concept, 74–75; on definition of authorship, 60; on disinterestedness, 23, 56, 194n6, 200n54, 200n58; “forming power” concept, 73, 74–75, 79; as a founder of British aesthetics, 57, 194n6; history and poetry grouped together, 195n14; on mimetic representation, 59; “The Moralists,” 73, 74; moral-sense theory of, 42–43, 55, 56; philosophy as worldly self-cultivation, 70, 71–75, 199n51; Platonism (Neoplatonism) of, 47, 56–57, 71–73, 79, 196n23; “Sensus Communis,” 72; Stoicism of, 22, 63, 69, 196n28. See also Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times; “Soliloquy; or Advice to an Author” Shakespeare, William, 105 shape, 8, 19, 37, 122, 170; literal shape of objects, 24; play of, 193n32; as primary quality, 45; as property of objects, 167. See also figure; form Sidney, Sir Philip, 60 Silver, Sean, 189n1, 190n5 simile, 5–6, 124, 130 slavery, 120, 207–8n3 Smolderen, Thierry, 109 Socrates, 65 soliloquy, 58–61, 195n17 “Soliloquy; or Advice to an Author” (Shaftesbury, 1710), 58–65, 72, 81, 196n26 Soni, Vivasvan, 63–64, 219n37 spectatorship, 125, 142 Starr, G. Gabrielle, 26 Sterne, Laurence, 26–27, 174–77, 179, 220n6

Rake’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 85 Rancière, Jacques, 76, 78, 79–80, 93, 200n70 reason, practical, 55 reflexivity, 38, 95, 96, 177; dancing and, 141; grammatical, 120; in Tristram Shandy, 178 Reid, Thomas, 194n6 Renaissance, 6, 66, 220n9 representation, 34, 77–78, 80, 144, 154; aesthetics and, 23; artifice and, 78; artisanal experience and, 13; comparative principle and, 101; formal purposiveness and, 163; generalizing of, 10–11; limits of linguistic representation, 179; literary, 82; mimetic, 59, 92, 93, 104, 216n25; pleasure of the imagination and, 98; verbal language and, 115 Reynolds, Joshua, 10, 76, 212n1 Richardson, Jonathan, 81–83, 207n2 Ricks, Christopher, 211n19 Roach, Joseph, 79, 201–2n72, 209n6 Russian Formalism, 67 satire, 173, 176 Schotland, Sara, 208n3 science, 51, 61–62, 193n42 Second Characters (Shaftesbury, unfinished work), 57 Sedgwick, Eve, 198n44 seduction, 24 Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Wechsler, 1982), 84 self-loss, technical versus erotic, 24 “Sensus Communis” (Shaftesbury), 72 serpentine line, 89, 113, 114, 126–27, 148, 211n18; dance movement and, 138–40, 139; S-shaped curve as paradigm of beauty, 88. See also “line of beauty”

234

INDEX

theater (drama), 58, 59, 197n30, 201–2n72; plot as essence of tragedy, 66; stage actor as instrumental body, 209n6 theatricality, 142, 212n24 Third Critique (Kant), 25, 145, 146, 147, 150, 171. See also Critique of the Power of Judgment Thompson, Helen, 50–52, 69, 193n38, 197n32 time, 110, 116, 193n32 touch, sense of, 7, 35–36, 96, 97; considered inferior to vision, 37, 96; in Hogarth’s aesthetic theory, 38; lightness or heaviness of, 82 Townsend, Dabney, 72, 75, 199–200n54 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 1739– 40), 1, 20, 184n5 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 26, 174–79, 220n9 Turner, James Grantham, 12 Two Discourses (Richardson, 1719), 82

Stoicism, 22, 56 Stolnitz, Jerome, 188–89n1, 194n2, 199–200n54; on disinterestedness, 200n58; on Shaftesbury’s beautifying concept, 74–75 structuralism, 27, 178 subjectivity, 29, 37, 53, 201n70; agency and, 120; displaced in favor of action, 144; political, 143; taste and, 149 sublimation, 128 sublime, the, 5, 71, 97, 149 Summers, David, 23, 56, 66–67, 70, 197n32 Swift, Jonathan, 136 symmetry, 103, 104, 113–14 Symposium (Platonic dialogue), 70, 198n45 Task, The (Cowper, 1785), 180–82 taste, 1, 3, 13, 20, 58, 70; class distinctions and, 16; as common sense, 154, 215n19; formal abstraction and, 148–49; form and problem of taste, 149–57; genius and, 164, 217n29; in Hogarth’s aesthetic theory, 123; Kantian aesthetics and, 188n43; as proxy for subjectivity, 37–38; pure and impure judgments of, 159, 216n25; refinement of form in artmaking and, 166; role in making artworks, 163; subjectivism/subjectivity of, 21, 29; “taste skepticism,” 149; theorized in 18th-century Britain, 22; vagueness of, 147–48 technique, 8, 62, 88, 105, 132, 134, 173; abstraction and, 2, 7, 91; of dancing, 143; disembodied eye and, 137; mimetic, 93; of moral self-examination, 55; of perception, 1, 9, 10, 23; of soliloquy, 58

Valéry, Paul, 202n1 variety, infinitude of, 105 virtuality/virtualization, 95, 96, 97, 102 vision, 86, 97; abstraction and, 170, 178; centrality to painting, 41; distance and mediation as affordances of, 96–97; form as shape and, 86; phenomenology of, 12–13, 210n14; touch in relation to, 35, 36–37, 38, 96, 192n19 visual arts, 7, 8, 10 visual pleasure, 33, 34, 105, 111, 113, 116; abstract spatial form and, 173; cognitive activity and, 12; dancing and, 139–40, 143; intricacy and, 108; wantonness and, 24

235

INDEX

Walpole, Horace, 108, 111, 205n37 wantonness, 113, 130; dancing as elegant wantonness, 140–41; formal intricacy and, 107, 128; as joyful selfabandon, 108; motion associated with, 141, 211n21; multivalent meanings of, 211n19; sexual connotation of, 107, 140, 141, 211n19; as singlemindedness, 140; visual pleasure and, 24, 111 Watt, Ian, 50 Wechsler, Lawrence, 84, 86

“What Is New Formalism?” (Levinson), 17 White, Hayden, 187n38 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 122 women: addressed in The Analysis of Beauty, 17, 24, 118–23, 127, 129, 131–32; attire/fashion as aesthetic interest, 129–30; practical formalism and, 9, 17 writing, 26, 62, 109–12, 206nn41–42 Zerilli, Linda, 208n4

236