Ars Analogi Rationis

(Adapted from Victor Grauer, Montage, Realism and the Act of Vision)

The Analogue of Reason

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the original meaning of the word aesthetic is "of or pertainable to things perceptible by the senses, things material as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial; also 'perceptive, sharp in the senses.'" It was on the basis of this now practically obsolete definition that one Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1712-1762), a follower of Descartes, Leibnitz and Wolff, formulated the first philosophical theory in which the term aesthetic is associated with the arts.

While Baumgarten's ultimate intention has been variously interpreted, his formulations regarding what he called aesthetica (we too shall use the Latin form, to distinguish Baumgarten's usage from the current one) represent a profound break with the rationalist tradition of his mentors. Discarding the efforts of Leibnitz and others to subsume sensory experience within the purview of reason (ratio), Baumgarten insisted on the radical otherness of such experience. Aesthetica is thus regarded, not as one element within the ars rationis (logic), but as itself an ars analogi rationis (analogy of logic). This sensory logic, both opposed to, yet structurally analogous with, conceptual logic, has for its object, not the abstract categories of the conceptual, but, on the contrary, the concrete "individual in its immediacy as it is grasped in sensate experience" by means of poetry or the visual arts.1

The Order of Sensuousness

Baumgarten's long forgotten, misunderstood project, so remote from what passes for aesthetics today, was forcefully revived in a prophetic book of the mid-Twentieth century: Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Marcuse's work, a profound study of the revolutionary implications of Freudian psychoanalysis, has itself been unduly and unaccountably neglected in the literature currently relating Freud to signifying practice and politics.2

Marcuse rejects Freud's rather puritanical suspicion of art and his tendency to regard it as a form of sublimation, i.e., a convenient means by which the instinctual drives might be "idealized" away through transformation onto a "higher plane." For Marcuse, this attitude reflects a traditional prejudice: 

[U]nder the predominance of rationalism, the cognitive function of sensuousness has been constantly minimized. In line with the repressive concept of reason, cognition became the ultimate concern of the "higher," non-sensuous faculties of the mind ...Sensuousness, as the "lower" and even "lowest" faculty, furnished at best the mere stuff, the raw material, for cognition, to be organized by the higher faculties of the intellect. 

Pointing to Baumgarten's role in establishing "aesthetics as the science of sensuousness to correspond to logic as the science of conceptual understanding," Marcuse points out that "the philosophical history of the term 'aesthetic' reflects the repressive treatment of the sensuous (and thereby 'corporeal') cognitive processes." Baumgarten's discipline "installs the order of sensuousness as against the order of reason. Introduced into the philosophy of culture, this notion aims at a liberation of the senses ..."3

The political impact of Baumgarten's ideas becomes evident as Marcuse goes on to discuss his influence on one of the key figures of the Romantic revolution: Friedrich Schiller. Schiller locates the "aesthetic function" within a "basic impulse, namely the play impulse," which to both Schiller and Marcuse, is associated with human freedom. Within this context, "art challenges the prevailing principle of reason: in representing the order of sensuousness, it invokes a tabooed logic -- the logic of gratification as against that of repression."

To Marcuse, Schiller's theory is an "attempt to undo the sublimation of the aesthetic function" as it has usually been understood. To this end, Schiller contrasts the "sensuous impulse" with the sublimating "form impulse" of the "imagination" (in Lacanian terms, "the imaginary" -- in Freudian terms, secondary elaboration).

The former is essentially passive, receptive, the latter active, mastering, domineering. Culture is built by the combination and interaction of these two impulses. But ...instead of reconciling both impulses by making sensuousness rational and reason sensuous, civilization has subjugated sensuousness to reason in such a manner that the former, if it reasserts itself, does so in destructive and "savage" forms, while the tyranny of reason impoverishes and barbarizes sensuousness.4

Nature and Culture, Again

As Romanticism developed, the delicate balance advocated by Schiller could not be sustained. Sensuousness did, indeed, reassert itself in the characteristically ambivalent Romantic concept of nature: both destructively "savage" and benignly "innocent." This notion of nature as radically other to culture links Romanticism with realism in the analogy which has sustained itself from Ruskin to early Metz: seeing:signification::nature:culture.

As modern semiological analysis has so effectively demonstrated, the above analogy cannot be maintained without perpetuating ideological repression. Yet the typical semiotic view, in which all perceptual experience must be totally subject to signification, ends, like orthodox psychoanalysis itself, by once again subjugating the "sensuous impulse" to the "form impulse."

With respect to the above situation, [Julia] Kristeva's approach comes as a breath of fresh air. Moving out of the realm of metaphysical -- anti-metaphysical opposition, she looks to a particular practice, the poetic language of certain avant-garde writers, finding therein a return of the repressed "sensuous impulse" rooted in a radical otherness to signification. However, as we have seen, the ties of even the most radical "poetic language" to the signifying process prevent her from grounding le sémiotique within artistic practice itself. Choosing, instead, the chora, a given, body-centered function, she comes dangerously close to reifying the "natural" as archetypal source of that which opposes signification.

Culture Vs. Culture

Clearly we must find our way back to the lucid project defined by Marcuse, grounded in that fundamental break with rationalism which is Baumgarten's "tabooed logic...of gratification." It is important to note that Baumgarten does not fall into the error of grounding sensory experience in "nature," or even the body. While such a formulation might be warranted in some empirical sense, justified by what has come to be called "perception psychology," or even psychoanalysis, it does not provide any structural means through which the senses can effectively resist mastery by the rational. This is why the formula, "seeing:signification::nature:culture," is so weak, leading to the repressive response of semiotics: all "seeing" is subject to the culturally determined codes of signification.

Baumgarten had already found something much stronger, which may be paraphrased as follows: seeing is subject to the culture of signification and ideology only to the extent that they are not opposed by the culture of aesthetica. It is aesthetica, an artifice, a culturally determined act, which must ultimately found the order of sensuousness as liberation from the ideological domination of the senses by the "form impulse."

Ars Analogi Rationis

There is no point, of course, in attempting to revive Baumgarten's theory in any general sense. As radical as was his basic insight, his overall view was inevitably limited by the artistic practice of his day. As should by now be apparent, it is within the artistic practice of our own time, the Cubism of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger, the work of Mondrian, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Webern, Brakhage and Kubelka, etc., that we are likely to find an ars analogi rationis rigorous enough to resist the "form impulse" in all its many guises. Indeed, it is negative syntax itself, for which the opening out of the signifying gestalt is equated with precise organisation of the material surface and the consequent foregrounding of the sensate world, which must ultimately be recognized as aesthetica in the truly radical sense which alone can give real meaning to the term. As such, not only does negative syntax stand opposed to conceptually determined logic, but, as an "analogy of reason," must also be understood to mirror its structure.

Such a notion should hardly come as a surprise. Negative space, negative time, negative montage -- all have been defined and indeed, named, in terms of that which they oppose. The relentless process of neutralization, fragmentation, opening and determination which lies at the heart of negative syntax is operationally equivalent, in some sense at least, to the process of logical analysis which grounds positive syntax.

Central to this analogy is the notion, only very tentatively developed in these pages, of a "perceptual axiom." While it is undoubtedly useful to ground such an axiom in the body (Kristeva's chora), this is hardly more fruitful than grounding a logical axiom in "the mind." If a true axiom must already be a conceptual determination, a "negative axiom" must be a perceptual determination, i.e., a structure existing outside of the body, in the objective world. We have already, of course, identified one type of objective structure, a Mondrian painting, as being in some sense "axiomatic." As a perceptually clear and distinct primary (non-derived) construct, the product of a relentless process of systematic reduction, such a work has much in common with a logical axiom. It is lacking, however, in one vital respect. Unlike a true axiom, it cannot serve as the basis for derivation.

A much better candidate in this respect and, indeed, worthy of serious investigation, is that already much studied, much mystified and maligned entity: the twelve tone row. In itself, and almost by definition, radically disjunctive, the row is capable of generating derivations which inherit this property, distributing the basic principle of negative syntax throughout the structure. Ultimately, in the hands of a Webern, the serial method becomes a highly sophisticated system-for-the-disruption-of-system, an ars analogi rationis without parallel in the history of the arts.

Ars Analogi Semiologi

In our time, logical systems have consistently been attacked as "mere" constructs. Rarely have they been praised for their constructual force. The great philosophers transformed thought from an essentially vague and passive process to a creative and disciplined means of actively shaping the mental world. As an achievement, this goes far beyond the reach of the kind of scepticism that would question the "claims" of any particular rational scheme or all put together. If today's most advanced thinkers reflexively insist on "debunking" thought itself at its very foundations, they can hardly deny its beauty and power.

Negative syntax can also be regarded as an attack on thought, but only in a strictly limited sense. The development of a perceptual logic is an attack on idealism as the hegemony of thought and should by no means be considered an attempt to undermine the rational within its own realm. Negative syntax has simply given us a standpoint outside of thought; i.e., provided us with the means of deconstructing certain forms of ideology without recourse to the embarrasingly infinite regress of self-reflexivity. Indeed, with respect to ideology, negative syntax occupies a position coordinate with that of semiology (and related forms of critical discourse) itself.

In other words, both semiology and negative syntax may be understood as culturally determined modes of resistance to ideology, polarized at cognitive extremes. While semiotics can expose ideology-as-it-impinges-on-thought by means of organized thought (logic), negative syntax can oppose ideology-as-it-impinges-on-the-senses by means of organized perception (aesthetica). Thus, while semiotic deconstruction of perspective as a coded system of pictorial representation, helping us to understand pictorial positive syntax, does not help us to resist its effects, an analytic Cubist painting does. An intellectual grasp of the workings of the "transmission codes" of cinema, while conceptually liberating, cannot weaken the hold of the analogue-image. A Brakhage film can.

Only when semiological, or indeed, any form of rational discourse oversteps its limit, seeking to encompass and dominate its "other," do repressive strategies of the sort which fuel the vicious circle of ideology, emerge. When content to keep its place, the rational is, of course, capable of a genuine self-criticism, reasonably free of mystification. When this is understood, it should be clear why there need be nothing amiss in modelling an aesthetic theory by analogy with the principles of axiomatic logic.

Traditional aesthetics, with its vague formulations concerning "beauty," "value," "feeling," "taste" and "transcendent experience" can have no meaning in the context we have outlined here. If certain artists have actively shaped and clarified perception as certain thinkers have shaped and clarified thought, then artistic activity on such a level ought to lend itself to the most precise critical scrutiny. Only by such means can we hope to get beyond the myth of the artist as inspired child or charismatic sage.

Notes

1. This, at least, is the very convincing contention of Leonard P. Wessell, who disputes Croce's charge that Baumgarten's project was distorted by rationalist bias. See Wessell, "Alexander Baumgarten's Contribution to the Development of Aesthetics," in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 30 no. 3 (Spring,1972) pp. 333-342.

2. Space does not permit discussion of an equally important, equally neglected (currently at least) and remarkably similar work: Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Connecticut:Wesleyan University Press, 1959). Brown's analysis of Freud's formulation of the death wish is especially meaningful with respect to the theories of Lacan and Kristeva.

3. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston:Beacon Press, 1955) pp. 180-181.


4. Ibid. pp. 181, 182, 185-187.