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Edmund Burke. Illustrationfrom Cabinet of Irish Literature
discrete concrete particulars, the ruling order risked the ludicrous embar-
rassment of finding its own history falling beyond the scope of its governing
rationality. That rationality was in danger of allowing the whole of the
Lebenswelt- the domain of actual lived experience - to slip from beneath its
sway; and the aesthetic was born in part as a response to this troubling
ideological dilemma. Reason, Baumgarten reminds us in his Aesthetica
(1750), must remain supreme; but its dominance must never be allowed to
degenerate into simple tyranny. It must respect the relative autonomy of the
sensuous Nature it subdues, recognising in that realm a certain logic which is
not quite its own. The aesthetic, one might say, thus signalled an historic
shift on the part of enlightened absolutism in terms of the exercise of power:
from coercion to hegemony. Power, it was seen, must no longer remain
imperiously indifferent to the senses, but must infiltrate them from the
inside in order to regulate and control them more effectively. This is the
burden of Friedrich Schiller's 1790s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man, where the aesthetic is represented as a kind of fifth columnist
smuggled by Reason into the realm of sensuous existence, the emissary of a
kindly absolutist power which recognises the ineffectiveness of mere brute
dominion as any adequate mode of social control. The whole concept of the
aesthetic was thus indissociable from an emergent project of bourgeois
political hegemony, redefining the relations between law and freedom,
mind and the senses, individual and the whole.
What this meant, in effect, was that the aesthetic was the way power, or
the Law, would be carried into the minutest crevices of lived experience,
inscribing the very gestures and affections of the body with its decrees. It is
this, essentially, which was realized in the whole eighteenth-century project
of 'manners', whereby the body became the subject of a meticulous
disciplining which eliminated the opposition between the proper and the
pleasurable. To live out the law spontaneously, to introject it as the very
source and essence of one's free identity, is what the work of art, above all,
exemplifies; and this in turn can become the paradigm for a whole new
conception of subjectivity, by which the human subject, in Althusserian
phrase, will come to work 'all by itself', without need of rebarbative
constraint. To live one's necessity as freedom - to give, as Kant says, the law
to oneself, to refuse all external determination for the pure movement of
one's own self-production: all of this came to be summarised and epitomised
by the aesthetic artefact itself. But it was also a new kind of political
requirement, in a world where the dismantling of the centralised structures
of absolutism, and the emergence of marketplace relations, meant that the
human individual had to become his or her own seat of self-government.
The aesthetic, then, marks the way in which structures of power became
gradually transmuted into structures of feeling, ethical doctrine dissolved
into the spontaneous texture of subjective life. Custom, virtue, habit took
over from dictat and naked authority, so that the laws which govern subjects
were to be felt as directly pleasurable, intuitively enjoyable, aesthetically
Aestheticsand Politicsin Burke 55
BURKE
It is not surprising,given what was at stake in these debates, that Edmund
Burkebeganhis workon the sublimeandthe beautifulby seekingto defend
the possibilityof a science of taste. If beauty is merely relative, then the
bonds which leash society together are in dangerof loosening. Beauty for
Burkeis not just a questionof art:
I call beauty a social quality;for when men and women, and not only
they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in
beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with
sentimentsof tendernessand affectiontowardstheir persons;we like to
have them near us, and we enter willinglyinto a kind of relation with
them, unlesswe shouldhave strongreasonsto the contrary.'
the beauty which wins our free consent, and beguiles us like a woman, is
based nevertheless on a kind of cunningly dissimulated law.
Burke confesses that he can see no way of uniting these two registers,
which clearly poses a political problem. The dilemma is that the authority we
love we do not respect, and the one we respect we do not love:
The political paradox is plain: only love will truly win us to the law, but this
love will erode the law to nothing. A law attractive enough to engage our
intimate affections, and so hegemonically effective, will tend to inspire in us
a benign contempt. On the other hand, a power which rouses our filial fear,
and hence our submissive obedience, is likely to alienate our affections and
so spur us to oedipal resentment. Casting around desperately for a
reconciling image, Burke offers us, of all things, the figure of the
grandfather, whose male authority is enfeebled by age into a 'feminine
partiality'. Mary Wollstonecraft was quick to assail the sexism of Burke's
argument in her Vindication of the Rights of Men. His distinction between
love and respect, she points out, aestheticises women in ways which remove
them from the sphere of morality. 'The affection (women) excite, to be
uniform and perfect, should not be tinctured with the respect which the
moral virtues inspire, lest pain should be blended with pleasure, and
admiration disturb the soft intimacy of love.'3 'This laxity of morals in the
female', Wollstonecraft continues,
the same token, spontaneity can get out of hand. The more the human
subject works 'all by itself', the better - and the worse - for authority. If
freedom transgresses the submission which is its very condition, the
repressiveness of the sublime can be invoked; but this ultimate efficacy of
power is also its potential downfall, breeding as well as subduing rebellion.
Power is thus a kind of riddle, of which the mystery of the aesthetic, with its
impossibly lawless lawfulness, is an apt sign.
The aesthetic experience of the sublime is confined to the cultivated few;
and there would thus seem the need for a kind of poor person's version of it.
Religion is of course one obvious such candidate; but Burke also proposes
another, which is, surprisingly enough, the lowly activity of labour. Like the
sublime, labour is a masochistic affair, since we find work at once painful in
its exertion yet pleasurable in its arousal of energy. 'As common labour,
which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a model of terror is the
exercise of the finer parts of the system' (p. 181). The sublime, with its
'delightful horror', is the rich man's labour, invigorating an otherwise
dangerously complacent ruling class. If that class cannot know the uncertain
pleasures of loading a ship, it can gaze instead at one tossed on the turbulent
ocean. Providence has so arranged matters that a state of rest becomes soon
obnoxious, breeding melancholy and despair; we are thus naturally driven
to work, reaping enjoyment from its surmounting of difficulties. Labour
involves a gratifying coerciveness, and is thus an aesthetic experience all in
itself, at least for those who theorise about it. Both material production and
political life, base and superstructure, display a unity of force and fulfilment.
Hegemony is not only a matter of the political state, but is installed within
the labour process itself. Our agreeable wrestling with Nature's recalci-
trance is itself a kind of socialised sublime; and this agreeableness of labour
is even more gratifying to those who profit from it.
What the aesthetic in Burke sets its face most firmly against is the notion
of natural rights. It is precisely that dryly theoretic discourse, a revolution-
ary one in his day, that the appeal to the intimate habits of the body is out to
worst. The essay on the beautiful and the sublime is a subtle phenomenology
of the senses, a mapping of the body's delicacies and disgusts: Burke is
fascinated by what happens when we hear low vibrations or stroke smooth
surfaces, by the dilation of the eye's pupil in darkness or the feel of a slight
tap on the shoulder. He is much preoccupied with sweet smells and violent
startings from sleep, with the vibratory power of salt and the question of
whether proportion is the source of beauty in vegetables. All of this strange
homespun psycho-physiology is a kind of politics, willing to credit no
theoretical notion which cannot somehow be traced to the muscular
structure of the eye or the texture of the fingerpads. If there are indeed
metaphysical rights, then they enter this dense somatic space as dispersed
and non-identical. Like 'rays of light which pierce into a dense medium',
Burke argues in Reflections on the French Revolution, such rights are 'by the
laws of nature, refracted from their straight line', enduring 'such a variety of
60 HistoryWorkshopJournal
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power
gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of
life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the
sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved
by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery
of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from
the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the
understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defect of our naked,
shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be
exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.7
Woman, the aesthetic, and political hegemony are now in effect synony-
mous.
We can returnin the lightof this to the quarrelbetween Burkeand Mary
Wollstonecraft.It is not quite true, as Wollstonecraftsuggests,thatBurkeis
an aesthete concerned to divorce beauty from moral truth, thus reducing
women to decorative amoralists. On the contrary, Burke wishes to
aestheticisemoraltruth, in order to renderit safely hegemonic.Woman,or
beauty, thus becomes a kind of mediationof man;but what Wollstonecraft
rightlysees is that this process does not work in reverse. Beauty must be
includedwithin the sublimityof the masculinelaw, in order to soften its
rigours, but moral sublimity is not to be included within the beautiful.
Women are indeed in this sense excluded from the domain of truth and
morality.Burkedeconstructsthe oppositionbetween beautyand truth,but
only partiallyand unilaterally.Beauty is necessaryfor power, but does not
containit; authorityhas need of the veryfemaleit placesbeyondits bounds.
The politicalvictoryof the aesthetic in Burke is more than a local one.
Indeed one might claim that from Burke and the later Coleridge, and
onwardthroughoutthe nineteenthcentury,the aestheticas a categoryis in
effect capturedby the political right. By the mid-nineteenthcentury, the
'poetic' will have been so defined as to renderthe phrase'politicalpoetry'
effectively self-contradictory.But there is a less gloomy alternativenar-
rativeto be told. FromSchillerandearlyMarxto Marcuseandthe Frankfurt
School, the aesthetic also comes to signifya traditionof social thoughtfor
whichthe free realisationof humancreativecapacitiesis at once an end in
itself and the very dynamicand imperativeof historicalchange. There is no
more reasonfor humanbeings to fulfil their creativecapacitiesin this way
thenthereis reasonfor a workof art;whereartis mostprofoundlypoliticalis
thus, ironically, where it most radically has its end in itself - is self-
generative. In the free self-determinationof the aesthetic can be found a
form of politics which, from the time of Burke onwards, challenges and
interrogatesthatother mode of aestheticthoughtwhichseeks to subduethe
bodyto the Law, ratherthanallowit to rebel againstit. The aesthetic,then,
is not a categoryto be cavalierlyabandonedto the politicalright,any more
than it is one to be uncriticallycelebratedas emancipatoryby the political
left. One terminus,in our own time, of the conservativeaestheticisationof
62 HistoryWorkshopJournal
NOTES
1 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1906), vol. 1, p. 95. All subsequent
references to this work are given parenthetically after quotations in the text.
2 Louis Althusser, 'On ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and
Philosophy (London, 1971).
3 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man (Gainesville, Florida, 1960),
p. 114.
4 ibid., p. 116.
5 Reflections on the French Revolution (London, 1955), p. 59.
6 ibid., p. 59.
7 ibid., p. 74.
8 ibid., p. 75.