Angelika Rauch

Hobart and William Smith Colleges
amr18@cornell.edu

 

In an attempt to ground the metaphysical nature of humans in form, Immanuel Kant pursues the possibility of a framed image without content. He calls this postulated state or mental product “purposiveness of representation.” What he means by this is that when you are faced with the beautiful what happens in your mind is the process of forming an image with the crucial exception that this image never achieves completion, you can never quite grasp in a conscious, representional image what the beautiful is. It is in a way like the story of Sisyphus, who rolls his rock up the mountain only to have it roll back downhill just as he reaches the summit–and so on, over and over again. This kind of repeated, and uncompleted, effort is the same activity as the mind games of imagination. The power of imagination is responsible for creating the image of the beautiful, and it has to start forever afresh in its attempt to build a new image whenever the previous is aborted just before it reaches closure–or, as Kant says “form” or “schema.” Full form would turn a complex and fragmented image or figure into a conscious representation of a concept. But this is precisely what does not happen in the aesthetic experience. (Kant asserts in the third Critique that imagination, when in reflexive play, “schematizes without concepts.”) What happens instead, is the production of vague images which, in my interpretation of Kant as the first postmodern thinker, I will call intuitions rather than images.

 

Kant’s postmodern status pertains to the difference between representative image and figure that figures according to internal, unconscious laws. It is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words “not a world nor the world that takes on figure, but the figure that makes world.”¹ Nancy compares this indeterminate figure to dream of a Narcissus who does not know the surface he is looking at, who is oblivious to the matter and composition of the sign he interprets. It was the merit of Kant to associate affect with the judgment of the beautiful. The aesthetic sign that elicits a feeling of pleasure, in this case also a libidinal affect, is first of all a presentation. And as Nancy elaborates, nothing plays itself out but the play of presentation in the absence of a concrete, represented object. The imagination is only encouraged to fill in the void of the object and, as I will show in the following, to associate memories from the subject’s unconscious history. These memories, as they are fleetingly touched by the play of imagination, are not subject to the general logic of representation; they do not have to appear as a reconstructed image of a concrete experience as if to be communicated to another person. Rather, they contribute to the primarily affective state of the present aesthetic experience where concepts and logic are banned. It is here that psychoanalysis has completed Kant’s struggle with imagination as a non-representative power of thinking and with the status of feeling as judgment. Since in my argument feelings are memories and therefore insert history into the process of thinking, Kant’s apparent formalism can be ammeliorated by his unacknowledged contingency on history and experience when it comes to the matter of imagination, or, as Kant himself suggests, to “mother wit” in the question of taste.

 

Kant’s treatise on the aesthetic judgment tries to reformulate the question of the beautiful as a question of formality: How can beautiful form be reflected or be constituted in the mind so that its subjective judgment can find universal consensus? Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment gradually funnels into an analysis of the “power of imagination”(Einbildungskraft) rather than imagination as sensuous representation, as concrete image content: How can imagination produce form if it does not work with concepts? It does not come as a surprise that Kant needs to abandon an empirical, body-bound concept of imagination for a so-called “transcendental” power of imagination that will not be contaminated by a sensuality through which the body would enter into representation. The putative power of this transcendental imagination produces pure intuitions, representations of mere possibilities of experience. The question is whether the idea of transcendence can indeed dislodge human cognitive faculties from physical contingencies, and hence from one’s body and sensations as they are also influenced by cultural objects.

 

Insofar as transcendental imagination is contingent on the subject’s existence, the implications of transcendentality for subjectivity would indeed be an affective determination of cognition. Here Kant’s change in definition of the transcendental power of imagination from “a function of the soul” (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) to “a function of understanding” (in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) is crucial for an investigation into the meaning of transcendence in metaphysical speculation about human nature. Today we would say, the distinction between soul and reason is important when we investigate the process of meaning formation in psychological terms. In other words, it is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes. In the discourse of the 18th century, the authority of the soul attributed to imagination a separate and autonomous faculty of imagination. In the case of imagination being a function of understanding, it loses its creative and unconsciously fueled status; in this latter definition, imagination can indeed not transcend the control of understanding. Kant’s notion of transcendental imagination is therefore a purely formalist concept, one that must repress the body in judging aesthetic experiences and aesthetized and pleasurable cultural objects.

 

Kant’s (insurmountable) task in the Critique of Judgement is to rationally combine a definition of taste with a concept of form that is not cognitive. It is his precise definition of the judgment of taste, for example “this rose is beautiful,” that it is not a cognitive statement, and a cognition of the beautiful and the work of art is not achieved. Why? Because the judgement of taste is based on a feeling, he says, the feeling of pleasure, and I would like to warn my reader, Kant is anything but a hedonist: this feeling of pleasure is one of “disinterested pleasure.” (Kant was clearly not a sensuous man; one only needs to read his biography). The funny thing about this subjective feeling of disinterested pleasure is that it is, as he claims, “attributed to everyone,” anyone can or could feel this “disinterested pleasure” in the realm of the beautiful. I will get back to this paradox later. Right now, I am concerned with Kant’s formalism in the aesthetic judgment of taste which is not supposed be cognitive. For, if the judgment of taste does not cognize anything, then the form of mental representations must be a non-cognitive form. This means, that the form of representation in the case of the beautiful cannot be issued by the faculty of reason because it would then have to be an “idea,” that is a completed and framed and cookie-cut representation. Instead, it must be a form that is an “intuition” of pure formality, or merely the experience of transcendence as a mental state. Since the judgment of taste pertains to the feeling of pleasure, the problem naturally lies with the objectification of this feeling in representation.

 

Transcendence and feeling are the two states that need to be represented to the mind. So, how then do you represent a feeling to the mind? Feelings are first of all body-bound. Kant is forever in a bind when he needs to make his move from the sensuous to the conceptual realm, from matter to form. His way out is to simply focus not so much on the form as on the process of forming a representation itself. This mental preoccupation with the process of form, of forming as such, ties up imagination and diverts its attention away from the body, from the sensuous realm, and from physical pleasure, and, as I will argue, away from the unconscious memory of the body of the mother. For it is the maternal body that supplies the infant subject with its first experience of wholeness, of absolute pleasure, and therefore of a libidinal subjectivity.

 

This formal/material impasse in the process of representing the beautiful reveals philosophy’s ambivalence towards imagination as a sensuous and intellectual faculty. The point of mediation between the sensuous and the intellectual would be affect, or rather a presumed affective character of imagination. This impasse proves that thinking the “imaginative” state, what Kant calls the purposiveness of representation, is impossible, precisely because it serves no purpose in the psychical economy of affective cathexis and emotional investment. Although an essential part of creative imagination is the capacity of wit, wit has to be excluded from the philosophical paradigm of cognition. Kant actually mentions the subcategory of mother wit (Mutterwitz) to stress that wit cannot be acquired or learned, but that it has to be inherited, presumably from the mother. And only what can be learned can also be cognized. Mother wit however belongs to the category of intuition, of a non-representational imagination that is linked to the body and to affect. Here one goes purely on intuition, and on feeling, as our still current turn of phrase suggests. But this exclusion, on Kant’s part, of the intuitive knowledge of wit and mother wit means coming to terms with neither the phenomenon nor with the feeling of creativity. Kant cannot come to terms with creativity because the implicitly acknowledged source of creativity in intuitive wit is the nurturing body of the mother; and this body has to be explicitly suppressed for the sake of glorifying the enlightened individual, whose undividable status is warranted by reason alone. (For, what makes us a common species and legitimates the right of equality is the fact that we all have in common the power of reason and rational thought.) By inhibiting the desire for merging with an other, the unconscious mother, the obscure feeling of a dependency and the experience of imperfection which accompanies the separated and individuated self is also eliminated. The inevitability of this desire for an other manifests itself only negatively, in an attempt to split off the affective nature from the cognitive self as a way of denying one’s dependence on something prior to consciousness. Once the foundational (m)other is killed off in the self, the possibility for relating to a social other on existential grounds diminishes. Kant’s reference to the “natural talent” of Mutterwitz serves him well if he wants to reflect the psychological structure of a mimesis in which the imaginary body of the mother not only produces a concrete sense of relation but also the intuition of the mere possibility of a sensical relationship between radically different things. Kant explains the capacity of mother wit as one that lets us compare unrelated and apparently different things; mother wit creates in the mind a new context for separate, cultural objects which then take on a different meaning. This facilitating, creative, and utterly subjective mental capacity in mimesis seems to resist further abstraction and must legitimate itself indeed as a natural talent; otherwise, imagination needs to rely on the fictional canon as providing necessary examples for grasping human nature through symbolized representations in language.

 

With respect to affect as the material base of experience, Kant’s critical move must aim at abandoning, if not repressing, affect altogether if he wants to define imagination as the formal power capable of detaching itself from the body. Such isolation of imagination from the body and from sensuous experience shifts the power of imagination towards the faculties of understanding and reason. Yet, bodily experience, namely sensation and affect, is what supports imagination and makes it an effective power for self-experience. Experience supplies the material for an imaginative translation into meaning. And it is this translation that represents the central issue in aesthetic judgment. For, what follows the feeling of pleasure, which supports aesthetic judgments, is a reflection on the mind’s relationship with feeling. Such reflection should, according to Kant, result in a “feeling of being alive,” a Lebensgefühl. Through feelings, the body has an impact on self-consciousness. It mediates between self and environment. One might be prompted to wonder “what might have determined the self” until this moment of self-awareness purely determined by feeling. An answer to this question would suggest that the subject does not decide the meaning of past experiences until they actually coalesce in a name for the feeling involved. (Hence, psycho-therapists always want to label the “feelings” that disturb you.) Without previous experiences, preserved in unconscious fantasies about the mother/other, the present experience could not motivate the subject’s imagination to produce an intuition. Past experience is needed for the creative power of imagination to draw on. Without recourse to history and an awareness of the past, the very concept of experience loses its cognitive validity. And now I should state my thesis: experience only has significance because of its genealogical and erotic structure.

 

If the judgment of taste does not rest on experience and history, as it surely cannot when it is regarded as the result of an abstraction from feeling and body, then it represents little more than a conceptual construct of an intellectual feeling and a heuristic device for mediating imagination and understanding. Kant’s understanding of (aesthetic) experience results from a separation of mind and body. His reasoning is caught in opposing the categories of materiality to those of formality. He is therefore unable to link these categories plausibly without the insight into a third “category,” the category of an unconscious translation, or what Walter Benjamin calls “correspondence” (which Benjamin extracts from the poetry of the French poet Baudelaire “Correspondences”). This third category of mediation, the correspondence, calls attention to itself only in the case of aesthetic judgment; for in the aesthetic judgment, the faculties are not preoccupied with cognizing the (beautiful) object. What is cognized can perhaps be summarized as the impact of the past upon the present, or even as history as a condition for consciousness.

 

If reflection on feeling were to bring about a cognitive judgment, an understanding, then it would have to evoke a lived past for an assessment of the present experience. A hermeneutical process of the mind would thus indeed bring about an understanding of the self as a historically constituted being. Kant, seemingly handicapped in this case by an epistemology of universal reason, cannot allow such subjective, and necessarily historical, understanding of the status of cognition. His aesthetic philosophy, however, manifests an attempt at combining the subjective category of experience with the universal truth of beauty. He follows through in this attempt by analyzing the function of various cognitive faculties generally involved in experience. This maneuver, necessary for postulating the universality of the judgment of taste, exposes Kant’s ongoing struggle with the concept of knowledge, as he is unable to theoretically separate knowledge from cognition. His bias towards an objective, universalizable knowledge, a knowledge that results from a priori logical categories of consciousness, prevents him from recognizing a hermeneutic process of cognition. When he associates materiality with sensation, which is variably subjective, he means by “reflection” only the formal, mental movement that is at stake when a phenomenon is apprehended into a representation, a formally closed, sensuous, and stable image. The mental process in reflective judgment leads to an accord of the faculties, which Kant stresses to be the same psychological result in everyone. It is here that Kant’s moral underpinning of the aesthetic judgment shows through. Since the mind’s interest does not lie with the object but with the subject’s feelings, Kant can come up with the idea of a “disinterested pleasure” of the beautiful.

 

Since for Kant, reflection only implies an apprehension according to form, the question remains: what is the form of a feeling? Feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. These images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain. In the case of the beautiful, it is not the mental representation of a rose that is pleasurable but the images remembered along with the subject’s affection by the rose.

 

A temporal differentiation of affect and feeling suggests that there are actually two pleasures at stake, the pleasure of the original which creates the affect, and the pleasure that results from many fleeting images associated with that pleasurable feeling. This pleasure of a pleasure relies on the (formal) power of imagination to continuously create and dissolve images for the purpose of keeping pleasurable feeling alive. No one image can do justice to the beautiful experience. The fuel for this ongoing process of imaging is supplied by the memory of pleasure to which, equally, no one (framed) representation does justice–why? because the memory is preserved in the material of feeling, not in a memorable image or, as Benjamin would say, a “souvenir.” If Kant has problems with the evaluation of feeling and affect as concerns their part in knowledge, he is all the more aware of the seminal role imagination plays in the mental process leading to cognition: “Every reference of representations [to imagination], even those of sensations, can be objective…but not the reference of [the representation of] the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, whereby nothing is signified in the object, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.”² Crucial for the judgment of taste is the subject’s (meta)affection by a representation of his being affected with pleasure. Being affected by representation means being affected by one’s imagination which brings about the feeling of being alive (Lebensgefühl ). This feeling, in turn, calls for another representation. But the feeling of being alive exceeds representation; thus, feeling occupies a heterodoxical status in knowledge. The discrepancy between feeling and representation impels the production of art whence intuitions derive their visual material. The visibilities rendered by art affect the subject anew each time.

 

The significance of (Kant’s mention of) “mother wit” may be greater yet if we cite the psychoanalytic feminist vantage in the physical premises of knowledge and desire.³ A feeling of pleasure that stems from a primary experience with an other, i.e. the mother-child union, will unconsciously preserve the memory of this (m)other as a condition for feeling good. The relation between the child and the mother (read: the concrete object of pleasure) becomes a memory by which the developing subject recognizes a similar relationship to an object of pleasure in the future. Whereas the mother at this later point has become a fantasy of the object at hand, the feeling between self and other has remained the same; hence, the feeling could guide the subject’s conscious imagination to a creative interpretation or assessment of any object at hand. This kind of pleasurable connection and unhampered transference of the mother’s body onto the object to be cognized could engender the capability of mother wit. Through such transference the object becomes a “transitional object”⁴ as a means of coping with desire and the experiental difference between real and ideal. Such libidinal coping via transitional objects materializes the passage of time–until the nurturant (m)other returns to the abandoned child–into subjective history.

 

A “witty” interpretation of an object always works on the object’s form, a form that receives its impetus from some previous representation that supplies the interpreter with an intuition. For Kant, “mother wit” suggests the natural gift of forming an imaginary connection between concrete experience and abstract knowledge. We might conclude that the capacity for wit in general develops through the use of mother wit, the correlation between feeling and intuition in aesthetic representation or judgment. Mutterwitz seems to comprise the creative, or flexible, part of imagination which in the process of judgment transforms the past and arrives at a cognizable intuition of the present.

 

This natural ability to judge with mother wit does not need recourse to a conceptual frame in order to effect an understanding. We might say, Kant unconsciously utilizes a concept of the subject whose self-containment is not guaranteed from the start. Yet, if the subject were merely constituted by a priori mental faculties, its self-sameness could not be in doubt. Instead, the Kantian subject finds itself engaged in a process of developing first its various faculties, especially the skill for interpreting its experiences. Essential for such experiences, and consequently for interpretation and the production of sense, is an other, as both source of stimulation and as “surface projection” for the subject’s Ego formation. In the very first stage of human development, the other is the family of care givers who provide the child not only with its first experiences but also with the first meaning (i.e. language) to be associated with such experiences. The family mediates and thus manifests knowledge for the child. Kant, however, does not reflect upon this onto-genetic aspect of knowledge and the development of faculties. Though a reflection on the meaning of the conventional wisdom of Mutterwitz might have yielded such a developmental, if not historical, insight into the constitution of the subject as well as of knowledge. What should not be forgotten here is the fact that the other provides the support in the development of faculties, because the sensuous experience of an other, and of the subject’s own body via this other, provides the context for mimetic development. In this physical rather than meta-physical construction of an origin, experience testifies to its material ground, a ground that is not easily left for the purpose of some sort of formal experience. For matters of philosophical representation alone, the body provides the necessary metaphors in explaining unimaginable phenomema.

 

In an effort to rehabilitate the body for a critique of the dialectics of enlightenment, Hartmut and Gernot Böhme (two German literature professors who wrote an important book called The Other of Reason) have traced the human body in Kant’s scientific discourse about the universe. They emphasize that Kant’s ideas are not supportable by laws of physics but only by his own body experiences.⁵ The experience of touch, pressure, and jolt which causes the body to resist the “onslaught” of an other evidently motivates Kant to imagine the formation of spheres in space. Kant defines the structure of matter as an antagonistic relationship of polar forces: attraction and repulsion. Particularly repulsion is made out to be a basic force because it balances the force of attraction so that bodies, their volume, are “closed off by definite boundaries.”⁶ At the body’s boundaries, the forces of repulsion and attraction are equal. The body’s limits are extremely important for the protection of their form, and we could say also for their identity. Intruders have to be warded off if the body’s identity is to be maintained by its boundaries: “The force of impenetrability is a repulsive force keeping off [limits] any exterior being that might further approach.”⁷ Yet it is through the play of competing contracting and expanding forces that bodies, or rather spheres, delimit their shape.⁸ Hartmut and Gernot Böhme demonstrate in their investigation into Kant’s pre-critical writings how Kant searched for comparable phenomena of conflicting forces in the intellectual, psychological, and moral realms. Kant’s examples are indeed those of pleasure and displeasure, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, etc. These are all polar forces of repulsion and attraction, because one force cannot simply be annihilated by its logical negation, but only by the effect of an existing, polar Other. Kant explicitly states that there could be no difference in spiritual/mental matters and in the forces operative in the physical world: these forces can only be compensated with another, opposing force: “[A]n inner accidence, a thought of the soul cannot cede to exist without a truly active force exerted by/in the same thinking subject.”⁹

 

The parallel structure in patterns of thought between this “physical” Kant and the biologically grounded Sigmund Freud for the purpose of analyzing human consciousness is striking. This similarity in thought almost forges a new Kantian paradigm, “the process of unconscious repression necessary for unity of thought,” or what Freud has defined as consciousness, “to know and not know at the same time.” The participant of an unconscious is Kant’s unacknowledged paradigm of cognition. He had no recourse to the category of the unconscious, but in effect he is arguing for the necessity of repression which is only lifted in the non-cognitive judgment of aesthetic experiences.

 

Protecting the unity of the self through a model of consciousness requires an activity of thought in discernable images, in formed representations. To guarantee the form of being or its framed perception by the subject, the excess of matter, the memory of a limitless cosmic mother, has to be repressed. While the subject’s Ego is still linked with the mother/body in its affective capacity of wit, both Ego and (m)other are transformed into a self-contained cognitive subject that takes its stand (Gegenstand) against “mother nature” from which it forms its objects. Professors Böhme assume a similar kind of development of the philosophical subject when they analyze the philosophy of memory “as a reconstruction of the original detachment and emancipation of the Ego from the symbiosis with mother nature.”¹⁰ Kant can only admit cognitive status to what is and can be formed and framed in a mental image, because otherwise the force of the (m)other of matter per se cannot be overcome: the force of fear (of being engulfed by a noncognizable other) cannot be compensated with the force of (objectifying) reason. Kants says: “In dealing with nature, only the legitimacy of the cogito now prevails which has purified itself from its traditional fusion with nature.”¹¹

 

Traditional practices of communicating with nature–e.g., caring for nature, experiencing one’s dependency on nature, acting out in ritual one’s fear of nature as well as one’s gratitude–are no longer accepted as an enlightened form of being. These practices are not, in principle, guided by reason. Nature becomes that which must follow the laws of scientific reason. Such is the revolutionary turn in the conception of nature that Kant institutes alone in his conceptual shift from his pre-critical to his critical writings. Nature is no longer considered a maternal nature, a natura naturans, but a product, natura naturata. The human body is transformed into a “body of reason”¹² for the purpose of its cognition.

 

Priority of the intelligible turns the body into a surface for reason’s projections; projections are those images that cover up the body’s “wounds” inflicted by social inscriptions¹³ (i.e., the process of social conditioning) preventing individuals from being in touch with their own, physical experiences. Therefore social community loses its immediate ground in the body, and in a common physical history. Community is instead artificially legitimated in mediated ideologies and images of social existence and social cohesion. The subject no longer perceives his or her body directly but through representations in which “the subject affects himself in an intuition a priori and becomes its own object according to a principle of synthetic representation a priori of transcendental cognition.”¹⁴

 

No matter how material or maternal experience may be, in the conscious mind the mother has to leave. Afraid of the indeterminability of matter, Kant not only insists on the formality of knowledge, he also insists on the formality in the judgment of the beautiful. Only the formality of experience, purified of any sensuous aspect, “admits of universal communicability.”¹⁵ Kant even construes the formality of judgment as analogous to the theoretical and conceptual power of understanding. Since such an analogy to conceptual cognition necessitates the abandonment of the body or the other, the judgment’s task is to overcome the body in the feeling of pleasure; otherwise, it cannot claim its universal validity.¹⁶ In psychoanalytic terms, the separation from the (m)other has to be reinstigated with every judgment of taste. The avoidance of being captured by affects or passions–unconscious offshoots from the Ego’s desire for the other–indeed requires what Freud calls Trauerarbeit, a labor of mourning. The work of mourning is the conscious effort of giving up the fantasy of the mother, a fantasy that sparked the subject’s interest in feeling pleasure. In this light, mourning is necessary for clearing the subject’s mind and preserving the freedom of reason.

 

With the concept of the sublime, which is avowedly part of the aesthetic experience and particularly of post-modern experience, Kant explains the mind’s transformation of the impact of the other, the affects of terror and fear, into a reflection on the power of the human mind as such. The mental capacities supply the subject with the possibility of transcending the terrifying other in imagination. Awareness of one’s imaginative capacities re-enforces the will to dissociate from that threatening other. The sublime ultimately rests with the subject and his mental superiority to the seemingly sublime and hence overwhelming particularity of the object. A psychologically based sublime thus safeguards the affection from becoming passion and from swaying the Ego to surrender to the power of the other.

 

In his treatise on the sublime, Kant struggles to find a justification for dissociating reason from affection. The latter upsets the mind too much and motivates it to seek a purpose for this affection. But reflective judgment does not produce a purpose; it only proceeds according to the “principle” of purpose and produces the sense of an ability to represent affect. This sense of one’s ability for representation, the purposiveness of experience, would have to be contained in the resulting feeling of pleasure if the latter is to be an intellectual feeling. For the mastery of the initial sublime affect, however, the intellectual transformation does little more than merely suppress the other’s alterity. It seems as if the subject’s desire to know has been curtailed with an insight, instilled by reason, that whatever the unknowable quantity of the other may be, the subject qua consciousness is always bigger than “it.”

 

The evocation of an unknowable “Id” should be less a matter of homophony than a psychologically conditioned move, on Kant’s part, toward maintaining uniformity of the mind. Since the unknowable affect or nature threatens to split consciousness, Kant must retroactively efface the initial sense of the affect’s purposiveness (read: the affect’s knowability) by denying all cognitive content to the power of judgment (which includes the value of aesthetics and pleasure) and by positing its similarity to understanding in grammatical subjunctive only.¹⁷ Since the universal form, the concept, is not given in the beautiful, its reflection in the mind must entail a process of deformation that merely becomes manifest in and as the analytics of the sublime. By force of the mind’s incapacity to represent the beautiful, and we remember it is only the beautiful’s affect that is reflected, the beautiful itself is always already sublime in its “non-form.” Reason performs a therapeutic and moral task for the mind, which is to keep the affect in check and guarantee the equilibrium of faculties in the aesthetic as a sane mental state. The sublime portion of the aesthetic is determined, for instance, by the affect of enthusiasm. But such a strong affection, which no “sensible representation” can capture, thus causing the imagination to run wild, endangers the “noble mental state,” the only (natural) state that Kant admits as truly sublime. Kant is thus forced to eliminate affection from aesthetic pleasure altogether: “But (which seems strange) the absence of affection (apatheia, phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason.”¹⁸

 

What should have become evident in my exposition, is that Kant nonetheless starts out with the sense impression of the beautiful object and with nature, even though he dwells on the mental processes which bring about the formality of aesthetic judgment. Both sensation and nature–precisely because they resist subsumption under concepts and hence constitute an unknowable other in the aesthetic judgment–need to be regulated by laws of representation. The establishment of such laws force Kant into a concern with the formality of representation. This focus on formality rather than the physical support or context of reflection prevents him from taking into consideration what Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, the major figures in the philosophy of what could be called proto-Freudian Romanticism, have called “the subject’s inner sensibility,” its sensitivity, which affects the subject’s power of intuition. Sensibilität, or sensitivity, is a requirement for perception and aesthetic experience. Hence, perception names a capacity that is patterned after the subject’s past. This view subverts a concept of taste which reduces taste to its formal properties in judgment. Such a reduction of taste to its mere form demonstrates Kant’s avoidance of historical considerations for conceptualizing the subject’s experience of the present. If I had the space, I would show my reader how Kant’s epistemological innovation of criticism (Kritik) is, after all, grounded in history, the history of taste, rather than in a “transcendental aesthetics” that analytical philosophers opposed to cultural studies like to pursue. The method of critique takes as its object the particularity of taste, one that is contingent on the capability of discrimination.

 

In a nutshell, you cannot arrive at a judgement of taste or the statement that you like something without the ability to compare the present sensation to a previous one. Or, in other words, if you don’t remember your pleasurable mother, you will not stand a chance of finding this pleasure again in things beautiful.

 

In the 18th century, this comparing, transferring agency of the mind was conceptualized as the faculty of wit or–at least in the first half of the century–as spirit (Geist), which were both regarded as very distinct from reason. Reason represented scholarly bound (that is, coherent) thought, whereas Geist generated free roaming and creative thought. By this definition, Geist is no different from the concept of fantasy fashioned by European romantics in relation to thinking. Before the romantics placed their emphasis on fantasy as a power of thinking, 18th century philosophers of aesthetics acknowledged a mental capacity or talent in wit (which never occurs separately from Geist) which was responsible for the psychical translation process and its rhetorical representation in language. The presence of wit in a person accounts for the translation of Vorstellunginto Darstellung. This conception of wit foreshadowed the aesthetics of “genius” to which Kant fully subscribed. Philosophers before Kant reflected on the connection between psyche and language, and interpreted wit as a faculty that was contingent on language to express its power: Wit creates metaphors in language. Language, in its sensuous power of expression, reflects a certain knowledge of human experience, otherwise it could not affect the reader or listener on the level of feeling or imagination. This affection only happens if the faculty of wit has previously assembled the signifiers of language in such a way–i.e. in a text–that the receptive mind can easily compare different things that otherwise might never be compared. With reference to Benjamin, this comparison may only be possible by means of a tradition in which language and individual psyche are related in history. Tradition presents itself as what Benjamin has called the “canon of non-mimetic representation” in language.¹⁹ The capacity of wit turns written signifiers into figurative signs. Wit was acknowledged as a significant power of artistic representation in the burgeoning critique of aesthetics.²⁰

 

Wit came to represent an ingenious faculty to perceive similarities in different things. Again, Benjamin’s notion of unsinnliche ehnlichkeiten (non-mimetic similarities) in his essay on the mimetic capacity lends itself to an interpretation of wit as that mimetic capacity. Such a rendition of wit inevitably ruptured the mimetic model of representation which had been established on the premise that appearance resembled identity. Wit interferes in the mirror relationship of Urbild and Abbild, distorting and distracting imagination in its attempt to represent the object. Wit causes imagination to be creative and to assemble the various parts of the object in different and unexpected ways so that different things can be compared and subsequently associated with one another in the perceiver’s mind. The experience of surprise resulting from the unexpected relations survives in today’s meaning of wit in German as “joke.”²¹ When Freud elaborates on the commemorative power of joke, he points to an “ingenius” faculty of the unconscious mind in understanding a joke. Wit suggests an unconscious knowledge of relationships between things. For reasons of cultural taboos, this knowledge can only emerge in an oblique or non-mimetic linguistic representation. The fact that consciousness of the tabooed meaning is accompanied by explosive laughter shows the repressive tension involved in the socio-cultural reglementation of thought and meaning. By analyzing people’s mental constructions, Freud has also demonstrated that conscious thought requires the repression of certain similarities between experiences. The joke’s effect does not stem from an innovative connection between things but merely reveals an already cognized but repressed familiarity with tabooed ideas attached to these things. Finally, Freud’s notion of the uncanny (unheimlich) expands on this phenomenon of an unconscious familiarity in the feeling of fear.

 

Associating very different things in the linguistic representation of an object is made possible through the creation of seemingly artificial similarities; artificial, because artistic representation rests on the rhetorical quality of language which initially produces such similarities between things or signs. From this vantage point, language exerts a psychological power by prompting additional meanings that would otherwise be forgotten in the reference or mirror function of linguistic signs. This latter utilitarian concept of language prevails in the science of linguistics not dissimilar from the view of texts in the positivist assumptions of historicism. The antidote to such a constrained view of language is comprised by the realm of the aesthetic, or an assumed literariness of texts, which is decried for poetic license confined to this realm. This antidotal status of so-called literary texts was, in the history of aesthetics, finally cancelled by Benjamin. His critique insists that for the purpose of building historical consciousness aesthetic and allegorical strategies are necessary. These strategies of representation (Darstellung) parallel the psycho-analytic transference and essential temporality in the formation of thought (Vorstellung). The similarities produced by the rhetorical and figural power of language can be viewed as examples of a belated intuitive connection supplied by wit. Wit thus proves indispensable for imagination as a cognitive power in aesthetic representation.

 

Contingent on mother wit, aesthetic judgment, even in its reflective component does not act arbitrarily (freed from certain universalities) but finds its support in a subjective history of desire and feelings. Kant’s notion of transcendental power might have to be abandoned in a psychology of subjectivity which seems to be expressed and analyzable in the aesthetic realm. We may, however, read transcendental power as merely a philosophical term for an 18th century theory of invention. Invention was held to be the result of absolute creativity and not a function of memory, or forgetfulness; this memory aspect nonetheless resounds in the German word Er-findung and in English might be associated in the term dis-covery. But if wit is responsible for something new, it might only seem new to consciousness when it is represented as art.²² If this is the case, then the novelty rests merely on the feature of the-finally-becoming-conscious of what had already been latent but could not be cognized. We remember that Freud found the wittiness of a joke to consist of the unconscious meanings of words which had been commonly repressed in accordance with a cultural taboo. In this view, what underlies wit is an unconscious knowledge that is un-covered in an imaginative, witty use of language. This cognitive-creative structure, reflected in newly detected similarities between things, seems to fit the 18th century use of the concept “soul” with which the notions of wit, spirit, and imagination are almost interchangeably linked. All these notions designate an activity of the psyche that interferes with a presumed a priori distinction of subject and object, displacing and even dispersing both into a new constellation in representation. An unconscious agreement between subject and object is articulated in the repetition of signifiers. In the temporality of this repetition, previously contiguous or associated features of an experience are recombined in the conscious emergence of a single sign. The analytical-philosophical (that is, nonlinguistic) approach of metaphysics always denied this temporalized and historically significant liaison between subject and object while insisting on their definite distinction.

 

What sets this activity of the psyche in motion? Why would the individual, encountering textuality, “see” something differently than before? And why, when looking at separate things, would the subject indulge in a vision of their similarities? Such questions aim at identifying the motivation of wit and fantasy. They try to address the e-motional relationship between the subject and the object. The process starts, again, with affect. Depending on its force, affect triggers an emotional interest in the objects and motivates the subject to perceive similarities. The knowledge supporting the perception of similarities can emerge only once affect has set in motion the mental translation process, the movement of meta-phora, that turns affect into images and reflected feelings. The power or rather the intensity of affect depends upon the impact of experience in the subject’s past. The past experience is unconsciously repeated along with the sense impressions of the current object. The subject’s disposition vis-à-vis the object is thus influenced by the past as it engages the subject’s desire. This animated desire ultimately forms the subject’s vision of the object. It is this desire-driven vision that constitutes the basis for a value judgment, such as “this rose is beautiful.” Given the view that the past is represented only in feeling, what the mind compares is not so much the particularities of various objects, as it compares the affect with an unconscious desire. To what degree this desire is satisfied by the present experience determines whether the contingent affect is reflected now as a feeling of pleasure or pain. If there is pleasure, the affect has satisfied the desire for self-completion, for the imaginary experience of being whole. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant recrutes this kind of pleasure as a basis for the judgment of taste.

 

My elaboration of the feeling of pleasure and pain as originating in the past may suffice to suggest an analogy between the creation of metaphor in both language and the mind. The tertium comparationis, which functions as the reference point for a comparison of different things, may indeed be provided by the capacity for pleasure and pain in the psychical apparatus. In Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, the feeling of pleasure imports a subjective purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) into mental representation.²³ Purposiveness precedes the cognition of an object and sets in motion the psychical activity of comparing the affect with the unconscious desire in the subject. The activity of comparing will “find,” i.e. create (erfinden), similarities between the pleasurable experience in the past and the one in the present, all projected at first outward, enveloping with fantasy the world of objects. The creative power that finds and has traditionally always found such similarities is the artistic genius in aesthetic representations. But in our postmodern culture where objects have turned into aesthetic icons, the aesthetic effects in popular culture are triggered by a fantasy of loss and remembrance of things past. Everyone resorts to wit to assemble into a pleasurable configuration and familiar life context the cultural debris of history and aesthetic tradition, to which the objects-turned-icons allude.

 

Since the object is of no cognitive concern in aesthetic judgment, it is the subject’s sense of familiarity and connectedness with her past that is being challenged in the beautiful. This appears as a familiarity for which she has no concept or representation but only a feeling of pleasure that expresses the connection with the past, a feeling that lingers while affecting the person’s mood. Mood calls attention to itself in the lingering of the feeling and the contemplation of the beautiful. Kant defines this mood (Stimmung )as a state of inner harmony with all faculties in playful accord (übereinstimmung). (The semantic identities in the German words for mood and accord already suggest a “sensible” correspondence between mental and physical phenomena.) Such a mood might also be analyzed as a harmony between unconscious drive and conscious reality. But reality here is the irreality of the imagination. In the beautiful, the experience is not one of objectivity or exterior reality but of the formation of subjective intuitions. The intuition of the beautiful is an intuition of feeling. In this state of intuition, the subject is made to reflect upon her own Gemüt, her state of mind, her mood, through which she gains a sense of life, Lebensgefühl.

 

If wit stands for the capacity to compare an unconscious past with its similarity in a different medium such as language, it must itself be partly unconscious and partly conscious. Indeed, because of this ambivalent status, wit was conflated in the philosophy of the 18th century with equally ambivalent, non-conceptual but nonetheless potentially cognitive and creative powers such as Geist and imagination (Einbildung). The unconscious component in these faculties, which I have developed here as an aspect of history with respect to the form of representation and feeling, actually does surface in Kant’s critique of imagination, specifically in his discussion of genius as related to Geist. If the unconscious not only makes itself felt in the aesthetic experience as a feeling of pleasure but also determines the latter’s cognizability in the judgment of taste, then Kant’s term Mutterwitz for the natural talent of judgment already invokes a connection between an unconscious and a conscious faculty. Intuition of the beautiful relies on the mediating capacity of such a natural talent; this talent is all the more important for the transformation of an intuition into a mental representation. If mother wit performs the switch from intuition to representation, then the exact status of imagination in representation remains unclear, is it indeed a formal power (i.e transcendental) or an archive of image content (i.e., empirical)? Is it an Einbildungskraft (power), and thus possibly an extension of the force of desire, or a phenomenon and thus a phantasy (Einbildung) about the form of the object, i.e., the other?

 

If the aesthetic judgment consists of a process of reflection where imagination is free to produce intuitions, then it seems to be based on an a priori (unconscious) knowledge of pleasure. In German, Vermögen, the term for mental faculty and mental capacity, is semantically related to the word Vermächtnis meaning “legacy.” Legacy implicates the past as an active agent in the present, and this is made explicit in the incorporated noun Macht (power). In the signifying capacity of humans, the power of legacy transpires in the idea of tradition, understood as both translation and inheritance. As a mental activity, this legacy or tradition asserts itself in the capacity of wit. If the faculty of wit is inherited from the past as Mutterwitz, wit cannot be a formal category of consciousness but must be a capacity of formation that is unconsciously derived from the mater-iality of the primal experience of completion and its resulting pleasure. In the cultivation of genius (Bildung ), an appeal is made to this inheritance that constitutes the subject’s nature which Kant claims gives the rule to art. The universality that Kant ascribes to the judgment of taste can only be based on a concept of nature that does not exist in opposition to culture, but that is above all derived from culture and hence developed from the formation of individuals (Bildung). What cannot be “cognized” in aesthetic judgment–the aesthetic judgment is not a cognition in Kant’s view–is the appropriation of the past as nature itself, because this nature only manifests itself in representations of an experience. Thus, it is tradition that has to be invoked in the formation of the individual by appealing to his or her inheritance which builds genius as the capability of translating experiences into images. And the use of tradition is what distinguishes a postmodern experience from a modernist experience. The past is after all not dead, never in the individual psyche that is always confronted with new specimens of a seeming present.

 

Notes

 

1. Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Luc Nancy, et al., “The Sublime Offering,” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: SUNY UP, 1993) 29.
 

2. “Alle Beziehung der Vorstellungen, selbst die der Empfindungen, aber kann objektiv sein…nur nicht die auf das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust, wodurch gar nichts im Objekte bezeichnet wird, sondern in der das Subjekt, wie es durch die Vorstellung affiziert wird, sich selbst fühlt.” Kritik der Urteilskraft, 115.

 

3. Psychoanalytic feminism disputes the patriarchial mode of separation and brings evidence for a psychological, specifically male, need to repudiate the primary identification with the mother in order to arrive at a sense of individuality. Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: California UP, 1978) has argued that this assertion of (male) difference rests on a denial of the mother as dependence on the other as well as commonality with the other. In Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) Evelyn Fox Keller departs from this psychological dynamics and critiques the resultant dualism in Western scientific thought where only one side is always idealized at the expense of subduing the other. This idealization of the autonomously thinking subject is typical in all modern social activity and forms of knowledge which projects the irritant (m)other outwards in order to dominate it/her, as Jessica Benjamin argues in “Authority and the Family Revisited; or A World Without Fathers?” (New German Critique, 13 [Winter 1978] 35-57). In a more recent article Benjamin elaborates the importance of intersubjective space for the recognition of desire and its resultant sense of self; the body of the mother provided the first space of this kind and the fantasy of the mother’s body can be called up any time via “transitional objects” that are then identified as causing pleasurable experiences. Cf. “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space,” Feminist Studies /Critical/Studies ed. Theresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 78-102.

 

4. cf. D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1958).

5. “His [Kant’s] theory of bodies (spheres) is not a physics of the exterior of bodies, but from the interior of an organic body (Leib), one’s own sensibility. As such it is however repressed–excluded from the discourse of metaphysics and is nonetheless its hidden Other.” Harmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 103.

 

6. Immanuel Kant, Der Gebrauch der Metaphysik, sofern sie mit der Geometrie verbunden ist, in der Naturphilosophie, dessen erste Probe die physische Monadologie enthält in Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) 549. (In the following I shall refer to this text as Monadologie.)

 

7. Kant, Monadologie, 547 (“Die Kraft der Undurchdringlichkeit ist eine Zurückstossungskraft, die jedes Äu ere von einer weiteren Annäherung abhält.”)

 

8. cf. Monadologie, 547-553.

 

9. Kant, Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grö en in die Weltweisheit einzuführen in Vorkritische Schriften, 804.

10. cf. Das Andere der Vernunft, 145: “Wenn die Geschichte des Selbstbewusstseins zurückgeht bis zu jener primären Unabgegrenztheit, die abgelöst wird durch den dynamisch gerichteten Organismus, von dem her sich die Unterschiedenheit von Objekten wie die Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins bilden–: wenn dies so ist, dann kann die Philosophie der Erinnerung als Rekonstruktion der ursprünglichen Ablösung und Emanzipation des Ich aus der Symbiose mit der Natur/Mutter gelten.”

 

11. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 140. (“Im Umgang gibt es nur noch die Legitimität des Cogito, das sich von jeder traditionellen Vermischung mit Natur gereinigt hat.”)

 

12. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 109.

 

13. cf. Dietmar Kamper’s critique of the “body’s graphism” that engenders a different sense of historicity as well as of community mediated in the physical memory of pain: “On the basis of regularities in the similarity, correspondence, and sympathy with the pain of the other, a unique embodied temporality can emerge from all the metamorphoses of wound, scar, memory trace, pattern, sign.” Zur Soziologie der Imagination (München: Hanser, 1984) 159. (my translation.)

 

14. Kant, “Wahrnehmung ist die empirische Vorstellung wodurch das Subjekt sich selbst in der Anschauung a priori afficirt und sich selbst zum Gegenstand nach einem Prinzip der Synthetischen Vorstellung a priori der transzendentalen Erkenntnis macht…” Opus Postumum II, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. XXI/XXII (Berlin, Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1900-1955) 461.

 

15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 60; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 140.

 

16. “Thus the principle of judgment, in respect of the form of things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the purposiveness of nature in its variety. That is, nature is represented by means of this concept as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the variety of its empirical laws.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 17; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 89 (emphasis mine.)

 

17. Kant derives the principle for judging from the “universal laws of nature” which “have their ground in understanding, which prescribes them to nature…,” thus it assumes a unity that the undetermined particularity of the object has with the determined laws in the faculty of understanding. In this same passage, Kant continues to, however, by denying such a cognitive process: “Not as if, in this way, such an understanding really had to be assumed (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle–for reflecting, not determining); but this faculty gives a law only to itself, and not to nature.)” Critique of Judgment, 16/17. Translation modified according to Sam Weber’s introductory essay to his book Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986). In this essay he excavates the problematic status of “purposiveness” for an aesthetics that cannot come to terms with the status of feeling as other. “The purposiveness of nature,” Kant says in the same place, “is therefore a particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgment.” (my emphasis).

 

18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 113; Kritik, 199.

 

19. Elaborating on the cultural history of mimetic capacity, Benjamin compares language to astrological figurations to show how non-sensical similarities can be produced in imagination: “Jedoch auch wir besitzen einen Kanon nach dem das, was unsinnliche ähnlichkeit bedeutet, sich einer Klärung näher führen lä t. Und dieser Kanon ist die Sprache.” “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” Angelus Novus, 97.

 

20. Cf. Alfred Bäumler: “Wit shows itself mainly in the happy invention of a ‘flowery manner of speaking’ [verblümter Redenarten], i.e. metaphors, through which we are brought to [recognize] similarities among things, as metaphor is only a ‘short allegory.'” in Kants Kritik der Urteilkraft. Ihre Geschichte und Systematik. (Das Irrationalitätsproblem in er ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft) (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923) 148.

 

21. “Eine zweite Gruppe technischer Mittel des Witzes–Unifizierung, Gleichklang, mehrfache Verwendung, Modifikation bekannter Redensarten, Anspielung auf Zitate–lä t als gemeinsamen Charakter herausheben, da jedesmal etwas Bekanntes wiedergefunden wird, wo man anstatt dessen etwas Neues hätte erwarten müssen. Dieses Wiederfinden des Bekannten ist lustvoll, und es kann uns wiederum nicht schwerfallen, solche Lust als Ersparungslust zu erkennen, auf die Ersparung an psychischem Aufwand zu beziehen.” Sigmund Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, 135. (emphasis mine.)

 

22. “Wit discovers something new by tracing similarities between things…. Similarities have to first be found, they are not obvious to everyone.” Bäumler, 148.

 

23. “But the subjective element in a representation, which cannot be an ingredient of cognition, is the pleasure or pain which is bound up with it…. The purposiveness, therefore, which precedes the cognition of an object and which, even without our wishing to use the representation of it for cognition, is at the same time immediately bound up with it, is that subjective [element] which cannot be an ingredient in cognition. Hence the object is only called purposive when its representation is immediately combined with the feeling of pleasure, and this very representation is an aesthetical representation of purposiveness.” Kant, Critique of Judgement, 26; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 99/100.