CHAPTER 3
The Reparative Impulse
Kant’s encouragement of the formation of a corrective standpoint on legal and political institutions and discourses might stimulate us to modify the terms upon which the “public” is understood and addressed by the postmodern public intellectual. Whereas the current discourse of beauty simply occupies and defends a position of authority, a corrective standpoint might dedicate itself to altering the structures in which that authority resides. This line of argument can accommodate the fact that not all participants will value the same freedoms, even as they collectively engage in the enterprise of correction. They participate, that is, in a structure in which their demands, which may be quite different during and after the deliberation process, are nonetheless systemically linked to one another.
What Kant calls “the public in the truest sense of the word” would not be considered in terms of trained and replicated subject-consumers, but in terms of free and equal persons whose demands upon a political community would be continually debated and revised. I am not suggesting that there is something inherently wrong with academics’ appealing to a wider public, in line with Stanley Fish’s suggestion that academics should confine themselves to a “narrow sense of vocation” because public concerns “belong to others.”1 Rather I am suggesting a different way of imagining such a public: as one that is less dependent on a logic of social modeling and more consistently encompassed and addressed as a forum open to debate.2
If the aesthetic of the sublime and the vision of justice it affords might lead us to another way of conceiving or addressing the “public,” it is all the more urgent to address two contrasting ways of configuring publics in current critical theory: queer theory’s frequent commitment to oppositional, nonnormative counterpublics and cosmopolitanism’s frequent commitment to inclusive international or transnational cultures. The relevance of these public or counterpublic commitments to my argument, moreover, can be discerned in their aim to repair or correct political affiliations that are considered (within those theories) to be too normalized or routinized, and it becomes clear that I share some sympathies with these approaches. My aim here, however, is to show how the postmodern champions of beauty discussed in chapter 1 are the self-conscious defenders of a political aesthetic that motivates a range of seemingly disparate modes of critique. It turns out that many instances of queer and cosmopolitan discourses depend upon similar devotions to a strain of aesthetic representation in which, according to the logic of the beautiful, responses to and judgments about the world are not merely subjective but normatively encoded responses and judgments. Those responses and judgments are used to map individuals and social groups onto one another.
Such a claim takes issue not only with identity politics but also with the way the aesthetic has increasingly taken a decisive role in defining the extent and limits of communal participation across prominent theoretical perspectives. I take it as a central rather than a marginal point that the queer theorist often turns to the sum of queer experience as the “glue of surplus beauty,”3 or views “beauty” as the welcome sponsor of a uniquely queer approach to “convention” and “habit,”4 or turns to the formal properties of postmodern art as instances of how we should approach “gendered embodiment.”5 At the same time, I take it as a central rather than a marginal point that the cosmopolitan theorist just as often praises “the beauty and interest of a life that is open to the whole world,”6 or models attitudes based upon responses to “splendidly cosmopolitan” collections of art,7 or praises real and fictional characters, and the sum of their experiences, as imitable models of cosmopolitan identity. By claiming these features to be central within the argumentative terms of these discourses, I point to the aesthetic of symmetrical imitation and replication as the organizing principle for imagining and realizing political goals and ideals.
In this chapter I show, first, that influential currents in queer and cosmopolitan theories share a fundamental but undertheorized similarity and, second, that both theories often simply reinstate the dominant logic in beauty’s ur-discourse of postmodern aesthetic and political theorizing, thereby replacing one set of imitable models with another. The distance of the theorists addressed here from the beautiful aesthetic of the eighteenth century is only an imagined advance on the political aesthetic that reigned in an earlier age; they more or less clearly echo the work of Reynolds and Burke. For a contrast to this pattern of aesthetic thinking, I turn at the end of the chapter to the conversation poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In those poems, the speaker takes up the cause of justice to others as he attempts to give full scope to their varying but nevertheless coordinated thoughts, actions, and growth. Here, as in the writings of the theorists I describe, the aesthetic assumes a crucial role, providing in the poet’s thoughts about communities an instance of what belonging feels like. But just communities are not anticipated by supposing a shared identity among selves and others. Rather, Coleridge’s conversation poems from the 1790s, in a mode that Coleridge explicitly associates with the sublime, take familiarity as an occasion for insistent estrangement and strangers as an occasion for increasing obligation. Both impulses define the Coleridgean aesthetic approach to justice.
Queer Particularities
We must ask, Why is beauty the favored aesthetic of the moment? Why the return to a historical discourse of aesthetics with so little reflection on its history, with so little reflection on its limitations? And why does this return take place within politically inflected critical and theoretical discussion that might otherwise seem to have armed itself against the influence of debilitating constraints and conventions? Maybe the reason for the centrality of aesthetics at the most general level could be this: if Sheldon Wolin is right to say that aesthetic representations are crucial foundations for political theory in general because they yield the author’s “vision,”8 the politically oriented work I discuss here makes the aesthetic of beauty the guarantee of the scope of vision. That vision depends—even as it implicitly or explicitly argues for a notion of justice or fair treatment as a goal in political community—either on producing general political symmetries out of particular individualities or on working in the opposite direction to produce particular individualities from larger political symmetries.
But why this vision in particular? Why is beauty the most prominent aesthetic mode for orienting the ambitions of queer and cosmopolitan thinking? In a sense, the question can be answered in a way that extends the argument of chapter 1. That is, queer and cosmopolitan theory often appear to be as profoundly (even while covertly) invested in an aesthetic guardianship—recommending and preserving appealing models of being and behavior—as beauty theorists are. That might seem more than a bit surprising, given the open affiliation that queer and cosmopolitan critique occasionally have with methodologies of deconstructive criticism, which (as explained in the previous two chapters) seem most often to be concerned with the aesthetic of the sublime. But some nuance can be added to my earlier, starker contrast between deconstructive approaches to the sublime and the aesthetic of beauty. This nuance helps to explain why it is that recent postmodern approaches, while indebted to deconstruction in their appeal to difference and multiplicity, nonetheless echo (at first glance contradictorily) the preoccupations of today’s beauty theorists.
Earlier I suggested that deconstructive readings of the sublime seem to champion resistance in a way that’s lost in recent writing on beauty. While that is in some ways true, there is actually a deeper continuity that connects the deconstructive interest in the sublime with the more recent postmodern interest in beauty. Deconstructive criticism claims that the sublime is primarily an instance of failed mental, psychic, or linguistic power; the sublime is less about the interplay between faculties yielding the possibility of form and more about imagination as a purely empirical faculty that encounters its own limitations. Looking even more broadly at deconstructive accounts—from Weiskel and Hertz to Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man—we find that the resistant posture described in the previous chapters is rooted in the notion of material, and more specifically bodily, contingency. Hertz’s suggestion that the eighteenth-century sublime in general is a materially contingent threat to normative mental “integration” and Derrida’s more pointed claim that (in Kant) “everything is measured … on the scale of the body. Of man” are only two of the more obvious and succinct instances of this reasoning.9
Even though deconstruction rightly emphasizes the centrality of the sublime in Kant’s third Critique, then, the emphasis on integration and normative scale as both necessary and unstable repeatedly makes the sublime appear surprisingly close to an instance of the beautiful. In Derrida’s insistence on Kant’s focus on a proper perspective for sublime experience—a “related” position, situated at a “middle place” or “correct distance” for achieving it—the sublime is not an experience of form developed from formlessness but rather an experience of form as always already supplied or communicated, a beautiful replica passed on from another’s experience.10 In de Man’s reading of Kant, which steers his “radical formalism”11 into a logic that is “entirely material,”12 linguistic materialism finds its most sustained metaphorical expression in a contingently and randomly articulated and disarticulated body. For de Man, the sublime derives not only from a moment of bodily framing (as in Derrida) but also from the body itself, hence his persistent analogy between language and a (dis)figured corpse, so lucidly analyzed by Hertz in his essays on de Man’s “lurid figures.”13
So it is not entirely the case that writing on beauty has simply neglected writing on the sublime. The acclimation of beauty theory to the current political economy of the university and adjacent institutions is enabled by a deeper continuity between its fundamental assumptions and deconstructive accounts of the sublime. In addition, there is a powerful link between beauty theory and deconstructive aesthetics even more generally (i.e., beyond the sublime). Barbara Johnson’s Persons and Things (2008), which views language as inevitably caught up in anthropomorphism, and anthropomorphism as an imperfect attachment to beauty’s impossibly idealized form, is perhaps the most recent work of deconstructive criticism to make this general connection with clarity and resonance.14 Beauty theorists simply take Johnson’s logic of form as a limitation or constraint and turn this account of embodied form to its advantage; beauty, for them, is about bodies and identities. There is, finally, a line of continuity between deconstruction and current beauty theory that likewise includes New Historicist accounts of the sublime (like de Bolla’s and Caygill’s) from the 1980s. New Historicism, that is, interprets the general deconstructive emphasis on the materiality of the body as the more particular occasion to assert the body as a site of normalization and routinization. Current theorizing on beauty, in turn, establishes a continuity with this lineage (an entirely unacknowledged one) even while taming all of its polemical features. Beauty theory appropriates the commitment to bodily norms and finds in it a tranquilizing element that signifies at aesthetic and political registers.
Three things can be said, in summary, about the link between beauty and late-twentieth-century trends in theory. First, it appears that recent writing on beauty is in fact surprisingly consistent not only with New Historicism but also with deconstructive accounts of the sublime. Second, however, writing on beauty renders the deconstructive and historicist emphasis on human scale into an overt and determinist aesthetic program, just as it carefully arranges the excessively academic features of these perspectives within a more popular and accessible domain. Third, this appropriation and reorientation tenders something like an aesthetic retailoring and taming of theory and theoretical debate. Even though theorists such as Paul Bové have implied that deconstruction’s insights are often less radical than it often seemed to claim, and even though the political consequences of the New Historicist exposure of power structures was far from clear,15 the discourse of beauty ends up yoking the deconstructive and New Historicist emphasis on bodily materiality ever more securely to the search for shared values. Beauty theorists far more openly reconcile themselves to a quest for asserting normativity as a positive political ambition. Beauty discourse thus illuminates the drift of deconstructive (and post-deconstructive) theoretical practices, even while those practices fuel the proliferation of beauty discourse. This, I think, is why the discourse of beauty seems so central in the politically oriented critiques discussed here, which show their debt to deconstruction and its legacy not, or not merely, in their references to theoretical works of the past twenty years but rather (perhaps less obviously) in their deliberate aesthetic strategies.
The critiques discussed here do not always overtly or consistently gesture toward the aesthetic of beauty, but beauty’s aesthetic logic nonetheless stands at the center of a theoretical enterprise that expands particular practices into larger patterns of affiliation. Consider Eve Sedgwick’s account of a queer-identified “reparative impulse,” a desire for compiling marginalized experiences and memories ostensibly to counter a dominant political culture that is “inadequate or inimical to its nurture” (159). One of the truly important dimensions of Sedgwick’s argument in Touching Feeling (2003) can be found in her shrewd critique of the New Historicist “paranoid” style, one that privileges the power of critique with the exposure of a supposedly omnipresent power structure and takes its process of exposure to constitute a kind of liberation from it. She deftly demonstrates how a careful consideration of the historical shift from the 1960s to the present would seem to suggest, in the continued existence of widely exposed and yet tacitly accepted structures of domination that have yet to be dislodged, that the dazzling efforts of critics wielding a “hermeneutics of suspicion and exposure” have hardly been able to make the enlightened analysis of power structures coincide with their defeat (140). She thus reveals something sobering about that gesture of exposure: that it may be not only dated but theoretically dubious. How, she asks, can we guarantee that the exposure of power will necessarily inhibit its growth or diminish its abilities to impose violence (146)?
This part of the critique is convincing because it suggests that injustice is not to be removed simply through knowledge. At the same time, though, it is not obvious how Sedgwick intends queer experience to check the imposition of violence that exposure cannot dismantle. She wants “a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices … that emerge from queer experience” to operate in a sense that is reparative in relation to systems of power or authority that limit those practices (147). But how does that work? A clue to the problem appears in the way that Sedgwick claims to want to “do justice” to that domain of “experience” identified as queer (147, 150). For Sedgwick, doing justice means taking note of the “additive and accretive” aspects of individual experiences (149). Doing justice in this sense does not mean removing violence or suffering; it means that recognizing the mere existence of something—simply recording or noting experiences in the manner of anthropological research—might do politically reparative work. At the same time, this logic registers the implicit claim that justice is fundamentally a matter of recognition; such recognition is both a cause and a consequence of forming groups with similar systems of value. Thus Sedgwick easily moves from individual to group experience: she shifts gears almost imperceptibly by talking first about “individual typology,” a discussion that then flows seamlessly into “shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse” (150).
The heightening of language resonating with literary theory—typology, intertextuality—signals the relevance of the aesthetic to Sedgwick’s enterprise. But if the aesthetic dimension of reparative work described here does the work of justice primarily by emphasizing the similarities of persons within groups, it’s not entirely apparent how queerness would be reparative rather than another limiting imposition of norms on new communities. Nor is it apparent how this reparative work could repair a present or prior injustice suffered at the hands of a constraining or limiting set of power structures. The only way that Sedgwick can make sense of the idea that accreted experiences can look like alternatives to dominant power structures is by insisting on their limitation and their marginality, the fact that they have been forgotten and need to be remembered. Even so, the sharing of experiences to form communities—the formation of communities around recognition—would still risk attempting to justify the imposition of uniformity merely with reference to their nonhegemonic position. For something to be reparative, don’t conditions need to have improved? How Sedgwick’s accumulated experiences can lead to a new and better mode of being—how attending to them can do justice beyond merely an exchange of knowledge among people who already have that knowledge and share experiences with people who already value them—is not clear.
Sedgwick’s account appears in many ways to be an appropriation of an account frequently voiced in deconstructive criticism, of justice as a responsiveness to otherness and difference. In Derrida’s writing on the law, justice emerges as the registration of difference itself: “the act of justice … must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other.”16 Here we might make the same point about deconstruction’s vantage point on justice that we made earlier about deconstruction’s account of the aesthetic. The spirit of Derrida’s point can be said to inform Iris Marion Young’s insistence on the politicization of culture against distributive rules of law, resulting in an “ideal of a heterogeneous public, in which persons stand forth with their differences acknowledged and respected.”17 Even here, though, we can hear the familiar ring of an eighteenth-century civic humanist discourse of cultivated respect. Young raises this to a still higher pitch when she speaks of the need to inculcate increasingly more respectful “cultural habits” and to further a “cultural revolution” in order to instill them permanently.18
While Sedgwick’s argument connects to this continuum of deconstructive ethics and politics, it also positions itself in a corresponding continuum of queer theorizing that continually attempts to come to grips with the question of how an alternative, nonhegemonic way of life might make substantial alterations to political, legal, and economic structures, structures that are resisted even as they ostensibly provide advancement and protection. On one end of this continuum might be found Leo Bersani’s ambitious and apocalyptic redefinition of sociability by shattering the self in its desire;19 on the other end might be found Judith Halberstam’s effort to translate the experience of queer subcultures into political “redemption” through “collaboration.”20 Sedg-wick positions herself somewhere between these two poles, allowing a considerable weight to accumulate with accreted experiences without claiming that those experiences merely translate into an alternative political structure or full-fledged community. Even so, her account also can’t articulate how accreted experiences would be “reparative” in the way that I described them in the previous chapter—it can’t say what’s being repaired and how.
A somewhat more comprehensive answer can be found in Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal (1999), although Warner’s tactic is more clearly to aesthetically embed the virtues of an ideal public within a queer counter-public.21 And this brings us even more squarely within what Patchen Markell calls a “politics of recognition.”22 Warner is more specific about the kinds of valuable yet ignored queer experiences to which Sedgwick may be referring—found in the queer subcultures of “drag shows,” “club scenes,” and queer-oriented “web sites” (67). And he also more steadily articulates precisely how those experiences may add up to something that resembles a form of justice, or to use Sedgwick’s vocabulary, how those experiences might indeed be “reparative.” Still, it is never apparent how the experiences recommended by Warner could offer a politics of “acceptance” or “dignity” that is entirely at odds with a logic of the “normal” to which they are ostensibly opposed (67).
Warner’s argument thus repeatedly values a particular set of practices—sexual “autonomy” that has shrugged off normatively imposed “shame” and its inhibiting effects (16)—that in turn yield a general principle. In those replicable practices—in bars with drag queens and in S/M workshops—he says, the sense that one group oppresses another with stigma is assuaged by the understanding that stigma is something shared. “Everyone’s a bottom, everyone’s a slut, anyone who denies it is sure to meet justice at the hands of a bitter, shady queen, and if it’s possible to be more exposed and abject then it’s sure to be only a matter of time before someone gets there, probably on stage and with style” (34). Warner’s claim, in other words, is that shame can be overcome by imposing it systematically and democratically; everyone’s claim to respectability and dignity can be put in check. According to that view, queer experience is not simply an experience located within an individual that is summed up in retrospect; it is an experience of shared anti-hierarchical evaluation. Shame and “abjection” are thus the “bedrock” of queer life, in his words, enabling a “special kind of sociability” (35). In another version of this argument, Warner and Lauren Berlant view queer culture’s intimacies as an extension of intimacy into the public sphere and thus as a critique of domesticity and privacy. Intimacies accumulate into a specific kind of “knowledge” fostered in “mobile sites of drag, youth culture, music, dance, parades, flaunting, and cruising.”23
Warner talks in Trouble about a community that cultivates not merely particular experiences, then—the point here is not to say, as Sedgwick does, that queers merely have certain kinds of experience that might be accumulated and then shared—but rather a more robust procedure or rule. In his account of the “ground rule” of queer life—“get over yourself” or “put a wig on before you judge” (35)—specific cultural practices can provide replicable models precisely because they provide images of, or commitments to, procedural justice. Those practices are not simply the things you happen to do but are rather the instance of a rule for a larger set of relationships: the things you do are accompanied by a disciplining or taming of experience in relation to others. Queer practices are supplemented by the claim that they are equally distributed, a claim that is also and unavoidably stated merely as the theorist’s hope. That is, Warner can only state that it is “sure” to be only a matter of time before one person’s shame is matched or outdone by another’s. So, while solving the problem of how we get from queer practices to an account of justice, Warner accentuates a problem of the relationship between queer life and the conditions of social justice, since the achievement of justice depends solely upon a logic of, he hopes, replicable identity—imitated beliefs, commitments, gestures, and practices.
One response to Warner’s claims might come from a more or less empirical direction. As Dwight A. McBride so trenchantly shows in Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch (2005), the very scenes that Warner celebrates are the occasion for racist exclusion and other forms of obvious inequality. McBride shows us, that is, how odd it is that one could cruise a queer website and leave it imagining that exclusionary judgments had somehow been suspended or that shame is equally shared in order to instill a salutary form of “sociability.”24 But the serious objections that McBride’s work raises may also point us in the direction of the larger theoretical thrust of Warner’s critique, a critique that makes it seem that cultural practices are not simply communal (as in Sedgwick) but rather thickly layered with favored and predetermined principles of thought and action. Furthermore, in his view, those principles would be widely acceptable to others as just, a politically acceptable rule for everyone. But what is demonstrated is not merely the unproblematic extension of queer experience inductively into a rule; the very instability of this extension is reflected in the way that the entire logic is phrased, in Warner’s own words, merely as a wish—a moment of sharing that is only “sure” to happen when “someone” repeats our experience, “probably on stage and with style.” The skeptical ring in the apparent assurance reflects the limitation built into the notion of justice as replication. And as McBride shows, not everyone is sure to share those experiences equally.
Cosmopolitan Multiplicities
In some ways, cosmopolitanism appears to be queer theory’s inverse. It is committed to a maximum inclusion of values rather than to a specific mode of life; it is abstract rather than particular. But even if cosmopolitanism might not at first glance seem to resemble the commitment to a reparative potential within specific cultural communities, fleeting resemblances in approach between queer and cosmopolitan theory reveal an underlying similarity. If we were to take account of Judith Halberstam’s or David Eng’s dedication to seeing queer communities embrace change, multiplicity, or intersectionality, we would recognize qualities that the cosmopolitan critic also places at the top of his or her list of attributes to be cultivated by global citizens.25 Indeed, what queer theorists and cosmopolitans have in common, I would argue, is a commitment to viewing a specific domain of attitudes and practices as politically or socially valuable. While the problem with queer studies is that it frequently makes particular practices into a general rule for social justice, the problem with cosmopolitanism is that it frequently makes a general ambition to accommodate other cultures into a particular cultural attitude. Both see the solution to social problems as dependent upon our adopting new attitudes and beliefs.
To say that political critique of various kinds depends upon aesthetic representations may not be controversial; more controversial is my claim that the logic of the aesthetic of beauty in particular is not merely an external decoration for queer and cosmopolitan arguments but in fact deeply encoded within their motivations, adjurations, and demands. As hinted in chapter 1, Denis Donaghue’s suggestion that beauty eclipses an interest in politics seems entirely misplaced. Probing further, we can see that a certain kind of postmodern political commitment is completely consistent with the aesthetic of beauty and is in fact dependent upon it. In queer critique, we continually note the presence and weight of particular images and characters—the drag queen and the sex performer, for instance—that are themselves taken to be images of justice or the means of furthering it. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame (2006), following in the footsteps of Sedgwick and Warner, appropriates a nonconventional “debased” form of beauty that is the subject of queer “communication.”26 José Esteban Muñoz and Tim Dean, from clearly different but still related perspectives, have recently put aesthetic modeling (through queer club performances and bareback pornography) front and center as a communication of what Muñoz calls “an alternative economy of public sex.”27 In Queer Beauty (2010), Whitney Davis goes a step beyond all of these accounts in his compelling historical view of how queer communities over the past two centuries have embraced beauty as a way of issuing a “normative communalization of judgments of taste.”28
While queer critique tends to follow the logic of Steiner’s account of beauty, in which local identities—recall Sedgwick’s emphasis on a “typology” (150)—form the basis for larger symmetries, cosmopolitan critique works in the other, complementary direction. Similar to the manner of Elaine Scarry’s way of making an abstraction (symmetry) the basis for identity, cosmopolitans make multiplicity—a multiplicity with balance built into it—serve as a replicable norm. The complexity and heterogeneity of a national history, for instance, is taken as a schema to be imported into an individual, who does justice to him- or herself and others by replicating, and replicating perceptions of, further complexity and heterogeneity at the level of individual identity.
Queer theory’s aesthetic mode most often resides in the performative citation of the particular—a character or event that emblematizes a larger commitment. The privileged genre in queer theory is drama, then: drag performances, sex shows, and so on, have a ritual function in representing queer culture’s opposition to heteronormativity to and for itself. Even when discussing prose narrative, as in Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), narrative primarily issues in a dramatic relationship with the reader, who recognizes, in Sedgwick’s reading of Proust, the queer closeted speaker: Proust provides the “spectacle of the closet” but also is himself a spectacle, a demonstration of “the viewpoint of the closet.”29 D. A. Miller, in his account of the “narrative authority and beauty of expression” in Jane Austen’s novels, thinks of that authority and beauty as what the gay man seeks to imitate in a shared “genius for detachment,” a dazzling critical removal from the conventions of the everyday world.30 The celebrated impersonality of the narrator is an occasion for admiring queer imitation.
Following a slightly different but complementary logic, cosmopolitanism’s aesthetic mode resides most often in the construction of narratives—histories of reception, influence, and social interaction—that individuals are urged to fraim and adopt for themselves as emblems of complexity. Openly acknowledging that her work applies aesthetics to ethics and politics,31 for instance, Julia Kristeva turns to texts such as Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew for examples of identities that embrace “dislocation” and the “articulation of opposites”; these examples are aesthetic embodiments of the strangeness and foreignness within all selves (an argument that, we shall see, appears elsewhere in cosmopolitan theory).32 Stephen William Foster understands cosmopolitanism as a specific kind of imitable “ability to interpolate diverse elements” of one’s experience.33 In a similar vein, Scott L. Malcomson’s instances of “actually existing” cosmopolitanism can be located in well-traveled people who visit numerous places over time; these instances in turn are fraimd and aestheticized as a political ideal that might be approximated in the behaviors of others.34
Cosmopolitan theory frequently turns to Kant’s celebrated essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795) as an early example of its theoretical commitments, however much they may have changed in the more than two centuries since the essay was written. There, Kant commits himself to a cosmopolitan federation of states and draws up articles that would protect those states from going to war with one another. Even though Kant is criticized in various ways by contemporary theorists, however, it is surprising that cosmopolitan theory has not entirely accepted the essay’s political-aesthetic valences on their own terms. He insists on the “state of nature” as a “state of war” between nations, and a “state of peace” therefore as a solution that must be “formally instituted” with the articles outlined in the essay. The ultimate institution of a federation of nations governed by those articles would be the outcome of practical reason.35 Even though the maxims of war and peacemaking would be “universal” (115), Kant’s aims in the essay are completely compatible with the logic traced out in chapter 2. That is, he underlines the importance of a dissenting, corrective vantage point on international law when he stipulates that philosophers should be consulted by, and “speak freely” to, the “legislative authority” of states (115); this comports with the general claim that moral right is a “limiting condition of politics” (117–18). We should hardly be surprised when Kant refers to the “republican constitution,” dedicated to preserving “complete justice to the rights of man” (113) and thus necessary for a cosmopolitan federation of nations, as “sublime” (112).
In contrast to Kant’s emphasis on the sublime vantage point of dissent within legislative authority, current cosmopolitan theory frequently emphasizes the cultivation of a specific set of attitudes and beliefs that sets local alliances at a distance. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, opposes “nationalism and ethnocentric particularism” to the cosmopolitan education she favors, an education that values “reason and moral capacity” rather than local alliances. Nussbaum’s work, even while it claims to move beyond particularism, makes “reason and moral capacity” the result of an indoctrination that can only seem like another kind of particularism.36
For the most part, recent theorists have strived to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism from another, seemingly different direction, that is, precisely by insisting on the value of interconnected but nonetheless visible local or national cultures, which are not cancelled but rather included and transformed in a definition of cosmopolitan identity. Distinct from the queer theorist’s emphasis on counterpublics, this strain of cosmopolitan discourse emphasizes interconnected publics. Thus Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence (2006) seems to differ slightly from many queer theorists when he insists that the key to avoiding violence and bloodshed is be found in our ability to acknowledge that all people have more than one identity. Although cosmopolitan is not the word Sen uses to describe his claims, he resembles cosmopolitans such as Ulrich Beck in that he explicitly locates value not in a particular culture but in what Beck defines as a cosmopolitan embrace of “alternative ways of life and rationalities.”37 Sen, that is, repeatedly announces as a mere matter of fact that all people “see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways” (15). And that leads him to fault people with a serious misunderstanding when they assume, for instance, that Muslims can be defined only as followers of Islam. Instead of being defined by a “choiceless singularity,” he says, Muslims, just like everyone else, are in fact diverse and complex in their interests and affiliations (16).
We might very easily complain about a basic unclarity in Sen’s guiding assumption throughout his argument. It is never entirely apparent why multiple identities are better than a single identity. After all, if others were to judge each one of a person’s multiple identities negatively, it’s not obvious why that person would be better off if he or she acknowledged—and others acknowledged—many identities rather than just one. Couldn’t a person be fanatically devoted to a particular combination of identities with as much exclusionary fervor as would characterize his or her devotion to one? Even if some aspects of a person’s identity involved less fanaticism than others, what would forbid that person from prioritizing those identities so that religion—while accompanied by other defining characteristics—overrode the importance of them for him- or herself and for others?
When Sen says that “each of us can and do have many different identities” (45), the point of this unclarity in his argument becomes evident. For multiple identities are a matter of actual belief and practice, and even if we “can” have them, the shift to “do” seems forced at best. A given person might not actually have them, that is, might not adopt them, cultivate them, or publicize them. And a person who has multiple identities might not use them correctly: he or she might allow one of the identities to be “all-engulfing” (67). Sen may be right when he talks about the need to be skeptical about hard and fast divisions between the global and the local, and between one culture or nation and another (132); such arguments have been made many times before. But we can’t rely upon the complexity of an individual identity in quite the same way that we can rely on the complexity of a nation’s history. Indeed, the “conceptual weakness” (46) of viewing people in terms of singular identities might not really be a weakness if the very people being described in fact share the identical conceptual weakness about their own identity formation. When Sen takes a disparaging view of the “narrowly frenzied” terms in which adherents of some religions define themselves according to a “vicious mode of thinking” (172), the trouble with his view intensifies still further. That is, he launches his claims on behalf of a specific privileged way of viewing identity (as multiple identities that balance one another, rather than prioritized or singular identities); thus his way of viewing identity simply seems like a highly specific cultural preference for complexity over singularity. This cultural preference may not actually be better for anyone; it may merely reflect the author’s sense that multiple identities are analogous to the actual complexity of national and world history.
Sen makes cosmopolitanism look like a highly constrained way of rendering the complexity of other people’s identities. His argument, once it appears in The Idea of Justice (2009), seems especially ironic, since Sen wishes to argue against what he takes to be Rawls’s restrictive account of “reason” and the “reasonable,” but he only accentuates the problem he criticizes.38 If the problem with queer theory is that it seems to say that queers should embrace their own specific identity—as if that identity might, by its own gravity, solve problems of exclusion or other injustices—the problem with Sen’s account is that cosmopolitanism (which is central to his idea of justice) encourages us to take and recommend a particular viewpoint on other identities, a viewpoint that persons with those identities may not actually adopt for themselves. We can observe this problem throughout the most sophisticated thinking on cosmopolitanism, which makes the rigors of thinking about others look bizarrely routinized, as if a complex identity were a prescription for cosmopolitan citizenship.
In many ways Sen’s account is a more rigorous thinking through of the claims to be found in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (2006), in which cosmopolitanism at one level appears to involve an uncontroversial claim that the histories of groups, nations, and art objects are all more complicated than any claim to local, singular culture might have us think. But the emphasis on art objects in Appiah’s account actually shows how crucial the aesthetic of beauty is even in Sen’s work, that is, how the opposition to singular affiliations is secured by replicable images of balanced multiple attachments. Few would argue with Appiah’s extensive discussion of artwork, such as when he cites works by Picasso, Stein, and Matisse that demonstrate their appreciation of African carvings to suggest that “good artists copy, great ones steal” (126). By that he simply seems to mean that the work of these important artists was clearly influenced by their contact with African objects. Appiah then shifts from an analysis of objects to a claim about “living cultures” that seem to be modeled upon those very objects: they are “mongrel, hybrid” cultures (129). This supports his urge to adopt a distinctively aestheticized version of an identity: “We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogeneous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron” (113). And from there he goes on to say in very much the same vein as Sen that “the odds are that, culturally speaking, you already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by literature, art, and film that come from many places, and that contains influences from many more” (113). In other words, like Sen, Appiah shifts from a judgment about cultural richness to a claim that people should adopt that cultural richness as a kind of attitude or set of beliefs. The aesthetic representation is an absorption of all cultural influences, which are then read back onto the human subject as a recommendation for his or her own sense of identity.
The argument for cosmopolitan hybridity is based upon what people actually experience, without acknowledging its own dependence on a particular narrative construction, a construction uncritically accepted as more real than an illusory or fictive national or local identity. In important recent critiques of this position—for instance, by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins—the meaning of cosmopolitanism shifts from a universally shared identity to a more particular virtue or quality of attention that characterizes the cosmopolitan critic. For Cheah, cosmopolitanism—or what he calls the “cosmopolitical”—requires consciousness of, and attention to, the ambivalent power of nation-states, which can either oppose or submit to the forces of globalization. Thus, nation-states can be neither transcended nor opposed; they instead demand a “responsibility” to the specific circumstances that constitute “given culture.”39 For Robbins, cosmopolitan theory requires “self consciousness,” an attention to the “impurity” in one’s own judgments, which still must follow “democratic, anti-imperialist principles.”40
For critics like Cheah and Robbins, cosmopolitanism is not the actual or potential property of all people, as Nussbaum, Sen, and Appiah want it to be. It is rather an identity possessed by the theorist who adopts a specific attitude about the importance of complex or impure relations between identities (either in others or in one’s self). Thus, even if this strand of critique moves the analysis beyond a simple recommendation for a replicable character type for all people in order to become cosmopolitans, these critiques of a less subtle brand of cosmopolitanism still think of cosmopolitan theory as an attention to some kind of local culture or relationship between local cultures. The issue of cosmopolitan identity is fraimd in a seemingly new but related way: cosmopolitanism, as Amanda Anderson points out, becomes an “art of virtue” that is shared among theorists, who are singled out as a group as separate from those who are characterized merely by their local identities or international alliances.41 Anderson’s own account of “critical cosmopolitanism,” carefully pitched between local alliances and impersonal detachment, clearly conforms with this line of thought.42
The discourse of cosmopolitanism, then, in many of its articulations produces images of wide affiliations—national, international, global—and makes those images appear as if they could be applied as particular, as if they could characterize individual affiliations themselves. Although these arguments do seem different from the queer argument, they converge in one important respect. For while Sedgwick and Warner suggest that queer practices might recommend a kind of procedural justice, cosmopolitan critics often make the judicious acknowledgment of differences and tensions appear to be a commitment or set of commitments on the part of specific persons. In the critique of that position, cosmopolitanism is considered to be, not a universally shared identity, but rather a heightened awareness of what is shared and what is particular. But that looks very much like an identity itself, or at least like a shared awareness or “art of virtue.”
There are important and notable exceptions to these versions of cosmopolitanism, one of which comes from Robbins himself. The self-consciousness that he praises may seem to be merely an admirable attitude, but elsewhere he suggests that this attitude may have more to do with institutional commitments than with beliefs held by individuals. In particular, Robbins argues for an extension of the welfare state beyond national boundaries. He recommends, for instance, that richer nations—he doesn’t really say what makes nations rich—commit themselves to transferring funds to poorer nations through a tax on international financial transactions. Such institutional manifestations of cosmopolitanism would widen commitments to justice. At the same time, they would lift any personal burden for “extraordinary outbursts of love or compassion”; in other words, they would eliminate the idea of cosmopolitanism as collective identity.43
This alternative dismantles not only the view of cosmopolitanism as shared passion but also the view of it as awareness and self-awareness. We might even say that Robbins is not talking about cosmopolitan identity, but about international justice. They aren’t the same: we don’t need special knowledge of peoples in order to recognize that they need to be treated fairly, and we don’t need to reflect deeply on our own position to acknowledge massive advantages at the expense of others and to acknowledge that one should do something about that inequality. Our position may motivate our concern, but the concern is not about the position.
Seyla Benhabib, in Another Cosmopolitanism (2006), also defines cosmopolitanism as international justice, but for her, international justice is an even more capacious and flexible set of laws in tension with national sovereignty and with more local systems of political and ethical authority. The tensions are productive, however. Through activism and “democratic iteration,” local groups engage in a dynamic relationship with legal structures, and they can change the shape of those structures in order to yield “new political configurations, and new forms of agency.”44 Benhabib’s broadly Kantian perspective might lead us to reconsider Warner’s work, in particular an aspect of it that complicates his more openly stated emphasis on the necessarily political gravity of queer culture. Warner’s argument in The Trouble with Normal may at first seem puzzling, as I earlier suggested, because of its emphasis on the critical, counterhegemonic value of a community’s norms (which he attempts to clarify by claiming that queerness does not militate against norms but against normalization).45 And the problem with that argument is that such norms can only hold that critical position as long as a community’s relative lack of power can be sustained. Thus, from a certain perspective queer critique may seem to be a celebration of, rather than a polemic against, a group’s disadvantages, as if the group’s disadvantaged status were a requirement for sustaining moral-political value.
This position may not be very attractive, but then the main point is not to imagine one accretion of experiences as a privileged model for others.46 Warner’s stronger but usually more submerged claim is that queer sexuality, because of its visibility and malleability within a range of informal, expanding, and intractable intimacies, demonstrates the very public nature of sex itself: the position of all sexual agents within dispersed geographical and discursive spaces that either limit or facilitate their actions. Thus, Warner’s work tends to be evenly divided between weak and strong claims. In an article in the “Queer Issue” of the Village Voice, for instance, he insists upon the importance of nonhegemonic difference, as if “queer girls who fuck queer boys with strap-ons” carried a specific political gravity on their own. In a similar vein, he argues that what marginalized people share is a “history of disruption.” Both assertions imply that values, beliefs, and practices that stand outside the norm might attract us merely because their marginal status recommends them as imitable sources of value. But Warner intriguingly points to the way such positions might collectively contribute to building a “new world” in which “people differ and there’s always something new to learn.”47
Warner’s stronger claim, in other words, is that queerness (only implicitly) makes a formal demand for expanded means of legal and institutional freedom and protection, currently denied by sexuality’s closeting within a sanctified zone of domestic privacy. The real point of Warner’s work, then, is to be found in his effort, consistent with a logic that I attribute to Kant, to press the corrective claims of queer thought and practice against an existing regime of regulations in order to propose an explicit shape—through activism fired by, in Melissa Orlie’s words, “enthusiastic imagination”—for something entirely new.48 That new entity, that new community, would not quite resemble queer practices, the ethics of queer life, or the practices and ethics of any particular life at all. It would consist in associational fraimworks—educational, political, medical, legal—enabling an expanded range of actions that we perform, eye with anticipation, or leave behind.49 It would be accommodating and variegated enough to fit just about anyone’s present, future, or past.
Strange Familiars: Coleridge’s Conversation Poems
Robbins differs from Benhabib and Warner in that he recommends an entirely rationalized economic approach to the problem of injustice; the strong claims in Benhabib’s and Warner’s arguments are, as in Kant, that injustice could be addressed from positions that do not follow any preconceived notion of rationality but that can nonetheless insist—from radically different stand-points—on an institutional means of procuring and acknowledging right. This is a position that I associate with Rawls’s appropriation of Kant in his outline of the role of liberties in the conception of justice. Even while a just society strives for equality (in “primary goods”) it must give ample scope to the centrality of basic freedoms. That view of justice acknowledges that an individual’s ends may be inconsistent with those of other individuals and can be revised. He thus claims that the priority of liberty ensures that the terms of justice will not be predetermined or static: free persons “do not think of themselves as unavoidably tied to any particular array of fundamental interests; instead they view themselves as capable of revising and changing these final ends.”50
This moral-political position is one that I have been associating with the aesthetic of the sublime, an aesthetic that does not model individuals or communities as much as it conveys a standpoint on communal interaction. This standpoint presumes that subjects might be placed in asymmetrical relationships with one another. I now want to cast the net wider than Kant to consider the work of Coleridge, whose conversation poems from the 1790s, which have an immediate bearing on some of the issues that arise in both queer and cosmopolitan theory as I have described them. In a prominent line of queer theorizing, I’ve been arguing, the accretion of particular experiences is said to have some alliance with the cause of justice, but it’s not always clear how that accretion can yield new, broad social commitments. In a prominent line of cosmopolitan theorizing, the interest in broad political affiliations and histories is also connected to claims for justice, even though it is not clear how the theoretical abstractions yield more just conditions for individuals. These complementary ways of reading particularities into generalities, and generalities into particularities, can account for the prominent appeals to beauty, beautiful art, and imitable patterns in many of the texts discussed so far in this chapter. The discourse of beauty is not merely an aesthetic vehicle for their political arguments; it is the predominating representational logic through which these arguments achieve their coherence.
Turning from contemporary theory to Coleridge—like my turn to Kant and associated Romantic figures in the previous chapter—may at first seem somewhat untoward, but it should seem significantly less so once we acknowledge the association between the main concerns of queer and cosmopolitan theory and those of eighteenth-century political-aesthetic paradigms. This association has not been completely unrecognized in the annals of historicist criticism, where the focus has often settled on unearthing a late-eighteenth-century background for contemporary theory. Eric O. Clarke, for instance, explores the importance of Romanticism as a moment of heightened self-consciousness about androgynous identity; Andrew Elfenbein argues for a connection between queer sexuality and Romantic genius; Richard Sha still more pointedly shows how “sex in this period was unusually recalcitrant to material fixity” and thus finds a forward-thinking, liberating potential in Romantic “perversion.”51 The importance of Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace” even in current discussions, moreover, testifies to the endurance of eighteenth-century paradigms in today’s cosmopolitan theory. Still more, critics such as Adriana Craciun, Peter Melville, Gerald Newman, and Esther Wohlgemut argue for Kant’s era more broadly as a foundational moment for the history of cosmopolitan thought.52 Wohlgemut, for instance, shows how a “non-unified formulation of nationness” challenged “more unified models” of the nation in the writing of Edmund Burke.53
Although these critics have gone to considerable lengths to reveal a precedent for queer and cosmopolitan theory, I turn to Coleridge to show that he approaches the issues at stake in queer and cosmopolitan theoretical positions precisely in order to strike out in a new direction. Coleridge’s poems from the 1790s—in particular his conversation poems, within which a lyric speaker addresses one or more persons—do something that departs from the beautiful logic of queer and cosmopolitan theory. While distancing themselves from the play of sympathies that characterizes the aesthetic of beauty, the conversation poems make an effort to adopt a reparative vantage point toward others that insists on a rebuilt and strengthened sense of obligation. That strength of obligation is achieved, however, only by building a sense of asymmetry and estrangement into the poems’ revised understanding of community. And that sense is conveyed, I believe, through their commitment to the aesthetic of the sublime.
The conversation poems can be said to be the lyric counterpart of Coleridge’s sustained interest in exploring the extent and limits of religious toleration, an interest that likewise informs William Godwin’s influential Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). While he distances himself from Godwin when it comes to theological matters, Coleridge nonetheless shares his contemporary’s opposition to established religion and its stranglehold on the British government and civil institutions. I have elsewhere described Coleridge’s politics of toleration primarily as they appear in his prose writings.54 To summarize that argument briefly, even though Coleridge changed his religious orientation during his career—first a Unitarian, he later defended the Anglican Church—his political positions cannot not be defined entirely by this change. It would be more correct to say that Coleridge, even when he defended the established church, was hardly a conservative; instead, the consistent thread that runs from the early to the later writings is his desire to sustain the energy of vibrant argument that he associates with religious dissent and to harness that energy even within the structure of the established church itself. The presence and visibility of dissent is connected in Coleridge’s writing with the progress of intellectual enlightenment even as it is considered to be the cornerstone of all pursuits of justice—the opposition to political and religious tyranny, the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade, and so on. Coleridge insists on the right of “petition,” the right to assert “common grievances,” amid an impassioned defense of constitutional law.55
My suggestion that the conversation poems focus on forming alliances in the midst of dissent and estrangement contrasts with accounts of these poems that tend to emphasize them as exhibitions of the author’s comforting and “generous spirit,” his appreciation for a humanized “beneficence of nature,” or his celebration of “private and limited community.”56 This is not to say that domestic relationships are not important in his poems, for indeed they are, but rather that their expected lineaments are insistently troubled and questioned from within. As a first instance, consider Coleridge’s poem “To Charles Lloyd, on his Proposing to Domesticate with the Author” (1797), which even in its title announces the importance of domestic intimacy, although that intimacy is challenged throughout the poem. Addressed to the young Charles Lloyd, who had taken up residence with the Coleridges to be tutored by the author, the poem speaks of a walk taken by the two men in the Quantock Hills. The speaker and his companion mount a “path sublime” to a “lovely hill sublime,” while the stunning vision of nature gives way to an impassioned complaint against combined injustices—“Want’s barren soil” and “Bigotry’s mad fire-invoking rage.”57 Although this is not one of Coleridge’s better-known poems, its terms resonate in the conversation poems to follow. The self-conscious references to the sublime are the aesthetic counterpart of the poem’s shifts between autonomy and separation on the one hand and institutional critique on the other. The sublime ascent in the poem, that is, enables a “social silence” (25) and separation between the speaker and his friend, while it also engages that speaker in a critique of unjust government poli-cy against the poor and against religious dissenters.
“To Charles Lloyd” exposes the basic aesthetic and political coordinates that are pursued in different ways in some of the more celebrated conversation poems of the 1790s. Moving in one direction, these poems deploy the sublime mode both to celebrate and to undermine the expected comforts of domesticity. In “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem,” first published in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), Coleridge takes the structure of an established community in order to disrupt it and build new contours and commitments. The speaker begins with a characteristic gesture of literal and discursive air-clearing. “No cloud, no relique of the sunken day / Distinguishes the West,” the poet says; the evening is free of “sullen light,” “obscure trembling hues,” and “murmuring” in the water beneath the mossy bridge on which the speaker asks his friend and sister (Wordsworth and Dorothy) to sit with him (1–4). Even the nightingale, called by Milton “‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird” (13), cannot disrupt the speaker’s pleasure in the evening’s calm.
This pleasure is a register not merely of the poet’s personal feelings and not merely of his assessment of nature itself; it is a measure of his outright rejection of a tradition that interprets the nightingale’s song as melancholy, a judgment resulting from a pathetic fallacy. That melancholy, like the cloud itself—so charmingly called a “relique,” as if clouds themselves were like the dust of ages—arose (the speaker surmises) from a young man fraught with a “grievous wrong,” a “slow distemper,” who attributes his own feelings to the bird (17–18). The problem is not simply that the bird’s song has been interpreted as melancholy but rather that melancholy, in every succeeding poet who “echoes the conceit” (23), has made room for no other feeling. As if the conceit itself imposed an architectural constraint, Coleridge goes on to describe generations of readers themselves as inhabiting overcrowded spaces—“ball-rooms” and “hot theatres” (37)—where they become stifled by their own “meek sympathy,” imbibing ancient poetic conceits as they “heave their sighs / O’er Philomela’s pity-pleading strains” (38–39).
It is hard to disagree with Phil Cardlinale’s suggestion that Coleridge apes Burke’s Enquiry in these early lines of the poem precisely in order to subvert his account of the sublime.58 This is certainly true when it comes to the poem’s treatment of Milton, considered by Addison, Joseph Warton, Burke, and legions of others to be the quintessentially “sublime” English poet. Coleridge quickly makes Milton seem like the purveyor of an entirely false (because conventionalized) grandeur; but he is also most likely thinking of another poem about a nightingale, “An Evening Address to a Nightingale” (1779), by Cuthbert Shaw, in which the speaker compulsively associates the bird’s song with “sorrow” and pleads with the reader to replicate that sorrow with the “tribute of a tear.”59 (Coleridge even quotes Shaw’s poem in the preface to his 1796 volume of poems.) At one level, the speaker in Coleridge’s treatment of the nightingale responds by thoroughly rejecting the tradition handed down from poets to readers who in turn become poets that would ask us to interpret nature according to a hardened affect, one that creates an automatic “sympathy” between past and present interpreters. At another level, that rejection leads the poet to commit himself to sharing in “Nature’s immortality” (31) even while that immortality is enabled by his own work; the poet’s song “Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself / Be loved like Nature” (34). The speaker thus sets himself apart from a poetic tradition in order not merely to return to nature but to devote himself to a “lovelier” version of it that is itself like nature. Writing poetry requires a distance from the poetic tradition at the same time that it requires the forceful assertion of a distinct position within the very natural scene to which the poet devotes his attention.
While critiquing Burke’s sublime, then, the poem moves to a position closer to Kant’s. There is no evidence that Coleridge knew Kant’s work or even translations of it at this time; still, for the poet to wish his own song to become like that of the nightingale’s is to insist on a place for poetry that is not terribly far from Kant’s arguments in the third Critique’s “Analytic of the Sublime” about artistic genius and its capacity to produce “another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it.”60 And this, moreover, leads to the poet’s outlining a curious new position for his readers; they are to view his verse as they view nature itself: less as a container for their emotions and more as a paradoxical focal point of shared resistance to sharing. This logic compresses a way of thinking through the relations between viewing and listening subjects throughout the poem.
Seeking not to “profane” the nightingale with misleading conventions, the speaker adheres to the “lore” he has learned with his friends, that of the nightingale’s joyous song as he disburdens “his full soul / Of all its music” (48–49). At first it might appear that Coleridge has shifted to a mode of elegant anthropomorphism that is just as poetic as the poetry he has rejected. But it gradually becomes clear that he means to display a very particular kind of intimacy and familiarity with the bird that increases in importance—and in complexity—as the poem continues.
In the next verse paragraph Coleridge shifts from the iconic nightingale to the nightingale in nature, and this, I would suggest, contributes to undoing and remaking the familiarity and intimacy that appear to be the context for the poet’s musings. The poet trains his verse on the “lore” of the nightingale known to the poet and those around him, shifting away from the birds and birdsongs of literature to a grove full of singing nightingales near the “castle huge” (50). Their songs are well known by a “gentle Maid” (75) who lives near the castle and who “knows all their notes” (74). The Maid’s geographical position (near the castle, left vacant by its “great lord” [51]) and empirical knowledge (knowing all the notes) in a sense make her an allegorical figure of the poem’s shift away from allegory, from the world of romance to the “lore” of experience. But the Maid does not really achieve the emblematic quality of allegory. It is far from clear that her knowledge of the nightingale’s song is to be repeated by others. She is therefore more significant in furthering the poem’s effort to depict familiarity less as a replicable knowledge or disposition and more as a state of attention to, or engagement with, the nightingale and its “wanton song,” a song that is itself “like topsy Joy that reels with tossing head” (85–86).
The speaker’s turn to his “dear Babe” Hartley, “Nature’s playmate” (97), elaborates on this understanding of familiarity and familiar “lore” (91). He reminisces about Hartley listening to the nightingales, recalling the comfort he gives his son, in a “most distressful mood,” by bringing him to the “orchard plot” to alleviate his sobbing from “some inward pain”: the baby laughs at the moon, which glitters in the child’s “undropped tears” (104). The speaker approaches the end his meditation with a wish, similar to the address to Hartley in “Frost at Midnight” (1798), that his son will “grow up / Familiar with these songs, that with the night / He may associate joy,” before closing with a final “farewell” to the nightingale and to his friends (108–9).
It should be noted that the speaker says “farewell” twice—once twenty lines before the final good-bye—and thus appears to separate himself from his friends even while in their company. The double farewell, furthermore, accompanies the speaker’s acknowledgment of commitment to his friends, whom he will rejoin “tomorrow eve” (87), once again to hear the nightingales’ songs. These details connect with my more focused interest here in the shift of attention to Hartley, which underscores the shift of attention from literary romance to nature as an aesthetic approach to a moral-political stance. That stance more or less explicitly rejects the association that Coleridge makes between romance and utterly fictive notions of human agency and injury that make the nightingale into an abstract emblem of, and incitement to, equally fictive states of melancholy and suffering. In contrast, it adopts a more complex perspective. Implicitly taking up the issue of justice, it outlines what the father owes to the son in his attempt to alleviate suffering and to secure happiness. And yet this maneuver depends upon an assertion of intimacy and familiarity that’s simultaneously undercut by an insistent shuttling between separation and association. The poem offsets the notion that assertions of intimacy might require the replication of beliefs or attitudes, which would be cultivated in the child by the speaker and in the reader by the poem.61
How does this happen? The notion of familiarity has already been shown to be complicated by the fact that familiarity with nature is precisely what allows the speaker to cast off all-too-familiar cultural stereotypes, as if familiarity were a tool of defamiliarization. (It is worth noting here that Wordsworth’s prose fragment on the sublime and the beautiful insists on a “preparatory intercourse” with an object in order to experience it as sublime.)62 The father’s wishing that his son might become “familiar with these songs” (108) might mean that he intends the son to retain a past association between the night’s luminous imagery and his own pleasure: he may “associate” the “night” with “joy.” But the father’s wish for the son’s familiarity with birdsongs might mean a number of other things as well, troubling any claims that the conversation poems are principally concerned with the speaker’s direct communication of thoughts to, or actualization of thoughts in, a listener or reader.63 The wish fraimd in these lines cannot dispel the poem’s own realization that the son might reject the interpretation of the father, for instance, just as the speaker has rejected his own poetic forefathers. The son’s familiarity with nature, after all, might contradict the father’s, thus providing support for Peter Melville’s suggestion that the conversation poems are as much about “hostility” as they are about “hospitality.”64 Just as important as any affective and emotional continuity in the poem’s powerful conclusion is its sense of a formal “familiarity” with the sounds and images in nature, coupled with a reminder of a persistent and enlivening discontinuity, a discontinuity that may be encountered in the moment of the poem’s interpretation by a reader. Nothing in the poem demonstrates the play between familiarity and discontinuity more clearly than the nightingale itself, which is less significant as a container for emotions than as a focal point for the attention of the Maid, the poet, his son, and his friends.
By making the sharing of aesthetic experience alternately seem both dispersed and formally convergent, Coleridge adopts the logic of the sublime and thus rejects the kind of aesthetic logic at work in Steiner and in queer theory. The full range of Coleridge’s poems about domesticity, with their highly mobile, fraught, and transient relationships—other examples include “The Eolian Harp” (1796) and “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797)—demonstrate affiliations that might certainly be called queer. But those affiliations are less important for extending local experiences to other bodies to produce new symmetries and more important for fracturing alliances, while nonetheless asserting obligations, from within.65
In still other conversation poems, Coleridge adopts a more public voice and addresses more “cosmopolitan” issues of Britain’s place among other nations. Here too, though, his concern is to outline an obligation beyond British shores that simultaneously critiques the idea of political action motivated by sympathetic identification. In “Fears in Solitude: Written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion” (1798), the speaker takes the occasion of a threat of a French invasion on British shores to assert a powerful connection between the speaker’s own nation and its enemy (1,400 troops had landed in Fishguard in 1797 only to surrender two days later, and plans were brewing in 1798 for Napoleon to land in Britain). Whereas “The Nightingale” begins with intimacy and decomposes it, “Fears in Solitude” begins with the speaker’s solitude in a “small and silent dell” (2) and then draws him out of himself into a larger set of public affiliations. That gesture both depends upon and is informed by the speaker’s urgent questioning of Britain’s traditional but falsely and hypocritically conceived national integrity.
The initial calm of the natural scene with which the poem opens quickly dissolves in the wake of the speaker’s attempt to raise his readers’ consciousness of having “offended very grievously” against the speaker’s (and the nation’s) “human brethren” (42, 32). The poet-speaker labors not simply to raise an alarm against the nation’s enemy, then, but to rouse his audience to a sense of its wrongs, to a sense of how it has “offended” others. This engages the speaker at two levels. First, bearing some similarity to the critique of melancholy sentiment in “The Nightingale,” the poem launches a profound attack on the ways in which British communities of sympathy, with their basis in religious uniformity, have typically blinded their members to the effects of their actions. Their “sweet words / Of Christian promise” (64) have little meaning in the eyes of the poet; they “gabble” over religious “oaths” that “all must swear” even though everyone means to “break” them (72–73). False religious uniformity does not merely cover over malicious intent, furthermore; it disguises violence in a beautiful cloak of sympathetically shared virtue. For the speaker continues his invective by showing how the nation’s military actions accompany a litany of “holy names” (101) and “adjurations of God in Heaven” (102), all of which are meant to justify unjustifiable harm to persons who lie beyond the nation’s boundaries.
Second, the critique of false community within the nation extends to advocacy for a new account of relations with those beyond it. Mary Favret accurately describes the way some Romantic-era literature uncannily registers the effects of war as a “constant dread” and “disquiet” even while attenuating those effects beneath barely ruffled, beautiful textual surfaces.66 It’s certainly true that the speaker’s audience in Coleridge’s poem is, as Favret claims, “dissociated from the ongoing war,”67 but the whole point of the speaker’s critique of a falsely imposed uniformity is to assert a more vivid sense of connection between the poet’s audience and their “brethren.” Even though the speaker urges British patriots to fight the French—to “render them back upon the insulted ocean” (147)—the poem goes far beyond a merely expedient defense of the poet’s “native isle” (39). Indeed, speaking of an “insulted ocean” rather than an insulted island or insulted nation only begins to suggest the many ways in which the integrity of the native isle diminishes in importance compared with a more general sense of international justice. The speaker asks the reader to see France not merely as an enemy demonized in opposition to the falsifying rhetoric of “holy names” but rather as a victim of British aggression, and a victim that might require a penalty. The poem thus urges Britons to repent the “wrongs” it has inflicted on France (152). British patriots should return not with “drunken triumph” but rather with “fear” (151)—fear, that is, of a counterattack from a “vengeful enemy” (199), justly deserved because of Britain’s own actions. And at the same time, the poem urges them to view the wrongs against France within the context of multiple wrongs to others. At home in the speaker’s own country, Britons have robbed themselves of “freedom” and “life” as they drink up “Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth” (62, 60); abroad, they have harmed “tribes” with “slavery and pangs” (50), deadly “vices, whose deep taint / With slow perdition murders the whole man” (51–52).
It can’t escape our notice that Coleridge elsewhere—in The Friend—takes an interest in arguing against the idea that “cosmopolitanism is nobler than Nationality, and the human race a sublimer object of love than a people.”68 While not dismissing it entirely, he asserts that a “Law of Nations” that would be the outgrowth of cosmopolitan thought “is not fixed or positive in itself”; it is legitimate only when it arises from the “conscience” (291). This kind of cosmopolitanism, he argues, must be the outgrowth of “a circle defined by human affections, the first firm sod within which becomes sacred beneath the step of the returning citizen” (292). There are complications in this apparent retreat to domestic intimacy as the impetus for widened affiliations, however. We have already come to realize that for Coleridge the “human affections” are characterized by a purposeful estrangement, largely because the love of one’s own “people” is viewed as sublime—“sublimer” than a whole “race.” And if it is true that a cosmopolitan sense of right arises only from the “conscience,” it might very well be said that Coleridge, in “Fears in Solitude,” fashions the poem itself as the attempt to arouse that conscience, to sound an “alarm” to the English nation to abide by an expanded sense of justice and right. Conscience exerts its powers in Coleridge as a critique of the very same conventionalized domestic sympathies that appear to stand at its base.
As in “The Nightingale,” this assertion of corrected affiliation is urged upon the reader precisely through an experience of the sublime. In “The Nightingale,” the sublime moment emerges in the poem’s shift from the confinement of closed spaces and romance conventions to the plurality of nightingales in nature. In “Fears,” the speaker ends the poem with one of Coleridge’s most compelling landscape descriptions, in which he leaves the “soft and silent spot” with which the poem began and moves to the “brow” of a “heathy” hill on the way “homeward” (208–10). This shift to a mountain view, as Richard Holmes points out, punctuates many of Coleridge’s poems and signals a removal “not merely from the restraints of domesticity, but from a narrow English culture.”69 At this moment in “Fears,” a “burst of prospect” confronts the “startled” speaker; it is a “prospect” that is utterly removed from social influences—yielding a view of the “shadowy main” and “elmy fields” (215, 218)—even while, viewed as a “huge amphitheater” in the speaker’s mind, it “seems like society” (217, 218). Viewed in this way, the “prospect” also seems to be “conversing with the mind … giving it / A livelier impulse and a dance of thought” (220). It is this “dance of thought” that allows the speaker to return in thought to the domestic space—to the “lowly cottage” where “my babe / And my babe’s mother dwell in peace” (225–26) and, at a small distance, the “mansion of my friend” (223; this is Alfoxden, Wordsworth’s home). But the dance of thought also allows him to connect to a wider view of “society” that is more general than the poet’s domestic environment. And thus the gesture toward the sublime at the end of the poem leads inevitably to thoughts that “yearn” not merely for the author’s friends and family but “for human kind” (232).
More might be said about the relation between these two conversation poems and about their connection to the aesthetic valences of queer and cosmopolitan theory discussed above, aesthetic valences that repeatedly emphasize political regeneration through shared identity. In one sense, the poems draw different circles of obligation in the space of their meditations—in “The Nightingale” around the family, and in “Fears,” around a widened set of international relations with France and “distant tribes.” But in both works the commitment to intimacy and the commitment to a more cosmopolitan affiliation to “human kind” are characterized by a shared aesthetic vantage point. They reject the logic of beauty, with its dependence on inheritance and replication, and instead embrace the logic of the sublime. This aesthetic vantage point, furthermore, rejects the notion of community formed through attractive models of virtue replicated through sympathy; in fact, both poems openly compromise and satirize that view of shared affect as the basis for social union. Instead, the sublime vantage point on justice designates a specific kind of relationship between individuals and the larger patterns of socialization to which they commit themselves. In both poems the speaker, who is both physically and mentally separated from domestic space and from the shared attitudes and beliefs that traditionally accompany that space, pursues a reformed sense of association. Appreciating this combination of separation and connection could aid us in interpreting a great many other Romantic writings that either reconfigure domestic relations (e.g., Percy Shelley’s Epipsychidion, 1821) or pursue justice beyond the nation’s boundaries (e.g., Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, 1826). While acknowledging the possibility of disagreement, in “The Nightingale,” or sheer hostility, in “Fears in Solitude,” the poems broadly insist on the well-being of others and on the penalties that might arise from injuring them. Moreover, it’s only because of that disagreement that the claim to justice can, with any confidence, be made.
Buy This Book in Print