Perception breaking in upon sense

Dog before the World, by Franz Marc

In ‘Snake’ D H Lawrence wrote:
‘The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But I must confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough.
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
For he seemed to me again like a king, …

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.’

Many philosophers are ranged against Lawrence‘s perception of the snake. Wittgenstein repeatedly insisted that what lies outside our language is inaccessible. He wrote: ‘If I were to talk to myself out loud in a language not understood by those present my thoughts would be hidden from them.’ And:
‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’

In ‘What is it like to be a Bat’ Nagel insists that the subjectivity of others is beyond anything we can experience or imagine.

Rorty, who is well known for his rejection of the claim that language holds a mirror up to nature, believes that ‘The fundamental flaw in previous attempts to discuss knowing has been the confusion of facts with objects’. He quotes with approval Wittgenstein’s claim that the world we know is a totality of facts, not of things. Facts refer ‘to the language we speak now’ as they rely upon society’s necessarily ethnocentric linguistic usage.

Lawrence clearly believed in ‘the language we speak now’, but he insisted that, apart from facts, we also know things; such as that particular snake – that mute snake. Alongside human sense there is the perception of mute spectacles.

The subjectivity that maintains facts looks down on mute things with condescension because they are unable to respond in its discursive economy. But this interpretation of muteness; e.g. ‘It’s a dog’s life’, overlooks the possibility that mute things may be distressed when they find that we do not respond to the relations between things they know. Everything in the natural world belongs to the circulation of mute spectacles. Just as in the discursive economy words disclose an association between facts, each spectacle discloses some resemblance within the circulation of spectacles. Every spectacle is a subjective event set apart from the whole, but it respects and requires the circulation to which it belongs. There is a beatific grace, and liberty, to this natural circulation that is often missing in the discursive economy.

Lawrence believed that the Etruscan world was alive:

The whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world.

Mute life is not simply a depravation of the social signs that make interpretation possible. It is not an abject life, but a life devoid of shame, a prelapsarian circulation of subjects who are always spectacles. If human beings wish to belong to the natural world then their perception of others must not be eclipsed by the subjectivity and prejudice of sense and their figurative speech must constitute the mute voice of a spectacle.

Blood Consciousness

D H Lawrence stayed in Taos, New Mexico, in 1922.

Lawrence uses the terms ‘mental consciousness’ and ‘blood consciousness’ to distinguish between ‘sense’ and ‘perception’. What Lawrence most valued in Hardy was his understanding of the way in which his character’s actions were shaped by their blood consciousness. For Lawrence, Hardy was always:
Setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature, setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness, within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself, surpassing human consciousness.

Lawrence’s St. Mawr describes how the failure of Mrs Witt and her son Rico to recognise unfathomed nature exposes them to disruption. Mrs. Witt is only at home in the conscious world, but she has intimations of another aspect of the world:
She had lived so long, and so completely, in the visible, audible world. She would not easily admit that other, inaudible. She always wanted to jeer, as she approached the brink of it.

She had made the society columns, but this it brings little satisfaction. Indeed it becomes the basis of a self-indictment:
I begin to wonder if I've ever been anywhere. I seem to have been a daily sequence of newspaper remarks. I'm sure I never really conceived you and gave you birth. It all happened in newspaper notices.

Mrs. Witt can find no alternative to directing herself in a show. She conceives of a tableau vivant in which she and her son-in-law Rico go riding.

‘St. Mawr’, the horse, is Lawrence's idea of a spectacle.

For Lawrence, St. Mawr has been made nervous by the human power-urge:
the brilliant skin of the horse crinkle[d] a little in apprehensive anticipation, like the shadow of the descending hand on a bright red-gold liquid. But then the animal relaxed again… he was of such a lovely red gold collar, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive.

The conflict between Rico and St. Mawr makes the central event of the novel inevitable. St. Mawr is panicked by a dead snake, this degenerate perception, compounded by Rico's fetish for the mastery of nature, causes St. Mawr to fall back on Rico.

The outcome of this ‘accident’ is the realisation by Mrs. Witt’s daughter, Lou, that she must quit the ‘mental life’. Lou puts down roots in the New Mexico landscape:
There's something else for me mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. … And I am here, right deep in America, where there's a wild spirit wants me, a wild spirit more than men. And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves is for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am, with the deep nature aware deep down of my sex. It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.
She becomes able:
To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion...

This blood consciousness, for Lawrence, meant rootedness in the natural world.

The Industrial Landscape

Leeds by Turner

The industrial landscape, which D H Lawrence describes in The Odour of Chrysanthemums, is an engineered environment against which people struggle. Those who populate the scene, like the woman with the basket in the introduction, are trapped. They adjust to their mechanical environment by efforts of will.

In struggling to survive in an alien world Elizabeth Bates, the wife and mother, has learnt discipline. She knows what must be done, if she and her family are not to succumb to poverty and disgrace. But alongside her discipline there remains a person of feeling, someone who is touched by the grace offered by the chrysanthemums.

Lawrence uses the occasion of the meeting of father and daughter to describe Walter, the woman’s husband, as a drinker, and to show the stress between Elizabeth and her father. Walter conforms mechanically to the discipline that is associated with life as a struggle, but he is aware of the alienation inherent in this discipline. He attempts to escape his alienation by drinking.

Lawrence describes the inside the Bates’ house in terms of ‘life’; this contrasts with the dreary, forsaken and stagnant ‘death’ outside. Blood relations are living fragments set apart from this mechanical world. In this respect Lawrence’s point of view is close to that of Marx; who believed that mechanical production denies man his 'species being'. But ‘death’ is ineluctable. The sullenness shown by the child, his conformity with a discipline he has no sympathy with, is the same as his father’s.

However Elizabeth interprets this hopeless resentment as a self-centred indulgence. She takes alienation for granted and struggles to live on its terms. She is persuaded that there is no place of grace. She represents herself as someone who is able to meet the challenge of mechanical work. She is therefore proud and judgmental, rather than sympathetic. She has taken on the perspective of those whose mechanical strategies produced the industrial revolution.

Elizabeth fears her husband may be injured in the mine, but is angry with him because she finds him inadequate to what she believes is required. She tells herself that she was a fool to marry him.

One evening Elizabeth is concerned because Walter is late back from work. She believes her husband is drinking. If it is also the fear for her husband as a person then she does not acknowledge this. From her adopted perspective such knowledge is unthinkable. As a neighbour sets out to search for Walter in the public houses Elizabeth’s blood responds to a possibility she dare not represent.

The miners who bring home Walter’s body distance themselves from his death by means of a technical discussion of the accident at the mine. It is as if emotions are evil, and mechanical explanations good.

Later Elizabeth becomes aware an unmistakable feeling of dread. But her immediate response is practical; the turn of events remains unacknowledged.

Elizabeth finds she is able to respond with feeling, in a natural way, to Walter’s body. It has the power of an interdisciplinary spectacle. To have known her husband only as a function is revealed as a dream in which she has been living. Lawrence’s story shows how Elizabeth, who has adopted the dominant culture as her sole perspective, is shamed by her husband’s death. But what, as the pregnant mother of two children, is the alternative to the dream?

The culture that Lawrence exhibits and opposes is the mechanical reason of the enlightenment. Lawrence suggests that while Walter conforms in his practice to this culture because he has no choice, he does not believe in it as his wife does. This causes the estrangement between man and wife that Lawrence may have found between his own parents.

The Odour of Chrysanthemums illustrates Lawrence’s belief that ‘we must either love or rule’. This story shows how the need to rule was an imperative early in the twentieth century. But this social urge to power conceals people from one another. Only the death of her husband can reveal him to his wife.

Turner and Ruskin

Turner Richmond, Yorkshire

Turner’s painting of Richmond, Yorkshire is quite different from anything a more conventional artist would have seen had they stood alongside Turner as he looked out over that landscape. Yet I am certain it is true of that Yorkshire landscape.

Turner’s champion, John Ruskin, wrote:
I am in the habit of looking to the Yorkshire drawings as indicating one of the culminating points in Turner’s career. … [they] have the most heart in them, the most affectionate, simple, unwearied, serious finishing of truth. There is in them little seeking after effect, but a strong love of place …

Ruskin’s identification of love and truth makes no objective sense. So in order to grasp Ruskin’s evaluation of the picture I need to emancipate myself from conventional representations. However I also need to avoid going to the opposite extreme by insisting that some knowledge of the history of art is required to appreciate the picture. Ruskin was right to insist that the painting has to be understood in its relationship to the landscape around Richmond. The picture cannot be understood either as a particular configuration of facts, or, by simply looking at other pictures and their place in the history of art.

For Ruskin the picture is true just so far as it is an event that arises from Turner’s affection for the Yorkshire landscape. The picture is true insofar as it is an index of the power of that landscape. And the relationship between the picture and the landscape is mediated by Turner’s strong love of place.

Ruskin championed Turner because he saw that Turner’s mind neither imposed itself on his subjects, nor was it a tabula rasa. Turner gave a voice to the landscape; he searched out an intonation and the place was changed by it. This demonstrates Ruskin’s religious sense of ‘mind’; he wrote: ‘Minds are not such pure Venice glass. The truth of nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness, as it is to him who does, infinity.’ (MP, 1, 2, 2)

For Ruskin, particular truths are concealed by literal representations of nature. He wrote:
‘The deceptive imitation of nature is inconsistent with real truth; for the very means by which the old masters attained the apparent accuracy of tone which is so satisfying to the eye, compelled them to give up all idea of real relations of retirement, and to represent a few successive and marked stages of distance, like the scenes of a theatre, instead of the imperceptible, multitudinous, symmetrical retirement of nature …’

‘Turner starts from the beginning with a totally different principle. He boldly takes pure white for his highest light, and lampblack for his deepest shade; and between these he makes every degree of shade indicative of a separate degree of distance … .’ (MP, 1,2,1)

For Ruskin the truth of nature corresponded to the truth he found in Turner’s landscapes. The truth of Gothic Architecture corresponded to the truth he found in the bible. He read the cathedral porches at Amiens with the same affection as he read the bible. If we are to grasp Ruskin idea of truth we need to discover how Ruskin read nature, Turner, Gothic architecture and the bible.

In Of Kings’ Treasuries Ruskin gives a lesson on how to read. He takes as his text a passage from Milton’s Lycidas. Milton speaks of:

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
The golden opes, the iron shuts amain, [i.e.with conclusive force]

Ruskin comments: Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound….

For Ruskin, as for Plato, the key of heaven is beauty, which has the power to disclose the architecture of the good. Truth is not an objectivity that holds its subject spellbound, but something whose power signifies a sovereign subjectivity. Ruskin insisted on the power of things. He wrote:
The word ‘Blue,’ say certain philosophers, means the sensation of colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at a bell gentian. …Now be it observed that the word ‘Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and the power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, … (MP, 3, 4, 12)

For Ruskin the power of the beloved awakes the moral being of the lover to the light of God. The beloved is a microcosm that reflects the light of the macrocosm. The key of the prison shuts out the light by insisting upon an image whose only ground is the will of a separate subject to discipline others. The prison key effaces the image of God with the image produced by the self.

This contrasts with the golden key in which the self is effaced. Ruskin wrote:
And then I learned the real meaning of the word Beautiful. With all that I had seen before – there had become mingled the associations of humanity – the exertion of human power – the action of human mind. The image of self had not been effaced in that of God. … It was then only that I understood to become nothing might be to become more than Man; …

Ruskin had faith in the natural order of God. In this order nothing is separate:
everything is part of an organic whole:
the appearance of separation or isolation in anything, and of self-dependence, is an appearance of imperfection; …

The way in which everything relies upon the power of everything else to develop its perspective is the basis of an inter-subjectivity which is essential to the development of the soul. No subject that participates in this inter-subjectivity is sufficiently strong to know others without betraying what Ruskin called the ‘pathetic fallacy’. He wrote:

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away … by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. … Now so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces. … there being a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes just and true.

Those events which have the power to disturb us by disclosing a light we have not seen before are the spectacles identified by Plato. The spectacle gives rise to feelings for ‘a light that never was on sea or land’. For Plato, and I think for Ruskin, the practical imperative of the human mind, or the body’s desire for pleasure, can blind it to spectacles that disclose the truth. Only the enlightened can adopt the contemplative gaze of theoria, a gaze which discloses a beauty independent of its perceiver, and which in turn gestures toward the glory of God. We may read either to establish the prison house, or with an appetite for those spectacles that in disturbing us emancipate us from subjective prejudice and constitute steps in the life of the soul.

Truth can either by identified with those determinations and judgements grounded in the intentions of the speaker, or with those spectacles that reveal other intentions. For Ruskin it is impossible to determine the literal truth of Shakespeare, or of Dante, but we perceive the truth of their intention with feelings of affection. We need to bring to their texts a feeling for what is meaningful and to find in them a way of carrying that meaning forward.

Wordsworth’s Spectacular Nature

Buttermere Lake by Turner

Geoffery Hartman takes for granted the subject-predicate model of the subject set out in psychoanalytic theory. Hartman brings to his interpretation of Wordsworth’s poems Jung’s schema of the process of self-discovery and individuation. He takes as his starting point Wordsworth’s ‘trouble’. From there the relation between the poet and nature is one in which the poet manages a wound. The poems become a ‘dressing’; i.e. the means of closing a wound. In discussing ‘The Ruined Cottage’ Hartman claims it shows that Wordsworth realised that the imagination must separate from nature in order to overcome the danger of being assimilated into a preconscious wholeness.

For Hartman Wordsworth’s restored imagination is based not on the recognition of spectacles, but on his private subjectivity. He writes: The horizontal extension of the scope of the poet’s subject matter is only an aspect of something more important: its vertical extension, its inward resonance.

But Wordsworth wrote, in The Pedlar:
for in all things
He saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

He was acknowledging the joyful circulation of spectacles. He celebrated our participation in ‘The One Life’:

Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.
(Expostulation and Reply, 1798)

In ‘A Slumber …’ Wordsworth does refer to something that endures through change: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

But what endures is not the poet, but nature; i.e. the circulation of spectacles. These spectacles are not simple, they answer to one another so as to suggest ‘they are features of the same animated face.’ This face is not an object for the inquiring gaze; it is only disclosed by increments – particular spectacles. It is the event of disclosure that we feel.

As William James pointed out: … things are discreet and discontinuous… But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie. Our sense of place is neither of silence, nor of thunder, but of thunder breaking in upon silence. It is neither diversity nor identity, but an enduring stream. A sense-of-place is above all a sense of time, not as displacement, but as endurance. An enduring place has the qualities of a landscape; it has neither the diversity of the materialists, nor the absolute identity of the idealists.

Wordsworth could not have been clearer: the poet is not only a subjective trouble sheltering from the world, but also a spectacle within a changing landscape, or face, comprised of an enduring circulation of spectacles.

Nature is spectacular

Halcyon Daze

A text does not necessarily exclude nature; it only excludes it when it is read as if its literal sense mirrors nature. A spectacular text answers to natural spectacles.

A spectacle is a subject that resembles the network of spectacles from which it emerges. Spectacles resemble their tradition.

Heraclitus wrote that: Nature loves to hide: the event that discovers a resemblance subsequently becomes a resemblance that is discovered.

Literal speech objectifies nature as sense and does not effect a turn in the perception of resemblances. The subject that knows literal sense is immutable and is considered to transcend what it knows. The sublation of events by subjects who make literal sense out of nature excludes them from participation in natural resemblances.

Plato described the mimesis that gives rise to the circulation of resemblances; however he understood both as the resemblance of things to a disembodied and generic form that transcends circulation, and as the resemblance of particular things. This led him to believe in an ideal original of which actual things are poor copies.
Plato’s belief that the real transcends circulation and is immutable is an example of the way in which subjects are unaware of some of the things they take for granted and are unable to put them into question. Plato lived at a time when it was assumed that to be unaware is to have forgotten. We live in a time when to be unaware is to have failed to realise what is going on. Now the assumption that truth is timeless is not taken for granted.
Plato’s perspective is an example of the way in which what are always perishable resemblances become bounded subjects who are unable to incorporate some spectacles. The bounded subject needs shelter and separates itself from some parts of the circulation of nature. Human beings become somewhat immutable subjects by objectifying natural spectacles. The literal sense of words allows human beings to become different from nature. Circulation is a drama that arises from a combination of resemblance and difference.