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The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects by Charles AltieriReview by: David MikicsComparative Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 178-181Published by: Duke University Presson behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122320.

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BOOK REVIEWS

THE

PARTICULARS

F

RAPTURE:

AN AESTHETICSOF THE

AFFECTS.

By

Charles Altieri. Ithaca: Cornell

University

Press,

2003.

x,

299

p.

My

first

impulse

after

finishing

The

Particulars

of

Rapture,

Charles Altieri's brilliant ex-

amination of affect in

literature

and

visual

art,

was

to

try

out Altieri's

theory

on one of

my

favorite recent

pop songs,

Daniel

Johnston's

Speeding

Motorcycle

(perhaps

most fa-

miliar

in

the version

by

Yo la

Tengo):

Speeding

motorcycle

Of my heart

Speeding motorcycle

Let's be smart

Because we don't

want

a

wreck

We can do a lot of tricks

We

don't

have to

Break our necks

To

get

our kicks

Beginning

with the ambition for a

prudent

managing

of

affect,

Johnston's

song

ends

up by driving

in

the

opposite

direction,

toward

a certain embrace of recklessness. Since

my

heart,

like a

speeding

motorcycle,

is

always hanging

me,

then there's

nothing

you

can do -and so, the

speaker

concludes with considered (and still

appealingly

tentative)

glee:

speeding motorcycle,

let'sjust

go.

The

thoughtful

surrender to affect as

something

that has

its

own kind of

intelligence

is

also

part

of the

plot

of The Particulars

of Rapture.

Our emotions inflect and drive

us,

so

that,

as

in

Johnston's

song,

whether we decide to

present

ourselves as

careful or

reckless,

such a decision about the

self-image

we offer to the social world

cannot

keep up

with

the

exhilarating,

peculiar

turns of

affect.

Why

is affect so hard to describe

in

terms of our

presentations

of

self,

and

yet

so

essential to

what,

and

how,

we

mean?

To address this

question

Altieri has to clear

his

way through

a vast recent

landscape

of

ethical,

and

frequentlyjust plain moralizing,

theory.

He

explains

that

much of this recent

theory

ties emotion

and affect to

identifications,

to the

ways

in which we claim a

particu-

lar

self-image,

and with it a rationale for our actions. In this

respect, contemporary

cognitivism

and

philosophy

of ethics are

quite

convincingly

linked to cultural studies

in

Altieri's

presentation,

since cultural studies also

assumes that all our

experience

occurs

on the level of

identification

(that

is,

identification with familiar social roles

and

preju-

dices).

These

days,

cultural studies' claims

concerning

the

supposed typicality

of our

responses

and identifications seem

just

as threadbare as

philosophy's

current effort to

prove

that the life of our

feelings

is

fully

responsive

to,

or even a

form

of,

rational

judg-

ment. One of Altieri's

great strengths

is

that,

instead

of

merely administering

repeated

kicks to these

not-quite-dead disciplinary

horses,

he looks

beyond polemic

to outline a

vigorous theory

of his own.

While

most current

theory

relies on an

assumption

of

in-

stantly recognizable

social

roles,

Altieri asks

whether

such roles are in themselves defini-

tive

(how

such roles come to be

played

and

why they

even exist are

questions

for another

book).

Most of the

time,

Altieri

writes,

we are free to cultivate various identities with-

out

worrying very

much about how

they

can be

integrated...

In such cases we are not

establishing

ultimate

values..,.

most of our actual investments

in identities do not form

definable units within

specifiable

structures

(140-41).

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BOOK

REVIEWS/179

In Altieri's

view,

many

current

aesthetic

theorists,

whether

they

come

from

cultural

studies,

cognitive psychology,

or

philosophy

of

ethics,

err

by

focusing

on a

social or

ethi-

cal context rather than the

particular

effect of the text: the

way

it turns our

attention,

moves

us,

and

makes us

move. Unlike

Deleuze,

whose

work on

emotion Altieri

praises

with

(one

senses)

a

profoundly

frustrated

but

nevertheless

hyperbolic

enthusiasm,

he

wants to

show

how

openness

to

affect both in

works of art

and

in

the

lives of other

people

can

result

in

enlightenment

(so

that

an

aesthetics of the

affects also

becomes a

means of

elaborating

how there

may

be

profoundly

incommensurable

perspectives

on

values that

are

nonetheless all

necessary

if

we

are to realize

various

aspects

of our

human

potential

[5]).

Altieri's

emphasis

on the

didactic value of

the emotions

is

pursued

with a

thankfully

vague,

generalizing

touch,

so

that we

are unsure

quite

how to take

the word

realize n

the

sentence I

have

just

quoted.

Here his

canny

(and

unacknowledged)

precursor

is

Emerson,

who reflects on

mood

as a means of

life-strengthening perspective

in

a

way

that,

unlike the later

pragmatist

tradition,

deliberately

evades

tests of

concrete

practical

results.

Altieri's

enterprise

in

The

Particulars

of Rapture

echoes his earlier

book on

abstraction

in

modernism

(Painterly

Abstraction n

Modernist

American

Poetry

[Cambridge

University

Press,

1989]),

which

stated his

current

argument

in

literary

historical

terms. As

Altieri

explains

it in

Painterly

Abstraction,

modernism turns

its back on a

late

Victorian

drama of

identifications,

and the

self-congratulatory presentations

this

drama

involves,

in

favor of

something

more

risky:

a

wary,

sometimes brittle

attention to

affects

that are so

subtle or

oblique

they

cannot be

assimilated

to the

images

of self that

one

presents

to

others

in

the

social

world.

(For

Stevens,

life was

not

people

and scene

but

thought

and

feeling. )

The

Particulars

ofRapture

s

resolutely

modernist

in

this

sense, though

its

definition of

mod-

ernism

has been

expanded

to include

Caravaggio,

Wordsworth,

and

Titian,

as

well as

Joyce

and

George

Oppen.

Yet

many

of

Altieri's best

readings

are of writers

who

engage

in

the drama of

identifications. He makes

effective

arguments

for

poets

like C.K.

Williams

and

Matthew

Arnold,

showing

that

they

are not

merely

sanctimonious or

sentimental,

as

one

might

have

thought,

but

rather that

they

struggle

with

sentiment

and

projection,

with their

own

impulses

toward

the

self-serving

use of

identification.

Altieri is less

con-

vincing

when he

considers

writers

and

artists who

are

truly

abstract,

who

explore

affects

without

using

recognizable

characters and

all-too-human

dramas.

(Think

Malevich

or

Pollock,

whose work is

considered

here but

generates

far

less

intriguing

readings

than

the mimetic

works.)

My question,

simply

put,

is whether

Altieri's

theory

takes into

ac-

count the

fact that it

seems to

need mimesis to say truly interesting things. (Altieri him-

self seems to

have a sense

of the

problem

when he

remarks on

the

difference between

interpreting

abstract

modern

dance or

Pollock,

on the one

hand,

and a

poem

with a

distinct mimetic

plot

like

Plath's

Cut,

on

the other

[246]).

Although

Altieri resists

psychoanalysis

because of

its

commitment to

mimesis-in

psy-

choanalytic

theory,

according

to

Altieri,

the

position

of the

actor

in

fantasy

scenarios

usurps

a more

provisional,

experimental,

or

abstract

sense of

how affect

works-he

seems

to be

more

psychoanalytic

than

he

acknowledges.

He is

strongest

as

a critic

when he

encounters a

writerly

fantasy

and

then,

with his

enormous

subtlety,

discerns

the

affective

traits that

modify

or

inflect the

fantasy.

But

he states his

theory

as if

affect

could be

fully

abstracted,

detached from

fantasy

altogether.

This

idealizing posture

is

appealing,

be-

cause it promises to liberate us from the sometimes oppressive weight of our fantasies,

but,

to

me at

least,

it

remains more

hopeful

than

genuinely

explanatory,

even

with Altieri's

own

tremendously

accomplished

readings.

Altieri's

fascinating

account of

jealousy

in Othello

and

Proust,

which

opens

his

book,

shows

that this

critic does

recognize

his

powerful

idealizing

impulse

(21-23).

Altieri wants

to turn

away

rom the

horrifying

inescapability

of

Othello'sjealousy

and

toward

the

greater


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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

180

detachment,

through

intense

and

leisurely

reflection,

that

Proust affords.

Unlike

Othello,

Proust's Charles Swann turns his

jealousy

in

his hands and examines

it,

as

if

it were

an art

form for

contemplation,

not a

reason

for

bloody vengeance.

Altieri

admits he

is

tempted

to choose the

greater

freedom and

flexibility

of Swann's world over

Othello's,

but he also

praises

Othello:

It s

difficult to

imagine any

more

complete

measure of love than one

in

which an

agent

both sacrifices the other and

destroys

himself in its name. And it is diffi-

cult to

imagine

a richer

understanding

of

justice

than

one that so

divides

the self that its

only

recourse is self-destruction. Some

ways

of

experiencing

the world

just might

be

worth

dying

for

(22).

Altieri is

usually

not much of a Nietzschean. But

I

love this

passage

be-

cause

in

it he

slyly

casts himself as Nietzsche

ventriloquizing

the

stuffy,

somber voice of

current ethical

philosophy

and

turning

it to Nietzschean ends.

In his final

chapters,

Altieri takes aim at

probably

the two most influential current

theorists of emotional

subjectivity,

Martha Nussbaum and

Judith

Butler. Altieri scores

a

palpable

hit

against

Nussbaum

(who,

it is

true,

is not

exactly

a

moving target).

Nussbaum's

emphasis

on

cultivating

virtuous

agents

who know what

and

why

they

desire

means

that

she must shun the rest of

us,

who feel emotions without

being

able

to

justify

them with

respect

to rational

goals.

But,

Altieri

argues

in

our

defense,

and

against

Nussbaum,

there

is an intrinsic measure

of worth within affective states that seems to have little to do with

the

pursuit

of a

philosophical

goal

like

defining

the

good

life. We

may,

like Proust's

Swann,

enjoy

our

jealousy

because of its

interesting

twists,

its advanced

characteristics,

rather

than

because

we can

justify

its

place

in our

world.

Pace

Nussbaum,

attending

to

the culti-

vation and

perception

of our emotions does not mean that we are

guided by

reason's

efforts to know the

good,

but rather

by

the more

agile

and learned nuances of the emo-

tions themselves (172-73).

Altieri's

argument against

Butler's

Althusserian

view of emotional identification is even

better. He writes

that

treating

all

positive

emotions as based on enforced

identifications,

as Butler

does,

ignores

by

fiat the

possibility

that we

are

actually responding

to features

of the

world that

might

elicit

pretty

much

the same emotion under a wide

variety

of

cultural frameworks.

Altieri

disputes

Butler's claim that

sympathy

exists

only

because

agents

pursue

the

identity

of

sympathetic persons.

Instead,

he

suggests,

We

struggle

to

find

satisfying expressions

based on forms of

caring

that

are not

easily

translated into

identity

terms

(219).

Although

in

Butler's version of the world we are

considerably

more

mystified

and

easily

manipulated

than

in

Nussbaum's,

these thinkers are similar

in

that

they

see emotion as

something

that we feel

compelled

to

justify

in

terms

of our

self-

knowledge. In order to make something of our feelings, we must know,we must define to

ourselves,

the kind of

person

we claim to be.

The

critique

of Nussbaum

and Butler is

satisfying,

but raises an

additional

point.

The

basic

question

that Altieri alludes

to,

without ever

fully

confronting,

in TheParticulars

of

Rapture

is

why

we want to

imagine

the criteria for our

actions and attitudes as the out-

come of our claims to

knowledge

rather than

the result of a

capacity

for

expressive

inflec-

tion embodied

in affect.

What

Altieri does not consider

is

why

Nussbaum and Butler are

not

merelywrong, why

their inclinations toward

seeing knowledge

claims as

definitive

are,

in

fact,

telling.

The work of

Stanley

Cavell offers

one

explanation

for this

epistemological

temptation:

that it is an avoidance of the fact that

the

position

of others is

fundamentally

different

from

ours,

different

in a

way

that can never

be

covered,

never

adequately

ad-

dressed, by claims about what these others know or don't know. Altieri shies awayfrom

Cavell's

work,

but Cavell could

help

to show

why,

even

though

our cultivation

of various

identities can be loose and

contingent

in

keeping

with

our

expressive capacities,

we

nev-

ertheless

often tend to defend

ourselves,

and

explain

who we

are,

by pursuing

knowledge

claims

that could never do

justice

to this

expressiveness,

to the

subtlety

of affect.


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BOOK

REVIEWS/181

As

always

in

Altieri's

books,

much of the

fun,

the

really good

stuff,

is in the

many

discursive

footnotes and several

appendices.

Here we

find,

to choose

just

one

example

from

a

good-sized

treasure

trove,

a

startling,

inventive

realignment

of thinkers: tradi-

tional rationalists

join

existentialists like

Sartre and cultural constructionists

like Rom

HarrY,

Altieri

remarks,

in

arguing

that

imaginations project

values on an indifferent

world.

At the other end of the

spectrum

(he continues),

Whitehead,

Deleuze,

and

Merleau-Ponty

explore

a

universe that

recognizes

no

sharp

distinctions between what

the

agent

contributes

and what the world

solicits,

between what we want

from the world

and what

is

already

there

(211).

The

strongest aspect

of Altieri's critical

practice

is the

way

he stations

himself between these two

extremes,

between a hermeneutics

of

suspi-

cion intent on

unmasking

the

imagination

as a mere means

of

projection

and the con-

trary

view

that

prefers

to see

imagination discovering

what

is

already

immanent

in

its

surroundings.

Emotions,

Altieri's

subject

in

TheParticulars

of Rapture,

are

necessarily

in-

volved

in

fantasies,

in a

projection imposed

on

reality,

but

they

also tell of a coherent

relation between the self

and its environment that is evident

in the

immanent,

gestural

rightness

of affective

expression.

I

hope

that,

in

future

work,

Altieri will

continue to ex-

plore why,

unlike most

critics,

he cannot associate his

thinking solely

with

one of these

theoretical

models or the

other,

why

each of

them,

taken

alone,

dissatisfies

him. In

doing

so,

he

may help

us to understand

the difference between

imposing

a vision on the world

and

finding

it

there.

(Discovery

can

look,

or

feel,

like

imposition, especially

in

analytic

retrospect;

and

imposition

can be claimed as

discovery,

for

example

by

Wordsworth.)

Altieri's work

has an alert

energy

unusual

for someone who

operates

such

heavy

theo-

retical

machinery

(this

especially

comes across for those

who have seen

him

lecture).

Like few critics I know, he combines his elaborate and rigorous analytic manners with a

potentially

infectious

joy

in his own

perceptive powers.

I

hope

he

writes

some more

long,

hard books.

DAVID IKICS

Universityof

Houston

THE

PLAY

F

CHARACTER

N

PLATO'S

IALOGUES.

y Ruby

Blondell.

Cambridge: Cambridge

University

Press,

2003.

xi,

452

p.

POETICS

BEFORE

PLATO:

INTERPRETATION

ND

AUTHORITY

N EARLYGREEKTHEORIES

OF

POETRY.

By

Grace M. Ledbetter. Princeton:

Princeton

University

Press,

2003.

viii,

128

p.

Analytic philosophy conquered

the

study

of Plato

among

classicists

in

the 1960s with

the works of G.E.L. Owen

and

Gregory

Vlastos. From time to

time,

of

course,

attention

was

paid

to

the

style

of the author who was

widely

acclaimed

among

the ancients as the

most

sublime artist ever to write Greek

prose.

But as

long

as the terms

governing

this

discussion were the

philosophical

versus the

literary,

Plato's

irony, imagery,

and use

of

myths

tended to be

assigned

to

ancillary

status at best. The

general

situation could be

summed

up

in

a

metaphor

Lucretius used

to

explain

the

composition

of De rerum

narura:

the

Epicurean philosopher

who

composes

a

Latin

poem

is

acting

like

a

doctor who

rims

the

cup

with

honey

to make a bitter but salubrious

draught

go

down

(1.936 ff.).

The

metaphor,

whose Platonic

pedigree

could be traced to such works as

Gorgias,

seems to

justify focusing

on

philosophical

argument

and

disregarding

those

techniques

the

phi-

losopher may

have

borrowed from the

flattering

arts of

poetics

or rhetoric to make truth

palatable

to the

inexperienced.

And

yet-and

this is what makes technical

analyses

inad-


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