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L IVED E XPERIENCE, H ISTORICAL
C ONSCIOUSNESS AND N ARRATIVE: A C OMBINATORY A ESTHETICS E THIC
The most elaborate philosophic or scientific inquiry and the most ambitious industrial or political enterprise has, when its different ingredients constitute an integral experience, esthetic quality. For then its varied parts are linked to one an-other, and do not merely succeed one another. And the parts through the experi-enced linkage move toward a consummation and close, not merely to cessation in time. This consummation, moreover, does not wait in consciousness for the whole undertaking to be finished. It is anticipated throughout and is recurrently savored with special intensity.
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Int roduc tio n
IN CHAPTER 1 OF THIS WORK I introduced an “aesthetics ethic,” a dynamic, densely deliberative and imaginative field comprising individual and community his-torical experience, embedded within profoundly aesthetic contexts. My claim is that this ethic is the dappled experiential ground out of which history is first lived, and
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torical writing then constructed. In terms of this definition, I remind readers of the meanings of the word aesthetic: “to perceive;” and ethic: “character,” “custom,”
“comrade,” “kinship,” “family.” These ideas open onto a world of conscious experi-ence and awareness that I believe is applicable to our topics. In the following I will examine three essential elements of the aesthetics ethic: 1) the extent of aesthetic ele-ments and conditions within and as experience (to borrow from John Dewey); 2) community dynamics, individual/community intersubjectivity and morality within lived experience (this study will be linked to Daniel Wickberg’s histories of sensibili-ties); 3) and certain aesthetic facets employed in narrative historical writing, which is a “discourse founded on genre conventions [my aesthetics] and the expectations and beliefs of its community [my ethic]” (Kellner 2). I should inform the reader that some of the following examinations will forecast analyses to take place in chapters 3, 4 and 5, and I will notify the reader when my analyses point to these chapters.
My framework, I think, accords with the thoughts of Huizinga, who wrote that historical sense is a reticular but methodical synthesis that “proves anew its close connection with the forms of thought of ordinary human life, which also would be impossible without general categories into which intelligence organizes phenomena”
(291). Huizinga added that “by reason of its natural bent historical sense always in-clines toward the particular, the graphic, the concrete, the unique, the individual”
(298). Huizinga’s conceptions fit with his research methodology, which held that “no knowledge of the particular is possible without its being understood within a general frame” or, yet more poetically, “Every historical fact opens immediately into eternity”
(299, 300). Huizinga’s thoughts seem to adumbrate my aesthetics ethic, with its “gen-eral” philosophical/phenomenological frame of historical consciousness, experience and understanding, alongside the moral and ethical aims and outcomes in human
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communities; conditioned by “particular” aesthetic and narrative details, emerging out of conscious and compositional processes.
Overall, it might be fair to call my approach a sort of pragmatism, perhaps in-strumental/structural, a fairly socio-linguistic analysis of interacting human praxes, including, most importantly, communicative action. My hope is that this combinatory model will provide, as Steven G. Smith, professor of philosophy and religious studies at Millsaps College, has written, “aesthetic, ethical, political, scientific, speculative”
analyses and models, the sum of which will be “important modes of evaluation” in historical understanding, which is itself a “web of practice on which our own lives are lived” and in which lived experience, though “done and over with” is “still vibrating”
with meaning and impact (all 14). Similarly, my combinatory model is perhaps simi-lar to Benedetto Croce’s understanding of historical exegesis as an “extremely com-plicated and delicate dialectical process” (History as the Story of Liberty 7), or Paul Ricoeur’s overall demesne of historical experience and emplotment at once a “real domain, covered by ethics” and an “imaginary one, covered by poetics” (Time and Narrative Volume 1 46).
Given the ramified studies that follow, I am inclined to warn the reader with a quote from Nelson Goodman (1906-1998), whose intellectual quarry, like ours, “does not run a straight course from beginning to end” (ix), and whose pursuit
hunts; and in the hunting, it sometimes worries the same raccoon in different trees, or different raccoons in the same tree, or even what turns out to be no rac-coon in any tree. It finds itself balking more than once at the same barrier and tak-ing off on other trails. It drinks often from the same streams, and stumbles over some cruel country. And it counts not the kill but what is learned of the territory explored. (ix)
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Following Goodman, in this analysis I hope to indicate how the confluences of re-sponsibilities, roles, reasons and responses through which historical action is effected is a decidedly aesthetic, contingent, modal, moving-target world, captured in histori-cal writing, fictional and non-fictional. If I do not always reach concrete conclusions in the following, I hope that I eruditely and accommodatingly spur a few ideas, shed some light in dim areas of historical understanding, and indicate possible areas of fur-ther study. At its most ambitious, my aim is to show details about how historians and historical novelists perceive common facets of historical consciousness emerging out of the aesthetics ethic, and then in their turn interpret these data. These artists function as some of the foremost tellers of history, and in this way are part of and themselves constitute a true kinship of overlapping interests, methods, aims and outcomes. We might say that historical writers are in one sense representatives of their communities, who by way of their representations speak for those communities.52 Historical repre-sentations in this environment become astonishingly complex and variegated, a veri-table stew of subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity; imagination and artful-ness; intentionality and actualization; enunciation and circumscription; reference and contrivance; experience and conjecture; intellection and apperception; contingency and modality. The aesthetics ethic will, I hope, prove to be a useful map of these ex-periences and functions. We will find that by way of what I call an “aesthetic gaze,”
humans cast a beacon of awareness across lived experience, first perceiving, then in-terpreting, and then narrating historical experience. This gaze is steeped in those aesthetic contours I referred to in chapter 1 of this work: dense temporality; subject-, object- and intersubjectivity; intertextuality; narrative form and fettle; seman-tic/syntactic complexity; historical, moral, argumentative and aesthetic rhetoric;
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tingency and modality; an effort toward becoming; and the fluid construction and ap-prehension of truth in historical narrative.53
In the above respects, historical experience and representation are for me the veritable mortis and tenon of my examination, and will be drawn out, analyzed, com-pared and contrasted in a variety of ways. Like Frank Ankersmit, I will be on the lookout for cracks in the walls of historical experience and representation, and in this way I may in some respects be looking beyond standard “contextualist accretions”
that often determine historical understanding and conscious, but which “stand[] in the way of direct and immediate experience of the past” (both Ankersmit, Sublime His-torical Experience 156). With the way clear, we may penetrate and with luck espy “a new world of experience,” and enter into an intentional historical world where “we can no longer separate the experience from what it is an experience of: The past then comes into being only because a certain social and mental world is experienced as past” (both Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience 102, emphasis in original).
We will also see my aesthetics ethic as the threshold where historical experi-ence and historical narrative blend, as adumbrated in the thoughts of Scholes and Kellogg, who wrote that “Meaning, in a work of narrative art, is a function of the rela-tionship between two worlds: the fictional world created by the author and the ‘real’
world, the apprehendable universe” (82). To turn once again to Ankersmit, he tames the sometimes-unruly tentacles of meaning we are after when he writes that “repre-sentation is the birthplace of meaning—and whoever is interested in the nature of meaning can do little better than to closely investigate representation” (Sublime His-torical Experience 96, emphasis in original). Representation and meaning—
conceptions that cut to the very heart of lived experience, narrated history, and his-toricized narrative that I will examine here and in the remainder of this study.
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The Aes theti cs Et hi c: Aes theti c Conto urs i n Live d E xperi ence
HISTORIAN JERZY TOPOLSKI HAS WRITTEN that “It is not logic but imagina-tion that generates more or less concretized mental images constituting a background onto which the historian, ‘playing’ with basic information, imposes some content, oc-casionally modifying the ground (an effect of idealization) in one way or another”
(203). Though Topolski specifically refers to the historian, let his ideas be an intro-duction into the idea of aesthetics as an organic constituent of historical/lived experi-ence, with our perception (and associated imagination) virtually the essence of con-sciousness, which in turn and concentrates and constitutes the veritable quiddity of the life world. This is an expansive view, a view onto human ontology, which will require careful examination, but I remind the reader that I am not alone, and many major thinkers and other analysts of human experience have sought answers in light of such encompassing views, taking light of vigorous worlds of experience, action, percep-tion, apperception and communicapercep-tion, coursing from interior subjectivity, to exterior objectivity, to communal intersubjectivity and back again—Dewey’s reciprocal and transactive doing and undergoing.54 With this in mind, in the following I will shape my aesthetics ethic around the ideas of thinkers who I believe I am in accord with, and who have taken in a broad spectrum of lived experience and understanding in their efforts to elucidate experience and outcomes.
Most readers have no doubt gleaned that my aesthetics ethic can be related to John Dewey’s analyses in Art as Experience, with their views onto the aesthetic bases and contours of lived experience, human action, creativity and communication—all environmentally conditioned, recursively employed, emotively expressed,
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cally germinated, adaptively accorded and temporally consummated. In short, subjec-tivity, intersubjectivity and related objectivity necessitate and engender an initial aes-thetic impulse that yields an artful “doing” by agents that is in turn “undergone” by their peers. This is a combinatory effort of creation and interpretation, aesthetic to the core, welding subject and object into a dynamic quicksilver: “The uniquely distin-guishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and en-vironment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears” (Art as Experience 249).55 As to some of the particulars of this aesthetics ethic, Dewey goes on that “As an organism increases in complexity, the rhythms of struggle and consummation in its relation to its environment are varied and prolonged, and they come to include within themselves an endless variety of sub-rhythms. The designs of living are widened and enriched. Fulfillment is more massive and more subtly shaded” (Art as Experience 23). To sum up, Dewey’s aesthetic world and experience become:
an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it, together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity. […] [T]hings and events experienced pass and are gone. But something of their meaning and value is retained as an integral part of the self. (Art as Experience 104)
This very Husserlian, time-conscious field is a fertile expanse that traverses the fic-tional and non-ficfic-tional, the performed and eventuated, the imagined and experienced.
One of the wonderful things about Dewey’s theory is how he recognizes that any and
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all acts that incorporate genuine expression (such as, in our study, historical appre-hension and associated narration) become aesthetic, and this aesthetic lifeblood flows into every vein, capillary, vessel and artery of lived experience. Lenore Langsdorf wrote of the pragmatic, highly functional Deweyan aesthetics ethic thusly:
Accordingly, Dewey’s aesthetic theory is interested in how art works through-out human life in the service of meliorative goals, rather than in what it is, apart from life’s everyday and specialized domains. Thus the subject-matter of prag-matic aesthetics differs from that of traditional, analytic aesthetics: it concerns the work of art, rather than the art object; the dynamic experience that is artistic
crea-tion, rather than the static product of that activity; the consequences of art for the improvement of life, rather than ‘art for art’s sake.’” (152 emphasis in original)
Overall, Dewey’s aesthetic conditioning within lived experience is an astonishingly vital, wholly ecological, hyper-responsive, intricately temporal and blazingly imagi-native cross-fertilization of community and individual consciousness, commitment and communication, an eyes-wide-open trek across potential, toward consummation.
For Dewey, aesthetics in lived experience is nothing less than a “unique transcript of the energy of the things of the world” (Art as Experience 185), and “a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives” (Art as Experience 14). It is during this transitional process that we “reach to the roots of the esthetic in experience” (Art as Experience 14) and then, coming out on the other side as it were, achieve “a transformation of interaction into participation and communication” (Art as Experience 22). Extending his gaze even wider, Dewey adds that in this aestheticized existence, “Things, objects, are only fo-cal points of a here and now in a whole that stretches out indefinitely” (Art as
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ence 193), which is in turn a virtual “recession into the implicit” (Art as Experience 194). I extend Dewey here and claim that this environment can be understood as, in effect, lived historical experience which, with associated historical narration, become transactive media of varied constitutions, the awareness and application of which are
“the very heart of […] esthetic perception” (Art as Experience 199). Linking these ideas up to historical apprehension and narrative, Dewey continues that aesthetics in lived experience are “a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civiliza-tion” (Art as Experience 326), and also “the means for entering sympathetically into the deepest elements of remote and foreign civilizations” (Art as Experience 332).
Dewey’s references here remind us that, as the ground of all historicity, the aesthetics ethic is a veritable window opening onto the historical experience of peoples and ages past—and from there the source of historical writing.
Let me turn now briefly to two other thinkers who flesh out these aesthetic possibilities. Frank Ankersmit links lived historical and aesthetic experience when he writes, as I have noted, that “History comes to us in wholes, in totalities, and this is how we primarily experience both the past itself and what it has left us—as is the case in the arts and in aesthetic experience” (Sublime Historical Experience 119). Paul Ri-coeur, meanwhile, paints a picture of transacting experiential and aesthetic (textual) attributes as large as the others sketched here when he comments that “in a prelimi-nary analysis, starting again with literary criticism, and parallel to what I have done in my first volume à propos of historical intentionality, I developed the notion of the world of the text. A text, actually, is not a self-enclosed entity. It has not only a formal structure, it points beyond itself to a possible world, a world I could inhabit, where I could actualize my own possibilities in so far as I am in the world. […] The world of
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the text is a transcendence in the immanence of the text, an outside intended by an inside” (A Ricoeur Reader 349).
These varied ideas can be applied as I build up the edifice of my aesthetics ethic, a framework comprising an amalgamation of human awareness, existence, and narrative enterprise, insinuating itself into a truly encompassing historical view and consciousness, steeped in intersubjectivity and phenomenological intentionality, with an essential aesthetic thrust emerging from human consciousness and entering into the flourishing communicative endeavors of historiography and historical fiction.56 We live, perceive, enact, historicize, commune, narrate, know, understand, engender, characterize and develop within this environment, with all of this activity forming a mighty current that sweeps us along in genuinely aesthetic, narrative lived experience toward the denouement of narrated history—the story and record of all we are.
And yet….What I have described might prompt some to accuse me of a kind of totalizing, the pursuit of some sort of principium maximus or “covering law model”
which could be used to construct “grand narratives” (or simply quick and easy solu-tions). The scope of my inquiry at first blush does seem ambitious, and to be sure when one ventures into deep and wide channels like these, care must be taken. But I do not think this thus automatically becomes suspect, as great thinkers like Dewey, White, Croce and Ankersmit show. I view my model as a synthetic mechanism, which maps interpretation and conveyance of the varied elements of lived history, historical apprehension and historical narrative in effective ways. As for the complexity of event and interpretation, these are conditions and outcomes which, needless to say, history abounds in, in areas aesthetic, social, personal, legal, national, moral, aborigi-nal, ideological, experiential, etc. And thus, a generous aspiring complexity is called for. Indeed, this is an understanding that has been glossed over by too many analysts
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for too long. It is my hope that the pieces to my aesthetics ethic puzzle fit together in constructive ways, and their relations, synchronicity and reciprocal qualities are not engineered into existence, nor intended to be that principium maximus, mechanically churning out all the right answers at all the right times. The aesthetics ethic is rather something of a hypothesis, a provisional working model intended to provide insight, and to be used as a flexible interpretive instrument to reveal various possibilities about (and, when possible, accurate answers to) the questions about history and narra-tive that we are asking.
Similarly, some may feel my model is a bit too neat, a little too unified, and this is a criticism that I believe has been leveled at Dewey. But this may not be true, and in fact I may be onto something of a deconstructive turn, an inversion of the widely-accepted “binary opposition” (Ricoeur’s “fundamental bifurcation”) of history and fiction, and a radical claim that a long-established perceptual/communicative or-der is in fact out of oror-der (or just incomplete). Note how Dewey sounds nearly Der-ridean when he writes that the aesthetic forms we have been outlining go through something of a maelstrom of conflict, a “complex interaction” of “mutual affinities and antagonisms,” of “clashings and unitings, the way they fulfill and frustrate,
Similarly, some may feel my model is a bit too neat, a little too unified, and this is a criticism that I believe has been leveled at Dewey. But this may not be true, and in fact I may be onto something of a deconstructive turn, an inversion of the widely-accepted “binary opposition” (Ricoeur’s “fundamental bifurcation”) of history and fiction, and a radical claim that a long-established perceptual/communicative or-der is in fact out of oror-der (or just incomplete). Note how Dewey sounds nearly Der-ridean when he writes that the aesthetic forms we have been outlining go through something of a maelstrom of conflict, a “complex interaction” of “mutual affinities and antagonisms,” of “clashings and unitings, the way they fulfill and frustrate,