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My Chapter upon Lines: Motion, Deviation, and Lineation in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics
Ist Teil von
Criticism (Detroit), 2019-01, Vol.61 (1), p.1-26
Ort / Verlag
Detroit: Wayne State University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2019
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This essay argues that the eighteenth-century emergence of algebraic and
arithmetic methods that require only numeric operators and that do not base
their claims to truth upon Euclidean axiomatic geometric magnitudes and
relations (lines, angles, proportions) transformed the ontological status of
lines. For classicist geometers, the points and magnitudes of Euclid had a
status akin to the Longinian sublime: the classical line is not simply a symbol
mediating an absent truth; rather, the classical line should be understood as
the thing itself. After arithmetization, however, the line is only an
inscription, another symbol among many, subject to the gulf between signifier
and signified. It is also relegated to an effect of, rather than the organizing
principle of, motion, and hence enters history. Aesthetic theorists contribute
significantly to the reconceptualization of lineation. From William Hogarth’s
infinite variety, to Edmund Burke’s insensible deviation, to Laurence Sterne’s
digressive progression and William Gilpin’s easy line, aesthetic orthodoxies
arise that are founded in deviation from rigid prescription and from prior
axiomatic models. Aesthetically and politically, a positively construed but
semantically empty notion of deviation helps to generate the fantasy of subjects
in relationships to spectacles and institutions that are not mediated by any
ideological structures other than personal affective sensation. Precisely
because the Burkean/Gilpinesque subject/spectator recognizes himself as deviant
(which is to say ungoverned by doctrine, fanaticism, or standards imposed
against the grain of his own intuitions), his participation in the frame of
polity and the spectacle of nation can be understood as wholly natural and
volitional, not to say homogeneous. At the same time, the aesthetics of
deviation can be seen as key to the modernist avant-garde, preserving a close
parallel between its premises and the supposedly radically distinct values of
bourgeois aesthetics.