Critical Feelings and Pleasurable Associations
- Critical Feelings and Pleasurable Associations
Wher'er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,The mild necessity of use compelsTo acts of love; and habit does the workOf reason, yet prepares that after joyWhich reason cherishes. And thus the soul,By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursu'dDoth find itself insensibly dispos'dTo virtue and true goodness …
(Wordsworth, The Old Cumberland Beggar)
In this essay, I read Wordsworth's program for a popular poetry as an instructive example for those seeking to harness a philosophy of the virtual to a democratic politics. I highlight affinities in his writings between a creative imagination and a democratic sociability, both of which rest on a capacity to find pleasure in novelty and difference. Wordsworth describes a poetic imagination that delights in the multiplication of sensuously perceived similarities and differences. This same delight, he suggests, can both promote and benefit from the extension of sympathetic bonds beyond the domestic sphere to interclass relationships, and even to a multitude of strangers. He therefore theorized and experimented with new poetic techniques with the aim of distributing these pleasures to a broad audience, combining critical feelings with pleasurable associations. His poetry thus serves to disseminate among its readers what Brian Massumi – echoing Spinoza – has called an "implied Deleuzean ethics," namely the "multiplication of powers of existence, to ever-divergent regimes of action and expression" (Massumi 2002, 34). Moreover, it highlights the potential value of such an ethos for modern democratic societies, which require capacities and opportunities to form gratifying associations with diverse populations under conditions of rapid social change.
Critical Feelings
With their Lyrical Ballads (1798) Wordsworth and Coleridge famously promise to inaugurate a democratic poetics, meaning one that both draws its inspiration from and expresses itself in the common language and psychic registers of the middle and lower classes. However, they aim not merely to replicate, but also to educate popular affections. As Wordsworth explains in his Preface to the 1800 edition, their poetry is addressed to an audience whose discerning powers have been degraded by specialized labor, the overstimulation of urban life, and compensatory "gross stimulants" provided by the popular literature of the day.
For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves … when I think upon this degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation […]".
(LB, 9-10)
In response, the authors undertake to heighten sensitivity to excitements less gross, to enhance powers of discernment and generosity toward the new by teaching its readers to receive pleasure from novelty and difference. Wordsworth allows that we prefer to be pleased "in the particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased" (LB, 24). However, he argues, "the powers of language are not so limited as [the reader] may suppose …" (24). Moreover, the aesthetic education that enables people to receive "other enjoyments" than those to which they are is accustomed is "likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations" (LB, 25). This education does not instill a rational control of emotional drives, nor does it amplify moral conformity; instead, it pluralizes attachments while drawing attention to the dynamic intersection of thought and feeling in a pleasurable state of creative association. As Wordsworth suggests, sympathetic powers of imagination are especially crucial for social solidarity in modern, that is, diverse and mobile societies. I defer for the time being a discussion of the later Wordsworth's reservations concerning modern, urban life and political reform in favor of a closer look at the nuances of his poetic technique and the complex feelings it aims to inspire.
As Wordsworth makes clear, the purpose of Lyrical Ballads is...
