University of Oregon

The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects by Charles Altieri

Review by: David Mikics
Comparative Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 178-181
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122320 .
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BOOK REVIEWS
THE PARTICULARS
OF RAPTURE:AN AESTHETICSOF THEAFFECTS.By Charles Altieri. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2003. x, 299 p.

My first impulse after finishing TheParticularsof Rapture,Charles Altieri's brilliant examination 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 familiar 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 "alwayschanging 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 particular 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 prejudices). 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 judgment. 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 instantly recognizable social roles, Altieri asks whether such roles are in themselves definitive (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 without 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 ethical 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"in
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 TheParticularsof Raptureechoes his earlier book on abstraction
in modernism (PainterlyAbstractionin ModernistAmericanPoetry [Cambridge University
Press, 1989]), which stated his current argument in literary historical terms. As Altieri
explains it in PainterlyAbstraction,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 of Raptureis resolutely modernist in this sense, though its definition of modernism 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 convincing 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 account the fact that it seems to need mimesis to say truly interesting things. (Altieri himself 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 psychoanalytic 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, because 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 Othelloand Proust, which opens his book,
shows that this critic does recognize his powerful idealizing impulse (21-23). Altieri wants
to turn awayfrom 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:"Itis 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 difficult 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 because 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 "virtuousagents" 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 cultivation 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 emotions 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, "Westruggle 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 selfknowledge. 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 TheParticularsof
Rapture is whywe want to imagine the criteria for our actions and attitudes as the outcome of our claims to knowledge rather than the result of a capacity for expressive inflection 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 addressed, by claims about what these others know or don't know. Altieri shies away from
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 nevertheless 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: "traditional 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 suspicion intent on unmasking the imagination as a mere means of projection and the contrary view that prefers to see imagination discovering what is already immanent in its
surroundings. Emotions, Altieri's subject in TheParticularsof Rapture,are necessarily involved 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 explore 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 theoretical 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
MIKICS
Universityof Houston

THEPLAY
IN PLATO'S
DIALOGUES.
By Ruby Blondell. Cambridge: Cambridge
OFCHARACTER
2003.
452
xi,
University Press,
p.
AND AUTHORITYIN EARLYGREEKTHEORIESOF POETRY.By
POETICS BEFOREPLATO: INTERPRETATION

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 rerumnarura:
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 philosopher 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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