Guy de Maupassant - "Mademoiselle Fifi"

I. Windslow Ayer - "The Great North Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details"

Ernest Belfort Bax - "German Culture Past and Present"

Frank Dilnot - "Lloyd George"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

B >> Benedetto Croce >> Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic




[Sidenote] _Intuition and representation._

Other psychologists are disposed to distinguish from sensation something
which is sensation no longer, but is not yet intellective concept: _the
representation or image_. What is the difference between their
representation or image, and our intuitive knowledge? The greatest, and
none at all. "Representation," too, is a very equivocal word. If by
representation be understood something detached and standing out from
the psychic base of the sensations, then representation is intuition.
If, on the other hand, it be conceived as a complex sensation, a return
is made to simple sensation, which does not change its quality according
to its richness or poverty, operating alike in a rudimentary or in a
developed organism full of traces of past sensations. Nor is the
equivoque remedied by defining representation as a psychic product of
secondary order in relation to sensation, which should occupy the first
place. What does secondary order mean here? Does it mean a qualitative,
a formal difference? If so, we agree: representation is elaboration of
sensation, it is intuition. Or does it mean greater complexity and
complication, a quantitative, material difference? In that case
intuition would be again confused with simple sensation.

[Sidenote] _Intuition and expression._

And yet there is a sure method of distinguishing true intuition, true
representation, from that which is inferior to it: the spiritual fact
from the mechanical, passive, natural fact. Every true intuition or
representation is, also, _expression_. That which does not objectify
itself in expression is not intuition or representation, but sensation
and naturality. The spirit does not obtain intuitions, otherwise than by
making, forming, expressing. He who separates intuition from expression
never succeeds in reuniting them.

_Intuitive activity possesses intuitions to the extent that it expresses
them_.--Should this expression seem at first paradoxical, that is
chiefly because, as a general rule, a too restricted meaning is given to
the word "expression." It is generally thought of as restricted to
verbal expression. But there exist also non-verbal expressions, such as
those of line, colour, and sound; to all of these must be extended our
affirmation. The intuition and expression together of a painter are
pictorial; those of a poet are verbal. But be it pictorial, or verbal,
or musical, or whatever else it be called, to no intuition can
expression be wanting, because it is an inseparable part of intuition.
How can we possess a true intuition of a geometrical figure, unless we
possess so accurate an image of it as to be able to trace it immediately
upon paper or on a slate? How can we have an intuition of the contour of
a region, for example, of the island of Sicily, if we are not able to
draw it as it is in all its meanderings? Every one can experience the
internal illumination which follows upon his success in formulating to
himself his impressions and sentiments, but only so far as he is able to
formulate them. Sentiments or impressions, then, pass by means of words
from the obscure region of the soul into the clarity of the
contemplative spirit. In this cognitive process it is impossible to
distinguish intuition from expression. The one is produced with the
other at the same instant, because they are not two, but one.

[Sidenote] _Illusions as to their difference._

The principal reason which makes our theme appear paradoxical as we
maintain it, is the illusion or prejudice that we possess a more
complete intuition of reality than we really do. One often hears people
say that they have in their minds many important thoughts, but that they
are not able to express them. In truth, if they really had them, they
would have coined them into beautiful, ringing words, and thus expressed
them. If these thoughts seem to vanish or to become scarce and poor in
the act of expressing them, either they did not exist or they really
were scarce and poor. People think that all of us ordinary men imagine
and have intuitions of countries, figures and scenes, like painters; of
bodies, like sculptors; save that painters and sculptors know how to
paint and to sculpture those images, while we possess them only within
our souls. They believe that anyone could have imagined a Madonna of
Raphael; but that Raphael was Raphael owing to his technical ability in
putting the Madonna upon the canvas. Nothing can be more false than this
view. The world of which as a rule we have intuitions, is a small thing.
It consists of little expressions which gradually become greater and
more ample with the increasing spiritual concentration of certain
moments. These are the sort of words which we speak within ourselves,
the judgments that we tacitly express: "Here is a man, here is a horse,
this is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me," etc. It is a medley of
light and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere
expression than a haphazard splash of colours, from among which would
with difficulty stand out a few special, distinctive traits. This and
nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the basis
of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels tied to
things take the place of the things themselves. This index and labels
(which are themselves expressions) suffice for our small needs and small
actions. From time to time we pass from the index to the book, from the
label to the thing, or from the slight to the greater intuitions, and
from these to the greatest and most lofty. This passage is sometimes far
from being easy. It has been observed by those who have best studied the
psychology of artists, that when, after having given a rapid glance at
anyone, they attempt to obtain a true intuition of him, in order, for
example, to paint his portrait, then this ordinary vision, that seemed
so precise, so lively, reveals itself as little better than nothing.
What remains is found to be at the most some superficial trait, which
would not even suffice for a caricature. The person to be painted stands
before the artist like a world to discover. Michael Angelo said, "one
paints, not with one's hands, but with one's brain." Leonardo shocked
the prior of the convent delle Grazie by standing for days together
opposite the "Last Supper" without touching it with the brush. He
remarked of this attitude "that men of the most lofty genius, when they
are doing the least work, are then the most active, seeking invention
with their minds." The painter is a painter, because he sees what others
only feel or catch a glimpse of, but do not see. We think we see a
smile, but in reality we have only a vague impression of it, we do not
perceive all the characteristic traits from which it results, as the
painter perceives them after his internal meditations, which thus enable
him to fix them on the canvas. Even in the case of our intimate friend,
who is with us every day and at all hours, we do not possess intuitively
more than, at the most, certain traits of his physiognomy, which enable
us to distinguish him from others. The illusion is less easy as regards
musical expression; because it would seem strange to everyone to say
that the composer had added or attached notes to the motive, which is
already in the mind of him who is not the composer. As if Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his own intuition the
Ninth Symphony. Thus, just as he who is deceived as to his material
wealth is confuted by arithmetic, which states its exact amount, so is
he confuted who nourishes delusions as to the wealth of his own thoughts
and images. He is brought back to reality, when he is obliged to cross
the Bridge of Asses of expression. We say to the former, count; to the
latter, speak, here is a pencil, draw, express yourself.

We have each of us, as a matter of fact, a little of the poet, of the
sculptor, of the musician, of the painter, of the prose writer: but how
little, as compared with those who are so called, precisely because of
the lofty degree in which they possess the most universal dispositions
and energies of human nature! How little does a painter possess of the
intuitions of a poet! How little does one painter possess those of
another painter! Nevertheless, that little is all our actual patrimony
of intuitions or representations. Beyond these are only impressions,
sensations, feelings, impulses, emotions, or whatever else one may term
what is outside the spirit, not assimilated by man, postulated for the
convenience of exposition, but effectively inexistent, if existence be
also a spiritual fact.

[Sidenote] _Identity of intuition and expression._

We may then add this to the verbal variants descriptive of intuition,
noted at the beginning: intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge,
independent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function;
indifferent to discriminations, posterior and empirical, to reality and
to unreality, to formations and perceptions of space and time, even when
posterior: intuition or representation is distinguished as form from
what is felt and suffered, from the flux or wave of sensation, or from
psychic material; and this form this taking possession of, is
expression. To have an intuition is to express. It is nothing else!
(nothing more, but nothing less) than _to express_.




II

INTUITION AND ART


[Sidenote] _Corollaries and explanations._

Before proceeding further, it seems opportune to draw certain
consequences from what has been established and to add some explanation.

[Sidenote] _Identity of art and intuitive knowledge._

We have frankly identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the
aesthetic or artistic fact, taking works of art as examples of intuitive
knowledge and attributing to them the characteristics of intuition, and
_vice versa_. But our identification is combated by the view, held even
by many philosophers, who consider art to be an intuition of an
altogether special sort. "Let us admit" (they say) "that art is
intuition; but intuition is not always art: artistic intuition is of a
distinct species differing from intuition in general by something
_more_."

[Sidenote] _No specific difference._

But no one has ever been able to indicate of what this something more
consists. It has sometimes been thought that art is not a simple
intuition, but an intuition of an intuition, in the same way as the
concept of science has been defined, not as the ordinary concept, but as
the concept of a concept. Thus man should attain to art, by
objectifying, not his sensations, as happens with ordinary intuition,
but intuition itself. But this process of raising to a second power does
not exist; and the comparison of it with the ordinary and scientific
concept does not imply what is wished, for the good reason that it is
not true that the scientific concept is the concept of a concept. If
this comparison imply anything, it implies just the opposite. The
ordinary concept, if it be really a concept and not a simple
representation, is a perfect concept, however poor and limited. Science
substitutes concepts for representations; it adds and substitutes other
concepts larger and more comprehensive for those that are poor and
limited. It is ever discovering new relations. But its method does not
differ from that by which is formed the smallest universal in the brain
of the humblest of men. What is generally called art, by antonomasia,
collects intuitions that are wider and more complex than those which we
generally experience, but these intuitions are always of sensations and
impressions.

Art is the expression of impressions, not the expression of expressions.

[Sidenote] _No difference of intensity._

For the same reason, it cannot be admitted that intuition, which is
generally called artistic, differs from ordinary intuition as to
intensity. This would be the case if it were to operate differently on
the same matter. But since artistic function is more widely distributed
in different fields, but yet does not differ in method from ordinary
intuition, the difference between the one and the other is not intensive
but extensive. The intuition of the simplest popular love-song, which
says the same thing, or very nearly, as a declaration of love such as
issues at every moment from the lips of thousands of ordinary men, may
be intensively perfect in its poor simplicity, although it be
extensively so much more limited than the complex intuition of a
love-song by Leopardi.

[Sidenote] _The difference is extensive and empirical._

The whole difference, then, is quantitative, and as such, indifferent to
philosophy, _scientia qualitatum_. Certain men have a greater aptitude,
a more frequent inclination fully to express certain complex states of
the soul. These men are known in ordinary language as artists. Some very
complicated and difficult expressions are more rarely achieved and these
are called works of art. The limits of the expressions and intuitions
that are called art, as opposed to those that are vulgarly called
not-art, are empirical and impossible to define. If an epigram be art,
why not a single word? If a story; why not the occasional note of the
journalist? If a landscape, why not a topographical sketch? The teacher
of philosophy in Moliere's comedy was right: "whenever we speak we
create prose." But there will always be scholars like Monsieur Jourdain,
astonished at having created prose for forty years without knowing it,
and who will have difficulty in persuading themselves that when they
call their servant John to bring their slippers, they have spoken
nothing less than--prose.

We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal
reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from
revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has
been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of
it a sort of special function or aristocratic circle. No one is
astonished when he learns from physiology that every cellule is an
organism and every organism a cellule or synthesis of cellules. No one
is astonished at finding in a lofty mountain the same chemical elements
that compose a small stone or fragment. There is not one physiology of
small animals and one of large animals; nor is there a special chemical
theory of stones as distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is
not a science of lesser intuition distinct from a science of greater
intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition distinct from artistic
intuition. There is but one Aesthetic, the science of intuitive or
expressive knowledge, which is the aesthetic or artistic fact. And this
Aesthetic is the true analogy of Logic. Logic includes, as facts of the
same nature, the formation of the smallest and most ordinary concept and
the most complicated scientific and philosophical system.

[Sidenote] _Artistic genius._

Nor can we admit that the word _genius_ or artistic genius, as distinct
from the non-genius of the ordinary man, possesses more than a
quantitative signification. Great artists are said to reveal us to
ourselves. But how could this be possible, unless there be identity of
nature between their imagination and ours, and unless the difference be
only one of quantity? It were well to change _poeta nascitur_ into _homo
nascitur poeta_: some men are born great poets, some small. The cult and
superstition of the genius has arisen from this quantitative difference
having been taken as a difference of quality. It has been forgotten that
genius is not something that has fallen from heaven, but humanity
itself. The man of genius, who poses or is represented as distant from
humanity, finds his punishment in becoming or appearing somewhat
ridiculous. Examples of this are the _genius_ of the romantic period and
the _superman_ of our time.

But it is well to note here, that those who claim unconsciousness as the
chief quality of an artistic genius, hurl him from an eminence far above
humanity to a position far below it. Intuitive or artistic genius, like
every form of human activity, is always conscious; otherwise it would be
blind mechanism. The only thing that may be wanting to the artistic
genius is the _reflective_ consciousness, the superadded consciousness
of the historian or critic, which is not essential to artistic genius.

[Sidenote] _Content and form in Aesthetic._

The relation between matter and form, or between _content and form_, as
it is generally called, is one of the most disputed questions in
Aesthetic. Does the aesthetic fact consist of content alone, or of form
alone, or of both together? This question has taken on various meanings,
which we shall mention, each in its place. But when these words are
taken as signifying what we have above defined, and matter is understood
as emotivity not aesthetically elaborated, that is to say, impressions,
and form elaboration, intellectual activity and expression, then our
meaning cannot be doubtful. We must, therefore, reject the thesis that
makes the aesthetic fact to consist of the content alone (that is, of
the simple impressions), in like manner with that other thesis, which
makes it to consist of a junction between form and content, that is, of
impressions plus expressions. In the aesthetic fact, the aesthetic
activity is not added to the fact of the impressions, but these latter
are formed and elaborated by it. The impressions reappear as it were in
expression, like water put into a filter, which reappears the same and
yet different on the other side. The aesthetic fact, therefore, is form,
and nothing but form.

From this it results, not that the content is something superfluous (it
is, on the contrary, the necessary point of departure for the expressive
fact); but that _there is no passage_ between the quality of the content
and that of the form. It has sometimes been thought that the content, in
order to be aesthetic, that is to say, transformable into form, should
possess some determinate or determinable quality. But were that so, then
form and content, expression and impression, would be the same thing. It
is true that the content is that which is convertible into form, but it
has no determinable qualities until this transformation takes place. We
know nothing of its nature. It does not become aesthetic content at
once, but only when it has been effectively transformed. Aesthetic
content has also been defined as what is _interesting_. That is not an
untrue statement; it is merely void of meaning. What, then, is
interesting? Expressive activity? Certainly the expressive activity
would not have raised the content to the dignity of form, had it not
been interested. The fact of its having been interested is precisely the
fact of its raising the content to the dignity of form. But the word
"interesting" has also been employed in another not illegitimate sense,
which we shall explain further on.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the imitation of nature and of the artistic
illusion._

The proposition that art is _imitation of nature_ has also several
meanings. Now truth has been maintained or at least shadowed with these
words, now error. More frequently, nothing definite has been thought.
One of the legitimate scientific meanings occurs when imitation is
understood as representation or intuition of nature, a form of
knowledge. And when this meaning has been understood, by placing in
greater relief the spiritual character of the process, the other
proposition becomes also legitimate: namely, that art is the
_idealization_ or _idealizing_ imitation of nature. But if by imitation
of nature be understood that art gives mechanical reproductions, more or
less perfect duplicates of natural objects, before which the same tumult
of impressions caused by natural objects begins over again, then the
proposition is evidently false. The painted wax figures that seem to be
alive, and before which we stand astonished in the museums where such
things are shown, do not give aesthetic intuitions. Illusion and
hallucination have nothing to do with the calm domain of artistic
intuition. If an artist paint the interior of a wax-work museum, or if
an actor give a burlesque portrait of a man-statue on the stage, we
again have spiritual labour and artistic intuition. Finally, if
photography have anything in it of artistic, it will be to the extent
that it transmits the intuition of the photographer, his point of view,
the pose and the grouping which he has striven to attain. And if it be
not altogether art, that is precisely because the element of nature in
it remains more or less insubordinate and ineradicable. Do we ever,
indeed, feel complete satisfaction before even the best of photographs?
Would not an artist vary and touch up much or little, remove or add
something to any of them?

[Sidenote] _Critique of art conceived as a sentimental not a
theoretical fact. Aesthetic appearance and feeling._

The statements repeated so often, with others similar, that art is not
knowledge, that it does not tell the truth, that it does not belong to
the world of theory, but to the world of feeling, arise from the failure
to realize exactly the theoretic character of the simple intuition. This
simple intuition is quite distinct from intellectual knowledge, as it is
distinct from the perception of the real. The belief that only the
intellective is knowledge, or at the most also the perception of the
real, also arises from the failure to grasp the theoretic character of
the simple intuition. We have seen that intuition is knowledge, free of
concepts and more simple than the so-called perception of the real.
Since art is knowledge and form, it does not belong to the world of
feeling and of psychic material. The reason why so many aestheticians
have so often insisted that art is _appearance_ (_Schein_), is precisely
because they have felt the necessity of distinguishing it from the more
complex fact of perception by maintaining its pure intuitivity. For the
same reason it has been claimed that art is _sentiment_. In fact, if the
concept as content of art, and historical reality as such, be excluded,
there remains no other content than reality apprehended in all its
ingenuousness and immediateness in the vital effort, in _sentiment_,
that is to say, pure intuition.

[Sidenote] _Critique of theory of aesthetic senses._

The theory of the _aesthetic senses_ has also arisen from the failure to
establish, or from having lost to view the character of the expression
as distinct from the impression, of the form as distinct from the
matter.

As has just been pointed out, this reduces itself to the error of
wishing to seek a passage from the quality of the content to that of the
form. To ask, in fact, what the aesthetic senses may be, implies asking
what sensible impressions may be able to enter into aesthetic
expressions, and what must of necessity do so. To this we must at once
reply, that all impressions can enter into aesthetic expressions or
formations, but that none are bound to do so. Dante raised to the
dignity of form not only the "sweet colour of the oriental sapphire"
(visual impression), but also tactile or thermic impressions, such as
the "thick air" and the "fresh rivulets" which "parch all the more" the
throat of the thirsty. The belief that a picture yields only visual
impressions is a curious illusion. The bloom of a cheek, the warmth of a
youthful body, the sweetness and freshness of a fruit, the cutting of a
sharpened blade, are not these, also, impressions that we have from a
picture? Maybe they are visual? What would a picture be for a
hypothetical man, deprived of all or many of his senses, who should in
an instant acquire the sole organ of sight? The picture we are standing
opposite and believe we see only with our eyes, would appear to his eyes
as little more than the paint-smeared palette of a painter.

Some who hold firmly to the aesthetic character of given groups of
impressions (for example, the visual, the auditive), and exclude others,
admit, however, that if visual and auditive impressions enter _directly_
into the aesthetic fact, those of the other senses also enter into it,
but only as _associated_. But this distinction is altogether arbitrary.
Aesthetic expression is a synthesis, in which it is impossible to
distinguish direct and indirect. All impressions are by it placed on a
level, in so far as they are aestheticised. He who takes into himself
the image of a picture or of a poem does not experience, as it were, a
series of impressions as to this image, some of which have a prerogative
or precedence over others. And nothing is known of what happens prior to
having received it, for the distinctions made after reflexion have
nothing to do with art.

The theory of the aesthetic senses has also been presented in another
way; that is to say, as the attempt to establish what physiological
organs are necessary for the aesthetic fact. The physiological organ or
apparatus is nothing but a complex of cellules, thus and thus
constituted, thus and thus disposed; that is to say, it is merely
physical and natural fact or concept. But expression does not recognize
physiological facts. Expression has its point of departure in the
impressions, and the physiological path by which these have found their
way to the mind is to it altogether indifferent. One way or another
amounts to the same thing: it suffices that they are impressions.

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