The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
this inconsistency of taste as a failure of poetry as communication to inculcate proper values. For Coleridge, the point is that readers’ negative experience of Wordsworth’s authorship of new meaning turns them back on their own deficiencies of judgment, challenging their basic self-understanding:
Not being able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive, but were not quite certain, that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarreling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that / Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgement, and were now about to censure without reason. (71-72)
Readers’ experience of negative projection onto poetry they cannot cognitively process reveals a gap in self-consciousness that in turn betrays the ideological nature of these seemingly benign but in fact pernicious defects of judgment. Both cause and effect of such defective judgment is not simply an incoherent but a paranoiac reaction to the new meaning of experimental poetry: “In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger” (71). The emotional regulation of taste later advocated by Richards here is undermined by a disjunction between two forms of self-understanding that ought to be desynonymized, as Coleridge shows in a remarkable footnote that follows. In it, Coleridge thinks through, well in advance of Louis Althusser, a diagnosis of ideology in terms of the desynonymy of two pronouns of identity, I and me — one that is fully accessible to Jacques Lacan’s account of identification and misrecognition:
In opinions of long continuance, and in which we had never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. . . . Thus in the well known bull, “I was a fine child, but they changed me;” the first conception expressed in the word “I,” is that of personal identity . . . the second expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed. (72)
The fundamental desynonymy of I and me shows how identity has been confused between terms of which there is a “sensation, but without the sense, of their connection,” and Coleridge brilliantly sees this synthetic confusion as the “antithesis” of a paranoiac investment in the object of inadequate judgment (that is, the Lyrical Ballads) by the inadequate critic. Such critical incoherence is the symptom of a slippage in the social reception, thus ideological reproduction, of authority; its symptoms may, in Althusser’s terms, be seen as resulting from a kind of negative hailing by the object of judgment that leads to a condition in which one feels that to be “convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault.”30 For Coleridge, there is a direct connection between inadequate self-consciousness and an emotionally ungoverned response to being addressed by the defamiliarizing form of poetry’s new meaning: “I have heard at different times, and from different individuals every single poem [in Lyrical Ballads] extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which . . . seem to have won universal praise” (BL, 74). Taste must be brought under regulation, finally, to counter the destabilizing antagonisms of new meaning in poetry, and the rewards of taste are not only aesthetic pleasure but power and mastery, a cultural imperative: “In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, become influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality” (85).
While Coleridge’s desynonymy of identity and identification (I and me) leads, on the one hand, to the inculcation of power as appropriate response to and judgment of poems “of the loftier kind,” the vagaries of poetic indeterminacy — that is, the problem of differences of judgment due to the slippage of language in the aesthetic object itself — are addressed to a different standard of regulation than the inculcation of critical mastery. In other words, Coleridge desynonymizes terms for identity as an example of an even more general linguistic process by which meanings that have been subsumed under imprecise terms should, and even historically will, be distinguished by a desynonymy. This historical moment of the construction of identity has immediate practical consequences for the unity of the subject, lest it fall (as in the fundamental misrecognition of me as I) into errors of judgment by means of a more general misrecognition of language as eliding differences between terms. There is strong support here for Hamilton’s reading of Coleridge (in favor of language rather than transcendence) in Coleridge’s prematurely abandoned argument for a self-consciousness produced through language as an alternative to the imagination that will be “transcendentally deduced” in chapter 13’s missing account.
Coleridge includes his desynonymy of identity in a series of related linguistic moments that distinguish general from particular, identity from relation, standard from idiosyncratic. In a bizarre overlay of the biblical notion of primal androgyny onto both biology and semantics, linguistic history takes the form of a parthenogenetic paramecium in making such distinctions happen as language splits meanings off from its original body:
There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria [scholia: “a ‘barely-there immortality’ of the tiny organisms”] which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens until the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in the two halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. (83)
Recent accounts of linguistic change propose an altogether different notion of new meaning occurring at such a protoplasmic moment of division and polysemy; in one account, original meanings are distributed between different metaphorical domains and interpreted by different pragmatic contexts, resulting in linguistic innovation.31 Coleridge at times seems to understand such contextually reflexive processes of semantic change, as when “sounds” lead to an “immense nomenclature” as a result of their use by “rational beings in a social state.” Going through the chain of antitheses that structures his meditation, however, we perceive a more monovalent account of semantic change in which the practice of desynonymy, much like that of the Russian Formalists’ ostranenie, works to undo the bad symbolizing produced by habituated judgment in providing both the “sense as well as the sensation” of differences Coleridge thinks of as simply binary oppositions. In this sense, meanings seem to have devolved, psychologically as well as historically, from an idealized originary moment Coleridge elsewhere postulated in language as the “Verb Substantive,” a linguistic/existential monad (the verb to be) that can only be dissociated by the subject in the vagaries of actual grammatical predication.32 As a result, Coleridge cannot entirely account for the new meaning brought about by cultural change, as much as he is provoked by its linguistic evidence. This is one explanation for Coleridge’s preference for Wordsworth’s sublime address, in opposition to his borrowings from common language, in the second half of the Biographia, a judgment reflecting the contradiction between self-consciousness and language that produced the moment of desynonymy in the first place, especially as it devalued social contexts for discriminations of language. Thus the paradox of Coleridge’s criticism for Hamilton is its advocacy of a transcendental “emptying out” (identifiable in both romantic and postmodern poetry) where “the sublime . . . only becomes sublime by losing its sense” (166). If Coleridge had known the later uses to which a sublime poetics of organic form were to be put and rather had developed the fuller implications of his account of desynonymy, it might have saved him from the defensiveness of his Christian conservatism, as well as saved us from some bad poetry.
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