Blake’s <i>Milton</i> and the Nonlife of Affect

Previous articleNext article FreeBlake’s Milton and the Nonlife of AffectJoel FaflakJoel FaflakWestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRomanticism inherits an earlier eighteenth-century concern with how humans respond to the world by further exploring affect as a mode of communication integral to human sociality and existence: sentio ergo sum. Romantic criticism explores feeling as a transference between expression, cognition, and cogitation, which presents its own dangers. For instance, Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (Poetical Works 740) names the wellspring of poetic inspiration but also of human vitality itself. As the matrix through which human experience materializes and understands itself, a central tenet of Wordsworth’s verse, feeling is the human afflatus and bonding agent of personal and social expressions, exchanges, and obligations. Wordsworth’s subsequent description of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” however, implies a traumatic latency between feeling and the cognition of feeling: feel first; remember and think later. This delay further names an anxiety about feeling preceding thought and memory, which can be ambivalent and devious records of experience. On one hand, Wordsworth extols the potent and florid effects of feeling, even if they necessitate a measured response; on the other hand, his verse tarries with the autonomy of feeling as a parallel mode of cognition that at once evinces and challenges the very concept of the human.1Recent criticism has begun to appreciate more fully the complex ways in which Romanticism understands feeling.2 Richard Sha argues that emotions are “necessarily multiple, and by implication, transient” and “fungible”; they convey intentionality but lack agency and thus confuse the “border between matter and sociality” (Motion 31). Such confusion, Michael Hardt argues, transforms the “ontology of the human” (xi). For Rei Terada, feeling’s states of exception challenge “intentional subjectivity” and thus mark the “nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject” (4–5). In moments of extreme passion, for instance, the light of sense goes out to reveal things as they are, at which moments the apparent identities of a subject vanish. Such extremities track the virtual existence of affect, what Brian Massumi calls its “zone of indistinction” (66), as if always to ask, “Where am I?” What individuals feel along their pulses registers the natural but also preternatural labor of their sensoria as they perpetually touch upon and withdraw from the world. Feelings embed subjects in the world as a first line of cognitive access, except that the immediacy of feeling eludes a subject’s immediate grasp; where and how individuals live in and through their feelings are precisely where that life at once arrests and evades their understanding. This both instantaneous and recessive affective ecology registers the life of the human while also making humans strangers to themselves, evoking what I would call the nonhuman or nonlife of affect.Borrowing from speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux, I argue that feeling challenges “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). This “temporal discrepancy between thinking and being,” like the latency between feeling and emotion in Wordsworth’s Preface, speaks “not only [to] statements about events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species” (112). To such unthinkable events Meillassoux ascribes the terms “‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter,’” which “indicat[e] the traces of past life … but [also] materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event” (10), such as the luminescence of a star reaching us after billions of years of light travel.3 To think beyond the “givenness” of being—to think of a being beyond thought—is thus to locate “that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere” (5, 7). For my present purpose, Meillassoux’s speculation speaks to the attempt of Romantic writers to think of and through feeling as both embodied and disembodied, individual and social, local and global, within and beyond temporal immediacy, alive and beyond life.One of the most challenging accounts of feeling produced by Romanticism is William Blake’s Milton: A Poem in Two Books, written and illuminated between 1804 and 1810, the year it was published.4 The affective labor of Blake’s verse asks its readers to think after the finitude of correlation and thus materializes a “world devoid of humanity” (Meillassoux 127), feeling as the “feeling of being on foreign territory.” Feeling constitutes what Timothy Morton, partly responding to Meillassoux but in the vein of object-oriented ontology, an offshoot of speculative realism, calls a “hyperobject,” a thing, such as climate, that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). Unfolding across past, present, and future, a hyperobject “remains nowhere at all in empirical reality, an object with thousands, perhaps millions, of qualities with no actual concrete manifestation of itself in its totality,” such that “[r]eality therefore suddenly becomes radically inconsistent with human experience” (Washington 451). Milton immerses its readers in feeling as hyperobject, as if to make them feel what it feels like to be inside feeling itself as the nonlife of affect. The poem climaxes in an amorphous transaction between bodily, environmental, and symbolic forces whose involuted atmospheric evolution Blake figures as a Moebius strip composed of letters at once individually legible and collectively entangled: “The Clouds of Ololon” wrap “round [Blake’s] limbs” as a “Garment [of War] dipped in blood / Written within & without in woven letters.”5 This moment of revelation produces less knowledge or enlightenment than the terrors of consciousness: “Selfhood … must be put off & annihilated always, / To cleanse the Face of [one’s] Spirit by Self-examination” (40 [46]: 36–37; E 143). Self-annihilation and self-examination coexist in what Theodor Adorno terms negative dialectic: not a Hegelian negation that results in the positive sublation of a greater awakening or unity, but the negative awakening to the limits of knowledge, an “‘anti-system’” that “use[s] the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity” (xx).Recent criticism explores how Blake’s visionary imagination pushes his readers to consider the posthuman and nonhuman dimensions of the experience materialized by reading Blake. For Steven Goldsmith, “the transformative agency of reading does not come easily in Milton, … meeting resistance every step of the way” (313). Blake’s verse, in Sha’s words, “performs a simultaneous annihilation of the self without getting rid of the self” (Imagination 142). This thwarted comprehension assaults the ego as a reader struggles to understand herself and others. Like the Sons of Los as “Labourers of the Vintage,” we “touch each other & recede; to cross & change & return” (26 [28]: 1, 6; E 123). Whatever “Visions of Eternity” readers glean in this process, “we see only as it were the hem of their garments / When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond’rous Visions” (10–12).6 In perpetual conflict with a Urizenic rationality that threatens to atomize humans as cognitive mechanisms, Blake envisions a world in which the idea of a “fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (Horkheimer and Adorno 3). For Blake, revelation and enlightenment are less parallel than uncanny contraries, the feeling or experience between which inter-animates both forces. Or as Goldsmith argues, “we have hardly begun to notice those emotions in Blake that, rather than transforming the world, transform the reader’s desire for empowerment” (312).Milton does battle with its own certainty to produce a further paradox: to fight the disaster of a process of enlightenment that, aiming for the static ideal of absolute knowledge, signifies another form of nonlife, Blake, to borrow a verb still current in his time, disasters enlightenment. The Preface to Milton calls this the ceaseless “Mental Fight” (1.13; E 95) of a mind/body transference Sha explores as Blake’s neurological imagination.7 From this Clausewitzian state of total neural conflict, Jerusalem (which in Blake’s mythos is ultimately Babylon’s uncanny other) rises from the ruin of its own certainty to produce a further catastrophe: Eternal Death in Golganooza, the city of art as “heaps of smoking ruins” that are “ever building, ever falling” (5: 40, 6: 1–2; E 99), just as the Four Zoas “All fell toward the Center in dire ruin, sinking down” (19 [21]: 21; E 112), as if perpetually into the creative black hole of enlightenment itself. To read Milton is thus to enter a transactional interpretive field (and minefield) of battle “mobilized precisely by the contradictions it struggle[s] endlessly to ‘reconcile’” (Rajan, “(Dis)figuring” 384). This conflict of interpretations more than invites or incites a reader’s psychosomatic response to the trauma of not knowing; it literally makes a reader feel what Deborah Britzman calls the difficulty of education, which “makes us nervous,” like “psychoanalysis,” in that it “touches upon raw nerves” (3).8 I shall first read this terror in terms of the relation between psychiatry and mesmerism, both emerging in Blake’s time, and eventually in terms of psychiatry’s later radicalization as psychoanalysis, whose future shadows Milton casts upon the reader’s present as the self’s disaster at the limit of psychoanalysis.9Animating this process is the “electric flame of Milton’s awful precipitate descent,” which awakens “Albions sleeping Humanity” as he “began to turn upon his Couch” (20 [22]: 25; E 114). Here “electric flame” signifies the formative process transpiring between Milton, Blake, and Albion as well as the drive of this evolution, as if to name the sheer drive of feeling itself. Milton’s “descent” as “electric flame” takes shape through the bodies it affects, which in turn materializes the poem as a protean sensorium whose movements, less shapes or identities than what Blake calls “States” of feeling, transmogrify a subject’s desire for enlightenment as much as harness and transform the latent potential of enlightenment. Like the “Energy” or “Eternal Delight” (Plate 4; E 34) Blake describes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the “electric flame” in Milton releases a reader from the “Ratio of the five senses,” which positions her at the “abyss of the five senses” (Marriage Plate 6; E 35), suspended within the nonlife of revelation. Laboring against enlightenment, revelation thus produces an eviscerating affect, what Goldsmith calls the “agitation” or enthusiasm Blake’s writing effects in its reader as “a potentiality to be otherwise, a future waiting to be mobilized by an audience whose faculties will have been properly roused to act” (9). This agitation leaves readers as much frayed as charged: as much by nuclear fission unleashing madness as by electrical circuit conducting to madness does the poem irradiate enlightenment, a dangerous realization that may or may not come.10 For instance, Blake’s “London” imagines a 1790s politics susceptible to ideological manipulation and thus offers an alternate vision of Georgian England’s version of alternative facts, a hallucination of the potential dementia of Blake’s time, figured in the King’s madness.A key symptom of this anxiety about the dangerous endgame of revelation is psychiatry, which emerges in the Romantic period from an idealistic belief in finding a cure for madness. The German medical doctor Johann Christian Reil coined the term “Psychiaterie” in 1808, three years after Coleridge coined the word “psycho-analytical” (Notebooks 2: 2670).11 Reil’s psychiatry was at once speculative and empirical, philosophical (even metaphysical) and scientific, envisioning a polymathic conflict of psychic faculties, although psychiatry, especially in England, was quick to establish its medical and institutional authority.12 The early moniker for psychiatry was “moral management,” “moral” meaning “emotional” or “psychological,” reflecting the post-Revolutionary spirit of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In 1792 William Tuke opened the Retreat in York for the “moral therapy” of insanity, and at Pennsylvania Hospital Benjamin Rush campaigned for the humane treatment of mental patients. The following year Philippe Pinel, who coined the phrase traitement moral, famously unchained the inmates of the Bicêtre asylum.13 As Roy Porter writes, “the ultimate aim [of early psychiatry] was to calm [rather than further enslave] the mind” and “thus render it receptive to the blandishments of sweet reason.” Patients “had to be motivated through the manipulation of their passions—their hopes and fears, their sensitivity to pleasure and pain, their desire for esteem and revulsion from shame” (Social History 18–19). Here Porter echoes Reil’s utopian desire for “[a] bold race of men [who] dares to take on this gigantic idea, an idea that dizzies the normal burgher, of wiping from the face of the earth one of the most devastating pestilences” (cited in Shorter 8). Reil’s Enlightenment zeal, ironically couched in the rhetoric of apocalypse and bewilderment, but also reflecting how psychiatry was called upon to manipulate a patient’s feelings, is haunted by the specter of psychiatry’s attempt to rewire psychic, behavioral, and above all emotional energies, a Urizenic restraint of a patient’s rather more baroque affective and psychological life.Elsewhere I explore how Romantic psychiatry uses nationalist ideas of social cohesion and well-being to discipline increasingly unwieldy populations, and how Romantic literature at once reinforces and resists this civic conformity.14 Although Blake does not take up psychiatry directly, targeting scientific authority as a “Ratio of the five senses” speaks against the capacity of psychiatry to psychopathologize the dangers of cognitive liberty. Blake would no doubt have targeted psychiatry as a disciplinary endeavor whose “Rational Demonstration” (3), in the name of curing madness, would in turn “dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness / Cast on the Inspired” (Milton 48/41: 8–9), a madness whose creative impulses were the wellspring of Blake’s visionary enterprise and by which he was diagnosed as an artistic and social pariah. Milton refers to this threat as the “Dead … repos’d on [Satan’s] Couch / Beneath the Couch of Albion” (9 [10]: 49–50; E 104), a “Couch / Of death” (15 [17]: 9–10; E 109) that, when entered by Milton’s Shadow, through the “Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence” (3) that enter with him, reveals “His real and immortal Self … as One sleeping on a couch / Of gold” (11–13). The alchemy of this possible transformation is also figured as Orc’s “Couch / Of fire” over which Oothoon and Leutha “hoverd … in interchange of Beauty & Perfection in the darkness / Opening interiorly into Jerusalem & Babylon” (18 [20]: 39–41; E 112). Such tropes evoke the political, religious, and scientific enthusiasms at once enlivening and threatening Blake’s society, although these social energies in turn fire Blake’s imagination.For instance, the language of “fire” and “flame” also references John Birch’s electrical machine, introduced in his 1802 Essay on the Medical Application of which the treatment Blake for his Birch’s both and scientific targeting of no doubt Blake’s in Milton in that Blake Birch’s symbolic as a or “electric flame” within and between and thus bodies and their This on Blake’s description of the of the star of Milton into the Blake’s that of this on my / As a immortal of & at which Blake & it on to Eternity” E the time the of who the and the of immortal are the of [Blake’s] / From out the of his where by / The Eternal his E the “electric flame” of inspiration in bodily, psychic, and Blake’s reality the of the five senses,” a where bodies and transform as feeling Milton Blake’s and the of the of Blake’s both literally and in Blake’s that is the of E in which Blake and its / A a of not with E This is also “the in every individual E also by E in which & his / the & the / self & E in this no of the of is at once and From the ceaseless fight of these “Mental E the poem as Blake’s and he upon the / A E in Here the or of revelation at once and disasters enlightenment, and thus its perpetually in affective by this process the version of psychiatry in mesmerism, a with As “a of and a of and to the of the a distributed and … of an This and all and like the between the alternate name for When it was thought to produce the to the in both individuals and in to its and thus to and other that in a of and which thus its of through his of of with and would touch the from these the of the to and between the of a that of and and the real or of its The psychosomatic of between legitimate and psychic and not to the of and that “electric flame” makes a between and Birch’s On one hand, all from to like a life in and through the bodies it a of agency in which feelings not only within but between This the psychosomatic life of a affective ecology that both and human experience. this of subjects are never if their feelings and thus their very are their more is of how imagination could literally affect not only its terms of being but being itself. a visionary access to the how it to a life of its In the scientific, and accounts of mind/body cognition by I would thus argue that Milton the of as a form of a for Milton’s “electric flame” as a affective drive that shapes and is by the transference between and and thus between the psychosomatic and the poem figures in the of that Milton’s the of Blake’s Milton from that and the of Blake’s the to visionary the form of Milton as a response to these that is at once and and the have upon first the and the poem as a what calls an (cited in and The of Milton as much as the and of Milton’s and apocalypse of Blake’s In the in which to offers an to The poem thus its own bewilderment, which in turn our affective just as in the of the not by the of their but by how a reader the limits of knowledge as the for The of of the earlier Milton the as it Blake reading Milton into the process of off sense of her ceaseless mental fight an apocalypse of enlightenment that with Milton into Blake’s from where Milton on his “Couch of E the of E the of Milton, emerging in the poem as one of Milton the of the E “the Couch of Albion” E 143). Milton, reflecting a that as a process that constitutes itself as it In the in as Blake upon the / A & into its state / To & in the E at which the of the to have its this of leaves a reader to how it to her to the of the poem as a of which her with each On one hand, this process a revelation to the visionary of On the other hand, reading Milton at once and this as of a to the future that tarries with the of not Blake’s Milton, the aim of psychiatry to the affective of its a of by mesmerism, psychiatry into psychoanalysis, which challenges how feeling and makes sense of experience. Although the in to the life of feelings to psychiatry with the limits of understanding. This the scientific authority of but its of calls the of to itself its speculative the where to the of Milton this both for and within its readers as their experience of the terror of enlightenment, how they and live with the matrix of within the calls the of this trauma the of a as the form of Blake’s which as his is in his experience of it This is at once the if space and the radically of feeling of and through the and bodies in space and time, a form and at once embodied and This and process with revelation as an future that may or may not can be no from Milton’s terror of and for its madness both and the affective of revelation in to the argues that memory, produces an of that produces “a radically or of from a and of out between and As a process in which “the has only and to those of both the and the with the challenge of to the of each rather than a life On one hand, the between Milton and Blake, out through a of this On the other hand, Milton envisions a within the of own (Rajan, “(Dis)figuring” 384). The poem thus the evolution by into a that the affective of the poem from or of The awakening that with Milton’s & in the of Blake E endlessly and through the and of the at once and desire for and This apocalypse without a revelation without enlightenment, through a reader’s affective experience of the poem as the nonlife of affect. Milton come to Self E he eventually in E as if to enter the of the of who is in The or of that is the by a “Ratio of the five senses” must be for the self-examination that with to the must first its as one but (and even can except by through the that this E one of Blake’s key for the feeling the perpetually and as it itself and the world that is its the process of the perpetually to a feeling of its feeling, Milton is less to the or of this evolution than to mark the that is both the and the limit of that the of to that one must for the of the and the that is the of death” is both and When it it without The who to into a whose terms are and into a whose with it … the of after calls this space the between actual and symbolic figured through the of the or as drive without “the of a who does not to but

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