Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

16 looking away
tion, the teleology of judgment is eluded, and the world feels lighter.
We’re a hair’s breadth here from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgments,
which also enjoy the lightness of nonconceptual perception. I’ll explain in
a moment why this hair’s breadth nonetheless makes the difference between
Kant’s aesthetic and its other. For now, I only want to point out that
the suspensiveness and potential evasiveness of appearance with regard to
fact—the manner in which object perception holds itself apart from fact
perception without negating it, and so lends itself to personification as gentle
and noncommittal—gives appearance its fanciful appeal. The association
of appearance with mereness, lightness, radiance, and hypothesis is
our only way of registering the absence of a weight we carry without
knowing it, the perceived pressure of the given world and its natural laws
on our potential endorsement. 20
This pressure is itself “Phantom or Fact,” as Coleridge would put it. To
feel the pressure is to personify facts, projecting on them a desire for approval
that only other people could really demand. Keats appreciates the
flower for declining to call, “admire me I am a violet!” 21 —and while Keats
was no stranger to the enigmatic force of other people’s mere existence, it’s
possible to measure the distance between his state of mind and Coleridge’s
20. As some forms of appearance have the effect of deferring the imperative to endorsement,
appearance may also be experienced as qualifying the endorsement required
by presenting or seeming to present degrees of facticity. Some facts are better established
than others and could merit different degrees of acceptance; the experience of
mere appearance before or after fact perception awakens our sense of such a possibility.
As though we thought too many givens were all too well established, the notion of degrees
of facticity can also become attached figuratively (and weirdly) to different types
of objects. Elaine Scarry, for example, argues that flowers charm because they are already
filmy and imagelike (Dreaming by the Book: Imagining under Authorial Instruction
[New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001]). Sextus rightly dismisses the epistemological
significance of variously organized objects: laciness or diaphaneity cannot lend an object
a lesser degree of actuality, or qualify our fact perception of it. The attractiveness of rarefaction,
though, responds to the desire for more degrees of actuality, fewer exigencies,
more options. The transient objects typically celebrated by lyric poetry may be experienced
as less demanding with more legitimacy, since they can obligate us only for the
few moments they last. On the various associations of substance understood as rarefied
or “massy,” see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: U
of California P, 2000).
21. Letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert
Gittings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 61.