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

40 looking away
impossible, 7 it is displaced into attitudes toward our most explicitly contin-
gent perceptions: Schein, fleeting visual phenomena, and the rhetorical trompe
l’oeil of the appearance of appearance. Lingering among the spectra, Cole-
ridge expresses something we do not feel entitled to say because it is so
comprehensive and banal: the world as given leaves a lot to be desired, and we
can neither be reconciled to it nor simply accept our lack of reconciliation.
1. purple haze
Like many people who experience dissociation, Coleridge thought himself
isolated and misunderstood. He ascribed this state of affairs to his
phenomenological and epistemological deviance. The inverse ratio between
Coleridge’s consciousness of his perceptions and his ability to communicate
with others is partly a matter of philosophical taste, as he notes.
Thus Coleridge complains of “the pain I suffer & have suffered, in differing
so from such men, such true men of England, as [. . .], & their affectionate
love of Locke” (N 1418; see also N 3566, N 4605). The dominant
attitude of empiricism, he believes, is only nominally liberal, intolerant of
alternative perspectives. In this context, Coleridge’s plagiarisms of idealists
express his hunger to be in agreement with someone at last. 8
7. Again, the situation is asymmetrical, since satisfaction with the inevitable is permitted:
although it’s supposedly perverse to protest or object to nontragic natural conditions,
it isn’t supposedly perverse to affirm the same conditions. It takes someone as
meticulous as Wittgenstein to be annoyed by pointless affirmation.
8. Tillottama Rajan and Julie Ellison, especially, have pointed out the self-abnegation
in Coleridge’s sociability, a subordination that renders suspect his desire to form happy
alternative families. “The wish for vicarious gratification, in poems written throughout
Coleridge’s career, produces stories of self-exclusion,” Ellison remarks (Delicate Subjects:
Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990], xii).
Rajan reads Coleridge’s figuration of auditors within the conversation poems as the invocation
of “a surrogate self, through whom the poet must represent himself in a place
where he is not.” Unlike Wordsworth, “Coleridge remains physically isolated from the
being on to whom he projects his own naiveté, able to live his dreams only through another
and at a distance that seems to negate his claim of proximity to this being.” The
distance and miscommunication conveyed by all this conversation, she notes, do not
lead Coleridge to revise his ideal of conversation: “the inversion of the conversation
mode...rather confirms, from a position of complete despair, a vision which Coleridge
is content to celebrate in the mode of exile” (Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism
[Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980], 229–230, 233).