Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World

Abstract

Atlantic AesthesisBooks and Sensus Communis in the New World Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio) I take the aesthetic to concern the formation of communities of sense—communities in which consensus about the value of sensory information (such as judgments regarding beauty) binds people together. This definition of the aesthetic draws on but departs from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who describes the aesthetic in terms of “sensus communis” or common sense. By “sensus communis” Kant does not mean common sense in its vernacular meaning so much as sensing in common—or shared sensation and, importantly, shared judgment regarding that sensation. For Kant, such judgments have universal validity: on my reading, however, the shared terrain of aesthetic value is one that creates community (as well as exclusions from it) rather than one that emerges from it.1 For this reason, the formation of a sensus communis should be understood as an ongoing process (rather than a singular event) and aesthetic judgment, in turn, must be understood as far from universal. This account of the procedural force of the aesthetic is one that leads me to choose the term aesthesis over aesthetic in my title: I use the term aesthesis to signal an activity (of judgment, of shared sensation and meaning making, of community formation) rather than to remark upon the quality of an object or experience. With respect to the early Atlantic world, this emphasis (on process) has particular relevance: from 1492 forward, the Atlantic world was a scene of violent encounter and contested community formation among indigenous Americans, Europeans, and enslaved Africans. The genocidal history of European settler colonialism in the Americas and the development of an Atlantic economy based on the stolen and coerced labor of enslaved Africans form the signal scenes of Atlantic history. But in the mix with the violence of imperial domination is a complex and varied history of material negotiations between peoples that took [End Page 367] place at the ragged edges of language and culture. In this history we find not just a “middle ground” (to draw on Richard White’s valuable account of temporary shared sovereignty between European settler colonials and native peoples), but something more robust and sustaining—the aesthesis of survivance, and the generative and creative force of aesthesis in the shadow of imperial violence.2 In what follows, I explore instances of what I describe as “aesthesis from below” in the Americas—aesthesis grounded in the material and sensate conditions of living in shared terrain—rather than aesthetics from above, or the imposition of a set of tastes that colonize subjects by way of bodily sentience and norms of civility.3 More complexly, I mean to suggest that the aesthetic is never wholly distinct from aesthesis—from the process by which sensation becomes a site of shared meaning and, conversely, the process by which sensation shears away from the constraints of collective sense into materiality as well. And thus aesthetics from above necessarily trades in aesthesis from below, despite claims (or allegations) to the contrary. What interests me, then, is the tipping point that the aesthetic names, or better put, the tipping itself involved in the process of aesthesis—an oscillation between the material and the formal, the ontic and the mimetic, the subjective and the collective. The stakes of this argument with respect to critical discussions of aesthetics and Atlantic literary studies are worth spelling out. The critical turn in the past three decades toward cultural and historicist studies largely set aside evaluative aesthetic modes of literary analysis. The “greatness” of a literary work (an evaluation that, in turn, defined a constrained canon of works judged to partake in such greatness) ceased to determine the worthiness of an object of study; rather, the cultural currency of literary texts and objects was itself the subject of attention. Two corollary developments were associated with this turn: first, a vastly expanded canon of texts became legitimate objects of study and second, aesthetic evaluation was cast as ideologically suspect—the servant of an elitist agenda aimed at abstraction from and obfuscation of the historical and political realities of the world.4 In the field of literary criticism, then, aesthetics are not infrequently associated...