The General, the Particular, and the Art of the Commonplace

Abstract

The rejection of abstraction and generalization in Romantic aesthetics has a long afterlife in nineteenth-century culture. The emergence of particularity as a countervailing source of value is exemplified by a new and philosophically informed appreciation for the humble details depicted in Dutch painting, while an emphasis on the effects of blur and soft focus in early discussion of photography as an art form attests to the persistence of a contrary valuation of ideal types. These cultural debates form a network of conceptual and historical links connecting William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wordsworth’s poetics of the everyday and Eliot’s realism do not straightforwardly valorize particularity, but instead deploy an unstable and generative dynamic between specificity, analogy, and generality. This dynamic is also at work in Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance,” a labile range of similarities among individual instances that cannot be reduced to a single common element. The philosopher’s early formulations of “family resemblance” are revealingly bound up with nineteenth-century intellectual culture through the figure of Francis Galton, whose experiments in composite photography represent a unique convergence of scientific and aesthetic investment in abstraction. Intended as visualizations of statistically determined common traits, Galton’s composite portraits (including the “criminal,” the “scientist,” the “Jew”) were an object of fascination for Wittgenstein, who repeatedly adduced them as examples of errant method and yet also commissioned and held as a keepsake a composite portrait of himself and his siblings. As a form of analysis and of recollection, “family resemblance” emerges as an affectively charged approach to the imagination of the ordinary as a ground of aesthetic and epistemic value.