The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic by Tony C. Brown (review)

Tony C. Brown's study of eighteenth-century aesthetics does not, as many studies do, focus on objects of aestheticization, nor does it unhesitatingly assume that the aesthetic is itself a stable or settled human experience. Rather, Brown takes a progressive methodological stance that aims to unite both historical and theoretical approaches to the subject. Taking a non-national approach, Brown examines the difficulties that English, German, and French writers have with thinking the New World in the eighteenth century; a century that "put particular pressure on European modes of understanding the human's relation to itself and to the world" (xii). The result is a smart insight into the "clear and confused" (47) formulation of knowledge that Brown argues constitutes eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.

While The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic is focused on a particular subject, eighteenth-century aesthetics, Brown's background in critical theory, philosophy, and comparative literature allows him to situate his study among broader ideas that were developing in the eighteenth century, such as the field of anthropology and the formulation of the concept of Europe itself. In part 1, Brown articulates his theory of "the Enlightenment problematic," which he believes springs from the eighteenth-century notion of the primitive, which is simultaneously "necessary and exceedingly difficult to think" (xii). For Brown, the difficulty that eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists face in their attempts to think the primitive causes a loss of confidence in their own ability to understand their place as humans in relation to the world. This loss of confidence articulates a sense of self for Europeans, which their encounters with the "New World" both maintained and perturbed.

Brown uses a dual historicist and theoretical approach because of his concern over the "universal sovereignty" (x) that history is often accorded. Brown's study can therefore be situated among recent critical conversations about these two approaches. Of late, both positions have been under fire. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus critique the prevalence of psychoanalysis and Marxism as "metalanguages" in which "the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses" (3), and Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox argue that historicism is unable "to acknowledge or engage positions that do not reflect its own fundamental assumptions" (xii). Brown attempts to proceed in spite of these critics' positions by putting the metaphysical question "Why something rather than nothing?" back into historicism. Doing this allows Brown to move past the idea that historical context is the only valid mode of explanation, away from an inquiry of representation merely as representation, and to instead inquire about the object of representation itself. Brown's methodology is therefore indebted to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie (1967) and Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading (1979). However, for Derrida, the eighteenth century constituted the time when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrestled with the problem of interpreting writing, while for Brown, it is the time when "the primitive as almost nothing must be grappled with as a breach in anthropological security" (xvi).

For eighteenth-century theorists, the aesthetic experience occurs between the sensation and the understanding. Most of these theorists, however, do not differentiate the variations in time and space in which these experiences occur. As such, Brown is right to point out the high frequency of exotic figures that seem to occur "[w]hen an aesthetic theorist does look to move beyond the indicative to formulate the substantive makeup of an aesthetic experience (what it is and what causes it)" (5). Yet the prevalence of the primitive only serves to bring about the Enlightenment problematic. Brown explains that the Enlightenment problematic "is that of thinking the temporal and the non-, pre-, or atemporal on the same plane" (1). Rather than an outright contradiction of terms, though, we are left instead with an aporia or impasse. Brown explains, "One cannot think through the problem in its own terms, yet those...