Aesthetics à la Mode

James Noggle’s book on taste opens with the poem “The Woman of Taste” (1733), which ridicules the fine ladies at the opera:

But ah! Beware, lest list’ning to the song,Your transport, or your sorrow, shou’d be wrong;When you shou’d smile or sob, shou’d laugh or cry,The hint still taking from the neighbour’s eye.

Although it is tempting to denounce the woman of taste as a fraud, Noggle notes, “She is doing just what people of taste do. Though there is irony in the relationship between the self-absorbing transport and the lateral social checking, the compound as such does not betray taste. It rather makes taste what it is.” There is an “imperative for it to be correlated with the feelings of one’s neighbours, presumed to be of the right sort” (29).

Noggle’s readings of the “double moment” of taste—the feeling, then the checking, or, in more elegant terms, the reflection—focus on moments when the quiet workings of taste unravel. He rereads in particular the relationship of ideology to taste’s “double moment.” “Most scholars have thought that by connecting discrete feelings to larger social structures, taste smoothly and tacitly enlists individuals’ immediate impulses to support consumer culture, the market for luxuries, and the elitism of the commercial classes” (3). Noggle does not deny this thesis; indeed, he both pursues and confirms it. What he disputes is that this process was unconscious: “The theoretical understanding of taste as an unknowingly obeyed ‘aesthetic ideology’ must be revised” (3). He suggests that the reflective moments of taste offer “a critical potential in eighteenth-century writing that has gone unseen by theorists from Joseph Addison to his many heirs among cultural historians today. This ‘doubleness’ permits astute writers in the period to pull taste apart, to explore the gaps between immediate pleasures and cultural progress, and so use taste to criticize the very ideological constructs that many scholars think it upholds” (4).

In his reading of Evelina at the opera, for example, Noggle focuses on a single moment of absorption, Evelina’s surprised rapture at the singing of a famous Italian castrato, which, however, is the same moment she becomes an object of amusement—she is sitting with her unruly, trading-class cousins, the Branghtons, who talk throughout the performance and mock Evelina for her affectation. “Tasteful attention,” and “taste as a social performance” can never be separated, notes Noggle, while for Burney, the latter kills the former (149). Social awareness destroys the possibilities for absorption, even as such absorption confirms one’s sense of self. For Noggle, this is a paradigmatic moment of modernity, its subject caught within a hopelessly compromised taste, at the perfect intersection of pure sensual enjoyment and unavoidable class-consciousness.

Noggle promises to illustrate those moments in the texts he reads where we can see an explicit, or at least partial, recognition of the ideologies taste does not always confirm. Further, close attention to historical context, he promises, will show the difference made by these radical observations about eighteenth-century ideology revealed in the moment of perception. This is a tall order, and it is only uncertainly achieved. The Temporality of Taste is illuminating and learned, and it marshals vast resources; the progress-of- commerce rhetoric of the New Whig hegemony summons, for example, the combined forces of Karl Marx, J. G. A. Pocock, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Lacan. An array of eighteenth-century letters, memoirs, poems, conversational verses, even newspapers, material that conveys some of the vigor the subject of taste itself generated in the period, help make the case. Still, the book is a very difficult read. Part of this is the terrain itself—an analysis of implied views, of contradiction and paradox, of unexpressed assumptions, and the nuances of fantastical ways of thinking. And part of it is Noggle’s prose, so elliptically theorized it threatens at times to exceed the grasp of even the most determined reader.

Noggle...