Organicism

baldly? Rather, labour over Braille. George Elliott Clarke University of Toronto Organicism Since the demise of the New Criticism, the word “organic” has fallen into disrepute on both aesthetic and political grounds. Increasingly removed, as a dead metaphor, from its context in the life sciences, it has come to signify a whole greater than the sum of its parts which is totalitarian with respect to these subaltern parts, as well as a self-developing entity whose unfolding through a kind of entelechy confers a certain inevitability on the manner of its growth. Leavis’ s valorization of organic communities (cited by Wil­ liams), the St.Simonians’distinction between organic epochs (or periods of synthesis which are ideologically coherent) and critical epochs (which are more chaotic but merely transitional), Hegel’s exaltation of the organic state over an “atomistic”civil society, and Coleridge’s valorization of form as indwelling over shape as superinduced provide a genealogy for a concept whose conservative social consequences become entrenched in the mid­ nineteenth century, but whose initial aesthetic elaboration can be traced to the infamous “Romantic ideology” (as McGann terms it). R. H. Fogle has described the American version of this ideology, in which an organicism imported by transcendentalism from (a sanitised version of) Romanticism and German Idealism valorizes a concept of “growth”that “discards the old and leaves its shell behind,” thus underwriting a myth of the United States as “a growing and potentially perfect democracy.” This myth reaches its summit in Whitman’ s vision of America as the “archetypal organic body” of society (92-3). Fogle’s account is particularly interesting because of his own New Critical affiliations. For it is in the American New Criticism that the theory of organic form as the reconciliation of opposites, and the notion of a whole or structure as “parts arranged in their proper order,” receive their definitive modern restatement. This organic “form,”it should be noted, conveniently forgets organic “process,”in a supplementation of the organic with structural metaphors (like the well-wrought urn) that is the reverse of Kant’ s troubled supplementation of the metaphor of the building with that of the body in his notion of “architectonic” in the first Critique. 46 IRajan Interestingly Williams himself recognizes that associating organicism with conservative social and aesthetic structures might not reflect the term’s full historical complexity. Williams cites Burke’ s contrast between the English of 1688 who acted by “the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization,”and the French of 1789 who acted “by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people” (228): an interesting distinction because it associates the organic with “atomistic”and “disintegrating”forms. But even here, “organized”is clearly valorised over “organic,”despite the fact that the verbal proximity concedes that the body itself may not support the fictions of the body politic built upon it. In taking issue with the received view of organicism, my aim is not to dispute the attribution to the Romantics of the theories of organic form described above, though in fact the notion goes back well before 1780-1830, to Aristotle’ s distinction of totals which are mere aggregates from wholes. Nor do I mean to question the presence of an “organicist ideology,” as we can call it, in Romantic political theory: for instance in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (which was influential on the Victorians), and Coleridge’ s On The Constitution of the Church and State, which transfers the physiological notion of constitution as the inherence of parts in a whole to the political sphere. I want, rather, to suggest that the organicist ideology comes into being as a result of an aestheticization of the organism that forgets its scientific complexity, and that unlike their successors, Romantic thinkers such as Coleridge and Hegel who promote this ideology were sufficiently involved in work on the life sciences to be constantly brought up against the tenuousness of this ideology. In short, it is not the case that organicism “naturalizes”what is socially constructed and is a metatrope for the work of ideology. Rather the notion of “natural­ ization” is itself a form of what Paul de Man calls “aesthetic ideology”: the supplementary recourse to...