In a 2010 article by Aaron Kunin, an entertaining connection is brought into view between art – “(d)ecoration in the sense of the elaboration of abstract surface patterns ‘for the pleasure of art, without seeking to convey any truth with it’” – and cruelty (“Decoration, Modernism, Cruelty,” Johns Hopkins UP).

I’m not talking about the already discredited trope essentializing Asiatic cruelty (which people still seem to enjoy discrediting), the one first introduced by Victorian era art critic John Ruskin in an 1859 lecture (“All ornamentation of that lower kind is pre-eminently the gift of cruel persons…”). Although it is interesting to see how Kunin traces this weak association across several literary examples from that era, beginning with the utilitarian school inspector in Dickens’s Hard Times and ending with Ruskin himself as a child who, “not given any toys to play with by his utilitarian, anti-illusionistic parents, (made) a game out of tracing the pattern in the carpet with his eyes or his feet…” It’s a neat trick precisely not because of some easy point to be won, some evidence recovered from the literary archives to be brandished like a smoking gun, but in that Kunin seems to be performing, in his own tracing out of a surface pattern, a denial of a similarly conceived meaning of cruelty to be predicated of Victorians.

The rejection of an essentializing move, one that draws from a limited arsenal of mental operations to diagnose (gendered) others as either ‘fanciful’ or else possessed of reason, is in keeping with a wish to break from the use of the imagination to draw boundaries around kinds of minds, kinds of people. It’s a decided departure from Dickens’s school inspector who requires to be shown only that which falls within the range of his diagnostic repertoire, such that the imagination in the service of exaggeration or fancy speaks to ignorance only from the perspective of one who would call it that. (At the same time, however, restricting the range of imaginative expression in this way seems to be what allows for the whole preoccupation and study of ‘cruelty concealed by decoration.’ To me, this would not be too much of a loss, since it was already quite a bit to constantly have to remember. In any case, a cruder and not more refined cruelty would seem not as concerned with the concealing of violence, but rather to flaunt it, whereas a truly refined cruelty looks more like that which would make me hardly aware of what was being inflicted on me.)

What’s interesting, then, about the Kunin article (in a non-essentialized, passing fancy sort of way) is the exploration of Victorian-style wallpaper in connection with Leibnizian monadology. It’s as though Victorian patterning that reproduces itself can be read as a literal expression of a wish, a kind of discernible unreason as by-product of a utilitarian anti-aesthetic in which one searches for lines of free play where there are no such lines (the mental operation of fancy), these lines made to form a covert space to which something escapes. Here, some infinitesimal part of oneself is produced, a version that lives on, awaiting one’s return to entertain the thought of a formerly unachieved possibility. This latter part of the fantasy is explored with the Henry James story, “The Jolly Corner.”

Yet, entertainment value aside, can this longing for escape and promise of return be chalked up to a ‘worldview,’ a discoverable Weltanschauung that follows from a method (Wissenschaft)? It looks to be not the ‘necessity’ being sought after, as Richard Kuhns took care to note in his elaboration of what is meant by art as a method and vehicle for learning in the Hegelian sense:

“…no interpretation of the concept of lawful relationship, except on Leibnizian grounds, will allow that a causal relationship is a necessary relationship. This, the necessity of logical entailment, is not the necessity that Hegel has in mind. Rather, the necessity that a science of art would lay bare and explain would be the necessity of the progressive stages of the development of spirit through time. Thus the ‘laws’ Hegel would seek must give an account of necessary relationships holding between successive art forms…” (“Art as a Phenomenology of the Imagination” 1970, 85).

Metaphysics in general, understood as artifice, seems to be not a thing to object to necessarily, but surely a less violent imagination than one that turns to monads is possible. A more subtle use of the imagination is what Wallace Stevens called for (and demonstrated) in “Imagination as Value.” The essay opens with the example of Pascal as one whose imaginative faculty was limited in scope (but I suspect it’s ‘he’ in an ‘il est nous’ sense). When Stevens wrote, “After all, Pascal’s understanding of the imagination was a part of his understanding of everything else” he was pointing to the need for a more proportionate measure of imagination to reason. That kind of divine measure in one’s own mind is what appears to have been lacking in our model, such that a sudden or disproportionate miraculous intervention administered by the parish priest became necessary. A kind of extreme unction is called on where a violent rather than subtle use of the imagination is what’s required to get the job done.

Stevens envisioned a mode of thinking particular to the imagination as something different than products of reason alone or how one talks about natural events. If, as he says, the turning inward and upward to imaginative heights is how the soul travels on this side of death, then the imaginative faculty should be more suited to moderating life as a mode of thinking that realizes the extent of its artifice.

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