Isobel Armstrong’s Material Imagination
Steven Connor I draw the phrase ‘material imagination’ from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material world is imagined, not just by scientists and engineers, but by everyone, all the time: poets, children, footballers, cultural analysts, cabdrivers, medics and mad Hatters: the ‘material imagination’, then, as the way in which matter is imagined. In an age of conventional scepticism, in which the mind is always, as a Beckett character says, ‘on the alert against itself’, the prescribed move to make at this point is to doubt whether one can ever look steadily at anything other than one’s own conceptions or categories. But where do these conceptions and categories come from? For there is no way of imagining the nature of the material world which does not draw on and operate in terms of that material world, its spaces, substances, stresses, processes. Imagination is itself always prepossessed by the world that it attempts to imagine, made up, like the gingerbread-man enquiring into the question of his dough, of what it makes out. So the phrase ‘material imagination’ must signify the materiality of imagining as well as the imagination of the material. Isobel Armstrong’s work is a the most richly significant extension we have seen in recent decades of what might be called a Hegelian materialism of signification. Perhaps that work is, as a result, sometimes caught in the fix that Hegel bequeathed to us all, whereby one cannot imagine any kind of object except as dead and other to us, even as we also cannot help wanting to take that object into epistemological custody, making it our own, making it us, by flooding it with feeling and concept. We either leave the object out in the cold of our objectifying, or we kill it with the kindness of our identification. Wherever you look, whether within the recesses of the subject, or at the object, the same subject-object pingpong is always about to start up. And yet, Isobel has always been disinclined to let such predicaments bake into impasses. Indeed, the effort of her entire work has been to show the vitality of such predicaments, predicaments which are largely epistemological in Language as Living Form and political in Victorian Poetry. The problem which keeps generating and regenerating the ‘living form’ of nineteenth-century poetry is that of how to marry the self-forming contemplations of Hegel, in which the mind risks overwhelming its own world by taking itself as its own other, with Marx’s insistence on relationship. It is only when there is a relationship between the material act of mind represented by a poem and sets of material circumstances that relations can really exist, that time can be inhabited as well as merely unfolding, and that the poem can act and work (1982, 48-9). The most significant moments in Isobel’s virtuoso readings of nineteenth-century poetry are often those where a certain field of material possibility is isolated, rotated and worked. There is, for example, the moment in which she reflects on Hopkins’s use of the phrase ‘glassy peartree’, saying that ‘[t]he idea emerges through the particular physical nature of glass and one might say that the notion of transparency is given a soul because it is incarnate in the specific irreducible and particular qualities of glass’ (1982, 8). Or there are these reflections on the idea of an ‘air’ in Victorian Poetry: An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an ‘influence’, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs, where they are figured as a responsive, finely organised feminine creativity, receptive to external influence, returning back to the world as music that has flowed in, an exhalation or breath of sound. (1993, 326) Another example would be the reading of a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in Language as Living Form which concludes that Everything is moving through everything else and the kinship of exhalation and winds, rain and aerial dew, which are all offered as separate entities and actions, is such that forms and functions merge, reverse and exchange. With ‘it circles round’, ‘it’ is not merely either the original exhalation or the aerial dew but every element in the passage. Exhalation, winds, blooms, fruits, flowers, stems, leaves, dew, as a totality, a unity, circle round. The rapidity, the flux of syntax, the capacity of Shelley’s words to make things dematerialise into aery thinness, is extraordinary. (1982, 45) These passages have in common the fact that they are reading poems which are themselves at these moments reading aspects of the material world, the world of nonhuman objects, substances, organisms, and processes, dew, air, transpiration, evaporation and, in the process, perhaps also trying to become these objects. In the last quotation, Isobel’s argument is that Shelley can do anything, because the mind of his poem makes everything over into itself. At this point in her argument, she is instancing Marx’s critique of Hegel, that, in the latter’s philosophy, ‘Man cannot create himself in terms of a meaningful and evolving relation with externality; he can only create himself anew as an entity of thought’. (1982, 43) But, in evoking Shelley’s dematerialising power, Isobel seems also to limit or partly to revoke it: if there is evaporation, coalescence, there is also work in Shelley’s writing, if only the work of dissimulating work. Isobel’s own working out of the process whereby work is dissimulated in Shelley’s poem restores the sense of an encounter, a striving, a resistance, an abrasion, a transforming, a surpassing. At moments like these, Isobel is borrowing a poem’s encounter with material objects or processes to release and disclose the nature of the poem as a worked object for her. All of this might come down, as is suggested at the opening of Language as