Aesthetic Body

Definition

The aesthetic body names the second of Ann C. Colley's three models of the body–interior relation, read from Walter Pater's semi-autobiographical "The Child in the House" (1878) — with echoes in "Emerald Uthwart" (1892) and Marius the Epicurean (1885): a mode of inhabiting in which the body is a "sensuous presence," conspicuous "because of its willingness to be affected by what lies outside of it." Where Ruskin's child watches from invisibility, Pater's child is "conspicuous because of its willingness to be affected by what lies outside of it," and its visual experiences "are not detached or bodiless. They emerge from and return to a body through which images move along the nerves and bring vitality to his being" (pp. 69–70). Colley's formula for the model: "Here the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body" (p. 70).

The aesthetic body is constitutively permeable — it "risks being wounded by the tyranny of the senses and the surrendering of its boundaries," accepting what crosses its threshold: winds through open windows, "the perfumes from the neighbouring garden," the cry announcing a father's death, the sting of a wasp in a basket of crab-apples, the ghost of a dead woman invited into the child's broken sleep (p. 70). Its interiors are its doubles: rooms that, "as if they were bodies themselves, extend and incorporate what is beyond them," that "do not shut themselves off; they resist exclusiveness," so that "the child's body and the rooms of home engage in an exchange. In a sense, each passes into the condition of the other" (p. 71).

Key Thinkers

• Ann C. Colley — names the model and gives it its mechanism: images moving "along the nerves," the conjoined haptic-visual, the willed surrender of boundaries.
• (Discussed, not yet paged — see log: Walter Pater, whose "The Child in the House," "Emerald Uthwart" and Marius the Epicurean supply the model's texts; his child-figures Florian Deleal, Emerald and Marius.)
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the philosophical family: the aesthetic body is an impressionistic lived body avant la lettre — perception emerging from and returning to the sensing body (see lived-body); Colley's first footnote claims her writers "anticipate" Merleau-Ponty's "bodily situation."

Related Concepts

• Lived Body — the aesthetic body is Pater's literary ancestor of Merleau-Ponty's body-subject: perception as something the body does, not a detached screen receives.
• Invisible Body — the model's opposite number: Ruskin's eye-only spectatorship against Pater's permeable body; the wasp watched vs. the wasp that stings.
• Optic and Haptic Perception — Colley's "the haptic and the visual conjoin" is a literary instance of the optic/haptic conjunction that Riegl theorized as alternating modes and Merleau-Ponty dissolved into the mind-body complex.
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the aesthetic body's interiors "extend and incorporate what is beyond them," "like a shuttle in a loom"; the exchange in which "each passes into the condition of the other."
• Embodiment — the broader thesis the model dramatizes: the body as a knowing, feeling, vulnerable entity, not a vehicle for the eye.
• Uncanny — the aesthetic body's permeability admits the revenant: the dead woman of the neighbours' talk sits "beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep" — the homely interior taking in the unhomely guest.
• Olfaction — the same Pater on both sides of the sensory debate: the aesthetic body's author also dismissed architecture as too utilitarian for the spirit, its spiritualities only "lurk[ing] about architectural form as volatile effects" (via Drobnick, who rehabilitates the phrase for the olfactory approach to architecture — see Volatile Architectures (2002/2006)). The writer whose child-body breathes "the perfumes from the neighbouring garden" is the writer who denied architecture its senses — the wiki's two Pater entries as the embodiment debate's internal split. See olfaction, white-cube.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the source that names the model: "a sensuous presence" (p. 69); "the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body" (p. 70); "the tyranny of the senses and the surrendering of its boundaries" (p. 70); interiors "as if they were bodies themselves" (p. 71).
• source-notes/drobnick-2006-volatile-architectures

Open Questions

• Is the aesthetic body a nineteenth-century literary formation (the Paterian impressionism of the 1870s) or a structural type — and does Pater's gendering of receptive sensibility matter for the wiki's gender/interior cluster (the permeable body has been historically coded feminine)?
• Colley's model makes the interior an exchange-system of the body's desires ("windows and gates left ajar"). Can an interior be designed as an aesthetic body — engineered permeability — and how would that differ from the atmospheric staging of Atmosphere?
• The model risks what it feeds on: "the tyranny of the senses." Where is the threshold between aesthetic receptivity and overwhelm — and does Stevenson's sick body (see ubiquitous-body) name the cost of Pater's open house?