The Poetics of Pure Experience

There is the famous passage in William James, Principles of Psychology (1890):

“one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” as interpreted by Dall-E.

[A]ny number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind WHICH HAS NOT YET EXPERIENCED THEM SEPARATELY, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

Something out of nothing, it seems. Or more precisely, the intelligible out of the sensible–that is the main question of psychology. Here the baby becomes a point of convergence for the mind’s ontogenesis and phylogenesis alike, and James turns to the emergence of sensible forms for the newborn in the same way earlier psycholinguists Philipp Wegener (1848–1916) tried to under language emergence by listening to the intensities of babies’ babbling.

One phrase from this passage of James is often picked up by later philosophers who are trying to take sensations seriously: process philosophers, new materialists, affect theorists, etc: the blooming, buzzing confusion that describes the sensible world before the inventions of subjective forms. The interest for me, for now, is in the language: not just the synesthetic apposition of visual (blooming) and auditory (buzzing) sensations in the phrase–which only reinforces the message–but what is perhaps one of the most successful uses of alliteration and trochaic meter, coupled with the emphatic recurrence of the dark vowels (as Nabokov would say), in the history of philosophy. Almost in direct contradiction to the message’s content, the little outburst of poetry in academic prose is all too memorable, all too regular, all too unforgettable as an expression. All too . . . unconfusing.

But of course, that’s exactly the point. Or rather, as the notion that the sensory world is disorderly without the actively involvement of perception is hardly a new idea, what makes James’ phrase paradigmatic is that the three-word phrase presents, in miniature form, its own philosophical argument. Let me return momentarily to Wegener, one of the forgotten pioneers of linguistics whose work, despite his impressive intellectual pedigree (having studied with the likes of Curtius and Steinthal), was forgotten not long after his death (and quite possibly even earlier). His Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885) was published only five years before Principles of Psychology, and in it Wegener (another self-declared empiricist) devotes the first chapters to a study of child speech–or more precisely, the emergence of the sound-image in the earliest stages of consciousness.

Tonbilder oder Lautbilder werden empfunden, die Muskeln suchen dieselben nachzubilden, es gelingt mehr und mehr die Laute diesen Originalbildern gleich zu bilden.

Diese gehörten und wieder erzeugten Lautbilder werden unter gewissen Verhältnissen empfunden, verschiedene Lautbilder unter verschiedenen Verhältnissen: das eine, wenn das Kind gewisse Schmerzgefühle hat wie Hunger oder Durst, das andere, wenn gewisse optische Empfindungen erregt sind u. s. f. Gleichzeitig mit diesen Empfindungen oder richtiger in unmittelbarer Folge treten die Laufbilder in die Seele, d. h. kurz nachher oder vorher, und bilden mit diesen zeitlich verknüpfte Vorstellungsreihen. Je häufiger diese Reihen in der Seele auftreten, desto stärker und unzerstörbarer werden sie, desto fester verknüpfen sich die einzelnen Glieder dieser Reihe unter einander.

Wegener, Untersuchungen, p. 9.

Original title page of Weneger’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885)

The concretization of words in logogenesis, in other words, draws from significant differences, or intensities in the field of sensations (“psychischen Wirksamkeit und Intensität”). But this is more than a linguistic process; rather, this is the emergence of thought as we know it, a kind of “unbewusste Abstraction, bei der Gleiches sich verbindet und verstärkt, Ungleiches sich hemmt.” With sound-images are also concretized bodily sensations, muscular memory, light-images in the field of vision. The intensities or Jamesian “bignesses” of sound (its “verschiedene Stärke der Betonung,” for example) feeds not only into the emergence of words–in fact, it cannot do so if a larger field of feelings was not involved–but meaningful abstraction in its full sphere of operation.

Rhythm and rime, in other words, is thought, plain and simple. The sound-image that solidifies in the “blooming, buzzing confusion” is a miniature of this process wherein the intelligible reveals itself in its sensibility and the sensible, its intelligibility. The surprising correlate of this oft-quoted thought-rime is that the referent of the phrase, whatever it may be, is in fact a red herring of sorts. The “anarchic materialist” picture of the world that it appears to depict may be a limit of experience, although already its sound leads us away from depictions. One would be mistaken to take such a world to be experience’s purest form or the substrate of an ontology upon which a vilified process of abstraction might intrude. Instead, James would insist elsewhere that nothing about the bloom and the buzz is experientially prior to abstraction, and that to insist otherwise is to, perhaps ironically, not be radical enough in one’s empiricism:

Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats [. . .] [T]he flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelope everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. The things that they envelope come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of ‘fact’ as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, [. . .] flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ch. 3 “The Thing and Its Relations”

But of course, all this explanation is unnecessary if one only reads the thought-rime aloud, to hear and feel the harmonious con-fusion of sound in action. The flowers and the flux, the bloom and the buzz, pure experience and pure experience.