Getting Physical with Romanticism Romantic studies have always been a weathervane for contemporary issues in cultural theory, partly because all the roads to modernity seem to lead back to the Romantic period, and partly because Romanticism has always seemed to be something more than a period of cultural history in its tendency to elicit passionate commitments and continued debates about its nature and importance. To "be" a Romanticist, to profess Romantic literature or culture, has always seemed to entail something more than "being" a scholar of the eighteenth century, or even being a professional literary historian more generally.
The conversation in cultural studies has turned, in recent years, toward material culture, objecthood, and physical things. It is not surprising, then, that these issues have percolated down to the early nineteenth century, and that the relationship of "Romanticism and the Physical" is now on the agenda. In the old days, of course, it would have been "Romanticism and the Spiritual" (or the mental, the psychological, the ideal, the immaterial, the metaphysical). We would have been quoting Blake's "Mental Things are alone real" and Wordsworth's vaporous raptures over the mind and the spirit. But if all roads lead to Romanticism, they inevitably bring along with them the baggage of our present concerns- -post-coloniality, gender, race, technology, and now "the physical." What exactly is "the physical"? Is it the physical body? or the physical, material world more generally, the object of the physical sciences, especially physics (and not biology)? Is it the domain of nature, the nonhuman realm of what Wordsworth called "rocks and stones and trees," and all the rest-the earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, the planets and stars in their courses? And what is the rhetorical or theoretical force of invoking "the physical" as a thematic within Romanticism? Is this a signal of a new materialism, another overturning of Hegel and idealism? Is it a reflex of the fashion for "bodily matters" in contemporary criticism, and if so, is this a natural body or a cultural body? A virtual techno-body, a gendered, racialized, erotic body, or a body without organs? Where does the invocation of the physical locate us in the endless debate of nature and culture, the natural and human sciences? Is it a replaying of the old Romantic division between the physical, understood as the organic, living substance, and the material, understood as the inert, dead, or mechanical? The great temptation for Romanticists is to think that our gesture of "getting physical with Romanticism" is an accomplishment in itself. We are in danger of supposing that somehow the turn to the physical is a tough-minded and realistic gesture, a politically progressive act of getting down to the concrete, hard facts, the obdurate stuff of things in themselves, an escape from old fashioned "Romantic idealism." and of course the more closely we look a both Romanticism and at the physical world, the more difficult it becomes to sustain any such illusion. The physical is a thoroughly metaphysical concept; the concrete is (as Hegel points out) the most abstract concept we have; bodies are spiritual entities, constructions of fantasy; objects only make sense in relation to thinking, speaking subjects; things are evanescent, multistable appearances; and matter, as we have known since the ancient materialists, is a "lyric substance" more akin to comets, meteors, and electrical storms than to some hard, uniform mass.* *see Daniel Tiffany's _Toy Medium_ for a brilliantly detailed exploration of "poetic substances" and iconologies of matter.
