Introduction: What is the Sublime...(Philip Shaw)

자료: Philip Shaw, The Sublime, Google books

※ Following is a reading note about the above book. To see the original text please refer to the above link.

***

Introduction,

0.1. What Is the Sublime?

Derived from the Latin sublimis, a combination of sub(up to) and limen(lintel, literally the top piece of a door), the sublime is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'Set or raised aloft, high up' (see Wood 1972). The word has many applications[:]

• A building or a mountain may be sublime, as may a thought, a heroic deed, or a mode of expression.
• But the definition of the sublime is not restricted to value judgments; it also describes a state of mind. The cavernous interior of St Paul's cathedral instills a sense of awe; King Lear's dying words fill the audience with lofty emotion; the idea of infinity is beyond words.

Our attempts to match such grandeur necessarily fall short of the mark. How, for example, should we speak of God? In Psalm 139, David proclaims that divine knowledge 'is too wonderful' to express; 'it is high, I cannot attain it' (line 6; Holy Bible 2001). Yet somehow a sense of God's majesty is conveyed through this very failure. And it is not only the elevated or pleasing that inspires such thought. The OED goes on to describe the effect of the sublime as crushing or engulfing, as something we cannot resist[:]

• A revolution, for instance, may be sublime in so far as it carries a people along with it, inspiring them with grand ideals, convincing them that the world can begin anew.
• To some, the imagining of apocalypse is sublime. What could be loftier and at the same time more terrifying than the revelation of St John?
• For the critic James Usher, writing in the late 18th century, the power of the sublime is such that it 'takes possession of our attention, and all our faculties, and absorbs them in astonishment' (Ashfield and de Bolla 1996; 147).
• Most recently and most controversially, those of us who looked agog at the destruction of the twin towers on September 11 2001 could be said to have experienced something of this power to astonish (see Zizek 2002), a claim to which I will return in chapter 6 and 7.

1. In broad terms, whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, ^then^ we resort to the feeling of the sublime.

2. As such, the sublime marks the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what lie beyond these limits; this may well explain its association with the transcendent, conceived by the theologian John Milbank 'as the absolutely unknowable void, upon whose brink we finite beings must dizzily hover'(204: 211).

The sensation of cognitive failure in the face of the sublime is evoked by the Romantic poet John Keats(1795-1821) in his poem 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles', composed in 1817:

My spirit is too weak--mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

*** 이 페이지는 미리보기를 볼 수 없습니다***

(... 중략) For Lynch, the moment when the world is shown to be blank, mute, and absurd is far removed from the expressive vitality of the Hebrew Psalms.

• If this is indeed a spiritual moment, it is one that emerges at precisely the point when all that we know, all that we have felt, thought, and understood, becomes useless, or even ridiculous (see Zizek 2000b).
• On this understanding, the sublime experience points no longer to an object beyond reason and expression, but rather to 'that within representation which nonetheless exceeds the possibility of representation'(Milibank 2004: 212). Uncoupled from Judeo-Christian concept of the divine, the sublime is figured in postmodern thought as immanent rather that transcendent.

We will go on to explore the consequence of this shift in understanding in the following chapters. For now, it may be that these thoughts have already overreached themselves, so much so, perhaps, that they have become a demonstration of the very thing I am attempting to describe: an experience that is excessive, unmanageable, even terrifying. With this in mind, let us turn now to a brief account of the history of the sublime.

0.2. The Sublime Has a History

Since the concept was first presented in the ^Peri Hupsos^ or ^On Sublimity^(1965), an aesthetic treatise attributed to the Greek critic Dionysius Longinus in the first century CE, the sublime has stood, variously, [:]

• for the effect of grandeur in speech and poetry;
• for a sense of the divine;
• for the contrast between the limitations of human perception and the overwhelming majesty of nature;
• as proof of the triumph of reason over nature and imagination;
• and, most recently, as a signifier for that which exceeds the grasp of reason.

Common to all these definitions is a preoccupation with struggle: for Longinus, the discourse of the sublime, whether in political oratory or in epic verse, works to overcome the rational powers of its audience, persuading them of the efficacy of an idea by means of sheer rhetorical force. In Longinus' view, as we shall see in Chapter 1, listeners and readers are ravished or, more disturbingly, raped by the power of words.

The rhetoric of violence also pervades the religious writings of Thomas Burnet (1635-1715). In his Telluris Theoria Sacra (1680-9, translated into English as The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684-9; see chapter 2), Burnet envisions the day of judgment when the enemies of God, terrified by his unspeakable Glory, 'call for the Mountains to fall upon them' (1965: 302). Published in the wake of the first widely available text of Peri Hupsos, translated as Traité du Sublime by Despréaux Boileau in 1674, The Sacred Theory of the Earth locates the sublime within the context of the biblical apocalypse. Although the work makes no direct reference to Longinus, its concern with the grandeur and power of the divine, contrasted with the limits of sinful nature, feeds directly into writings on the sublime dating from the 18th century. With particular focus on the writings of John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Lord Shaftesbury, we will look at how speculations on sublimity prompts anxieties about the self, the nature of the divine, and the ethics of nobility.

Burnet's work is important additionally for its analysis of the origins of the sublime. Whilst Longinus stresses sublimity as a purely rhetorical phenomenon, Burnet and his followers in the 18th century pay close attention to the vast and grand in nature. As the literary critic Marjorie Hope Nicolson(1959) has argued, interest in the 'natural sublime' initiated a major shift in British culture as poets and artists turned from the representation of politics and manners towards the exploration of mental and physical intensity. The lofty mountain peak or the swelling ocean, as depicted in the poems of Akenside and Thompson, and in the writings of the Romantics, discussed in chapter 5, thus became the scene for darker meditations on the nature of the self and its relations with the external world (see Hipple 1957)

The emphasis on the pleasure and pain of sublime experience, evident in the litterature of this period, owes much to the influence of the Irish politician, aesthetician, and pamphleteer Edmund Burke(1729-97). As in Burnet's writings, the threat of violation is a constant theme in Burke's. In his landmark A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757: 1990), however, the threat of violence is mitigated by the effects of distance: an erupting volcano may well induce terror in the mind of one about to be engulfed by lava, but to the distant spectator the sight could be experienced as a form of delight. In this secularized version of Burnet's apocalypse, the viewer may exercise a facility for aesthetic contemplation; the volcano is judged not to be a threat to life and is perceived instead as an example of the awesome destructive power of nature. Through repeated exercise, the meeting with the sublime strengthens our powers of conception; we become, as it were, equal to the powers we survey.

Drawing on the legacy of the Longinian tradition, Burke directs his analysis towards the effects of the sublime in language. It is at this point, as many recent critics have noted (see de Bolla 1989; Ferguson 1992), that the ^Enquiry^ begins to expose a fault line in the history of the sublime. Words have a power, Burke argues, to raise the idea of the sublime, such that the distinction between the sublime object and its description no longer applies; it is language, in other words, that brings about the transformation of the world, enabling us to hymn the vastness of the cathedrale or the depths of the ravine. More radically, the stress on sublimity as an aspect of language leads Burke to undermine the privileging of human consciousness. For if the grandeur of the ocean is no more than a matter of rhetoric or description, might the same not be said of other alleged truth claims, such as the integrity and autonomy of the self?

For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in an extension of this thought, the struggle is between the evidence of the senses (what philosophers refers to as the empirical domain) and the supersensible power of reason (literally over or above sense). Here, as I argue in chapter 4, [:]

• the sublime affirms ultimately the ascendancy of the rational over the real: the mind of man, that is, is greater than anything that might be discovered in nature(see Kant 1789; 1987).
• With Kant and his followers in the German Idealist tradition of philosophy, the emphasis shifts decisively away from empiricist or naturalistic theories of the sublime and towards the analysis of sublimity as a mode of consciousness.

Yet here again, as the poststructuralist theorists Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard have argued (see chapter 6), there are critical indicators in Kant's text that the analysis of the sublime reveals the failure point of idealism, highlighting the dependency of consciousness on the transformational power of language.

Though Derrida, de Man, and Lyotard display scepticism towards the Kantian tradition, they nevertheless continue to work within its parameters. And the same is true of their contemporaries working in the spheres of art and literature. If the tone of the so-called 'postmodern sublime' is less positive, less routinely convinced of the transcendental significance of the sublime, its meanings and structures continue to be informed by the findings of the past. In the work of the American abstract painter Barnett Baruch Newman(1905-1970), for example, a yearning for transcendence is pitted against an open acknowledgement of the impossibility of this desire. The sublime emerges in Newman only as an instant of creative intensity, derived not from God, nature, or indeed from mind, but rather from the event of artistic creation. The sense of the beyond, that is, is nothing other than an effect of oil on canvas.

(중략) On the page 8:

In light of these examples we might wish to regard the postmodern sublime as [:]

• an attempt to re-read a theoretical tradition, placing emphasis on its paradoxical, unfulfilled, or self-baffling emphases.
• Recalling Zizek's comment, quoted earlier, if there is a spiritual dimension to the postmodern sublime, it resides in the ability of contemporary culture to negate the material inertia of things in such a way that it allows us to come alive to the feeling of something beyond the merely functional or utilitarian.

Such a feeling might emerge, for instance, when surveying the material vacancy of the art of Andy Warhol(1928-1987). The Marilyn Monroe series prompts the viewer to meditate on the relentless drive of capitalist reproduction but in a way that forces us to become aware of its inertia, its still point. The Marilyn portrait is iconic, in the religious sense, because no amount of reproduction can nullify its enigmatic presence. We might say that Warhol's art is sublime despite itself. And such a feeling can take the viewer by surprise.

Perhaps there is nothing new about this feeling. When, in 1798, the poet William Wordsworth(1770-1850) referred to the deep, underlying significance of things as a sensible sublime [which continues as follows:]

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose light is the dwelling of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of thoughts,

And rolls through all things....

(Wordsworth 1984)

it is the effort to overcome the recalcitrance{고집, 반항} of words, their resistance to the elevated, which most impresses. Wordsworth, perhaps more than any other poet, is profoundly aware of the gulf separating thought and expression. The most important words are not, as we might expect, the words of manifest greatness or power, such as 'suns', 'air', and 'ocean', but rather those words which in ordinary language hardly merit atten[tion].... , words such as 'and', 'all', and 'in'. The poem's use of connectives ('And the round ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky...') is an attempt to compensate for the material deadness of words, to make the connection between objects and ideas. Wordsworth's lines encompass that 'something' which lies beyond the reach of human comprehension yet somehow, miraculously dwells 'in the mind of man' (see Wlecke 1973).

Even so, there are important distinctions to be made in the developing meaning of this concept. Part of the function of the following chapters is to show readers how the theories of Longinus, Burnet, Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Derrida, and Zizek differ from each other. Whilst it is possible to point to structural similarities between, say, the Romantic and the postmodern ideas of the sublime, we should be no less aware of their key dissimilarities. In the case of Lyotard, as we shall discover, the goal of the sublime is to sustain a sense of shock, to prevent the reader/viewer/interpreter from coming to terms with the meaning of that which exceeds the norm. If the aim of Romanticism is somehow to incorporate the 'sense sublime', postmodernism, by way of contrast, seeks to retain a sense of the sublime, a 'something' that can never be 'interfused' through the use of metaphors, symbols, or verbal connectives. Since, as we have seen, such an approach might well usher in Romanticised notions of reverence and awe through the back door, as it were, other versions of postmodernism endeavour to do away with the sublime together.

Before proceeding, I wish finally to say a word about beauty. Since Burke, the concept of the beautiful has been set against the concept of the sublime, more often than not as a point of theoretical contrast.

• The sublime is greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the beautiful is light, fleeting, and charming and implicitly feminine.
• Where the sublime is a divisive force, encouraging feelings of difference and deference, the beautiful encourages a spirit of unity and harmony. In political terms, the impulse of the one, we might say, is individualistic, even dictatorial, that of latter is social and democratic.

Although theory has confined itself, for the most part, to analyses of the sublime, in recent years some attempts has been made to reappraise the beautiful, to regard it not merely as a weaker sister figure but as a just counter-spirit to the violent encroaches of the sublime. This discussion will be addressed in the afterword.

The gendered nature of the disctinction between the sublime and the beautiful also has a history: in Longinus, as was noted, sublime speech 'ravishes' or rapes the listner; in Burke, the sublime is a virile masculine power, one that is contrasted with its passive feminine counterpart, the concept of the beautiful. Even more explicit in the early Kant is the distinction between the depth and profundity of the masculine sublime and the shallow, slight nature of the feminine beautiful (see Kant 1764; 1960: 46-9, 60, 78, 93, 97). In the light of this insistent distinction it will come as no surprise to learn that the concept has attracted much recent attention from feminist as well as Marxist, psychoanalytical, postcolonial, and deconstructive theorists. As Patricia Yaeger has argued, the sublime 'is ... a masculine mode of writing and relationship'(1989: 202; see also Maxwel 2001); its imprint is seen everywhere: from the elevated poetics of John Milton's religious epic ^Paradise Lost^(1667) to the abyssal confrontations of Francis Ford Coppola's anti-Vietnam war film ^Apocalypse Now^(1979). Feminist critiques of Longinus, Burke, and Kant, as well as more recent attempts to assert a notion of the feminine sublime, will be discussed in due course.

0.3. Sublime is Now

In a very strong sense the sublime does indeed verge on the ridiculous; it encourages us to believe that we can scale the highest mountains, reach the stars and become infinite when all the time it is drawing us closer to our actual material limits: the desire to outstrip earthly bonds leads instead to the encounter with lack, an encounter that is painful, cruel,and some would say comic. The sublime, somewhat ironically, given its overtly metaphysical ambitions, turns out to be a form of materialism after all. Perhaps the sublime is irony at its purest and most effective: a promise of transcendence leading to the edge of an abyss. Still, there may be a sense in which even such falls come to depend on ways of thinking that have no relation to any underlying material cause. And here is a further twist of irony: could it be that the sublime does indeed affirm the unlimited nature of being? Could the concept of the sublime, as Kant believed, lead ultimately to the triumph of mind over matter, or possibly towards an affirmation of the divine? So many questions straining towards the limits. We are never certain of the sublime.

0.4. Notes on Texts and Approaches

In addition to the core texts by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, I have made extensive use of ^The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory^(1996), edited by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla. This anthology reflects the broadly poststructuralist approach of de Bolla's earlier book-length study, ^The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject^(1989), in which sublimity is regarded as a textual or linguistic phenomenon. Rooted in the work of contemporary French thoerists, such as Michel Foucault and Jacuques Derrida, de Bolla reads the history of the sublime as an increasngly sophisticated attempt to come to terms with the idea that 'there is nothing beyond the text'. In the discourse of the sublime we thus become aware that all points of origin such as God, nature, or mind are merely effects of the combinatory power of language. Over the following pages we will encounter several readings that build on this claim, substituting de Bolla's discourse with related terms such as ^parergon^ (Derrida 1987), rhetoric(de Man 1990), the unpresentable(Lyotard 1991), the offering(Nancy 1993), and the Thing(Lacan 1992).

De Bolla's work is, in part, an attempt to correct the more 'common-sense' assumption of Samuel Holt Monk's classic study of the sublime. Published in 1935 (reprinted 1960), ^The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England^ remains an invaluable source of information. I have to some extent favoured Monk over de Bolla by maintaining the place of Kant in this tradition. Readers should also be aware of another influential early study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson. In ^Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite^(1959) Hope Nicolson stresses the importance of non-Longinian approaches to the sublime. Again, readers approaching de Bolla for the first time are advised to consult this work for the insight it gives into the relations between sublimity, religion, and the limits of language.