Judy Lochhead the Sublime the Ineffable and Other Dangerous Aesthetics

8/12/2019 Judy Lochhead the Sublime the Ineffable and Other Dangerous Aesthetics

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The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics

Judy Lochhead

Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 12, 2008,

pp. 63-74 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/wam.0.0004

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Theorizing Gender, Culture, and Music 63

fable reveals a disturbing trend toward conceptsthat are contrary to the philosophical and po-litical goals of feminism.2While various otherscholarly domains have debated the conceptualvalue of these aesthetic concepts, such a debateis missing in music studies. This lack is danger-ous to the extent it masks a regressive longingfor an absolutean absolute that, under the flagof the unpresentable, harbors a hidden and nos-talgic return to repressive binaries of gender.

My task here is to historicize briefly the con-cepts of the sublime and the ineffable and torecount the critical debates concerning theseaesthetic categories. Then Ill present a few in-stances of how these categories have surfaced in

In the mid-1980s jean-luc nancy ob-served that the sublime is in fashion([1988] 1993, 25), reminding us that aes-

thetic categories have a history despite the ten-dency to naturalize and universalize aestheticexperience.1 In recent music studies the oncemoribund concepts of the sublime and its twin,the ineffable, have been resuscitated under thebanner of postmodern thought, which in a sin-gle stroke claims them as both new and univer-

sal. As George Lakoff (1987) has demonstratedin his well-known Women, Fire, and DangerousThings, whose title I invoke here, categories ingeneral are revealing about human understand-ing. Here I argue that the recent promotion ofaesthetic categories of the sublime and the inef-

theorizing gender,

culture, and music

The Sublime, the Ineffable, and

Other Dangerous Aesthetics

Judy Lochhead

1. While I have read Nancys statement to suggest a histor-ical understanding of the sublime, it sets up an argumentfor understanding the sublime as a universal conceptasthe destiny of art ([1998] 1993, 25).

2. While I do not address it here, the concept of the un-canny similarly undermines the philosophical and politicalgoals of feminism. Since a historicization of the uncannyrequires a wholly different set of issues and authors, I willnot address it here. But throughout the footnotes I providesome quotes that suggest how discussion might proceed.


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64 Women & Music Volume 12

Once this change occurs, discussion of thesublime migrates into writing that is more strict-ly philosophical, affirming the break betweenaesthetics and ethics. It is at this juncture alsothat the binary distinctions of gender play a de-terminative role in defining aesthetic experience.

Specifically, the sublime is gendered male and isopposed to the beautiful, gendered female. AsCornelia Klinger observes, this polarizationof the sublime and beautiful . . . take[s] placeat the same moment of Western history whengender relations undergo not a real revolution,but a considerable reshuffling in the wake of theEnlightenment (1997, 194). Beauty is associ-ated with things that are small, smooth, curvy,delicate, clean, passive, and quiet. The sublime

is associated with things that are vast, rough,jagged, heavy, hard, and loud.In his 1757 essay, A Philosophical Enquiry

into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful, the Irish writer Edmund Burke valo-rizes the sublime as a superior aesthetic categoryby virtue of a power that registers in prerationalexperience. Its association with pain and dan-ger and the terrible invokes fear that is at oncepainful and pleasurable.7 Beauty, on the otherhand, is an inferior aesthetic category associatedwith weakness and imperfection. For Burke,women are guided by nature to embody the at-tributes of beauty in order, presumably, to ap-peal to mens desire: Beauty in distress is muchthe most affecting beauty.8

Such gendering of the beautiful and sublimealso appears in the thought of Immanuel Kantin midcentury. It is explicit in an early workfrom 1764, Observations on the Feeling of

recent music scholarship in light of these criticaldebates.3

Sublime Primer

The first significant use of the term sublimetracesback to a Greek treatise on rhetorical technique

commonly attributed to Longinus.4 Writing inthe first century CE, Longinus described the sub-lime as a lofty quality of speech that effected akind of transport for the audience. For Longinus,sublimity in oration produces ecstasy as wellas wonder and astonishment, and, flowingfrom the orators linguistic skill, it tears every-thing up like a whirlwind.5

Longinuss treatise was resurrected in the eigh-teenth century, and the concept of the sublime

became central to the birth not only of aestheticsas the province of artistic experience but also,as Peter De Bolla has argued, of the modern hu-man subject.6Turning away from the Longinianfocus on the sublime effects of rhetoric, eigh-teenth-century authors presented taxonomicaccounts of those phenomena of the natural orconstructed world linked to sublime affect andconsidered aesthetic issues in the context of eth-ics and morality. By the mid-eighteenth century,accounts of the sublime had turned away fromthe ethical and toward psychology, that is, to theexperience of the individual as an autonomoussubject.

3. Throughout the remainder of the article I quote agreat many authors on the sublime and the ineffable. Thelarger passages from which I take short phrases are givenin the footnotes. Ideas and words included or discussedin the text are bolded in the quotation. Additional rel-evant quotes about the sublime are included to provide abroader picture of the extent of the historical fascinationwith the sublime.

4. The author of the text is not known because of an ap-parent misreading of the original manuscript. See the in-troduction to Longinus ([first century CE] 1965) by D. A.Russell for more details.5. For grandeur produces ecstasyrather than persuasionin the hearer; and the combination of wonder and aston-ishmentalways proves superior to the merely persuasiveand pleasant. . . . Sublimity . . . tears everything up likea whirlwind and exhibits the orators whole power at asingle blow (Longinus [first century CE] 1965, 2).6. Three translations of Longinuss text appeared in theearly years of the eighteenth century (1712, 1724, 1739).See De Bolla (1989, 32).

7. [The source of the sublime is to be found in] whateveris fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conver-sant about terrible objects (Burke [1757] 1990, 36).8. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that farfrom being produced by them, it anticipates our reason-ings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force; Beautyalmost always carries with it an idea of weakness andimperfection. Women are very sensible of this; for whichreasons, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to coun-terfeit weakness, and even sickness. In all this, they areguided by nature. Beauty in distress is much the most af-fecting beauty (Burke [1757] 1990, 53, 100).


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ing a sense of pleasure.10So a judgment of beautyassures the smooth flow from the sensible worldto conceptual Understanding. In a judgment ofthe Sublime, however, Imagination is not in ac-cord with Reason. When faced with an objectof extreme size or power, the Imagination can-not properly synthesize the sensible evidenceitcannot form a presentation of the object. As anoutrage on the imagination the sublime is atonce a displeasure emanating from the in-adequacy of the imagination but at the sametime a pleasure, since the inadequacy associ-ated with the sensible world makes us aware ofthe ideas and teleology of pure reason.11Becausethe sublime points to the human capacity forreason and hence morality, Kant asserts that the

sublime is not a property of things of naturebut rather an indication of our superiority overnature within, and thus also over nature withoutus.12For Kant, the sublime is associated withthings that appear unbounded by either form orsheer size, in other words, things that defy ourcomprehension; yet through this cognitive frus-tration the superiority of pure reason becomesapparent.

As a concept of extremes the sublime plays

a significant role in aesthetic theory and artisticpractice in the nineteenth century both becauseof the strong emotional content of its negativepleasure and because of the ideal of freedom

the Beautiful and Sublime, and especially in itsfourth section, entitled The Distinction of theBeautiful and the Sublime in the Interrelationsof the Two Sexes. Here Kant inscribes genderinto the very nature of knowledge, which hequalifies with aesthetic categories: the under-standing of women is beautiful, that of men isdeep.9The ethical cast of the earlier eighteenth-century discussion appears in this Kant work aswell: a womans virtue is beautiful, while that ofa mans is noble; a womans actions are guidedby an avoidance of the ugly; and while thereare good moral qualities that are amiable andbeautiful . . . they can not properly be includedwithin the virtuous disposition (Kant [1764]1960, 57). In a single stroke Kant both degrades

the feminine and the beautiful and elevates themasculine and sublime as superior both aestheti-cally and morally.

The distinction between the beautiful and thesublime recurs in Kants later and highly influen-tial works, and while the explicit gendering fallsaway, the gender-based opposition remains inforce. In Kants Critique of Judgment, the thirdof his trilogy of works presenting a philosophyof human knowledge and ethics, the dualisms of

the beauty-sublime distinction play a significantrole in his account of aesthetic judgment.For Kant, knowledge entails the actions and

interactions of the faculties of Reason, Under-standing, and Imagination. Imagination syn-thesizes the sensory evidence of the world, Un-derstanding thinks through the syntheses ofImagination, and Reason is our capacity to formpure ideas apart from the sensible world (Shaw2006, 7290). All human cognition requires theinteraction of these faculties, but the capacity for

morality resides solely in the realm of Reason.In a judgment of beauty Imagination and Un-

derstanding are in a harmonious relation, creat-

9. The fair sex has just as much understanding as themale, but it is a beautiful understanding, whereas oursshould be a deep understanding, . . . The virtue of a wom-an is a beautiful virtue. That of the male sex should be anoble virtue. Women will avoid the wicked not becauseit is unright, but because it is ugly (Kant [1764] 1960,78, 81).

10. Pleasure in aesthetic judgment is not associated with de-sire for Kant because of his notion of aesthetic disinterest.11. The feeling of the sublime, may appear, indeed, inpoint of form to contravene the ends of our power ofjudgment, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation,and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, andyet it is judged all the more sublime on that account;

The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling ofdispleasure arising from the inadequacy of imaginationinthe aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain an estima-tion by reason, but it is at the same time also a pleasure,aroused by the fact that this very judgment of the inad-equacy, namely, that event the greatest power of sensibil-ity is inadequate, is [itself] in harmony with rational ideas,insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us (Kant[1790] 1964, 91, 11415).12. Sublimity . . . does not reside in any of the things of na-ture, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may becomeconscious of our superiority over nature within, and thusalso over nature without us (Kant [1790] 1964, 114).


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lime played easily into the aesthetic goals of highmodernist artists.

The sublime held fascination for a wide rangeof poststructuralist philosophers as well. In his1978The Truth in PaintingJacques Derrida re-visits Kants discussions of the sublime becauseit engages the question of how knowledge isbounded. Following out a passing reference inKant to the parerga, or frames, of artworks,Derrida considers their status as boundaries inconjunction with Kants idea that the sublimeis the unbounded.16For Derrida, the concept ofunboundedness only makes sense when set inopposition to the bounded, and hence Derridaclaims that the unboundedness of the sublime isan effect of consciousness itself (Shaw 2006,

119). As a constructed category, art and hencethe artwork require a boundarya framemarking them off as art. In other words, theartwork lacks the unity of a work withoutsome sort of boundary. The pleasure of the sub-lime for Derrida, as Mark Cheetham argues,consists not in the promise of something . . .outside a given frame, but rather from the per-petual . . . activity of framing itself, from the

parergon (qtd. in Shaw 2006, 118).

Taking a somewhat different tack, JuliaKristeva links the sublime to abjection. ForKristeva, the sublime edges the abject, and assomething added it causes us to be both here

it representedthe freedom of the pure reasonfrom the real. Thus, for Schiller, the sublimeoverstep[s] the limits of . . . sense in orderto bestow freedom from the sensuous prison ofthe beautiful.13 While the gendering of beautyand the sublime is just below the surface here,it bubbles up in his appropriation of the mythof Calypso and Ulysses.14 Beauty, as Calypso,ensnares Ulysses in the sensuous pleasures of thebody, but the Sublime liberates him to fulfill ahigher destiny. The Romantic sublime appearsas the absolutely unknowable Other.

In the early years of the twentieth century theaesthetic category of the sublime was largelydismantled as a sluggish legacy of Romanticism.Revived in the second half of the twentieth cen-

tury, it played a significant role in poststructur-alist philosophy and in various writings aboutpostmodernity. As part of a manifesto from 1948entitled The Sublime Is Now the artist BarnettNewman appropriated the concept as an aes-thetic banner that freed artists from the shacklesnot only of beauty but also of memory, associa-tion, nostalgia, legend, [and] myth as a celebra-tion of absolute emotions.15The masculinistimage of freedom typical of the Romantic sub-

13. The sublime opens to us a road to overstep the limitsof the world of sense, in which the feeling of the beautifulwould forever imprison us. . . . [I]t is suddenly and by ashock that the sublime wrenches our spiritual and inde-pendent nature away from the net which feeling has spunround us, and which enchains the soul more tightly be-cause of its subtle texture. . . . one single sublime emotionoften suffices to break all this tissue of imposture at oneblow to give freedom to the fettered elasticity of spiritualnature, to reveal its true destination, and to oblige it toconceive, for one instant at least, the feeling of its liberty(Schiller [1801] 1967, 143).14. Beautyunder the shape of the divine Calypso, be-

witched the virtuous son of Ulysses, and the power of hercharms held him long a prisoner in her island. For long hebelieved he was obeying an immortal divinity, whilst hewas only the slave of sense; but suddenly, an impression ofthe sublime. . . seizes him; he remembers that he is calledto a higher destinyhe throws himself into the waves andis free (Schiller [1801] 1967, 143).15. [After Michelangelo,] painting continued on its mer-ry quest for a voluptuous art until in modern times theimpressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began themovement to destroy the established rhetoric of beautybythe impressionist insistence on a surface of ugly strokes.. . . I believe that here in America, some of us, free from

the weight of European culture, are finding the answer,by completely denying that art has any concern with theproblem of beauty and where to find it. . . . We are reas-serting mans natural desire for the exalted, for a concernwith our relationship to the absolute emotions. . . We arefreeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, associa-tion, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have

been the devices of Western European painting. Insteadof making cathedralsout of Christ, man, or life, we aremaking [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings(Newman [1948] 1990, 173).16. What constitutes them asparergais not simply theirexteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural linkwhich rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon.And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity ofthe ergon; So, although the sublime is better presentedby (raw) nature than by art, it is not in nature but in our-selves, projected by us because of the inadequation in usof several powers, of several faculties (Derrida [1978]1987, 59, 132).


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explicit form in an allegory he concocts (quot-ed in its entirety in the note).20 Personifyingthe Kantian faculties of Imagination, Reason,and Understanding, Lyotard tells the story ofthe birth of the Sublime. Reason (male) rapesImagination (female), and the Sublime is con-

ceived. Imagination dies giving birth to theSublime. And Lyotard concludes: Imaginationmust be violated for it is from her pain, throughher rape that the pleasure to envision or almostenvision the law is obtained.

Despite the gendered history of the sublime,some feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990sappropriated and reshaped the concept as ameans to value and sanction the artistic prac-tices of women. Envisioning the sublime as an

empowering aesthetic, Patricia Yeager arguesagainst a sublime of domination and hierar-chy and for a horizontal refiguring, in otherwords, for the sublime as an expansion toward

. . . [and] there.17Like Derrida, Kristeva claimsa paradoxical status for the sublime as an im-possible bounding.

The sublime plays a large role in Jean-FranoisLyotards discussions of the aesthetic of modernand postmodern art.18For Lyotard, postmodernart is framed by modern art, but postmodern artand specifically the postmodern sublime deniesitself the solace of good formsthe postmod-ern sublime puts forward the unpresentablein presentation by breaking away from notonly formal convention but any consensus ofa taste.19The postmodern artist does not workwith preestablished rules, and the postmodernwork defies existing forms of conceptual under-standing. Manifesto-like, Lyotard urges against

a modern nostalgia of the whole and the oneand for a war on totality by means of thepostmodern sublime.

While the masculinist gendering of the sub-lime as male is mostly implicit, Lyotard gives it

17. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not thesame moment on the journey, but the same subject andspeech bring them into being . . . the sublime is somethingaddedthat expands us, overstrainsus, and causes us to be

bothhere, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling.

A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed,joyfascination (Kristeva [1980] 1982, 1112).18. The sublime plays an important role in Lyotardsthought generally, but I focus here only on his aesthetictheories.19. The postmodern [sublime] would be that which, inthe modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presen-tation itself; that which denies itself the solace of goodforms, the consensus of a taste which would make itpossible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unat-tainable; that which searches for new presentations, notin order to enjoy them but in order to impart a strongersense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writeris in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the

work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according toa determining judgment, by applying familiar categoriesto the text or to the work. . . . We have paid a high enoughprice for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for thereconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the trans-parent and communicable experience. Under the generaldemand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hearthe mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for therealization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is:Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to theunpresentable; let us activate the differences and save thehonor of the name (Lyotard 1983, 34041).

20. The father is satisfied, the mother is unhappy. Thesublime child is emotionally mixed, ambivalent, compris-ing pain and satisfaction. This follows from the fact thatin terms of the genealogy of the so-called faculties of cog-nition the parents stem from two different families. She isjudgment, he is reason.She is an artist, he is a moralist.She reflects, he determines. The moral law (the law of the

father, paternal law) makes up its mind and determinesthe mind to act (determines the spirit of action). Reasonwants good children and requires imagination to bringforth just moral principles. But the mother, the reflectivefree imagination is only able to deploy forms without anypre-determined rule, without defined or definable aims.The sublime is the child of an unfortunate encounter.Misfortune, because the Idea shows so little willingnessto concession, the law, the father is so authoritarian, sounconditional is the respect he demands, that it is impos-sible (he does not care) to reach at a voluntary consent. . . with imagination. He drives the forms apart, the formsdrive themselves apart, they become exuberant in his pres-ence. He fertilizes the virgin devoted to forms disregarding

her consent. He does not demand anything but respect forhimself, for the law and its realization. He does not needa beautiful nature. The only thing he demands impera-tively is a raped, overpowered and exhausted imagination.Giving birth to the sublime, she dies, believes to die. . . .Violence, force is necessarily linked to the sublime, thatbreaks free and rises . . . Imagination must be violatedfor it is from her pain, through her rape that the plea-sure to envision or almost envision the law is obtained.. . . You will smile about this childish scenario. I usethe translation by Klinger (1997, 191211), which dif-fers substantially from the one by Jeffrey Librett (Lyotard[1988] 1993).


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Philosophical and Aesthetic Critique

A wide-ranging critique of the sublime emergedover the last twenty years in various humanisticdisciplines. My focus here will be largely on thosewho have resisted the sublime as a meaningfulphilosophical or aesthetic concept or who havetaken a broader critical perspective on its role inknowledge. But it is important to note that thesublime remains viable in a wide array of disci-plines. My discussion proceeds chronologically.

In Postmodernism and the Born-Again Avant-Garde John Tagg argues that the Lyotardian re-jection of grand narrative in the postmodern isaccomplished by means of a thoroughly modernand grand trope of the avant-garde: the urgeto make new.24Out of the smoke and dust

of the postmodern sublime the outlines of arough but redeeming modernism appear in thefull force of patriarchal power.

Peter De Bolla, both as a single author andwith Andrew Ashfield, develops a complex ar-gument about the emergence of the concept ofthe sublime in the eighteenth century. De Bollaargues that the autonomous subject, a concep-tualization of human subjectivity based on theself-determination of the subject and the per-

ception of the uniqueness of every individual, isthe product of a set of [eighteenth-century] dis-courses, including that of the sublime.25For DeBolla, the sublime refers not simply to an aes-thetic category but to a discursive technology

others.21 Carolyn Freeman, in The FeminineSublime, distinguishes a patriarchal from a femi-nine sublime on the grounds of how the Otheris construed in each. As an aesthetic stance, thefeminine sublime takes up a position of respectin response to an incalculable otherness.22

Like Lyotard, Frederic Jameson conceives asublime unique to postmodernity in his Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Cap-

italism. For Jameson, advanced technologies ofpostmodernity make it possible to think the im-possible totality of the contemporary world sys-tem.23Invoking first the technological sublimeof advanced technology introduced in 1964by Leo Marxs groundbreaking The Machine inthe Garden, Jameson then argues that the post-

modern sublime resides in the enormous andthreatening yet dimly perceivable, other real-ity of economic and social institutions.

21. Women must create a new architectonics of empow-ermentnot through the old-fashioned sublime of domi-nation, the vertical sublime which insists on aggrandizingthe masculine self over others, but instead through a hori-zontal sublimethat moves toward sovereignty or expen-diture, that refuses an oedipal, phallic fight to the deathwith the father, but expands toward others, spreads itselfout into multiplicity (Yaeger 1989, 191).22. The feminine sublime is neither a rhetorical mode nor

an aesthetic category but a domain of experience that re-sists categorization, in which the subject enters into relationwith an othernesssocial, aesthetic, political, ethical, erot-icthat is excessive and unrepresentable. . . . I argue for areading of the sublime as an allegory of the construction ofthe patriarchal (but not necessarily male) subject, a self thatmaintains its borders by subordinating difference and byappropriating rather than identifying with that which pres-ents itself as other; The politics of the feminine sublimeinvolves taking up a position of respect in response to anincalculable otherness (Freeman 1995, 34, 11).23. Yet conspiracy theory [as manifest in contemporaryentertainment literature] must be seen as a degraded at-temptthrough the figuration of advanced technology

to think the impossible totality of the contemporary worldsystem. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening,yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic andsocial institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodernsublimecan alone be theorized (Jameson 1991, 3738).See also Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology:The Sublime is no longer an (empirical) object indicatingthrough its very inadequacy the dimension of a transcen-dent Thing-in-itself (Idea) but an object which occupiesthe place, replaces, fills out the empty place of the Thingas the void, as the pure Nothing of absolute negativitythe Sublime is an object whose positive body is just anembodiment of Nothing (1989, 206).

24. What is extraordinary, however, is that from theshards of this shattered whole, Lyotard retrieves his ownunity. Postmodern thought and postmodern art havethrown aside the security blankets of belief, the consol-ing myths of legitimizing narratives of the past, and have

called into question the adequacy of every discourse inorder to present the sublime fact that the unpresentableexists. . . . There is a single line of questioning and a singlecompulsion: the urge to make new. . . . The diversity ofexperimentation and dissent is gathered up in the unityof the mission of the avant-garde to challenge the verystructures of meaning of society. Like John Wayne, out ofthe smoke and dust of the postmodernist explosion, we

begin to see the familiar chunky outlines of a rough butredeeming modernism (Tagg 1989, 3).25. The autonomous subject, a conceptualization of hu-man subjectivity based on the self-determination of thesubject and the perception of the uniqueness of every in-


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power of the sublime in helping to define thevery nature of human subjectivity. But he notes,instead of a model of a whole and cohesive,coherent and unitary subjectivity, Lyotard putsforward a subjectivity premised on fear andthreat.28 Thus, domination and violence are

raised to the level of a principle, indeed theprin-ciple for the foundation of self and culture.

Cornelia Klinger observes that by the latetwentieth century the explicit gender hierarchiesthat underlay the beauty-sublime distinctionhave been cut loose from the ontological andmoral framework of the eighteenth century.29The sublime of postmodernity is reduced to agesture of rigid resistance and for the sheer goalof causing pain for pleasure. The postmodern

sublime of the avant-garde that cuts through theconventions of society and a concept of thesublime has lost whatever pretensions to socialresponsibility it might once have held.30

In Failure and the Sublime Steven Helmling

remarks on the anxiety toward representation

that runs throughout Frederic Jamesons work.

This anxiety is expressed in notions of the un-

representable and a desire for an escape from

that creates the subject of aesthetics at the sametime as it legislates the aesthetic subject.26

Timothy Engstrm, in The Postmodern Sub-lime?: Philosophical Rehabilitations and Prag-matic Evasion, worries about the prohibitionagainst representation in the Lyotardian counselagainst narratives or any sort of presentation,since it protects one of the oldest narrativeof the absolute we have: deference for the ob-scure.27As Engstrm points out, the elevationof the avant-garde as the new priesthood overthe ineffable masks the necessity of representa-tion, that escape from representation is notpossible and that mere beauty may not be sucha bad thing.

In The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia

for Violence Thomas Huhn remarks on the

dividual, is the product of a set of discoursespresent tothe period 175663. . . . [T]he discourse on debt and thediscourse on the sublime, generate the discursive milieuwithin which the autonomous subject becomes apparent.. . . [T]he discourse on debt and on the sublime, the oneproducing the rationale for a never-ending inflation of thenational debt, the other a powerful mechanism for evermore sublime sensation, which leads to a conceptualiza-tion of the subject as the excess or overplus of discourseitself (De Bolla 1989, 6).26. The discourse on the sublime, then, should be seen as

a technical discourse of the subject: it bridges the incom-mensurable gap between aesthetic pleasure and ethical ac-tion. But in order to function effectively as a technology ofknowledge production it must become transformational,a discourse of the sublime. . . . As technology, the dis-course on the sublime creates the subject of aesthetics atthe same time as it legislates the aesthetic subject (DeBolla and Ashfield 1996, 6).27. What may be more worrisome is when thou shaltnot make visible, like thou shalt not make graven im-ages (Exodus), becomes itself a sacralized ban, or prohi-bition, an aestheticized via negativethat protects one ofthe oldest narratives of the absolute we have: deferencefor the obscure. . . . The contest is not between presenting

and unpresentability but between competing conventionsof presenting, forming, and figuring. . . . His concept ofthe sublime, however, runs the risk of a certain sort ofevasion, the risk of striving to abdicate responsibility forwhat it is discourses do, whether sublime or not. To makethe unpresentable the primary value of the true artist, andto make the avant-garde the new priesthood over the in-effable, seems also to evade much of what is best aboutmuch non-Lyotardian postmodern art and theory: thatis, its willingness to forgo grand apologetics vis--vis thesublime in favor of a more modest acknowledgment thatescape is not possible, not desirable, and that mere beautymay not be such a bad thing (Engstrm 1993, 204).

28. The pleasure of the sublime is what binds subjectivity

to itself; it is the moment when subjectivity feels itself, themoment when subjectivity becomes whole and cohesive,coherent and unitary. It is in short, the moment in andaccording to which subjectivity is constituted. . . . Sub-jectivity [for Lyotard] is grounded in the inverted, thoughnonetheless more powerful image of a threatening andfearful nature. Thus domination and violence are raised tothe level of a principle, indeed theprinciple for the founda-tion of self and culture. Pleasure is both concealment andlegitimation of this elevation (Huhn 1995, 274).29. By the end of the twentieth century the specific mascu-linism of the sublime that evolved with the rise of the mod-ern subject in the eighteenth century has lost its original on-tological and moral frameworkbut the masculinist gesture

of breaking away from a given order is retained. Havinglost its justification and purpose in the service of a higheraim, it is reduced to a gesture of rigid resistanceagainst anygiven reality, combined with the intention to cause pain forpleasure as an aim in itself (Klinger 1997, 206).30. [For Lyotard] it is not the realm of nature, as forKant and Schiller, from which the sublime must help us tobreak away. Instead it is the realm of the social that hastaken this place. It is not the spell of sensuality (or femalesexuality) that must be overpowered from a firm ratio-nal and moral standpoint; but the conventions of societymust be ripped through by aesthetic, artistic innovation(Klinger 1997, 206).


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In summary, the critique of the sublime in the

last twenty years clusters around issues of vio-

lence, domination, failure, an obsession for novel-

ty, latent masculinism, and a channeling of desire

modeled on patriarchal constructions of aesthetic

experience. Additionally, some authors have fo-

cused more broadly on how concepts of the sub-

lime have played a formative role in constructions

of the modern autonomous subject and how the

sublime has become the unknowable transcen-

dent of modernity. It is within the context of this

broad-ranging critique that I visit recent writing

about music in order to flag a warning about the

sedimented meanings of aesthetic categories that

have become fashionable. I will focus on the sub-

lime but also bring in the ineffable, which as the

rebound of the sublime offers itself as the unpre-sentable and inexpressible.

The Sublime and Ineffable in Music Studies

The ineffable has been insinuated into recentmusical thought in the United States through thephilosopher Vladimir Janklvitch, who wrotein the Sartrean and Merleau-Pontyan context ofFrench Continental philosophy in midcentury.

Janklvitch claims that the purpose of musicis to express infinitely that which cannot beexplained because there are infinite intermi-nable things to be said of it.33For Janklvitch,the ineffability of music is the poetic mysterypar excellence.

More recently, Scott Burnham has addressedBeethovens heroic style, observing a kind of su-persublime musical effect that goes beyondan overmastering presence.34 For Burnham,

thematization.31 For Helmling, this inability

to make sense of things revives the existential-

ist absurd . . . (when alienation was a buzzword

only bores and spoilsports linked with Marx).

In Sublimity: The Modern TranscendentJohn Milbank posits that the sublime of moder-

nity has assumed the place of the transcendentaccorded to God in premodern times. Both Godand the sublime are unknowable and infinite,but the modern-postmodern transcendent is con-ceived as an unknowable void, whereas thepremodern transcendent is conceived as a su-pra-hierarchical summit which we may gradual-ly hope to scale.32While beauty and sublimityinhered in the transcendent God of premoderntimes, beauty becomes a purely banal quality,

leaving the aesthetic field free for an art entirelyreduced to . . . shock and rupture.

31. The antithetical power of the sublime draws,again, from both a desire for the unrepresentableescapefrom thematizationand an anxiety about an inabilityto represent or render representable. This anxiety aboutthe inability to give representation to such enormousforces [Jameson 1991, 34], an ominous sense of empti-ness in the postmodern veu itself, an inability to makesense of things, besets individuals in their lived experienceof the increasingly unintelligible life-world of late capital-ism [Jameson 1991, 51]a theme that revives . . . the ex-istentialist absurd of a generation ago (when alienation

was a buzzword only bores and spoilsports linked withMarx) (Helmling 2001, 118).32. One might suppose that modernity is characterizedby a simple rejection of transcendence in favour of imma-nence, meaning the pure self-sufficiency of the finite worldto itself . . . Yet although the shift to immanentism wascertainly crucial, the reconceptualization of transcendenceas sublimitywas of equal importance. . . . At its heartlay a new thinking of the transcendent as the absolutelyunknowable void, upon whose brink we finite beings mustdizzily hover, as opposed to an older notion of a supra-hi-erarchical summit which we may gradually hope to scale.. . Through these transformations however, it has nonethe-less remained fundamentally enabled by a supposedly cru-

cial aesthetic distinction between the sublime on the onehand and the beautiful on the other. In the postmodernversion of this distinction,beauty becomes a purely banal,ideological, or even impossible instance, leaving the aes-thetic field free for an art entirely reduced to the effectingof the sublime as shock and rupture; However, whereonce the sublime God was alsobeautiful, also regardedas the eminent infinite reality of every mode of harmoni-ous proportion and value, modernity and postmodernitytend strictly to substitute sublimity for transcendence.This means that all that persists of transcendence is sheerunknowability or its quality of non-representability andnon-depictability (Milbank 2004, 21112, 21213).

33. The mask, the inexpressive face that music assumes

voluntarily these days, conceals a purpose; to express in-finitely that which cannot be explained . . . the mysterytransmitted to us by music is not deaths sterilizing inex-plicability but the fertile inexplicability of life, freedom,or love. . . . The ineffable. . . cannot be explained becausethere are infinite interminable things to be said of it: suchis the mystery of God, whose depths cannot be sounded,the inexhaustible mystery of love, both Eros and Caritas,the poetic mystery par excellence (Janklvitch [1961]2003, 71, in the chapter The Ineffable and the Untel-lable: The Meaning of Meaning).34. [Beethovens heroic-style music] manages to modelthe self and to inspire the awe due to the sublime. The ef-


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able effects offer the undomesticated, the wild

and the free; in other words, these effects suggest

the absolute other of the Romantic sublime.37

In his Beethoven Antihero Robert Finkdraws specifically on Lyotards notion of thepostmodern sublime as that which puts for-ward the unpresentable in [the form of the]presentation itself.38 Focusing on McClarysnow infamous metaphorical association of thefailed rapist with the moment of recapitula-tion in the first movement of Beethovens NinthSymphony, Fink contextualizes the violent im-plications of this moment through a history ofcritical accounts. The violent metaphors of anentire line of male critics encode the familiar

Beethovens heroic sublime allows the indi-vidual to merge with the universal throughan enthused and interiorized presence of thesublime, recalling directly Kants valorizationof the sublime as a marker of pure reason.

In The Hip-Hop Sublime as a Form of Com-

modification Adam Krims argues that the de-tuned layers of samples in reality rap defyaural representability for musically socializedWestern listeners.35The effect of this hip-hopsublime becomes a figure for inner-city lifeand projects the ghetto as radically unrepre-sentable.36Krims further argues that this hip-hop sublime serves as a commodity that is mar-keted as a sign of authenticity. For Krims, then,the unrepresentability of the hip-hop sublime is

a musical effect that is representable by Marxianeconomic theory.Drawing on Janklvitchs concepts of the

drastic and the gnostic, Carolyn Abbate

claims the sublime unpresentability of all music

through concepts of both the ineffable and the un-

canny. Focusing on real music in the moment

of performance, Abbate claims that its unpresent-

fect of this music on the listener goes beyond being seizedby an overmastering presence. . . Instead it demonstrates

. . . that the developing self can indeed be a thing sub-lime, that the rhythm of individual struggle can becomethe rhythm of the Weltall (the cosmos) and vice versa. . . The heroic style offers a concrete locus of the merg-er of the individual and the universal. . . . The music. . . seems to animate and empower its listeners . . . One

becomes literally enthused, flushed with the interiorizedpresence of the sublime. . . . The self is made sublime, thesublime given a history (Burnham 1995, 150).35. But the particular musical treatment of the sampledexcerpt is equally telling. It is imbricated in a dense com-bination of musical layers; all of them maintaining thefamiliar duple regularity, but in the domain of pitch theycomprise a sharply dissonant combination, even by the

standards of jazz or soul harmony. In fact, the layers arenot even in tune,so to speak: they are separated by in-tervals that can be measured only in terms of fractions ofwell-tempered semitones. The result is that no pitch com-bination may form conventionally representable relation-ships with the others; musical layers pile up, defying auralrepresentability for musically socialized Western listeners.This is what produces what I call the hip-hop sublime(Krims 2002, 68).36. The failure of representation itself becomes a figurefor inner-city life . . . [and the detuned layers] proj-ects the ghetto. . . as radically unrepresentablein itself(Krims 2002, 69).

37. But there is something about the objective mode[of writing about music] that seems to protest too much,bypassing the uncanny qualities that are always waitingnearby in trying to domesticate what remains nonethe-less wild; Janklvitch defines musics ineffability (forsome, an uncomfortable word) at times rather neutrally asmusics indeterminacy, its mutability when submitted forcontemplation, its range of effects, which include seem-ing to be strange or beautiful noise as well as firing upsocial or poetic or visual or other associations. It is thisthat frees us; Thus general suspicions of aural presenceneed themselves to be resisted. Presence can be demon-ized for reasons that seem programmed, for not all thosewho argue for its worth are vulgar. And reflexive scornfor musics ineffability is equally contestable. Ignoringreal musicthe musical eventand scorning effabilitygohand in hand because they are interdependent (Abbate2004, 508, 516, 532).38. McClary heard in Beethovens Ninth what I did: notthe abstract comforts of Hanslicks musically beautiful,but an audible trace of what I later came to recognizeas Jean-Franois Lyotards postmodern sublime; [An]entire line of male critics have grasped at metaphors of(often sexualized) violence to situate this passage as aliminal case of the modern sublime, as the painful plea-surable moment where the discomfort of unspeakablecontent is held in checkjust barelyby the comfort of

comprehending a great composers formal genius; Thebeautifying[strategy]. . . attempts to deny or minimizeany disturbing aspects, usually by exalting technical de-scription over exegesis; But her rape image . . . encodeswith aphoristic brutality the complex and postmodern re-lation to form that is characteristic of Lyotards second,postmodern moment of the sublime . . . [which provides]formal insight into Beethovens aesthetics of failure. . . .McClarys infamous remark shows . . . the shattered il-logic that puts forward the unpresentable in [the form ofthe] presentation itself: the postmodern sublime. To listento it with herto hear Beethovens failure as both sublimeand postmodernis my goal (Fink 2004, 11113).


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man soul. The technological sublime, then, isa transcendent effect that defines the limits ofhuman existence.

Ending

The philosophical and aesthetic resurgence ofthe concepts of the sublime and the ineffable inthe latter half of the twentieth century has beenthe subject of intense critical scrutiny in thosefields. But the valorization of these and relatedconcepts in music studies seems to have benefit-ed little from this larger debate. If we forget thesedimented meanings of the sublime, proclaim-ing it new and fresh, and if we forget its deadand maligned sister, the beautiful, we swim indangerous waters. Similarly, there is danger in

our move toward immanence and the particu-lar and away from transcendence and the gen-eral. As J. M. Bernstein notes in The Fate ofArt: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida

and Adorno, there is no non-contingent wayof following the path of increasing immanencewithout losing a critical perspective or attain-ing a critical perspective that does not repeat thesuppression of particularity (1992, 67).

My goal here is not to censor but rather to

raise a red flag of warning lest such terms as thesublime, the ineffable, the unpresentable, theuncanny, and immanence mask sedimented gen-der binaries that will keep the feminine in theground along with the beautiful.

Works Cited and Other Relevant Texts

Philosophy, Art, Aesthetics

Bernstein, J. M. 1992. The Fate of Art: AestheticAlienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Uni-

versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Burke, Edmund. [1757] 1990. A Philosophical Enqui-

ry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

the Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Castle, Terry. 1995. The Female Thermometer: Eigh-

teenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the

Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press.

De Bolla, Peter. 1989. The Discourse of the Sublime:

Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

pleasure-pain of the modern sublime, but suchhermeneutic accounts are opposed to those ofthe beautifying, which attempt to deny orminimize any disturbing aspects of the musicthrough technical analysis. By means of a seriesof formal failures in the first movement, the vio-lence of the recapitulation enacts for Fink thesublime unpresentable in the . . . presentationitself. Such a historicizing and updating of theviolent sublime does little to mask a nostalgiclonging, and, in a Lyotardian fashion, it does soby killing off the beautiful.

Finally, Anne Shreffler refers to the techno-logical sublime in her account of the receptionof Varses music and of his self-representation,playing off of concepts developed in particu-

lar by Leo Marx and later David E. Nye.39ForShreffler, the technological sublime is an atti-tude about new technologies that in the middleof the twentieth century contextualized musicalproduction and reception generally and Varsesmusic specifically. In the Western context of themid-twentieth century, new technologies notonly inspire fear and hope but also are in-dicators of the extreme intensities of the hu-

39. The enormous cultural value ascribed to technologyin the twentieth century, as well as the mixture of awe,admiration, hope, fear, and even horrorthat people expe-rience with regard to technologys power can be describedas the technological sublime. . . . The technological sub-limethen, refers not only to an attitude that celebratesthe possibilities, the power, and the dangers of technol-ogy, but also one that takes into account the heights anddepths of the human soul (Shreffler 2006, 290). Seealso Paul Attinello, Passion/Mirrors (A Passion for theViolent Ineffable: Modernist Music and the Angel/In theHall of Mirrors): The educated and proper view of themore difficult musical products of modernism is that theyrepresent experiments in organization, transformation,

and sound. However, even the educated and sympatheticlistener is frequently struck by an unavoidable impressionof violence, chaos, and attempts to stretch human percep-tion. The widespread denial of this sonic violence suggeststhat it can be seen as a cultural symptom and, in fact, asa distinguishing characteristic of modernist music at thepoint where it looks into the abyss of the future. . . . [Areading of the music in terms of a history of] feeling oraffect [is] to aim beyond mundane understanding towardsome ineffable quality, a kind of transcendence that re-calls the terror and shattering vision of both Rilkes andBenjamins angelsone annihilatingly beautiful, the othergrappling with the detritus of history (2004, 154).


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Judy Lochhead the Sublime the Ineffable and Other Dangerous Aesthetics

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