Sublime borders: modernism, music and the negative

“After the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism” (Adorno 1997: 197). Positioning at its core the category of the sublime, the modernist aesthetic famously engenders a problematic relationship between music – characterised as an autonomous, self‑relating agent of nonrepresentational negativity pursuing on its own terms a powerful critique of the Western metaphysic of presence – and its embeddedness in cultural contexts. At its most radical, like in Lyotard’s aesthetic, music’s ‘immaterial matter’ becomes a traumatic, ‘in‑human’ Otherness, a sublime, otherworldly sound-event, “which is not addressed […and] does not address” (Lyotard 1991a: 142). The musicologist Susan McClary recently highlighted how in the last few decades a new generation of composers has arisen, which by still drawing on the modernist tradition nonetheless engages more directly with signification and the cultural inscription of music. On this basis McClary calls for rehabilitating the allegedly feminine category of the beautiful, thus relocating music’s essence within the anthropological boundaries of pleasure and opening it for cultural diversity and contextuality. Yet, is the beautiful the more apt category for aesthetically framing this artistic development? As Catherine Belsey has pointed out, the specific twist at the core of Žižek’s philosophy consists in its conflating Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of sublimation with Kant’s concept of the sublime (Belsey 2005: 141). Žižek’s sublime object thus intermingles not only pleasure and pain but also the absolute negativity of the Lacanian Real and the positive features of its cultural inscription. In my paper I explore the potential this theoretical frame offers for reading these recent artistic developments neither in terms of a domesticated modernism nor as a return to the aesthetic category of beauty as a culturally embedded fit between form and content. Instead, I will propose that we read them as the exploration of a specific, twisted space at the crossroad of the ‘meaningful’ positivity of culture and that ‘sublime’ negativity that the modernist aesthetic sees as the nonrepresentational essence of music.

Kaleidoscope

• Like this year's hemline, we may all simply have to endure ‘postmodernism’ until the next season. So perhaps we should face facts and start taking a few notes, to be casually dropped at our next garden party. Language, they tell us, and particularly literary language, doesn't describe the world, but only the meaningless machinery of language itself. Character and story are cultural restraints to the ‘free play’ of self and identity, and as such should be subverted. Authors shouldn't write novels any more, but rather ‘deconstruct the Western metaphysic’… Like many post-moderns, Paul Auster has a theory about the world, but, unfortunately, nothing to go with it. In his new novel, In the Country of Last Things, the narrator who travels across Auster's fragmented, entropic landscape never discovers her lost brother, but only other lost people, vast quantities of dead and disused objects. It is a world in which language neither works nor matters; it simply lies brokenly about (Scott Bradfield, ‘Thoroughly Postmodern’, The Listener, 28 Jul 88).

Literary Representation and Social Legitimation: J. L. Burckhardt's Approach to “The Orient”

As a field of study, the Middle East, like its predecessor the “Orient”, continues to exist more concretely within a vast realm of Western texts, both artistic and ethnographic, than it does on the ground. This ingrained disparity between representation and social reality has motivated some scholars to examine this literature as the manifestation of physical or ideological domination. In Edward Said's Orientalism the interpretation of this literature becomes a search for determining social and political forces, the evidence of which, like the nineteenth-century anthropological notion of “survivals”, resides in each text as an implicit network of unconscious images and metaphors. Similarly, Abdelkebir Khatibi, investigating the historical and ethnographic texts of Jacques Berque, views this literature as determined by the requirements of an exigent and compelling, but inherently flawed, Western metaphysic; an “onto-tháologie” which, in confronting questions of essence and existence, must formulate an “other” to realize its “self”.