Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime by Mark Canuel (review)

In “Poetry Makes You Weird” (The Chronicle of Higher Education online, December 10, 2012), Eric G. Wilson defends verse as something that “propels us into uncharted regions … where we must create, if we are to thrive, coordinates … more sublime than the ones we already know.” Mark Canuel’s Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime defends sublimity in remarkably similar terms as an experimental aesthetic which, if applied to issues of social justice, suggests how we might conceive of right governance as an open-ended process, one which can accommodate heterogeneity and dissent while not abandoning a commitment to reciprocity or legal order. For Canuel, the sublime is a queer and liberating alternative to the aesthetic of beauty’s normativity, even though the latter has eclipsed the sublime over the past decade as a focus for political theory. Surveying work by Elaine Scarry, Peter de Bolla, and others interested in recuperating beauty as an aesthetico-political paradigm, Canuel discerns a disturbing pattern of assumed consensus or “symmetry” (p. 19) at work in the logic of beauty. He argues that such symmetry goes beyond a commitment to “fairness” or equal justice for all by naturalizing certain principles—including sympathy, sameness, and heterosexual reproduction—as a blueprint for social harmony, implicitly excluding true diversity and dissensus.

Canuel asserts that the Kantian sublime constitutes an alternative to beauty insofar as it suggests a mechanism whereby subjects can experience “what morality feels like” (p. 46) without a determinate content to limit the scope of what can be accommodated within the purview of this feeling. In The Critique of Judgment, Kant famously theorizes how, during sublime experiences, our imagination’s inability to provide sensory equivalents for ideas only reason can entertain (such as infinity or higher morality) actually makes us aware of the superiority of our reason over all objects of sense. In the case of the “moral law,” Canuel interprets this unrepresentability as an index of Kant’s “liberality” insofar as our shared capacity to “give ourselves” this law in a highly individualized manner suggests a tolerance towards “different kinds of moral or religious bearings” (p. 48). Moreover, he believes that Kant’s sublime, in rejecting governmental imposition of “images and childish ritual” (qtd. in Canuel, p. 49) upon a populace for purposes of social control, also outlines the conditions of possibility for rigorous dissent and a corrective approach to juridical reform.

The strengths of Canuel’s book are its theoretical sophistication and timeliness at a cultural moment when academic freedom of speech and meaningful dissensus are increasingly threatened. While Canuel’s reading of the sublime resembles others which explore the aesthetic’s potential for oppositional politics (such as Lyotard’s), it also makes compelling connections between the sublime and Kant’s moral philosophy, delineating more clearly how the aesthetic might be linked with social justice. Moreover, Canuel offers readers fresh and original readings of Romantic poems such as Byron’s Manfred and Smith’s Beachy Head. A notable blind spot in Canuel’s assessment of the sublime, however, is its lack of engagement with a considerable body of Romantic scholarship that critiques the sublime’s dialectical features. Feminist, New Historicist, psychoanalytical, and ecological criticism of the past thirty years has explored the significance of this dialectic, often concluding that far from being a purely negative or empty category, the sublime’s investment in so-called “vigorous” (masculine) morality and in rational superiority implicitly “others” certain groups (women, non- Western peoples, and non-human agents), thereby creating a ground for domination. From this perspective, it is no accident that the Romantic sublime was readily co-opted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century technological sublime’s project of controlling natural and social production via ever-expanding processes of rationalization, albeit with unforeseen results. If critics such as Frederic Jameson are right in suggesting that late capitalist technological networks have themselves become sublime both in their unrepresentable complexity and unprecedented power over human and non-human entities, this unrepresentability and power complicate Canuel...