Stages of the Sublime in North America

How does one stand
To behold the sublime?

(Wallace Stevens, "The American Sublime," from Ideas of Order)*

A contemporary French theorist tells us that "[t]he sublime is in fashion (à la mode)"--and not only in France, nor just in theory. ¹ He goes on to remark that in fact the sublime was inevitably "de la mode . . . because it has always concerned a break within or from aesthetics." It marks the instance of discontinuity in experience, the moment of loss and disfigurement. What goes unremarked, however, is the paradox by which that moment is registered in experience, enabling the sublime to retain a measure of aesthetic coherence. So understood, it is figured as modern, modernist (Adorno), or even (in Lyotard's attention to "the sublime is now") postmodern. ² It might be that our preoccupation with the status of modernity and modernism helps explain the current fashion for talk of the sublime. Such talk is in any event quite different from an eighteenth-century and equally a Romantic interest in certain features of experience adjudged to be sublime. True, the sublime has by now come to form part of the furniture of our common world (artistic, philosophical, or everyday). Yet that should not blind us to the attendant fact that--as with other categories of aesthetics--the sublime is historically specific, and has been taken in a variety of ways. We should be wary of reifying it, therefore, but equally wary of reading one sense of the sublime backwards or forwards into another time period, thus assimilating history to theory. For all its historical contingency, we may nonetheless continue to speak of the sublime, or more cautiously, of styles of the sublime.

I propose however to discuss another aspect of the sublime, or rather, talk of the sublime. It is an aspect only recently come to the fore--although you could argue that it was always implicit, especially in view of the term's historicity, that is, its existence in a specific discourse rather than as an objective order discourse refers to. I wish to focus less on the phenomenality--however that is to be described--and more on the pragmatics of the sublime: what is done or performed in judging or experiencing something to be sublime, along with often tacit assumptions made about how others will likely receive it. For one thing, given that the sublime has usually been taken as implicating subjectivity or selfhood in some crucial way, a focus on performativity might prove revealing of this process. Moreover, the problem of how the self seems prior to while presupposing a discourse of subjectivity--a set of shared conventions--is one that the experience of the sublime might highlight, if not perhaps resolve. (A caveat is in order: this should not be taken as an attempt to reduce the sublime, or indeed subjectivity, to a mere figment or projection.) Taking a performative angle on the sublime might reveal something about how we typically approach the world, or at least some literary reflection of the world. Lastly, a performative approach runs parallel to some recent moves in aesthetics to take mimesis as simulation rather than representation or imitation (though I shall not be concerned with the ontological and emotive interests displayed in such work). ³

In the perspective opened up by sublime pragmatics, Stevens' question appears astute. For how does one stand to behold the sublime, when beholding itself is in question? Moreover, how does one stand to behold--that is, in theory--a beholding of the sublime? Judgments of the sublime are not just performatives, but also reflexive in form. It is not the least obscure feature of the sublime that its theory tends to mimic the gesture of subjective projection into nature found in the sublime itself--a move Kant labels "subreption." ⁴ The theory itself verges on becoming sublime, as Gibbon suggested of reading Longinus. ⁵ Such constitutive reflexivity in the critical rhetoric of the sublime forms the heart of my...