Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability

Introduction

Introduction Exploring Sublime Varieties Imagine the wide lawn of the Champs de Mars during the Reign of Terror in late eighteenth-century France.1 Thousands of people are packed together to participate ‘‘universally’’ in one of the many festivals celebrating the cause of freedom. They sing, they shout, they merge into a massive voice. The sound of this voice alone is staggering and uncannily irresistible. It grows louder as more join in, caught by the thrill of the moment or scared to openly disengage from an agitation that seems to enforce the participation of all. This voice then takes on a life of its own. It is no longer a multifarious whole, louder here, dissonant there, but rather extracts itself from its parts, rising higher and higher until it becomes a voice hovering above the crowd—bodiless, de-composed, singular. In the ears of the Jacobin rulers, this rising voice encapsulates the emergence of a single will—not a will of parts, but a will that rises above its sum total, no longer divisible. Its individual voices only serve the larger totality, thus constituting a body of uniform power and a body of subjection at the same time: a subjection of the many to the one, of difference to an uncompromising harmony. Consider, in this respect, the ambitious project of the composer Étienne-Nicolas Méhul: to have a crowd of thousands, divided into four sections, sing a major chord together at one of the many festivals organized during the Terror.2 ‘‘In these times,’’ James Johnson has remarked, ‘‘all were performers.’’3 Though typically ‘‘revolutionary’’ in its sacrifice of the individual to the common will, this idea(l) of unanimous participation was, perhaps, not an exclusively French invention. Ironically, before the French revolution, its future critic Edmund Burke had already pointed to the overpowering effects of the singing and ‘‘shouting of multitudes’’ in his Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.4 ‘‘The sole strength of the sound’’ produced by a multitude of voices, Burke remarked, ‘‘so amazes and confounds   Introduction the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forebear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the croud.’’ Burke identified both such sonorous overkill and the near involuntary participation in a massive unison as being productive of the feeling of the sublime: of a ‘‘great and awful sensation’’ that momentarily halts the mind and ‘‘fills it with terror,’’ freezing it into a debilitating stupor (ESB II, sect. XVII, , ). Thus, the sublime feeling boils down to a sudden transport incapacitating the mind, laying it prostrate before the tremendous force of a scene, interrupting the ability to act or reason voluntarily. In what I would like to call its legitimate mode, the sublime feeling in Western philosophy and art criticism typically enacts a movement from the multiple and divided to the unified: from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous . It combines feelings of pleasure and pain (being referred to as a ‘‘delightful horror,’’ ‘‘pleasing stupor,’’ or ‘‘frightful wonder’’), but this combination has been dominantly represented as a dialectic reversal. Thus, the sublime feeling often involves a negative moment of fright, frustration, or confusion—that is to say, a state of scattering, dispersal—that is relieved and finalized by a positive moment of mental relief or elevation. There is something that arrests the mind, but this arrest harbors its own release: the experience of fright or frustration screens a reversal in that it signals to the mind the possibility of its opposite. The pain becomes an occasion for pleasure ; the latter is mediated by the former, so that this pain is never more than a go-between. It is this passage, as if it were a failsafe thoroughfare, that I question in this book, by rereading the sublime ‘‘musically.’’ ‘‘Musically,’’ I will point out in detail below, here does not only refer to the cultural practice of music in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It rather also bears on an aesthetics of undecidability and indeterminacy that comes to be intertwined with the so-called empty sign of instrumental music in later eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Great Britain , France, and Germany. The story of the empty sign is familiar enough, yet its bearing on the aesthetics of the sublime as an aesthetics of the infinite on the one hand and (suspended) shock on the other is...