In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. Empty Signs and the Burkean Sublime The empty sign would have to be the sign of a paradox: a sign that is not quite a sign, yet as such marking the process of signifying itself. It is not quite a sign (at least in the Saussurean sense), because it constantly suspends a signified. Empty signs are ‘‘pure’’ signifiers resisting the Saussurean logic that signifiers and signifieds invoke each other and thus cannot function without each other: wherever there is a signifier, a signified is presupposed. Yet what if the associative bond between the two is all too slippery; what if cultural conventions do not (yet) allow for a shared meaning to crystallize? What if a signifier could mean anything to anybody, and the idea of the sign is revealed as a process of endless, aimless signifying? In his New Method for Assisting the Drawing of Original Compositions of the Landscape, Alexander Cozens seems to have promoted the materialization of such empty signifiers as visual indices in his elaborations on the blot: a crude mode of drawing that starts from a very rough, and in a sense very minimal, mode of visual configuration.1 ‘‘An artificial blot,’’ he explained, ‘‘is a production of chance with a small degree of design. . . . All the shapes are rude and unmeaning, as they are shaped with the swiftest hand.’’ This is an abstract strategy of the body: not a mathematical abstraction, but quick, accidental , open dashes out of which some shape could be born. There are forms, ‘‘hints for composition,’’ but no closed figures.2 Admittedly, Cozens may be a slippery example in this instance. His blot paintings have been familiarly appropriated in twentieth-century criticism as enigmatic imprints of times and aesthetics yet to come (romanticism, symbolism, abstractionism). Yet Cozens’ blotting method is nevertheless inevitably part of a cultural poetics of the sublime circulating throughout the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. One could say that this poetics manifested itself in art as a poetics of indeterminacy, with faint, unspecified shapes in painting (Cozens’ blots, John Constable’s clouds, J. M. W. Turner’s foggy color fields), in a predilection for raw and rugged, ‘‘unfinished’’ landscapes, but also for vaguely suggestive modes of mediation in literature—whether for leisurely thrills (as in Gothic fictions) or to   Empty Signs and the Burkean Sublime instill a sense of the infinite via the indeterminate (William Wordsworth’s Prelude). As I will argue in this chapter, this poetics of indeterminacy—one might even term it a ‘‘suggestive turn’’—partook of a fascination with the so-called empty sign of instrumental music in critical theory. As I will stress, the aesthetics of the sublime in the eighteenth century affectively gestured an aesthetics of terror that expressed an increasing antioccularcentrism (to borrow Martin Jay’s term):3 it favored not-showing and a suspension of the known. Indeed, in Edmund Burke’s Enquiry the existential tension of uncertainty relative to terror was translated into a visual indeterminacy where the artificial sublime was at stake. To evoke the sublime in art, one must specify and reveal as little as possible, so as to sustain terrors of uncertainty or even awed admiration. For Burke, not pictures but words could achieve this, as only words would be able to rouse obscure ideas: ideas that do not raise distinct images to the mind. Yet in their turn, words reiterated another mode of mediation: they can be seen to rehearse the endless deferral of the signified ascribed to instrumental music in the eighteenth century.4 As scarce as Burke’s references to music may be, ‘‘musical’’ (or indeterminate) mediation nevertheless subtends his argument on words and verbal mediation in the Enquiry. In this way, the so-called full linguistic sign becomes implicated almost as a matter of course in the empty sign of music. This not only applies to evocations of terror but also to evocations of the idea of the infinite attached to a more ‘‘quiet’’ sublime feeling in the Enquiry. Elaborating on this urgency of indeterminacy , I finally propose a musically informed notion of the sublime that resists a decisive sense of closure or resolution. I base myself both on Burke and on James Usher, for whom the delight of indecision associated with instrumental music converged with the idea of an ‘‘alternative’’ sublime feeling that revolved around unending desire. By way of these two theorists, I propose a...

Share