The Limits of the Sublime, the Sublime of Limits: Hermeneutics as a Critique of the

Postmodern Sublime
Author(s): Jerome Carroll
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 171-181
Published by: Wiley on behalf of American Society for Aesthetics
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 JEROMECARROLL
The Limitsof the Sublime,the Sublimeof Limits:
Hermeneuticsas a Critiqueof the PostmodernSublime
i. introduction: the antinomial sublime or the
SUBLIME AS A MEDITATIONON LIMITS
The sublime has had almost as many interpreta-
tions as it has appearances in philosophical liter-
ature. Edmund Burke 's indicator of irrepressible
instinctive passions becomes Immanuel Kant's ev-
idence of man's capacity for reason. Kant's insis-
tence that the sublime experience, which for him
cannot be precipitated by something that is man-
made, sheds light only on the subjective faculties
is subverted by T. W. Adorno, who valorizes the
oppositional force of the sublime art object as a
point of resistance against the identity-imposing
subject. This conception of art's oppositional force
is in turn exploded by Jean-Frangois Lyotard, who
identifies Kant's sublime as the point at which
meaning in a more general sense gets opened up
to radical interpretive indeterminacy, in the face
of which the only plausible response is joyous
openness.
As such, the sublime appears at the interstices of
some of philosophy's age-old and most intractable
problems. It evinces the difficulty of separating
man as a subject from the surrounding world as
object, but also the impossibility of not doing so.
It expresses the limitations of citing reason and
cognition as the basis of man's relationship to the
world, though it is also seen to give access to firm
foundations for rational thought and knowledge.
Likewise the objects or qualities that the sublime
is reckoned to inform us about in all of these
incarnations tend to be located at the poles of
various antinomies: it refers to the infinite and
contentless "Idea," or to immanent "matter," or
the mute object that tells us only about itself; it is
TheJournalof AestheticsandArt Criticism66:2Spring2008
2008TheAmericanSocietyfor Aesthetics
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an attribute of the subject's faculties (albeit insofar
as these are of interest to Kant precisely because
they are seen to be more than just "subjective")
or is seen to belong to raw matter, to those ob-
jects that precisely resist man's conceptual pow-
ers; it resists purpose or is seen to evidence man's
capacity to turn anything to his purpose; it is an
indicator of a possible foundation for conceptual
knowledge, or a source of "oppositionality"; it is
the characteristic quality of our confusing, global-
ized hyper-capitalist times, what Fredric Jameson
refers to as the "cultural dominant" of late capi-
talism, or an important source of resistance to a
pernicious and ever more widespread "identity"
thinking.1
None of this is new, of course, and my aim in this
article is not to trump all of the above ideas with
an all-encompassing definition of the sublime. In-
deed, my argument in this article is compelled by
the sense that the concept of the sublime is resis-
tant to this kind of singular definition, evidenced
by the many, often seemingly opposite ideas at-
tached to it: reason, matter, immanence, the in-
finite. This presumably begs questions about the
sublime's usefulness as a philosophical concept.
Might its resistance to singular and unambigu-
ous definition suggest that the sublime no longer
refers to anything that might be considered cen-
tral or specific to it, emblematic of what Adorno
calls its "unassuaged negativity"?2 Is the sub-
lime an example of Lugwig Wittgenstein's "fam-
ily likeness," whereby related concepts are seen
to have no shared and unifying "center"? Does
the sublime refer to any quality that is inalien-
able to its concept, or is it an archetypal "empty"
signifier, a receptacle for a thinker's preferred
172
philosophical position? Alternatively, might this
oscillation between antinomial terms, this sense
that it is particularly difficult to answer questions
about what quality the sublime designates or what
object it attaches to, point to a more persistent
quality of the sublime, a central point in the con-
stellation that makes up the concept? I will an-
swer this latter question in the affirmative, propos-
ing that this quality is the sense that there comes
a point at which things- people, objects, quali-
ties, and concepts - must be defined, as the ety-
mology of the term 'sublime' suggests, in terms
of what limits them, in other words what they in-
teract with. I will argue then in what follows that
sublime theory might be taken to provide a lesson
of this decisive role that limits must play in any
ontology. This will be elucidated in an examina-
tion of how the category of the sublime has been
mobilized in thinking about art in particular, its
allegedly "oppositional" force, and its philosophi-
cal significance in the second half of the twentieth
century.
In the main discussion of this article I will
contrast Jean-Francois Lyotard and Wolfgang
Welsch's interpretations of the sublime as em-
blematic of art's immanence - its refusal to refer
beyond itself - and as a locus of heterogeneity with
the more hermeneutically oriented treatments of
the sublime in the aesthetics of Adorno and Al-
brecht Wellmer.3 The latter pair will be enlisted
in a critique of the twin ideas of immanence and
heterogeneity, which I view as exemplars of post-
modern sublime theory's tendency toward an on-
tology of abstraction, and as such to be precisely
contrasted with the recognition of the role of lim-
its, of interactions, in any ontology. With refer-
ence to Adorno and Wellmer's ideas I will draw
on the resources of sublime theory for thinking
about art as a component in a more interdepen-
dent and triangular conception of the relation-
ships between the mind and its freedom, the mind-
external world, and techniques of representative
meaning.
ii. sublime aesthetics: heterogeneity or
HERMENEUTICS
i. Heterogeneity, Immanence, and the Question
"WhatIs Art?"
Archetypal of sublime theory's antinomies are
the formulations of Jean-Frangois Lyotard, whose
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
investments in the theoretical figure range from
seeing it as an indication of the "pure idea" as
supersensory foundation for knowledge to "sheer
matter" as critique of the rational faculties, from a
negative constriction of art's meaning-function to
an alleged affirmative openness of meaning. Wolf-
gang Welsch, a thinker who cites Lyotard as the
key theorist of the postmodern, spells out the polit-
ical dimension of this latter affirmation: the plural
and affirming gesture implicit in the celebration
of a loss of forms is "critical" precisely because
of its refusal to admit of a singular and unified
meaning. In this respect Welsch distinguishes be-
tween the postmodern "preference for the plural"
and the traditional "search for identity."4This re-
iterates Lyotard's frequently cited remarks on the
sublime in the "What Is Postmodernism" essay,
in which he prefers a "joyous" sublime to what he
calls Adorno's modern "nostalgia for lost forms."5
Welsch distinguishes further between postmod-
ernism's allegedly nonhierarchical, "horizontal"
model of knowledge and a more traditional and
hierarchical, "vertical"legitimation of knowledge.
This horizontally asserts that there is no funda-
mental "ground" of knowledge nor any claim to
final, objective, or universal validity, and needs to
conceive of meaning in terms of an ongoing inven-
tion of new forms of knowledge, seemingly never
looking backward at how new meaning might re-
late to or be sustained by context or convention.6
That Welsch also celebrates Adorno's quintessen-
tially negative aesthetics as an "aesthetics of the
sublime" is a tension that remains unresolved in
his work.
This apparent contradiction is also apparent in
Lyotard's notion that the postmodern sublime is
seen as enacting not only a liberating "opening
up" of meaning, but also a characteristically "neg-
ative" constriction of meaning, evident in claims
as to the allegedly immanent force of- usually
artistic- artifacts that are labeled sublime. So in
four texts on the issue, Lyotard identifies the sub-
lime variously in terms of a "negative presenta-
tion" of the "unpresentable," a temporal sublime
as caesura or the experience of anxiety it causes,
which Lyotard also conceptualizes as a denial of
the dialectic, and as an immanent "matter."7But
in spite of their seemingly opposite terms, the po-
litical claim made for this immanence is not far
removed from Lyotard's "joyous" and affirma-
tive sublime, insofar as both enact a similar re-
jection of the representative model of meaning.
Carroll The Limits of the Sublime
In the former, affirmatory and "joyous" mean-
ing is not constrained by the need to refer back
to singular meanings. In the latter, the sublime
experience or object is said in some way to tell
us only "about itself." This latter self-reflexivity
comes straight from Kant's sublime, which tells us
only about our own ultimately supreme rational
faculties, albeit uncoupled from Kant's rationalist-
humanist orientation. Here the seemingly human
capacity to generate meaning- even in the most
inhospitable surroundings, in the case of Kant's
sublime- is precisely that which is to be evaded,
whereby the sublime art object is associated with
a politics of art that defies external reference or
correspondence.8
The logic of this politics of immanence is made
clearer by comparison with its opposite, namely,
what Welsch calls an "input hermeneutics."9In this
latter mode of interpretation, art only attains value
by virtue of what non-art uses it is put to, what pre-
existing perspectives and insights it is employed to
illustrate and promote. In such cases art's mean-
ing and import are seen to be ultimately judged
according to nonaesthetic or extra-artistic crite-
ria, generating a kind of meaning that could do
equally well without the receptacle of the artwork,
which is reduced to a mere vehicle of expression.10
Such openly committed art is seen to forfeit the
intrinsic political force of art's formal resources
and the epistemological quality that is identified
with the aesthetic dimension, namely, its heteroge-
neous nature.11Lyotard claims likewise to prefer
"artistic" activity that is said to respond only to
the question "What is art?"12This sounds like a
reprisal of the nineteenth-century aesthetic of art-
pour-l'art, whereby art is allegedly divested from
any ostensible moral or didactic purpose, or its
twentieth-century variant of autotelism associated
with high modernism and celebrated by the New
Critics. But the hollow answers to the question
of what remains once this relation to "external"
content has been disavowed- contentless formal
devices, the purely sensuous or material- suggest
that such distilling and reducing art to its essence
and separating it off from external factors, at best
a cul-de-sac, is in fact implausible. Lyotard and
others enthusiastically associate this abstraction,
this short-circuiting of meaning with the sublime,
but my concern is to suggest that the philosophi-
cal value of the theoretical figure of the sublime
might equally well be interpreted in precisely the
opposite terms.
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173
ii. Extremes versus Limits
In my view it is problematic that Welsch's and
Lyotard's twin ideas of heterogeneity and imma-
nence leave little room for an account of contexts
or conventionality that meaningful experience -
and the meaningful reception of artworks in
particular- tends to rely on. Of course, precisely
the point of some investments in the sublime is
that objects that are described by it are seen to
defy this kind of reliance on context or conven-
tion. This detachment from the specifics of any
context is apparent both in cases where that which
is abstracted is intended to perform the function
of a philosophical foundation, as in the "idea of
reason" or "idea of humanity" that Kant sees the
sublime as revealing, or where it is invested with
a more countercultural force, as in Lyotard's and
others' politics of the supplement, in which the "in-
comparable quality . . . does not offer itself to dia-
logue or dialectic."13The question is whether this
abstraction makes sense in either case. Both in my
view are symptomatic of a tendency that associates
theoretical investments in the sublime with anti-
nomial extremes, which is to be contrasted with a
reading of the sublime as teaching us about any
ontology's dependence on limits. In this respect it
is perhaps worth drawing attention at this stage to
the two metaphors that I deployed in my introduc-
tion to this article. On the one hand, the sublime
was seen to appear at the intersticesof philosophi-
cal issues- the nexus of subject and object, for in-
stance, which might be associated with a sublime of
limits. On the other hand, the elements to which
the sublime is attached tend to gravitate to the
poles of these issues- the rational subject, the im-
manent object- exemplifying the sublime's ten-
dency to be associated with exclusive and extreme
substantives of any dialectic. In this regard the
"pure idea" that Kant deduces from the sublime
experience is little different from Lyotard's imma-
nent "matter,"which is in turn little different from
the all-excluding or all-encompassing ideas of the
nonidentical or heterogeneous.14
Hi. Positivism and the Sublime of Limits
One problem with this tendency toward extremes
is the inadvertent positivism it exhibits, such as that
which Manfred Frank has identified as inherent
in postmodernism 's extolling of heterogeneity.15
174
A similar problem attends Lyotard's and Welsch's
claims about immanence, insofar as art's mean-
ing is said to depend on nothing beyond itself. In
contrast to this apparent positivism, sublime the-
ory read as a meditation on limits might be taken as
a reminder of the contingency, in the case both of
art's oppositional force and of categories like self-
hood or a grounding "idea." The ontological sig-
nificance of the limit is stated most emphatically by
G. W. F. Hegel, whose dialectic might reasonably
be characterized as an ontology of limits. He as-
serts that "[sjomething is only what it is only in and
by virtue of its limit. We cannot therefore regard
the limit as only external to being which is then
and there. It rather goes through and through the
whole of existence."16One obvious example of this
operation of limits is to be found in the much-cited
master and slave dialectic, in which the identity of
neither position can be said to be self-sufficient,
rather is only experienced and realized to the ex-
tent that it depends upon and interacts with the
other.
Hegel's sense that identity and meaning are
generated by virtue of the operation of limits sug-
gests that the abstractions that sublime theory
wants to dignify are not plausible. Does it make
sense to refer to a "pure idea" that must be sep-
arated from any content, which it is then claimed
to "ground"? Can the transcendental possibility
of thinking sensibly be divorced from the actu-
ality of thinking? What could we say about this
pared-down "pure idea"? Can it be sensibly said
to exist, or might it be the point at which transcen-
dental philosophy is in greatest danger of ending
up in a cul-de-sac of pure self-relation? Analogous
to this is the characterization of selfhood as di-
vorced from the limits and interactions that sustain
it. The seminal example here is Rene Descartes'
famous conclusion in the "Second Meditation"
that the mind enjoys "internal" self-knowledge,
rather than knowledge of itself only indirectly, by
virtue of its interactions with the world. In my view,
F. W. J. Schelling was right to criticize the claimed
certainty and immediate, internal, and direct na-
ture of this self-relation as incomprehensible.17As
far as the oppositional force of sublime art is con-
cerned, is it convincingly explained in terms of het-
erogeneity or immanence? Do these qualities con-
vincingly replace comparison and friction as the
lifeblood of art's mode of resistance, or do they
sacrifice them at the altar of postmodernist phi-
losophy?
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By these reservations about positivism and ab-
straction I do not mean to suggest that "pos-
itive" or "abstracted" meaning is a bad thing
per se: we presumably rely on some kind of - at
least provisionally- positive and separate identi-
fication of objects, ideas, selfhood, and so forth. In-
deed, a necessary component of thinking in terms
of limits is that any indeterminacy or dialectic
that might be associated with the sublime itself
has a limit. But this self-cancellation also pre-
cisely refutes the sense that the sublime can be
all-excluding or self-sufficient, and underlines the
sense that any object or quality labeled sublime
must operate within a context of convention, just
as it can only be understood in counterpoint to
processes of identification.
/v. Intense Interest in Presentation
The autotelism that characterizes Lyotard's and
Welsch's aesthetics is a case in point. The for-
mer's question "What is art?" must presumably
in a very basic sense also refer to that which is
not art. It begs questions about how the cate-
gories of art and non-art are related to one an-
other, for instance, by virtue of the epistemological
or representative strategies that each depends on
or deploys, and how these compare to equivalent
strategies outside of art. This gives the lie to the
even muter sounding notion of an "incomparable
quality," in which Lyotard sees the political force
of the artwork residing.18Lyotard's strict idea of
immanence certainly seems to set the bar very high
for what kind of art may be considered sublime,
presumably only describing the most austere ex-
periences of privation or the most self-reflexive
art objects. Kant already associated the simplic-
ity exhibited in minimalism with the sublime in
his precritical writings, but it is doubtful whether
even the most abstract and minimalist art can be
said to defy comparison in this way, at the same
time as meaning anything at all.19
At the very least, rather than disavowing the
representative relation, self-reflexive questions
about what counts as art suggest at the very least an
inquiry about the conventions of artistic represen-
tation. So in works like Malevich's Whiteon White
(1918), painting's substantive referential content
gets replaced by a self-reflexivity that places the
formal, technical, and material properties of the
artwork at center stage. Are Malevich's nonsigni-
fying painted surfaces an instance of Lyotard's
Carroll The Limits of the Sublime
"matter" that art must approach "without re-
course to the means of presentation"?20 Presum-
ably the very fact that these appear in the artwork
render them more than mere "matter." So while
Paul Beidler asserts that "the fact that the sublime
cannot be presented becomes irrelevant when art
loses interest in presentation, as is the case with
minimalism," in my view minimalism cannot re-
ally be characterized by a loss of interest in pre-
sentation, but rather indicates an intense interest
in the fate of presentation.21 It is in this respect
that Adorno, in his discussion of the sublime's
transposition into art, characterizes advanced art
as "pulling on its concept like on a chain."22
Symptomatic of this enduring interest in pre-
sentation is the suspicion that the claims about
heterogeneity and immanence in Lyotard's and
Welsch's work do not convincingly escape the rep-
resentation paradigm, as is their stated aim: rather
they seem to gravitate to its extremes, namely, re-
spectively to the idea of its explosive proliferation
(via total nonidentity) or to its zero degree (unity
with itself). The idea of heterogeneity aims to ex-
plode representation: where everything is a rep-
resentation everything substantive is eradicated,
including any notion of self. Conversely, the idea
of immanence claims, implausibly, to separate the
art object off from either mind or world. Clearly
this supports my contention that certain uses of the
sublime opt for the extremes of antinomial poles,
and, if anything, this is the opposite of "escaping"
from any representative paradigm. Preferable in
my view is a conception of art (and art that is la-
beled "sublime"or "oppositional" in particular) as
a navigation of the boundaries of representation
and meaning, boundaries that precisely indicate
that mind and world, idea and matter, cannot so
easily be separated.
v. Wellmer,Communicative Relations, and
Absolute Freedom
In my view both mind and world are more
convincingly included in Wellmer's sublime aes-
thetics, who, like Welsch, emphasizes the sub-
lime component in Adorno's aesthetics. Wellmer
treats the sublime most extensively in his es-
say "Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime," the
stated aim of which is to ally Adorno's sublime
aesthetic to a theory of communicative ethics.23
This suggests a debt to Jurgen Habermas, but
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175
importantly is also an engagement with Hans-
Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical position; indeed
Wellmer's treatment of the sublime- its combi-
nation of critique and tradition- seems to over-
come the incompatibilities between Gadamer's
and Habermas's positions referred to above (see
note 3). Like Lyotard, Wellmer celebrates sub-
lime art as an innovatory experience that is
"unprotected by aesthetic convention."24 As well
as being an uncomfortable departure from con-
vention, for Wellmer such aesthetic experiences
also precipitate a "loss of objectively assured sys-
tems of meaning."25But this departure from ob-
jective meaning is not the kind of radical, anti-
foundational openness that Lyotard and Welsch
celebrate. Rather it refers to Habermas's con-
viction that any communicative act presupposes
that we are involved in networks of commu-
nicative performance in which we make valid-
ity claims that we are precisely free to contest?6
(Of course Habermas's communicative ethics in-
sists that the contestability of these claims bestows
on them an at least quasi-objective status- what
he calls "strongly universalistic claims"- insofar
as they must convince interlocutors without co-
ercion?1) Not unlike Habermas's comments else-
where, Wellmer sees sublime art as "carrying a
potential for opening up communicative relations
and the relationship that the aesthetic recipients
have to themselves."28This "opening up" sounds
like an archetype of the contestability that is the
crux of Habermas's communicative rationality.
Moreover, as far as Welsch's and Lyotard's au-
totelism is concerned, this "opening up" is only
conceivable within and against a background of a
network of meaning and communication, which
Wellmer refers to as the "structures of mean-
ing we inhabit in our everyday world."29 Even
artistic innovation - perhaps particularly artistic
innovation - depends on the existence of such net-
works. It is in this sense that departures from con-
vention must depend on and are to some extent
meditations on convention, as Schonberg asserts:
"no new technique in the arts is created that has
not had its roots in the past."30 Moreover, the
hope and belief is that such departures can re-
flect back on and change habits of thinking be-
yond the aesthetic experience. It is in this vein that
Habermas demands, in the light of the historical
avant-garde's failed attempt to integrate life and
art, and in contrast to Lyotard's and Welsch's aes-
theticized turn inward, that "aesthetic experience
176
is drawn into an individual life history and is ab-
sorbed into shared ways of living."31More than
just asserting an insertion of art into life, this
reconnection depends on a paradigm shift from
the view of an individuated and separable subject
(whose rationalized and instrumentalizing nature
Adorno's aesthetics may be seen as resisting) to
intersubjective models of meaning, selfhood, and
rationality, associated with Habermas. Wellmer, in
an essay entitled "Wahrheit, Schein, Versohnung:
Adornos asthetische Rettung der Modernitat,"
fruitfully traces Habermas's paradigm shift back
onto Adorno's view of art. According to this read-
ing, Adorno's view that the artwork offers a "nega-
tion of objectively valid meaning" does more than
decenter the artwork's immediate meaning; it also
thereby forges critical distance from potentially
oppressive conventions of meaning and reflects
back on and has the capacity to alter our mod-
els of subjectivity.32This view of art as a dimen-
sion of intersubjective communication, in which
art's redemptive moment is no longer character-
ized in terms of the struggle between subject and
object, also offers a new perspective on Wellmer's
somewhat dated-sounding lament that our ev-
eryday structures of meaning have "dried up"
and his view that sublime art is somehow single-
handedly responsible for re-enchanting meaning.
Conceiving art as a dimension of communica-
tion that can reflect on and ultimately change the
ways we make meaning- and not least the ways
we think about selfhood - combines a reception-
theoretical approach that takes account of tradi-
tion and a critical-theoretical approach that allows
the possibility of critical distance.
vi. Adorno, Sublime Art, and the Cognitive Self
It is worth noting that the suggestion that the
sublime informs us about the performative, inter-
subjective nature of being and meaning is at vari-
ance with the essentially solipsistic Kantian read-
ing of the sublime, the primary concern of which
is to describe the interaction between mind and
matter. I have already questioned the tendency of
theorizations of the sublime to opt for an exclusive
conception of either mind (or "idea") or matter. In
my view this reflects a dubious conviction that the
coherence of qualities such as selfhood, cognitive
freedom, or art's oppositional force depends on
their being extricable from any kind of constraint,
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
context, or (extrinsic) content. This afflicts both
Lyotard's Kantian reference to the sublime as the
"final destination of the mind, freedom" and his
assertion elsewhere that the freedom that is associ-
ated with the sublime is only to be achieved by the
suspension of conceptual faculties.33 The appar-
ent contradiction between these positions should
not distract us from the connection between the
two: it is a small step from the absolute freedom
that is seen to propel the mind here to the total
"liberation" from meaning-oriented cognitive ac-
tivity. Neither seems to me to be a viable way of
thinking about selfhood or the kind of liberating
strategies sublime art can offer.
At the very least, the view that the conceptual
faculties are something to be evaded must take
account of the obvious rejoinder that works of
art that deploy this challenge to thinking (or per-
ceiving) also provoke and indeed depend on con-
templation. An example of this kind of overtly
thought-provoking work is Michelangelo Pisto-
letto's Cube (1966), whose composition from six
inward-facing mirrorsrenders an important aspect
of the work's "meaning" at once infinite and inac-
cessible. The artwork may evade determinate or
at least adequate representation in our mind, but
this is not the same as a "privation of thought,"
and may even be quite the opposite.34 It is in this
respect that Adorno refers to the "utmost con-
centration" that is required in experiencing sub-
lime art.35In this respect Lyotard's association of
the sublime with the "inhuman" might even be
taken as an acknowledgment that it is an inalien-
ably human characteristic to search for meaning,
and begs the question of whether this inquiry af-
ter or production of coherent meaning can be so
simply "suspended."
Like Lyotard's, Adorno's ideas are character-
ized by an ambivalent attitude toward the human
subject, albeit that in Adorno's case this very am-
bivalence is consciously central to the political
force of his thinking about art. Well known for his
disparaging assessments of the manipulated mind,
Adorno associates the artistic sublime with a re-
jection of humanism in favor of art that articulates
its own "inhumanity."36But at the same time he
is unwilling to relinquish the sovereignty or free-
dom of the individual as a locus of political ac-
tion. Emblematic of this is the sense in which his
sublime aesthetics does not preclude but rather
depends on art's cognitive impact. His references
to an aesthetics of shock in the discussion of the
Carroll The Limits of the Sublime
sublime in Asthetische Theorie suggest a similar
suspension of the cognitive faculties that Lyotard
celebrates, but his remark about the recipient's
"utmost concentration" suggests otherwise. In this
respect, precisely in this difficult aesthetic experi-
ence, the reflective individual remains pivotal to
the possibility of "glimps[ing] beyond the prison
that itself is."37Adorno insists that the "liquida-
tion of the I" that this experience of shock precip-
itates arrests the usual habits of subjectivity in a
way that is the subject's saving grace: for Adorno
this liquidation is precisely the opposite of the cul-
ture industry's "weakening of the I."38Insofar as
sublime art is associated with a defamiliarizing re-
newal of habits of representing and seeing, the self
is acknowledged as the necessary starting point of
looking beyond its own limited and self-centered
perspective.
At the same time, the fact that Adorno himself
refers to the art object's "inhumanity"is indicative
of the fact that he thinks we should avoid giving
too much weight to the human, cognitive effects of
art. Simply enlisting his sublime to an aesthetics of
consciousness raising, which is not the same thing
as the "most progressive consciousness" of social
and artistic antagonisms that Adorno celebrates in
some artworks,would be to ignore Adorno's warn-
ing in Minima Moralia that any approach to the
world that turns everything into knowledge about
the self and how it relates to the world, that makes
man the "measure of all things," sees man "from
the first as an object."39This misgiving about re-
ducing man to the status of an object reiterates
the fact that the subject and its cognitive free-
dom are still at stake for Adorno, albeit that this
freedom depends on acknowledging the (partic-
ularly aesthetic) object's inherent indeterminacy.
In this respect Martin Jay identifies Adorno's re-
fusal "to short-circuit a negative dialectic that pre-
served some distinction between the [subject and
object]."40
But implicit in the idea of a paradigm shift to
an intersubjective or communicative model of aes-
thetics is that the converse is also true: to develop
Jay's metaphor, alongside any such preserved dis-
tinction between subject and object, the sublime
has also been taken to insist that subject oper-
ates at the same level as- in a circuit with- those
objects that make up its life- world. This was al-
ready the point of Johann Georg Hamann's cri-
tique of Kant's sublime, and might inform Thomas
Weiskel's more recent remark that the theoretical
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111
figure of the sublime is a complement to a psychol-
ogy that stresses its own limits.41It is also implicit
in Adorno's ideas, though this idea of being "in a
circuit with" the world is different from Welsch's
"horizontality" inasmuch as the ontology of lim-
its does not presume to do away with the subject
tout court, rather to recognize that it can only ex-
ist by virtue of that which surrounds and delimits
it. So, for instance, the sense in Adorno's sublime
aesthetics that the subject's freedom is bound up
with the indeterminacy of the objects that it expe-
riences indicates the mutual dependency and in-
terpenetration of mind and matter.
Moreover, in my view this sense of a circuit of
man and world is not just about an aesthetics of
resistance, rather it tells us important things about
the ontology that the sublime of limits, as opposed
to the gesture of abstraction, emphasizes. Hie idea
of a circuit of matter and self reminds us that in
a significant sense we are out there in the world
as much as we relate internally to a kind of prior
notion of selfhood. This reassertion of a life-world
might offer one interpretation of the topos of na-
ture in Adorno's writings on the sublime. The sub-
lime experience is seen to bring home to man the
fact of his "being bound to nature,"which Wellmer
more extravagantly calls the "remembrance of na-
ture in the subject."42Evidently Adorno wants to
overturn the elevation of man above nature that
Kant's sublime enacts, but the point is that this in-
volvement with nature is more than just a noniden-
tical counterpoint to man's rational, conceptual
modus operandi. Rather, in terms very similar to
hermeneutical theory, it may be taken to indicate
the subject's prior involvement with the world.
Martin Heidegger, for instance, makes a very sim-
ilar philosophical point with recourse to the term
iek-sistence>in the "Letter on Humanism."43(Paul
Fry convincingly associates this state of ekstasis,
standing outside of oneself, with the sublime.44By
contrast, Wellmer reads Adorno's conception of
the "ecstatic moment of aesthetic experience" as
something quasi-religious and "not of this world,"
a utopic moment that the communicative reading
of Adorno's aesthetics can correct.45) In his "Age
of the World Picture," Heidegger decries both the
privileging of the subject that metaphysics has en-
acted since Descartes and the concomitant sepa-
ration of the world into subject and object: "The
world is not an object that stands opposite us and
can be looked at. [Welt ist nie ein Gegenstand,
der vor uns steht und angeschaut werden kann.]"46
178
But in contrast to this, the definition of the self in
terms of limits might be permitted to retain the
categories of subject and object, but divests them
of the need to be considered "substantively."The
subject and its object are not to be considered as
separate and self-identical, but define and deter-
mine one another. So, for instance, the individual
subject need not be taken to have a center as such,
but is what it is (and not least "free") by virtue of
its interactions.
Of course, radical hermeneutics' strong sense of
this kind of prior involvement is what Habermas
is responding to when he sees Gadamer's concep-
tions of tradition and language as closed and hege-
monic.47For Habermas these notions of the sub-
ject's decentering and its prior involvement are in
danger of banishing crucial human capacities like
rational, critical ideological reflection, whereby
he thinks we can intervene in such handed-down
structures of understanding. His intersubjective
model of rationality thinks we cannot conceive of
rationality in terms of separable subjects, but in my
view this is not so different from the hermeneuti-
cal view that we cannot separate ourselves from
our life-world. Habermas's mistake in my view is
precisely to posit the subject as straightforwardly
separable from these structures: the main prob-
lems with his intersubjective ethics center on their
retention of a self-identical and authoritative sub-
ject, removed from precisely the relations of con-
ventions and habits- not to say instances of coer-
cion and authority- that make ethics difficult and
reflection on it necessary. In this respect Adorno's
sense that freedom depends on being "open" to
the indeterminacies of the objective world might
be taken as a corrective to Habermas's more end-
oriented critical reflection.
This notion of "openness" is vague, and still
seems somewhat beholden to an idea of the ob-
ject as "immanent" and somehow "good in itself,"
as well as to the conception of the world in terms of
a competition between subject and object. Indeed
at times Adorno seems to subscribe to the same
kind of politics of immanence as Lyotard, as in his
references to the notion of "das Mehr," the surplus
or supplement whose political force derives from
the sense in which it evades recuperation by instru-
mental use or determinate meaning. But, crucially,
Adorno is more reticent than Lyotard to assert
this politics of supplementarity in positive, self-
identical terms. For Adorno supplementarity is a
necessary component in any dialectic, such as that
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of artistic innovation but equally that of evolution
in meaning more generally, which must accommo-
date elements whose position and meaning have
not already been mapped out. Any strict separa-
tion of this supplement from the context that gives
it its freedom and its oppositional force is anath-
ema: "the surplus is not simply the context of the
elements, but an Other, mediated by that context
and yet distinct from it."48Art's connection to its
context is clearly complicated, but it does not make
sense to assert that art's meaning is in some way
"immediate," much less that its oppositional force
precisely depends on this self-sufficiency. The cen-
tral concern of Adorno's Negative Dialektik is to
refute the suggestion that the dialectic can either
be evaded, an evasion that would then be cele-
brated as a critical force "in itself," or that it can
reach an endpoint in positive and self-sufficient
meaning.
Adorno's and Lyotard's remarks about the Ab-
solute are emblematic of their different ontologies.
Sounding like a crude version of Kant, Lyotard
is happy to refer to the sublime in terms of the
possibility of a "concretisation of an objective in-
finity," and as a representation of the "universal
Idea."49Adorno by contrast takes his lead from
Hegel, for whom the absolute is never positively
stated, never positively appears.This is not a Hera-
clitean statement that the manifold phenomena of
reality are always in flux, but rather an acknowl-
edgment that, just as identity depends on refer-
ence to what it is not, nonidentity is inconceivable
without identity, and more practically that no po-
litical emancipation follows necessarily from it. So
while Adorno shares the same concern that man
imposes meaning on the world, a concern that Ly-
otard addresses with the idea of "immanent mat-
ter," for Adorno there is no easy way out: one cer-
tainly cannot simply state that certain experience
is resistant to mind or indeed that all experience is
in some respect thoroughly open-ended. Adorno
sees meaning as a process that tends to work in the
opposite direction, toward identity, characterized
for example by abstractions, exclusions, and sim-
plifications. For Adorno this means that the onus
is on us to consciously oppose this tendency, al-
beit that this, paradoxically, can only be done with
"utmost concentration."
It is symptomatic of the sublime that this non-
identity can always tend toward positive state-
ment, insofar as it is readily "absolutized," as in
Lyotard's remark about the artwork's immanent
Carroll The Limits of the Sublime
meaning. Rather than this self-sufficient truth, the
lesson of the sublime seems to be that art's truth
or oppositional force must be cognitively experi-
enced, and that this experience is characterized
by its fragility. Adorno's remarks in Asthetische
Theorie that the sublime is essentially dialecti-
cal, that it always readily turns into its opposite,
seem to be the obvious corollary of the model of
the sublime that conceives of meaning in terms of
limits.50Welsch refers likewise to the "precarious
dynamic" of the sublime, underlining the brittle-
ness of art's critical or oppositional force.51
in. conclusion: representation beyond the
"ready-made world"
Equally, thinking in terms of limits need not dis-
pense with the relation of representation. Hei-
degger, Lyotard, and others see representation as
enacting a deleterious and metaphysical separa-
tion of the subject from the world, while reflec-
tion theory after Kant posits it as a necessary me-
diating moment in all our involvements with the
world. Sublime theory is nothing if not a medi-
tation on representation, whether to mind or in
art, and whether one asserts the decisive failure
of representative faculties, art's evasion of them,
or their ultimate recuperation. But I have already
suggested that the heterogeneity and immanence
in Lyotard's and Welsch's work do not escape the
representative paradigm, merely gravitating to its
extremes. By contrast, Adorno's and Wellmer's
formulations on the sublime seem to derive their
force precisely from the difficult triangular con-
ference of susceptible mind, difficult object, and
changeable conventions and habits that constitute
the life-world around us. This does not just teach
us about the internal workings of the artwork or
those of the mind, but also reminds us about the
ways in which we interact with the external world,
the ways in which we as subjects already mutually
define each other. This cannot exclude a degree
of self-reflexivity- that it is to some extent also
about the mind. It certainly does not attempt to
simply erase the gap between the subject and ob-
ject that is invoked by the representative order,
but suggests that the two cannot be conceived in
such separate terms in the first place. It is in this re-
spect that Wellmer reads the sublime in terms not
of a "dialectics of subjectification and reification
(i.e. the dialectics of enlightenment) and therefore
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179
not the polarity of complete negativity and recon-
ciled spirit; [the sublime experience] is rather the
price that has to be paid by subjects who are trying
to emancipate themselves from tradition and con-
vention."52In my view, the ontology of limits does
not admit of any sense that the world is "ready-
made" and that we are separable from it, and that
our knowledge of the world can only be assessed
according to how well it corresponds to this ready-
made world. It is in this sense that Christopher
Butler, in his book Early Modernism, reminds us
that conceptual art should perhaps not be thought
of in terms of a direct correspondence to reality;
rather "[s]uch signs may reveal the way in which
we conceive of the external world, which means
that art of this kind does not (really) represent,
but rather shows us how the mind might use signs
to remind itself of aspects of the external world."53
This interplay between mind, art, and ways of
interacting with the external world is well exem-
plified in John Cage's silent musical pieces and
his ideas about art. His infamous silent pieces are
not- or at least not only- a reduction of repre-
sented content to nil, but also aim to explore the
cultural habits and corporeal and cognitive pro-
cesses that underlie how we make meaning. This
underlines the difficulty of excluding broader cul-
tural or cognitive inputs in our experience of even
the most austere art. In this respect, for Cage, as
David Revill notes, the silent piece represents "the
ultimate elision of art and life."54It also underlines
the fact that hard and fast barriers between art and
non-art reality, meaning and indeterminacy, mind
and matter are hard to sustain.
JEROMECARROLL
Department of German
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, United Kingdom NG7 2RD
internet: jerome.carroll@nottingham.ac.uk
1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism(London:Verso, 1991), p. 6.
2. TheodorW.Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie,Gesammelte
SchriftenBand 7 (Frankfurtam Main: SuhrkampVerlag,
1970), p. 296; trans, by Robert Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic
Theory(London:Athlone Press,1997),p. 199.In subsequent
referencesto these volumes, the first page numberrefers to
the original German edition, the second, in parentheses,to
the English translation.
3. Adorno is, of course, more usually associated with
CriticalTheory,whose concernsand approachoverlap with
180
but are by no means identical to those of hermeneutics,
as became apparent in the exchanges between Haber-
mas, Gadamer, and others around 1970. See, for in-
stance, Theorie-Diskussion:Hermeneutikund Ideologiekri-
tik, ed. Jiirgen Habermas et al. (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp,
1971). The positions are well sketched out by Peter Chris-
tian Lang in Hermeneutik- Ideologiekritik- Asthetik:iiber
Gadamerund Adorno sowie FrageneineraktuellenAsthetik
(Konigstein:ForumAcademicum,1981), and center on the
issue of the statusof reflectionin their ideas.Habermassees
Gadamer,because of the latter's deference to tradition,as
failing to acknowledge that reflection can intervene in our
inheritedwaysof seeing things.Gadamerrepliesthat it is im-
plausiblein hermeneuticaltermsto think that we can reflect
our way out of the traditionsand conventions that sustain
understandingof anythingand everything.As such, reflec-
tion is little more than "false objectification"of states of
affairs (see Lang, Hermeneutik- Ideologiekritik- Asthetik,
pp. 103 ft). Lang cites Albrecht Wellmeras the first thinker
to attemptto integrateideological criticisminto hermeneu-
tical awareness(see Lang, Hermeneutik- Ideologiekritik-
Asthetik,p. 109). For Wellmer,the abilityto rationallyques-
tion attitudes and knowledge that is handed down to us is
preciselypart of our tradition.Wellmer'sprimacyin this re-
gard may be the case as far as explicit engagement goes,
but I will suggest that the positions taken up by Adorno as
well as Wellmerin relationto the sublimeoffer a specifically
hermeneuticalcorrectiveto investmentsin the postmodern
sublime.
4. Wolfgang Welsch, Asthetisches Denken (Stuttgart:
PhilippReclam, 1990),pp. 91, 93 (where no publishedtrans-
lation is indicated,translationsare my own).
5. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpre-
sentable:The Sublime,"trans.Lisa Liebmann,Artforum20
(1982):64-69, quote from p. 68.
6. Welsch,AsthetischesDenken, pp. 91-92.
7. Jean-FrancoisLyotard,The PostmodernCondition:A
Report on Knowledge,trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 73-81;
see Jean-FrancoisLyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-
Garde," trans. Lisa Liebmann, Geoffrey Bennington, and
Marian Hobson, Paragraph6 (1985): 1-18; Jean-Francois
Lyotard, "After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,"
in The States of Theory: History, Art, & Critical Dis-
course,ed. David Carroll(ColumbiaUniversityPress,1990),
pp. 297-304, quote from p. 303;Jean-FrancoisLyotard,The
Inhuman:Reflectionson Time,trans.Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1991), p. 110.
8. Welsch,AsthetischesDenken, p. 158.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Welsch,AsthetischesDenken, p. 159.
12. Lyotard,TheInhuman,pp. 135-136.
13. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft(Stuttgart:
PhilipReclam, 1963),p. 154;Lyotard,TheInhuman,pp. 141-
142.
14. Lyotard,TheInhuman,p. 110.
15. See Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus?
(Frankfurtam Main:Suhrkamp,1983), p. 16.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, System der Philosophie, I. Teil,
SdmtlicheWerke:Jubilaumsausgabein 20 Banden, Band 8,
ed. HermannGlockner (Stuttgart:Frommann,1927-1930),
p. 220.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
17. F. W. J. Schelling, Zur Geschichte der neueren
Philosophie:MunchenerVorlesungen(Stuttgart:Kohlham-
mer, 1926), pp. 9-32, quote from p. 10.
18. Lyotard,TheInhuman,p. 141.
19. See ImmanuelKant,Beobachtungeniiberdas Gefu'hl
des Schbnenund Erhabenen(Leipzig:Im InselVerlag,1913),
p. 48.
20. Lyotard,TheInhuman,pp. 110, 139.
21. Paul Beidler, "The Postmodern Sublime: Kant &
Tony Smith's Anecdote of the Cube," The Journalof Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism53 (1995): 177-186, quote from
p. 179.
22. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 32 (16), translation
amended.
23. Albrecht Wellmer, "Adorno,die Moderne und das
Erhabene,"in Endspiele:Die unversonlicheModerne:Es-
says und Vortrdge(Frankfurtam Main:Suhrkamp,1993),pp.
178-203; translatedby David Midgley as "Adorno,Moder-
nity,and the Sublime,"in Endgames:TheIrreconcilableNa-
tureof Modernity.Essaysand Lectures(MITPress,1998),pp.
155-181. In each case the first page reference refers to the
original German edition, the second in parentheses to the
English translation.Wellmer, "Adorno,die Moderne und
das Erhabene,"p. 184 (162).
24. Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderneunddas Erhabene,"
p. 187 (165).
25. Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderneund das Erhabene,"
p. 184 (161).
26. Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderneunddas Erhabene,"
p. 197 (174).
27. Jiirgen Habermas,"Die Philosophie als Platzhalter
und Interpret,"in Moralbewufitseinund kommunikatives
Handeln (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp,1983), pp. 9-28,
quote from pp. 23, 26; translatedby ChristianLenhardtas
"Philosopheras Stand-in and Interpreter,"in After Philos-
ophy: End or Transformation?ed. Kenneth Baynes, James
Bohman,andThomasMcCarthy(MITPress,1986),pp.296-
315.
28. Jtirgen Habermas, "Die Moderne- ein unvollen-
detes Projekt,"in Kleinepolitische Schriften(Frankfurtam
Main: Suhrkamp,1981), pp. 444-464, see in particularpp.
460-461; translatedby Seyla Benhabibas "Modernity- An
Incomplete Project,"in TheAnti-Aesthetic:Essays on Post-
modernCulture,ed. Hal Foster(London:Pluto Press,1985),
pp. 3-15. In subsequentreferences,the first page reference
refers to the originalGerman edition, the second in paren-
theses to the English translation. Wellmer, "Adorno, die
Moderne und das Erhabene,"p. 190 (167).
29. Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderneund das Erhabene,"
p. 192 (169).
30. Cited in ChristopherButler, Early Modernism:Lit-
erature,Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford
UniversityPress, 1994), p. 47.
31. Habermas,"Die Moderne,"pp. 460-461 (12), trans-
lation amended.
32. Albrecht Wellmer,"Wahrheit,Schein, Versohnung:
Adoraos asthetische Rettung der Modernitat,"in Zur Di-
alektikvon Moderneund Postmoderne:Vernunftkritik nach
Adorno (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp,1985), pp. 9-47,
see in particularpp. 26-37; translated by David Midgely
as "Truth,Semblance, Reconciliation:Adorno's Aesthetic
Redemption of Modernity," in Albrecht Wellmer, The
Persistenceof Modernity:Essays on Aesthetics,Ethics,and
Carroll The Limits of the Sublime
Postmodernism(MIT Press, 1991), pp. 1-35. In subsequent
references, the first page number refers to the original
German edition, the second in parentheses to the English
translation.
33. Lyotard,TheInhuman,p. 137. Lyotard,TheSublime
and the Avant-Garde,p. 2.
34. Lyotard,TheSublimeand the Avant-Garde,p. 2.
35. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie,p. 364 (245), translation
amended.
36. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 293 (197).
37. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 364 (245).
38. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie;see also p. 401 (269).
39. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 285 (191). Theodor
W. Adorno, MinimaMoralia,GesammelteSchriftenBand 4
(Frankfurtam Main:SuhrkampVerlag,1997),p. 70;Theodor
Adorno,MinimaMoralia:Reflectionsfrom a DamagedLife,
trans.E. F. N. Jephcott(London:NLB, 1974), p. 63.
40. MartinJay,"IsExperienceStill in Crisis?Reflections
on a FrankfurtSchool Lament,"in TheCambridgeCompan-
ion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (CambridgeUniversityPress,
2004), p. 141.
41. See Hans Graubner, "Hamanns Asthetik des Er-
habenenunddie Wiederkehrdes Erhabenenim 20. Jahrhun-
dert,"in Die Gegenwartigkeit JohannGeorgHamanns.Acta
des achten InternationalenHamann-Kolloquiumsan der
Martin-Luther-Universitdt 2002, ed. Bern-
Halle-Wittenberg,
hard Gajek (Frankfurtam Main:Peter Lang, 2005), p. 221.
See ThomasWeiskel, The RomanticSublime:Studiesin the
Structureand Psychologyof Transcendence(JohnsHopkins
UniversityPress,1976), p. 17.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
181
42. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, p. 295 (198), transla-
tion amended.Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderne und das Er-
habene,"p. 200 (177).
43. Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit
mit einem Brief tiber den 'Humanismus'(Bern: Verlag A.
Francke,1947),p. 70; translatedby FrankA. Capuzziwith J.
Glenn Gray and David FarrellKrell as "Letteron Human-
ism" in MartinHeidegger:Basic Writings,ed. David Farrell
Krell (London:Routledge, 1993), pp. 217-265, 228.
44. See Paul H. Fry, "The Possession of the Sublime,"
Studiesin Romanticism26 (1987): 188.
45. Wellmer,"Wahrheit,Schein,Versohnung,"pp. 26, 19
(18, 11).
46. Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," in
Holzwege (Stuttgart:Vittorio Klostermann,1950),p. 30; my
translation.
47. Jurgen Habermas,"Der Universalitatsanspruchder
Hermeneutik," in Theorie-Diskussion:Hermeneutik und
Ideologiekritik, ed. Jttrgen Habermas et al. (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp,1971), pp. 120-159.
48. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 122 (79), translation
amended.
49. Lyotard,"Presentingthe Unpresentable,"pp. 66, 68.
50. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie,p. 295 (198).
51. Welsch,AsthetischesDenken, p. 116.
52. Wellmer,"Adorno,die Moderneunddas Erhabene,"
p. 184 (161).
53. Butler, Early Modernism,p. 72.
54. David Revill, TheRoaringSilence:John Cage:A Life
(London:Bloomsbury,1992), p. 165.