Sublime

The Remainder

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SUBLIME. What is the responsibility of the avant-garde?

Historically – as the ‘advance guard’ of medieval armies – it was to lead a ‘line of march’ and deploy first into battle. For British armies of the C15th, for example, ‘vanguard’ foreriders (translated from the French ‘avant-garde’) would accompany the ‘harbingers’ who sought shelter for the total force as it progressed (a term drawn from Old French ‘herbergeor’, provider of lodging). The vanguard would serve as scouts, protect diplomatic officials or trumpeters, and be comprised of a range of troops; in his late C16th Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres military writer, and poet, Robert Barret illustrates this point:

Let the Officer of the Vanguarde draw out three rankes of the armed pikes…

However, throughout the C19th – as military techniques came into contact with increasingly powerful weaponry (cannons, muskets, rifles, gatling guns) – the use of ‘avant-garde’ forces slowly fell out of favour, with more flexible structures taking their place. So, as with seemingly all disused military technologies (and vocabularies) it was only natural for the culture sector to adopt the term, turning it – in 1825 – towards the arts.

Through his book Literary, Philosophical and Industrial Opinions (1825), French social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon is credited with the initial rearticulation of the term ‘avant-garde’ as a kind of ‘social force’ – putting down the sword to pick up the lyre – he writes:

Let us unite. To achieve our one single goal, a separate task will fall to each of us. We, the artists, will serve as the avant-garde: for amongst all the arms at our disposal, the power of the Arts is the swiftest and most expeditious. When we wish to spread new ideas amongst men, we use in turn the lyre, ode or song, story or novel; we inscribe those ideas on marble or canvas… We aim for the heart and imagination, and hence our effect is the most vivid and the most decisive.1

Saint-Simon’s writing is one of the clearest articulations of a political position, emerging within European cultural circles of the early C19th, that art could play a practical, emancipatory role in society – one made most strikingly through the ‘Realist’ paintings of Gustave Courbet or Honore Daumier and, later, in the work of poets like Arthur Rimbaud. Courbet’s infamous ‘Stone Breakers’ – completed a year after the publication of The Communist Manifesto (1848) and a series of workers’ uprisings in France (1834) – illustrated this sensibility clearly, depicting two roadside labourers at almost life-size. In 1855, demonstrating its radicalism, the painting was rejected from an international Salon in Paris, its depiction of ‘plain people’ described both as ‘deliberate ugliness’, ‘unsuitable’ for artistic representation, and ‘socialist propaganda’ by the bourgeois-academic curators of the day.

Here, in his rejection of both Romanticism and academic idealisation – in his representations of nature and his refusal to naturalise working-class labour – Courbet opened a space for experimenting with new forms of (political) representation within the imperial core; a line of enquiry through which one might trace the work of later French ‘avant-gardists’: Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, and even C20th Russian constructivists, such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. (It is worth noting, perhaps, the passing similarities between the ‘Stone Breakers’ and Lissitzky’s ‘Red Wedge’).

In each case the ‘responsibility’ of these painters concerned what, how, and eventually whether artistic representation could function ‘ahead’ – as the vanguard – of a rapidly modernising public taste, proposing new forms of representation, out of step with social convention, often at great personal risk (Courbet was imprisoned for his participation in the Paris commune). Writing on the question of the Avant Garde in Artforum (1982), the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard summarised this approach:

Avant-garde painting eludes the esthetics of beauty in that it does not draw on a communal sense of shared pleasure. To the public taste its products seem “monstrous,” “formless,” purely “negative” nonentities. [...] Thus they introduced painting into the field opened by the esthetics of the sublime... 2

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So, perhaps this is the remit of the ‘avant-garde’: administrator of the sublime?

Etymologically, the term ‘sublime’ is derived from a compound Latin term sublīmis; sub- (which, while often giving the sense ‘under’, in this case means ‘up to’) and -līmen or -limus, meaning a ‘line’ or ‘threshold’ – i.e. ‘up to the line’ – giving a definition of ‘uplifted’, ‘high’, ‘lofty’, or ‘exalted’. From its Latin roots the term found its way into c16th English via Middle French as a quasi-practical term made with reference to ‘things’,3 ‘scientific properties’ – such as the conversion of liquids into gases – noble ‘people’, and exalted ‘ideas’.

In the c18th the concept of ‘the sublime’ (here in ‘elevated’ form, from adjective to noun) took on a specific character within European philosophical discourse, as part of a move towards ‘enlightenment’ aesthetics and Romantic ideals. This renewed interest began – in many accounts – with French poet Nicolas Boileau’s translation of a Roman-era text by an anonymous author (known as Longinus), titled simply Du Sublime (1674), which considered the possibility of art to ‘confront’ an (often threatening) unknown, ennobling the artist in the process.

If the etymology of the term ‘sublime’ defines a kind of limit, its exploration often appears to involve some form of transgression; and so ‘explorers’ of the sublime sought to investigate and experience first-hand ‘the incommensurability of the sensible with the metaphysical (the Idea, God)’. In 1757 the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke advanced these ideas, for example, in his essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; in his writing Burke sought to define the ‘sublime experience’ as an encounter with fear (nature, God) which had the power to transform the self, in this way internalising the concept as a kind of psychological experience. In 1790, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed this conception, describing the sublime similarly as a subjective experience, but one which exposes the ‘limits’ of reason itself: an “inadequacy of imagination” which momentarily reveals the unnameable, undecidable, indeterminate and unpresentable, an ‘inaccessible form of excess’.

In his book Sublime Art (2017) researcher Stephen Zepke – drawing on Lyotard – describes this ‘event’ as a kind of ‘freedom of feeling-thought’, in which one experiences the sublime as an “infinite inventive capacity [...] unleashed by negating all the cognitive principles acting as the conditions of its possible experience, or, in other words, by negating representation.”4 Far from a demonstration of ‘lack’ the sublime experience acts like lightning, as Lyotard writes: it “short-circuits thinking with itself.”

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In 2023, following the release of Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ movie, the phrase ‘SUBLIME!’ morphed briefly into an internet meme; a reaction GIF represented by Ryan Gosling’s (Ken’s) stunned face in the moment Margot Robbie (Barbie) tells him she's ready to be his “longterm-distance-low-commitment-casual girlfriend”. In the film, Gosling takes a step back inside the house to compose himself, and ad-libs the line off-screen: ‘SUBLIME!’

For the Romanticists – such as Friedrich, Delacroix, Turner, Goya – the sublime was mobilised as a means of rejecting traditional forms of beauty, and exploring (expanding?) the finitude of human experience during a time of seemingly infinite change. For the Realists and later modern ‘avant-gardists’, the sublime was instrumentalised as a means of experimenting with the conditions of representation itself, and the social structures such forms of representation gave rise to. This is as true for state-sanctioned Soviet Socialist Realism as it is for Joseph Beuys’ environmentalist Conceptualism. As Zepke writes, paraphrasing Lyotard, “this ‘displacement’ of the infinite from a (romantic) ‘elsewhere’ to something that ‘happens’ to us directly is [...] ‘the whole difference between romanticism and the “modern” avant-garde’.”

And yet today, in the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, where might one find this avant-garde? This sublime encounter of ‘postmodern’ experience? For Lyotard, the “governing principle of the postindustrial techno-scientific world” – the responsibility of the ‘postmodern’ artists – is not to “reinstate a make-believe ‘reality’” (qua Realism) but to continue the search for an ‘immanent sublime’ through deconstruction. The artist's question is not, for Lyotard, “How can we avoid anguish?” but “What is painting?” ad infinitum. The search for critiques of capitalist aesthetics, for their alternatives, is replaced by their integration into its cultural output: from ‘the sublime’ to ‘SUBLIME’!

For Jacques Rancière, comradely critic of Lyotard’s position, the ‘meaning of the postmodern moment’ thus becomes clear:

...it was just the moment of disconnection between artistic modernism and political emancipation. The dismissal of the latter allows for artistic avant-gardism to get into a new connection and endorse a new ‘historical task’. The avant-garde indeed must indefinitely draw the dividing line and sever modern art from commodity culture. But the inscription of the double-bind is no longer the contradiction revealing the mark of alienation and bearing the promise of emancipation [...] Such is the last word that the self-cancelling aesthetic of the Sublime gives to the metapolitics of aesthetics.”5

This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Footnotes

  1. https://www.joaap.org/new3/Katsiaficas.html#back4 ↩

  2. https://www.artforum.com/features/presenting-the-unpresentable-the-sublime-208373/ ↩

  3. e.g. “through sweat and labour gainst those rockes sublime, let us ascend” (c.1600) ↩

  4. Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future Stephen Zepke (2017) ↩

  5. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-sublime-from-lyotard-to-schiller ↩