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Dick Hebdige the IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT: TOWARDS a SOCIOLOGY of the SUBLIME

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Dick Hebdige the IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT: TOWARDS a SOCIOLOGY of the SUBLIME New Formations number 1 Spring 1987 Dick Hebdige THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE SUBLIME A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, 'The 9th thesis on the philosophy of history') Cosmogony Legends. Like almost all Indians, the Algonquin tribes believe in the Thunder Bird, a powerful spirit whose eyes flash lightning, while the beating of his wings is the rolling of thunder. He it is who prevents the earth from drying up and vegetation from dying. (Robert Graves (ed.), New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology) In recent years, the reappraisal of political and intellectual priorities which has been forced upon us by a whole series of cultural, political and epistemological crises has led to a renewal of interest in the genealogy and origins of contemporary modes of thought, ways of seeing and saying. As part of this process of critical, reflexive practice - a movement back which can involve either a painful but necessary return to primary questions or a wilful retreat from the challenge of the present - there has been a renewal of interest in the origin and meaning of the aesthetic experience. Attention has been concentrated on two founding moments: the origin of western philosophy in ancient Greece and the birth of formal aesthetics in the Enlightenment when the categories of 47 the Sublime and the Beautiful were first used to differentiate the varieties of aesthetic experience. At the same time, the rhetoric of postmodernism has helped to induce and articulate a generalized 'sense of an ending' which is focused around a refusal of totalities, explanatory systems, older certainties of all kinds. Often, and paradoxically, the genealogical impulse has here been combined with a tendency to engage in what Jean Baudrillard calls 'science fiction': a sense of play and prophecy, along with forms of parable and allegory, has entered 'serious' critical discourse, sometimes in the shape of highly schematic diagnoses of our present 'condition'. In this spirit, some commentators have deconstructed the 'aesthetic', and in a Derridean flourish turned it inside out, presenting in its place a critical postmodern 'anti-aesthetic'.1 Taking advantage in what follows of the critical licence opened up within the Post I shall move back and forth across this landscape mobilizing different kinds of knowledge, different voices, different kinds of writing, to reflect upon the provenance in the modern period of the idea of aesthetics and aesthetic judgement and to summarize two different but related critiques of the 'aesthetic': on the one hand, Pierre Bourdieu's work on the social origin and functions of aesthetic taste and, on the other, the postmodernist promotion, following Nietzsche, of an 'anti-aesthetic' based on a rejection of the Enlightenment idea(l) of beauty. At the same time, by cutting back at regular intervals to more grounded 'ecological' descriptions of the street in London where I live, by concentrating in particular on the heterogeneous (sub)cultural- ethnic mix that constitutes the local demographic, I hope to 'bring home' - in both the literal and figurative senses of the phrase - the implications of issues raised in these larger debates on taste, aesthetics, postmodernism. This weaving together of incommensurable levels, tones, objects represents an attempt to engage suggestively in those debates, to alternate between on the one hand the personal, the confessional, the particular, the concrete, and on the other the public, the expository, the general, the abstract: to walk the flickering line between vertigo and ground. The ghost of a totality hangs in the air like the shadow of Klee's Angel over the discourse(s) of the Post but the Angel also has another side and a different name. (In other places it answers to the name of Thunder Bird.) This article, centred as it is on the reverie of the impossible object (a sociology of the Sublime is, after all, impossible) is also intended as an invocation of the Thunder Bird: as a tracking of the Angel's brighter aspect. The invocation ends with a question: if sociology is concerned with the discovery and examination of invisible, impalpable structures which cannot be directly apprehended in experience but which none the less condition everything that passes as social experience, then what can sociology do with the unconscious, what can it do with those invisible, impossible, imaginary structures we inhabit every night as we sleep? What kind of sociology would take dreams as 'data'? 2 There is a paradox in the historical development of the word 'taste'. Originally denoting physiological sensations, the word was generalized from meaning NEW FORMATIONS essentially passive physiological responses (primarily palatal) to given stimuli, to a sense either of the active attribution of value to aesthetic objects or of the more or less codified rules of polite society - so-called 'good taste'. By the eighteenth century, according to Raymond Williams,2 the word had been, as it were, etherialized so that it no longer referred to the physical senses but rather to the underlying principles which are taken to govern the laws of conduct and aesthetics alike. From that time onwards, taste can be taken to refer to the judgement of either social or formal values, while the 'laws' or 'rules' which are invoked to legitimate and authorize those judgements are in both cases typically seen as God-given, universal, timeless. It is that confusion surrounding the term - a term which can designate at once physical sensations of attraction and repulsion and the elaboration of both social and formal codes - which provides the starting-point from which subsequent debates on taste proceed. The entire fragile edifice of modern aesthetics could be said to rest upon the founding set of contradictions and oppositions traced out during the eighteenth century around the word 'taste'. A struggle over the meaning of the term begins in earnest in the latter part of the century. The romantic poets, for example, as part of their resistance to the commercialization and commodification of literature - itself linked to the decline of aristocratic patronage and the rise of the literate mercantile and industrial middle classes - begin to articulate a mythology of artistic production around the solitary figure of the alienated and marginalized poet-prophet. This romantic archetype of the isolated creative genius, estranged from urban 'polite society', temperamentally aligned with Nature and the Folk (as opposed to the Public), develops in explicit opposition to the cultural aspirations of those sections of the emergent bourgeoisie which are seeking to emulate aristocratic models, to gatecrash 'high society', to codify and generalize the rules of taste and manners so that they can consolidate their economic ascendancy in the cultural field. The conflict arises, then, between those who resist any attempt to submit or reduce literature and the arts to the laws of the market, and those fractions of the emergent elites who seek to conceal and euphemize the 'vulgar' sources of their wealth in industry and commerce and to raise themselves and their offspring to a 'higher', more spiritual level. For Wordsworth, who in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads had referred contemptuously to those 'who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry',3 only the poets, men (sic) of principle and insight, in tune with Nature and the eternal verities, pledged to defend and renew the living language through their poetry, should be entrusted with the sacerdotal role of distinguishing the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the enduring from the transitory. And these oppositions develop, in the succeeding decades, alongside other ideologically weighted distinctions between, for instance, 'art' and 'industry', 'individual' and 'mass', 'organic' and 'mechanical', 'high' and 'low' culture. In other words, they develop alongside and in parallel with all those structured oppositions which form around the superordinate polarity between culture and society which Raymond Williams shows to have dominated literary-critical and aesthetic discourse in England from the latter part of the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth.4 THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT 49 But the question of taste, of discrimination, of the generalizability or otherwise of aesthetic judgements, is posed much further back, at the root of the western philosophical tradition, in the Platonic concept of ideal forms, where the objects which we encounter in sensory experience are held to be mere tokens: imperfect, mortal echoes of the absolute forms of the Good, the True and the Beautiful which are said to exist beyond the reach of our senses, 'on the other side' of sensory experience, beyond time and change. In a famous series of metaphors, of which the fable of the cave is the most developed and concise, Plato argued that the phenomenal forms of perception were mere shadows of the Real, of the absolute and timeless Forms which lay beyond sensory perception.
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