OTR Comment & Culture - October, 2004

There is always something to be wary of, something always moving in certain aesthetic systems to beware. This something is proto-fascism. From Mazzoni to D’Annunzio to Heidegger runs the threat. Or, in the alternative nothingness (nihilism) noted in Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay on Minimalism, "The Aesthetics of Silence" (Aspen 5/6), the threat is pietistic silence, self-destruction, abject formalism, or whatever suits the purpose of vacating the premises of spent systems. Sontag mentions Kleist’s suicide, Hölderlin’s madness, and Nietzsche’s self-destruction. Deleuze’s jumping from his very own formalistic window on the world seems straight out of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: "Better to break the window and leap ..." (Yet dialectical materialists will always point out that Hölderlin suffered from schizophrenia and Nietzsche from tertiary syphilis. Conversely, asymmetrical blame games exist for making the French Revolution the fault of Jesuits, south-German, Swabian Illuminati and/or godless Freemasons, while Napoleon has been blamed on Romanticism and a distorted Nietzsche became the patron saint of Nazism.)

And then there was Helmut Newton crashing his Cadillac into a wall on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, leaving the Chateau Marmont on January 15, 2004, the anniversary of Dali’s death, and killing himself in the process. Close friend of Dali and master of the photographic, voyeuristic sublime, Newton answered the call in his own inimitable tragic way - by staging an accident - shortly after donating his entire photographic archive to the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin. This is all quite apropos of the implicit ideologies of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic (detailed by Terry Eagleton and Hal Foster), and the eventual outcome of the ultimate confrontation with the Sublime, the Self visited upon Itself.

Sontag reminds us that Rimbaud turned to slave trading in Abyssinia, a very different season in hell for the author of the sensational "Alchimie du Verbe". Klossowski’s post-Surrealist, pre-Existentialist turn in the echoing silences of a Dominican order (and the subsequent Sadean turn) seem similarly disposed. It is not difficult to find innumerable souls up against the wall, not finding the proverbial gap in things through which to escape everything else - all totalizing systems. History is littered with the debris of individuals answering the call of the Sublime, yet responding with forged documents; that is to say, individuals hearing the call of the sublime 'nothing' - Freedom and Love - and providing the opposite.

In the Gnostic system the World - a code-name for fallenness - is ruled by the demi-urge. This image, made most potent in Blake’s Ancient of Days, is the phantasm, in outline form, of all ideologies in the extended field of representation, compass in hand. For Lacan and Derrida this outline is the place held in all systems (vertically or horizontally arrayed) for the Names-of-the-Father, the absent Father. The confrontation with this phantasm, which is also the ego, is the last confrontation en route to the call of the Sublime. It is the last test before crossing into this parallel world. For the Buddha, the last temptation was ‘Heaven’. For Kazantzakis’ Christ it was a normal life with wife and children.

For the Russian Formalists, before swerving off into Soviet ideology (and until Socialist Realism came along), the last temptation was to seek presence for the absence they so brilliantly foretold. Many were sent off to prison for the favor. Thus the Nature-Culture divide is ‘bridged’ by ideologies left, right, and center because it is an unstable thing. Dialectics cannot resolve this rupture in things. It is the exquisite and mysterious ‘nature’ within the seemingly archaic discours naturel, yet discernible as metaphysics since Pascal, that carries within it the antidote. As antidote, this natural language slips in and out of discourse (discourses). It was sought (and lost) in Vienna, at Cacciari’s so-called Turning Point c.1900. It was lost and found and lost again within all of the various movements within art and aesthetics throughout the 20th century. That it calls now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is of sublime significance, yet the dangers of it being misrepresented are as potent today as any time past.

Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s late neo-conservatism (after the French Revolution) is a minor affair compared with the 20th-century manifestations of the failure of nerve before the sublime call. Goethe’s regressions, after Sturm und Drang, are insignificant when placed next to the evisceration of natural language underway these past decades within post-modern nihilism. Answering the call by re-loading ideology is as appalling as answering the call with empty, formalistic language games. Hence, then, the necessity of Benjaminian critique and the endless demolition project of modernity anyway, modernity as eternal now, in the face of reaction and - potentially - much, much worse.

Gavin Keeney writes and lectures on the intersection of landscape, architecture, and aesthetics. He is author of On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Birkhauser, 2000) and the Keeper of the Archive-Grotto http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/index1.html.