Page 205 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
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DICK HEBDIGE 193
space outside language and the Law, beyond the boundaries of the
Imaginary register: the Real being the realm of the promise/threat of our
eventual (unthinkable) disintegration, our absorption into flux. The
sublime is here installed in each case as the place of epiphany and terror, the
place of the ineffable which stands over and against all human endeavour,
including the project of intellectual totalization itself. Lacan’s Real,
Foucault’s power-knowledge spirals, Kristeva’s signifiance, Derrida’s
aporia, Barthes’ text of bliss: all are equivalent, in some senses reducible to
Lyotard’s category of the sublime. This elevation of the sublime (which has
its more literal (or crass) quasi-empirical corollary in the cult of
schizophrenia (see above)—the cult, that is, of dread, of the sublime mode
of being in the world) could be interpreted as an extension of the aspiration
towards the ineffable which has impelled the European avant garde at least
since the Symbolists and Decadents and probably since the inception in the
1840s of metropolitan literary and artistic modernism with the ‘anti-
bourgeois’ refusals of Baudelaire. It implies a withdrawal from the
immediately given ground of sociality by problematizing language as tool
and language as communicative medium, by substituting models of
signification, discourse and decentred subjectivity for these older humanist
paradigms and by emphasizing the impossibility (of ‘communication’,
transcendence, dialectic, the determination of origins and outcomes, the
fixing or stabilization of values and meanings, etc.). The moment which is
privileged is the solitary confrontation with the irreducible fact of
limitation, Otherness, ‘differance’, with the question variously of the loss
of mastery, ‘death in life’ (Lyotard), of the ‘frequent little deaths’ or
‘picknoleptic interruptions’ of consciousness by the unconscious (Virilio),
and so on.
The conversion of asociality into an absolute value can accommodate a
variety of more or less resigned postures: scepticism (Derrida), stoicism
(Lyotard, Lacan, Foucault), libertarian anarchism/mysticism (Kristeva),
hedonism (Barthes), cynicism/nihilism (Baudrillard). However such a
privileging of the sublime tends to militate against the identification of
larger (collective) interests (the ism’s of the modern epoch, such as marxism,
liberalism, and so on). It does this by undermining or dismissing as
simplistic/‘barbaric’ what Richard Rorty has called ‘our untheoretical sense
of social solidarity’ (1984:41), and by bankrupting the liberal investment in
the belief in the capacity of human beings to empathize with one another,
to reconcile opposing ‘viewpoints’, to seek the fight-free integration of
conflicting interest groups. There is no room in the split opened up in the
subject by the Post for the cultivation of ‘consensus’ or for the growth and
maintenance of a ‘communicative community’, no feasible ascent towards
an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas). The stress on the asocial further
erodes the sense of destination and purposive struggle supplied by the
‘optimistic will’ (Gramsci), and the theoretical means to recover