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
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