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Nancy Glazener
University of Pittsburgh

The Sublime Limits of Meaning and Action:
White Noise and More Thoughts on Postmodern Conditions

Most of us, as critics, are junkies craving the sublime. This is by no means only an effect of our professional identities, although the critical climate of recent years has nurtured this appetite. We love gaps (a.k.a. abysses) and excesses; we may also love to trace continuities and regularities, delicate interplays of forms and conventions, but we tend to find most revealing those moments in texts, or readings of texts, when customary strategies for containment break down, opening onto dizzying vistas. A particular performance of a would-be-sublime unsettling may strike us as routinized or cheap, even melodramatic, but few of us can help being compelled by more genuine-seeming glimpses of the vast ranges of meaning and meaninglessness beyond the scope of our familiar categories.

Those of us who crave the sublime do so because its aesthetic best captures our sense of what is or could be meaningful in our existence, professionally and personally. We may not have given up on happiness, the register more consonant with the beautiful; we may even disapprove of certain constructions of the sublime; but in any quest not to live our lives in vain, the sublime is very likely to figure. In this paper, I want to work through some important features of our current fascination with the sublime, not in order to renounce or reclaim it but to propose a particular and, I believe, new understanding of how it might inflect our understanding of our capacities for action. To this end, I want to put Burke and Kant's classic theories of the sublime and Terry Eagleton's arguments about some of the cultural functions of aesthetics in conversation with Jean-François Lyotard's appropriation of the sublime for postmodernism and Hannah Arendt's definition of action, using Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise as a touchstone for the ways in which these theorists speak to contemporary US culture.

White Noise is steeped in the sublime: in classic examples of the sublime and even classic keywords of the sublime. The central event of the novel is a family's experience of what is called, in wonderfully apt bureaucratic language, an "airborne toxic event," during which the narrator Jack Gladney is exposed to a deadly level of the gas Nyodene Derivative–not an original toxic gas, mind you, but a derivative one. In the wake of the event, the sunsets over the Gladneys' town become especially glorious:

Not just any sunset would automatically rank as sublime, at least according to the dominant theories of the sublime, but a sunset imbued with poisonous residues in the atmosphere, "tinged with dread," does. For Burke, especially, the sublime takes its force from the "passions which belong to self-preservation," which can be "delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without actually being in such circumstances." Although no one in this novel can trust the government to keep them safe, by the time Jack and others start seeing the unusual sunsets, the crisis has passed: each amazing sunset carries the idea and the memory of danger, but poses no immediate threat.

For Kant, the dangers summoned up by the sublime are both more abstract and more intimate than for Burke. Like Burke, Kant admits that the potential of Nature to induce fear can be an element of the sublime; like Burke, he understands this effect to hold only when there is no immediate danger. But Kant plots the subject's encounter with the sublime as a drama offering, or at least retracing, an internal transformation. The sublime's key feature for Kant is not danger or power, but the quality of being beyond our perceptual capacity and cognitive mastery: the natural world is the best example of this vastness (119). The subject's encounter with the sublime is initially overwhelming, as the subject encounters the extent or power or wonder of what is beyond his conception; then, the crisis is resolved, as the subject discovers or remembers his own inner power of reasoning, or his share in this universal faculty, a power that elevates him above what he is contemplating. This movement is worth quoting in detail:

The Oedipal quality of this resolution becomes even clearer in Kant's discussion of "our incapacity to attain to an idea that is a law for us. . . (105, emphasis in original):

Terry Eagleton underlines the Oedipal dimension of this process, invoking the dynamic by which the subject ceases to fear the phallic law of the father by virtue of understanding that he (and the subject throughout these accounts is implicitly or explicitly male) can be a father and a subject/enforcer of the law in his own person. The subject's "reward for thus submitting to the pains of castration will be a kind of reconstitution of the imaginary at a higher level, as it comes to perceive that the infinity it fears in the sublime representation is in fact an infinite power within itself." This embrace of the autonomy of the bourgeois subject–its subjection to a law that it understands to be freely taken upon itself–may even be one of the ways in which a subject is created who can be interpellated, Eagleton proposes (24).

Not surprisingly, though, the sublime brings no such resolution to Jack Gladney or anyone else in White Noise. The world of the book is secular and remote from the embrace of duty that fueled Kant's categorical imperative. Oedipal anxieties are closer at hand–arguably, Hitler, Jack's object of study, is both a terrifying and a sheltering father for him–but do not seem to find any resolution. Similarly, the experience of the sublime catalyzed by the sunsets is stalled. As John Frow has explained, the "twist" in the sublime of DeLillo's sunsets "is that the sense of the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations." The second sunset post-toxic event is described with even greater awareness of its predecessors:

The sunset is vast, dangerous, and tragic, but it is also overwritten and (violating Kant's dictum that the sublime is evoked by objects "absolutely great," beyond comparison [106]) can be evaluated somewhat dispassionately as a performance.

Quite aptly with respect to White Noise, Terry Eagleton describes the famous binary of the sublime and the beautiful as an ideological symbiosis in the service of the bourgeoisie. The beautiful, for Kant, is like the sublime a category of the subject's experience, although the beautiful (unlike the sublime) lays claim to being universal. The beautiful is something which pleases utterly apart from self-interest (50) and independently of its "concept," or the meaning and use entailed by its existence in the world (60). Unlike responses involving the sublime, the perception of beauty must be divorced from emotion (68); it must also depend on something more than the senses, which determine merely individual preferences akin to appetites (44-5). In an earlier work, Kant spun out the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful more evocatively: "The sublime moves, the beautiful charms"; "The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can also be small. The sublime must be simple; the beautiful can be adorned and ornamented" (48). "Understanding is sublime, wit is beautiful. Courage is sublime and great, artfulness is little but beautiful" (51). And finally, in a formulation important for Burke as well, "Sublime attributes stimulate esteem, but beautiful ones, love" (51) In Kant's and Burke's accounts, beauty is linked to pleasure quite directly, so that the challenge of defining beauty as more than an individual sensory response (where Burke is content to leave it) lies in spiritualizing or idealizing it: Kant, though he wouldn't claim that everything beautiful is good or vice versa, ultimately claims that "the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good," which is the reason why it and not the sublime can lay claim to universality (223 Critique). Yet the beautiful, despite this important symbolic role, is associated with repose and somewhat passive pleasures, in contrast to the struggle to internalize duty and power marked or perhaps even stimulated by the experience of the sublime.

Accordingly, Eagleton stresses that the binary of the beautiful and the sublime–the poles of aesthetic responsiveness within the dominant Western tradition–carry out a division of labor in which the beautiful soothes the subject and the sublime stirs him to action: "Ideology must not so thoroughly centre the subject as to castrate its desire; instead we must be both cajoled and chastized, made to feel both homeless and at home, folded upon the world yet reminded that our true resting place is in infinity" (90). The binary also maps roughly onto the subjective experiences of production and consumption, both essential for capitalism but potentially in conflict. Like the beautiful object, which our senses are miraculously designed to appreciate in common with our fellows, the commodity seems to be addressed to us; however, the world of production, which involves our subjection to the estrangements of labor and the laws of economics, is a vast arena in which we feel insignificant (92):

The dialectic of conceptual containment and its shattering parallels the alternation (not necessarily a dialectic) between the subject's stable relationship to the commodity and his unsettling share in the global economy.

No wonder, then, that DeLillo's characters seek comfort in shopping, in the consoling accessibility of commodities: Jack, injured by a colleague's deprecating remarks, takes the family on a shopping orgy at some point, and through his own shopping begins "to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed" (84), being centered by the experience in very much the way Eagleton describes the beautiful operating. But the sinister passivity of shopping comes to the fore in the supermarket, which crackles with intimations of mortality. Jack's friend Murray Jay Siskind, a pop culture scholar, rhapsodizes about supermarkets due to the richness of their "psychic data" (37), the "[w]aves and radiation" given off in that space (38). Technological mysticism pervades the book, and Murray is its high priest. So it is both screamingly funny and deadly serious when Murray compares the supermarket where the characters often meet to the space that Tibetans believe marks a transition between death and rebirth, where the soul " 'recharges' " and " 'restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth' " (37). " 'Here we don't die, we shop,' " says Murray. " 'But the difference is less marked than you think' " (38). This must be what Jack later calls (quoting someone, perhaps Murray) " 'the death that exists in routine things' " (248). If death is like white noise, as Jack and his wife Babette imagine, then arguably the white noise of multitudinous confusing stimuli is like death–and like a low mimetic version of the sublime, not only in its invocation of the danger of death (Burke's sublime) but also in its formlessness (Kant's sublime). Of course, such a low mimetic version of the sublime offers no opportunities for heroic or even tragic responsiveness.

Now the normative Oedipal crisis is in fact not resolved as neatly as Eagleton suggests, even for a boy: the penis is not the phallus, and the fullness of power and capacity that one mistakenly attributes to the father, the law's representative, can never really belong to anyone, even though there are real power differentials among people. Accordingly, we should not imagine that some unambiguously decisive and effective action, the outcome of reason and will, used to issue from subjects' encounters with the sublime, before mass culture and ideological state apparatuses eroded subjectivity and public life. But there is in White Noise a longing for action which is also a longing for meaning, a longing that might be fueled by so much sublimity. For instance, a teenage friend of Jack's family trains to break the world record for sitting confined with poisonous snakes (182), thereby "enlarging the center" of his existence, "creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration" (268). Contemplating Orest Mercator's goal, Jack wonders if we envy athletes because "[i]n building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying" (267)–a mechanism that sounds very much like the subject of the sublime's transmutation of an external threat into his own transcendence. By the same logic, Jack is persuaded by Murray that a " 'dier can become a killer' " (293), so he shoots the man, shrouded in mystery and therefore seemingly powerful, who has coerced Babette into having an affair with him. After having shot Willie Mink, Jack waits for a subjective charge, as if he wishes to embody the sublime or at least the phallic for someone else: "I tried to see myself from Mink's viewpoint. Looming, dominant, gaining life-power, storing up life-credit. But he was too far gone to have a viewpoint" (312). In the wake of this failure, Jack decides to try to save Mink's life instead, marvelling that his own "attempts to redeem himself might prolong the elation he felt when he committed the crime he now sought to make up for" (315). The elation and the racing pulse are real, but without issue: Jack is still among the diers (320). Even these extreme actions–taking a life, saving a life–don't seem meaningful.

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is animated by a similar longing for action, and her formulations of some of the characteristics of action shed light on the conditions in which it might seem meaningful. She distinguishes between action, the revelatory and unexpected doing of a distinct individual, and behavior, the normalized conduct of a social creature. Action, she believes, is possible only in the company of others, not only because many actions require more than one person but also because an action's effects on the shared world of humanity depend on other people's being brought into relationship with it: an action which never enters into history (considered not as record, but as the "organized remembrance" of collective life) is no action at all, for Arendt (182-3, 198). However, this collective life must take the form of a public and political world–the Greek polis is her ideal–which offers men opportunities to be esteemed and remembered; the social, which extends the purely private life of the household across large populations, is the enemy of action. The exclusivity of the Greek polis counts as a great flaw in this conception today, but the motive for action that Arendt emphasizes seems related to Jack's: the fear of death is also the fear of being forgotten, which might be why Murray claims that Jack uses Hitler to protect himself from death (287). Interestingly enough, Arendt's emphasis on the revelatory quality of action–its contributing to a story about the actor, as well as to the shaping of collective life–is largely compatible with a belief in the subject's incomplete self-knowledge and problematic intentionality: "the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer" (184). A true action is not governed by the logic that distinguishes between means and ends, either to privilege ends and discount means or to idealize process (229), but it is boundless in its effects, boundless especially in its production of relationships (190-1). Especially in distinction to behavior, an action defies normative evaluation:

The most important index of the fact that Jack is struggling in the register of the sublime is that he is striving for meaningfulness, not pleasure or even glory: it is a secret wicked act, not a public heroic one, that he attempts in shooting Willie Mink. No doubt the failure of this act and even of his more public rescue of Mink indicts both himself and the world, in some respects: as Camus put it, "the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together." But Orest Mercator's attempt at heroism, arguably a miniature and forerunner of Jack's action, seems to be foiled especially by external forces: he is duped by a man who promises to supply him with 27 venomous snakes, but who instead supplies him with only three that turn out not to be venomous. He gets bitten for nothing and retreats into obscurity (298). Despite his successfully carrying out his internal resolution, Orest gets shortchanged by circumstances outside himself. No glory, no entry in the Guinness Book of World Records (the closest thing to a genuine historical record in the novel, even though its systematizing falls short of Arendt's understanding of true action).

The main sense in which life might seem equal to the subjective dramas of the characters in White Noise is that it still affords the inevitability of death, the greatest threat and conventionally the source of humans' capacity for tragedy (which is generally linked to the sublime). Jack and Babette are both deeply afraid of death: so deeply, in fact, that Babette has had sex with Willie Mink in order to try out a drug, Dylar, designed to eradicate the fear of death. However, the family feeds on catastrophes that happen to others, on death as spectacle: a Friday night finds them bonding by watching televised "floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. . . . Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping" (64). These packaged catastrophes seem to function like homeopathic medicine, domesticating death and destruction through its presentation in a manageable genre; they also unite the family in its safety (before, of course, the airborne toxic event brings catastrophe their way). Watching a local fire provides another occasion for specifically masculine bonding, partly because of the "manliness of firefighting" (239) but also because of the "ancient, spacious and terrible drama" of the fire and destruction (240). The explicit stalling of this scene's sublime possibilities is especially revealing, however: an odor of something synthetic burning returns the viewers' concerns to their own deaths, undermining the previous drama (240-1).

The problem with the narrow concern with one's own death as a spur to action is that it does not fulfill one of the most important ethical functions of the aesthetic, which is to enter into some kind of identification larger than the self. The autonomy of aesthetic perception (like the autonomy of the work of art) is not just an autonomy from outside determinations but from determinations that imprison one in the motives and emotions of one's limited selfhood. Of course, we can be imprisoned not just by biologically reductive understandings of our subjectivity–Jack's son Heinrich's view, not unlike Burke's, that happiness is a nerve cell getting too much or too little stimulation (182)–but also by economistic ones. This is why "interest," understood as "self-interest," must be utterly banished by Kant from any judgment of the beautiful, and why the merely "agreeable," the product of personal and idiosyncratic sensations, is similarly disqualified. The notion that the aesthetic involves some kind of rising–or being raised–above one's ordinary perceptions, even one's ordinary identity, suffuses many discussions of the aesthetic. Eagleton proposes that for Kant "aesthetic judgement signifies. . . essentially a form of altruism" as people put themselves in others' places to try to attain some kind of "universal subjectivity" (97). More profoundly, the aesthetic performs an important function in modelling, through this idea of individuals linked in shared approbation of the beautiful, a kind of social bond that would be uncoerced, undegraded by the marketplace, and therefore a repository of value–the aesthetic being an end or value in itself (63-4).

The beautiful, for Kant, always verges on the normative: its universality and the necessity of its being somehow aligned with the good, which it symbolizes, delimit its possibilities. But part of the appeal of the sublime for us these days is its shattering of the containment that grounds norms. There is the danger, of course, that the sublime can be degraded into the fetishization of transgression or resistance, or that the radical cognitive decentering offered by the sublime can be too facilely equated with an act of political destabilization. It would be unwise to underestimate the recuperative power of the Oedipal experience of the sublime that Eagleton highlights in Kant's model: the mastery of the vast expanse of possibilities for meaning and action by the gratifying conclusion that the world therefore provides suitably challenging materials for one's own faculties of reason and will, grounded in hegemonic, normative categories of thinking and doing. Jean-François Lyotard also warns against short-circuiting recuperations of the sublime, which he identifies with modernism. The modern "nostalgic" "aesthetic of the sublime" as manifested in a work of art "allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure." In contrast, the "real sublime sentiment" requires a bit more pain along with the pleasure: "the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination of sensibility should not be equal to the concept" (81). The postmodern work of art, embodying this more authentic sublime, "puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself"; it "denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable"; it "searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable" (81). This is an austere creed–would enjoyment really blight these new presentations?–but its austerity is different from Kant's, whose version of the sublime encounter culminated in renewed faith in the subject's access to reason.

The distance between Kant and Lyotard can be marked partly by the successful propagation of norms in the intervening centuries, and the emergence of a political suspicion of what norms have wrought. Whereas Kant valorizes the struggle of the subject to bring himself in line with universal perceptions of beauty and categorical imperatives, in our own and Lyotard's era the danger seems much greater that norms will have already infested our most intimate perceptions and impulses and forms of self-knowledge, so that our every behavior contributes only to the sum of data available to the sciences and social sciences. The promise of the unpresentable is not, then, that it is merely more grist for the mill of normative conceptualization, but that it can be summoned as a challenge to the dominion of the normative: that postmodern artists can "invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented" (81). The postmodern artist tries to make something new, in the best old Romantic tradition, but something so new that it points its audience beyond the norms of intelligibility. The postmodern work of art has the "[character] of an event" (81). One can read this optimistically as a significant swerve away from the Oedipal schema: Lyotard's subject, the postmodern artist, apprehends through the sublime some intimation of a reality, or a set of possibilities for meaning, beyond the ones available to him; does not misrecognize this reality as part of a whole which he, too, manifests (the Hegelian move) or as a fund of materials which he can import into established artistic forms, thereby revivifying them; but rather strains to find ways of invoking this "beyond" without colonizing it. The subject is not thereby transformed or re-subjectified, as in the Kantian model, but rather has worked to denaturalize some norms, possibly including the norm of subjectivity itself, so that they resonate parodically.

Does this activity of the subject count as meaningful action? On this question hinge many judgments made about postmodernism, which tend to accumulate along a tiresome binary: either postmodern innovation is the only real action, the only kind of action that is sui generis, the only genuine foundation of political involvement, according to the proponents of postmodernism, or it is the pastime of an exclusive elite (perhaps like the citizens of the polis?) who are sidestepping their real responsibilities, both to art and to political life. Either postmodern practice, as understood by Lyotard and others, is crucially new, or it is simply another instance of the capitalist and modernist drives to declare obsolescence and demand novelty. The whole debate indeed is organized uncannily by the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, with the emphasis of Habermas and others on communicative human sympathy, the possibility of sharing the same faculty of reason, and on the capaciousness of realism and other accessible, inherited forms aligning that anti-postmodernists with the beautiful. The paralysis of Jean Baudrillard's position, in which the play of simulacra fends off any possibility of action rooted in the real, might even correspond to the initial encounter with the sublime, in which one is overwhelmed by a spectacle that seems to negate any possibility of response.

One difficulty in applying Arendt's account is ever distinguishing action from behavior. From Louis Althusser's theory of the subject's interpellation, which puts ideology at the innermost core of people's self-understanding, to Anthony Giddens's more optimistic notion that structure in social life is "both enabling and constraining" and that individual actions constantly revise the social structures in which they have meaning, the difficulty of separating out a person's independent responses from socially inculcated routines looms in contemporary social theory. The emphasis of de Certeau, Butler, and others on microlevel or interstitial versions of transformative agency provide alternative formulations designed to avoid this impasse. At the end of White Noise, DeLillo deploys a wonderful scene that might serve as an objective correlative for the problem of meaningful action. Wilder, Babette's pre-school child, rides his tricycle across a freeway, crossing the traffic moving both directions, while two elderly women watch, horrified, and shout for him to stop. This is, arguably, the riskiest action of the book, taken by someone whose motives remain utterly enigmatic, and with unknown effects because the book ends soon thereafter. Wilder's action, I want to suggest, is a gambit: neither securely positioned as action nor as mere behavior; indeterminate of meaning and incalculable in its effects. If it were action, in Arendt's understanding, it would be expressive and historical. If it were behavior, it would manifest the unifying and more or less stultifying influence of society, which wants to inculcate regular conduct. Instead, like an action, Wilder's gambit is unpredictable: crossing the freeway, he moves across the torrent of norms rather than with or (simply reactively) against them. Wilder's action is witnessed by many, but doesn't take place in what Arendt would consider a public. Perhaps the very opacity of Wilder's subjective understanding of his action makes it possible to see it as a gambit, which is a beginning, even if it may ultimately be recuperated as surely as the government covers up the airborne toxic event or even if it may be relegated to a tidbit of human interest. Indeed, the very boundlessness of action that Arendt emphasizes arguably makes it impossible to classify any doing securely as action or behavior, especially as successive generations reinterpret the extent of the norms that govern behavior. And possibly, the boundlessness of action–be it for good or evil, repression or freedom, individual or collective purposes–may be the best capacity we have for answering the challenges of the boundless realities and boundless powers outside our ken that we organize by means of the sublime.

Just after the description of Wilder's amazing gambit, the novel closes with juxtaposed scenes of sublime sunsets and the beautiful supermarket, underlining their interrelation. The discussion of the sunsets focuses on the viewers' responses, more than the previous descriptions have:

There is a caution here: transcending previous categories makes for a kind of undecidability, not necessarily a good in itself. The sunset seems new, arguably new in the sense of Lyotard's postmodern sublime, although the prospect looms that it will be "absorbed" or discounted as anomalous (the tactics of normativeness). Its effects, too, are boundless. Pointedly parallel to the change wrought in sunsets is the more recent change at the supermarket, whose "shelves have been rearranged": "It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. . . . . There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge" (325, 326). The supermarket, very much as Murray suggested though without any certainty of rebirth, seems like a purgatory or limbo where people wait to die–to "check out," as we say. And the last thing seen on the slow-moving check-out line is the tabloid racks, displaying "The cults of the famous and the dead" (another mutation of our collective memory).

The supermarket, where everything has been packaged, is comforting but stultifying. The sunset produces more uneasiness, more indeterminacy: we know we will all die, ultimately, but we don't know how our lives will change or how we will occupy those changed or unchanged lives, much less whether we might be able to act in some way that changes our shared world. The fascination of White Noise is very much the fascination of our encounter with the sublime, which structures so much of our sensibility for what might count as meaningful in life and in action. Bringing the sublime into some articulation with the boundlessness of human action might open up an alternative either to being paralyzed by the sublime or to attempting to colonize it.

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