Journal of American Studies of Turkey
Vernon Hyde Minor
Nearly everyone in the world knows
and has some deeply held, personal response to what happened in New York City
and Washington, D. C., on September 11, 2001. The extraordinary sight of wide-bodied
Boeing airplanes speeding like bullets down Manhattan Island at near the speed
of sound, a mere 500-800 feet above the busy streets, then smashing into the
city’s tallest buildings, eventually reducing them to rubble—these sublime acts
of terror stunned the world. In a sense, we witnessed two types of the sublime
as defined by Kant, the terrifying and the splendid. The terrifying arises from
the great power and speed of these projectiles carrying helpless, unknowing
passengers, and the dreadful toll in lost lives; the splendid results from the
magnificence of the airplanes and the remarkable, gargantuan architecture of
the twin towers. Most of us knew the experience not from being there or from
descriptions, but from representation—through the lenses of cameras that
captured so much of what happened that day. Those who watched live television
witnessed in fearfulness and wonder as the spectacle unfolded. How even to
speak of this catastrophe, to write about it? With great care, even reticence,
perhaps, as the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen soon discovered. His
comments on the terrorist attacks to reporters for the German press agency DPA
were widely reported. The New York Times (September
19, 2001) carried the translation: “What happened there is—they all have to
rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever. . . That
characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that
people practice madly for 10 years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and
then died. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. . . I could not do that. Against that, we
composers are nothing.” Stockhausen
realized immediately the consequence of what he had said and begged his
interviewers not to report it. But of course they did. As a result, the
composer saw two concerts of his music cancelled “out of feeling for the
political culture of the city and the federal republic,” according to Christina
Weiss, Hamburg commissioner of culture. Stockhausen left Hamburg “in distress.” What he voiced was the unspeakable before
the indescribable; the sublime element was, in a sense, the unnamable, as in
St. Augustine’s avowal that god is celestial, ineffable, and unnamable. But
this was not god in his sublime terribilità; here was the devil as
destroyer.
It is interesting and instructive to ponder briefly the difference between Stockhausen’s response and that of Osama bin Laden, whose description of the event was broadcast in December of 2001. Bin Laden was almost in a reverie as he explained in serene terms the beauty of the event as it unfolded (he, too, witnessed it on television), how perfectly the towers collapsed. His detachment was largely owing to the fact that he conceived of the occurrence as having a clear, comprehensible end—terror to the infidel. There can be no sublime in an event so intelligible and, for him, acceptable. Madness, in other words, senses no awe, refuses to be incredulous.
I suspect that Stockhausen never for a minute thought in terms
of the “final cause,” the grounds for the attack, or its presumed goals. He may
never have thought even of such motivated expressions as “attack”. For him it
was a happening brought about by artists of inscrutable imagination and power.
He certainly touched a public nerve by falling into an old and classic
aesthetic trap—the failure to distinguish between art and life. This “error”—or
more likely (given the circumstances) miscalculation—was all the more egregious
in the minds of many because it seemed to reveal that intellectuals and artists
are locked away in an ivory tower, effete, unconnected to that which is “real,”
incapable of recognizing human suffering. Stockhausen’s response could in fact
be understood as the contrary of insensitivity and isolation, as we shall see.
Nonetheless, many perceived that what the German composer did was unspeakable
(in the sense of disgusting and appalling) because he dared to articulate the
ineffable and the horrific in the name of art. It probably makes little
difference whether he was right or wrong: Speaking in public about the apparent
relationship between art and actual tragedy led him into a thicket of
controversy.
I would like to comment on how Stockhausen’s provocative (to say the least) reference to the “greatest work of art for the whole cosmos” says something profound about how we understand experience and how it is inevitably filtered through art. I’ll review three related traditions in the philosophies of art: the sublime, aesthetic distance, and the distinction between art and reality.
Let me begin with the last tradition
first. In his brilliant reviews of the Salons
(so named for the salon carré in
the Louvre where the art exhibitions were held), the French critic Denis de
Diderot discoursed at some length on the sensitive subject of “real” vs.
artistic experiences.[1]
Deep into an embedded narrative on paintings by Claude-Joseph Vernet, Diderot
imagined a conversation with a certain (fictional) Abbé on just this topic. In
the middle of a long journey through pastoral landscapes (actually paintings by
Vernet hung at the exhibition of 1767), Diderot used his fictive setting to
enter into a discussion on aesthetic and emotional response to life and art.
I’ll quote at length from Diderot’s text, as it bears directly and forcefully
on the present discussion. Here Diderot speaks to the Abbé:
The
spectacle of Paris in flames would horrify you; after a certain lapse of time
you’d enjoy strolling through the ashes. You’d experience violent anguish on
seeing a friend perish; after a certain lapse of time your melancholy would
conduct you to his tomb and you’d sit down there. There are simple sensations
and compound sensations, and that’s why only objects seen or heard are
beautiful. Take all accessory ideas and ethical associations away from a sound,
and you’ll remove its beauty. Fix an image on the surface of the eye, such that
its impression does not gain access to the mind or heart, and nothing beautiful
will be left in it. There’s another distinction to be made, that between an
object in nature and the same object in art or imitation. This terrible
conflagration, in which men, women, children, fathers, mothers, brothers,
sisters, friends, strangers, and fellow citizens all perished, overwhelms you;
you flee, you avert your gaze, you close your ears to the screams; the
desperate witness of a misfortune inflicted upon so many loved ones, perhaps
you’d risk your life, you’d attempt to save them, or seek to inflict upon
yourself the same fiery end. But should you be shown incidents drawn from this
calamity depicted on canvas, your eyes would dwell upon them joyfully; you’d
say with Aeneas: ‘En Priamus Sunt hic etiam praemia ludi.’ [‘Behold Priam!
Here, too, virtue has its due rewards’—Virgil, Aeneid, I, v. 461]—And I’d shed tears? [this is the Abbé speaking]—I
don’t doubt it. –But if I’m experiencing pleasure, what do I have to cry about?
And if I’m crying, how can I experience pleasure? –Is it possible, Abbé, that
you’re not familiar with these kinds of tears?[2]
This then becomes the question of
our essay: what kind of tears do we shed when sensing the artfulness of an
actual event, undergoing “compound experiences” (that is, connecting the
sensations to our own complex feelings)? Diderot quoted from La Rochefoucauld:
“’In the greatest misfortunes of those dearest to us, there is always something
that does not displease us.’”[3]
Diderot didn’t say that there is no pain in real tragedy, nor did he insist
that the theater of the stage and “the theater of the world” (his phrase) are
one and the same. But they are close, and they are apt to be confused with one
other, for there is pleasure in actual misfortune, a pleasure dangerously close
to the pleasure that arises from the aesthetic experience.
Diderot danced close to the very
problem that undid Stockhausen, but he was a more agile critic, one not given
to denying the importance of aesthetic distance as articulated by Aristotle,
who, in his Rhetoric (1382a, 1385b),
balanced pity and fear against one another, so that the former draws us in
while the latter repels us. The plot must be serious enough not only to prompt
these emotions but to keep them in balance. Aristotle warned that too much
emphasis upon imagery or spectacle in a tragedy could lead to the horrific. If
the psychological relation of the audience to the tragic narrative is overly
affective, then there is likely to be no purgation, no cathartic experience of
an almost medicinal efficacy. As Aristotle suggested, were we to overbalance
just a little in the direction of the spectacle, there would be a collapse in
aesthetic distance. What that may lead to is the experience of the sublime.
The sublime as a Latin term defines
the lofty and the grand and was, even before Cassius Longinus (3rd
c. AD; the supposed author of On the
Sublime), associated with styles of rhetoric. Yet, the ways in which
Longinus used the term evoke the ideas of expressionism and communication ahead
of rhetorical value. Perhaps this affective use of the term appealed to Nicolas
Boileau, the “Lawgiver of Parnassus,” who translated Longinus in the later
years of the seventeenth century as part of his pursuit of a new understanding
of the French language freed from the fetters of Italian and Latinate rhetoric.
The resulting effect of abandoning traditional rhetorical tropes and figures, Boileau
believed, would be a renewed and yet courtly French language based purportedly
on “natural” sentiment and feeling.
The concept of the sublime took off
in the eighteenth century as a new category for the experiencing of both nature
and art. Picking up on Boileau’s influential translation, Joseph Addison
published his Pleasures of the
Imagination in the Spectator in
1712 in which he extolled the joy one experiences when witnessing something
astonishing, something that sets us free from normal limits. His was a sublime
of self-transcendence—something that in fact exceeds language and common
rhetoric.
The rest is, in a very real sense,
history. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, which he read to friends as a
19-year-old undergraduate at Trinity College, became the benchmark for
contemporaneous and later discourses on the sublime, and in many ways the basis
for Stockhausen’s notorious comments. Like Aristotle long before him, Burke
understood the connection between pity or pathos and fear and how the two
together ameliorate, or indeed sidestep, pain. In his discussion of the
sublime, Burke began with the experiences of pain and fear. Because our basic
drive for self-preservation is so powerful—much stronger even than the desire
for pleasure—fear springs unbidden to our consciousness. Any event or
circumstance that can give rise to fear, danger, or pain constitutes the
sublime. The source of danger is the fear of death, a fear more powerful even
than the terror of pain. Danger and pain when they press too nearly ”are simply
terrible; they can give no delight, but at certain distances, and with certain
modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day
experience.”[4] In other
words, if we don’t find ourselves in imminent danger, we’re likely to be moved,
in an empathetic manner, to delight. The word delight may seem a bit strange to
us here, for how could we delight in someone else’s suffering? Burke admitted
that English, in his opinion better fitted for business than philosophizing,
does not always have exact words for the kind of emotion one feels when in
sympathy with others. He chose a term that struck him as possessing a lower
power than pleasure but one that nonetheless conveys a certain gratification. For
Burke, Aristotle’s pity wasn’t entirely a satisfactory term. But there has to
be some connection (as well as some separation) between I and thou: Were we to
perceive the pain of others as our own, we couldn’t possibly sympathize and
empathize anymore. If another’s pain hurt us like a toothache or a slap in the
face, we’d only turn away. There has to be something besides distance that
prompts us to help those in distress. This something becomes the lynchpin, the
unifying element that allows us to perceive the sublime.
The step from human emotions to the
realm of the aesthetic is quickly taken. The arts of poetry and painting (and
other “affecting” arts) transfer sympathy or the passions from one person to
another. Art can actually give a certain delight to “wretchedness, misery, and
death itself;” that which normally appalls us can in tragedy, for instance,
bring satisfaction.[5] We take part
of our pleasure from the act of imitation, according to Burke. Just the same,
he insisted on a point that Stockhausen may have agreed with as well, and that
is that the closer a representation or imitation effaces itself when giving us
a calamitous event, the better it is. The more the artist breaks down the
distinction between the real and the fictive the better we like it. No matter
how wonderful the representation, no matter how moving the spectacle, we’d
still rather see the real thing. Burke wrote specifically about the burning of
London. Who wouldn’t rather watch it than see a play about it or look at it in
a painting? Diderot, as we have seen, would’ve opted for a representation of a
burning city, although he was not loath to admit the aesthetic power of an
actual horrific event.
In the realm of the sublime, life
and art collapse into one another; fear and danger—so long as our impulse to
self-preservation isn’t threatened—feed the soul. The sublime causes
astonishment, a state in which everything in one’s horror-filled mind remains
in suspension. The sublime is not formed by reason, although it may anticipate
or produce reason. Stockhausen was in the grip of the sublime when he described
the “greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”; then, too late, his reason
returned.
My point is that Stockhausen had in
mind the tradition of the sublime; he was far enough away from the actual
events of 9/11 to feel relatively safe. He is a modernist composer, one given
to playing with that thin line separating art and life, and a post-modernist as
well who not only challenges art/life distinctions but believes in performance
art, where such differences are all but obliterated. It can come as no surprise
to us that he saw something of such unparalleled horror in terms of the
absolute work of art.
Burke wrote that “. . . there is no
spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity;
so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes or whether they are turned
back to it in history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed
delight, but blended with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in such
things hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts
us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer; and all this antecedent
to any reasoning by an instinct that works us to its own purposes, without our
concurrence.”[6] Stockhausen’s
sense of the sublime may have originated in that part of the human emotion that
needs to sympathize with others, but it was directed in awe as well as envy
toward an event with aesthetic implications infinitely beyond his own capacity
(or desire, certainly) to emulate.
We can assume that Stockhausen has
imbibed the traditions of the sublime, the beautiful, the modern, and the
post-modern in his long years as a composer and member in good standing of the
avant-garde. Events of such magnitude as those of 9/11 prompted in him an
artist’s response, one grounded in aesthetics and modes of expression. It also
gave rise to fear and astonishment, so that the first thing he thought of was
art in terms of the absolute—the greatest (the most fully realized) work of art
for the cosmos.
One of the less recognized aspects of the aesthetics of the sublime, as we have seen, is the acknowledgement that we are drawn to disasters not because of some perverse pleasure in others’ pain, but because we cannot be of a caring disposition unless we find something agreeable in astonishment, something satisfying about the horrible. Or to put it differently, we are quite naturally aesthetized—rather than anesthetized—by horrific events of great historic significance. Then there is that paradoxical and bewildering experience of the sublime that Kant wrote about. The vast, powerful, terrifying forces unleashed by ill-used human technology overwhelms our cognitive faculties, revealing to us in gut-wrenching terms our inability to grasp, comprehend, or—and this is particularly challenging for an artist—to accomplish anything of such magnitude.
[1] Diderot on Art, 2 vols, ed. and trans. John Goodman, intro. Thomas Crow New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
[2] Diderot, II, 100.
[3] Diderot, II, 101.
[4]
Edmund Burke. A Philosophical enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and
Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings Ed. David Womersley. London: Penguin
Books, 1998: 86.
[5] Burke 91. This pleasure in tragedy was first
treated in Aristotle’s poetics, then again in Addison’s Spectator no.
418 (30 June 1712) and Hume’s “Of Tragedy,” (Essays, pp. 216-225). Also
see A. D. Nuttall. Why Does Tragedy
Give Pleasure? Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1996.
[6] Burke 93.