Judy Lochhead

The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics

While various other scholarly domains have debated the conceptual value of these aesthetic concepts, such a debate is missing in music studies. This lack is “danger-ous” to the extent it masks a regressive longing for an absolute—an absolute that, under the flag of the unpresentable, harbors a hidden and nos-talgic return to repressive binaries of gender.My task here is to historicize briefly the con-cepts of the sublime and the ineffable and to recount the critical debates concerning these aesthetic categories. Then I’ll present a few in-stances of how these categories have surfaced in

Experience, Borders: "How, therefore, must we live?": A Response to James Robert Currie

tion of a particular category within the economy of identity politics, the stereotyping now overt, while the oppression remains covert. For me, the postmodern embrace of the sublime and the ineffable entails an unquestioning acceptance of the individual subject’s aesthetic experience, since both exceed the possibility of linguistic and conceptual understanding. The lack of a critical perspective on subjective aesthetic experience thus perpetuates a host of sedimented meanings that have figured in concepts of the sublime and ineffable. The uncritical turn to subjectivity necessarily entailed by the embrace of the sublime and ineffable as aesthetic categories allows the reinscription or veiling of attitudes toward the Other that such a turn was meant to counter. As Joan Scott has observed, subjective experience is that “which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced” rather than that which provides “authoritative evidence” for knowledge (1991, 779–80). While taking markedly different paths, James and I arrive eventually at the issue of subjectivity as it has been figured in musicological thought at the turn of the millennium. I am in total sympathy with his points and share with him a sense of unease about the outcomes of some particular trajectories of musicological thought. I don’t share with him what appears as a weary pessimism, but that is probably more a result of disposition than anything else. Our papers are “about” identity and sublimity and how the construction and use of these concepts within recent musicological thought have reinscribed that which they sought to overcome. For James, the individual subject, once covertly stereotyped and oppressed as a representative of some particular category of the Other (queer, woman, minority, etc.), is once again stereotyped and oppressed through the commodificaExperience, Borders “How, therefore, must we live?” A Response to James Robert Currie