Martin Ryle & Kate Soper: To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern Times.

Martin Ryle & Kate Soper To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern Times Verso, London, 2002, 262 pp. ISBN 1-85984-686-6 (hbk) 45 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1-85984-461-8 (pbk) 18 [pounds sterling]

In the current intellectual climate, To Relish the Sublime? can only be read as a bold, and to my mind welcome, assertion of moral and intellectual humanism. The premise of the book, as the title intimates, is a return to Matthew Arnold's conception of culture as the source of 'sublime' experiences from which all people, potentially, can benefit. In taking this initial step, Ryle and Soper's aim is to reaffirm the idea that some cultural works are more rewarding, and therefore better, than others. The principal reward of an engagement with learned culture is the development of what the authors call 'cultural self-realisation'. By this they mean the attainment of a mode of understanding that is both transcendent and self-transcendent--which resists comfortable convictions and less exacting forms of gratification in favour of a grasping of social contradictions, and an awareness of oneself as an incompletely integrated but self-making being.

Focusing their study on literary fiction, Ryle and Soper argue that works which foster self-realisation are those that inhibit the reader's immediate identification with characters, and instead invite 'critical participation in the act or arts of representation itself'. 'The best cultural works are "sublime"', they argue, because they give the reader 'access to a more comprehensive or writerly perspective'. The liberating force of cultural texts thus depends not simply on giving voice to the experience of marginalised or oppressed individuals and groups, nor on confirming the pre-given identity of the silenced outsider. Their value lies, instead, in the way these works can open up perspectives from which readers who identify with them might challenge and transform their victimised position--a process which implies, contrary to the assumptions of cultural particularism, that excluded subjects transcend their experience and are never fully constituted by their social identity. It is, indeed, part of the political power of sublime cultural texts, the authors point out, that they can conjure a world--the sweet, limitless love of Romeo and Juliet, for example--which in our alienated society has never been truly experienced, but in the imaginative light of which our current world stands condemned.

Ryle and Soper recognise that the ideal of the development and enrichment of the self through rational contemplation and reflexive awareness is, with its Cartesian understanding of the self as interiority, a product of European modernity, and one which has only been conceived of as a universal goal from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Thinking of the self as something formed by the individual's own efforts has also brought with it the peculiarly modern notion of the ethical autonomy and accountability of the individual. The self implicit in the notion of cultural self-realisation is unstable and restless, but not fragmented or diffuse in the postmodern sense. The modern self is permanently in search of its authentic essence and, by virtue of this interminable search, is always transcendent to that essence.

This endorsement of the humanist concept of the autonomous self obliges Ryle and Soper to tackle the post-structuralist critique of the subject. They do this primarily by demonstrating the inconsistencies in the argument that claims to universal truth are a means of denying differences and of disciplining and controlling subjects. Foucault, for instance, 'could develop his critique of "truth" only at the cost of disallowing any special claims for the truth of this critique'. If truth is 'tyrannical', they point out, then so is the claim to have identified this tyranny, and so is the belief--that quintessential Enlightenment belief in the universal value of freedom and justice--that tyranny should be denounced. 'In the absence of any conception of a feeling, suffering, self-asserting subject', they continue, 'why should we even worry about discursive "tyranny" and its "authoritarian ruses"?' Unless structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers recognise the existence of a self-liberating agent--someone capable of utilising, in a rational and responsible way, the exposure of texts as ideology, meconnaissance, inauthentic or stereotypical representations--then the critique of the dominant discourse that these exposures yield is devoid of any value.

The discourse of cultural popularism, which eschews the promotion of learned culture in preference for the study of margin-alised or quotidian cultural forms, exhibits similar sophisms. Teachers of this perspective require students to critically examine popular culture using semiotic theory and techniques of analysis, which comprise the content of cultural education precisely because they are not normally acquired through the everyday consumption of soap operas, fashion magazines and advertising images. It is the suggestion of Ryle and Soper that the superiority of canonical cultural works, by contrast, derives from the way they require from their readers, as a condition of their enjoyment and comprehension, the very same critical sensitivity to the construction and representation of subjectivity that the discipline of cultural studies aims to cultivate pedagogically.

The authors' appeal to the humanist idea of the autonomous subject is not reactionary or dogmatic. They agree that European modernity has conceptualised the self in a partial and over-simplified way, and they acknowledge the fallacy of thinking of the self as something completely external to the power it opposes. But they reject the view, the most influential feminist proponent of which is Judith Butler, that subjects are wholly constituted in discourse, and that power is entirely a matter of linguistically constituted subject positions. Feminists from Wollstonecraft onwards have condemned the exclusion of women as candidates for the autonomy associated with human flourishing, challenging the bigotry that has represented women as incapable of rational thought, aesthetic judgement and political decision-making. More recent feminists, Ryle and Soper point out, have attacked not the invention of fictional gender differences but rather a conception of autonomy that is too narrow in definition.

The effect of this definition has been to exclude or devalue important aspects of women's experience, or, as has been suggested in more progressive arguments, to exclude a dimension of selfhood--as embodied, situated, embedded--that is in fact intrinsic to the flourishing of both sexes. These feminist perspectives thus oppose theorisations of the subject that neglect the physical, social and intersubjective mediation of reason and consciousness, but they do not dispense with the ideal of self-reflexivity and transcendence. Instead, they call for a fuller and more nuanced picture of the self as a situated and ambiguous being.

Ryle and Soper document how the rise, in eighteenth-century Germany, of the notion of cultural betterment, or Bildung, reflected a turn towards the classical ideas of ancient Greece and Rome. For Aristotle, and more especially for Plato, the good life was a rational, contemplative experience, detached from everyday concerns and from interference by public life and politics. In eighteenth-century Europe, the Romantic movement emerged as a rival to the one-dimensional discourse of rational self-control and utilitarian decision-making that is conventionally seen as definitive of the Enlightenment period. The idea of the aesthetic, and with it the category of 'beauty', then served to mediate between the conflicting demands of sensuality and reason. In Kant, the authors argue, this is apparent in the way aesthetic judgement is thought to reside in universal--and therefore intersubjective and socially unifying--cognitive structures. In Schiller, this same project is overtly politicised, with the function of art being to offer an imaginary fulfilment of the self in the absence of which revolutionary action is inconceivable.

Following Schiller, Marx also defined human flourishing in terms of the development of sensibility rather than in terms of the accumulation of material things. But his argument is problematic, the authors point out, for its insistence that the historical precondition for this flourishing is the absolute dispossession of the proletariat and its reduction to 'naked subjectivity', and for its assumption that, in a future society of abundance, all projects of self-realisation will be consensual in conception and non-conflictual in consequence. Subsequent Marxists, they observe, differed according to whether they saw aesthetics as a means of giving expression to latent and repressed sensibilities (Lukacs, Benjamin, Brecht), or whether (as with Adorno and Marcuse) they believed that the redemptive power of art could only be fulfilled by the separation of aesthetics from the functional logic of the administered world and its resistance to all but the most educated of publics.

It is, in fact, the tension between instrumental rationality and intrinsic value commitments--manifestations of reason that are interdependent as well as contradictory--that is central to the history of the idea of cultural self-realisation; and it is by capturing and prompting reflection on this tension, Ryle and Soper suggest, that works of learned culture reveal their excellence. Although the book contains a chapter on modernism, with a short discussion of Joyce's Ulysses, the authors refuse to equate the least accessible forms of culture with the most progressive or sublime. They acknowledge the huge cultural influence modernism has had in drawing attention to social construction through language; and they note that, although modernism challenged the translucent, unified self of Romanticism, it still aspired to a more accurate depiction of the self--of its restless self-consciousness and existential experience of contingency--rather than abandoning the idea of the transcendent self altogether. But they also stress the way the obscurity and recalcitrance of modernist texts may have impeded cultural democracy by making the possession of cultural capital a prerequisite for decoding and finding self-realisation through such works.

The central section of To Relish the Sublime? is a discussion of a number of realist novels, mostly written between 1890 and 1910. The novels were chosen primarily for their narrative content, since the protagonists of the novels--by George Gissing, Jack London, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster and Thomas Hardy--all seek self-realisation through culture, yet nearly always suffer the contradictions of this ideal in the form of social isolation, material vulnerability (or its inverse-economic success at the cost of cultural disillusionment), and even death. Prefiguring these novels are works by Mary Hays and Jane Austen from a century earlier, both of which explore the contradictory fate of women enlightened and emboldened by their encounters with Romantic literature and philosophy, but who find themselves as much imprisoned by the cultivation of their emotional sensibilities as liberated by them.

Reflecting on these contradictions as they exist today, Ryle and Soper's depiction of modern society deliberately dissents from morbid and elitist accounts of culture rendered one-dimensional by the ubiquitous utilitarian logic of capitalism. They concede that popular culture is increasingly crude and narcissistic in its promotion of competitive individualism and material acquisitiveness, but note that cultural representations of society, however uncritical of its commercial character, are still a form of commentary on that society and therefore 'testify to its still less than totally administered status'. TV soaps may exhibit an 'excess of moral didacticism', they continue, but their abundant appeals to sentimental values and allegiances demonstrate the continuing importance to viewers of the non-instrumental principles of altruism, conviviality and tolerance. Thanks to the vocational understanding of the purpose of higher education that is now dominant, the commitment of universities to the ethical ideals of furthering critical thought and autonomy is increasingly reduced to cosmetic mission statements. But the fact 'that these aspirations have still continually to be sounded speaks to the incomplete triumphs of one-dimensionality' and 'indicates the persistence of a need for its cultural antithesis'.

It is this refusal to deny culture the role of immanent critique that constitutes the authors' strongest criticism of cultural particularism. Ryle and Soper refer sympathetically to Walter Benjamin's reminder that, because 'cultural treasures' owe their existence 'to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries', 'there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'. But they also point out that even those who claim to speak for oppressed and marginalised groups must recognise that, historically at least, these groups have had little chance to leave their own cultural memorials, and that those who have created or drawn attention to representations of these people's sufferings have been able to do so precisely because the burden of 'anonymous toil' has fallen lightly on them. Cultural works, the authors conclude, are always 'marked' by the unfree society from which they originate, but this doesn't make them 'damned by their genesis'.

As this point bears out, the conditions for cultural democracy imply a society in which free time, instead of the production and consumption of material commodities, is the primary measure of prosperity, and it is this vision of social progress that Ryle and Soper believe should inspire us. Though they concede that learned culture is not the only source of fulfilment and self-realisation, it has the advantage of being an ecologically benign route to human flourishing that could, in principle, be accessible to all without diminishing its value to each. Learned culture's 'other-worldliness' may promote indifference to the fate of society rather than cultivating republican virtue, the authors freely admit, but it retains its critical value by helping 'to awaken forms of sensibility which are immanently in contradiction with instrumental economic "ends"'.

To Relish the Sublime? has a structural and stylistic unevenness that is characteristic of a coauthored text, as well as an open, explorative, and sometimes inconclusive feel that unsympathetic readers may find unconvincing. Its synthesis of literary criticism and political philosophy is fruitful, though an engagement with other relevant theoretic literature might have strengthened it in places. There is, for example, no determined effort to address Bourdieu's influential argument that the 'Kantian aesthetic' which privileges form over content and style over function--is simply a bourgeois construction whose purpose is to symbolise the distance of the leisure-rich dominant class from a lower-class world chained to practical necessities.

The authors' proposals for a society of disposable time could also have drawn beneficially on theoretical attempts to define the limits to economic rationality particularly those which have identified cultural practices that are corrupted or displaced when given over to market forces. Some of these contributions are especially relevant in the way they defend the authority of the producer of cultural goods, and in their critique of the neoliberal idea that consumers enter the marketplace pre-equipped to make autonomous and self-gratifying judgements on the value of cultural works.

This is, nonetheless, a stimulating and erudite text that, while acutely sensitive to the distortions and imperfections of our cultural imagination, is a refreshing reminder of the value of critical humanism.