Filmstrips Photographs of the Sheffield ring road taken by the author in 2011
Filmstrips Photographs of the Sheffield ring road taken by the author in 2011
Downwards we hurried fast,
And entered with the road which we had missed
Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow travellers in this gloomy pass,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow step.
(Wordsworth 1805, p. 240)
Two hundred years after Wordsworth, we can continue to hurry fast at slow step, and to enter the road that we had missed, as we try to approach, circumnavigate, bypass or leave the city. I want to explore the extent of this continuity, broadening the ways in which the ring road might figure both as a site of actual experience and as one within thought. Although it is usually understood as the product of rationalised planning, the ring road can also be regarded as an instance and a site where rationality is exceeded. I approach it both as a site of sublime experience and as a figure for that experience, drawing on its ambivalent location between city and country, between artefact and nature. Its ability to be traversed in several directions simultaneously can cause theoretical as well as physical discomfort. In common with the sublime nature of Wordsworth’s time, it can elude our perceptual and imaginative grasp, while providing exhilarating transport. This sublime ‘failure’ can be observed anecdotally in real(?) experience on the road, but also in the movement of various attempts by disparate disciplines to pin it down with theory.
From its earliest record in fragments such as On the Sublime, a Greek treatise probably written in the first century AD,1 interest in the sublime has long been associated with its ability to transport us, rather than to persuade us rationally. Indeed, the modality of transport has proved to be a particularly enigmatic aspect of sublime experience. Peter de Bolla argues that, not only are the sources of movement many and various, but the transportation that these set in train involves discontinuous movement between states of mind and proves difficult to anticipate or contain: ‘The rhetorical force of “transport”’, he writes, ‘is not confined to the arts of oratory and persuasion; “transport” as a trope not only stands for the heightened sensation of the sublime, it also produces sublimity’.2
The consequences of this irrational and productive transportation have frequently been too frightening to accept, and discussion has been forcibly returned to ‘proper’ objects.3 The possible similarities between the transport available through the sublime and that experienced on the ring road can be approached through a consideration of their spatial and cultural dimensions. Both enjoy a certain slipperiness of spatial location and complexity of cultural claims; sublime transport in both cases can involve a tendency towards excessive production; and both have been subject to attempts by authority to cover over this excess. de Bolla suggests that much eighteenth-century aesthetics can be considered an attempt to bound or limit the power of this sublime trope. Theories of the sublime had to deal with ‘the problem of locating an authority or authenticating discourse . . . Such a discourse’, he states, ‘would need to control the transport resulting from the sublime experience, and to determine the limits of the transportation, from where and to where, with whom and by whom’.4
In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant asserts that this experience could be delimited – or unified, to use his own terms – when each person, through the exercise of will, puts their own disposition to one side to ‘take a standpoint outside of himself in thought, in order to judge the propriety of his behaviour in the eyes of the onlooker’.5 This movement outside oneself to provide a viewpoint for judgement is a particularly important mode of transport. The tacit assumption is that propriety needs to be measured against previously established rules; the correct viewpoint for judgement is attained by assuming the viewpoint of the ‘creator’. Henri Lefebvre is critical of the ‘lucidity’ predicated on these assumptions, a situation he explicitly links to the planners and urbanists who ‘create’ the ring road:
The fact of viewing from afar, of contemplating what has been torn apart, of arranging ‘viewpoints’ and ‘perspectives’, can (in the most favourable cases) change the effects of a strategy into aesthetic objects . . . All of this corresponds only too well to that urbanism of maquettes and overall plans which is the perfect complement to the planning of sewers and public works: the creator’s gaze lights at will and to his heart’s content on ‘volumes’; but this is a fake lucidity.6
Although the arguments used to push through the construction of ring roads are usually made on highly rationalised grounds and according to the logic of a systematising thought, I would suggest that they also provide an instance where the experience of our designed environment opens up to a different reading. Just as eighteenth-century writers on the sublime failed to agree on whether the experience was universal, culturally particular or individual, so contemporary interest in the ring road produces a spread of irreconcilable approaches. Generally, ring roads are without clear definition (unlike motorways, whose requirements are clear in legal terms) and they are awkward to classify. The exemplars would be the orbital motorways, beltways, périphériques or via cintura that can be found around some of the world’s great cities, though many smaller towns are similarly ringed. Although the ring road is not a motorway (designed for high capacity and high speed), it does not provide for frontage access, pedestrians or stopping. This awkwardness about the ring road’s definition is shared by a variety of interested parties, from those involved in their planning through to those minded to analyse how they are used after construction, and again revolves around the issue of judgement.
In a discussion of how the engineer establishes criteria for judgement, for example, Gavin Macpherson observes how difficult a task it proves to be: ‘One of the problems faced by the highway engineer is that his creation will normally be required to perform a number of different, sometimes conflicting, functions’.7 A related difficulty of definition is raised by the UK Department of Transport’s criteria for highway link geometry, according to which the ring road would be classified as ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’.
As I’ve tried to suggest, experience of and theories regarding the sublime failed to coincide as comfortably as their theorists might have liked: the right road sought by Burke et al. proved harder to journey along than they would care to admit. It is around this uneasy coincidence that the analogy between sublime objects and the ring road can be pursued. Physically and psychologically, the location of the ring road has frequently been taken as a limit: limit of the city, limit of nature. However, this boundary need be neither complete nor physically peripheral. Though the ring road might be considered a site mediating between city and nature, it can be various things to various people. It allows them (us) to approach, circumnavigate, queue, cruise, bypass, reclaim or leave the city. Just as it provides an easy figure for this boundary, it is hard to locate, in a full sense of the term.
Despite the various guides offered to aesthetic reflection, the sublime moment always signalled an occasion when reason and understanding were exceeded. Owing to this limitlessness – which might apply to the sheer magnitude of the sublime object, or the ambiguous location of the ring road, being neither whole nor fragment, neither in nor out of the city – it is not possible to identify an object per se that provokes the sublime experience. Nevertheless, in order for our understanding to grasp or determine the experience, it needs to bound or limit that experience in some way. It needs to be objectified, turned into or provided with a sublime object: reason demands it.
Limitlessness has been dealt with in various ways, by various theorists. Most feared it. Few asked much of it on its own terms, or sought to explore what might lie beyond. Some dealt with it by developing strategies to bound it: For Kant, there was no sublime object as such, yet, paradoxically, the sublime experience depended upon the provision of some objectivity to move it beyond the ‘mere’ fright provoked by limitlessness. His solution to this theoretical problem was to offer up a ‘super-added thought of its totality’8 – an objectivity on loan to subjective experience – which could allow judgement to step outside and thus complete the experience.
On the ring road, one might again observe that there is a requirement for a super-added thought of its totality to make sense of the journey; what is the ring road but a succession of nodes of decision making (turn off, don’t turn off) interspersed with periods of removed transportation, periods of distraction, where the surroundings rarely give anything to the journey by way of features (or indeed distraction) that can sufficiently bound experience to permit judgement?
To counter this experience of limitlessness, the ring road frequently offers information from beyond its present, information perhaps to provide orientation, that makes us think we have crossed a boundary, that we have arrived somewhere (Welcome to A . . ., You are now entering B . . ., Twinned with C . . .). These couple with mediations of the thought of totality, thanks to the endless signage that accompanies such a journey; how can we make a judgement based on the experience of simply being there, when what we need are the signs of an objective reality outside or beyond this formless space?
In addition to the limitlessness precipitated by the sheer scale and ambiguity of location, the engineering of the ring road’s link geometry undermines another aspect of everyday aesthetic experience, resulting in a need to respond counter-intuitively to demands that we get in the left-hand lane to turn right, head north to go south, and so on. Ring roads are almost by requirement the imposition of a different order of space on the landscape, famously insensitive to ‘place’.
The sublime operates in conjunction with fear and pain; the spaces of the sublime demand enigma, an advanced decontextualisation to instill the fear that underwrites any sublime experience. It is to the particularities of sublime fear that we must now move. Fear was, for many writers, a central ingredient of sublime experience. The particular nature of this fear was carefully delineated by those seeking to distinguish between the sublime and the beautiful. Sublime fear had to be pleasurable. The ring road offers multiple, simultaneous and possibly conflicting fears. There are fears associated with speed, disorientation, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, GPS navigation, of missing one’s turning, of not seeing it or seeing it too late. Also, perhaps, there is fear of driving, fear of being driven, fear of delay, fear of crashing, fear of others, road rage, fear of engineering. Some fears are associated with the use of the road, whereas others are produced by simply being there – I’m on the ring road and I don’t like it, it makes me scared. Whitlock’s 1971 analysis of fear on the road reports a quasi-sublime fascination in attitudes surrounding road deaths, arguing: ‘Doherty is possibly correct in suggesting that horror fascinates rather than acts as a deterrent to rising road-accident rates.’9
Whether a straightforward fear for one’s own life, on the ring road or in any other situation, would be sufficient as a sublime experience is a moot point. Burke, for example, steered the sublime experience through a middle ground between painless, ‘benevolent’ pleasure (which he linked to feelings of the beautiful) and the simply painful. The sublime pleasure available on this middle ground, he argued, involved feelings of self-preservation, but came with the proviso that these do not ‘press too nearly’.10 Kant, too, qualifies the involvement of fear in his account of the sublime, permitting it ‘only in . . . so far as it does not convey any charm or emotion arising from actual danger’.11 A couple of sections later, Kant is more specific regarding the perception of such danger, arguing that, ‘without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored man as terrifying’.12 Just as the feeling of the sublime was only available to the initiated, so the experience of the ring road is only available to those literate in the ways of road travel; the Highway Code(X) is the letter of this law. Learn the rules of the road and you’ll be OK; you can take your place in that microcosm of society, the community of drivers. Ordinary, physical orientation is no use at these speeds, and familiarity with place provides no guarantee of successful judgement, for such physical referents as personal or communal landmarks do not necessarily relate to the route and may give it an unfamiliar aspect, if they give it anything at all. Speed also mitigates against recognition or comprehension. A different modality of perception is required, for locals as well as strangers. If we are not initiates, we might just get scared. Yet, what happens if we don’t read the book, don’t subscribe to that superadded thought of totality? Are we just left with a scary experience? Such awkwardness might actually point to another aspect of sublime experience, available on the ring road and beyond, which reveals another way of using the architecture of our surroundings. It might forcibly reveal the fragmented way in which architecture is consumed; after all, fragments are all we ever get, despite the best intentions of most architects and planners, whose attempts to ‘naturalise’ architecture by unifying it imply a notionally omnipresent view.
This fragmented, excessive moment of travel allows us to return, over- or underdetermining the possibilities presented by the road that the planners conceived on uber-utilitarian grounds, to viewing space from afar, conceiving grand schemes for traffic circulation, zoning, high or low occupation density, the green-belt and out-of-town, brownfield and inner-city. Here, the ring road can stand as an exemplar of free movement, not axiality, not Haussmann, not from A to B, not concentricity or annularity, but as a site for and of an inadequate representation that the work of the mind cannot complete. On the road, traffic can exist between memory and fantasy, between use according to the rules (the Highway CodeX) and use not against, but merely without, the rules; this could be a sublime event that the city’s ring road offers. As Virilio observes, ‘to go nowhere . . . now seems natural for the voyeur–voyager in his car’.13
Thanks to its sublime possibilities, the ring road can offer two new experiences: it can be a notional site from which the difference between city and nature continues to be figured, and from which an experience of the sublime might be gained, at least to the extent that this would involve an emotional pleasure brought about by a juxtaposition of forces that can accept oxymoronic components and resist the desire for total comprehension. More importantly, it suggests a broader modality for architectural experience than architects have traditionally been prepared to acknowledge, one that occurs over time, in pieces, involving a mobile relationship between the observer and the observed. All of these experiences, of course, supplement our more straightforward uses of the road. From the depths of an engineering textbook, the following advice on curve geometry seems to offer an appropriate conclusion: ‘A good balance between the demands of horizontal curvature gradient is necessary to achieve economy and aesthetic satisfaction’.14
1 See Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime (William Smith, trans.) (1996), in Ashfield and de Bolla 1996. This is reprinted in an abridged version from Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime: Translated from the Greek, with notes and observations, and some account of the life, writings, and character of the author, by William Smith (the second edition, corrected and improved), London, 1743. It is agreed that On the Sublime was written in the first century AD, although Longinus is now believed to have been a Neoplatonic philosopher and rhetorician active during the third century AD. Although the real author is now frequently referred to as Pseudo-Longinus, the majority of texts on the sublime from the eighteenth century onwards attributed On the Sublime to Longinus, a confusion I perpetuate here.
2 de Bolla 1989, p. 37; italics in original.
3 For example, Kant floats the possibility of an experience where the imagination fails to account for an idea and falls back from this attempt, but nevertheless, ‘in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight’, which he connects with ‘a representation . . . that lets us see its own inadequacy, and consequently its subjective want of finality for our judgement’, but he declines to discuss this situation (‘At present, I am not disposed to deal with the ground of this delight’); Kant 1952 (original 1764), section 26, p. 100.
4 Ibid., p. 37.
5 Kant 1960 (original 1764), p. 75.
6 Lefebvre 1991 (original 1974), p. 318.
7 Macpherson 1993, p. 145.
8 Kant, op. cit., section 23.
9 Whitlock 1971, p. 7. He is citing Terence T. Doherty (1965) Facts versus emotion in traffic safety, Medicine, Science and the Law, p. 5.
10 Burke 1958 (original 1757), Part 1, section XVIII.
The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately effect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.
(Ibid.)
There is similar stuff on pain and terror in Part 4: see, in particular, section VII, ‘exercise necessary for the finer organs’, where Burke states that, ‘delightful horror . . . which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment’.
11 Kant, op. cit., section 23.
12 Ibid., section 29.
13 Virilio 1991, p. 67.
14 Baston 1968, p. 71. A little later, the authors seem to steer away from the sublime to more beautiful aspirations, suggesting that, ‘curvature and gradient add considerably to the aesthetic value of a road, and when not used to excessively large values make a positive contribution to safety’ (p. 71).