A LIFE WORTH LIVING
Every society makes use of sublimity. The sublime serves as the engine for social organization and for individual activity within that organization. Without some indication of the sublime, a society would become idle and cease even to reproduce itself. The sublime gives the subject the capacity for enjoyment by convincing it that its life is not simply a series of empty physical processes. The subject’s capacity for satisfaction emerges along with the idea of the sublime and can’t endure without this idea. The end of the sublime would mark the end of subjectivity itself in addition to the social order in which the subject exists. As subjects of the signifier, we need a reason to go on, and sublimity provides that reason for us.
The act of sublimation occurs when the subject creates an object that is out of reach, but it is precisely the status of being out of reach that serves to animate the subject. If we did not have an object that we could not obtain, we would cease to be active subjects because we would find ourselves with no incentive to act. Everything would be attainable, and nothing would be worth attaining. Sublimation provides a way for the subject to fail, and the subject satisfies itself by repeating a necessary failure. It produces satisfaction for the subject, but this satisfaction is never that of obtaining the object.1
Traditional society based on rigid social hierarchies and capitalist society are radically distinct. But both share the need for the sublime. If capitalism simply eliminated the sublimity of traditional society, it would not be able to provide any enjoyment for its subjects, and they would never invest themselves in its perpetuation. Because there are people devoted to capitalist society, we know that it has not eliminated sublimity altogether. And yet, the situation with regard to the sublime is not what it once was. The site of sublimity has undergone a transformation, and in the process, our understanding of the sublime has shifted as well.
In traditional societies, gods, leaders, or priests bore sublimity. People followed their commands because these commands emanated from a site that transcended the brute material world and gave significance to that world. Though some people continue to treat political or religious leaders as sublime figures today, this status has for the most part been lost in the epoch of capitalist modernity. A popular music star or famous athlete is more likely to appear sublime than a president or a priest, but this type of sublimity is contingent and confined to a limited number of fans. Capitalism allows for the beheading of kings, the mockery of presidents, the critique of popes, and the denunciation of preachers. All of traditional society’s bastions of sublimity find themselves exposed to desecration under capitalism. Capitalist society appears to function without the necessary ingredient for social reproduction. But sublimity doesn’t disappear under capitalism, even though it seems like it does.
The transformation in the sublime that capitalism effectuates creates a more palatable version of sublimity for the subject. Just as capitalism gives us love in the less traumatic form of romance, it gives us the sublime without the awe-inspiring and terrorizing figure that we must obey. Capitalism sustains sublimity, but it subtracts the traumatic figure in which subjects experience this sublimity. Even though capitalist sublimity lacks the power to produce the extreme versions of satisfaction produced by the traditional sublime, it gives it to us in a more tolerable package. This is the bargain the capitalist subject accepts: a less terrifying sublime in exchange for a lessened satisfaction that derives from the sublime.
Capitalism’s transformation of the sublime is not self-evident, even though everyone can see that we no longer live in a world of kings or priests. But a seeming contradiction in Marx’s thought reveals the complex operation that capitalism performs in regard to the sublime. To grasp the nature of the capitalist sublime—that is, to see why people invest themselves to profoundly in the self-destructiveness of the capitalist system—one must confront this point at which Marx speaks against himself. The tradition of this type of reading of Marx begins with Louis Althusser, but we must take it in a new direction.
MARX CONTRA MARX
In an effort to reconcile contradictory directions within Marx’s thought and render Marx’s critique of capitalism more cogent, Althusser conceives of an epistemological break during Marx’s career. There is no other way, as Althusser sees it, to rid Marx of the humanism that besets his early work and cripples its political efficacy. In For Marx, he articulates this idea of a radical break, and he marks 1845 as the year when humanistic concepts disappear from Marx’s thought.2 The problem of revolution at this point undergoes a radical change. After 1845, according to Althusser, Marx develops a science that enables him to analyze the functioning of capitalism without the concept of alienation that would transform revolution into a reclaiming of a lost humanity. But the gap between the humanism of the young Marx and the sophisticated economic analysis that appears in Capital is not the point at which Marx appears most at odds with himself. This point of seemingly irreconcilable self-contradiction occurs after 1845, when Marx talks about the transformation wrought by the commodity and its logic.
The contradiction occurs in two of the most famous passages from Marx’s work: his description of the effects of the commodity in The Communist Manifesto and the “Commodity Fetishism” section from the first volume of Capital. The difficulty here is that this doesn’t reflect a case of Marx changing his mind or a case of his position evolving. That is, we cannot make the claim that an epistemological break transpires between Marx’s analysis of the commodity in The Communist Manifesto and in Capital, even though almost twenty years elapse between the two works. The fact that the first work is a polemic and the second a detailed theoretical exploration is also insufficient for explaining the vast transformation that the figure of the commodity undergoes. Between these two passages, Marx remains in the same conceptual universe, but his emphasis in that universe shifts. In the earlier work, he points out the desublimating effect of capital, and in the later, he draws attention to the sublimity of the commodity, its tendency to give social relations a theological hue.
There is, nonetheless, a way of reconciling the radically different direction that Marx takes in the two passages, and this consists in reading them in a causal relationship. In other words, capitalism destroys the traditional form of sublimation in order to prepare the ground for the new form it would usher in. Initially, the desublimating effect of capital removes any transcendent place from the social terrain and thus enacts an unprecedented social upheaval. As Marx and Engels describe this process in The Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”3 Capitalism portends the end of the sacred or sublime location that could continue to reside outside of the system of exchange. Everything becomes secular and quotidian because everything can be exchanged for the right price.4 This is the universe we continue to inhabit today, a universe in which value is reducible to exchange value and in which nothing transcends the gravitational pull of exchange—not honor, not loyalty, not even love.
Sublimity depends on the transcendence of the everyday. In this sense, the body of the king or the vastness of space has a sublime status due to the impossibility of encountering them in one’s daily life. But the onset of capitalism transforms these sublime impossibilities into commercial possibilities. With enough money, anyone could dine with a nation’s leader or hire a rocket to fly into space. Capitalism introduces a chain of equivalences that destroys all sublime transcendence. With capitalism, the stars fall down to Earth
But the elimination of the space for the sublime and the process of universal commodification have a magical effect. This process transforms ordinary objects into commodities, which are mystical entities endowed with sublime properties. In what is probably his most important philosophical and political discussion, Marx analyzes this transformation in the “Fetishism of Commodities” section of the first volume of Capital. Here he says, “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”5 Though the exchangeability of the commodity eliminates the transcendent sublime, the effectiveness of the commodity depends on the reintroduction of the sublime on another level, internal to the system of exchange—an immanent sublime.6
The idea that capitalism produces sublime objects is not one of Marx’s most controversial claims. But perhaps it should be. The sublime, as Kant defines it in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, necessarily transcends all sensible presentation and involves instead the ideas of reason. In this sense, the commodity is most often a material object and cannot be sublime: we can grasp through our senses even the most sophisticated commodities. But there is another sense in which the term sublime fits the commodity perfectly.
In our encounter with the sublimity of the natural world, Kant insists that this sublimity derives not from the awesome power of nature but rather from our capacity to regard our own self-interest as insignificant. The sublime object enables us to recognize our self-transcendence, our victory over utility. When confronted with a sublime object, we exhibit more concern for the object than for our own situation. Sublimity proves, for Kant, that we are not simply natural beings or beings confined entirely to a plane of pure immanence. This is why the conception of an immanent sublime, like what Marx proposes in his discussion of commodity fetishism, seems at first glance oxymoronic.
Capitalism appears irreconcilable with sublimity not solely through its destruction of all transcendence but also through its insistence that all capitalist subjects must operate as self-interested entities. The sublime marks the point at which the subject abandons its self-interest, and capitalism refuses to recognize any such point. The logic of capitalism and of its ideological defenders is that self-interest is always, in the last instance, determinative, and this amounts to a rejection of the sublime as a possible category. In contrast, this is the only source of Kant’s philosophical concern for the sublime.
Kant sees the sublime as the bridge to morality because it attests to our capacity to break the chain of natural causes and to dismiss the significance of our own good. A natural being would not be capable of such an act, nor would the perfect subject of capitalism, which attests to the strained relationship that capitalism has with sublimity. Kant argues, “in our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to those things) as not the sort of domination over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment.”7 Unlike other animals, subjects can abandon their everyday concerns and devote themselves to a transcendent cause.
Like the natural world, capitalism doesn’t offer a transcendent cause to which subjects might pledge their fidelity. It is impossible to imagine someone fighting a war in the name of capitalism, which isn’t to say that this doesn’t happen under other guises, like freedom or democracy.8 Capitalism itself is not a repository of sublimity and offers none of the transcendence that Christianity or the Roman Empire does. But capitalism does provide a different form of transcendence—one that inspires satisfaction and devotion, even if only to a lesser degree than the sublime figures of traditional society. It is this transcendence that comes to the fore when the capitalist subject confronts the commodity.
Many commodities are useful. Paper towels clean spills, and watches indicate the time. But the sublimity of the commodity resides in its fundamental disdain for utility and the disdain that it reflects in the subject. The commodity implies a thoroughgoing transformation away from use value, which is why Marx himself claims that exchange value is value as such. Once the commodity emerges, there is no contrast between use value and exchange value but only exchange value, and the sublime resides in the abandonment of use value. The utility of the commodity is not only secondary; it is necessarily marginalized through the creation of exchange value.
Just as our experience of the sublime in nature, according to Kant, enables us to marginalize our self-interest and adhere instead to the moral law, the experience of the sublime commodity allows us to set aside our concern for how the commodity might be useful to us and serve our self-interest. This is what Marx sees as the theological dimension of the commodity. It provides the subject an enjoyment through its lack of utility, like the enjoyment that religious worship offers. We enjoy it not in spite of its uselessness but actually because it serves no practical purpose.
When we look around at our dwellings at the end of our lives and survey all the commodities that we have accumulated, we often come to the insight that they amount to nothing but a heap of worthless junk. Like most insights that come as one approaches the end, this one is entirely misleading. The fact that the commodities were worthless junk from the beginning is what gave them their sublimity and what gave us enjoyment in accumulating them. No one values accumulating useful things. The collector, who is a derivation of the capitalist bent on total accumulation, always collects items with no use value—old stamps, empty beer cans, baseball trading cards, and so on.9 One doesn’t collect useful items because there is no enjoyment attached to their accumulation. Though capitalism preaches self-interest, the enjoyment that it offers—the enjoyment of the sublime commodity—is an enjoyment that depends on the absence of self-interest.
Capitalist subjects value commodities for their transcendence of utility, and this transcendence produces their sublimity. It is not even possible to escape the commodity’s disdain for utility and purchase commodities purely for their usefulness. Within the capitalist universe, usefulness itself becomes a form of inutility, as the fashion for apparently useful products like blue jeans or SUVs attests. The utility of these products disappears beneath their fetishistic sublimity. One buys a useful commodity in order to present oneself as a subject concerned only with utility, not because one is concerned only with utility. One buys the SUV for its sublimity even as one insists on its usefulness for hauling things. Every consumer and producer within capitalism falls victim to the sublimity of the commodity that derives from the commodity’s inutility. There is no path back to pure use. Though capitalism presents itself as a regime dominated by utility, the capitalist sublime depends on a thoroughgoing break from this utility.
The commodity is sublime both for the producer and for the consumer. The producer experiences it as a magical entity that creates value out of nothing, and the buyer sees in it the power to inject a moment of transcendence into daily life. The invisibility of the labor that produces the commodity is integral to its sublime status. If the excess productivity of the labor becomes visible, then the commodity loses its sublimity and becomes an ordinary object to be bought and sold. Because it is an effect of the transformative power of an invisible labor, capitalism’s immanent sublime is difficult to recognize, unlike the transcendent sublime (that predominates in religious experience, for example). But it accounts for the interest that the producer and the consumer sustain for the commodity.
THEOLOGICAL COMMODITIES
The sublimity of the commodity for the producer emerges when the commodity realizes the creation of value. As the capitalist sees it, a miracle takes place; something emerges out of nothing. The passing of time and the laws of supply and demand enable the capitalist to transform an object, the commodity, into profit. As Deirdre McCloskey puts it without any trace of irony in The Bourgeois Virtues, “It’s the Bourgeois Deal: leave me alone to buy low and sell high, and in the long run I’ll make you rich.”10 When presented like this, the deal that McCloskey offers seems hard to pass up. It reflects an investment in the sublime status that the commodity has for the producer. The creation of value is a miracle because it depends solely on the time lag between buying and selling.
Even the more complex theories of value, like the labor theory developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, promulgate the miraculous dimension of the commodity. For them, labor creates value that becomes profit. But neither of them explains—and this is the lacuna that Marx takes as his point of departure—how the capitalist is able to profit on the commodity while paying the market price for labor. Every exchange is fair and balanced, as they see it, which logically eliminates any point at which value might enter into the structure. This theorizing is not simply a historical accident: in order to function effectively, capitalism must obscure the moment of value creation. If we can see value emerge, the commodity loses its sublime ability to turn nothing into something, and capitalism loses its true believers who put their capital to work for the sake of profit.11
Capitalist producers rely on the sublimity of the commodity to continue doing what they do, but they also pass on this sublimity to consumers. The sublimity of the commodity acts as the hidden source of satisfaction for both producers and consumers in the capitalist system. Though the producer parts with the commodity and the consumer acquires it, it accomplishes the same thing for both. The commodity makes the producer richer and the consumer poorer. But the transaction allows both parties to truck with sublimity, which is why both keep re turning to transactions. The way that capitalists present commodities for sale highlights their sublimity. Without this, there would be no buyers.
The commodity form is sublime, not the particular content of the commodity. Just as the act of production renders the creation of sublimity obscure and vague, the sale of the commodity disguises the formal nature of the sublime and identifies it with the commodity’s content. If consumers recognized that the commodity’s sublimity was purely formal, the commodity would lose its sublime status. The sublimation of the commodity is a formal operation that emerges out of the basic structure of capitalist exchange: this exchanges carries with it the power of sublimation. No particular commodity, whatever its content might be, can have an inherent sublimity.
No seller can avow that the commodity owes its sublimity to form rather than content. Instead, the seller emphasizes that the Mercedes Benz or even the Ford Focus is a car without equal, that only this particular content can provide the sublimity the consumer seeks. If the car dealer proclaimed that any car would suffice because the commodity form itself produces the sublimity, the sublimity would disappear. It survives only in masked form.
The sublime inheres in the promise of something extra that the commodity offers to both producer and consumer. This is the purely formal quality of its sublimity. Most commodities are everyday empirical substances with clear material limits, like the package that contains them. The empirical package of the product serves as a vehicle for the sublimity inherent in every commodity. But the form of the package is not just a vessel for the sublime content. Every commodity requires a package, whether it is a physical one or an imaginary one. This package provides a barrier to the enjoyment of the commodity, but it is this barrier that ensures the commodity’s sublimity for the consumer and thereby enables the consumer to enjoyment the commodity. Without the barrier and its sublimating effect, commodities would appear to us as worthless junk.
When I buy a new iPhone, I don’t immediately have access to the iPhone itself. Instead, I must navigate the packaging and disentangle the commodity that I want from the inessential form that I don’t. This act of unpacking focuses my attention on the content and obscures the production of sublimity, which occurs through the form of the packaging. The package creates the promise of more, and even commodities that arrive without any packaging at all carry this promise. In this sense, the excessive packaging of the commodity has an ontological necessity.12 As we search for a knife to cut through the annoying packaging, we ask ourselves in the midst of cursing the producer why we must always navigate this excess. We never take this question seriously, but we should. The excessive packaging provides the form that invigorates the commodity with the sublimity that renders it desirable. As we cut through the packaging, we perform an act akin to that of the mystical saint’s moment of communion with God, but we do so without the trauma of the mystical rupture. The commodity embodies the promise of an ultimate satisfaction or enjoyment that would transport the consumer beyond the secular world, a promise that no commodity will ever fulfill.
With the packaging of the commodity, capitalism reveals that it has adopted a key lesson of psychoanalysis—the distinction between the object that causes our desire (the lost object that can never become present) and the object of desire (the empirical object that we can obtain). What causes our desire is the barrier or obstacle that presents itself to the subject. The recalcitrant packaging is the object-cause of our desire, just like the glass window of the auto showroom that separates us from a new Porsche. The object of desire is the content hidden by this formal barrier, and in itself the content has no value. The form of the object-cause of desire creates whatever value the object of desire has, which is why obtaining objects of desire inevitably leaves us disappointed or even depressed.13
The sublime satisfaction that the commodity promises becomes visible in advertisements, which try to imagine what this sublime satisfaction might look like. Advertisements show certain clothes worn by celebrities or a driver with a car going through a picturesque countryside at high speed. No one advertises a commodity by showing how it will anchor one in the drudgery of daily life. This is true even for the products that sustain daily life. Advertisers present soap, laundry detergent, and even toilet bowl cleaners as if they have the capacity for creating transcendence out of everyday tedium. Rather than simply cleaning the remnants of urine and feces from the toilet, I will transform the much used toilet into a shining embodiment of purity and cleanliness if I have the correct cleaner. Instead of just removing the dirt from my body in the shower, I will experience a complete bodily and spiritual renewal if I use the proper soap. The advertisement for even the basest commodity invokes the sublime and promises it to the future consumer.
The failure of commodities to live up to the promise of their advertisements in no way lessens the power of the advertisements over us. In fact, it augments their power. When a commodity fails to deliver the promised transcendence, we search even more diligently for another product—perhaps a new and improved version of the same one—that will come through for us. This is the logic behind someone buying a videocassette of a film, then a DVD of the same film, a Blu-ray DVD of it, and finally a digital copy.14 In each case, the advertisement promises a transcendent filmic experience that never arrives, but the new version renews the promise. This promise’s vitality depends on the commodity’s failure to deliver on it.
Within capitalism, the advertisement is more important than the product. Though we often find advertisements annoying and try to avoid them (by changing the channel of the television or turning the page of the magazine), they are actually the site of our satisfaction with the commodities we consume. We enjoy through the advertisement, even when we try our best to ignore it. We believe that the commodity must redeem the promise of sublimity that the advertisement makes, but the advertisement is the source of that sublimity. The commodity never fulfills the promise, but the act of promising itself has a creative power. The advertiser in the capitalist universe is the forger of sublimity. The satisfaction that we derive from commodities is the product of advertising, not the commodities themselves.
By invoking the sublime, advertisements enable capitalist subjects to come close to the transcendence eliminated by capitalism’s emergence. The transformation Marx and Engels document in The Communist Manifesto demands the creation of a new type of sublime, and this is what the advertisement specializes in. It is a much less satisfying sublime than that associated with kings and priests, but, at the same time, it is a sublime that mitigates the trauma inherent in all sublimity. The commodity disguises its sublime transcendence, and as a result, no consumers feel as if they are touching the hand of God when they buy a new car. Though the act of buying a new car approximates the sublimity that existed before capitalism, it also spares us some of the sublime’s capacity for producing enjoyment. The satisfaction of the commodity pales in comparison with the satisfaction found in God.
DRIVING THE CAR OFF THE LOT
By aligning sublimity with the always deferred future of the commodity, capitalism exploits the nature of the subject’s desire. As Georg Simmel explains in his treatise on money, desire relies on distance. He notes, “We desire objects only if they are not immediately given to us for our use and enjoyment; that is, to the extent that they resist our desire. The content of our desire becomes an object as soon as it is opposed to us, not only in the sense of being impervious to us, but also in terms of its distance as something not-yet-enjoyed, the subjective aspect of this condition being desire.”15 The commodity form has this distance, and it endows the commodity with its sublimity. Once we traverse the distance and acquire the commodity, we experience the profound disappointment, to repeat the formulation of The Communist Manifesto, of all that is solid becoming air, of the sublime becoming quotidian.
Even capitalist economists display an insight into this point when they analyze the utility that a commodity has. Marginal utility theory does not address the actual satisfaction that a commodity provides for the consumer. It is the anticipated satisfaction that, according to this theory, functions as the basis for the decision concerning what to consume. The capitalist economy takes anticipated rather than realized satisfaction as the motor for the decisions that occur within it. Even if the jeans I bought are too tight or the apple is rotten to the core, the utility of these commodities, for the purposes of calculation, lies in my expectations. The commodity’s sublimity is futural.16
The prospect of consumption is always more gratifying than the act of consumption. We love to go shopping for the commodities we desire because in the act of looking at several possibilities we tarry with the sublime. The joy of shopping lies in the interaction with a seemingly infinite number of promises of future satisfaction. Before we purchase an object, it has a transcendent quality, akin to a religious icon from the Middle Ages. After the purchase, the sublimity rushes out of it, and we are left with an ordinary object that falls far short of our expectations.
Theorists of capitalism chronicle the desublimation of the commodity through the terminology they employ to describe the process of consumption. In his Principles of Economics, for instance, Carl Menger reserves the word commodity for an object in the production and circulation process, while using the word consumption good for the object after its final purchase. This phraseology bespeaks an implicit understanding of the transformation that purchases enact. He says, “from the possession of the first into the possession of the last owner, we call them ‘commodities’ but as soon as they have reached their economic destination (that is, as soon as they are in the hands of the ultimate consumer) they obviously cease to be commodities and become ‘consumption goods’ in the narrow sense in which this term is opposed to the concept of ‘commodity.’”17 Though Menger doesn’t comment on the commodity as a sublime object, his desire to bar the term for the object after the consumer has it suggests an association of the commodity with future sublimity. Once one has the commodity, however, this sublimity evaporates, and one must go to extreme lengths to recover it.
The objective correlative of this dramatic shift occurs with the purchase of a new car. While looking around the lot for the right car to buy, one is choosing among a series of sublime objects. But immediately after buying the car, it ceases to be sublime, even if one is relatively content with one’s choice. The fact that the new car loses significant value from the moment one leaves the dealership testifies to the loss of sublimity. The religious experience of seeking the commodity becomes immediately secular after one has it. This emphasis on the future promise inheres in our conception of the sublime, and capitalism utilizes, though it does not create, this association.
In order to forestall this secularization of the commodity at the moment one buys it, the consumer must resort to drastic measures that would recreate the distance that existed prior to the purchase. One tack toward this end is to create an aura of insecurity around the object. If I believe that a criminal might steal my new car at any moment, it retains some of the sublimity that the act of attaining it eliminated. Arming my car with a car alarm, locking the doors, and putting it in a secure garage represent efforts to restore the lost sublimity of the newly acquired commodity.
There are, needless to say, actual threats to our commodities. There are criminals who would steal what we own. But security systems are not designed to prevent theft or deter criminals, though this is their secondary function. The primary function of the security system is to restore the sense of sublimity that the purchase of the commodity destroyed. This is why people often employ security systems for items that no decent criminal would think of stealing. The annoyance of the car alarm that one must constantly disengage (or that goes off inadvertently) reminds one that even the little compact car is a sublime object.
Threats to the object render possession insecure and produce a psychic distance that nourishes the future sublime, which is the only form of the sublime that exists in the capitalist universe. Commodities are sublime—they abound “in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”—because we see them through the shop window. Capitalism brings the sublime down from the transcendent, but it remains at a distance in the field of immanence.
Even though capitalism locates the sublime within the field of immanence (which distinguishes it from traditional societies), it always imagines the sublime in the future. The capitalist subject never experiences the sublime here and now but only in the promise that the commodity embodies. It is in this sense that capitalism holds the sublime at a distance while rendering it immanent. By leaving sublimity always in the future, capitalism obscures our actual experience of the sublime. It does so in the way that Kant’s morality obscures the sublimity of the moral law by depicting it as a future act to be accomplished rather than an act already done. Hegel’s critique of Kantian morality thus functions as an implicit critique of capitalism’s futural sublime. When we think of the sublime in the future, we fails to see how this future has already manifested itself and made possible our act of conceiving it. The turn from Kant to Hegel is the turn from a future sublime to a present sublime. It is the turn from capitalism to an egalitarian society.
HEGEL’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF COMMODITY FETISHISM
The great philosopher of the sublime, Immanuel Kant, eliminates the external distance that separates the subject from sublimity with his conception of the moral law. The location of the sublime undergoes a dramatic transformation. Even though Kant’s most sustained discussion of the sublime occurs in the third Critique, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, it is at the conclusion of the second Critique where Kant’s relocation of the sublime takes place. In a stunning passage that relates two apparently disparate phenomena, Kant claims, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”18 Through the equation of the starry heavens above and the moral law within, Kant manages to conceive an immanent form of transcendence. The sublime continues to transcend the everyday, but it exists in the midst of the everyday that it transcends. It is not just above us but also within us and our subjectivity. In this sense, Kant repeats the revolution perpetuated by the commodity, which replaces external transcendence with the commodity’s transcendence of itself.19
This is not to say that Kantian morality is in any way reducible to capitalism or capitalist morality but rather that Kant accomplishes a parallel transformation of the sublime. Both capitalism and Kant bring the sublime into the field of immanence—for capitalism it moves from the king to the commodity and for Kant from the stars above to the moral law within—but neither goes far enough in this revolutionary act. The sublime, in each case, remains futural and thus reproduces the distance from the sublime that exists in traditional societies. It would fall to Hegel to rectify Kant’s error and to a future egalitarian society to rectify the parallel error of capitalism.20
Hegel finds Kant’s theorization of the moral law his greatest philosophical achievement, and yet, he recognizes a blind spot that detracts from the conceptual insight. The recognition of this blind spot allows Hegel to point the way past the commodity’s determination of the sublime while still retaining an immanent sublimity. Though the moral law represents an internalization of sublimity so that the figure of the sublime no longer appears in the natural world, Kant actually retains the distance that separates the subject from the sublime in the way that he formulates the moral law. For Kant, the moral law addresses the subject as an imperative. It presents the subject with a duty that the subject ought to accomplish. This ought (or Sollen) marks the point at which Hegel takes issue with Kant’s invocation of the moral law.
As long as morality remains a sublime possibility that we ought to attain, a distance between the subject and the sublime remains, and morality continues to function like the commodity, promising a sublimity that it will never deliver. Instead, we must conceive morality as something already attained and accomplished. As Hegel puts it in his critique of Kant in The Phenomenology of Spirit, “Consciousness starts from the idea that, for it, morality and reality do not harmonize; but it is not in earnest about this, for in the deed the presence of this harmony becomes explicit for it.”21 Hegel privileges the moral deed rather than the moral imperative to act in the future. According to this way of thinking, we should conceive morality as sublime and yet also as already accomplished.
Hegel’s vision of the moral law is Kant’s vision with the future subtracted from it. The moral law lifts us out of the everyday, but it does this when we accomplish moral deeds, not when we experience the moral imperative (as it does for Kant). Morality is not a sublime duty that we ought to accomplish but a sublime duty that we have accomplished and continue to accomplish. Hegel’s transformation of Kantian morality away from the ought or the future accepts Kant’s basic premise—that the moral law is sublime—while rejecting its link with capitalism—its emphasis on the future. Hegel’s morality preserves the radicality of the Kantian revolution while discarding its accommodationist structure. The Hegelian form of morality is thus antithetical to the form proposed by capitalism.
Capitalism accommodates itself well to morality. One might even discover within capitalism a moral code, as Milton Friedman does, that will enable one to combat various forms of discrimination. According to Friedman, capitalism charges us for our prejudices—if we refuse to buy from members of another race, for instance, we end up paying more—and thereby works to eliminate them. This sort of morality remains within the bounds of utility and has nothing sublime about it. But the Kantian moral law rejects any claim to utility and thus disrupts the process of accumulation. Kantian morality is sublime rather than useful. Unlike Freidman’s morality, it is not a good investment.22
Due to its rejection of interest, Kantian morality is quite distinct from any capitalist morality. And yet, Kant does not go far enough because his morality retains the furtural dimension of the capitalist sublime. This is what Hegel discards in his reformulation of Kantian morality. This is also what the emancipation from capitalist society must do in order to break fully from the capitalist universe.
When we conceive of the Kantian moral law as already accomplished, as Hegel enjoins us to do, the location and temporality of the sublime undergo a shift. The sublime is no longer a future event but a present one. It is no longer the promise of satisfaction but the attainment of it. This change in understanding the sublimity of the moral law can be translated into the theorization of the commodity’s sublimity. Though we attach the commodity’s sublimity to a future possibility, the sublime exists in the commodity form itself as already realized. The promise is already its fulfillment. This shift of perspective, which removes sublimity from the future, destroys the commodity’s power over us. One finds satisfaction in commodities, but one ceases to expect any more satisfaction. The Hegelian relation to the commodity demands the abandonment of one’s claims to dissatisfaction with the content because it locates satisfaction in the commodity form itself irrespective of the content.
A SATISFIED ORIENTALISM
We can see the contrast between the dissatisfied relation to the commodity and the satisfied relation in the West’s relationship to the Far East. That is to say, we can see the difference between capitalism’s futural sublime of the commodity and socialism’s already accomplished sublime by examining the trajectory from orientalism to Sofia Coppola’s antiorientalism developed in her Lost in Translation (2003). Since the beginnings of capitalism, the East or the Orient has had a sublime status for the West. Orientalism transforms the East into a site of mysterious wisdom, holding secrets that remain ever out of reach. It is both the location of exotic commodities and itself one. As Edward Said points out when he identifies the problem in Orientalism, this attitude toward the East functions as the engine for colonial exploration that seeks the Orient qua commodity.
Like the love object, the Orient is a paradigmatic commodity. It embodies mystery for the capitalist West and is difficult to attain. One must traverse thousands of miles, learn foreign languages, fight wars, and investigate unfamiliar customs. And even with all this probing, the Orient seems to resist all efforts to know it fully. One is always trying to know it but never achieving any epistemic mastery.
When Said theorizes the problem of orientalism, he begins with an epigraph from Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The epigraph does not announce any critique of capitalism but Marx’s own dismissal of the political efficacy of the lumpenproletariat and this class’s need for someone to represent its interests. Though Said is not a champion of the lumpenproletariat, he includes this line in order to show Marx’s dismissive attitude toward otherness.23 Within the book itself, Said sees Marx as symptomatic of orientalism rather than as one who fights against it. Despite this discussion of Marx, Said avoids any mention of capitalism as the system that produces orientalism, even though all his examples of the orientalist mindset come from the capitalist epoch.24
For Said, orientalism is basically an instance where knowledge functions as the justification for power.25 Orientalists domesticate the otherness of the Orient and transform it into a comprehensible object. But the important gesture does not occur with this transformation into an object of knowledge but in the very constitution of the Orient as a mystery to be known. Said approaches this point when he notes, “The relation between Orientalist and Orient was essentially hermeneutical: standing before a distant, barely intelligible civilization or cultural monument, the Orientalist scholar reduced the obscurity by translating, sympathetically portraying, inwardly grasping the hard-to-reach object.”26 The key phrase in Said’s account is the last one: the oriental object is hard-to-reach and thus sublime, which is why it arouses the desire of the orientalist.
Though orientalism may be, as Said claims, the impetus for the colonial project rather than its a posteriori justification, it is nonetheless the case that orientalism is a product of capitalism. Prior to the capitalist epoch, one might conquer or destroy the other, but one would not view the other through the prism of the commodity’s sublimity. Once capitalism arrives on the scene, everything changes, and orientalism doesn’t just become possible but entirely necessary. One cannot imagine capitalism without some form of orientalism, some mode of transforming the other into a figure of sublimity that must be explored. The exoticism of the other is the extension of the fetishism of the commodity, and it remains the prevailing attitude toward the other today. The only way to counter this attitude is to show that the other or the commodity doesn’t have a secret that the future might reveal.
When Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation appeared in theaters, critics and spectators greeted it with much acclaim, and it earned Coppola an Oscar nomination for best director, recognition that only three other women in the history of the Oscars have received. But it also occasioned a virulent opposition for its investment in orientalism. For many critics, Coppola’s film exemplifies a typically racist mode of thinking about Japan: it never tries to depict an authentic Japan but remains satisfied with a view from two Westerners.
There seem to be just two possible responses to the predominance of orientalism. One can either perpetuate it with images of exotic otherness or debunk it with images of the authentic other, thereby desublimating the East. Critics indicted Coppola for doing the former and failing at the latter. The objections to the film went so far as to gel into a campaign against the film entitled “Lost-in-Racism” that encouraged Academy Award voters to eschew any support for it. One of the film’s critics, Peter Brunette, summarizes the argument against the film when he states, “the characters take cab rides through the brightly-lighted Ginza area of Tokyo, where a rainbow of neon plays on their faces, go to nightclubs and hang out with strange people, stare respectfully at Buddhist ceremonies, watch a flower-arranging class, go golfing at the foot of Mt. Fuji, and never, ever get even one millimeter below the surface of this apparently impenetrable Other and these Kodak moments.”27 For Brunette and other critics of Coppola, there is no real Japanese particularity in Coppola’s Japan, and this is the indication of Coppola’s orientalism.
But it is this absence of an authentic Japan that comprises the antiorientalist core of Lost in Translation and the film’s challenge to the sublimity of the commodity. Coppola neither perpetuates the orientalist image of Japan as an exotic other nor does she present spectators with the real Japan. As Coppola conceives it in the film, the essence of Japan is not a sublime mystery that one can penetrate or just another desublimated object. Its sublimity resides in the encounter that the Western visitors have with it, and in the film, Coppola shows that what makes Japan appear sublime is the perspective taken up toward it. This does not eliminate the sublimity but does remove it from its entanglement with the commodity. The sublime is in our act of sublimation, not in the commodity that promises a sublime future.
The film depicts the relationship that develops between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) while he is in Tokyo filming a television commercial and she is there visiting with her spouse. Unlike other films in which Asia serves as the backdrop for the growth of Western characters, Japan does not function in Coppola’s film as a site of mystery or wisdom. There are no oriental secrets waiting to be discovered in the film. Instead, we see Bob and Charlotte having an experience of the sublime through their own way of relating to Japan. The fact that they don’t probe beneath the surface of the country, far from being an indication of the film’s racism, suggests a refusal of the logic of the commodity that infuses orientalism.
Even when the film seems to employ the most obvious cultural stereotypes, it uses them to illustrate where the sublimity actually resides. At one point in the film, Charlotte asks Bob, “Why do they switch the rs and the ls here?” This question indicates the possibility of a hidden particularity within the Japanese approach to English, but Bob’s response bespeaks the absence of any such secret. He says, “For yucks, you know, just to mix it up. They have to amuse themselves because we’re not making them laugh.” Bob’s offhand answer suggests that the question itself is completely wrongheaded: there is no secret to find in the Japanese pronunciation. It is produced for the Western audience and in relation to this audience.
The film’s destruction of oriental mystery becomes clearest in its depiction of the role that America plays in the exoticism of Tokyo. When one looks for the hidden particularity of Japan in Lost in Translation, one finds American culture rather than any authentic otherness. This is apparent from the film’s opening scene. Bob stares out at the excesses of the Tokyo nightscape, and Coppola cuts from these images of excess to the awestruck look on his face. But subsequently we see a large billboard image of Bob himself amid the nightscape. Later in the film, Coppola shoots Bob and Charlotte running through Tokyo at night while the city background remains out of focus. When part of this background does come into focus, it is the billboard of Bob’s face. In the heart of Tokyo, the spectator finds the figure from the West rather than the secret identifying Japanese otherness.
The fundamental idea of Lost in Translation is that the sublimity of Japan is sublimity for Bob and Charlotte, that there is no secret to Japan that might be lost in translation. This revelation invalidates Japan as a commodity, and it represents a key to transcending orientalism, which is the zero level of the commodity’s sublime effects. One can no longer relate to the other as a sublime commodity when one recognizes that the sublime is not a goal to be achieved but an absence already discovered. This is the transition from Kant to Hegel.28
The Hegelian form of sublimity that manifests itself in the commodity results in two ever present possibilities accompanying capitalism—the threat of the fundamentalist reaction and the promise of revolutionary emancipation. These two possibilities inhere within the commodity’s sublimity. The former is the result of the dissatisfaction that follows the experience of the sublime. One turns to fundamentalism not because capitalism fails to deliver the sublime but because it does, and fledgling fundamentalist subject refuses to accept that the sublime can actually be experienced. The would-be revolutionary subject, in contrast, grasps that it has really touched the sky in the act of acquiring the commodity and thus can divest from the capitalist project of accumulation. The satisfaction that derives from the commodity can exhaust the desire for the accumulation of commodities.
THOSE FOR WHOM CAPITALISM IS NOT SUBLIME ENOUGH
Capitalism’s failure to deliver on the promise of sublimity most often produces fundamentalists rather than revolutionaries. This is because the revolutionary must accept that the sublime we can actually have is the only possible sublime, that there is no more sublime future out there somewhere, whereas the fundamentalist is able to retain the promise of an ultimate enjoyment attached to a transcendent sublime. The appeal of the fundamentalist is inextricable from the broken promises of the commodity. It is a reaction that remains within the system that it purportedly rejects. Fundamentalism simply demands that capitalism keep the promises inherent in the commodity. It is the internal effect that the capitalist economic system produces, not a foreign enemy seeking to destroy it from the outside.
Even though he is a defender of capitalism, Joseph Schumpeter recognizes that the new form of sublimity that capitalism offers has deficiencies in comparison with the religious sublime that it replaces. According to Schumpeter, “the stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.”29 Schumpeter believes that the immanent sublime created by capitalism is not genuinely sublime. The result will often be a revolt against the leveling process and an attempt to restore the lost sublimity of religion. But the problem with the sublimity of the commodity is not that the commodity fails to be sublime. It is that the sublime can actually be attained. Unlike traditional societies that always keep the sublime at a transcendent level, capitalism brings the sublime down to Earth and paves the way to disappointment. When he recognizes the potential disappointment of this version of the sublime, Schumpeter anticipates the fundamentalist reaction to the commodity, though he himself sustained his faith in the commodity and avoided this seduction.
Fundamentalism is a product of capitalist modernity. It is a revolt against the form of sublimity that the commodity provides. The fundamentalist is not someone who fails to experience the satisfaction that capitalism offers but someone, instead, who experiences it fully. This satisfaction is dissatisfying for the fledgling fundamentalist because it doesn’t live up to the promise that capitalism makes. No commodity is the equal of its advertisement, and this gap is the source of the fundamentalist’s disappointment. For most of us, the gap leads to distrust in advertisements or to an unending search for better commodities. This is because, unlike the fundamentalist, we remain within the field of consumption. But the fundamentalist is a disaffected consumer, one who turns away from consumption like a scorned lover.
The structure of fundamentalism—its status as a response to the failures of capitalism—explains why so many suicide bombers come from middle-class families and have ample experience of Western life. Even Islamic fundamentalism is an internal rejection of capitalism for its failure to keep its promises rather than an external attack. This is not to say that the United States was responsible for the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center or that France was responsible for the 2015 attack on Paris, a thesis that denies all agency to the attackers. But it is to say that those attackers were not outsiders. Their differences in religious belief from the majority of American or French capitalists were simply contingent and their attack stemmed from a profound desublimation that affects other non-Islamic fundamentalists as well, as the case of Timothy McVeigh, another fundamentalist bomber, reveals.
The fundamentalist doesn’t translate the disappointing experience of consumption into a verdict on the sublime itself but seeks out a genuine sublime in the form of religious belief, nationalism, or something of the sort. This is to fall under the spell of capitalism even more than the avid consumer. The fundamentalist accepts the logic of the promised sublimity of the advertisement, though she or he seeks the fulfillment of this promise in what she or he views as the ultimate commodity—a return to the solid ground of genuine belief that capitalism has eradicated.
In the contemporary world, it seems as if the only alternatives are investment in the sublimity of the commodity and fundamentalist revolt against this form of the sublime. But there is another possibility: confrontation with the failure of the commodity to deliver the ultimate satisfaction it promises can lead one to a new understanding of the sublime. Rather than seeking out a genuine sublime by joining a militia or wearing a burka, one can recognize that the commodity form of the sublime reveals the true nature of the sublime.
The commodity doesn’t promise a false sublime and then fail to deliver an authentic version. No, its form of promise and failure constitutes the nature of the sublime. The sublime exists in our failures, not in our successes, and this is what we take pains not to confront. In this sense, capitalism lays bare the sublime that earlier epochs employed while simultaneously rendering it obscure. The task today is to be adequate to what capitalism reveals, to confront the sublime in its inevitable failure rather than to seek respite in the promise of its future realization. That is to say, when it comes to the sublime, we must be Hegelian rather than Kantian. We must follow the logic of the commodity to its end point in order to unlock the secret of sublimity.
The failure of the commodity’s promise to deliver the ultimate satisfaction is at once the failure of the sublime as well. The point is not that we inhabit a completely secular world with no traces of the sublime.30 The sublime exists, but it is not located in a future moment of transcendence. It is present in the capacity for transcendence, for the creation of something out of nothing, in everyday life. Once we can see through the promise of the commodity, we can change the way that we view the sublime. Though capitalism cannot itself accommodate this leap, its transformation of the sublime from transcendence to immanence makes it possible. This is its great achievement, one that we should not cease to applaud.
Marx was entirely correct to claim that capitalism is necessary for the development of the egalitarian system that would replace it, but this necessity is psychic as much as it is economic. We can only make this psychic step if we pay attention to the lesson that the commodity teaches us about sublimity. Our disappointment with the new car that we just purchased is not the moment of the failure of the capitalist sublime but the moment when its truth is revealed. Without capitalism and the commodity, we couldn’t see that we already have what the commodity promises for tomorrow. But once we do see that we already have what the commodity promises, we emancipate ourselves from the strictures and the obfuscations of the capitalist system. Capitalism is the ladder to a new understanding of the sublime that we must kick away if we are genuinely to achieve that understanding.