April 9th, 2008 Fred McVittie
In chemistry, a substance is said to undergo the process of sublimation if, on heating, it changes state from a solid to a gas without passing through an intermediate state of liquidity. Observing sublimation in action is a relatively rare experience, confined primarily to chemistry students or, historically, to alchemists, and a prototypical experimental demonstration might proceed as follows:
A small amount of a solid substance is placed in the bottom of a test tube and the test tube is then held over the flame of a bunsen burner. For a few moments nothing happens, then a thin vapour may be seen issuing from the substance (or maybe not). This vapour may be seen to rise up the tube and, when it reaches the cooler regions at the top, deposits itself as a solid on the glass sides of the tube (1). With some substances there is not even the telltale trace of vapour to mark the passage of the substance through the intermediate space; it may appear to simply diminish in presence at one location and accumulate in another, higher place. This is the literal, ‘embodied’ sense in which the term ’sublimation’ can be experienced, and as noted is not an experience that many will have had. Nevertheless, this process of sublimation has extensive use as a metaphor and the structure of this metaphor links it to the wider imaginary landscape within which knowledge makes sense (and the senses make knowledge). The relationship between this particular metaphor to the wider imagination, and indeed why such an apparently arcane experience is appropriate in this case, can be revealed by an analysis of the various uses of the term outside of its specific scientific or alchemical context (2).
The term ’sublimation’ appears in Freudian psychoanalysis, and is most usually applied to the practices of artists. He writes that “Among the instinctual forces which are put to this [civilizing] use the sexual impulses play an important part; in this process they are sublimated.” (Freud, S. 1966. 27). This “process” “consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a sexual component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social. We call this process ‘sublimation’, in accordance with the general estimate that places social aims higher than the sexual ones, which are at bottom self-interested.” (Freud, S. 1966. 429)
Note the use in this passage of terms indicating differences in elevation, and the unstated values associated with different ‘levels’. The originating substance of sublimation is placed ‘at bottom’ and is narrowly concerned with the self and the sexual body. The products of sublimation however are given the wider and more lofty perspective of the social. The metaphorical schema underpinning this image, in addition to its narrative of alchemical transformation, also makes use of the UP IS GOOD association discussed elsewhere. The view from the top of the test tube or alembic vessel takes in the houses and gardens of one’s neighbours.
The particular goodness of this sublime position, particularly when it becomes the precipitator of art, is, for Freud, not unclouded with potential problems. For Freud the libidinous and thanatoid drives of the ego, constantly under the whip of id and superego, ideally found release in the delights of sex and the void of death. But for those of us who are wedded to either celibacy or self-preservation these drives must send their energy elsewhere and the destination of choice for artists, writers, and other creative inadequates, is to exhaust them upward in the vaporous evanscences of art, the social function of which, for Freud, is questionable. He describes the artist as “…originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy.” (Freud, S. 1911. 24). This is an image of creativity in the arts as the steam above the factory; energy lost to the environment as uncontainable and useless gas. This unruly, and possibly even toxic, waste is deposited as solid accumulations on our gallery walls and the shelves of our libraries without even passing through the hydraulically practical liquid stage of useful procreation or of turning the wheel of life into the mulch of death. As is evident from the tone of these sentences, to Freud (as to Plato before him (3)) the product of arts practice was a deviation from the intended use of these drives. It is interesting to note that Freud, in keeping with the necessity of maintaining consistency in the utilisation of his image schema, (although he may not have thought of it in those terms) described the alternative to sublimation as ‘repression’. The workings of the steam-driven psyche act upon the unwanted desires such that instead of being evacuated to the air they are pushed underground. The verticality of the psychic dimension is retained, along with a notional position of the self, in the form of the ego, at ground zero. Repressed material enters the confines of the dark, whereas the sublime expands upward into the light.
This characterisation of sublimation as the cause of, at best, harmless vapourware, is obviously not one that tends to be shared by artists and those in the art industry more generally. For the cognescenti, the alchemical transformation that marks the change from the solid and indeed stolid experiences of this fallen world into the elevated condition of high art is little short of miraculous. This process, including the airy gap across which the substance disappears and reappears, bears the marks of the magickal, reminiscent of an earlier, more theological age. As Peter Harrison reminds us “Some of the practitioners of alchemy also wished to claim much more for their chemical experiments that that they merely signified Divine activities or theological doctrines. Thomas Tymme, the English translator of Calvin’s commentary on Genesis, believed that God had actually used alchemical processes to create the world, bringing it forth from an elemental chaos ‘by his Halchemicall Extraction, Separation, Sublimation, and Coniunction’”. (Tymme, 1605 in Harrison, 2001). As the base material of God writ small, the paint diminishes from the palette and recongeals in angelic form on the canvas; inconsequential ink evaporates from the pen and rises unseen to trace the shape of sounds across the page. The dull and profane solidity of matter passes invisibly upward to become a second solid, a bright and sacred work of art permanently glimmering in the empyrean of the cultural imagination. This is the alternative take on sublimity favoured, and most clearly exemplified, in the work of the Romantic poets; Wordsworth for example, uses the term ’sublime’ or its derivations twenty times in his ‘Prelude’, each usage referring to some kind of elevated state which, it seems fair to say, he never articulates well, which is probably the point, since almost by definition the Romantic sublime is forever an inarticulable idea beyond expression in the charnel-house language of fallen flesh.
For Edmund Burke, whose Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and for Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790), the sublime finds its place within the glossary of formal aesthetics, and this place illuminates the intuitions of the Romantic poets and those painters of the period who similarly aspired to this transcendent position. Interestingly, the sublime of Burke is aspirationally more lofty even than the social overview suggested by Freud. He distinguishes the sublime in art from that which is merely ‘beautiful’. The judgment of beauty, he claims, “has its origin in our social feelings, particularly in our feelings toward the other sex, and in our hope for a consolation through love and desire.” http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-570785/sublime
The production of the sublime, on the other hand, may require the mobilisation of cthonic forces which one would be hard-pressed to consider social;
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (Burke, E. 1757/1998. 50)
What is more, the view from the ground, when looking up into the eyes of this sublime horror is similarly enlarged. To feel oneself the object of that terrible subject is not the detached aestheticism one feels in the presence of beauty. The height of beauty is merely that of the pedestal, whereas sublimity touches the void, and the only appropriate response, as Burke notes is one of astonishment.
“Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.” (ibid. 53)
It is irresistable at this point to note in passing that one, ideosyncratic etymology of the term sublime traces it to the latin super limas, which means ‘above the slime or mud of this world’. (Beattie, J. in Monk, H. 1935. 129), although Monk does comment that Beattie’s contribution is “chiefly memorable” for its “etymological aberrations.”
To return to the ground on which we began, this term ’sublimation’ has its technical origins in the laboratory and marks this odd and counter-intuitive transformation in which the intermediate stage is invisible. Instead of seeing physical change one sees upward motion, disappearance and reappearance. This chemical act is not the first use of the term however, and if we are to get to grips with the meaningfulness of the concept in its full embodiment we may need to go further back. Without wishing to evoke etymology as explanation, it is worth noting that the origins of the word ’sublime’ lie in the Latin ’sub lintel’, indicating a metaphor to do with thresholds, entrances and exits, passage across, through, or under a significant boundary. To ’sublime’, in what may seem an overly literal sense of the phrase, would mean to pass from one location to another, very different type of location; leaving the cell in which one has been confined, stepping out of the darkness into the light. The identification of the metaphor in which STATES are understood as LOCATIONS has been well explored (Lakoff & Turner. 1989. 3) and this use of the concept of the physical threshold, a transition zone in which there is no perceptible and identifiable space in which change can be observed, merely the demarcation of a line of difference, is evidently an entailment of that overall metaphor.
It seems to be a consistent theme in much writing, unfortunately beyond the scope of this piece, that part of the human condition is to be a dweller on the threshold, without definition other than as a liminal interface between the inside and the outside, the fallen and the risen, the sublimated and the repressed, the day and the night. As Samuel Beckett put it:
“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” (Beckett, S. 170. 34)
(1) Almost all gasses, if frozen, will pass from solid to gas without passing through a liquid phase if the atmospheric pressure is kept very low. There are some substances however which are solid at room termperature and that undergo sublimation at atmospheric pressure. These include include phthalic anhydride (1,2-benzenedicarboxylic acid anhydride), which is widely used for making paint resins. Another is terephthalic acid (1,4-benzenedicarboxylic acid), which is used form making polyester. The most common substance is probably napthalene, which is the active ingredient in mothballs. Some substances, iodine for example, appear to undergo sublimation but this is actually a different process involving an oxidation and reduction reaction.
(2) Thomas Timme, in his epistolary to Duchesne’s 1605 ‘Practise of chymicall and hermeticall physicke’, wrote, “Then shall yee see the sublimated substances clinging to the sides of the glasses”
(3) In Plato’s ideal and noble Republic, poetry and the arts were to be banned, partly because of their status as imitations (and therefore further distancing man from the light of ideal forms), but also because they cause excessive and unnatural emotions and appetites to be aroused, that is, to ‘rise up’. (Republic X.595b-608b).
References
Beckett, S. (1970). The Unnamable. New York, Grove Press.
Beattie, James. (1783) Dissertations Moral and Critical. London, 1783). Quoted in Samuel H. Monk, 1935.
Edmund., B. (1998). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Freud, S. (1966). The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. . New York, Norton.
Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.
Harrison, P. (2001). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. and M. Turner (1989). More than cool reason : a field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago, Ill. ; London, University of Chicago Press.
Monk, S. H. (1935). The Sublime. A study of critical theories in XVIII century England. New York, MLA.
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