The Sublime and the Subliminal
Modern Identities and the Aesthetics of
Combat
Harvie Ferguson
. . . it is always just one thing alone that makes happiness happiness: the
ability to forget. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Modernity, Identity and War
M
ODERNITY IN its western manifestation (and the following is
concerned exclusively with western societies; future publications
will take up many of the issues discussed here in a comparative
context) is a complex and many-sided development; nothing less than the
transformation of reality. Classical sociological thought provides a rich
source of reflection on the character of that development and models of its
changing institutional structure. The history of modern philosophy, science,
art and religion, equally, provide fundamental source material of the `native
view' of these developments; the self-descriptions and self-understandings
of people living through these very processes of change. To simplify a
continuous and intricate process, it is convenient to treat modernity as a
development the leading characteristics of which in turn emerge and come
to prominence in a distinctive fashion. That is to say, while modernity was
not everywhere the same, and did not develop according to a rigid pattern,
broadly similar features do recur and link three distinctive phases of the
whole process; phases distinguished by, among other features, characteris-
tically different relationships between warfare and identity.
Early modern society might be dated from around 1550 to about 1700.
This period is marked by the age of absolutism, the rise of centralized states
and their apparatus of administration and control, the dominant role of
mercantilism, the rise to prominence of merchant capital and the eclipse of
old aristocratic societies throughout Europe by newer trading nations and
Theory, Culture & Society 2004 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 21(3): 1­33
DOI: 10.1177/0263276404043618
the formation of their world empires (Braudel, 1981, 1983, 1984; Curtin,
2000; Wallerstein, 1974, 1980). It is a period dominated by the search for
order founded on the direct expression of power. The central theme in the
development of western society and culture of this period is the challenge
and fear of disorder. Human autonomy, which is the fundamental enabling
assumption of modernity (Blumenberg, 1983; Koselleck, 1985), is grasped
as an unlimited power of self-construction and self-destruction; a view
articulated with uncompromising clarity by Hobbes in his Leviathan (1962),
and expressed, less precisely and forcefully, in innumerable lesser works.
The old order has been radically deposed, but it is not clear that a new order
can be established and successfully institutionalized at all levels of society.
In order that society should be made coherent, the centralization of power
and the spectacular display of its supremacy, readiness and effectiveness
must be deployed as a means of quelling any dissent, recalcitrance or oppo-
sition. In the Baroque Age public display of the power of the ruler is taken
to extreme and dramatic lengths, and is seen everywhere (Foucault, 1975;
Maravall, 1986). The model of identity that emerges here is equivalence.
Society becomes a collection of identical atoms; nature a collection of
universal objects. The supreme power isolates and gathers together deviants
and deranged individuals, those who fall outside the new rational forms of
social organization and social life. At the same time new sciences make
their tentative appearance in novel processes of collecting, identifying and
enclosing deranged specimens of nature. The prince's power extends
throughout the world. Objects are taken from far-flung places and brought
together, arranged and housed within a cabinet of curiosities. The
Wunderkammer is a repository of natural perversities that, in turn, are
subjected to a process of ordering, naming and classifying (Daston and Park,
1998; Findlen, 1999; Jardine et al., 1996; Kaufmann, 1993, 1995; Pomian,
1987). All these phenomena, in turn, have their practical and ideological
roots in the process of exchange and the development of mercantile activity
(Hadden, 1994).
From around 1700 to 1870 is the central period in the development
of what might be termed classical bourgeois modernity, associated with
rapid industrialization and large-scale urbanization. The ordering principles
of modernity are now seen as immanent in individuals themselves. Classical
political economy is the ego psychology of the modern age. In fact, modern
society will be self-regulating in just the same way that nature, once
collected, can be grasped as an ordered and coherent whole (Unger, 1975).
The view of identity here is linked directly to the new social and political
realities of modern society. The order of the modern world is held to be
generated automatically from the self-motivated and self-interested action
of individuals. Driven by needs and motivated by desires, each person acts
rationally in pursuit of goals that only they can adjudicate in terms of
hidden, ultimate value. At the same time, however, and without foresight,
the interaction of self-regarding individuals gives rise to predictable and
reliable patterns of behaviour. This conception, from one point of view,
2 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
reinforced the equivalent notion of identity; in the factory, as in the prison
or the school, each individual was exactly replaceable by any other. In a
different perspective however, and one in which individuals were increas-
ingly viewed in terms of contextual characteristics, it gave rise to more
decisive and characteristic forms of distinction. Where each is equivalent
to another, separate and personal identity can be maintained only through
an appeal to hidden inner characteristics; which now become the concealed
primary qualities upon which identity is founded. Identity becomes a
process of self-realization; of `positing' the self in its own project of
becoming. Equally this becomes a new standard for collective identities.
Any group might establish its distinctive identity through expressive forms
of life to which its members formed a sentimental attachment; to which they
`belonged'. This, of course, was the fertile ideological soil in which the
differing cultural identities of nation, class and locality grew to prominence
(Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990).
From 1850 up to the present, and to an increasing extent, new forms
of order and new modes of identification have become significant. The large-
scale ordering mechanisms of modern society ­ the market, the state, the
institutions of work, education, and pleasure ­ have become taken for
granted. Progressively, organized opposition to its fundamental assumptions
has been defeated and, almost, forgotten. Consequently `society' now
appears as a given reality that no longer needs to be maintained by the
conscious `effort' of individuals. Modernity has come to assert a fatal self-
sufficiency; seemingly invulnerable to whatever we might think, or feel or
do in our lives as private individuals. Thus, fleeting and superficial forms
of identity have become more common and are now openly encouraged as
an important psychological device promoting consumer culture. The hyper-
modern, the postmodern, the late modern are all characterized by a loos-
ening in identity at a personal and collective level. To an increasing extent,
many people have come to embrace the ontological playfulness that is
characteristic of contemporary culture; relieving them of the more demand-
ing search for any `authentic' identity through absorption in the apparent
freedom of innumerable forms of empathy.
Of course, there has been no lessening of passion and commitment to
the meaningful traditions and forms of life to which people attach them-
selves. In many instances, it is quite the reverse; but there is a growing
sense of the variety, contradictoriness, discrepant affiliations and multi-
plicity of roles that characterize modern experience and give rise to a clearer
awareness of their impermanence (Maalouf, 2000).
In important ways each of these ordering principles (collection, self-
regulation, chance), and forms of identity (equivalence, distinction, empathy),
are linked to, and emerge through, the practice of different kinds of warfare.
War and identity have been intimately related throughout the long history
of western society, and this close relationship also characterizes the
development of modernity. War is the most `extreme' of modern experiences
and, as experience is held to be the only ultimate authority in and for the
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 3
modern world, this relationship should not surprise us. Yet the role of
warfare in the emergence and development of identities in modern society
has remained obscure. Of course war is not the `cause' or even the `foun-
dation' of such forms; but warfare has played a peculiarly significant role
in their formation. The classical works of sociology were written at a time
when it was widely believed that large-scale warfare was coming to an end,
to be superseded by pacified social institutions and techniques of conflict
resolution. Indeed, the establishment of the market, the state and adminis-
trative agencies as well as the new practices of work, the emergence of total
institutions of care and the large-scale tendencies towards urbanization and
industrialization were all significant features of modern society and, of
course, contributed to the formation of new identities. Nonetheless, the
distinctive and important role of warfare for this entire development should
now be more clearly recognized.
The equivalent form of identity finds its first and clearest example in
the new military techniques of the early modern state. The so-called military
revolution was primarily a transformation in the social organization of
warfare and the social psychology of combat (Hale, 1985; MacNeil, 1982;
Parker, 1996; Roberts, 1967). New weapons technologies were of second-
ary importance here in relation to a novel conception of the soldier as a
singular unit in a collection. The art of war consisted primarily in the instill-
ing of discipline among soldiers, and the practice of drill and manoeuvre to
make large collections of fighting men responsive to commands (Foucault,
1975). The soldier was no longer defined by the essential qualities of
courage, skill and the possession of a tradition of honour; rather, the soldier
was reduced to being an element in a complex mechanism, the overall struc-
ture and purpose of which he need know nothing of (Delbrück, 1990). Prior
to the division of labour that came to characterize industrial production, the
progressive divorce of conception and execution and a `managerial revol-
ution', had already taken place in the organization of warfare. The military
revolution was, at the same time, the modern-state in embryo; requiring new
forms of administration throughout society and, above all, new, centralized
mechanisms for imposing and collecting taxes (Black, 1999; Contamine,
2000; Downing, 1992; Ertman, 1997; Glete, 2002).
The distinctive form of identity gains its significance as ideological
struggle to realize a political programme and system of values within a
specified territory; and to authenticate through force the inner meaning of
a particular world view. Combat is here viewed as the highest form of expres-
sive will; an outpouring, growth and uprising of a meaningful commitment
to an ultimate cause. These are typically `people's wars' of nationhood and
revolution; wars legitimated, if not motivated, by ideological commitment.
Clausewitz (1968) clearly distinguished these two modern forms of warfare
and, in analysing their historical significance, turned strategic thinking
away from the fruitless search for a Cartesian geometry of combat to a
serious consideration of the `moral factor' in combat (Aron, 1976).
The empathic form of identity is the product in part (and particularly
4 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
for men) of modern technologically advanced, total wars that, emerging in
the American Civil War, developed during the 20th century into a global
phenomenon (Bobbitt, 2002; Förster and Nagler, 1997; Kolko, 1994).
Empathic identification is transparently arbitrary and any resemblance can
be a sufficient ground for empathy; seemingly categorical and radical differ-
ences of any sort can be bridged, no difference makes a difference, so that
every difference has the quality of a choice of a self-motivated and non-
expressive freedom. The destruction of the ego and the psyche ­ of every-
thing fixed and permanent in the soul ­ is a prerequisite for the rise of
contemporary selfhood. War is not the necessary form of this destruction but
it was, in fact, a crucial route to the specific selfhood of contemporary society.
The appropriate mode of grasping the experiential reality of combat,
and the identities it informs, is also distinct for each phase in the develop-
ment of modern society. The first is to be understood rationally; that is,
primarily in terms of the power of command and the development of new
strategies based upon this power. The soldier's role is to obey and be respon-
sive to the will and strategic plan of the commander. The soldier is the
equivalent unit of combat; interchangeable one with another, ideally iden-
tical element in a complex fighting machine the overall coordination and
control of which depend wholly on a clearly formulated plan of action. The
second form of combat is to be understood ethically; as the struggle for
justice, national liberation and `rights'. Here war primarily becomes a means
of asserting collective interests and, ultimately, the reality of the collectivity
itself. Its fighting force is founded on revolutionary fervour, national pride
and belief in the historic justice of the cause. Throughout the 19th century,
military science itself increasingly took note of the `moral basis' of combat,
and sought to instil, in addition to discipline and obedience, a specific
`offensive spirit' that the rational strategist could count upon as an essen-
tial element in the planning of any operation. Morale became fundamental
to the strategy of combat (du Picq, 1987). The third form is best viewed
aesthetically; that is to say, in terms of the immediacy of an overwhelming
experience; as terror and the sublime. The 20th century was to an unprece-
dented degree warlike, and warfare during this period became industrial-
ized destruction. Citizens not only participated as economic resource but
were targets, and formed guerrilla and irregular forces as well, so that the
distinction between soldier and civilian was systematically eroded. It also
justified immediate state intervention in the economy (as opposed to free
market ideology that characterized the conduct of war in the era of classical
bourgeois modernity).
It is not possible, within the limits of a single article, to substantiate
this typological sketch with sufficient illustrative material, or adequately
discuss the host of issues that a brief presentation raises. The subsequent
discussion, therefore, is confined to a brief examination of the ways in which
modern warfare is related to the emergence of empathic identity.
The problem might also be put in a more direct and urgent way that
raises directly the continuing practical as well as philosophical issue of
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 5
modernity. If we have created modernity as a self-disclosing realm of human
freedom, why does it remain stubbornly opaque? If experience has become
the ultimate arbiter of reality, how is that experience itself seems incapable
of grasping itself and the world it creates? The experience of combat ­ the
kernel of warfare ­ remains something remote and enigmatic. It is the pre-
eminent shaping experience of late modernity, yet it remains elusive.
Indeed, the extent that every recent war becomes strenuously memorialized
is a sure sign, in fact, of the degree to which it is being forgotten. The First
World War memorial, `Lest We Forget', already indicates that it has been
forgotten.
How is this possible? How can the decisive experience of a century
be lost in a haze of poorly organized recollections and wholly inadequate
objective memorials? This lacuna is all the more surprising when we
consider the extent to which modern society was established in so many
declarations of human autonomy; so much certainty that a new self-
conscious beginning had been inaugurated, free from the obscuring Other-
ness of Nature or God. Humanity makes itself and, in making itself,
discovers itself, expresses itself. Yet, the immediate lesson of the most
advanced of modern societies is that humanity also loses itself, forgets itself.
Having liberated reality from the claims of authority and established experi-
ence as its self-certain foundation, experience itself became cloudy and
obscured by a strange impenetrability. Given this situation it is to the
development of aesthetics, rather than the rational sciences that we must
turn if we are to gain insight into the potent yet strangely withdrawn and
enigmatic world of modern combat.
Modernity and Aesthetics
During the latter part of the 18th century aesthetics was established as a
significant philosophical discipline. This was, in part at least, a recognition
of the growing autonomy of artistic practices ­ especially music ­ and the
problems of meaning and taste that they raised (Dahlhaus, 1991; Neubauer,
1986; Rosen, 1996). The decontextualization of art from religious ritual,
political spectacle or the exercise of command and the simultaneous
enlargement of its audience of private consumers, was a challenge to
previous theories of art. Even more importantly, aesthetics developed as the
first counter-movement within the Enlightenment. Where reason had
become the principal form in and through which humanity and its world
could be grasped, the passions, sensibility and pleasure had been treated
as secondary and even derivative aspects of human nature. And even where
the primordial force of the passions was acknowledged, this was understood
in an ultimately reductive sense; the human being was driven by needs,
motivated by desire and still guided by reason. The dominant rationalism
encouraged what amounted at first to a reductive aesthetics; but, increas-
ingly, the whole inner world of experience, and the immediacy of feeling
and sense, were recognized as irreducible and crucial aspects of the
Enlightenment's own conception of humanity.
6 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
Thus, for example, among the Scottish philosophers Kames and
Hutcheson championed an autonomous aesthetics founded on a natural
history of the passions and taste, in the one case, and on the sovereignty of
`inner sense' as an aesthetic as well as moral reality in the other (Broadie,
1997). The discourse of aesthetics, thus, became a thoroughly modern view
of the world and belonged as centrally as the concept of reason to a full
understanding of human nature.
Kant's philosophy is unquestionably the most sophisticated and
complex investigation of the central issues raised by the new aesthetics, and
its relation to both rational and ethical considerations. The historical context
of each of the Kantian critiques was fundamentally the same. If modernity
was genuinely to establish itself as the free and autonomous self-development
of humanity, how could it validate its entire development without reference
to discredited pre-modern authority? How could knowledge be other than
self-referential representation; how could the ends of action and the relations
among people be chosen and regulated in a non-arbitrary and just way? And
how could feeling be elevated to universal humanness? How, in short, could
the inherently free world of experience be constructed in such a way as to
impose upon itself form-giving limitations (Beiser, 1987)?
The aesthetic might be viewed, in the general context so far outlined,
as a peculiar form of representation; as the representation of immediacy, or
as immediacy interpreted as a representation of reality. If knowledge was
ultimately fated to express human estrangement from the non-human world,
then the aesthetic might effect a rapprochement with that lost world; a form
of immediacy specific to modernity. The aesthetic, that is to say, constituted
an immediate relation to the world in terms of feeling rather than a mediated
relation in terms of knowledge. The aesthetic invoked a non-discursive
presence. The paradoxical character of all the arts in modern society, there-
fore, was their commitment to represent the non-representational aspect of
reality; to convey the mute presence otherwise withdrawn to some remote
corner of the world. Through appearance alone the arts sought to make
present that which had no appearance (while the sciences, it might be
added, revealed the mechanisms of Nature which lay hidden within and
beneath that appearance) (Marin, 1999; Stoichita, 1995, 1997).
The peculiar, though not exclusive, task of art was to break the other-
wise withdrawnness of modern experience into itself. The most widely
discussed aspect of this paradoxical situation had focused on the notion of
the sublime and the conventions of sublimity in the pictorial arts. Poussin's
rendering of tempests, for example, has been strikingly interpreted by Marin
(and by the artist himself) as depictions of the sublime (Marin, 1999). The
artist's attempt to paint the sublime is a double contradiction; a modaliza-
tion of the impossible; a kind of transposed hieroglyph of the ungraspable.
The sublime in, or, rather, beyond Nature is suggested or hinted at by the
tempest; wild, unpredictable, violent, a rending of nature as a uniform and
continuous being; a disruption of, and irruption into, the realm of univer-
sality and necessity, at the very moment that Nature had finally been
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 7
conceptualized by science as absolutely uniform. This miraculous break-
down of the natural order is at once violent and awe-inspiring. The painter
attempts to represent this, to paint something that cannot be represented
because it is not a thing at all, nor even a gesture of Nature. It is something
altogether beyond empirical reality, and the artist invokes in this
(mis)representation a certain terrifying freedom of reality to form and express
itself in a wholly unpredictable fashion. For Poussin, the problem of painting
is essentially the problem of the sublime; of how art can divest itself of its
appearance and convey not what it designates but what it signifies. Later
Romantic painters, such as Friedrich and Turner, transposed the issue of the
sublime to one of pure subjectivity and used wilderness landscapes to
suggest the fathomless abyss of the human soul (Honor, 1981; Koerner,
1990). This perspective, it is worth noting, was by no means anti-scientific
in its vision of nature (Gusdorf, 1993; Larson, 1994; Mitchell, 1993).
Modern aesthetics became preoccupied with what amounted to an
essentially new conception of the sublime. The term itself had a long history
rooted in Ancient oratory. Longinus, thus, described the sublime as the irre-
sistible and mysterious power of speech:
For the excellence of elevated language is, not to persuade the hearers, but
to entrance them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with
wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us. The extent
to which we can be persuaded is usually under our own control, but these
sublime passages exert an irresistible force and mastery, and get the upper
hand with every hearer. (Longinus, 1965: 100)
In modern aesthetics, however, the sense of defencelessness became enig-
matic; it was powerlessness in the face of our own nature. This involved an
important development within the new aesthetics itself; a development that
can be summarized in terms of the difference between the approaches of
Burke and Kant. There is a transition here from an objective associationist
account of feeling to an exploration of interior subjectivity. In Burke the
sublime is an aspect of the `objective' character of the stimulus; of exterior
reality, which is in itself terrifying, magnificent and so on. But, for Kant, the
emphasis lay entirely on the subjective side ­ on the inconceivability of the
sublime and the abyss into which this throws the subject; a self-undermin-
ing of the self. This latter view is philosophically more penetrating but more
difficult to illustrate.
Artists persisted in depicting the sublime as a wild landscape even
though, in principle, such visions cannot be other than picturesque. The
sublime is the intuition of infinity within the subject; the abyss of interior-
ity projected into a picture of the world. Kant himself had begun with a
Burkean view and progressively modified his understanding (Kant, 1960).
In the sublime, interior `space' is infinitized and becomes symmetrical with
exterior space. The subject, suspended between the two, is the meeting point
of two infinities; a view already espoused by Pascal. Consciousness, as a
8 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
result, no more adequately grasps and reflects interiority than it pentrates
the pure Otherness of the `thing-in-itself'. Indeed, the `thing-in-itself' is
nothing other than a projection of the illusion of completeness and finite-
ness of the interior world of subjectivity; and once this has been broken
down, or broken through, it dissolves into nothingness.
The immediacy that Kierkegaard was to take as the distinguishing
criteria of the aesthetic is, therefore, already a strange and involuntary
imposition of the soul upon itself. And it is not pleasure alone, but self-
generated feelings of all sorts, which is its content. Pleasure orients the
aesthetic sphere in much the same way that goodness orients the ethical or
reason orients cognition and reflection; it is the normal tendency, the
expected and unsurprising direction of discourse and action, the movement
towards a conclusion and a satisfaction of some sort. But immediacy is,
equally, unpleasure and the perversity of the senses. There is a kind of
negative sublime; an infinite negativity found in irony and the defiance of
the spirit against itself. It is the negative sublime that we encounter in some
of Dostoevsky's extraordinary characters and, more generally, in the abyss
which is the experience of combat.
The Aesthetics of Combat
If the character of modern experience generally may be grasped aestheti-
cally, then combat (the essential experience of warfare) may be viewed as
the sublime potentiation of one of modernity's most characteristic features.
The study of warfare, and especially of combat, becomes a kind of applied
aesthetics.
There is, first of all, a straightforward sense in which an aesthetics of
combat has become significant. The most direct way in which people now
become informed of the experience of warfare is by reading novels and
watching films. Moreover, the western war literature of the 20th century has
been quite fundamental to the transformation of the novel as well as to the
development of our understanding of combat. There is an `elective affinity'
between the development of the modern novel and combat experience;
something that makes war one of the given themes of modern literature, and
literary art the primary modality for our grasping the modern, western
experience of war. The literary treatment of national and revolutionary wars
was vital for the development of classic realism in the novels of, for example
Stendhal, Balzac and Tolstoy as the development of total war was for Emile
Zola and Theodor Fontane. The specific literary reconstruction of the First
World War, of course, is fundamental to the development of a culture of
modernism throughout the 20th century (Eksteins, 1989). The literary inno-
vation and originality of, for example, Claude Simon, Ernest Hemingway,
Céline, Jules Romains, Ford Madox Ford, James Jones, Joseph Heller and
many others is unimaginable outside the context of the encounter with war
which conditioned their mature literary recreation of reality (Fussell, 1975;
Hynes, 1998; Rieuneau, 1974).
There is in addition, however, a more penetrating sense in which an
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 9
aesthetics of combat becomes meaningful. Combat is an extreme form of
experience and, as commonly with aesthetic judgement, it is easy to be
misled by its overwhelming objectivity into making the error of positivism;
of `explaining' the experience by a presumed external reality. But here, as
elsewhere, experience is by definition a humanly and socially constituted
phenomenon; a constructed reality.
The aesthetic construction of the experience of modern combat may
be outlined in terms of several crucial `categories'.
Terror
Burke begins his Philosophical Enquiry with a helpful general statement:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea 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. (Burke,
1990: 36)
It would hardly seem contentious to regard terror as the central experience
of modern combat! Interestingly, however, it is relatively recently that this
has been recognized, and has been so only as a result of the outstanding
work of scholars, including Ashworth (1980), Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker
(2000), Ellis (1990, 1999), Holmes (1985), Keegan (1991) and Linderman
(1997), who have sought to write partial histories of modern warfare, and
modern combat, from the perspective of the ordinary combatant. Yet, matters
are not quite so straightforward. The terror of the sublime bears a phenom-
enological kinship to the (oppositely evaluated) dread of the sacred; a
momentary conceptual and sensory dizziness which opens the soul to its
own abysmal interiority (Otto, 1959; van den Leeuw, 1963). And for the
soldier, also, the sublime begins in something exterior and irresistible. But
where the sacred has the potential to flood the soul and create a new and
deeper selfhood, the soldier's terror remains something external, imposed
and physical; fear crushes the body rather than liberates the soul.
A deeper insight into the connection between the aesthetics of the
sublime and the experience of terror can be gained through a consideration
of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Here, the sublime is `a presentation of an
indeterminate concept of reason' and arises:
. . . by a feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by
a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be
no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination's reason. (Kant,
1960: 91)
Indeed, he counts it `a negative pleasure' an alternate attraction/repulsion.
In terms of objects of nature, whereas the beautiful is a self-contained
form, the sublime `contravenes our power of judgement' and seems to be
`ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage
10 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
on the imagination' (Kant, 1960: 91). The sublime `cannot be contained in
any sensuous form', nonetheless, some such form may suggest the sublime
as a pure idealization. In a formula borrowed from St Anselm he charac-
terizes the sublime as the `absolutely great', something `beyond all compari-
son'. The sublime is to the realm of immediate feeling what the infinite is
to the concept of reason, or the Absolute is to the realm of Being; neither
presentable nor representable; a paradox. It is a paradox, nonetheless, into
which we can enter by way of its literary transformation.
Here, for example, is a fine, extended description of battleground fear,
from the most comprehensive and subtle of all modern war fictions, Jules
Romains' sublime novel, Verdun (first published in 1938 as part of his huge
novel cycle Men of Good Will):
Jerphanion was conscious of a sudden change of mood, a special kind of
shock which he had no difficulty in recognising since it had happened to him
before. It was as though he had been completely transported from one state
of being to another. All his senses were equally affected, eyes, lungs, mind,
and limbs. Nothing, within him or without, but was different from what it had
been a moment before. Each nerve-end seemed suddenly conscious of a
feeling of oppression, of something between excruciating pain and strangu-
lation. Every organ of his body felt as though it had been caught up and
constricted. He had a sensation of being tightly squeezed, while at the same
moment something seemed to click in his brain. No doubt about what had
happened. His head, his hands, the stretched skin of his chest, the way his
blood circulated through veins and arteries, his sense of the passage of time,
his anticipation of what the next moments would bring ­ it was as though his
whole conscious being had become aware that it was set in a vice which some
hand had turned quite definitely, though quite gently. His body seemed to
contract within a narrowing sheath with an effect of tingling. He could find
relief only, as it were, by shrivelling up inside himself, by making himself
smaller. His eyes, on the contrary, felt distended, as though they had been
just noticeably pushed outwards from their orbits. Some stranger to this place,
meeting him suddenly, could not but have been struck by his expression. His
brain, too, as though in an effort to escape, or as though subjected to some
uprush from within, felt like a living thing pressing heavily against the confin-
ing skull made more rigid by the steel of his helmet. There was nothing in
the experience that could be called acute pain; quite the contrary, nothing
like a sudden shock to be followed by an easing of the strain. What was
happening seemed deliberately to avoid getting worse; rather, it appeared to
be establishing itself as a chronic state. His mind might register what had
occurred like a singing in the ears, but only to resign itself forthwith to the
thing's continuance. `It's come. Incredible though it may seem, it's come, as
it came before.' (Romains, 2000: 53­4)
This is:
. . . a fear unaccompanied by any sense of shock or even by a noticeable trem-
bling of the limbs, free of any merely episodic character or of those automatic
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 11
reactions which might absorb and dissipate it, of anything, especially, that
bore the remotest resemblance to a movement of flight; a sensation that was
the concentrated essence of fear in its harshest form. (Romains, 2000: 55)
His first acquaintance with this fear had been overlaid `by a curiosity
so novel and so strong, by so violent an effort to show himself equal to the
occasion . . . with the surge within himself of great waves of nervous excite-
ment and exaltation'. But now no longer curious, he becomes aware of the
impossibility of avoidance: `One loses even the mystical respect for danger
. . . this particular manifestation of fear had just got to be accepted as some-
thing quite simple, without frills, without variation, without even the power
to develop, that went on and on' (Romains, 2000: 57). In the combat zone
fear is not a transitory feeling, or a psychological disposition; it is a perma-
nent state of being; it is something corporeal, indeed, it is the mode of
embodiment specific to combat.
For Burke (1990: 53), as for Romains and Kant, `no passion so effec-
tually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear'. This
is no discovery. Military authorities already knew all this, and sought
through training and discipline to provide the fear-stricken soldier with a
series of automatic activities; responses that would become habitual even
in the face of terror, and might serve to fill the sublime void with a comfort-
ing action. `Combat effective' troops keep the sublime at bay; for a time at
least, and desublimate their terror, by learned mechanical activity.
Burke additionally lists obscurity, power, privation, vastness and
infinity as accessory symptoms of the sublime. `Infinity', he says, has a
tendency to fill the mind with the sort of `delightful horror, which is the most
genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime' (Burke, 1990: 67). These
characteristics, equally, could be amplified and illustrated from memoir and
fictional sources. But each, in turn, would become a point of transition
between two worlds, and open on to a reality so transformed that these words
themselves fail to convey the altered state of being to which they refer. In
a more general way the negative sublime of combat can be grasped as
suspension of everything that makes our world meaningful, predictable and
manageable.
Chance
Combat, that is to say, is a world unlike any other; a world of confusion and
chaos, a kind of anti-world. Its sublime Otherness is made real for us, above
all, as the negation of order. On the battlefield Chance rules supreme.
In a radical sense the soldier cannot act. By virtue of his presence in
the midst of chaos the soldier, in fact, surrenders to Chance. The conditions
of modern warfare are impersonal, the enemy is distant and invisible, death
is doled out on an industrial scale. Jules Romains, once again, is a reliable
guide to the subtle interplay of rationalized forms and experiential chaos
which typifies the combat zone:
12 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
There was the actual front line, a place characterized by surprise strokes, by
primitive violence, by catastrophes confined within fairly localized limits, by,
in short, a confused activity in which chance, the unexpected, and the incal-
culable necessarily played a considerable part. But behind that lay a zone
marked by totally different features, the zone of `command', where the matter
of prime importance was to know what was happening, to foresee and, as far
as possible, to determine what should happen. (Romains, 2000: 115)
Combat literature abounds in examples of the rule of Chance.
Remarque, for example, tells us:
The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen.
We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncer-
tainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we
neither know nor can determine where it will fall. . . . A few months ago I
was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to
visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be
seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back
to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the
interval it had been buried. . . . No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But
every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck. (Remarque, 1963: 70)
Ernst Jünger describes similar experiences. He recounts an incident
in which a soldier pauses for a moment to converse with someone and sees
just ahead a shell explode at the point he would otherwise have reached. In
another case a soldier shelters from fire and heavy rain and, moments later,
sees a shell explode where he had been standing. Later:
. . . the same performance was repeated; only this time, as it was fine, I stood
outside the farmhouse. The next shell fell right in the middle of it. Such are
the chances of war. Here more than anywhere it is a case of little causes and
great effects. Seconds and millimetres make the difference. (Jünger, 1996:
211)
Romains, with characteristic amplitude of vision, comes to include the
high command within the domain of sublime chaos. The war in its entirety
could be viewed only from a vast distance `where conscious Will is no longer
lord of all, but only Chance' (2000: 35). At both the senior command, and
in the field, `At both ends of the scale, therefore, the indeterminate, the
unknown, the hand of chance, held sway . . .' (2000: 36­7). The zone of
rationality shrinks to insignificance.
The soldier is forced to wager his life and can do little to improve the
odds in favour of surviving. Most, unsurprisingly, accept their new and
incomprehensible world as the imposition of an ineluctable Fate. The
experience of Chance, it should be noted, has little to do with the rational-
ized activity of assessing risk, or the calculation of probability; it is a direct
exposure to the radical contingency of a reality in the face of which human
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 13
powers of reason, foresight, prudence and virtue are ineffective; even magic
loses its potency to reassure, or religion to console.
The combination of Fear and Chance effects a total transformation in
experience; indeed, transforms the character of experience itself.
Totality
The sublime is ungraspable Otherness; combat is ungraspable Otherness.
But there is nothing elusive or spiritually edifying in the latter (though Ernst
Jünger loudly proclaimed it as a value). Where the sublime in art indicates
radical transcendence that bounds and deforms reality by its presence, the
sublime of combat is forcefully, overwhelmingly and inescapably actual.
Combat is sublime immanence. It is, nonetheless, the antithesis of the
mundane or ordinary world; it is the contradiction of an actual sublime; a
paradoxical non-transcendental Otherness. This illogical formulation allows
us, from the security of the library or study, to enter, imaginatively but more
completely, into the world of combat.
The aesthetics of combat is not a perverse attempt to glimpse beauty
in the phenomena of war but, more importantly, a practical realization of
the programme of philosophical aesthetics. That is, rather than subject
reality to reason and objectify it falsely as an abstract system of relations
and equilibria; reality is recovered and dignified in terms of immediate
experience. This effort to rediscover reality finds its greatest success in
modern warfare; elsewhere (for example in leisure, consumption, art), the
aesthetic is compromised by being assimilated to a theory of representation.
But here, rather than imitate a greater but hidden reality, or reduce reality
to nothing but a series of arbitrary signs, the aesthetic gains its own inner
coherence in a practical demonstration of destructive power. Warfare is a
real presence, not a system of signs. It is not something to be understood,
but, imposing itself as an absolutely objective reality, constitutes an
inescapable event.
The sublime aesthetic object is self-enclosed; a world rather than a
differentiated segment of normal experience. It opens for us a new reality
that is quite distinct from our everyday existence. Combat, similarly, is a
world apart. Gerald Linderman's excellent book The World within War
(1997) makes this explicit and describes what appear to be its central
features with care and precision. And Richard Holmes (1985: 149) remarks
that `the battlefield is a unique and alien land, with logic, rules and values
of its own'. But, rather than enrich experience with another full and
meaningful reality, it is the exact antithesis of all meaning and all experi-
ence. It is a world of negation and nothingness. Combat is not just another
reality, a variation, as it were, of ordinary life, it is an inversion of every-
thing that makes ordinary life possible; it is radical Otherness, negative
existence; `Here there was no semblance of meaning'; here the soldier is
`initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanation would
be forever impossible' (Mailer, 1993: 245). The radical character of this
negation leaves nothing untouched.
14 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
The Senses
In the other world of combat sensory experience is transformed; it is differ-
ently constituted and ordered. The senses turn inwards. To take just one
aspect of what is, in fact, a thoroughgoing metamorphosis, in combat,
hearing rather than vision becomes the dominant sense. The soldier is
rooted to the spot, movement is unnatural; space is oriented vertically in
terms of the Earth and the Sky rather than horizontally and directionally in
terms of a near and far horizon. The so-called `front' is usually invisible;
the enemy cannot be seen, neither can the vast majority of his fellow soldiers
or commanders. Battle itself obscures the visual field with smoke, vapour
and poisonous gas. And there is danger on every side, the risk of being
shelled by your own side is ever-present. Jünger, cooler under fire than most
it seems, admits to being confused; `what puzzled me most of all was why
it went on from all sides' (1996: 25).
The soldier is attuned to sound, hearing is his most acute sense and
works without conscious reflection:
At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of
our being, a thousand years. . . . A man is walking along without a thought
or heed:­ suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of frag-
ments flies harmlessly over him;­ yet he cannot remember either to have
heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down.
(Remarque, 1963: 42)
Sound is continuous and becomes one of the few meaningfully differ-
entiated aspects of the sensory world:
The thunder of the guns swells to a single heavy roar and then breaks up
again into separate explosions. The dry bursts of the machine-guns rattle.
Above us the air teems with invisible swift movement, with howls, pipings,
and hisses. They are smaller shells; ­ and amidst them, booming through the
night like an organ, go the great coalboxes and the heavies. They have a
hoarse, distant bellow like a rutting stag and make their way high above the
howl and whistle of the smaller shells. (Remarque, 1963: 44)
Romains, similarly, notes the priority of sound:
Now and then the ear was utterly dazed by a single, absolutely hellish crash
accompanied by a sheet of flame. Then an unceasing and sharp swishing gave
the impression again that hundreds of pound weights were flying after each
other through the air with incredible velocity. Then came another dud,
plunging with a short, heavy thump that shook the solid earth all round.
Shrapnel exploded by the dozen, as prettily as crackers, scattering their little
bullets in a heavy shower, with the empty cases whizzing after them. When
a shell went up near-by, the soil rattled down in a torrent, and with it the
jagged splinters as sharp as razors rent the air on all sides. (Romains, 2000:
93)
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 15
Everyone listens `with the peculiar intentness that concentrates all thought
and sensation in the ear' (2000: 93). And sound is the only sense that might
be of any use: `In the face of the enemy the senses are always on the look-
out; and it is remarkable that, at such moments, quite ordinary sounds can
give one the instant conviction, "Something is up!"' (2000: 148).
In fact hearing does not so much become the dominant sense, as the
common denominator of sensation; a kind of general kinaesthesia that
begins with sound and ends in a general, undifferentiated pressure on the
surface of the body; the weight of fear, which Romains so well describes, is
first of all heard. Sensations, rather than discriminating and distinguishing
objects in the world, all focus and return to the body. All sensation ends in
the dark, shadowy mass of the body. Reality is muffled, colourless, close,
aversive but inescapable. It is unrelentingly painful. It is felt rather than
seen or heard or distinctly touched; it is felt, rather, as a continuous, engulf-
ing pressure.
Corporeality
The weight of fear presses the soldier to the ground. Remarque, in an extra-
ordinary passage, emphasizes the appropriateness of the Rabelasian
grotesque body-image with which his novel begins (the pleasures of eating,
defecation and sleep are all prominent in the opening pages) with an erotic
hymn to the Earth; the natural abode of the soldier:
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us ­ mostly from the
earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he
presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face
and his limbs deep in her from fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only
friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence
and her security. (Remarque, 1963: 41)
The carnival of death invokes a precise inversion of the Renaissance body
image in which modernity was inaugurated. In place of the upright figure,
gazing into the distance, ordering the world through differentiating power
of sight, the weight of the body gathered internally as a mobile and vital
force, the combatant is crushed, face buried, guts dissolved, his entire
weight draped over him like a lead rug. The body is reduced to pure materi-
ality; to a heavy mass that somehow has to be dragged around. There is
something uncanny in this corporealization; a living out and living through
of the body shadow rather than the body image; it is the presence of death
(Ferguson, 2000).
De-differentiation
A general process of de-differentiation characterizes experience at the front.
Here everything is the same, not because all identities are equivalent but,
rather, because every individual is absorbed into a mass. The living and the
dead are mixed: `Among the living lay the dead. As we dug ourselves in we
16 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
found them in layers stacked one upon another. . . . Arms, legs, amid heads
stuck out stark above the lips of the craters' (Jünger, 1996: 99).
Habitation reduced to rubble becomes part of a uniformly blighted
landscape; there is no vegetation, the land is colourless; `The village of
Guilemont was distinguished from the landscape around it only because the
shell-holes there were of a whiter colour by reason of the houses which had
been ground to powder' (Jünger, 1996: 99). In retrospect soldiers recall the
battlefield in tones of grey, a striking distinction from their visualization in
contemporary, and ravishingly beautiful films, such as Apocalypse Now and
The Thin Red Line.
The desolate landscape conceals instruments of death; battle becomes
a normalized condition and not a singular and dramatic event:
The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable
eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one
moment on which all depends. Then from some hole in the ground a single
red light ascends in fiery prelude. A thousand guns roar out, and at a touch,
driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes on. . . . Everyone
feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts
him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death. (Jünger, 1996: 118)
Total war reaches out from the battlefield; the distinction between soldier
and civilian becomes meaningless; entire populations are the enemy;
everyone is a combatant. The idea of the `home front' and the civilian `war
effort' and the reorganization of everyday life becomes imperative. Military
command becomes ubiquitous, along with destruction, resignation and fear.
Derealization
It is as if all reality being, so to speak, concentrated in the body, the world
ceases to exist; or, at least, becomes strangely dematerialized. This, it
seems, is the specific character of the sublime in combat, and the source of
its peculiar ecstasy. Jünger reports this transition from sensory bombard-
ment to the derealization of the world:
The roar of the battle had become so terrific that we were scarcely in our right
senses. The nerves could register fear no longer. . . . Everyone was mad and
beyond reckoning; we had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman
perspectives. . . the godlike and the bestial inextricably mingled. (1996: 254)
More commonly, combatants have described their experiences at
moments of extreme danger and the overpowering of the senses as akin to
dreaming, or walking into a filmscreen, or photograph. Jünger himself
remarks that he was overtaken by:
A feeling of unreality. . . . It was so mysterious so impersonal. . . . The impres-
sion of something arising entirely from beyond the pale of experience was so
strange that it was difficult to see the connection of things. It was like a ghost
at noon. (1996: 3)
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 17
And Remarque concurs:
The front is so absorbing that previous life ceases to exist; a landscape
encountered in a previous life takes on the appearance of a photograph a row
of poplars which had been the landscape of his youth became `a soundless
apparition'. (1963: 82)
Or, to take an example from a later experience, James Jones (1998:
163) tells us that in the war zone `there was no semblance of meaning . . .
it felt like being in a film'. A feeling, oddly, `that something more import-
ant, more enthralling should happen'. The `virtual reality' of the combat zone
is an aspect of fear and chance, not of modern technology; it was already
described this way by Jünger:
. . . we looked at all those dead with dislocated limbs, distorted faces, and
the hideous colour of decay as though we walked in a dream through a garden
of strange plants and we could not realize at first what we had all around us.
(quoted in Holmes, 1985: 177)
The common experience of the soldier in battle is `the certainty that none
of it was real' (Mailer, 1993: 195).
Romains has an interesting description of a night battle:
. . . an extraordinary battle of ghosts. . . . No one knew exactly what was
happening to his right and left. Men recognized their nearest neighbours as
friends by the sounds of their voices, the outline of their figures, the heavy
breathing, the grumblings and exclamations bristling with familiar vocables,
which surged and eddied with the moving mass of the bodies. They identified
the enemy by reason of some difference in outline, by some strangeness in
the noises they emitted, and chiefly in response to an obscure feeling, which
the mere material situation of the two sides was insufficient to explain, that
he was on the opposite side, that he was against them. They were conscious
of his pressure, and aware that it was they who formed the obstacle, the prin-
ciple of resistance, which must neutralize, counterbalance, and overcome his
effort. (2000: 317­18)
To this dematerialization and desubstantialization can also be traced the
comfort which the wholly inadequate protection of a somewhat inclined
stance, a flimsy barricade, even a scrap of cardboard seems to afford the
soldier; and the extraordinary way in which attacking troops seek to ward
off bullets by brushing them aside with their hands.
From the Sublime to the Subliminal
The radical, negative sublimity of the combat zone means that events
cannot, so to speak, emerge from it into the light of normal current experi-
ence. Extreme, violent and destructively actual as it is, combat is somehow
not quite real. As combat is a world apart, the recollection, within it, of a
18 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
previously peaceable existence becomes `a soundless apparition'. Indeed,
`here in the trenches' such memories become `completely lost to us. They
arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are
a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us.' And even if they were
revived and given back `it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead
comrade' (Remarque, 1963: 83). The `real-time' experience of combatants
is lost to us, and to them; as sublimely inaccessible as the immediate experi-
ence of a dream.
Memory and possibility are squeezed from the combat zone; the
subjunctive has no role in its overwhelming immediacy and, therefore,
human autonomy ­ which is humanity ­ cannot survive within it. Combat
is a thin, brutal facticity; an impossible combination of the absolute and the
arbitrary.
We can approach combat through notions of fear and chance but
cannot by such congenial means adequately grasp its fearful quality; the
closure of its world within itself resists all conceptual blandishments. The
sublime defeats all power of conceptualization, and combat ­ the most
dramatically real of any form of sublimity ­ becomes shrouded in the strange
simultaneous mysteries of corporealization and dematerialization.
Romains anticipates our difficulties; one of his characters despairs of
conveying to his friend the character of his current experience:
. . . the long privation of all things that make life real. . . . It is natural that
you should be infinitely curious. Incidentally, let me say that you've missed
something in not having the experience for yourself. No letter, no amount of
talk, and, still more, no literary descriptions in second-rate books ­ and books
on the war cannot but be second-rate ­ could ever give you the faintest idea
of the reality. . . . The most one can do is to throw one's line at a venture in
the hope of hooking some fragment of experience that may serve as evidence,
or, rather, as one scrap of evidence among others. I try to think forward to
the day when some man will try to put together the thousand and one state-
ments of those who were witnesses of these events which at present are
beyond the power of thought to compass. What will he make of them? God
knows!. . . I no sooner write down a phrase than I want to scratch it out again
as false, conventional, intolerably one-sided, as a wholly distorted view of the
facts. (Romains, 2000: 147­8)
The radical novelty of combat means that it cannot be grasped by the
imagination. Jünger carefully notes the misleading character of all antici-
pation of battle:
The horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew
us into the war. . . . And now at our first glance of horror we had a feeling
that is difficult to describe. Seeing and recognising are matters, really, of
habit. In the case of something quite unknown the eye alone can make
nothing of it. So it was that we had to stare again and again at these things
that we had never seen before, without being able to give them any meaning.
It was too entirely unfamiliar. (Jünger, 1996: 23)
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 19
A subsequent process of `familiarization' with destruction and disorder
serves only to render unexceptional, but not less mysterious, the phantom
images of war.
It is for the very same reason that combat is difficult to recall. The
combat literature of the 20th century emerged only a significant interval
after each major war. The struggle to remember is linked directly to the
transformation in experience that is essential to combat. To pile paradox
upon contradiction we might say that combat is not an experience at all ­
the most immediate, direct, aesthetically overwhelming of events is, from
another perspective, so alien, strange and Other, as to be devoid of the very
conditions of experience itself. The sublime cannot be conceptualized; it
cannot be anticipated or remembered; it is the incursion of an Absolute and,
as such, cannot be assimilated to the multiple and relativized perspectives
of any possible `normal' experience.
The detachment and difference of combat ­ what seems at first to
render it opaque to every analytic and descriptive effort of clarification ­ is
a difficulty which, however, and in an unexpected way, allows combat to be
reconnected with the entire development of contemporary society and
culture.
At the beginning of the 20th century the problem of memory arose in
a particular and pressing way. Memory, along with every other human
capacity and activity, was transformed in the emergence and development
of modernity; it became primarily an inward and personal secret; the hidden
history of the ego. Memory enabled individuals effortlessly to connect their
own past to a possible future in which their inherent uniqueness and poten-
tiality could be realized. The task of self-development, indeed, was accepted
by many as a quasi-religious duty and became fundamental to the entire
modern orientation to reality. But towards the end of the 19th century the
practical and theoretical difficulties of this task ­ the conception of personal
existence as a quest for authentic self-expression and self-realization ­ over-
powered every serious effort to satisfy its demands. Hysteria formed the
context for the emergence of Freud's psychology as well as for a variety of
now largely forgotten psychological theories of ego-fragmentation, double-
consciousness and the multiplication of disconnected memories, and its
characteristics were all so many symptoms of the internal breakdown of the
major modern tradition of ego psychology; of experience viewed as the
domain of the individuated and interiorized ego (Ferguson, 1996; Hacking,
1995).
What emerged from this crisis were new conceptions of the role of
memory in the constitution of experience. Rather than regard memory as a
record of past events, it was recognized as a creative process that entered
intimately into the constitution of every experience. Every experience is an
experience only to the extent that it is already memorable; that is to say, it
is already integrated with recollections of the past and imagined futures.
This process, in which memory becomes a continually shifting focus and
transformation of attention, is one of the fundamental modalities of
20 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
experience; and it is the continuous voluntary shifting of such modalities
and their perspectives that is productive of the characteristic `substantial-
ity' of actual events and actual experiences (Casey, 2000).
At the end of the 20th century a similarly diverse literature on collec-
tive memory has emerged. Samuel (1994), Nora (1992­6), Winter (1995),
Mosse (1990) and many others have discussed the century in terms of the
process of constructing and reconstructing a shared `memory' of its past.
This, we must suppose, indicates a crisis in the life of the modern state,
nation or community, in much the same way that, a century before, the
problem of memory indicated a crisis of personal identity. If the collectivity
is to be real, it must be continually present in memory and imagination; it
must establish the rich texture of residues that make up the everyday world
of appearance. And to this end the recollection of war is fixed upon as a
central locus of such memory; the moment in which the collective life of the
nation became real and the link between personal identity and collective
life could be forged anew and in ways which avoided the solipsism of the
classical ego or the fragmentation of its postclassical alternatives.
The myth of modern war was manufactured afresh with each major
conflict; as was the myth of nationhood, community and the common destiny
of the people (Mosse, 1990). But in viewing war as the constructive prin-
ciple of identity; such myths betray themselves, and cannot sustain them-
selves in the face of the personal records of modern combat too briefly
alluded to above. Combat cannot be an experience from which personal and
social identities are forged for the simple reason that it is not an experience
at all!
In combat, identity is lost; surrendered to impenetrable processes
which can be ascribed a meaning only at the cost of denying their
real/unreal character. The incommensurability of combat with `normal'
experiences renders the whole process of collective memorializing an inven-
tion; it is war re-invented, not remembered; and invented as something quite
different to that which, in its essential aspects, cannot be remembered at
all. In retrospect the sublime ecstasy of war becomes subliminal.
Trauma, Remembering and Forgetting
The problem of memory arises here just because the self or, rather, the ego
is lost in combat. The solidity and self-composure of the ego as an individ-
uated experiencing subject are washed away in combat, so that `experience'
itself becomes clouded; something other than the ego striding through the
world or contemplating a beautiful landscape. The striking affinity between
literary fiction and combat in modern society now becomes clearer in terms
of the formal transformation of normality that they both imply. Where the
novel is a dreamworld, combat might be thought of as the inversion of the
dream. The dream became a literary theme with the birth of the novel at
the very outset of modernity, and a preoccupation with dreams and dreaming
links Golden Age Spanish literature with both literary modernism and the
new `art of memory' practised in different ways by Freud and Proust
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 21
(Ferguson, 1996). The dream we know we have created for ourselves but
cannot help experiencing it as an objective reality; combat appeared to its
participants as pure externality, yet they are bound to encounter its awful-
ness as a sublime subjectivity. These symmetrical but opposed transform-
ations make the fiction of combat more `real' than either the memory of the
actual events or their objective, historical-sociological reporting. Anyone,
including war veterans, who genuinely wants to discover what combat is
`like', gains the greatest insight from reading James Jones or Jules Romains.
These novels, it should be admitted, even where they are `based' on actual
experiences of their authors, are not recollections but ­ in a masterly fashion
­ constitute that fictional transformation which alone makes available to us
the rich content of the events themselves. Thus, Caruth notes the role of
literature in reclaiming memory. The past must be recreated, even fiction-
alized, to be remembered. To be faithful to the reality of the past, therefore,
Alan Resnais, rather than produce the documentary for which he had been
commissioned, with Marguerite Duras invented the authentic memorial,
Hiroshima mon amour (Caruth, 1995).
Combat is forgotten just because, in destroying the ego, it destroys the
possibility of it being experienced in the first place; combat is not configured
as an experience, it is, rather, an episode of unreality. It is an inexperience.
And in order to be recalled, an inexperience has first of all to be trans-
formed. Hence the importance of the war memoir, especially the imagin-
ative reconstruction. Hence also the delay in the process of recall; this is
due less to the suppression of painful recollections, than to the difficulty of
effecting a constructive transformation.
Where battle is remembered (or, rather, misremembered) it is because
it is imagined in advance and spliced into existing experience so that, after-
wards, it can gain in immediacy by being recollected. Verdun, as Antoine
Prost points out, was recollected and celebrated as a symbol of the nation
after the war because so many soldiers were prepared (however inade-
quately) in advance for the encounter. Almost the entire French army was
involved, the method of replacing divisions meant everyone took a turn.
`Before experiencing the battle, they had imagined it, and that experience
later fed the collective imagination.' Thus, after the war, Verdun quickly
became a sacred place; a place of sacrifice and consecration; `Going to
Verdun was a kind of initiation: anticipated, vaguely foreseen, feared, and
inevitable' (Nora, 1992­6: 383). Romains, characteristically, describes the
more common case, the unanticipated and, therefore, unremembered, battle:
`Men in the antipodes spoke of the war's horrors, but since no one had
experienced them, they found them difficult to imagine' (2000: 34).
Combat, therefore, is first of all recalled through inadequate stereo-
types current in an earlier existence; stereotypes which condition even
accomplished literary memoirs such as those of Robert Graves, Edmund
Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, whose war recollections have their psycho-
logical roots as firmly in the English public school as they do in the trenches
(Blunden, 2000; Fussell, 1975; Graves, 1998; Sassoon, 2000). Normal
22 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
memory, it should be emphasized, is also a social relation and is not less
so in its bourgeois and individuated interior form (Connerton, 1989; Halb-
wachs, 1992). From Rousseau onwards the fiction of the self is the illusion
of personal memory as an isolated and objective recollection of the past.
The modern history of the notion of shock and trauma is an important
link between the inexperience of combat and the formation of new transient
identities. Combat is one of the most significant processes at work in the
establishment of empathic identities. During the latter part of the 19th
century the concept of physical trauma was introduced as an explanation
for the psychological disturbances, particularly disturbances of memory
function, which were, apparently, becoming more common. The idea was
introduced in part as a means of dealing with legal claims for compensa-
tion, arising particularly from railway accidents (Piero, 1988; Young,
1995). The great French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, took up the
notion and extended it as a general nosological category; but one linked to
hysteria. Only the hysterical were likely to sustain long-term physical or
psychological damage through physical trauma; congenital weakness
predisposed some people, particularly young women, it was held, to develop
memory loss and a variety of hysterical symptoms in the wake of physical
shock. The experience of the shock was itself undergone in a `dissociated'
state; a detached and dreamy condition characterized by a somnambulistic
lack of attention (Antze and Lambek, 1996; Ferguson, 1996).
The ideas of suggestion and suggestibility, as of nervous excitement
and neurasthenia, were also widely discussed as possibly predisposing some
people to long-term symptom formation after trauma. Forgetting the details
of the initial circumstances was commonplace and, in fact, often made
establishing legal claims more difficult.
Freud presented a new view; the trauma was a psychologically
meaningful event rather than the result of a physical shock; and its forget-
ting was motivated by an unconscious act of suppression or denial. The
theory became increasingly elaborate and sophisticated, leading to a
comprehensive theory of the neuroses. Again the forgetting is involuntary,
though here it is motivated unconsciously. His initial supposition was that
the traumatic memory, inscribed on the body as symptom, would disappear
once the meaningful form and mnemonic content were uncovered and trans-
lated. A good deal of Freud's subsequent development of a psychoanalytic
theory was an effort on his part to explain why this had not proved to be the
case.
However, as a direct result of studies of `shell-shock' during and
immediately after the First World War, shock theory was revived. Shell-
shock victims might be understood as suffering just the kind of circum-
stances Charcot had described; only here, as the shock was so great, even
normal and robust young men suffered physical and mental breakdown,
displaying symptoms characteristic of hysteria, including amnesia of the
precipitating event itself (Leys, 2000).
Continuing studies of `battle fatigue' have encouraged a further
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 23
development of the notion of trauma as an incomplete experience rather
than a forgotten event. In current discussion there is an assumption that the
overwhelming character of the experience ­ not only emotionally and phys-
ically, but cognitively ­ makes it a detached and fragmented event; in fact,
not an experience at all (Caruth, 1995). An influential study makes the point
that `In important ways, an experience does not really exist until it can be
named and placed into larger categories' (van der Kolk et al., 1996: 4).
The result is that the trauma is not recalled and formed into a narra-
tive past and assimilated to an identity: `The memory of trauma is not inte-
grated and accepted as part of one's personal past; instead, it comes to exist
independently of previous schemata (i.e. it is dissociated)' (van der Kolk et
al., 1996: 7). And it should be noted this is largely due to the social isolation
of the war veteran, and the guilt associated with the events of combat.
Symptoms then become indicators of real experiences and not `illusions' of
some sort:
The past is relived with an immediate sensory and emotional intensity that
makes victims feel as if the event were occurring all over again. . . . Para-
doxically, even though vivid elements of the trauma intrude insistently in the
form of flashbacks and nightmares, many traumatized people have a great
deal of difficulty relating precisely what has happened. (van der Kolk et al.,
1996: 8­10)
Caruth (1995: 8) talks of the `inherent latency' in the event itself. The
`belatedness' of historical experience `since the traumatic event is not
experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another
place, and in another time' (Caruth, 1995: 8). She draws attention to the
paradox that `the person has experienced an event that is outside the range
of human experience'. In trauma the person is `possessed by the past' even
though the past has not yet been established as an experience. The term
`witnessing' has been introduced to describe the recovery of traumatic
memories:
As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces
of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled
into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as know-
ledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of
reference. (Felman and Laub, 1992: 5)
Massive trauma precludes its registration. . . . The victim's narrative . . . testi-
fies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite
of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence.
(Felman and Laub, 1992: 57)
The point here is that the trauma is once again defined as meaning-
less. Indeed, it is the meaninglessness of the shock that makes it an
inexperience and a detached trauma which revisits the victim in unexpected
24 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
memory flashes, heightened emotional states and panic attacks. The First
World War, it might be argued, represents, on a larger scale, a transition
from wars of meaningful sacrifice to wars of meaningless chaos. The dis-
orientation of the shell, the explosion, is the primal reality of modern war.
This was already clear to Barbusse, who remarks of his first exposure to
mortar fire; `It seemed to strike from all sides at once at his sense of equi-
librium. Had it come from left or right, from in front or from behind? Diffi-
cult to be sure' (1917: 97). Shell-shock was a widespread experience among
soldiers during the First World War and its `reception history' continues to
develop (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2000; Leys, 2000; Shepherd, 2000).
The heightened intensity of battle became prolonged and signalled the end
of any credible notion of glory in battle.
The trauma of war, and its forgetfulness, continues to infect not only
the combatant but the civilian, the scholar as well as the politician and the
citizen. Conventional reticence still censors many literary reconstructions
of the trenches. There is little mention of the loss of bodily control in combat,
or of sex in the combat zone, or of the peculiar and disturbing ecstasy of
violence (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 2000; Bourke, 1999). The real
extent and intensity of violence are paradoxically absent from most histories
of war; as is violence against the civilian population and violence against
one's own comrades. The widespread anomie that characterized the putative
civilian population during and immediately after wars is yet to receive the
attention it deserves.
War is not the only trauma; indeed, the history of contemporary society
might be written as a process of adaptation to, and normalization of, its
varied, overwhelming shocks. Modernity oscillates between the banal and
the shocking; the boring and the traumatic.
Modern War and the Normalization of the Sublime
Experience and memory are continually interrelated and mutually inter-
dependent. We do not simply `have' experiences that are later recalled.
Memory, rather, is continually reconstituted in and through experience; and
it is only through the continuous assimilation of the past that experience
itself becomes possible. New psychological and philosophical views of
memory emerged in modern society just at the time when the self-certainty
of the ego as a detached experiencing mechanism broke down. Radical
reassessments of the functioning of memory are found not only in the famous
writings of Bergson and Freud, and the literary explorations of Proust,
which, in different ways, sought to establish new insights into the constitu-
tive role of memory in every form of experience, they are also central to the
development of orthodox, academic psychology. In the wake of Charcot,
French psychologists in particular investigated disturbances of memory as
a privileged route towards the understanding of normal psychic life. The
work particularly of Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet was influential, and
their meticulous case studies of amnesias, fugues and memory disturbances
of all kinds, which seemed to indicate a breakdown of classical forms of
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 25
modern identity (Ellenberger, 1970; Hacking, 1995; Janet, 1965, 1977;
Ribot, 1882). The memory crisis, as it has more recently been called, marks
the onset of identification ­ transitory states of wishfulness ­ alongside, and
even supplanting, the fixity of equivalence and distinction as a character-
istic form of modern identity.
The `memory crisis' at the end of the 19th century was itself symptom-
atic of long-term changes in the social structure of memory. Pre-modern
memory is collective ­ a form of ritual in which the traditions of the
community are rooted and through which they are reinforced. At the same
time, a specific, artificial memory, or `art of memory', was developed as an
aspect of the study of rhetoric. Artificial memory was a field of practical
mnemonics, specifically designed to assist the orator in his public role
(Carruthers, 1990; Yates, 1969). Progressively, the visualizing techniques
of the art of memory became abstract and logical; the `place categories',
which organized the memory system and facilitated the recall of material
extraneous to the everyday practices of the community, operated most effec-
tively when they formed a `natural' system. Thus, in the modern period, the
rise of science (though itself an `artificial' system of representations)
replaced other memory systems with the logical structure of nature and
shifted the focus of attention away from its technical application towards
the conceptual and empirical properties of the system itself. And while arti-
ficial memory systems became naturalized, collective memory was reduced
to fit the internal dimensions of the ego. Modern memory, thus, became
internal, personal and individuated; the modality of selfhood.
In relation to this large-scale shift, it is tempting to argue that modern
war constitutes a residual collective memory; a genuinely communal experi-
ence in which the life of society can be replenished and take root (Winter,
1995; Winter and Sivan, 2000). But this can be misleading. Quite the
reverse is the case. It is modern warfare, and the inexperience of combat,
which is the specific trauma through which contemporary society, with its
fluid and dynamic identities, emerged from its own past, freed both from
traditions and modern, abstract conceptions of nature and reason. Contem-
porary memory is becoming ever more fluid and interactive, though not
genuinely collective. There is no past; it is a memory of the present; the
continuous reinvention and reliving of a dream. The `actual' past is denied,
not lost. For contemporary life, new possibilities of collective memory,
particularly film, provide a reproduction of visible forms of the past and
encourage a sense of the contemporaneity of all events. Identification with
our own past, and the past of others becomes deceptively free and immedi-
ate.
Freud's essays in the art of recollection stood on the boundary, indeed
marked the boundary, between a culture which sought authenticity and in
which reality seemed naturally to represent itself in the depth and solidity
of the ego, and a culture that celebrates the inauthentic and regards all
depth with metaphysical scepticism. A century after Freud, infatuation with
collective memory is a token of a similar transition from a society which is
26 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
viewed in terms of a continuous history, tradition and forms of differentia-
tion specific to its own past, and a society in which collective identities are
no more necessarily joined to the history of the nation than personal experi-
ence is joined to the history of the ego. In the floating world every form of
identity has about it an air of arbitrariness, a wilful construction as happy
to remake the past as to reinvent the future. Personal identity thus becomes
at best ironic, and the search for `meaningful' experience recoils from a
century in which meaningful experience was precisely meaningless, where
extremity and ultimate reality were met with in the battlefield and in the
unconstituted rawness of a reality that refused to turn itself into experience.
Modern warfare, inconceivable and forgotten, is a large-scale model
of contemporary life and the forms of inexperience common to it. War is an
extreme version of all those tendencies that, in apparently more benign
ways, have come to colour contemporary existence. War was a cruel
initiation rite; a mechanism for the destruction of memory and the ecstatic
birth of novelty (Eksteins, 1989). The flimsiness of the past, its thinness and
lack of substantiality, are linked also to the emergence of new body images
that, for men, also have their origin in the trauma of combat. War forced
open the hermetic seal of the bourgeois body ­ the carapace of the ego ­
and opened it to a multitude of new influences. The mass neurosis of war,
anticipated by the young female hysterics of the late 19th century, deliv-
ered the individual from the historically significant but now unnecessary
constraint of reason and nature. War created the human raw material for
advanced society; people sensitive to their own whims. People for whom
fashion was more significant than memory and for whom momentary identifi-
cations could provide an adequate basis for action.
The turbulence of war is the prototype modern fluidity (Bauman,
2000). Romains describes for us the viscosity of mass movements so charac-
teristic of modern warfare:
They discovered that the physical properties of men reckoned by millions
made up an element that conditioned and neutralised all considerations of
mere strategy. Armies of so vast a size were found to possess unexpected
fluidity, a tendency to flow into, and fill up, any holes that might be made in
their compact body, to envelop, impede, and turn the point of any opposing
thrust; to give beneath a blow, to bend without breaking, to seep outwards
from the flanks, covering more and more ground with an ever-shifting, ever-
active front, growing to such a size that the forces involved could be regarded
as nothing less than nations in arms, obstinately clinging to the ground they
covered, adapting themselves to the accidents of its surface, tracing, almost
instantaneously, with millions of pairs of arms, a continuous scratch over
which they formed like a scab and at every point of which they faced the
opposing lines with a ceaseless crackling of fire, a lethal trembling, as though
something tormented, burning and unapproachable had become installed as
a natural feature of the landscape. (Romains, 2000: 158)
And, he remarks, `We just let ourselves be swept along; the tide of danger
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 27
picks us up and carries us with it' (2000: 158) Remarque similarly describes
the fluid dynamics of war; `To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though
I am still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking
me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself' (1963: 41). These are obser-
vations that might equally apply to the peaceful activities of contemporary
life.
Romains, indeed, already makes the association between modern
warfare and leisure pursuits; not through the public school idiom of fair play
and muscular endeavour that characterized many of the English officers at
the outbreak of the First World War, but in terms of the mass character of
its movements. Describing an enemy attack, for example, he observes:
The moving mass was less like a crowd intent on reaching some definite goal
than a sauntering concourse with plenty of time before it; like, for instance,
an outing of East End Parisian holiday-makers who had been to watch a
firework display on the Buttes-Chaumont and were now wending happily
homeward through the grassy undulations of the park. (Romains, 2000: 306)
Similarly, Norman Mailer, whose subsequent infatuation with sport is well
known, talks of combat as an incomprehensible mixture of fear, excitement
and anger `not unlike the feeling in a stadium' (1993: 11). And we might
well suppose that sport and leisure in the 20th century have sustained some
of the peculiar transformations in experience that, more completely and
radically, were the peculiar genius of combat.
Combat is a practical self-discovery of the modern age; an encounter
with meaninglessness, randomness, death and the body; the persistence of
a curious capacity for care. On the battlefield as elsewhere there is a
horizon, but it is ungraspable, unfamiliar, the very presence of death as an
externalized reality.
Combat is an aid to forgetting, which is a precondition for the sensuous
and psychic fluidity that characterizes contemporary life in advanced
societies. It is an initiation into a new mnemonics that alone preserves our
sanity in a world dominated by Chance and the inconsequential; it is an
aide-oubli. Shattering the link between body and self, it allows us to forget
the past. The past is something created not something recalled, a means, as
Nietzsche pointed out, of creating a sense of forward motion out of random
events. `In order to live', he says, a person `must possess, and from time to
time employ, the strength to shatter and dissolve the past' (1995: 106). This
was a difficult task for Nietzsche and his contemporaries, experiencing the
modern world at the height of its bourgeois self-certainty and historical
sensibility. But that world and that self-certainty, destroyed by modern
warfare, no longer presents itself as an obstacle to the multitude of arbitrary
identifications that daily present themselves as so many enjoyable alterna-
tives to the hard work of becoming someone in particular.
If we could live without the illusion of memory, then, `such a human
being would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart
28 Theory, Culture & Society 21(3)
in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming'
(Nietzsche, 1995: 89). But this is just the contemporary world of fluidity and
change; an alluring rash of possibilities in which the equivalent and distinc-
tive forms of self-identity are dissolved, in which history is lost in the cease-
less flow of becoming; a world relieved of meaning or cause, created by war
and sustained by the effort both to recall and forget its awfulness.
Acknowledgement
Financial support from the Japan Foundation enabled the author to complete this
article.
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Young, Allan (1995) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-traumatic Stress
Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harvie Ferguson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow.
He has written widely on cultural aspects of the development of modern
western society, including monographic studies of the work of Kierkegaard
and Freud.
Ferguson ­ The Sublime and the Subliminal 33