Subs, Sublimity, and Sublimation
A sub is someone who receives pleasure from being dominated by another.
Sublimity, or * clears throat * The Sublime, is a rather fruity, ripe old 18th century aesthetic category where a much larger Nature dominates the human subject, even while lifting them up—as in the small paintings of Caspar David Friedrich that depict very large environments.
Sublimation is a concept of psychoanalysis by which otherwise perverse drive energy is subverted into a socially acceptable aesthetic practice.
What do these three subs have in common? They share the common element of helplessness. As you may recall, helplessness is the existential foundation of the psyche; we begin in a state of prolonged and abject helplessness, incapable of survival and totally reliant upon the benevolent parent—or a not so benevolent as the case may be—to satisfy the Needs of Life. The state of helplessness becomes a kind of datum, or zone, to which we may visit now and then and to which we must ultimately return once and for all in old age.
The sub—whether the submissive, or the sublimator—remains under or subjected to something or someone. In their state of primordial helplessness the sub had been overwhelmed by an asymmetrical relation to their sublime parent-god, and thus developed, later on, some rather peculiar proclivities—either perverse, when in the bedroom, or aesthetic, when in an art practice. Like the desire to be tied up and whipped, the strange pleasure of ye old Sublime was said to be a negative pleasure; you are repulsed and attracted in equal measure by the terrifying object and to which you remain essentially helpless.
But when someone as fusty and trad-Anglican as Edmond Burke speaks of the bodily and pathic pleasure of the terrible and sublime, as long as it’s over there at a safe distance and by no means actually life threatening, we can get a sense of the lethal sadism inherent in conservative thought (war is really quite pleasurable—as long as it’s on the other side of the world) while at the same time we can easily imagine—if you’re into that sort of thing—this same Burke trussed up and getting whipped by a dom wearing a crown, naturally; a scene taking place safely within the realm of fantasy—or maybe not?
Not to be too pedantic about it, but it is precisely the collapse of the safe distance between the sub and the terror of sublime lethality that gives birth to the modern subject, as when Kant puts Burke’s safe distance inside of us, in our very ability to make a mental representation of what is otherwise totally unrepresentable. The sublime here makes a kind of double reflexive action (an endopsychic perception) by which we are at once subjected to an obliterating planetary force (desire) and astonished at our capacity to imagine it, and so may contemplate it at a remove and, presumably, without getting aroused? That’s the idea anyways; the sensible and sensorial become the supersensible and rational. Kant attributes our ability to think the terrible object to the prim faculties of reason, but, as you might have guessed, he was a prude and a lifelong virgin.
Kant’s sex-life aside, it is the destiny of his unknowable sublime object—the thing-in-itself—to become in time the very structure of the psychosexual as it is imagined in psychoanalysis. The Thing appears very early on in Freud’s work as a series of cut-up images made by the infant of the mother—that “prehistoric, unforgettable other person who is never equaled by anyone later." The thing is neither a thing, nor an object, but is rather an abyss, or forbidden zone, comprising everything we most desire in the other, and likewise, what we are most afraid of. The images, or thing presentations, are unassimilable to the attempts of organization made by the nascent ego, because primal repression, but nevertheless they begin to circulate and become the occult dynamo, and teeming void, of psychical reality.
Imagine the experience of this infant—experience is hardly the name for it, for that implies someone there to have an experience. The infant, who does not strictly speaking exist in any psychological sense, had been lately differentiated from the undifferentiated body of the mother, and having no categories, nor any mentalization with which to comprehend what is happening to them, is cast helplessly from the very top-end of ecstasy and satisfaction, down into the bowls of hell and oblivion and back again. Over time the sensual representations of these hells and these ecstasies—confused though they may be—become the organizing principle of the psyche, under the so-called pleasure principle.
Now these pleasurable and unpleasurable cut-up images of the unrepresentable thing-in-itself are psychotropic in the extreme; circulating within the child’s psyche, combined with synesthesia and autoerotism, they are hallucinatory even to the point of providing real satisfaction: see for example the upset toddler made serene by sucking on a nook. What can this child be thinking of, if not the sublime object in all of its omnipotent satisfaction?
