The tinnital sublime

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay proposes the sublime as a paradigmatic concept in a Western aesthetics of tinnitus. Through critical readings of canonical works on the sublime and analysis of contemporary artistic, cinematic, and audiological practices around tinnitus, I present what I call “the tinnital sublime,” an aesthetics that depicts tinnitus as a terrible sensory occlusion and disruption of the (agentive, masculine, European) self. Tinnitus can be a terribly sublime experience, but the subjectivity constructed in Burke and Kant’s aesthetics both amplifies the terror of tinnitus and denigrates tinnital subjects for feeling that terror. In contrast, recent composers have integrated tinnitus into their music, making a sometimes-uneasy peace with phantom sound. These composers dispense with Enlightenment notions that privilege a nature-conquering, sensorily unencumbered, and rationally detached self. Instead of struggling heroically against tinnitus, they present an “illegitimate sublime,” an aesthetics that honors suffering—but also attempts to elude it—by yielding to the uncontrollable nature of tinnitus. Listening to tinnitus through the sublime does poetic justice to the gravity of its ontology and phenomenology. At the same time, listening to the sublime through tinnitus dramatizes the ableism and alienation embedded in the sublime notion of ever overcoming our relationship to nature.