(Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) Temenuga Trifonova (Editor) - Contemporary Visual Culture and The Sublime-Routledge (2017)

Contemporary Visual Culture
and the Sublime
“This collection brings the sublime back to where it belongs, the centre of modern
critical thinking in fields that are much broader than that of philosophy and art his-
tory. It helps understand why we need the sublime as a transdisciplinary toolset that
brings together issues of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cultural policy, and digital
culture.”—Jan Baetens, University of Leuven
In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between
spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur
and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an “event” (tem-
poral), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to “cognitively map” the
decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis
(spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality
of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the
place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and politi-
cal values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the
limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental—of
representation.
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media

Arts at York University in Toronto.
Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
1 Ethics and Images of Pain 10 The Uses of Art in Public Space

Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad & Edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin
Henrik Gustafsson Stevens
2 Meanings of Abstract Art 11 On Not Looking

Between nature and theory The paradox of contemporary visual
Edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel culture
Wünsche Edited by Frances Guerin
3 Genealogy and Ontology of the 12 Play and Participation in

Western Image and its Digital Future Contemporary Arts Practices
John Lechte Tim Stott
4 Representations of Pain in Art and 13 Urbanization and Contemporary

Visual Culture Chinese Art
Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and Meiqin Wang
James Elkins
14 Photography and Place
5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads Seeing and not seeing Germany after
Edited by Jaqueline Berndt and 1945
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Donna West Brett
6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual 15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art

Culture A post-critical history of aesthetics
Edited by Lewis Johnson Wes Hill
7 Spiritual Art and Art Education 16 Installation Art and the Practices of
Janis Lander Archivalism
David Houston Jones
8 Art in the Asia-Pacific
Intimate publics 17 Collaborative Art in the Twenty-
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie First Century
King, and Mami Kataoka Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy
Neil Booth and Siv B. Fjærstad
9 Performing Beauty in Participatory
Art and Culture 18 Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video
Falk Heinrich and Drawing
Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik
Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes
19 Looking Beyond Borderlines 22 W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory
North America’s frontier Living pictures
imagination Edited by Krešimir Purgar
Lee Rodney
23 The Politics of Contemporary Art
20 Intersecting Art and Technology in Biennials
Practice Spectacles of critique, theory and art
Techne/technique/technology Panos Kompatsiaris
Edited by Camille C Baker and Kate
Sicchio 24 Contemporary Visual Culture and
the Sublime
21 Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Edited by Temenuga Trifonova
Practice
Edited by Christian Mieves and
Irene Brown
Contemporary Visual Culture and
the Sublime
Edited by Temenuga Trifonova

First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Temenuga Trifonova to be identified as the author of the

editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Title: Contemporary visual culture and the sublime / edited by Temenuga
Trifonova.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge advances in
art and visual studies ; 24 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017002529 | ISBN 9781138237728 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sublime, The, in art. | Arts, Modern--21st century--
Themes, motives.
Classification: LCC NX650.S92 C66 2017 | DDC 700.9/04--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002529
ISBN: 978-1-138-23772-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-29915-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Contents
List of Figures ix
Editor’s Introduction 1
TEMENUGA TRIFONOVA
1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen 42

ADRIAN IVAKHIV
2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality 52

PAUL COATES
3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime 64

JAMES KIRWAN
4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes 74

TEMENUGA TRIFONOVA
5 “Black and Glittering”: The Inscrutable Sublime 88

BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD
6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity 103

JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE
7 Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches 120

ELIZABETH OLDFATHER
8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime 131

LYUBA ENCHEVA
9 The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime 142

KSENIA FEDOROVA
viii Contents
10 From Diagrams to Deities: Evoking the Cosmological Sublime 153
HANNAH GOODWIN
11 Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World: The Sublime

in Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics 164
SANDRA SHAPSHAY
12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary Environmental

Photography 176
DAMIAN SUTTON
13 Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema 189

STELLA HOCKENHULL
14 Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime 200

JOSEPH M. GABRIEL
15 The Birds and the Bees 214

BILL BECKLEY
List of Contributors 227

Index 232
Figures
4.1 Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005, Turbine Hall installation,

Tate Modern, London,14,000 polyethylene boxes, © Tate Gallery,
London 2005, photo credit: Marcus and Marcella Leith, © Rachel
Whiteread; courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York,
Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, and Gagosian Gallery 81
5.1 Joseph Nechvatal, 1% Owns 50% of the World (2014), 36" × 72"
diptych acrylic on velour painting, courtesy Galerie Richard,
New York 90
5.2 Sebastian Diaz Morales, The Lost Object, video, 13'28", 2016 92
5.3 Sarah Krepp, BLOW-OUT: II (#115), approx. 60" × 96", tire,
wire, clamps, oil paint on wall, 2016 95
5.4 Tim Otto Roth, Aura Calculata @ XX oder der Mummelsee in der
Pfanne, Städtische Galerie Offenburg 2016, dimensions: 3418 × 2448 97
6.1 © Jeff Koons, Hulk (Wheelbarrow), 2004–2013, polychromed
bronze, wood, copper, and live flowering plants, 681⁄16 × 483⁄8 × 815⁄8
inches, 172.9 × 122.9 × 207.3 cm 110
6.2 Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage
to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet
tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the
Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,
2014, polystyrene foam, sugar, approximately 426 × 312 × 906
inches (1,082 × 792.5 × 2,301.2 cm), installation view: Domino
Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, NY, May 10–July 6, 2014, a project of
Creative Time, photo: Jason Wyche 113
7.1 Reduction of measures 325–330 of the fourth movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, op. 125 126
9.1 Alexa Wright, Alter Ego, 2005, screen-based interactive installation 149
10.1 A diagram typical of many astronomy education films, this still
from Wunder der Schöpfung (dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, 1925)
illustrates the orbit of the Earth around the Sun in a way that leaves
little room for an experience of the sublime. 160
10.2 A still from Wunder der Schöpfung showing solar corona. An
intertitle describes these solar flares as “flung upward” to heights of
700,000 kilometers 160
11.1 Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes (1859), Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City 166
x Figures
11.2 Photograph of Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes (1859)
in original exhibition frame and drapery 166
13.1 James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey, Chasing Ice (dir. Jeff Orlowski, 2012) 195
13.2 Home (dir. Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009) 197
14.1 Henry Fuseli, The Shepherd’s Dream, from “Paradise Lost” (1793).
Image courtesy of Tate Images, The Lodge, Millbank, London 201
14.2 Frederick Burr Opper, Dope! Will John Bull’s “Pipe Dream”
Ever Come True? (c.1902). A pioneer of American political
cartooning, Opper depicts British military efforts during the Second
Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as a “pipe dream” that may or
may not come true. The cartoon is funny in part because of the
surprising difficulties the British faced in their efforts to defeat Boer
forces. Unlike earlier years, in which the dreams of opium eaters
were understood to point to something real and true, here the
presumably fictive nature of the opium dream gives the cartoon its
humorous bite. Image courtesy of the United States Library of Congress 205
14.3 Victor Moscoso, The Miller Blues Band San Francisco (1967). This
concert poster illustrates the psychedelic visual style associated
with the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Image
courtesy of the United States Library of Congress 209
14.4 Peter Max, U.S.I.A. United States Information Agency (c.1970–
1980). This advertising poster for a government agency tasked with
advancing US public diplomacy demonstrates the way in which the
American psychedelic visual style was rapidly incorporated into
different types of cultural production. Image courtesy of the United
States Library of Congress 210
15.1 Photograph courtesy of Bill Beckley, 2016 225
Editor’s Introduction
Temenuga Trifonova
Over the last few decades philosophers and art historians have been concerned with
demonstrating the relevance of the supposedly obsolete aesthetic concept of the
sublime as evidenced by the publication of a wide range of texts—Jeremy Gilbert-
Rolfe’s Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999), Bill Beckley’s edited volume
Sticky Sublime (2001), George Hartley’s The Abyss of Representation: Marxism
and the Postmodern Sublime (2003), Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth,
Power and Cyberspace (2004), James Kirwan’s Sublimity: The Non-Rational and
the Rational in the History of Aesthetics (2005), Gene Ray’s Terror and the Sublime
in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (2005),
Philip Shaw’s The Sublime (2006), Robert Clewis’ The Kantian Sublime and the
Revelation of Freedom (2009), C. Stephen Jaeger’s edited collection Magnificence
and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music (2010),
Simon Morley’s The Sublime (MIT Press, 2010), Roald Hoffman and Iain Boyd
White’s edited volume Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science (2011),
Timothy M. Costelloe’s edited collection The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present
(2012), Emily Brady’s The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Nature (2013)—as well as by the growing number of international conferences
devoted to the sublime as a concept and an experience strategically positioned at the
intersection of the arts and sciences. While some scholars remain skeptical that the
experience of the sublime is still possible in our media-savvy, globally connected,
secular age, in which “we seem less inclined to regard the breakdown of reason and
expression as indicators of a higher or spiritual realm” (Shaw 3)1 or claim that the
sublime “is not a category in itself so much as a term that describes what cannot be
categorized” (Tabbi xi),2 others reassure us that declarations about the alleged obso-
lescence or death of the sublime “refer only to some inadequacy in the philosoph-
ical concept of the sublime, rather than signaling the disappearance of the human
experience to which the concept refers” (Costelloe 1).3 The ongoing reevaluation of
the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime has not necessarily led to a
clarification of what specifically they mean today as Bill Beckley’s somewhat abstract
reflections on the contemporary sublime demonstrate: “The sublime depends on
what it means to be human, because it is the response of a human—physically,
emotionally and intellectually—to the expansiveness of literature art, or nature, that
makes possible the . . . state of transport that is the spark of sublimity” (Beckley 7).4
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe puts his finger on the problem when he writes, as though in
response to Beckley’s statement above, that to ask what the contemporary sublime is
to ask “to what kind of a self it might nowadays be said to be proper (which would
2 Temenuga Trifonova
include the question of where the sensuous might be found nowadays)” (Gilbert-
Rolfe 2).5
The concept of the sublime as a separate aesthetic category is usually traced back
to the early first-century treatise On the Sublime6 traditionally yet mistakenly attrib-
uted to Cassius Longinus.7 The exclusion of aesthetics, and thus of the sublime, from
histories of antiquity has most often been justified on the grounds of the ancients’
alleged failure to separate inquiries into art from inquiries into philosophy, metaphys-
ics, ontology, politics, and cosmology. According to philosopher of art Paul Oskar
Kristeller’s previously dominant account of the history of aesthetics as a discipline
one cannot speak of “aesthetics” and “philosophy of art” in antiquity—aesthetics
was “invented” by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth
century (his Aesthetica was published in 1750) and formalized by Kant toward the
end of that century. However, in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece:
Matter, Sensation, and Experience8 James Porter offers several alternative accounts
of the birth of aesthetics, notably those of Clement Greenberg and Jacques Rancière.
In his influential “Towards a New Laocoön” (1940) Greenberg argued that modern
aesthetics was not born in the eighteenth century, when the arts in Europe were still
dominated by a single art, literature, which they all tried to emulate by conceal-
ing their respective mediums in favor of (literary) illusion; rather, the arts became
modern—i.e. they attained aesthetic autonomy—only in the twentieth century when
they began to foreground their materiality and became independent from litera-
ture (here broadly equated with “content”).9 On Rancière’s account, aesthetics was
“born” as a discipline when sensation became rationalized, and the history of aesthet-
ics is best thought of as a series of shifts in attention to the sensible, which is either
repressed or reclaimed; in short, the birth of aesthetics is a matter of “the distribution
of the sensible.”10
According to Porter, not only is the history of aesthetics, and thus of the sublime,
a lot longer than generally assumed, rather than dating back only to the eighteenth
century, but there is no dramatic break between the ancients and the moderns inas-
much as neither the former nor the latter separate aesthetics from other spheres of
experience (moral, social, or political). By broadening the view of what counts as
aesthetic experience, and positing arts as “genres of experience,” Porter’s material-
ist aesthetics acknowledges the inseparability of aesthetic experiences from other
aspects of culture, such as ethics, religion, or politics. Challenging dominant accounts
of antiquity, in which Plato and Aristotle figure as undisputable canonical think-
ers, Porter asserts that the aesthetics of antiquity was predominantly empirical and
materialist, and that “Plato and Aristotle are not the beginning of aesthetic inquiry in
antiquity [but] merely one of its more prominent derailing moments” (Porter 10) that
subverted Presocratic (materialist) aesthetics and redefined the aesthetic in terms of
the deprivation of the senses.
In an attempt to reconcile formalism/idealism and materialism Porter posits matter
or material (the senses) as the ground of aesthetic experience that cannot be dismissed
and that in fact reveals the very process of valuation, “the conditions that determine
the value of values” (11). However, at the same time that he reclaims the senses
from their rejection by formalist/idealist aesthetics, he also insists that matter and
sensation are never “bare” or “pure” but always socially coded, for sensations “are
not direct empirical imprints of some outer material reality” but rather “prismatic
reflections of the languages of sensation whose acquisition is a prerequisite to social
life” (16). “Matter” and “the senses” are not given a priori but categories of thought
produced under specific historical conditions. This concept of “matter” as, paradoxi-
cally, both “sensuous” and “socially coded” is already implicit in Raymond Williams’
notion of “structures of feeling” and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” to both
of which Porter admits his concept of “matter” is indebted. As we shall see, the
concept of matter as both the ground of valuation and as possessing a value itself
informs all historical accounts of the sublime, manifesting as (perhaps unavoidable)
slippages between philosophical and historical definitions of the sublime, between
considerations of the ontology of the sublime and of its (ethical, political, or other)
uses/functions.
Although Porter frames his project as a defense of materialist aesthetics and seeks to
locate the birth of the sublime in the Presocratics’ relationship to “matter,” the image
of the Presocratic sublime that emerges from the pages of his book is, in fact, one that
is immaterial or dematerialized. In the course of tracing the “invention” of the concept
of “matter” by the Presocratics and the history of matter’s subsequent devaluation in
Western culture11 Porter locates the birth of the sublime in the Presocratics’ experi-
ence of the sheer proliferation of matter and its hyperextension into infinity, a descrip-
tion that anticipates Kant’s mathematical sublime. Paradoxically, in trying to come to
terms with the sheer excess of “matter” the Presocratics, like Plato and Aristotle after
them, sublimated matter into its absence, locating the sublime in the remaining void.
In the writings of Anaximenes, Anaximander, and Anaxagoras matter
spreads into the indefinite reaches of the universe . . . [and] as it does so, it
transfixes the beholding gaze and becomes more than mere matter: it becomes
increasingly refined, less crudely material, more and more sublimated—in a word,
it becomes sublime. At the extreme, the Presocratic pursuit of matter turns into
the pursuit of something like sublime matter, a sheer and sometimes purer form
of materiality by way of matter’s hyperextension into infinity. [. . .] [M]atter natu-
rally gave way to a thinning out of its own substance and even to a state of near-
evacuation altogether, resulting in such concepts as those of the . . . empty Void.
(Porter 145)12
Thus, as soon as the Presocratics named “matter” as an aesthetic category they also
discovered the vertiginous sublime in which matter is an abyss or void lacking bound-
aries or borders.13 Ironically, Porter, too, ends his magisterial work devoted to the
critique of the dematerialization/sublimation of matter in the history of aesthetics by
sublimating matter into, literally, thin air (human breath): the voice, he argues, puts
us in mind of the monumentality of matter “even if, or just because, phoné is made up
of the tiniest bits of linguistic matter there are, mere stoicheia, little elements of sound
(or less than this) which last no longer than you can fetch another breath” (523).
One possible reason for this sublimation of matter might be that from the perspec-
tive of materialist aesthetics the only thing that distinguishes aesthetic from non-
aesthetic experience (and, as we shall see, the sublime from the beautiful) is time.
Porter, for instance, conceives of aesthetic experience in general, and of the experience
of the sublime in particular, in terms of an intensified experience of time: aesthetic
perception, he suggests, differs from “normal” perception only by virtue of its length
and the level of self-consciousness accompanying it. To explain what he means Porter
refers to Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” which he reads as renewing one of
the strands of ancient aesthetics, “the connection between aesthetic activity, the feel-
ing of life and the vivacity of sensation” (75). According to Shklovsky, the technique
of art is “to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of per-
ception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky qtd. in Porter
76). Porter points to various examples from antiquity that illustrate Shklovsky’s idea:
for instance, the monuments from antiquity Porter discusses as examples of “the
material sublime”—buildings on the verge of collapsing, ruins, and verbal inscriptions
on tombstones—are sublime not because of their sheer materiality, in the literal sense
of the word, but because of their vulnerability to time, to the threat of obsolescence
and erasure from memory/history. Similarly, the sublimity of the ancient “grand
style,” exemplified by Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On the Composition of Words, is
an effect of retardation:
Shklovskian “roughening” would best apply to the ancient grand style, with its
pronounced clashes of sound, heightened difficulties of pronunciation, retarda-
tions, gaps in structure, imbalances between clauses and periods, grammatical sol-
ecism, and the rest, all of which render the time of perception itself most intensely
palpable (not least by manufacturing mini-pauses, chronois, to attend to).
(Porter 229)
In this austere style language itself is laid bare, “all the materials stand exposed, in
part thanks to the slow-motion effects of the thickening and stuttering of rhythms
and sounds. Individual letter-sounds protrude, combinations break down, the illusory
mechanisms that once produced phantasiai grind to a halt” (229, emphasis added).
Even Aristotle, in chapter 7 of the Poetics, distinguishes the perception of an object
from the perception of the time it takes to perceive it—i.e. “the time of an aesthetic
perception must itself be aesthetically perceptible” (qtd. in Porter 98).
It is in the last section of Porter’s book, in which he explores the connections estab-
lished in various classical texts between poetics and monumental architecture, that
his notion of the sublime as an intensified experience of time, such as we find in the
experience of our own mortality, comes to the foreground. Analyzing a number of
early sepulchral verse inscriptions, typically written in the stoichedon style that flour-
ished from the 6th to the end of the third century BC, Porter underscores the tension
between the materiality of the inscriptions and a materiality of another sort—human
mortality. Such monuments were not celebrated merely for their “successful over-
coming of the sheer masses of material” (471); instead, historians (chief among them
Herodotus) saw such monuments as sublime because of “the juxtaposition of the
hard monumentality of things with their vulnerability to time’s passing” (474). Poets
discovered the sublime in the past’s resistance to being memorialized and monu-
mentalized as history: thus, ruins are sublime inasmuch as, despite their oppressive
material presence, they “are the most resistant to the project of description” (478).
What is sublime in these examples, then, is our intensified awareness—tinged with
melancholy—of the mutability of the world, our own mortality, and the transience
of memory.
Since Longinus’ text was virtually unknown until the seventeenth century, when it
was discovered in mutilated form with only two thirds of the tract surviving, there
have hardly been any historical accounts of the sublime in the Middle Ages. Recently,
however, scholars have begun questioning the long-held view that the concept of
the sublime is inapplicable to discussions of representation in the Middle Ages.
Stephen Jaeger’s edited volume Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics:
Art, Architecture, Literature, Music14 challenges a dominant, patronizing concep-
tion of medieval culture—what Jaeger refers to as “the diminutive Middle Ages”
(DMA)—as “a treasure trove of folklore, superstition, and weird eccentricities of
popular religion” (Jaeger 5). The different contributions to the volume persuasively
argue that the concepts of the magnificent and the sublime can be fruitfully applied
to the non-transcendental aesthetics of the Middle Ages, while acknowledging that
medieval sublimity and magnificence are not comparable with the Renaissance and
Romantic sublime due to the fundamentally religious nature of most medieval art,
whose main purpose was to provide access to the divine.
In 1673 French neoclassicist Nicolas Boileau published his translation of Longinus’
text, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, traduit de grec de Longin.
As Timothy Costelloe has argued, the entire history of the sublime following Boileau’s
translation is based on a mistranslation of the original Greek word “sublime”
whereby Boileau transformed “the Latin evaluative qualifier sublimis into a sub-
stantive neologism—sublime/sublimité—denoting it, in a conceptual sleight of hand,
as an essence or independent existence expressed in and through language rather
than belonging to or of language” (Costelloe 4).15 This uncoupling of sublime style
from the experience of sublimity—of “the sublime of discourse” from “the sublime
in discourse”—informs all later accounts of the sublime; thus, while the sublime
gained popularity in Britain, thanks to Boileau’s translation, it gradually severed its
association with literature and rhetoric and began to refer to the grandeur of natural
phenomena instead.16
The originality of the most well-known reexamination of the sublime in the eight-
eenth century, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), is often attributed to its entirely secular nature:
the Enquiry is less a philosophical treatise than a scientific inquiry, a work of experi-
mental psychology that finds the sublime interesting mainly because of the ways in
which it makes manifest the relationship between mind and matter. Throughout the
Enquiry Burke discusses the sublime as a psycho-physiological experience, emphasiz-
ing the link between physical and mental exertion such as can be found, for instance,
in the vibration of the eye in the act of contemplating the sublime ocean. Anticipating
Kant, Burke conceives of the sublime as an experience of negative pleasure—what he
calls “delight”—which results from the removal of pain or danger and which is clearly
superior to merely positive pleasure: “[W]e were not made to acquiesce in life and
health, the simple enjoyment of them is not attended with any real pleasure, lest satis-
fied with that, we should give ourselves over to indolence and inaction” (Burke 88).17
Insofar as negative pleasure is associated with a heightened awareness of being alive
it belongs to the “passions which concern self-preservation [and which] turn mostly
on pain or danger” (86). Whatever excites the ideas of pain and danger and produces
terror, at a safe distance, constitutes a heightened state of being that is aesthetically
pleasing. Burke provides a list of examples of potentially sublime objects: a great
extreme of dimension as well as the last extreme of littleness (however, depth is more
sublime than height), the idea of infinite addition and infinite division, succession and
uniformity of parts (an “artificial infinite”), a great profusion of things in apparent
disorder (the starry heaven), darkness (more sublime than light) and extreme light
(which, by obliterating all objects, produces the same effect as darkness), excessive
loudness (the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, or thunder) (114–123). Bodies
that are angular, rugged, and suddenly vary the direction of their outline, causing “a
twitching or convulsion of the optic nerve” (182), are sublime rather than beautiful,
while beauty is associated with elegance, grace, small size, fragility, and delicacy.
In the Enquiry the sublime is always coded masculine and the beautiful feminine:
with the sublime we submit to what we admire, but with the beautiful we love what
submits to us.18 The sublime is not a feeling shared with others but is experienced in
isolation—“absolute and entire solitude, the total and perpetual exclusion from soci-
ety, is as great a positive pain [like the sublime] as can almost be conceived” (90)—
while beauty is a “social quality” that inspires in us feelings of community with fellow
human beings. Finally, anticipating some postmodern theorists, Burke conceives of
the sublime in terms of privation, i.e. in terms of power: “I know of nothing sublime
which is not some modification of power” (107) for
pleasure must be stolen, and not forced upon us [whereas] . . . pain is always
inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain will-
ingly. [. . .] All general privations are great, because they are all terrible: Vacuity,
Darkness, Solitude and Silence.
(108–113)19
Writing as an observer rather than as a philosopher, in Observations on the

Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763) Kant locates the sublime in the response
of the beholder rather than in the world of phenomena, arguing that “the various
feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not so much upon the nature of the
external things that arouse them as upon each person’s disposition to be moved by
these to pleasure or pain” (Kant 1960, 45). Following up on Burke’s psychologi-
cally inflected account of the sublime, whose main focus is on the peculiarities of
human nature, Kant provides a taxonomy of temperaments or dispositions, which
determine the likelihood of being able to experience the sublime and the beautiful:
the melancholy temperament predisposes one to have a feeling for the sublime, the
sanguine frame of mind is characterized by a predominant feeling for the beautiful,
the choleric disposition is associated with the feeling for the splendid, and the phleg-
matic one has no feeling either for the sublime or the beautiful (67–68). Like Burke,
Kant compiles a list of phenomena capable of producing the feeling of the sublime,
including mountain peaks, ocean storms, the starry vault, Egyptian pyramids, St.
Peter’s Cathedral and so on, while his list of beautiful objects features women, birds,
sea shells, gardens, trees, summer days, and articles of dress and furniture:
The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the
description of a raging storm, or Milton’s portrayal of the infernal kingdom
arouse enjoyment but with horror [and are therefore sublime]; [. . .] the sight of
flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with gazing
flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer’s portrayal of the girdle of Venus . . .
are beautiful. [. . .] Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime;
flowerbeds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sub-
lime; day is beautiful.
(47)
Since nature provides the archetype of everything sublime and noble Kant condemns
anything unnatural as a perversion of nature and thus incapable of producing the
sublime: for example, he dismisses the Gothic as a grotesque deviation from the
“ancient simplicity of nature” and for being “either exaggerated or trifling” (114).
Given that Kant considers certain attributes of man—e.g. courage, understanding,
honesty, veracity, and respect—sublime, it is not surprising that the sublime functions
as a preparation for moral feeling: as he puts it, “subduing one’s passions through
principles is sublime” (57).
While he carries on the British tradition of locating the sublime in nature, rather
than in artworks, in The Critique of Judgment Kant identifies the sublime with a
specific, supersensible faculty of the mind—Reason—and emphasizes its role as a
preparation for moral thinking.20 According to Kant, reflective aesthetic judgments,
like those of the beautiful and the sublime, mediate between nature and freedom,
for while we can grasp the sensible only as appearance but not as an in-itself, we
can grasp the supersensible only as an in-itself but not in intuition. The mediating
function of aesthetic judgments depends on Kant’s introduction of the indeterminate
concept of a supersensible substrate underlying nature, which he posits as identical
with the indeterminate concept of the subjective purposiveness of nature: thus, when
making an aesthetic judgment we act as if nature had a purpose given to it by a higher
understanding (this also means that nature’s purposiveness is purely formal). In short,
Kant assumes a lawfulness in nature—though an indeterminate lawfulness—which
matches our understanding, where the understanding is considered indeterminately,
apart from any specific concepts.21
Although in the Critique of Judgment (1790), written twenty-seven years after the
Observations, Kant remarks that the analytic of the sublime is merely an appendix to
the analytic of the beautiful, he also argues that it is in the experience of the sublime
that man is fully human, that is, fully rational, because Reason plays no part in the
judgment of the beautiful. The sublime is subjectively contra-purposive insofar as the
imagination cannot comprehend an object of vast magnitude, but although we feel
displeasure at the failure of the imagination this displeasure is mixed with the nega-
tive pleasure we feel at discovering that the imagination is inadequate to the ideas of
Reason and becoming aware of our supersensible freedom and destiny:
Yet this inadequacy [of the imagination] itself is the arousal in us of the feeling
that we have within us a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not
an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes naturally of certain objects
so as to [arouse] this (feeling). [. . .] Sublime is what even to be able to think
proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.
(Kant 1987, 106)22
Ultimately, though, even as Kant points to various natural phenomena as examples

of the sublime, what he actually considers sublime is our own supersensible vocation
(Reason) rather than Nature itself: the mind “feels elevated in its own judgment of
itself. [. . .] But by a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted
for respect for the idea of humanity within our[selves, as] subject[s] this respect is
accorded an object of nature” (113, 114).
While in the Observations Kant distinguishes three varieties of the sublime—the
terrifying, the noble, and the splendid sublime (Kant 1960, 47–48)23—in the third
Critique he revises his original classification and now identifies only two types of
the sublime: the mathematical sublime (the encounter with extreme magnitude or
vastness, such as the view from a mountain) and the dynamic sublime (the con-
templation of scenes that arouse terror, such as a volcanic eruption or a tempest at
sea). According to Robert Clewis, however, there are in fact three, not two, major
forms of the sublime in the third Critique: the dynamic, the mathematical, and what
Clewis calls “the moral sublime,” which he describes as “the effect on consciousness
when the moral law, or some representation of embodiment thereof, is observed or
perceived with disinterestedness and aesthetically rather than from a practical per-
spective” (Clewis 17). While for Kant all types of the sublime prepare the mind for
moral feeling, Clewis, perhaps in an attempt to “purify” the Kantian sublime of any
extra-aesthetic value, assigns this function only to the “moral sublime,” because it
shares the phenomenological structure of moral feeling “in which sensible interests
are sacrificed to supersensible rationality” (226).24
The idea of the moral as the higher end of the development of aesthetic intuition
was by no means new at the end of the eighteenth century. The notion of moral
sensibility was prevalent in eighteenth-century Germany as part of the more general
concept of Sentiment (Empfindsamkeit) according to which “properly cultivated emo-
tions are our most reliable moral guides” (Duncan 62).25 The Romantic sublime, in
all its different incarnations, is best seen as an attempt to surmount the limitations of
the Enlightenment project reflected in Kant’s concept of the aesthetic as performing
a merely regulative function in the union of nature and reason. Such attempts were
not always successful as evidenced by the reception of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic
Education of Man (AEM )26 (1794) as a failed attempt to “combine Kantian principles
with [Schiller’s] own terminology, poetic language, and rhetoric” (Sharpe 17–19).27 In
his 1820s lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin Hegel sought to free Schiller
from the Kantian context in which his work had so far been discussed and compared
unfavorably.28 In Hegel’s mind, Schiller had, in fact, overcome Kantian dualism by
getting rid of the Kantian “as if”: the idea that we are to approach nature as if it had
a purposiveness of its own, even though in reality that purposiveness is borrowed
from, or imagined on analogy with, the purposiveness of our own reason.29 But did
Schiller’s aesthetic really attain the desired union of nature and reason?
At the end of letter sixteen Schiller promises to examine both “melting beauty” (the
beautiful) and “energizing beauty” (the sublime); and yet, the entire AEM is devoted
only to the beautiful, with the sublime (“energizing beauty”) remaining excluded
from man’s aesthetic education. According to Schiller, “melting beauty” performs a
balancing function: it gently “corrects” any excesses of sensation or thought. Thus,
the beautiful leads “natural man” “from sensation to thought” and “civilized”/moral
man from “concept back to intuition, and [from] law back to feeling” (Schiller 121).
Schiller recognizes that something else entirely is necessary to revive in man a sense
of Being and that something is energizing beauty, which he is reluctant to call by its
real name, the sublime. However, since the goal of civilized man’s aesthetic education,
as Schiller sees it, is to bring thought back to intuition and feeling, a certain privileg-
ing of the senses over reason is necessary to restore the lost balance. What modern
man needs, then, are the effects of “melting beauty” (which privileges matter and the
senses) rather than those of “energizing beauty” (which privileges form). This might
explain why Schiller excludes the sublime from modern man’s aesthetic education.
But is the sublime really absent from AEM? Do not the difficulties Schiller faces in
trying to balance nature and reason so as to create the impression of a real reciprocity
between them reflect the one-sidedness of his method, which limits man’s aesthetic
education to the beautiful? Is not Schiller’s ontologization of the aesthetic the dis-
guised form in which the excluded sublime reasserts itself, claiming the place it has
been denied in his ambitious program? Indeed, Schiller cannot exile the sublime: it
reasserts itself either directly, in instances when he intends to give an example of the
beautiful and instead gives an example of the sublime,30 or indirectly, as the reason
for the inconsistencies and slippages in his analysis of the relation between nature and
reason,31 in his preoccupation with the question of freedom (the standard-bearer of
the sublime), and in his ontologizing of the aesthetic, which brings Schiller surpris-
ingly close to some strands of postmodern aesthetics. Although the question of being
is not Schiller’s primary concern in AEM, the final goal of aesthetic education—the
attainment of “the moral state”—hinges on the ontological justification of man as a
free, self-determined subject. Schiller begins AEM with the intention of discovering
the nature of beauty and proposing it as a bridge to the moral state, yet by the end of
the work his focus shifts dramatically as he becomes increasingly concerned with the
possibility of the human itself. As long as Schiller construes the aesthetic as a transi-
tion to the moral state his aesthetic program remains limited to the rehabilitation of
the senses; whenever he conceives of the aesthetic as an end in itself, however, the
question of beauty becomes secondary to that of the sublime insofar as it concerns the
being of man, which, for Schiller, is never fully attained. This definition of the human
in terms of privation aligns Schiller with certain trends in twentieth-century aesthetics,
particularly those associated with Lyotard and Barnett Newman.32
As early as 1892, in his survey of Weimar Classicism entitled Die klassische Ästhetik
der Deutschen: Würdigung der kunsttheoretischen Arbeiten Schiller’s Goethe’s und
ihrer Freunde, Otto Harnack proposed that the most fascinating aspect of AEM
was Schiller’s failure to integrate the beautiful and the sublime in a unified aesthetic
theory. Harnack’s argument anticipates contemporary debates about the relationship
between the aesthetic and the ethical, debates that foreground the sublime as precisely
the obstacle to formulating a unified aesthetic theory. However, by the twentieth
century the debate over the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic had
moved to a higher, self-referential plane for, as we shall see, postmodern aesthetics is
no longer concerned with reconciling the ethical and the aesthetic but with judging
the ethical character of such a reconciliation in the first place. As Stephen Boos notes,
if Kant, Schiller and Hegel were concerned with finding a way to reconcile spirit and
nature, the universal and the particular, it is
no longer so obvious that it is the task of art to seek reconciliation. [. . .] Indeed, it

would appear that art has ceased to believe in its ability to provide such absolute
reconciliations but instead now devotes its energies to exposing the paradoxes and
contradictions in the attempt of philosophy to provide such absolute syntheses. In
this sense, art may have attained a self-consciousness that philosophy still lacks.
(Boos 25–26)33
Twentieth-century accounts of the aesthetic, particularly those of the sublime, were

predicated on an implicit doubling of the category of the ethical whereby the ethical
functioned as the object of debate and, at the same time, the criterion determining
the outcome of the debate, since it was namely the ethical nature of the debate that
was put into question in the first place, most notably by Lyotard, who insisted on the
proto-ethical (ontological) aspect of the postmodern sublime. One could argue that it
was precisely the contradictions the sublime generated in eighteenth-century aesthetic
discourse, and the obstacle it presented to establishing a unified aesthetic theory, that
provoked a concern in postmodern aesthetics with the ethical evaluation of the aes-
thetic reconciliation of reason and nature.34 In Aesthetic Theory35 Adorno challenged
Kant’s aesthetics for participating in “the idealist terror,” the belief that human
freedom and dignity entail a repression of nature and that nothing in art deserves
respect unless it owes its existence to an autonomous subject. Adorno saw the Kantian
sublime as a manifestation of bourgeois delusions of grandeur inasmuch as it is not
aroused by phenomena in their immediacy but by Spirit’s resistance to Nature. Kant
had attempted to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject, appointing reason as the
unifying moment insofar as reason is both a subjective faculty and the prototype of
objectivity (it is necessary and universal). However, Adorno argued, Kant’s subsum-
ing of particulars under universals (“common sense”) violated the notion of grasp-
ing things from the inside, the need for which he had introduced with the notion of
“purposiveness”: for instance, the beautiful must please universally and without a
concept, but universality and implicit necessity are conceptual. In sum, Kant’s formal
conceptualization failed to do justice to aesthetic phenomena, which are, by defini-
tion, particulars. In The Truth in Painting36 Derrida carried Adorno’s critique further,
arguing that Kant’s quasi-reconciliation of nature and freedom was based on a mere
analogy between reflective aesthetic judgments and logical judgments. Assuming that
although an aesthetic judgment is not a logical one it is still related to the understand-
ing, Kant imported the four logical functions from the Critique of Pure Reason (qual-
ity, quantity, purpose, necessity) into the Critique of Judgment. As a result, argued
Derrida, Kant did not articulate an aesthetic theory but only the formal conditions for
the possibility of aesthetic judgment in general. In Aesthetic Ideology37 Paul de Man
challenged Kant for demonstrating the triumph of Reason over the imagination only
by relying on a linguistic rather than a philosophical model, specifically on the use of
metaphor that granted the imagination human agency and described it as acting as
though it possessed free will.
While Adorno’s and Derrida’s critiques centered around Kant’s failure to distinguish
reflective aesthetic judgments from logical judgments, in The Inhuman: Reflections on
Time38 (particularly in the essays “Newman: The Instant,” “The Sublime and the
Avant-Garde,” and “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetic”)39 Lyotard took issue
with the ethical implications of Kant’s aesthetics, which sacrificed the aesthetic in
the interest of Reason by subordinating the aesthetic of the beautiful to the aesthetic
of the sublime. Lyotard distinguished between two types of “the inhuman”: the first
inhuman stands for humans’ emancipation as a finite process leading up to a result, a
synthesis, while the second inhuman constitutes a resistance to the first inhuman—it
refers to our debt to our own humanity as something that “needs no finality” (Lyotard
1988, 7). Lyotard understood the human in terms of privation: it is only through our
insufficiency, our inhumanity, that we are human, because the human is not a given
but waits to give itself: it “heralds and promises things possible” (4).40
Lyotard’s principal critique of the Kantian sublime is that it does not leave room
for an aesthetic inasmuch as it returns the imagination, in its failure, to pure reason.
In the third Critique, argues Lyotard, Reason wrongs the imagination by imposing its
own the rules of logical inference on it: from the inadequacy of the imagination an
inference is made about the superiority of reason despite the fact that the rule under
which the imagination operates is ostension, not inference. In Lyotard’s view, then,
Kant analyzes nature only to suppress it once again and affirm Reason’s superiority
over, and independence from, it: the Kantian sublime experience is a state in which
“[n]ature is ‘used’, ‘exploited’ by the mind according to a purposiveness that is not
nature’s. [. . .] The mind is lacking in nature [and] nature is lacking for it. It feels only
itself” (137).
Lyotard’s concept of the postmodern sublime as the “rehabilitation” of nature or
matter—in the guise of the quod, the event, presence, the Thing—makes manifest
the fantasy of returning to a spontaneous, prereflective, disembodied, and imper-
sonal (inhuman) state. In the essay “Something like: ‘Communication . . . without
Communication’” Lyotard describes this fantasy of a return from a representational
consciousness back to the “pure perception” of a “‘bare’ material point” as an
instance of what he calls an “immaterial materialism,” a term he coins to signify the
dethroning of the subject as an origin and its exile into a mere “transformer” in a
continuous, self-sufficient process of cosmological complexification. Given that tech-
noscientific research has purged the arts to such an extent that all that is left is their
material—this material, “non-formalized matter,” is the radically unthought, that
which obliges us to listen—the true task of the arts, Lyotard insists, is not to engage
in communication (i.e. “create culture”) but to seek out their own conditions of pos-
sibility, their own rules, and to generate occurrences before knowing the rules of this
generativity. This task belongs to an aesthetic of the sublime rather than to that of the
beautiful, which appeals to mere taste and “common sense.”
The term Lyotard chooses to describe this experience of the “radically unthought”—
the sublime—is “the event,” which signifies a mode of being that is absolutely self-
sufficient, irreducible to a description of itself, unrepresentable. The only thing that
could be said of “the event” is that it is. The notion of the “event” is premised on the
distinction between the quod and the quid. The quod is the fact that something happens
(that it happens)—it refers to the event stripped of any attributes and determinations,
while the quid is what happens: it refers to the sum of attributes and determinations
that describe the event. Bypassing even the minimal synthesis of apprehension that
philosophy demands in order for representation to take place at all, the “event” does
not fall under the category of signification but rather belongs to “the capacity for
showing or indicating. It presupposes that “something” particular is given, here and
now”(Lyotard 1993, 165).41 The “event” signals that there is still something beyond
consciousness, something radically “other” to consciousness: in the experience of the
sublime (of the “event”) the mind is disappropriated and becomes “passible” to what
is not it, to “a recurrent alterity.”42 The mind’s capacity to still be affected—what
Lyotard calls the mind’s “possibility”—makes possible the experience of the sublime,
but because this “passibility” is never guaranteed Lyotard formulates the sublime in
the form of a question: Is it happening? The postmodern experience of the sublime,
then, is predicated not on one but on two failures, for not only does the imagination
fail to produce a sensible presentation of the sublime object but reason, too, fails to
grasp the “event”: reason comes “too late.” As a movement toward the “unthought”
the postmodern sublime provokes contemplation, a mode of reception associated with
the Kantian judgment of the beautiful rather than with the “masterful intervention”
of the Kantian sublime: “[W]e think of presence according to the exclusive modality
of masterful intervention [and as a result] contemplation is perceived as a devalorized
passivity” (Lyotard 1988, 118). Ultimately, the postmodern sublime is “a passibility
to lack,” an “ontological melancholy” (118) provoked by the lack of a destiny.43
As this brief summary of Lyotard’s critique shows, even as postmodern theorists
criticize Kant they remain heavily indebted to his notion of the sublime as a crisis of
the faculty of presentation (Darstellung). However, in contrast to Kant, for whom
the analytic of the sublime was a mere appendix to the analytic of the beautiful,
postmodern thinkers view the sublime as crucial to reflective thought, and while
Kant still associates the sublime with emotions like awe and respect, postmodernists
conceive of the sublime in more corporeal or affective terms (Johnson 118).44 Gene
Ray’s work on the sublime is exemplary of the shift from the Kantian sublime as a
response to Nature45 to the postmodern affectively and ethically heightened experi-
ence of the sublime, which tends to be theorized as structurally similar to the experi-
ence of trauma in response to catastrophic historical events. Ray maintains that, first,
in the twentieth-century genocidal catastrophes have displaced natural disasters as
the source of sublime feelings and effects, and, second, that in the wake of Auschwitz
and Hiroshima the compensatory pleasure following the imagination’s failure to
grasp the sheer size and grandeur of raw nature in the Kantian sublime—the negative
pleasure accompanying our awakening to the fact that we possess a supersensible
faculty—is no longer guaranteed. In Ray’s account of the link between the sublime
and catastrophic history the sublime is justified only if it does “the work of mourning
and radical politics” (Ray 2005, 5). Leaving aside the fact that treating “the sublime”
and Benjamin’s “aura” as synonymous is debatable,46 it should be noted that Ray’s
understanding of the sublime is representative of a strong association, in postmodern
aesthetics, between the sublime, trauma, the return of the repressed, the work of
mourning, and the task of bearing witness to the unrepresentable while, at the same
time, rejecting “the reification of rejection” (9) for “the sublime hit . . . is subject to
the law of diminishing returns” (10). Like Ray, Harold Bloom compares the sublime
experience to the experience of trauma—the peculiar nature of sublime representation
is that “there is an implication that what is being represented is somehow absent,
and so must be restituted by an image” (Bloom 23);47 Dave Hickey, too, locates the
sublime in the subject’s response to transgression and excess (Hickey 42).48
Ray’s version of the traumatic postmodern sublime is clearly indebted to Lyotard,
who, in turn, draws heavily on Kant’s notion of “negative presentation” to make the
claim that while the “unpresentable” cannot be represented, the fact that there is an
unpresentable can be presented negatively, and that such negative presentations are
the states of privation through which the event is disclosed to “disarmed thought”
(Ray 2005, 23). The strand of postmodern thought on the sublime that links the
sublime with trauma and terror is premised on a significant shift in the notion of
incommensurabilty upon which Kant’s negative presentation rests. In the Kantian
sublime, this incommensurability is still recuperable as it concerns only the relation-
ship between the imagination and Reason; however, after Auschwitz this incom-
mensurability is no longer recuperable since we can no longer fall back on Reason.
With Reason no longer guaranteeing the second-order, compensatory pleasure of the
traditional sublime, the postmodern sublime can only be conceived in terms of a debt
that can never be repaid. Art that claims to have repaid that debt is thus seen as effec-
tively absorbed by the culture industry, capable of producing only a “false sublime”
that, for all its negativity and provocativeness, provides only cheap thrills, never the
“hit of the sublime.”
The difficulty of defining the sublime today has prompted scholars to speak ten-
tatively of a post-sublime in which “every otherness is sublime” (McEvilley 78).49
Where is this post-sublime located and what aesthetic, cultural, and political values
are coded in it? For Lyotard the value of the sublime as a disruptive event with
no transcendental pretension rests precisely in its ultimately political resistance to
rationalist appropriation or narrative representation. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has
shown, however, Lyotard’s “inhuman sublime” is no longer available to us: we
now live in the age of the “posthuman” sublime. While the “inhuman sublime” “is
still concerned with the human, with terror, the void . . . the post-human . . . has no
need of terror; a void is its home” (Gilbert-Rolfe 137). The age of the posthuman
is the period—beginning in the late twentieth century—that gave birth to a globally
networked, posthuman subject constructed by data flows and patterns. Posthuman
approaches to the sublime generally emphasize our technologically mediated rela-
tionship with Nature50 and draw upon poststructuralist concepts like “alterity,”
“emergence,” and “becoming-other” (Harrison 3–33). If the sublime puts into ques-
tion our ability to discern boundaries or spatial and temporal limitations, to ask
where we can find the “posthuman” sublime is not only to ask what has replaced
Nature (e.g. the global network of techno-capitalism, the Internet, etc.) as the object
that exposes our failure to discern temporal and spatial boundaries. If we are less and
less able to experience the sublime today could it be because, as Benjamin once sur-
mised with respect to the decline of lyric poetry’s appeal at the end of the nineteenth
century (in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”) something in the structure of our own
experience has changed?
In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin argues that lyric poetry’s growing
obsolescence in the second part of the nineteenth century can be attributed to a fun-
damental change in the structure of modern experience.51 Taking a detour through a
number of philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic texts, he describes this change
in terms of a series of dichotomies: Erlebnis versus Erfahrung, voluntary versus
involuntary memory, rational time versus embodied time/the durée/, consciousness
versus the unconscious, information versus storytelling. The restructuring of time
and attention by the new technologies of reproduction and the problem of the archiv-
ability of presence are essential to understanding the experience of modernity, but
also of postmodernity for, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe in Multitude:
War and Democracy in an Age of Empire “at the end of modernity reappear the
unresolved problems of its beginnings” (Hardt and Negri 237).52 To understand how
the structure of our experience might have changed it is necessary to consider how
the experience of time in the age of temporal/spatial compression and technologi-
cal reproducibility, which Benjamin theorized through the concepts of “attention,”
“instantaneity,” “presence,” “contingency” and “ephemerality,”53 has evolved in the
age of techno-capitalism, especially since, as we saw earlier, the experience of time has
always been central to the experience of the sublime.
The ambivalent response to modernity reflected in Benjamin’s analysis of the
decline of aura, which he treated with nostalgia even as he recognized its hidden
revolutionary potential, finds its mirror image in contemporary scholarship on the
restructuring of temporal and spatial experience in the network society. Nowhere is
this ambivalence more evident than in contemporary debates around the displace-
ment of embodied time by clock time, and of clock time by network/real time. The
notion of “embodied temporality” is usually traced back to the Bergsonian distinction
between “the qualitative temporality of the durée, the temporality of experience,
intuition, memory and consciousness [and] the quantitative temporality of a rational-
ized time based on science, measurement, and invariant rhythms” (Hassan and Purser
5)54 or, more generally, to the phenomenological (Husserlian) notion of the present
“as a ‘living present,’ a flowing present, a ‘now’ in which impressions and perceptions
stretch the mode of being through memory and expectations (retentions and proten-
tions)” (Hassan 6).55
If the transition from embodied time to rationalized (clock) time has most often
been discussed in terms of the decline or vanishing of experience, the response to the
transition from clock time to network/real time has been more ambivalent. Network/
real time has been criticized as an even more harmful version of clock time, but also
praised for its political potential to reinvest the subject with agency and create new
virtual communities of shared time, promising a return to a premodern temporality
and thus liberating us from the disembodied temporality of clock time.56 Critiques of
network/real time, and of digital culture more generally, remain implicitly or explic-
itly indebted to Benjamin’s analysis of the decline of experience (Erfahrung) and the
decline of aura in the age of technological reproducibility, which is driven by a desire
to master/control time. According to David Rodowick, digital culture is characterized
by a pragmatics rather than an ethics of time inasmuch as we “seek to manage time
in relation to information and as information” (Rodowick 175).57 Similarly, Barbara
Adam identifies the desire to control time as the main preoccupation of the ICT
(Information Communication Technologies) society.58 Building on Manuel Castells’
account of time in the network society as “timeless” Adam proposes that network time
transforms social time into two allied but distinct forms: simultaneity and time-
lessness. Simultaneity refers to the globally networked immediacy of communi-
cation provided by satellite television and the Internet, which makes real-time
exchanges possible irrespective of the distances involved. Timelessness . . . refers
to the layering of time, the mixing of tenses, the editing of sequences, the splicing
together of unrelated events. It points to the general loss of chronological order
and context-dependent rhythmicity.
(Adam 2004, 135)
The network society, then, has a distinct temporality: it is “instantaneous rather than
sequential, marked by a chronoscopic temporality rather than spatially constituted
clock time” (Adam 2007, xi). For Carmen Leccardi, too, the dynamics of acceleration
in the network society produces a “detemporalized present.” Analyzing the “fall” of
the present from a site for action to the present as “detemporalized instantaneity”
(Leccardi 28),59 she identifies two stages in the process of acceleration, the first being
“time–space compression” and the second, reduction/contraction of the present, a
concept proposed by the German philosopher Hermann Lubbe. Under the influence
of various processes of acceleration in the network society the notion of the future as
an open field of possibilities gradually fades away and the present “becomes “all there
is.” [. . .] The temporal dimension of the present [contracts]. In this case a loss of the
present as a space of choice and of reflexive action occurs” (31). This has important
political consequences, for insofar as network/real time erases the important time lag
between event and action, leaving no time for reflection, it “undermines democracy,
which depends on expectation and memory” (Crang 69).60
Such pessimistic responses to the ICT revolution have been tempered by more mod-
erate and even optimistic counter-critiques. Although new ICTs remain dominated
by capitalist and market forces they have “created a new form of technologically
generated time, the time of the network, which is a qualitatively and quantitatively
different time from that of the clock” (Hassan and Purser, 15). Network/real time
is here optimistically defined in terms of “flexibility” and “efficiency” (any time,
any place), which make it a time full of “potentiality.” Indeed, Hassan even hopes
that network/real time will make possible a return to premodern temporalities of
embodiment: given that in the network society the abstract time of the clock has
become increasingly irrelevant, supplanted by the new values of “speed, connectiv-
ity, and flexibility” (Hassan, 49) network time offers us a chance to reconnect with
our embedded temporalities. The saving grace of network time is the “connected
asynchronicity”—the power to create our own (virtual) times and spaces—it makes
possible:
What we experience, albeit in very nascent form, is the recapture of the forms of
temporality that were themselves displaced by the clock. What digital networks
make possible is the conscious creation of temporal contexts and the freeing of
the embedded times [notice the slippage between “embodied temporalities” and
“embedded times” which are, erroneously, treated as equivalent here] in humans,
in nature and in society.
(Hassan 2007, 51)61
Insofar as network time is a “context-created temporal experience” independent from

the clock time of the users it constitutes a return to the task-oriented time of premod-
ern societies. Following up on Hassan’s idea that ICTs have the potential to revive
“the forgotten sense of the lifeworlds we inhabit” (Mackenzie 90),62 and on Mark
Hansen’s observation that “as media lose their material specificity the body takes
on a more prominent function as a selective processor of information” (Hansen qtd.
in Mackenzie 91), Adrian Mackenzie suggests that not only does network time not
constitute a “threat” to our forgotten embodied temporalities but it can actually help
us recover them by challenging how we think “embodiment” and “time” in the first
place. Similarly, challenging Paul Virilio’s claim that network/real time “undermines
our ability to be present to our own experience” (Petranker 174)63 Jack Petranker
maintains that network time institutes a new “temporality of presence,” an experi-
ence of shared presence (through instant messaging, chat rooms etc.) (177).
Two of the most common lines of defense of network/real time originate in game
studies and neurophenomenology, with both fields proposing new ways of think-
ing the relationship between embodiment, presence, and time. Online gaming,
with its new and powerful automatisms—interactivity, control, modularity, and
programmability—has been held out as an example of the new kind of “connected
asynchronicity” and spectatorship that allows users to participate collectively in
the creation and modification of time and space. Given that the critique of net-
work/real time revolves around its erasure of the temporal delay/gap/interval that
makes reflective thought—and by extension autonomy and democracy—possible,
the defenders of network/real time have made it their priority to demonstrate that
this temporal interval has not vanished completely in the “detemporalized present”
of the ICT timescape. It is significant, however, that the only way they can “save”
the “interval”—that is, “embodied temporality” or “presence”—is by locating it
within the digital rather than within the human—for instance in the game-inspired
immersive effects of digital cinema64 or in temporal delays/intervals introduced on the
network (once again, in gaming).
Andrew Murphie frames his defense of network/real time as a response to Vincent
Descombes’ critique that “if history requires a delay in which reflection can take
place, then networked technologies seem to destroy history as they suck everything
into an overburdened present” (Murphie 124)65 and to Bernard Stiegler’s warning that
“‘global mnemotechnics’ (networked technologies and media-memory devices, from
digital recorders to databases) . . . directly challenges consciousness . . . memory, the
synthesis at the basis of human thinking processes, [and] the unconscious” (Murphie
125). Murphie acknowledges that network culture is characterized by an obsessive
compulsion to “reinforce the fragile present by recording it” (128), by what Derrida
called “archive fever.” However, argues Murphie, “archive fever” has done nothing
less than force us to acknowledge the impossibility of archiving presence, which is
not such a bad thing after all: since there was never a “real present” to begin with,
“the fall from presence” or “the fall of the present” has actually emancipated us from
“the metaphysics of presence.” The un-archivability of presence, Murphie concludes,
“allows us an enriched notion of newness” (126), one that takes into account the
various “lags, mismatched durations, relational disjunction and fragmentation” (126)
that constitute the “fallen present.”
Significantly, Murphie locates these “lags and mismatched durations”—the new
guarantees of autonomy and democracy—at the neuronal level. Pointing to recent
findings in neurophenomenology Murphie believes he has “resurrected” the lost
“interval” bemoaned by critics of network/real time and he locates it in the different
degrees of “latency tolerance” among network gamers—tolerance to delays/intervals
introduced on the network where different users are engaged in network gaming—
and in “the half-second delay between . . . physiological reactions, neuronal impulses,
and our conscious sense of an intention in the present” (128). Murphie’s relocation of
“presence” and “embodied temporality”—the resistance to network society’s speed
and simultaneity—on the neuronal level is dictated by his belief that contemporary
media culture is best understood not through old cognitivist/informational models of
thinking but, rather, through alternative models—such as Detlef Linke’s neurological
model, Varela’s neurophenomenology, and Brian Massumi’s “politics of affect”—all
of which acknowledge that thought is initiated by affect rather than by “information,
representations or recognitions” (135). According to Murphie, Varela’s contribu-
tion to this rethinking of “thought” consists in having complicated the notion of the
“present” by showing that it is constituted by the interaction of at least three different
levels of duration (rather than just one): these are tenths of a second, a second or so,
and longer than this. Similarly, Detlef Linke has proposed a more nuanced notion of
a “differential present” constituted through the mismatch of internal and external
rhythms of cognitive events:
We use the rhythms of the external world to assist our accommodation of the
information of the external world to our own internal rhythms. Here ‘accom-
modating’ crucially relies on mismatch. [. . .] Thinking arises in the disjunction of
rhythms, driven by their differentiated intensity, in a differential present.
(Murphie 134)
Finally, responding to Varela’s and Linke’s call for more work on micropolitics
or neuropolitics, Tiziana Terranova has posited a structural analogy between the
network and the human nervous system, proposing that network culture functions
as a correlative to “the transient and variable, differential, neuronal constitutions of
time—in short, the network duplica[tes] and transform[s] the ontogenetic power of
the human nervous system” (Murphie 136).
Ironically, Murphie’s counter-critique faults the critique of network/real time as
“disembodied” and “timeless” for remaining rooted in a discredited metaphysics of
presence and for failing to acknowledge our embodied temporality, which Murphie
equates with the experience of time on a neuronal level—what Murphie calls “micro-
time”—and which, he argues, makes a “micropolitics” or “neuropolitics” possible
(135). Murphie would have us believe that freedom—the standard-bearer of the
sublime—is “born” not in the “interval” between event and response but in the
interval between the firing of different neurons: autonomy is always already “given”
if only we acknowledge “the autonomy of affect” (Massumi) and the multiple micro-
gaps, micro-mismatches and micro-disjunctions happening all the time at the neu-
ronal level. From this point of view, the sheer “ephemerality” or instability of the
human nervous system “guarantees” that network/real time can never pose a serious
threat to our experience of time!
The ways in which the “posthuman sublime” has been theorized are informed by an
awareness of the significant changes both in our experience of time (and space) in the
age of techno-capitalism and in our discourse (critical or affirmative) of time and space,
some of which I outlined above. While the Kantian sublime had to do with the failure
to represent Nature’s grandeur, the posthuman sublime is associated with the failure to
think totality (both the social/collective and the epistemological totality), to reconcile
our experience of a globalized world, in which everything seems connected, with our
inability to understand that world via traditional notions of causality and agency,
which in turn poses new “representational dilemmas.” The posthuman sublime in the
era of techno-capitalism retains only the structure of the Kantian sublime insofar as
it points to, in Fredric Jameson’s words, our failure to cognitively orient ourselves in
“a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically devel-
oped categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves”
(Jameson 1995, 1–2).66 Reviving Burke’s account of the sublime as an experience of
exhilaration tinged with terror, in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991) Jameson describes the aesthetics of postmodernism as “depthless”
and “simulacral” and our experience of it as a mixture of exhilaration and terror. In
this context, the “unpresentable object”—the sublime—is no longer our supersensible
faculty (Reason) or Nature in its infinite grandeur, but rather the complexity of con-
temporary technologies and, more generally, the decentered global network of capital
itself.67 Since our dominant aesthetic is a spatial one Jameson uses the figure of “cogni-
tive mapping,” which he borrows from geographer Kevin Lynch’s book The Image of
the City (1960), to update the Kantian sublime as a crisis of representation; however,
he also rethinks the Kantian incommensurability between an Idea and its sensible
presentation in terms of a new kind of incommensurability, that between the individual
and the social: the sublime points to the incommensurability between the individual
subject and the “collective web of the hidden social order” (Jameson 1995, 33).
Vincent Mosco and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe describe the posthuman sublime in terms
similar to Jameson’s: the posthuman sublime is “surface without depth, continuity as
flawless and infinite extension” (Mosco 142),68 and it is to be found in advanced com-
munication technologies, TV, and the Internet, which make “all that happens in the
world immediately adjacent while safely distant [. . .] as one turns the television on and
off in order to have access at will to events over which one has no control” (Gilbert-
Rolfe 7). This description of the structure of the posthuman sublime—terrifying
closeness and safe distance—is oddly reminiscent of the eighteenth-century sublime,
with the crucial difference that the overwhelming infinity and grandeur of nature in
the Burkean sublime has now been replaced by the false sense of immediacy/pres-
ence produced by advanced communication technologies. The posthuman sublime
mimics the effects of the “old” sublime but in a devalued or bastardized form—the
simultaneity of the electronic (an artificially produced temporality) has replaced both
the immediacy of Nature and the mysterious immediacy of Lyotard’s sublime event
(Is it happening?). The limitlessness of nature in the Kantian sublime and of the
unrepayable ethical obligation felt in the postmodern sublime have devolved into the
calculated instantaneity of techno-capitalism.
To illustrate the impossibility of experiencing the sublime in the age of techno-
capitalism Gilbert-Rolfe compares Heidegger’s temple, Monet’s paintings of Rouen
Cathedral, and any video image of an old building made of stone. Technologies that
cause ontological anxiety (video, the Internet, and TV), he claims, are inherently
incapable of producing the sublime:
All things have become equally insubstantial, mediated by a medium that has
no correlation with things as substances—it is not stone transformed; it is not a
process in the sense that painting is visibly that, a passage with an end which has
concealed but reflects its beginning: and it is also instantaneous and automatic. It
is materially discontinuous, as a fabricated object or sign, with the world whose
image it presents (or produced), and it makes time invisible.
(Gilbert-Rolfe 33, my italics)
To the extent that we live in an increasingly disembodied world, which functions

through signs that have become unmoored from their references, and we no longer
experience time as internal to us but only as externalized/spatialized through various
systems of measuring time, we are unable to experience the sublime. To make matters
worse, and as David Nye has argued in American Technological Sublime, the exist-
ence of the atomic bomb, and more generally of weapons of mass destruction, has
destroyed the possibility of a sublime relationship with either natural or technological
objects because the precondition of a sense of personal safety in the face of something
powerful and overwhelming is no longer guaranteed.
In this posthuman context the sublime no longer occupies the privileged position
Lyotard and Newman assigned to it; on the contrary, the sublime now embodies the
most reactionary tendencies of techno-capitalism, while beauty represents our last
chance to reclaim the autonomy of the aesthetic:
The sublime, in contrast to beauty, seems to have become a function of the gen-
eral economy of signs out of which capitalism is made and which are made out
of it, and because of this beauty has an ultimately adversarial relationship to it.
Both seek to exceed meaning, to overload it with some sort of presentation of
meaning as more than itself, but where the beautiful is intransitive, and in that
indifferent to negativity as an active force . . . the sublime must be transitive in
some sense.
(Gilbert-Rolfe 13)69
Reversing the traditional hierarchy that assigns the sublime a superior value to that
of the beautiful Gilbert-Rolfe insists that it is precisely by virtue of its frivolousness,
its association with pleasure, and its “irresponsible indifference” (15) that beauty
becomes indispensable in the age of the posthuman. Inasmuch as “beauty stands in
opposition to the idea of productive thought and perhaps to the idea of production
itself” (69) its uselessness precludes it from being co-opted like the sublime, which
has by now lost any powers of resistance it might have once had. Having been once
entrusted with the philosophical task of bearing witness to a range of man-caused
catastrophes the sublime has become reified into a rhetoric of duty, offering only a
false sense of comfort.
Gilbert-Rolfe is not alone in pointing to the overvaluation of the sublime—or even
the very act of assigning any kind of value to the sublime (ethical, moral, or cogni-
tive)—as the cause for its reification. James Kirwan, too, rejects outright the notion
that the sublime has any ethical or cognitive significance (Kirwan 166), and Philip
Shaw ends his book on the sublime with a similar call for a return to beauty, after crit-
icizing Kant’s conception of the sublime as evidence of man’s possession of an inde-
terminate freedom. “Such freedom,” writes Shaw, “is cold, impersonal, freedom for
its own sake, divorced from desire, eros, the world of practical reason, from questions
of truth and justice” (Shaw 151). Shaw urges a reevaluation of beauty’s important
role as mediating the infinite with the finite through its connection with desire/eros.70
Ultimately, the problems “caused” by the sublime, and the skepticism with which we
increasingly regard it, follow from its artificial and pernicious separation from the
beautiful. In practice, sublimity cannot be separated from the appreciation of form,
for what attracts us to the sublime is not an abstract quality but the fact that the sense
of the awe-inspiring or the overpowering is conveyed in this particular mountain, or
in that particular moment. The only way to recuperate the sublime is to renounce
the transcendental pretensions that have been attributed to it and to recognize that
the awe, respect, and terror it has been said to provoke are always associated with a
particular object/phenomenon/event rather than with an Idea “beyond” it.
Twenty-first-century approaches to the sublime can be grouped into two categories:
those returning to Burke (somaesthetics and neuroaesthetic “updates” of the physi-
ological sublime) and those returning to Kant (environmental aesthetics). In Thinking
through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics71 Richard Shusterman rereads Burke as
a predecessor of somaesthetics, stressing that Burke, unlike Kant, acknowledged the
somatic dimension of the aesthetic by explicitly defining “certain conditions of our
nerves as the ‘efficient causes’ of [feelings of sublimity]” (Shusterman 146). What sets
somaesthetics and neuroaesthetics apart from older empirical approaches, however,
is their strong pragmatic orientation: they are concerned not only with examining
the physiological underpinnings of aesthetic experience but also with directing and
perfecting it—as Shusterman himself proposes, improved understanding of the role
of bodily factors in aesthetic experience will also enhance our aesthetic experience,
not just explain it. Thus, while thinkers coming from a philosophical or art historical
background (like Gilbert-Rolfe, Shaw, and Kirwan) tend to be critical of the sub-
lime, promoting the beautiful instead, scholars of somaesthetics and neuroaesthetics
continue to value the sublime, on account of the intense emotional response it pro-
duces, over the beautiful, which they dismiss as “too relaxing,” “affirmative,” or
“unchallenging.” Thus, Shusterman justifies his preference for the sublime over the
beautiful by pointing to the sublime’s “arousal of heightened tension [which] provides
more intense feelings that can combat what Fredric Jameson calls our postmodern
‘waning of affect’” (165).
In contrast to humanistically minded critics who strive to reunite the beautiful
and the sublime, neuroscientists are busy amassing evidence that the experiences
of sublimity and beauty are inherently different because the affective and cognitive
faculties they engage are “located” in different parts of the brain, even though they
“are completely blended in our higher psychological experiences” (Panksepp 21).72
Arranging our faculties in a hierarchy from “the most base” to “the most sophis-
ticated”—according to the evolutionary stage of the part of the brain where those
faculties are “located”—Estonian neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp resurrects the old
hierarchy that privileges the sublime as a more “sophisticated” aesthetic experience:
“Our most intense affects emerge largely from ancient ‘basements’ of the brain, and
our most sophisticated cognitions from the cortical roof. They also operate according
to different principles, such as ‘information processing’ versus ‘state-control regula-
tion’” (22). Using imaging and neurophysiological techniques, such as functional
magnetic resonance (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencepha-
lography (EEG), to study the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience, neu-
roaesthetics attempts to extract rules that would lead to a practical definition of
sublimity and beauty, connecting particular features of objects with the neural activity
corresponding to them. For example, Ramachanran, Zeki, and Kandel have written
case studies on classical Indian art, American and European modernism, and the
Viennese Secessionists, respectively.73 The search for specific brain states that cor-
relate with aesthetic enjoyment is, however, tricky, despite the many recent advances
in brain-imaging technology. For instance, while some studies claim that all works
that appear beautiful to a subject have a single brain-based characteristic—they have
as a correlate of experiencing them a change in strength of (fMRI) activity within the
mOFC (medial orbitofrontal cortex)—it has been demonstrated that the mOFC is not
uniquely associated with experiences of beauty but, instead, appears to be part of a
large network of brain regions that subserves all value judgments.
Barbara Stafford has described neuroscience’s turn to the sublime as the most recent
stage in what she calls “the lowering of the sublime” (Stafford 44) from its Burkean
and Kantian associations with mountain peaks, rolling vistas, starry skies, and oceans,
a process that started as early as the late eighteenth century as evidenced in that
period’s love for nested cosmic epics (Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Hell).74 Stafford points
to “the tunneling image probe,” “the ever-receding vistas of genetics,” “the spiraling
perspective of the nanoscale world,” and “the compression of information technology
[manifested in data mining]” (53) as various instances of this lowering of the sublime,
but it is the bottom-up approach of neuroscience that best illustrates the new plummet-
ing vector of what she calls “the nonconscious sublime.” As neuroscience probes the
human brain, plunging deeper and deeper “beneath the frontal and prefrontal lobes,
probing under the cortical layers into the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, insula,
and the nucleus accumbens” (53), the sublime comes to refer not to a conscious experi-
ence but to the invisible structure of the human brain or of the universe, to which we
have no immediate access. Stafford’s account of the “nonconscious sublime” appears,
on the surface, to revive Burke’s notion of the sublime as a psycho-physiological expe-
rience that foregrounds the unity of mind and matter, an experience that allows us to
“directly touch the invisible mind-body, feeling its material oneness” (46). However,
when the psycho-physiological sublime is pushed to the limits and transformed into
the “neurophysiological” sublime, any attempts to define the “nonconscious sublime”
as an immediate experience of our neurophysiological apparatus are doomed to end in
absurdity. Struggling to explain what the “nonconscious sublime” is Stafford describes
it as, paradoxically, an experience in which we somehow become conscious of usually
nonconscious neurophysiological processes: “By the sublime, I refer specifically to that
overwhelming psychophysiological intrusion which . . . transiently manages to merge
the personal awareness of our affective and cognitive states with the otherwise con-
cealed and impersonal neurophysiological mechanisms underlying them” (44).
Like Stafford, John Onians attempts to ground his neuroscientific approach by
framing it as a return to Burke’s physiological sublime.75 Taking some consider-
able liberty with Burke’s text, Onians claims that when Burke says that our feelings
“arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies . . . or from the natural frame and
constitution of our minds” he is referring to our neural constitution (Onians 91).
Thanks to the development of fMRI, which monitors the brain’s activity in real time
by tracking changes in blood flow, it is now finally possible, maintains Onians, to
fill in the blanks in Burke’s (alleged) inquiry into the neural substructure of aesthetic
experience. If theorists of the postmodern sublime focused on the element of terror
in the Burkean sublime, neuroscientists tend to privilege the complementary aspect
of self-preservation, which allows them more easily to frame aesthetic experience
within an evolutionary perspective. Thus, through a rather literal reading of Burke’s
association of the sublime with self-preservation Onians underscores the evolutionary
advantageous nature of the sublime—apparently in the course of history individu-
als exhibiting strong emotional reactions to large and dangerous things (traditional
sources of the sublime) have been more likely to survive (95)—and even identifies
the specific chemical neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) whose physical effects mimic
those of the sublime (increased heart rate, improved muscle readiness, alertness) (97).
From a neuroscientific perspective if norepinephrine is not well distributed through
the nervous system we are less likely to survive dangerous encounters, and, by exten-
sion, to experience the sublime!76
From the point of view of neuroaesthetics, it seems, art is sublime when it affects
us subliminally. Indeed, as the recent interest in neurocinematics—the study of the
brain and physiological activity of film viewers through brain scanners, eye-tracking,
and skin responses—testifies, in our desacralized age the subliminal has already begun
to displace the sublime. Somaesthetic and neuroscientific approaches to aesthetics
in general, and to the sublime in particular, conceive of aesthetic experience as an
activity that can be infinitely divided and subdivided, just as the mind can be divided
into sections, each responsible for a particular aesthetic response, which is usually
described as a trigger-response mechanism rather than in terms of the structuring
power of perception. In contrast to materialist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics belongs
to the New Materialism,77 which stresses the materiality of the mind rather than the
materiality of the phenomenal world or aesthetic object. Neuroaesthetic theories of
the sublime are methodologically flawed, however, for they have no way of closing
the gap between theories of explanation (statements about the physical make up of
the brain) and theories of interpretation (aesthetic judgments).
The second category of contemporary approaches to the sublime encompasses dif-
ferent versions of environmental aesthetics, which seek to reclaim the importance of
Kant’s natural sublime while also pointing up its ethical value. Emily Brady’s 2013
study The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature78 is repre-
sentative in this respect. Brady frames her project as an attempt to supplement recent
discussions of the sublime in Continental philosophy, which have focused exclusively
on the sublime in literature and the arts, by bringing back the notion of the natural
sublime. Not only does she challenge dominant readings of Kant, according to which
Kant located the sublime in a faculty of the mind rather than in natural objects and
phenomena, but she insists that the sublime in art is secondary to the natural sublime,
because artworks (with the exception of some examples of land art) generally lack the
features traditionally associated with the natural sublime—scale, formlessness, dis-
order, wildness, physical vulnerability, and affect. Therefore, although artworks can
“depict, represent, convey, and express the sublime, they cannot be sublime in and of
themselves” (Brady 6).79 The environmental sublime is distinguished from the natural
sublime by the pedagogical rhetoric in which d iscussions of it are usually couched and
the defensive stance from which the very notion of an “environmental sublime” is
posited. Thus, Brady defines the environmental sublime in response to two critiques of
the sublime as an aesthetic category: the critique that the sublime is anthropocentric
and self-aggrandizing, and the critique, made by feminist, postcolonial, and Marxist
scholars, that the sublime posits “nature as an alien ‘other’, different and separate
from ourselves, and over which we have power” (194). The only way Brady has of
countering these critiques is by appealing to the environmental sublime’s pedagogical
usefulness; accordingly, she renames the environmental sublime as “the humbling
sublime” and assigns it the pedagogical purpose of educating us about a more sus-
tainable way of life (202). The experience of this “humbling sublime” is described
as dependent on a certain degree of discomfort and anxiety in our relationship with
nature—thus, Brady reinstates the value of the “distanced fear,” the defining feature
of the Burkean sublime, thereby implying that fear and respect, rather than admira-
tion and awe, constitute the only viable ground for an ethical relationship with nature.
I have so far provided a short history of the sublime from antiquity to the present
“posthuman” age. As we have seen on numerous occasions, throughout this history
the sublime has been consistently identified with a “crisis of representation” though
that crisis has been described in different ways, for instance in terms of a temporal
intensification of perception or as the internal limit of representation itself. If the
sublime is a matter of the incommensurability between an image and a concept,
between a sensible intuition and an Idea that fails to be represented, then it is worth
asking whether our senses—which are differently engaged by the different arts—are
“capable of failing” in different ways. In other words, is the “crisis of representation”
medium-specific, potentially producing multiple, different sublimes? For example, is
the sublime in poetry or film (the so-called “temporal arts”) more likely to manifest
itself in an intensified experience of time, whereas the sublime in architecture or paint-
ing (the so-called “arts of space”) would be more likely to express itself in terms of
a failure of “cognitive mapping”? As A. Roesler-Friedenthal and J. Nathan’s edited
volume The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts80 demon-
strates Noel Carroll’s well-known critique of medium-specific arguments is alive and
well. Almost all contributors to the volume argue strongly against reviving Lessing’s
distinction between the “arts of space” and “the arts of time”: for instance, John
Shearman criticizes the designation of sculpture and painting as “arts of space” by
showing that paintings and sculptures are actually “transitive,” i.e. signifying through
the representation of an action or a momentary state (not stasis) rather than through
“the sum of their inert signs” (Shearman 2003, 65), and Peter Geimer analyzes the
ways in which instantaneous photography challenged Lessing’s dictum that the artist
ought to represent not the climax of emotion (the sublime) but the pregnant moment
just before or after it.81
This skepticism toward medium-specificity arguments is understandable given that
even materialist aesthetics tends to conceive of the crisis of representation with which
the sublime is usually associated in terms of the sublimation or dematerialization of
“matter” into breath (temporal gaps in poetry), existential space as distinguished
from physical space (architecture), or theatricality (sculpture), as the following exam-
ples demonstrate. As we saw earlier in my discussion of Porter’s work on the sublime
in antiquity, the sublime in Hellenistic poetry is created through “verbal architec-
ture,” which belies poets’ fascination with monumental buildings. In the austere style,
analyzed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
words are turned into building materials, and then the gaps between them are
magnified in such a way that they become three-dimensional objects jutting off
the page and so too microscopically surveyable in their minutes textures. Needless
to say, the gaps in question consist not of space but of time.
(Porter 507, my italics)
Since we are talking about oral poetry, what is at stake here are not whole words and
the spatial gaps between them but “vocalic and intervocalic sounds, silences (pauses)
and lengths of breath—the speaker’s breath” (507): in short, sublimity lies in the most
immaterial of things, namely the contrastive lengths of the speaker’s breath.
Like the poetic sublime, the architectural sublime is often located in our experi-
ence of space’s primary qualities (height, breadth, and depth): whenever architecture
enhances or subverts these qualities in order to expand or collapse our existential
space it produces the architectural sublime. Discussions of the “sacred sublime”
embodied in buildings of a religious nature, such as churches and basilicas, underline
the importance of the manipulation of physical space to produce an enhanced expe-
rience of space that is not physical. For instance, Hans Henrik Jorgensen explores
Christian vision and visuality by analyzing Christian churches and basilicas, whose
structure is always designed to impede or delay the gaze of the viewer, stressing the
“distance between the viewer and the holy object in its sacred, mysterious remote-
ness” (Jorgensen 179).82 Various physical features visually or physically impede the
viewer from making contact with the sacred, producing a heightened experience of
the non-physical remoteness of God, since “the interaction between veiling, Velatio,
and unveiling, literally Re-velatio, is the very structure of revelation” (186).
Richard Etlin offers a succinct and historically comprehensive definition of the
architectural sublime, particularly of the sacred architectural sublime, in his contribu-
tion to Timothy Costelloe’s edited volume on the sublime.83 Using a range of exam-
ples drawn from Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire, Etlin demonstrates
that the experience of the sacred sublime—what he also calls the “vertiginous sub-
lime”—is usually produced by the beholder’s perception of an unresolvable tension or
discrepancy between a building’s floating dome and the apparent insufficiency of the
visually isolated material support upon which it is supposed to rest, creating the illu-
sion of an upward infinitely expanding space into which the beholder is being sucked
(complemented, in some cases, by a floor pattern that creates the opposite illusion of
being sucked downward into an abyss). That the architectural sublime is a matter of
illusionism rather than an experience of physical space was already understood by
Plato as can be seen in his critique of Phidias’ aesthetic principles embodied in the
Parthenon. Plato condemned architects of monumental buildings, who, like Phidias,
used optical refinements (e.g. swelling and curvature of design) to soften the buildings’
proportions and visually deceive the viewer by producing pleasing optical results:
“what the viewer saw was no longer a statue or a temple but the appearances those
objects projected (Porter 417–418).84
Achille Bonito Oliva’s edited volume Architectura del Sublime: la chiesa del Santo
Volto di Gesu a Rom di Pietro Sartogo e Nathalie Grenon85 is devoted to one single
building, the modern church La chiesa del Santo Volto di Gesù built in Rome in 2006.
In an interview with Massimo Di Forti the church’s two architects Piero Sartogo and
Nathalie Grenon explain that their architectural project was designed to convey what
they call a “new, humanistic sublime” attained not through the revival of ancient
symbols of the sacred but through the concept of community (Sartogo and Grenon
qtd. in Oliva 187). The architectural sublime, then, is produced not through a com-
munion with God but through a communion with fellow human beings. More to the
point, they describe this humanistic sublime as a “virtual sublime,” underscoring its
independence from the actual experience of physical space: “Our idea [of virtuality]
stems from the use of signs (semiotics). [. . .] Architectural space is not necessarily
confined to the physical. Instead the architect’s manipulation of space, light and
surface creates a new perception of space whose essence is not just physical” (189).
Finally, in sculpture too the sublime depends, more often than not, on a certain
effect of theatricality rather than on the way in which “matter” is sculpted. Almost all
examples of the sculptural sublime Alison West discusses in From Pigalle to Preault:
Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture 1760–184086 (1998)—from those
that use Nature to make art on a much larger scale (Mount Rushmore) to those turn-
ing art into landscape (Christo’s Valley Curtain)—mix Nature with Art to produce a
theatrical effect. In the work of Falconet, which West foregrounds as representative of
the French neoclassical sculptural sublime, the sublime is produced through a strong
theatrical effect achieved through a strong chiaroscuro effect b
orrowed from painting.
Having long escaped disciplinary confines the sublime has migrated into other
discourses ranging from cinema and religion to urban studies and national history.87
In cinema studies the concept of the sublime has most often been discussed in conjunc-
tion with the concepts of “spectacle” and “cinematic excess.” For Scott Bukatman the
use of a “virtual camera” produces a cinematic sublime insofar as it provides the film
viewer with experiences that clearly transcend the physical limitations of his point of
view but which are still experienced subjectively.88 Bukatman’s work on the sublime
in science fiction cinema is a good example of what happens to the sublime when it
is imported into other discourses: 1) the sublime is used as a synonym for one of the
central organizing concepts of the other discourse, i.e. the sublime is used to “revive”
another old concept; and/or 2) the sublime is used to clarify an already existing dis-
tinction between two other concepts that have become conflated. For instance, in an
essay on the representation of automata in cinema entitled “Disobedient Machines:
Animation and Autonomy”89 Bukatman uses the sublime 1) to sharpen the distinction
between “the terrifying” and “the uncanny,” which he updates as a distinction
between the “uncontainable, sublimely terrifying” and “the uncannily disturbing”
(Bukatman 2011, 129), and 2) to breathe new life into the old concept of “cinematic
excess,” whose function, ironically, is to revive the even older concept of “suspension
of disbelief” (also known as “the reality of illusion”).90
The sublime has also infiltrated discourses of national art history and national
identity. Michael Shapiro’s Cinematic Geopolitics imports the discourse of the sub-
lime into a discussion of national and postnational (diasporic) cinema91 to explore the
ways in which the Kantian sublime has shaped the politics of aesthetics, aligning the
Kantian sublime with the end of the national and the rise of the postnational subject.
John R. J. Eyck claims to have discovered a uniquely Dutch sublime, which he calls,
paradoxically, “a subtler sublime”—a “semi-, quasi-, or even minisublime” (146).
Departing from the traditional association of the sublime with grandeur and magnifi-
cence92 Eyck describes the Dutch “homegrown domestic tradition of the sublime” as
originating in daily life and therefore mundane rather than inspiring awe and terror.
Struggling to trace the history of this “mundane sublime”—perhaps because there
isn’t one—Eyck resorts to inventing its legacy instead, which includes such instances
of the “mundane sublime” as the hyperrealism of the surrealists after Duchamp,
the readymades of Fluxus, and Warhol’s soup cans (Eyck 145–146). Along similar
(national) lines Chandos Michael Brown appropriates the notion of the sublime to
discuss the formation of American national identity through the evolution of an
“American sublime” within America’s “matrix of imperial expansion, revolution,
the pursuit of knowledge, and the contested meaning of natural and national his-
tory” (Brown 148).93 The American sublime, according to Brown, evolves through
three main stages: “the ideological sublime” (the era of North American settlement,
post-1700); “the nationalist sublime” (the revolutionary decades between the middle
of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the early American republic
(1760–1820) and “the first American sublime” (extending to the late 1840s).
Similarly, in his influential study American Technological Sublime94 David E. Nye
reads the sublime as “an element of social cohesion” in multicultural societies and,
because of that, much more relevant to Americans than to Europeans. Aside from the
question whether the increasingly multicultural nature of European societies demands
that this claim be revised, it is also unclear why the popular sublime, embodied in
natural sites such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, is restricted to America,
that is, why imposing natural sites like these cannot support an emerging cultural
nationalism in other nations. Nye’s history identifies a number of American sublimes
that have come into existence since the 1820s: the technological, geometrical, and
industrial sublimes develop in relation to railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, and facto-
ries; the electrical sublime emerges in various spectacular displays of world fairs, while
the post-World War II technological sublime finds expression in the atomic bomb, the
first manned flight to the moon, and the rededication of the Statue of Liberty on July
4, 1986 (Nye xv). This history of the American sublime is a history of “the social
context of technology, of how new objects are interpreted and integrated into the
fabric of social life” (xv) rather than a history of the sublime as an aesthetic category.
Paradoxically, even as he foregrounds the sublime as a historicized object of inquiry,
rather than a philosophical absolute, Nye maintains that throughout history the sub-
lime experience retains the same fundamental structure and it is only the objects that
inspire it that change, as though the experience of the sublime is independent of the
objects that produce it. It should also be noted that Nye’s American sublime departs
significantly from the Burkean and Kantian sublime by evacuating the notion of “neg-
ative pleasure.” Unintentionally reinforcing the cliché image of “American optimism”
Nye contrasts the negative pleasure that results from the failure of representation in
the Kantian sublime with the American technological sublime, which “is built on a
pleasure of a positive kind, for it concerns an apparently successful representation of
man’s ability to construct an infinite and perfect world” (287). Perhaps it is this lack
of negativity (pain) in the American sublime that accounts for its eventual devolution
into the “consumer’s sublime” of Las Vegas and Disneyland, which embodies the
constant search for positive pleasure.
The concept of the sublime has infiltrated urban studies as well. Reading the
phenomenon of the urban crowd through the prism of the Burkean and Kantian
sublime Christophe den Tandt proposes that the crowd inspires the same ambivalent
feelings—exhilaration mixed with fear of the loss of selfhood—usually associated
with the natural sublime. Whereas the late nineteenth-century urban sublime mani-
fested in urban novels “interweaves two strands of discourse: oceanic metaphors that
evoke magnitude and urban-industrial gothic that stirs accents of abject dehumaniza-
tion” (den Tandt 127),95 this “vitalistic description” of urban masses is ultimately
challenged by Romantic and Postromantic writers (from Edgar Allan Poe to T. S.
Eliot and Kafka), who underscore the link between the city, loss of self, and death,
thus giving rise to a new “necropolitan sublime” to be distinguished from the “met-
ropolitan sublime” (134). The “necropolitan sublime” is eventually displaced by the
postmodern, postmetropolitan variety of the urban sublime as seen in novels like
David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and hyperlink films like Paul Haggis’ Crash
(2004), Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), and
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), in which “the very unfolding of time and
space actualized in the form of human interconnections” (135) produces the sublime.
Given the current climate of breaking down rigid distinctions between the arts and
the sciences, scientific discourses have appropriated the concept of the sublime as well.
Observing the connection between much of the writing on the sublime as an aesthetic
category, quantum theory, and cosmology Ian Greig has argued that inasmuch as
quantum physics has effected “an interiorization of the infinite,” relocating transcend-
ence “into the quantum vacuum within,” we can now speak of a “quantum sublime,”
manifested, for instance, in David Bohn’s philosophy of physics. The “quantum sub-
lime” is a logical offshoot of Barbara Stafford’s “nonconscious sublime” mentioned
earlier—like it, it is invisible and graspable by the intellect alone (Greig 125).96 Finally,
while the sublime in physics is still predicated on a well-established aspect of the tra-
ditional sublime—the notion of “scale” (with the qualification that the sublime does
not depend on size: both the grand and the miniscule can be sublime)—”the chemical
sublime” tries to ground itself in another familiar aspect of the “old” sublime, the
notion of the limit. Thus, Roald Hoffman identifies the sublime in chemistry—a disci-
pline that “lacks that easy ladder to the sublime of boundlessness, of the downward or
outward freeways to infinity” (Hoffman 150)97—with the principle of change as such,
inasmuch as change presupposes the overcoming of a limit: “Energy may be stored in
chemical bonds, to be released in a chemical reaction. To set things into motion, to
effect change, one has to overcome some barrier, often a great one” (153).
One of the most sustained critiques of the exportation of the sublime outside the
disciplinary boundaries of aesthetics is to be found in James Elkins’ criticism of the
sublime as a transhistorical category. His principal objections are that, 1) the concept
98
of the sublime can be meaningfully applied only to a limited range of artworks, mostly
from the nineteenth century; 2) in contemporary scholarship the sublime is mostly
used “to smuggle covert religious meaning into texts that are putatively secular”
inasmuch as “sublimity,” “transcendence,” and “presence” are terms we use to talk,
indirectly about religion in an increasingly secular world (Elkins 75);99 3) the sublime
is inapplicable to discussions of science since it does not belong to the vocabulary of
most working scientists; 4) the postmodern sublime, an outgrowth of philosophy and
literature, is not applicable to the visual arts; and 5) the various incarnations of the
postmodern sublime, which posit a sense of presence, are logically incoherent in the
context of poststructuralism (the dominant approach to theorizing the arts) whose
basic premises are “mediation, translation, deferral of meaning, miscommunication,
and the social conditions of understanding” (78).
The larger issue here, as Elkins points out, is a general confusion between a “dis-
course on the sublime” and “a discourse of the sublime,” which accounts for the slip-
page in many postmodern theories from historical to philosophical definitions of the
sublime. Taken to the extreme the ahistorical stance of most contemporary accounts
of the sublime makes possible the infinite proliferation of the sublime, which empties
it out of all meaning until the sublime becomes a shorthand for the central problem of
representation itself,100 dramatizing the limits of discursive understanding. This is pre-
cisely how it is theorized in works as different theoretically and methodologically as
Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (1993), an influential anthology of French post-
structuralist writing on the sublime, and The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and
the Postmodern Sublime (2003),101 George Hartley’s study of the ways in which con-
temporary Marxism (from Althusser’s concept of ideological interpellation, through
Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious, to Spivak’s idea of the subaltern)
responds to the postmodern sublime as “the figure for the breakdown of representa-
tion” (Hartley 3). In the Preface to Of the Sublime: Presence in Question Jean-Luc
Nancy posits the sublime as nothing other than the question of representation:
Representation is articulated in terms of conformity and signification. But presen-

tation puts into play the event and the explosion of an appearing and disappear-
ing, which, considered in themselves, cannot conform to or signify anything. This
explosive event is what the tradition passes on to us on the names of beauty and/
or sublimity. [. . .] [T]he question of presentation is, in fact, nothing other than
the question of existence.
(Nancy 2)102
In his own contribution to the volume, enigmatically titled “The Sublime Offering,”103
Nancy posits the sublime as “the end of art” (both its destination or telos and the
suspension of art) and “the limit of presentation,” emphasizing that the sublime does
not signify a transcendence: it does not escape to a space beyond the limit (a “hidden”
world of Ideas or other “unpresentable things”) but takes place at the limit, which
also means that it does not leave aesthetics to penetrate ethics (Nancy 49). The other
essays in the volume subscribe to Nancy’s view of the sublime, with the notable excep-
tion of Lyotard, who assigns a specifically ethical value to the sublime: “The sublime
. . . requires suffering. It is supposed to hurt. It is “counterpurposive,” “inappropri-
ate” and it is sublime for this reason” (Lyotard 1993, 125).104 Along similar lines,
theorizing the Marxist response to the sublime through the representation/presenta-
tion (Vorstellung/Darstellung) distinction, Hartley defines the sublime as “the effect
of the limit internal to representation itself” without which “representation could
not operate at all” (Hartley 2003, 3–4). Ultimately, the sublime is just an indirect
way of talking about subjectivity: as Hartley reminds us, via a detour to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, the abyss [of the sublime] is not “the result of the subject’s
limited capacity for knowledge beyond sensory experience—but the very ground of
the subject: this paradox of a grounding abyss means nothing more than that the
subject is this space of incommensurability as such. [. . .] The subject is nothing but
the gap, the space of negativity, inherent in substance itself” (4). This notion of the
sublime as the “grounding abyss” of subjectivity sounds the death knell of an entire
history of the sublime as an aesthetic concept.
***
The volume Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime offers a map of the
contemporary sublime, from the Anthropocenic sublime (Adrian Ivakhiv), the surface
sublime (Barbara Stafford), the gendered sublime (Bill Beckley), through the vulgar
sublime (Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe), the techno-sublime (Ksenia Fedorova), the indus-
trial sublime (Stella Hockenhull), the environmental sublime (Sandra Shapshay and
Damian Sutton), the notional and the popular sublime (James Kirwan), the gamified
sublime (Lyuba Encheva), the neuropsychological sublime (Elizabeth Oldfather), to
the chemical sublime (Joseph Gabriel), the postsecular sublime (Paul Coates), the cos-
mological sublime (Hannah Goodwin), and the slippery border between the fake and
the real sublime (Temenuga Trifonova). While each of the contributors to this volume
offers their own reading of the sublime, all chapters are grounded in a shared under-
standing that aesthetic experience is always embedded—that aesthetic values, and
the aesthetic concepts in which they are embodied, are the product of their specific
historical contexts—and that the discourse of the sublime is inextricable from the dis-
course of the senses and that of the limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological,
technological, or environmental—of representation.
In “The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen” Adrian Ivakhiv argues that the pro-
liferation of things that could be considered sublime eliminates the possibility of
genuine sublimity105 by suggesting that the sublime can be “produced” in the same
way that anything else can, which makes it consistent with an era of productivity
through mixing, recombination, and hybridization. The only genuine repository of
the sublime, argues Ivakhiv, is that indicated by the notion of Anthropocenic passing.
To think the post-Anthropocenic sublime this chapter proposes an “eventology” that
distinguishes between three classes of events: 1) “events,” which are simply things
that happen; 2) “hyper-events,” and 3) “Events,” like the extinction of humanity,
which can only be witnessed through their befores and afters.
In “Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality” Paul Coates explores a
series of questions: Do we need the sublime? “After Auschwitz,” as some might put it,
can it ever again credibly occupy the upper case its concept seems to demand? Might
the Sublime represent a once necessary but now outmoded transitional form between
religion and secularism? Is “postsecularity” an attempt to exorcise the specter of
another name, “the Sublime,” to recreate the illusion of progress? Coates takes up
questions of representation, ideology, historiography, and self-delusion in the context
of what the Sublime “was” and “is” in cinema, and suggests that the contemporary
cinematic sublime is arguably more the Sublime of Burke than of Kant: less one of a
human, humane, simply bourgeois, moral order than one of horror at our ongoing
devastation of the world and of one another.
In “The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime” James Kirwan outlines the
concept of the sublime as described in the nineteenth century, and demonstrates the
extent to which it has been an enduring trope in cinema, from the beginning of the
twentieth century up to the present day. Kirwan then draws a contrast between this
continuity and the tendency within contemporary aesthetics to use the word “sub-
lime,” and to lay claim to this eighteenth-century tradition, in order to refer to several
different, and largely notional, constructs concerning the value of art.
Over the last couple of decades scholars and critics have been hard at work to define
the sublime negatively by specifying what it is not. As a result there has been a steady
proliferation of “fake” sublimes that simulate the sublime without actually being it.
In my own contribution to this volume, “Of Fake and Real Sublimes,” I consider a
few representative instances of this slippage between “real” and “fake” sublime and
the definitional difficulties brought about by it: 1) the environmental sublime; 2) the
CGI sublime; 3) the immersive sublime; 4) the data sublime; 5) the fetishization of the
detail as sublime; and 6) the forlorn sublime.
In “‘Black and Glittering’: The Inscrutable Sublime” Barbara Stafford asks whether
in a flat-line era where many, if not most, scientific and technological projects remain
esoteric or vaguely understood by non-specialists, a “Surface Sublimity” might exist.
She uses William Gibson’s account of Japanese unadvertised “secret brands,” in
his novel Zero History, as a springboard to considering the emergence of what she
calls “Brandless Art.” Stafford proposes that a revolutionary escape from ubiquitous
“signature” styles (Romanticism, Sublimity, label-driven fashion, etc.) and pervasive
selfie-solipsism is emerging in the scrutable experimental art and the e ngineering of
Intermedial artist/scientists.
In “Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity” Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe explores the role of
vulgarity, excess, and sublimated terror in the contemporary sublime, taking as case
studies the work of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, in which the disposable is vulgarly
monumentalized. As was not the case when he wrote Beauty and the Contemporary
Sublime (1999), Gilbert-Rolfe argues, we now know that techno-capitalism is not
only uncontrollable and limitless—and thus sublime—but also literally too big to
fail. This aspect of the sublime as both contemporary and a condition experienced
as uncertain needs to be taken into account insofar as it suggests a sublimity at once
frenetic and frozen. Having suggested in his earlier work that the sublime is no longer
to be found in nature (in the uncertainty of the deep space presented by a sea that
stretches to the horizon beneath an open sky) but in technology (in the depth of the
computer or television screen that has electricity running through it), and that the
uncertainty of the inherently ungrounded is characteristic of the technological sub-
lime, here Gilbert-Rolfe continues his examination of this uncertainty as an aspect of
the contemporary sublime.
In “Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches”
Elizabeth Oldfather argues that neuroaesthetics has barely begun to approach the
sublime, remaining dominated by studies of beauty. Current cognitive work on the
sublime often echoes eighteenth-century empiricism, both in its conceptual reli-
ance on Burke and Kant, and also in a shared propensity for hanging very broad
psycho-physiological speculations upon empirically observed features. The field as a
whole is highly speculative and diffuse, and though many of the insights generated
are intriguing, they do not hold out much hope for the sublime as a cohesive cognitive
phenomenon. The cognitive study of awe, argues Oldfather, offers a more promising
line of research. Although awe and the sublime are not perfect conceptual equiva-
lents, Keltner and Haidt’s foundational work on awe names two central features,
“perceived vastness” and “an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental
structures,” that encompass much of the sublime.106 Setting aside the fear/pleasure
dynamic of the Burkean and Kantian sublime allows us to grasp an emerging complex
of suspended wonder, ecstatic transport, self-estrangement, and supervenient mean-
ing oriented around the cognitive process of sudden “recentering”—a term Oldfather
borrows from narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan. While recentering can be a gradual
process, the signal feature of sublime recentering is that it occurs abruptly and invol-
untarily, generating a sudden sense that the world has shifted coordinates, producing
vertiginous transport and reordered meaning. The pleasure (and perhaps also the
terror) of the sublime may thus be of the same neurological class as the pleasures and
discomforts of insight—a sudden rush of cognitive reconnection that uncenters and
reforms, at least for a moment, the co-ordinates of the self.
In “Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime” Lyuba Encheva suggests that the
success of Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow”—a moment of intense involvement
when a feeling of easy mastery is combined with a dissipating sense of time and self—
as a promotional banner for gamification consists in its meaning-making capacity as a
persuasive periphrasis of the classical sublime understood more broadly as the forma-
tional encounter between self and world. The conceptualization of flow in gameplay
explores the limits of the self in the interplay between action and self-reflection,
intentionality and full submission to something greater than oneself. Departing from
the notion of the Kantian sublime as an affect produced by external stimuli, the
concept of “optimal experience” or “flow”—the “gamified sublime”—suggests that
sublime affect can be willed forth with the help of ready structures of engagement
and mind techniques. To determine to what extent the notion of “flow,” as concep-
tualized by Csikszentmihalyi and then adopted by gamification discourse, is related
to sublime experience or affect as a consciousness-forming event Encheva examines
“flow” alongside Freud’s understanding of Eros and Thanatos and Bataille’s study of
eroticism. Through an analysis of “flow” or “optimal experience” from within the
framework of psychoanalysis she shows that Csikszentmihalyi’s dialectical descrip-
tion of the human condition as hovering between freedom of the self and freedom
from the self is analogous to Freud’s and Bataille’s treatment of “liberation” and
“sovereignty,” and to the way in which the contemporary sublime is understood.
In “The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime” Ksenia Fedorova demonstrates
that the concept of the sublime applied to experiences of technologically mediated or
digital culture raises multiple questions that go beyond the redefinition of the sublime
itself, providing insights about the effects of technology on how we conceive of the
“self” and of being human. On the one hand, the concept of the sublime is applied
to certain phenomena of digital culture such as the autopoetic, generative qualities of
code, the extension of the senses that makes new perceptions possible, virtual reality,
which offers an illusion of immersion into “other,” imagined worlds, and datascapes
that are hardly navigable in their immensity and escape our ability to comprehend
them in their “totality.” Such phenomena seem to share many of the features of the
Burkean and Kantian sublime: the encounter with the unknown, the feeling of being
overpowered, the incommensurability between imagination and reason. On the other
hand, these same qualities, especially the quality of ambiguity and the sublime’s affec-
tive dimension, blur the boundaries between the sublime and other categories such as
the uncanny, the mysterious, and the subliminal. Fedorova then goes on to argue that
what makes difficult the discussion of artificial intelligence in terms of the sublime is
the fact that throughout its history the sublime has always been tied to the human per-
ceptual apparatus and to the human capacity for judgment. Although contemporary
science urges us to overcome our anthropocentric perspective and explores territory
that is indeed quite sublime—nano-worlds, oceanic depths, the genome, the “con-
nectome”—the application of the traditional notion of the sublime to describe these
new phenomena cannot be undertaken without sacrificing methodological integrity.
In her contribution, “From Diagrams to Deities: Evoking the Cosmological
Sublime,” Hannah Goodwin asks: Are digitally coded images capable of producing
the sublime or is cinema now associated with trickery and the spectacular, a sort of
bastardized sublime? She hints at one possible answer to this question by moving back
to an earlier chapter in cinema’s history when film had claims to Piercian indexicality
but when trickery was nevertheless prevalent in representations of sublime objects.
Specifically, she considers public astronomy education films of the 1920s that sought
to explain (and sensationalize) scientific conceptions of the cosmos in ways that cap-
tured the sublimity of the cosmos through active manipulation, modeling, and visual
trickery. In the second part of the chapter Goodwin returns to the present, arguing
that the constitution of digital film by 1s and 0s doesn’t annihilate the potential for the
sublime even if it challenges it. The 1s and 0s may constitute the fabric of the text, just
as animated diagrams and models that mathematized the cosmic are the foundation of
the 1920s films, but films like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or Lars von Trier’s
Melancholia, argues Goodwin, still gesture toward a totality that isn’t just the sum of
its rationalized components.
Sandra Shapshay begins her chapter, “Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-
Century World: The Sublime in Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics,” by
acknowledging that the usefulness of the aesthetic category of the “sublime” has
come under attack in Anglo-American aesthetics in recent years. Contemporary envi-
ronmental aesthetic theories have largely left discussion of the sublime to the dustbin
of history: the concept has been seen by leading environmental aestheticians as ineluc-
tably tied to religious and/or speculative-metaphysical ideas incompatible with a
secular, scientific world view. However, terms like “majestic” and “sublime” are still
in common usage to denote grand, overwhelming, terrifying, or vast environments
such as mountain ranges, cascades, or storms at sea, where terms like “beautiful,”
“lovely,” “graceful,” and “picturesque” seem inadequate for capturing their aesthetic
effect. Shapshay argues that this ordinary usage of “sublime” should be retained
and that a coherent, secular account of what she calls “thin” and “thick” sublime
responses to nature and art can be formulated.
In “The Sublime in Environmental Photography” Damian Sutton examines the
genre of environmental and postindustrial photography within contemporary art
practice in order to understand how photographers and viewers orient themselves
toward the subjects of this practice. This is a complicated and problematic spectato-
rial process, which engages spectator empathy and attempts a critique of unethical
industrial practices, but which also makes the viewer as consumer complicit in
the continued exploitation of postindustrial landscapes and their inhabitants. It is
through the notion of the sublime, argues Sutton, that we can understand how pho-
tographers resolve the contradiction presented by the ravaged environment as one of
sensational, spectatorial pleasure and immense fear, and how they seek to turn this
toward a meditation on globalization that can be understood by the viewer. Recent
works by photographers such as Andreas Gursky and Wing Ka Ho have challenged
our understanding of the sublime as one of fear in the face of nature as might, given
the scale and detail of their renderings of contemporary urban dwelling that seem to
match the power presented by the natural world. In such images it is the assault of
data, as much as the represented subject, that overwhelms the viewer.
In “Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema” Stella
Hockenhull explores the place of the sublime in the Neo-Romantic movement in
contemporary art, focusing on the sublime landscape in cinema and photography
(as distinguished from the picturesque landscape), which testifies not only to an
increasing interest in the sublime in relation to landscape but also to the dramatic
contrast between the unspoiled Nature of the Kantian sublime and the ravaged sub-
lime of the postindustrial landscape. Using British artist/filmmaker Sarah Turner’s
film Perestroika (2009) as her primary example, but also referring to other films,
Hockenhull shows that cinematic and photographic landscape images of industrial
growth and waste are still capable of producing the experience of the sublime, con-
firming the persistence of the sublime as a post-Millennium’s structure of feeling.
Joseph Gabriel’s chapter, “Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime,”
focuses on a rarely discussed phenomenon, “the chemical sublime.” Gabriel demon-
strates that under the influence of the writings of British Romantics like Humphry
Davy and Thomas De Quincey during the nineteenth century the use of ether, nitrous
oxide, hashish, opium, and other substances was frequently articulated through the
encounter with the sublime. Over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, however,
the rise of an empirically driven scientific practice made such claims less credible—they
were cast out of the domain of truth and into the domain of fiction and delusion. The
encounter with the chemical sublime was thus reduced to the category of delirium.
Yet this was an incomplete process; a counter-current remained, one in which psycho-
active drugs retained their power to provoke sublime experience and corresponding
truth-claims about the nature of the world. Gabriel explores the recent trajectory of
this remainder, distinguishing between, on one hand, the purely therapeutic/clinical
and recreational use of psychoactive drugs, which has nothing to do with the sublime,
and, on the other hand, the growing popularity of ayahuasca in the United States, in
particular the growing use of the drug by white Americans in the context of a growing
network of loosely linked communities that understand its use in overlapping spiritual
and therapeutic terms. Although neither the clinic nor the club seems to offer a path
to the chemical sublime, the ritualistic use of ayahuasca, argues Gabriel, suggests that
a reconciliation between art and science may still be possible.
In the last chapter, “The Birds and the Bees,” Bill Beckley reflects on the gender-
ing of the categories of the sublime and the beautiful in Burke and Kant in order to
ask, in the context of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s rethinking of the masculine sublime as
androgynous, whether the contemporary sublime is differently gendered as a result of
shifting ideas of “masculine” and “feminine.”
***
In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between
predominantly spatial and predominantly temporal definitions, from its conceptual-
ization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern
redefinition as an “event” (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our fail-
ure to “cognitively map” the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic
structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in
terms of the “new temporality of presence” produced by “network/real time” (tem-
poral). The sublime has also been assigned different functions or uses, from disruptive
(in theories emphasizing the sublime’s ethical obligation) to integrative (in theories
applying the sublime to the discourse of national identity and emphasizing its cohesive
effects). Whatever its specific historical incarnations, the affective potential of the
sublime, and the kinds of “things” or “experiences” deemed sublime, have always
supported certain social and aesthetic regimes of values while, at the same time, being
constitutive elements of value systems. If the “old” sublime was experienced as a
“loss of self,” and thus predicated on a belief in an otherwise unified, self-present self
that can be lost, the fact that today the self is always already decentered, lacking self-
presence, fragmented across multiple media platforms, raises the question whether the
“old” sublime is still available to us. By exploring the interlocking of new emotional
regimes and the new social and aesthetic values they give rise to, as well as the ways
in which modes of feeling and social and aesthetic values reinforce or contradict each
other, this volume seeks to contribute to the growing research in the history and soci-
ology of emotions, moods, and non-cognitive knowledge.
Notes
1 Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
2 Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to
Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
3 Timothy M. Costelloe, “The Sublime: A Short Introduction to a Long History,” in
Timothy Costelloe, ed. The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 1–11.
4 Bill Beckley, “Introduction: Sticky Sublime,” in Bill Beckley, ed. Sticky Sublime (New
York: Allworth Press, 2001), 2–16.
5 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth Press,
1999).
6 For an in-depth discussion on the sublime in Longinus see Malcolm Heath, “Longinus and
the Ancient Sublime,” in Costelloe, 11–23.
7 For an etymology of the word “sublime” see Costelloe 3–4.
8 James Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter,
Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
9 Partisan Review, Vol. VII, No. 4 (July–August 1940): 296–310.
10 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).
11 For a “history of matter” and its devaluation in Western culture after the c lassical period,
see Porter 120–200.
12 This evacuation or sublimation of matter into “sublime matter” happens most dramati-
cally in Anaximenes, who proposed air as the basic form of matter on the ground of
precisely its infinity and insubstantiality.
13 This fascination with the experience of an abyss or a void informs as well the Hellenistic
poetics of space, where sublimity is conveyed through the motif of “collapse” and “ruina-
tion” already hinted at in the melancholy connotations of faded sepulchral inscriptions.
14 C. Stephen Jaeger, ed. Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art,
Architecture, Literature, Music (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
15 Peter de Bolla has analyzed the confusion between a “discourse of the sublime” and
a “discourse on the sublime” in The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History,
Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989). The confusion between
the two, which Costelloe claims Boileau’s translation of Longinus put an end to, returns
in contemporary attempts to answer the question whether art can be sublime in and of
itself or it can only represent the sublime. According to Elizabeth Kessler, for instance,
representations of the sublime are not, themselves, sublime: thus, Hubble telescope images
of the universe can, at best, be filed under the category “pretty sublime” without being
sublime themselves because “by adding color, changing the contrast, and composing the
scenes, astronomers make visible aspects of the data that would be otherwise obscured”
(72). See Elizabeth Kessler, “Pretty Sublime,” in Roald Hoffman and Iain Boyd White, eds.
Beyond the Infinite: The Sublime in Art and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 55–74.
16 Gene Ray discusses the historical reasons for the reappearance of the sublime in the eight-
eenth century. See Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From
Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). See also
Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development
of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997) in
which she examines the transformation, following Northern Europeans’ experience on the
Grand Tour during the seventeenth century, of rugged mountainous scenery from ugly and
dangerous to exhilarating and sublime. Another major reason for this radical shift in atti-
tudes toward nature has to do with the destabilization of the orderly and anthropocentric
Ptolemaic universe by new scientific theories (Galileo, Descartes, Newton).
17 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful and Other
Pre-Revolutionary Writings (London: Penguin, 1998).
18 Compare Kant: “[T]he virtue of a woman is a beautiful virtue. That of the male sex should
be a noble virtue” (Observations 81). See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of
the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960).
19 See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Potts argues that the nineteenth century cultural
debate about the sublime and the beautiful was a debate about power and the invention of
a self-determining (republican) subject.
20 Theodore Gracyk suggests one possible reason for the relocation of the sublime from art
to nature. See Theodore Gracyk, “The Sublime and the Fine Arts,” in Costelloe, 217–229.
21 Bill Readings has pointed out Lyotard’s indebtedness to Kant’s idea of the sublime as
something that “leaves us without criteria and requires indeterminate judgment” (xxxi).
See Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991).
22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,
1987).
23 For a list of examples of the three kinds of the Kantian sublime, see the Appendix
to Robert Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 233–234.
24 Clewis extends the scope of the Kantian sublime once more when he claims that what Kant
calls “enthusiasm” can also count as an aesthetic feeling of the sublime and that this is
precisely how Kant intended his account of the French Revolution to be read.
25 Bruce Duncan, “Sturm und Drang Passions and Eighteenth-Century Psychology,” in
David Hill, ed. Literature of the Sturm und Drang (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2003), 47–69.
26 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, eds. Elizabeth
M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
27 Lesley Sharpe, Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1995).
28 Like Kant, Hegel thinks the sublime as the result of “the effort to give sensuous expres-
sion to an idea in which the inconceivability of the Idea, and the impossibility of find-
ing adequate expression of it by means of the sensuous, are clearly evidenced” (Hegel,
Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, 469–470). However, Hegel draws a distinction
between the “‘spurious or negative’ infinity of the mere endless progression of the finite—
such as is to be found in Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime—and the “genuine”
or “true infinity” that can accommodate the notion of God” (Hegel, The Encyclopedia
Logic, par 93–94, 149–150). See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
vol. 3 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) and The Encyclopedia Logic
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991).
29 Not everyone subscribed to Hegel’s opinion of Schiller. Hölderlin, among others, refused
to credit Schiller with overcoming Kant’s notion of the aesthetic as a regulative idea.
Schiller, he believed, failed to acknowledge the ontological or metaphysical status of the
aesthetic, i.e. he did not remove Kant’s “as if” clause in his interpretation of aesthetic judg-
ment. By stressing the idea of freedom, Schiller subordinated the aesthetic to the moral (like
Kant before him) instead of understanding the aesthetic as a means to knowing being itself.
30 For instance, Schiller points to Juno Ludovisi as an example of beauty, but his descrip-
tion is clearly one of an experience of sublimity. There is the Kantian attraction to and
repulsion from the sublime object—“we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly
grace, her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror”(109)—there is the solitude
of the sublime object—“a creation completely self-contained”—there are Heidegger’s and
Blanchot’s analogous notions of the nothing, the obscure, the neuter as that which calls
without imposing any demands on us, that which calls precisely by not calling—“neither
yielding, nor resisting”—there is Barnett Newman’s notion of Is it happening?—“no frailty
where temporality might break in”—and, finally, the Kantian motif of the quickening of
the spirit—“[a] wondrous stirring of the heart.” This is a state of mind “for which mind
has no concept nor speech any name” (109). This ecstatic abandonment of oneself, this
mixture of “utter repose and supreme agitation” (109) have nothing to do with the quiet,
peaceful contemplation the beautiful object evokes. The experience of “lofty equanimity
and freedom of the spirit” (153) as a state which is not itself contemplative but offers a
choice between abstract thought and direct contemplation” (153) is clearly an experience
of the sublime.
31 As Todd Kontje has shown, the ambiguities in Schiller’s treatment of the aesthetic both
as an end in itself and as a means to a higher moral end have been attributed to the social
structure of eighteenth century Germany, particularly to the process of bourgeois emanci-
pation. See Todd Curtis Kontje, Constructing Reality: A Rhetorical Analysis of Friedrich
Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York University Ottendorfer
Series (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).
32 For instance, Barnett Newman describes his experience of the sublime in the Indian
mounds in the Ohio valley as a physical sensation of time: “Suddenly one realizes that the
sensation is not one of space or [of] an object in space. [. . .] The sensation is one of time.
[. . .] I insist on my sensations in time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation
of time” (Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 175). Similarly, Schiller describes the “play drive,” which
mediates between the “sense drive” and the “form drive” in terms of the annihilation of
time within time, producing a reconciliation of becoming with absolute being (Schiller 97).
33 Stephen Boos, “Rethinking the Aesthetic: Kant, Schiller, and Hegel,” in Dorota Glowacka
and Stephen Boos, eds. Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries, SUNY
Series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 15–27.
34 The story of the sublime in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is often written as a
story of “the return of the sublime” though what prompted that return and when exactly
it took place varies in different accounts. There are, however, several moments in this
story that critics agree on, including the co-optation of aesthetics by ethics, the rejection of
the sublime by modernist art after WW2, the temporary return of the sublime in abstract
expressionism, followed by another repression of the sublime by pop art, minimalism,
and postmodernism, and another return, this time to a melancholic, “tempered” sublime,
which, according to Toni Morrison, captures the two structures of feeling dominating
the contemporary landscape: terror and melancholy. See Michael Duncan, High Drama:
Eugene Berman and the Legacy of the Melancholy Sublime (San Antonio, TX: The
Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, 2004).
35 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1998).
36 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
37 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
38 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (New York: Polity Press, 1988).
39 Although in The Inhuman Lyotard offers Newman’s art as an example of sublimity, in his
later work Postmodern Fables (1997) he contends that there is no aesthetics of the sub-
lime: “There is no sublime object. [. . .] Nor is there some aesthetics of the sublime, since
the sublime is a sentiment that draws its bitter pleasure from the nullity of the aisthesis”
(1997: 17–32). Instead, the sublime belongs to a “negative ontology” (235–249). See Jean-
Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
40 For a critique of Lyotard’s and Newman’s “intellectually imposing” sublime and its even-
tual institutionalization, see Julian Bell, “Contemporary Art and the Sublime,” in Nigel
Llewellyn and Christine Riding, eds. The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication,
January 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/julian-bell-
contemporary-art-and-the-sublime-r1108499, accessed April 14, 2016.
41 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1993).
42 Passibility to the event is the capacity to sense “something in excess of what the body can
sense, of what is sensible as circumscribed by the (biological, cultural) institutions of the
body. [. . .] Sensation is not only the reception of useful contextual information, it is also
in its immediacy the reminder of a threat. The body doesn’t belong to you, it is sensible
only insofar as it is exposed to the other thing, deprived of its self-distinction, in danger of
annihilation. It is sensible only as lamentable” (Lyotard 1997, 217–233).
43 Lyotard’s sublime is not devoid of melancholic overtones, which has prompted some crit-
ics to regard Lyotard’s philosophy as “arrest[ing] the imagination in a nostalgic reverie”
(Browning 2000: 157) and ultimately “climaxing in a melancholic reverence for what
eludes human conception” (85). See Gary K. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand
Narratives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000).
44 David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits,” in Costelloe,
118–131.
45 If today the sublime can still be located in nature at all this nature has been transformed
into “third nature,” which is neither fully cultural not fully o utside culture. On “third
nature” see Gene Ray, “History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear,” in
Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska, eds. The Sublime Now (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 133–154.
46 Gene Ray traces this link between the sublime and catastrophic history back to Benjamin’s
1936 “The Artwork in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in which Benjamin
“describes aura as an effect of the authority of singular works of bourgeois art” and
to Benjamin’s reworking on the notion of aura in his 1939 essay “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,” where “aura’s authority is no longer a function of the categories of bourgeois
art becoming obsolete under the pressure of material and technological change” (Ray
2005, 6).
47 Harold Bloom, “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime,” in Beckley, ed. Sticky
Sublime, 16–41.
48 Dave Hickey, “Nothing Like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio,” in Beckley,
ed. Sticky Sublime, 41–48.
49 Thomas McEvilley, “Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart,” in Beckley, ed. Sticky
Sublime, 57–84.
50 One articulation of this claim is that of Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoemer, who coined the
term “Anthropocene” to describe the present geological era, in which man has become
the most significant factor affecting global environmental change. Another articulation
includes Damian White and Chris Wilbert’s anthology Technonatures (2009), which
translates the Anthropocene concept from the geological and evolutionary to the ethno-
cultural level. See Ariane Harrison, “Introduction,” in Ariane Lourie Harrison, ed.
Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory (New York: Routledge,
2013), 3–33.
51 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations (Berlin: Schocken,
1969), 155–201.
52 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
53 See Leo Charney’s Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2012) in which Charney discusses the role early cinema played in the
structuring of contingency and attention in “peaks and valleys.” The problem of the
archivability of presence emerges in Charney’s ambivalent discussion of the sublimity
and, at the same time, the horror of “the empty moment,” usually disguised by cinematic
techniques of continuity.
54 Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser, “Introduction,” in Robert Hassan and Ronald E.
Purser, eds. 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 1–21.
55 Robert Hassan, “Network Time,” in Hassan and Purser, 37–61.
56 The reason for such divergent interpretations of temporality in the network society has to
do with the fact that the transition from premodern to modern to network time and tem-
porality did not proceed by means of elimination: clock time did not “replace” embodied
time, nor did network time “replace” clock time: rather, these three modes of temporality
coexist. See Barbara Adam, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
57 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007).
58 Barbara Adam, “Foreword,” in Hassan and Purser, ix–xi.
59 Carmen Leccardi, “New Temporal Perspectives in the ‘High-Speed Society’,” in Hassan
and Purser, 25–36.
60 Mike Crang, “Speed = Distance/Time: Chronotopographies of Actions,” in Hassan and
Purser, 62–88.
61 Along similar lines, Mike Crang challenges Virilio’s and Castells’ critique of the network
society by reminding us that the technological innovations of modernity—the telegraph,
the telephone, and the railroad—were seen as creating a shared temporality—similar to
ICTs—and thus leading to integration rather than to disintegration.
62 Adrian Mackenzie, “Protocols and the Irreducible Traces of Embodiment: The Viterbi
Algorithm and the Mosaic of Machine Time,” in Hassan and Purser, 89–105.
63 Jack Petranker, “The Presence of Others: Network Experience as an Antidote to the
Subjectivity of Time,” in Hassan and Purser, 173–-194.
64 Darren Tofts’ analysis of bullet-time cinematography is representative of the first line of
defense. Tofts points to the use of bullet-time photography in The Matrix as an example
of cinema’s “appropriation of the aesthetics and gaming strategies of video games and
their emphasis on the interaction within a high-res mise-en-scene” (111) in order to offer
spectators increasingly higher degrees of immersion. See Darren Tofts, “Truth at Twelve
Thousand Frames per Second: The Matrix and Time-Image Cinema,” in Hassan and
Purser, 109–121.
65 Andrew Murphie, “The Fallen Present: Time in the Mix,” in Hassan and Purser, 122–140.
66 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).
67 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991).
68 Cf. Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004). Mosco debunks the myth of cyberspace (or of instantaneity) as falsely
promising “a new sense of community and widespread popular empowerment,” “a genu-
ine global village” (24).
69 For an analysis of the sublime in relation to the beautiful in Burke’s aesthetic, see Rodolphe
Gasché, “. . . And the Beautiful,” in Costelloe, 24–36. Gasché argues that from today’s
perspective “beauty is the intrinsically more important and stimulating part of Burke’s
[sensualist, socio-anthropological] aesthetics” (26).
70 To fully appreciate the change in critics’ attitude toward beauty and the sublime, consider
Marcuse’s warning, in his discussion of Schiller’s letters, that nostalgic aspect of the beau-
tiful points to a dangerous tendency within beauty toward normalization, and that beauty
is less capable than the sublime to perform “a radical break with the terror of normality”
(Behler 21). Unlike the sublime, the beautiful can both “recall the repressed . . . [only] to
repress it again—‘purified’”(Marcuse qtd. in Behler 21). See Constantin Behler, Nostalgic
Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 1995).
71 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
72 Jaak Panksepp, “Affective Foundations of Creativity, Language, Music and Mental Life:
In Search of the Biology of the Soul,” in Hoffman and White, 21–42.
73 V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
(New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1999), A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness:
From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers (New York: Plume, 2005), and The Tell-tale
Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest For What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2011); Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest
to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
(New York and London: Random House, 2012).
74 Barbara Stafford, “Still Deeper: The Nonconscious Sublime; or, the Art and Science of
Submergence,” in Hoffman and White, 43–56.
75 John Onians, “Neuroscience and the Sublime in Art and Science,” in Hoffman and White,
91–105.
76 When Onians then draws attention to another, less commonly discussed aspect of the
Burkean sublime—obscurity—he inadvertently reveals a major drawback of neuroscientific
approaches to aesthetics: they simply restate what we already know instinctively. Referring
to fMRI studies of brain reactions to different kinds of objects Onians explains that an
object with clear associations (such a red strawberry) “elicits a response that is restful and
positive [whereas] an indeterminate and confused object is indeed more likely to provoke
mental movement” (100). Isn’t it common sense to assume that when faced with an inde-
terminate object the mind is more actively engaged to decipher its nature and meaning?
77 Some of the most prominent works promoting various versions of “the New Materialism,”
following the rediscovery of Deleuze and Spinoza, include Antonio Damasio, Looking for
Spinoza: Joy, Sorry, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Vintage, 2003); Heidi Morrison
Ravven, “Spinozistic Approaches to Evolutionary Naturalism: Spinoza’s Anticipation of
Contemporary Affective Neuroscience,” Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 1
(March 2003), 70–74; Peter Gaffney, ed. The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and
Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What
It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Estelle
Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through
the Arts (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013). “The New Materialism“ has been criticized for
its reductionist and anti-humanist tendencies. For instance, Sarah Ahmed has argued that
“the New Materialism” posits matter as an “it-like fetish object” while also strategically
ignoring previous theoretical work on body and matter, e.g. phenomenological studies and
feminist work on embodiment. For a critique of Deleuze and of Deleuzian philosophy more
generally, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980); Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (New
York: Picador, 1999); Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Alain Badiou, Cinema (New York: Polity, 2013);
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006) and “Is There a Deleuzian
Aesthetics?” in Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2004), 1–14; Slavoj Žižek, Organs without
Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004); Peter Hallward,
Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006). Some
of the most important critiques of “the New Materialism” and neuroscience include
Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of
Humanity (Durham, NC: Acumen Publishing, 2011); Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed:
The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Robert
Burton, A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us
About Ourselves (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013); Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-
Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2013). For a more balanced view of neuroscience, see Patricia
S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (New York: Norton, 2013).
78 Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
79 Similarly, speaking as an artist rather than as a scholar, Julian Bell insists that insofar
as artworks, unlike Nature, cannot escape being complicit in the commodification of
spectacle—nature doesn’t need us or want us to be overwhelmed by it, while artworks are
designed with that effect in mind—they cannot be properly sublime or represent the sub-
lime. Art that employs the whole human figure as its central property, or that represents a
human figure in relationship to interiors, cannot be sublime (Bell 16).
80 A. Roesler-Friedenthal and J. Nathan, eds. The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator
in the Visual Arts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2003).
81 John Shearman, “Donatello, the Spectator, and the Shared Moment,” in A. Roesler-
Friedenthal and J. Nathan, eds. The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual
Arts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2003), 53–81; Peter Geimer, “Times of Perception:
Lessing, Manet, Londe,” in Roesler-Friedenthal and Nathan, 77–99.
82 Hans Henrik Jorgensen, “Velation and Revelation: Hagioscopic Vision in Early Medieval
Architecture on the Iberian Peninsula,” in Roesler-Friedenthal and Nathan, 177–191.
83 Richard A. Etlin, “Architecture and the Sublime,” in Costelloe, 230–273.
84 The de(im)materialization of the architectural sublime is made literal in architects’
Diller+Scofidio’s project Blur. See Cary Wolfe, “Lose the Building: Systems, Theory,
Architecture and Diller+Scofidio’s Blur,” in Harrison, 115–137.
85 Achille Bonito, ed. Architectura del Sublime: la chiesa del Santo Volto di Gesu a Rom di
Pietro Sartogo e Nathalie Grenon (Milano: Electa, 2007).
86 Alison West, From Pigalle to Preault: Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture
1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
87 James Kirwan has argued that the notion of “aesthetic experience” has all but become
purely notional, with “a host of purely notional sublimes [being] posited in connection to
a variety of literary figures or cultural phenomena” (157). See James Kirwan, Sublimity:
The Non-Rational and the Rational in the History of Aesthetics (New York: Routledge,
2005), especially chapter 9 for a critique of Lyotard’s “therapeutic” sublime.
88 Scott Bukatman, “The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime,” in Annette
Kuhn, ed. Alien Zone II (New York: Verso, 1999), 249–276.
89 Scott Bukatman, “Disobedient Machines: Animation and Autonomy,” in Roald Hoffman
and Iain Boyd White, eds. Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 128–149.
90 According to Bukatman, the suspension of disbelief is pushed to the limit in narratives
featuring automata: we know very well that they are not human yet we find it problematic
to deny their humanity: “asserting the reality of the illusion” (the illusion of automata
being human) constitutes the “sublime excess” of these science fiction narratives (147).
91 Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2009).
92 John R. J. Eyck, “The ‘Subtler’ Sublime in Modern Dutch Aesthetics,” in Costelloe,
135–146.
93 Chandos Michael Brown, “The First American Sublime,” in Costelloe, 147–170.
94 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
95 Christophe den Tandt, “Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime,” in Kevin R. McNamara,
ed. The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 127–137.
96 Ian Greig, “Quantum Romanticism: The Aesthetics of the Sublime in David Bohm’s
Philosophy of Physics,” in Hoffman and White, 106–127. The Presocratics’ material sub-
lime, especially the atomists’ sublime, anticipates the sublime of contemporary physics.
97 Roald Hoffman, “On the Sublime in Science,” in Hoffman and White, 149–164.
98 James Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” in Hoffman and White, 75–90.
99 Other scholars consider the link between the sublime and religion almost self-evident. For
instance, Andrew Chignell and Matthew C. Halteman propose a fourfold taxonomy of
what they call “the theistic sublime,” “the spiritualistic sublime,” “the demythologistic
sublime,” and “the nontheistic sublime” (184). See Andrew Chignell and Matthew C.
Halteman, “Religion and the Sublime,” in Costelloe, 183–202.
100 In The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007) Jacques Rancière offers a radical
rethinking of “representation.” According to Rancière, the “representative regime” func-
tions through three major constraints. First, it is “a dependency of the visible on speech”
insofar as the function of speech is to order the visible by means of two operations: “an
operation of substitution (which places “before our eyes” what is removed in space or
time) and an operation of exhibition (which makes what is intrinsically hidden from
sight, the inner springs motivating characters and events, visible)” (113). Speech “makes
visible” only by means of under-determination: by not really making visible. The second
constraint “concerns the relationship between knowing and not knowing, acting and suf-
fering. [. . .] Representation is an ordered deployment of meanings, an adjusted relation-
ship between what is understood or anticipated and what comes as a surprise, according
to the paradoxical logic analyzed by Aristotle’s Poetics. This logic of gradual, thwarted
revelation excludes the abrupt emergence of speech that says too much, speaks too soon,
and makes too much known” (114). This constraint produces the pathos of representation
(e.g. Oedipus Rex). The third constraint is especially important: it involves a “regime of
rationality peculiar to fiction, which exempts its speech acts from the normal criteria of
authenticity and utility of words and images, subjecting them instead to intrinsic criteria of
verisimilitude and appropriateness” (120). To sum up, “the representative regime in art is
not one in which art’s task is to fashion resemblances. It is a regime in which resemblances
are subject to the triple constraint” (120). It follows from this that the break from repre-
sentation is not “the emancipation from resemblance but the emancipation of resemblance
from the triple constraint” (120).
Significantly, the break from representation (usually associated with modernism) was pre-
ceded by novelistic realism, which is commonly, and erroneously, considered the clearest
embodiment of the regime of representation. Rancière, however, maintains that novelistic
realism was precisely the emancipation of resemblance from the triple constraint of the
regime of representation: “It is the loss of representative proportions and proprieties. Such
is the disruption that critics of Flaubert denounced at the time under the heading of real-
ism: everything is now on the same level, the great and the small, important events and
insignificant episodes, human beings and things. Everything is equal, equally represent-
able. [. . .] Contrasting with the representative scene of visibility of speech is an equality of
the visible that invades discourse and paralyzes action. For what is newly visible has very
specific properties. It does not make visible; it imposes presence” (121). The primacy of
description in cinema and in novelistic realism no longer “makes visible” but represents
the threat of unintelligibility. This deprives representation of “its powers of ordered distri-
bution of knowledge effects and pathos effects. The representative separation between the
rationale of facts and the rationale of fictions collapses: the specific world of facts pertain-
ing to art can no longer be distinguished from the world of ordinary facts. Rancière refers
to Lyotard’s description of this phenomenon as “a failing of the stable adjustment between
the perceptible and the intelligible” (123); however, contrary to Lyotard, he takes this
failure to mean that, “exhibition and signification can be harmonized ad infinitum, that
their point of agreement is everywhere and nowhere” (123). In short, the disappearance of
criteria for unrepresentability means that anything can be made to signify or, alternatively,
that there is nothing that is unrepresentable (everything is a representation).
101 George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
102 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Preface to the French Edition,” in Jeffrey S. Librett, ed. Of the Sublime:
Presence in Question (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 1–3.
103 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sublime Offering,” in Librett, 25–53.
104 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Librett, 109–132.
105 Consider, for instance, Laura Mulvey’s short article “Close Up: A Clumsy Sublime,” in
which she locates the sublime in the indexical nature of film, which usually remains hidden
but occasionally “pops out,” for instance in the artificiality of rear-projection sequences,
in which three different levels of time become superimposed and conflated: the time of
viewing, the time of registration, and the time of fiction. The sense of temporal dislocation
produced through the “clumsy visibility” of the mechanism of rear projection gives rise to
what Mulvey calls a “clumsy sublime,” which she describes as “fascinating” rather than
overwhelming or terrifying, which begs the question of whether the term “sublime” is
appropriate in this case. Laura Mulvey, “Close Up: A Clumsy Sublime,” Film Quarterly,
Vol. 60. No. 3 (Spring 2007), 3.
106 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic
Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2003), 297–314.
1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen
Adrian Ivakhiv
The call for this anthology included reference to a profusion of things that could be
considered, or rendered, sublime: indexicality, the transcendental, the poetic, the
chemical, the pathological, the gothic, the prosaic, the neural, the cinematic, and
others. Such a list adds to an already lengthy list of “sublimes” that have been long
noted by cultural observers—the industrial, the technological, the nuclear, the ironic,
the postmodern, and so on.1 Together, these suggest that we live in an age of prolifer-
ating sublimity. Identifying, describing, and comparing this variety of sublimities can
in turn suggest that we, human observers, are capable of assimilating, making sense
of, and thereby containing and rendering safe any and all forms of sublimity—which
is ironic and paradoxical insofar as the sublime is precisely supposed to be that which
eludes such assimilation.
In this chapter, I wish to question the notion of proliferating sublimes, or at least
of the identification, classification, and comparison of them, by proposing a typology
of events that gesture toward something that is radically inassimilable. A list of such
“sublimes” suggests that the sublime is produced in much the same way as anything
else is. Modernity, it has been argued, was premised on the production of objects and
of representations, and postmodernity on sheer productivity through mixing, recom-
bination, and hybridization. But sublimity, to the extent that it is more than a mere
effect—a kind of Wizard of Oz phenomenon whose power fades when its trickery
is revealed—has always been taken as that which eludes understanding or assimila-
tion. In this sense, while a perception of sublimity can be produced in a conventional
manner, sublimity itself—if there is such a thing—can only come from outside any
known system of production or reproduction.2
Another way of saying this is that any term affixed as an adjective to the noun
“sublime” dredges up its own history of associations, such that the adjective is
elevated to “sublimity” yet never attains it, while sublimity itself is downgraded,
delimited, reduced, and brought to earth. Sublimity becomes humanized by one of
its mediators—technology, pathology, the neural network, the atomic bomb, and
so on. Assuming that a genuine sublimity is possible, it would have to elude such
humanization. For we live in the era of the Human, the Anthropocene, where human-
ity has become the defining and limiting factor of all production, reproduction, and
imagination of possibility. A genuinely sublime event could only occur if it were one
that framed humanization—that is, the entirety of human ambition and understand-
ing and its capacity to assimilate anything—within its own negation. Today, I wish
to argue, the only repository of such a sublime is that indicated by the notion of
Anthropocenic passing—that is, by the extinction of the human. The Anthropocene
The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen 43
may itself be a way of taming the recognition that humans emerged and will one day
pass away; but the human extinction event, whether connected or not to the “sixth
great extinction,” as Elizabeth Kolbert has called it, is inassimilable.3 To indicate it,
we would have to write it under erasure, sous rature, as sublime.4
Encountering the sublime is always an event—narratable or visualizable after the
fact perhaps, but always something that happens (to someone). To think the posthu-
man, and indeed post-Anthropocenic, sublime, the sublime of human extinction,
I will propose an “eventology” that distinguishes between three classes of events
distinguishable by their scope and scale and by their status with respect to human
observers. But before doing so, I will provide the context for this thinking-through of
the potential sublimity of events in general and of any specific events.
The Specter
A specter is haunting humanity; or rather, a specter haunts every human effort
to establish humanity as central, foundational, and of ultimate consequence in the
world. That specter is reality itself, a reality that supersedes, trumps, and outwits all
our ideas about it. This specter of reality is not exactly humanity’s shadow. It is more
the other way around: reality has become shadowed by a humanity that thinks itself
real and reality a mere shadow. Reality and Humanity, conceived in the upper-case
singular, jostle against each other in ways philosophies have proposed before, but
which have now become actively global, existential, and utterly real.
“The Anthropocene” is an attempt to name this situation—this reversible shadow-
ing of humanity and reality—while, at the same time, maintaining the centrality of
the humanity that is haunted by it. In thinking it can perform this double task—to
recognize the realism of a reality that will overcome and bury it, as the Anthropocene
will itself sink beneath the next layer of future geologies to come, and to simultane-
ously name itself, humanity, the Anthropos, as the central actor in this drama—the
Anthropocene is a contradiction. Exposing this contradiction is the task of realists—
or, rather, of Realists. A Realist is one who acknowledges his or her incapacity to
specify the reality in which one believes, and to thereby account for their realism. A
Realist believes in a reality—a crossed-out Reality, a Real sous rature—that outwits
and exceeds that capacity, and that always will.5
The signs are there for those who pay attention to them. Reports of melting ice sheets
and impending crashes, plane crashes and disappearances in Indian or Mediterranean
seas, car crashes, stock market crashes, Internet seizures and data breaches, doomsday
viruses online and off, crashes of the ocean’s fish stocks, swirling accumulations of
trash in the middle of the world’s oceans, rising sea levels and strengthening storms,
accumulations of toxic particles, radioactive dust, and microscopic plastic pellets in
the bodies and bloodstreams of every living thing on Earth, accumulations of space
junk in the atmosphere, mountains of waste, electronic and otherwise, building up to
a scenario like that depicted by the Walt Disney Company (in WALL-E), but without
its fatteningly indulgent space exit or its savvy humor. Sooner or later, it seems all too
likely that the trash will hit the fan, the crash will burst the dam, the supercollider will
hit with the full force of its impact. The mad rush for land, for survival, for salvation,
will begin in earnest, even for the most protected of us.
These are the material ecologies that make up the era tendentiously and conten-
tiously called the Anthropocene.6 Following the ontological triadism proposed, first,
44 Adrian Ivakhiv
by Charles Sanders Peirce and, later, by Félix Guattari (with Gregory Bateson acting
as a kind of intellectual go-between linking them), we could speak of two other kinds
of ecologies in addition to these.7 First, there are social ecologies, ecologies of rela-
tions between those granted recognition as agents in the world. Our social ecologies
work the same way as our material ecologies, with blowback to widening inequali-
ties and horrific injustices coming in the form of movements of growing refugee
populations—economic refugees, climate refugees—and ever-present threats of politi-
cal violence and terror.
Finally, between the material and the social—which we might think of, respectively,
as the objective and the subjective—are the intersubjective, inter-sensorial dynamics
from which they emerge. These are the perceptual ecologies, or mental ecologies
as Guattari calls them, drawing upon Bateson’s notion of an “ecology of mind.”
Blowback here comes as guilt, bad dreams, ghostly observances fracturing our sensory
perceptions, inarticulate rage against those who challenge the tacitly held consensus.
The present is haunted by the abyss of an ungraspable and inconceivable future. It is
these affective undercurrents that are our responses to the eyes of the world that haunt
us from out of the corners of our vision. They are what makes us feel that things aren’t
right—the traumatic kernel of reality, which both psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and,
with a different inflection, Buddhist philosophers have placed at the origin of the self,
but which in a collective sense may be coming back to haunt us globally.
We misperceive the nature of the world for the same reasons that we misperceive
the nature of our selves. Every social and linguistic order interpellates its members—it
shapes and hails them into existence with a call of “Hey you!”—and each does it
differently. But over the course of the storied history of humans—not the history
of the glorified Anthropos, just the story of humanity in its fragments—most such
orders have incorporated into that interpellation some sense of responsibility to more-
than-human entities or processes. In whatever way they were conceived—as spirits
or divinities, as kin, or in terms of synthetic narrative or conceptual metaphors like
life-force, the Way, the path, li and ren, 礼 and 仁, the four directions, Ubuntu, some
gift-giving and life-renewing sacrifice, and so on—these have typically borne a central
connection to what we now understand as “ecology” (at least for those social orders
that worked, for a while).8
Modern Western capitalism has arguably fragmented these relations, setting us
up individually in relation to the products of a seemingly limitless marketplace, but
collectively leaving us ecologically rudderless. So if scientists, the empirical authorities
of our day, tell us we are fouling our habitats, we have yet to determine how not to
do that, at least at the global levels where the problems become manifest. This is why
it is the relational and evental rather than the substantive or objectal that humans,
especially Westerners, need to come to terms with. Commodity capitalism has been
profoundly successful at encouraging its participants to think that objects are real,
and at projecting value into those objects so that they serve the needs of individuals,
even if they never quite manage to do that (which is, of course, the point). The effects
of our actions, on the other hand, are systemic, relational effects, and we will remain
incapable of adequately understanding them unless we come to a better understanding
of how systems and relational ecologies work and of how we are thoroughly embedded
within them.
At the same time, it is the objects that haunt us: the refuse swirling around in the
middle of the Pacific, the mountains of excreted e-waste, the stuff we send down our
chutes, out our drains, off to the incinerator, the river, the ocean, the atmosphere—
the black holes, out of sight and out of mind, from which we hope they never emerge.
When they reemerge, in our fantasies and nightmares, we reify them as the Thing, a
Demon, a Host—as in Bong Joon-Ho’s thriller of that name, about a river monster
embodying the legacy of industrial pollution in the Han river.9 They become sublime.
If our consumptive, commodity-captivated and spectacle-enraptured society has
privileged the object over the process, the thing at the center of our attention over
the relations that constitute it, this thing-centeredness should not surprise us. In part,
it is an effect of the human perceptual apparatus, with its heavy reliance on vision,
a sensory modality that shows clear edges to objects and that facilitates distanced
observation and predation. Where traditional cultures deemphasized the visual in
favor of the auditory or multisensorial, the narrative, and the relational, societies like
ours—ecologically and historically disembedded ones (in the sense described by Karl
Polanyi in The Great Transformation10), fragmented and individualized, and intensely
visually mediated—push the ontological objectivism, literally the “thing-ism,” about
as far as it can go.
One way to reemphasize the relations that constitute objects, and to thereby refocus
on how things might come together to appear sublime, is by coming to a better under-
standing of events. In the next section, I propose a typology of three kinds of events.
Eventology
For an event ontologist, or “eventologist” (also known as a process philosopher11),
there is no question of asking how or why events happen. They do, because that is the
nature of things. The question is always how to alter existing relations, how to move
them and shape them, how to respond to what is given. What are the different ways
of moving with and against existing relations so as to reshape them, enhance them,
enlarge them, soften them, tweak them, link them with others, and so on?
If everything is an event, the question is how to distinguish between different
kinds of events. Events can be defined as new relational processes arising somewhat
unpredictably from the encounter of previously unconnected processes. If all things
are taken to be organized sets of processes, bounded or unbounded, open or closed
in varying degrees, then events would be occurrences that do not merely repeat cycles
of activity, but that bring new things—new relations—into existence. The general
parameters of an event may be more or less predictable, but there is always an element
of unpredictability, because of the creativity initiated in the “creative advance into
novelty,” as Alfred North Whitehead termed it, that constitutes that event.12
To an eventologist, an archaeologist of what happens in the moment after it has
happened, there are at least three kinds of events. First, there are “events,” which are
simply things that happen—complex hyper-forms of relational enactment, assemblages
within assemblages always in the act of becoming something other than themselves.
This first category includes any and all events. In Whiteheadian process metaphysics,
what is required for something to be an event is a doing and a being-done-to: a bipo-
lar passage between a becoming-subject and a becoming-object (or several such). An
event is an enactment involving some relational movement between two poles—the
subjectivity coming into existence and the objectivities it beholds and responds to.13
The second kind of event is of a scale of magnitude different from such everyday
events, so let us call it an “Event.” In its confluence of trajectories and flows, it is one
46 Adrian Ivakhiv
that suddenly delivers an unpredictable manifold of novelty. Reverberations from
an Event ring far beyond the scope of its apparent origins, permanently rupturing
the ontology of a given social order. There is a certain confluence of trajectories and
flows, and then, suddenly, a manifold of new events has arisen. Things have shifted,
dramatically. A set of relational systems finds itself suddenly spun into a higher orbit.
One might call this a hyper-event, analogous to Timothy Morton’s notion of the
“hyperobject.”14 An Event encompasses not a single occasion or act of prehension
(Whitehead’s term for any relational act); rather, it is a meeting of processual consist-
encies out of which arises an unpredictable set of distinctly new processes, which in
turn expand the circle of affective horizons by which their effects reverberate into the
universe. Uprisings and political revolutions are examples of Events, and their causes
are always somewhat mysterious. Historians may reconstruct some of the threads that
contributed to them, and may come up with theories to account for them, but these
almost always remain contestable. They are moments when suddenly much more is at
stake than is normally the case.
Of course, there is no objective measure for distinguishing a mere “event” from an
“Event.” The Events of interest to a human observer will be different from those of
interest to an ant crawling on the window in front of that observer. Epistemology thus
always impinges on ontology; categories are affected by the perceptual capacities of
those for whom they are relevant. In a process-relational view, all that there is consists
of events, which we can take as open moments—relational alignments opening up
onto particular sets of possibilities, of which some become actualized and others do
not, through the activity of the singular points of agency woven into each of them. But
revolutionary moments are big moments, those in which many highly dynamic pro-
cesses converge to create possibilities for radical change spanning layers and levels of
activity that rarely get aligned all together in one fell swoop. Moments like these take
substantial groundwork to become possible—preparation such as that shown in the
“Action Plan” drawn up by Egyptian activists in the lead-up to Tahrir Square, or the
manifestoes and years of agitation leading up to the Russian or Chinese Revolutions.
But Events also arrive very much of their own accord, a realignment of stars or
planets in the sense that their genesis always remains somewhat unknown. In the
midst of such moments it is impossible to tell where things will end up. What will be
the shape of the new constellation that emerges once the dust is settled? Which social
and political groups will take power into their hands, or what kind of redistribution
of power will occur? Which figures, and which slogans and ideas, will rise above
others? Which elements (military, police, and so on) will turn against their traditional
allies or masters, and which will not? Or will it all slide back into a hardened and
more brazen authoritarian grip for another few years or decades? When there is so
much in play, the possibilities for change—for high-amplitude remodulation, quan-
tum leaps, and unpredictable reconfigurations—reach the level of a chaotics that
cannot be controlled by any single player. Agency is splintered along a million points
of light, points that can only be coordinated through an affective resonance and
momentum that is notoriously difficult to shape and direct. Some of these moments
combust (Berlin and Prague 1989, Egypt 2011, Kyïv 2014); others may fail to do so
(Tehran 2009, the protests at COP-15 in Copenhagen, the attempted coup of July,
2016, in Turkey). For their participants, their sublimity may even remain alive long
after they have exhausted themselves, as in the way that the “events” of Paris in 1968
provided a set of hopes and dreams for many for years afterward.
Eventology
But all of these are cast against the background of a stable, more or less unified human
subject. They are events of Humanity. None threatens that subject thoroughly and
completely. That leads us to positing a third kind of event, an Event sous rature,
which can only be witnessed through its before and its after, its ominous, rumbling
premonitions and its decisive yet ambiguous aftermath—but, crucially, which can
never be witnessed fully insofar as it undermines the very subjectivity, and thus the
witnessing capacity of those for whom it is an Event. The extinction of humanity,
like an invisible, monstrous force that awaits over some present horizon, is an Event
of the Third Kind, a close encounter with something that casts a shadow that cannot
ever be encompassed, assimilated, or hardly even thought within the system of coor-
dinates given to the subject. To the extent that even thinking humanity’s extinction
encompasses a becoming-extinct, humanity’s encounter with it would leave behind no
humanity, no “we,” in its wake.
Events like these can only be gestured at. The remainder of this chapter reflects on
a few variations of this “posthuman sublime,” the sublime of this Event of extinction.
It is, I argue, the most radical potential of the very notion of an Anthropocene to
suggest that the era of humans is a mere era, something short-lasting in the geological
history of our planet, and that it is therefore passing. The most radical potential of the
Anthropocene is to evoke its own burial.
Glimpses of this have been with us for a long time. Geology in its emergence
portended a vastness that threatened common conceptions of humanity’s centrality
to all things. In recent years, there has emerged a veritable industry of such posthu-
man visions, from Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us to National Geographic’s
Aftermath: Population Zero, and History Channel’s Life After People (both inspired
partly by Weisman’s volume).15 Many of these make use of real places, such as
Chernobyl’s “Zone of Alienation” (the roughly 1,000-square-mile zone evacuated
after the accident), to depict this rendering absent of humans; and in this sense, there
are real places that become emblems of this Event of extinction.
One of the most interesting and consistent efforts to circle around this kind of
Event can be found in the cinema of Werner Herzog. In Herzog’s 1977 documentary
La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption of an active volcano on the island of
Guadeloupe, the camera probes around to see who has stayed behind on the island,
ignoring the government’s exhortation to vacate. In the end, Herzog, waiting for the
volcano to erupt, pokes his camera into the caldera itself. This is the gesture toward
an Event that never happened, but which is always seething over the time horizon.
As in his quasi-science-fictional films—Fata Morgana (1971), Lessons of Darkness
(1992), Wild Blue Yonder (2005)—Herzog here affects a tone of tender and lyrical,
apocalyptic beauty, a resignation in the face of what may be humanity’s passing. Like
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Heart of Glass (1976), Grizzly Man (2005), and
several of his other films, it is also about the human encounter with an indifferent but
powerful, and in this sense sublime, (capital-n) Nature. The same elements that later
appear in Lessons of Darkness (about the burning oil fields of Iraq), and in different
permutations in several other films—moving vehicle and helicopter shots of a land-
scape emptied of humans, orchestral music including the Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s
Parsifal, and the feeling of a waiting, as if something momentous is about to occur,
or has already occurred, or both—are clearly present in La Soufrière, though without
48 Adrian Ivakhiv
the cinematographic intensity of Lessons of Darkness. At times the film is like an
archaeological dig through an abandoned city, or a devastated one (the town of Saint-
Pierre in Martinique). At others it is about sheer contact—between the camera and
the world—and about its embarrassed failure, the “inevitable catastrophe that did not
take place.” This is the failure that, Herzog seems to be suggesting, haunts the cinema
verité desire to be there when It, whatever It may be, happens.
Like most of Herzog’s films, La Soufrière blurs several sets of lines: between
documentary and fiction (a line that Herzog prides himself on dissolving, though here
he hews closer to the first pole), between observation and performative enactment
(meaning that his own persona is ever-present, which in this case includes taking his
crew up to the caldera to poke their camera inside the steaming volcano, as if daring
nature to scald them with smoke and ash), and between the hilarious and the deadly
serious. The film highlights the barbed irony that when, in 1902, the inhabitants of
neighboring Martinique were preparing to leave before an anticipated volcanic erup-
tion, their governor persuaded them to stay; 30,000 died. Now, seventy-five years
later, the inhabitants left (except for the few that Herzog’s crew finds and interviews,
and, of course, Herzog himself, attracted to the volcano like a moth to the flame). And
the volcano balked. Herzog notes an “embarrassment” in this, “something pathetic
for us in the shooting of this picture,” in that the film becomes “a report on an
inevitable catastrophe that did not take place” (La Soufrière). Yet, as in several of his
films, the tone mixes postapocalyptic sublimity, lyricism, pathos, and wry comedy, as
with the schmaltzy, orchestral rendition of Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself,” its melody
taken from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, adding a layer of comedy as the
camera pans across the island’s vacated landscapes.16
In Lessons of Darkness, a film composed of documentary images of the burning
oil fields of Kuwait in the wake of the First Gulf War, Herzog shows little interest
in helping the audience understand why the war occurred and who should be held
responsible for its results. Instead he presents us the images themselves clothed only
in the quasi-science-fictional, apocalyptic garb of his occasional voiceover narration
and subtitles: “a planet in our solar system,” “A Capital City,” “The War,” “After
the Battle,” “Finds from Torture Chambers,” “Satan’s National Park,” “And a Smoke
Arose Like a Smoke from a Furnace,” and “I am so tired from sighing; Lord, let it be
night.” The result is an apocalyptic yet ironic vision of a hell on earth that is visually
sublime but politically intangible. Herzog himself has called the film “a requiem for
a planet that we ourselves have destroyed.”17 Like an extraterrestrial visitor to the
postapocalypse, Herzog is vulnerable here to the same critiques that followers of deep
ecology have faced for years: that by identifying the perpetrators of the ecological crisis
with an all-embracing “us,” we lose the political precision necessary for understand-
ing how it came about, who has benefited from it, who has suffered most, and how to
challenge the institutional actors responsible for it. Yet Herzog’s artistic decisions can
be defended on the grounds that we know about the war already. Viewers at the time
had already seen the video-game-like images that characterized American media cov-
erage of the war, and they were likely to already have well-formed opinions about the
justifications for the war. With its “stubborn refusal to contextualize itself,” as Nadia
Bozak puts it, the film intended to present the images differently. Bozak writes that
in contrast to the frenzy of cable television coverage of the war, Lessons of Darkness
“slows down and even fossilizes the events of the war, turning fire-fighting machinery
into dinosaurs, abandoned weaponry into ancient bones.”18 Such aestheticization had
long been Herzog’s response to the political violence of the world. In a 1979 interview,
he stated that “we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore” and that
“if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with
which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.”19 If this seemed true in the
1970s, one would presume it to be no less true in the 1990s, and perhaps much more
so in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The newness of Herzog’s images
can of course be debated. Are they not simply a reiteration of well-known Western
tropes: apocalypse, humanity’s decline, and the futility of hope, all set to a soundtrack
of Wagner, Mahler, Prokofiev, Verdi, Schubert, Grieg, and Arvo Pärt?
In their defense, Herzog’s films can be taken as signs pointing to an Event that can
only be witnessed through its before and its after, its ominous, rumbling premoni-
tions and its decisive, if perplexing, aftermath. Unlike Alain Badiou’s “Event,” or
the messianic event—and its Pauline recognition (the two cannot be separated)—that
initiated the history of Christendom, the Herzogian Event is not historical, not a
lightning streak that marks history with the shadow of its exposure (as with May ’68,
or the Russian or French or American Revolutions, or for that matter Jesus’ Passion
and Resurrection). The Event is one before which humanity pales into insignificance,
even if our creative capacity to reach out to that Event is worth celebrating (as Herzog
often does). Herzog brings us to the edge of an anti-Event, a kind of antimatter to
the matter of human events. And, sublime ironist that he is, he takes this Derridean
absence of “Eventness” to be part of the Evental structure.
Introducing Cinders (Feu la cendre),20 Jacques Derrida’s poetic meditation on time,
loss, language, and trauma, Ned Lukacher asks, “At what temperature do words
burst into flame? Is language itself what remains of a burning?” Derrida’s reference
point is the Holocaust, but it is also the entry into language, which resonates with
Lacan’s notion of a gap between the Real and the Symbolic. With its implied reference
to the cultural memory of Pompeii—Western civilization’s archetypal reference point
for volcanically traumatic cataclysm—Herzog’s La Soufrière dwells on the signature
of the Event. Like a nuclear explosion that leaves its radioactive shadow splayed
across everything, the traumatic Event leaves everything askew, haunted by a specter
and ringing with inaudible or incomprehensible sounds. The vacated city, the empty
landscape, the city frozen in time, with its illegible ciphers, the Event is an Event we
can never return to because it has not yet happened, but which we can nevertheless
perpetually circle around. Something at its core eludes us like a black hole that sucks
its own reality away from our searching for it.
Humanity’s extinction, like the end of the world and the end of the self, is the
primal extinction that defines us (to the extent that there is an “us”) in our finitude
and ultimate emptiness. In this, the posthuman sublime gestures toward a beyond
that is familiar to the tradition of apophatic mysticism, which has carved out a rather
uncomfortable home within Buddhist, Christian, and other mystical traditions. In
the words ascribed to the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara by the Buddhist text known
across East Asia as the “Heart Sutra,” we are exhorted to go altogether beyond: Gate
gate pāragate pārasagm . ate bodhi svāhā! “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether
beyond. Oh what an awakening, all hail!”21 Taking this seriously means to go beyond
not only humanism and anthropocentrism, but also beyond the human altogether.
This is, of course, impossible for us humans.
The Event is, in this sense, impossible. It is also inevitable, which means that it is
Real, much realer than anything we can assimilate into our cognition or physicality.
50 Adrian Ivakhiv
As Tweedledee remarked to Alice in response to her protestations that she was real:
“You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying.” Perhaps he meant: you, humanity,
will only make yourselves a bit realer by crying. But a bit realer is far from Reality
itself, which is, and will remain, sublimely unattainable.
Notes
1 As figured by Kant, Burke, and others, the sublime was that which confronts us with the
limitations of our representations but also of our ability to control the world. For Burke
and the nineteenth-century Romantics, the sublime was experienced in encounters with an
overpowering and monumental Nature. Inspiring awe and astonishment, pleasure along-
side pain, it was marked by a radical ambivalence in which the desire to be inundated by
the sublime coexisted with a fear of being annihilated by it. For Kant, the sublime took on
a form more to do with the limits of representation: forever inaccessible to the categories
of reason, it marked the inherent threshold of our knowledge and signified the cleavage
between the conceived and the presentable. For both Kant and Burke, the sublime repre-
sented the “incommensurability between Nature and the human” (Steven Helmling, The
Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001, 13)). In advanced industrial capitalism, nature has been
effectively tamed and eclipsed and the sublime has taken other forms: these include the
technological sublime, which marvels at the grandiose and monumental works of an alien-
ating technology (David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996)); the apocalyptic sublime, represented by Auschwitz, and the nuclear sublime
of Hiroshima and Alamagordo (Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic
Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)); and the everyday sublime alluded
to in Surrealist art and in Freud’s notion of the uncanny—that is, the “sense of strange-
ness confronting us in familiarity” and “the excessive material presence of the object”
(Jerry Aline Flieger, “The Listening Eye: Postmodernism, Paranoia, and the Hypervisible,”
Diacritics, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1996): 99).
2 Here, I follow the sublime’s resuscitation in postmodernist and poststructuralist writing as
an indeterminate, ineffable alterity that hovers over human attempts at comprehension—as
in Lacan’s Real, Derrida’s différance, Kristeva’s signifiance, Baudrillard’s inhuman system
of objects, and Lyotard’s and Jameson’s differently inflected renditions of the postmodern
sublime. Lyotard has returned to the theme repeatedly, presenting the sublime as an excess
of indeterminacy that invades and dislocates the effort to create meaning (Jean-François
Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” Paragraph, Vol. 6 (1985): 1–18; Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986); Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); and Lyotard, Of
the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993)).
3 E. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2014).
4 The practice of writing sous rature, or “under erasure,” is generally attributed to Martin
Heidegger in his writings on metaphysics and, more generally, to Jacques Derrida, for
whom all of language should be thought of as a form of writing under erasure—that is,
understood as using terms that are inaccurate but necessary. See Gayatri Spivak’s discussion
of the practice in her translator’s preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1967]), xiv and ff.
5 I capitalize “Realism” in order to show an affinity (as will be shown below) with Jacques
Lacan’s notion of the Real. For Lacan, the Real is the unsymbolizable plenitude, the fullness
of reality that precedes both an individual’s differentiation into the Imaginary (the phase of
narcissistic and specular identification) and his or her incorporation into the Symbolic, or
social, Order. It is experienced as traumatic to one’s self-identity.
6 For some of the contention, see Eileen Crist, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,”
Environmental Humanities, Vol. 3 (2013): 129–147; Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or
Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016);
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making
Kin,” Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6 (2015): 159–165.
7 I’ve elaborated on this triadic framework in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image:
Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); see
especially Chapter Two.
8 Bateson argued this case in Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, a collec-
tion of essays and dialogues edited and expanded by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson
(New York: Bantam, 1988).
9 Bong Joon-Ho, dir. The Host (South Korea, 2007).
10 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).
11 On event ontologies and process metaphysics more generally, see: Ian G. R. Shaw, “Toward
an Evental Geography,” Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 36, No. 5 (2012): 613–627;
Leemon B. McHenry, The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North
Whitehead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Nicholas Rescher, Process
Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); N.
Rescher, “The Promise of Process Philosophy,” in C. V. Boundas, ed. Columbia Companion
to Twentieth-Century Philosophies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 143–
155; Douglas Browning and William T. Myers, Philosophers of Process (Bronx, NY:
Fordham University Press, 1998); A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978); Adrian Ivakhiv, “Process-Relational Theory
Primer,” Immanence, Nov. 5, 2010, http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/11/05/process-
relational-theory-primer/, accessed September 12, 2016.
12 Whitehead 166.
13 See Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, Chapter Two.
14 Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
15 Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Picador, 2007); Aftermath:
The World After Humans (National Geographic/Cream Productions (Canada, 2008)); Life
After People (David De Vries, dir., History Channel (USA, 2008)).
16 For those who recognize Carmen’s pop song in the melody, the lyrics are likely to be
remembered as well as it is the kind of song that once heard can never be unheard: “When I
was young/ I never needed anyone/ And making love was just for fun/ Those days are gone.
Living alone/ I think of all the friends I’ve known/ But when I dial the telephone/ Nobody’s
home.”
17 Paul Cronin, ed., Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 249.
18 Nadia Bozak, “Firepower: Herzog’s Pure Cinema as the Internal Combustion of War,”
CineAction, Vol. 68 (2006): 24.
19 Werner Herzog, Roger Ebert, and Gene Walsh, Images at the Horizon: A Workshop with
Werner Herzog (Chicago: Facets Multimedia, 1979), 21.
20 Lukacher, “Introduction: Mourning Becomes Telepathy,” in Jacques Derrida, Cinders, ed.,
trans. and intro. by N. Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 3.
21 This is Edward Conze’s influential translation; see Conze, Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamond
Sutra and the Heart Sutra (New York: Random House, 2001). On the provenance of the
Heart Sutra, see Kazuaki Tanahashi, The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the
Classic of Mahayana Buddhism (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2015).
Sublimity, Spirituality, and Horror
2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror

and Spirituality
Paul Coates
Introduction
Thinking the Sublime may well prompt the question of the contemporary usefulness
of the notion. “After Auschwitz,” as some might put it, can it ever again credibly
occupy the upper-case its very concept seems to demand? Is the Sublime now at best
sublime and thus self-contradicting? Might the Sublime represent a once necessary,
culturally outmoded transitional form between religion and secularism, a bridge his-
tory burned once crossed? Or did the project of modernity in fact remain stalled on
that bridge, perhaps unawares, suspended above a Nietzschean abyss looking back
uncannily at viewers who remained cryptically, unconsciously religious even when
most avowedly secular (Stalinism?), cryptically secular and modernizing even when
clearly quasi-religious (Nazism?)? Have we perhaps long inhabited a “postsecular-
ity” that is the belated name of a secularism unable adequately to acknowledge its
yearning for a communion once associated indissolubly with religion, or to commit
to religious communities apparently compromised by the “human, all-too-human”
failings of their devotees? Are we perhaps both ashamed and afraid to admit that
the possibly exponential erosion of nature’s once well-established regularities, and
the difficulty of measuring or controlling them, renders us far less sovereign than
modernity had imagined, reinstating the opposition of subject and world (object)
and reinvesting nature with some of the status still preserved within the concept of
the Sublime, that modern form of an animism no modern would admit to pursuing?
Might the Sublime have been a “natural supernaturalism,” the enthusiastic inner
lining of the Enlightenment, its form of religion: in other words, a form tailored to fit
the Enlightenment, incorporating the Enlightenment anti-clerical critique of religious
structures, but also providing an antidote to Enlightenment premises?
In this context the vogue recently enjoyed by the term “postsecularity” (e.g. Bradatan
and Ungureanu1) may suggest an attempt to exorcise the specter of that apparently
outmoded name, “the Sublime,” to recreate the illusion of progress. The “Sublime” of
postmodernity—its theorists, most notably Jean-François Lyotard, having given the
word an afterlife possibly motivated by the lack of alternative models of non-religious
religion—might be open to description as an array of fragments of postsecularity (e.g.
Wordsworthian “spots of time”) embedded within the secular as moments of rap-
ture, shadows of infinity dancing on disco walls beside Ecstasy consumers. One may
wonder therefore whether the namelessness marking the notion of “the postsecular,”
which declines to define an era through any positive novelty (and may fear novelty’s
possible deceptiveness, its entrapment in the eternal returns of fashion that may also
Sublimity, Spirituality, and Horror 53
have spurred the postmodern return of “the Sublime”), might replicate the Sublime’s
cognitive and linguistic paradox, which places within representation that which resists
and may be said to explode it, as the visible Sublime extends into the invisible, math-
ematical one whose numbers stretch out endlessly. The Kantian assertion of reason’s
triumph in the imagination of the endless may be less realistic than the dramatization
of the individual’s encounter with mathematical Sublimity, linking it both to indi-
vidual derangement and collective conspiracy theory, in Darren Aronofsky’s π (USA,
1998), a film that fittingly concludes in an ecstasy of false endings, and Kant is surely
vulnerable to the argument that naming endlessness puts it behind one in a manner
that itself is inconceivable. Another recent candidate for renomination of the Sublime,
that shape-shifting entity “the Other,” might be equally problematically unnamelike,
while other names (“the numinous,” as in Otto;2 the “spirituality” that stereotypically
is not religious) may be equally simultaneously applicable and unsatisfactory.
Facing such difficulties of nomenclature, any works critically designated as pursu-
ing the Sublime, be it in film or in other media to which the commodification of expe-
rience (its transcription in fixed and replicable form) is central, might be unusually
compromised, and classifiable, if at all, in Freudian terms, as compromise-formations.
Such formations would extensively hybridize realism and the fantastic, real and ani-
mated figures, real landscapes and digitally created ones, real and digitally idealized
(Photoshopped) faces, with the categories’ coupling and the attempted blurring of
their edges serving to persuade us of the possible reality of our dreams, “having it
all” as having the All. Its fusion of dream and reality may once have been central to
cinema’s appeal, now assumed by screened images in general, in a society concerned
to corral dream-quests within tangible (or quasi-tangible, “haptic”) reality, abandon-
ing earlier centuries’ belief that such dreams pointed beyond terrestrial modalities
even when modeled within their parameters, as the passage down the aisle of a church
toward altar and apse mapped the shape of transcendental destiny.3 May not the
prerequisite for an image’s designation as “Sublime” be a discredited totalization
requiring the effacement of duality, the putative “end of ideology,” parsing in capital-
ist forms patterns laid down by, say, the Nazi coupling of nationalism and socialism,
or the Stalinist proclamation of “socialism within one country,” which renounced the
argument that wars presented as national were in fact class-based, and workers of the
world should unite?
Insofar as postmodernism traced its own advent to the Holocaust’s crushing of the
grandly optimistic narratives of Enlightenment progress—a somewhat parochial self-
mythologization, as in the 1930s Walter Benjamin had already attributed a similar
effect to the Great War—one may well not be shocked by the following statement
by Gene Ray: “That Auschwitz and Hiroshima are sublime is an assertion that,
while never quite attaining full articulation or acceptance, seemed always to have
been on the verge of becoming a commonplace of late-twentieth-century thought
and theory.”4 The reason for that lack of articulation and acceptance is, of course,
a resistance to finding aesthetic value in images connected to real human slaughter.
Another significant threat to the Sublime, of course, is its possible categorization as
serving an imaginary that is obsolescent because patriarchal. The problematic nature
of this imaginary may be seen in the way the rising of a mountain out of the sea supplies
one prototype of the Sublime.5 The viewer’s lack of anything with which to identify in
a level landscape or seascape is open to description as afflicting the male imagination
alone. Wordsworth’s stolen boat episode in The Prelude may be paradigmatic of the
54 Paul Coates
breaking of this visual blockage: “something comes into being,” the phallus-as-power
metaphorized in the unexpected growth of the mountain, though in this case the
male child experiences emerging sexual identity as disorienting and threatening.6 This
critique of the Sublime does not counter it with a “feminine sublime” but declares the
latter a contradiction in terms.
Such issues of representation, ideology, historiography, and self-delusion may make
one wonder what the Sublime “was.” One cinematic example might be the closing
scene of Rossellini’s Stromboli (Italy/USA, 1950), in which Ingrid Bergman rests
exhausted on the slopes of the volcano from which rocks have rained down after
she has left the village below. A basic accompaniment of the Sublime, often unno-
ticed, and hence in a sense “unheard,” might be the supposedly “visual” medium’s
embarrassingly chronic dependence upon its score. In and around the Sublime would
lie images exemplifying popular culture’s capacity to confound the distinctions of
traditional Aesthetics, as the face of Garbo renders Beauty Sublime and arises from
the Ridiculous (as if scripts’ absurdities held up her arched eyebrows). At a later,
more postmodern conjuncture, the unexpected levitation of the previously apparently
grounded Buddhist monk in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (Italy/France/UK/Switzerland,
2015) renders the Sublime a deadpan joke, as if Godot’s arrival followed a warning
not to take him seriously, as he’s just a Deus ex machina. One might consider what
digitization has rendered arguably Sublime no longer, be it the ruin (no longer delecta-
tion for privileged onlookers, safely ensconced on hilltops, as all viewers enjoy protec-
tion against phenomena locked within a screen, and 3-D is only a phantom menace),
interstellar space or those Kracauerian “phenomena overwhelming consciousness,”
crowds and catastrophes. One might also weigh the possibility that the Sublime might
still possess a few bolt-holes, less in the realm of the expensively simulated incredible
than in those documentary images that refuse transactions with fiction or wishful
thinking. Here the relationship between, and arguable relative success of, Werner
Herzog’s feature Rescue Dawn (USA/Luxembourg, 2006) and his documentary Little
Dieter Needs to Fly (Germany/UK/France, 1997), both of which present the same
incident in the life of Dieter Dengler, affords a possible case study of the danger
fictionalization—the “based on a true story” syndrome—can pose to the effective
presentation of documentary material. Something nameable as “the Sublime” might
persist also at the molecular phenomenal level disclosed in documentary fashion by
the microscope, or in the alternative temporalities, narratives, and transformations of
slow, fast, and reverse motion. Insofar as the Sublime is a matter of scale, it involves
not just the infinitely large but the infinitely small revealed by the microscope, “infin-
ity in a grain of sand.” This is the small rendered large by that prototypical technology
of modernity, the lens. Later, the pixel will be one form of the grain of sand.
The afterlife of the Sublime may be most haunting, however, when manifested in the
form of human crowds and serried objects marked by a suffering we would rather not
see, usually in parts of the world exploited by “Western eyes” that are blind to them,
in such documentaries as Manufactured Landscapes (dir. Jennifer Baichwal, Canada,
2006), The Salt of the Earth (dir. Juliano Salgado and Wim Wenders, France/Brazil/
Italy, 2015), or Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (dir. Patricio Guzman,
Chile/Spain/France/Germany/USA, 2010), which takes the stars of Kant’s Sublime
and moral law and links them to the immoral horror of Chilean governmental murder
of supporters of the left. Viewing such documentaries with the suspicion justifiably
aroused by digitized works and mainstream fiction would be complacently agnostic
and repress awareness of these works’ conditions of production. Horror becomes
haunting by bypassing the merely virtuoso fantastic of the digital. It then confronts
us with all the objectivity of a dream, and the mirror it inhabits displays history’s
Medusan face. All the same, such images can also enter fiction penetratingly: in Nikita
Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (Utomlyonne solntsem) (Russia/France, 1994), to be
considered more fully later, the NKVD agent and family friend Mitya both displays
and conceals that face as he plays a piano while wearing a gas mask.
That face prepares the administration of death. In this context Herzog’s Little
Dieter Needs to Fly becomes particularly resonant, as its rendition of disaster in slow
motion can be correlated with the proximity of death throughout Dieter Dengler’s
ordeal after his shooting down over Laos. As Dieter reflects on his participation in
the Vietnam War simply because he felt a need to fly, the alternative temporalities
mentioned above come into play as napalm exploding in slow motion cues in his com-
ment that he only learned of the suffering of people on the ground when he became
their prisoner. The alternative temporality marshaled here can be correlated with his
later statement that just before crashing he saw his plane cracking up in slow motion:
slow motion becomes the deceleration of events described in many people’s anecdotes
of the experience of the moment preceding any kind of crash. Dying becomes like
floating, and all creation seems possibly given over to mortality as the Liebestod from
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde accompanies footage of jellyfish bodies opening and clos-
ing, frustrating determination (so stately is their movement) whether this too is slow
motion. Film’s orchestration of alternative ways of seeing extends into a simulation
of dreams, as Herzog recounts one in which Dieter stood amidst multiple smashed
planes and “yet he knew that the pieces would start to move and reassemble them-
selves again into real planes, as a broken coffee-cup in a film played backwards puts
itself together and leaps back up on a table.” The film’s end as it were materializes
this dream, as a camera airborne itself pans over row upon row of parked planes. The
vision corresponds to the utopian fact that “Death did not seem to want Dieter”—a
happy ending upon which it might be more pleasing to dwell if it did not override
the earlier awareness of others’ suffering in his own commentary. Except for finally
leaving Dieter on the ground, that place of suffering, the rest of Herzog’s film, fine
though it is, lacks the exemplary quality of the earlier passage, which implicitly posed
the question of the cost paid, by both self and others, for the fulfillment of dreams of
flying. Chaos ceases to be Sublime on becoming the kind of Real theorized by Žižek.
In terms of the contexts discussed already, the question of the Sublime becomes
“which Sublime?” If it seems possible to qualify it “Burke’s or Kant’s?” it is because
of their association with contrasting “negative” and “positive” Sublimities: in generic
terms, with darkness and horror on the one hand, or the stars (and science fiction?)
on the other. In reality the contrast is less stark, of course. Although Burke argues that
“terror is in all cases whatsoever, either openly or more latently the ruling principle
of the sublime,”7 Kant’s first example of the category in his Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is “the sight of a mountain . . . that [can] arouse
enjoyment but with horror,”8 though he subsequently identifies “the terrifying sub-
lime” as only one of its manifestations, alongside “the noble” and “the splendid.”9
Their unthreatening nature dilutes the strength of terror, suggesting a preponderantly
humane, or possibly simply bourgeois, order wished upon the stars. Nostalgia for
the light may be read as measuring those stars’ ironic distance from a humanity it
describes as star-dust but discovers mingled with the dust of “disappeared” political
56 Paul Coates
victims. Nevertheless, insofar as Kant then restores a two-part schema identifying
sublimities of height and of depth,10 one wondrous and the other shudder-racked, he
implicitly undermines his own apparent preference. If the Sublime of horror cannot
be Burkean exclusively, Kant’s tendency all the same is to look up in wonder. He does
not explain why depth should invoke shuddering. Because its suggestion of the Abyss,
Death, and the Pit renders doing so superfluous?
Universality, Music, Sound

One definition of the Sublime might see it as encapsulating universality within the par-
ticular: Kant’s formulation of a theory of Sublimity is unsurprising therefore, its strain-
ing of the boundaries of the particular being the legitimation of a claim to represent
the (immanently) universal. “After Auschwitz” the reconciliation of individuality and
universality in the ghastly caricature of Hess’ proclamation “Hitler ist Deutschland”
in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens (Germany, 1935))
perhaps ought to put resurrections of the category on pause. The widespread interest
in it displayed in the eighteenth century suggests a possibly unconscious suspicion that
universal Enlightenment reason secreted its shadow within itself, the sense-defying
inconceivability of a category as much recuperated as proposed by Kant, the mathe-
matical Sublime. Universal unreason, which ruptures every frame of thought, becomes
as closely wedded to reason as the infinite numbers that so tormented Musil’s Young
Törless. The key contradiction of the Sublime may well yawn between the large and the
small: small/individual viewer encounters large phenomena; small number inaugurates
an infinite series; individuality swells into a seemingly endless (system-destroying?)
crowd. The contradiction is also the paradox of the supposed Genius, the individual
within whom the universal is privileged to dwell, and never more so than when the
“universal” (because abstracted) language of music is made one flesh with language’s
relative concretion, persuading onlookers of its achievability here and now: when
Schiller’s words “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” are orchestrated by Beethoven. This
may secularize the fundamentally incarnational structure of Christian belief, both pre-
serving and denying it (to speak Hegelese, “sublating” it, allowing one to have one’s
cake and eat it): the magnanimity of Godhead exists, in statu nascendi, in a believer
in whom Christ dwells. As in the painting of Turner in particular, suggestivity and
dynamism coexist within the Sublime: the suggestivity propelling one moment toward
another that is still only intuited, humanity and cosmos uniting along the blurred
seam of man-made steam and natural mist. The Sublime may be a mirage, bodying
forth, in disembodied form, what lies beyond the horizon. Its engine, therefore, may
be an impatience for change inherited from, and anticipating, Revolution. Turner’s
painting is cognate with a photograph burgeoning with life itself, projecting its own
shapeless form as cinema. The blurring of so many of photography’s early subjects
shows technology straining, and failing fully, to capture life itself. This may be why
Kant remarks that “a long duration is sublime.”11 As in the openings of the composi-
tions of a Bruckner, that duration may also follow in footsteps scaling the mountain
down whose slopes sublime imagery flows. Kant’s requirement that the sublime be not
only great but “simple” abstracts two of the qualities of that mountain, whose rising
increasingly detaches it from surrounding objects to slough off the complexity of the
interdependent, denying its links with others in its chain. Slowness authenticates the
artistic experience by matching the tempo of the Sublime’s struggle up steep slopes.
Universalization of the particular helps explain the role of sound, particularly of
music, in expanding images into another sense, that of the Sublime. One such sound-
effect may be found in Mizoguchi Kenji’s Sansho Dayu (Japan, 1954). In the forest to
which kidnapped siblings Zoshio and Anju have been directed to take a female slave
to die, as they cut straw and branches to protect her from the frost they hear the voice
of their mother, whom they know to be far away. This contradiction dramatizes the
simultaneous existence and non-existence sparked by the combination of visual image
with a sound “representing” something beyond the frame. Sound can dissolve sight’s
(confining) immediacy, much like Rochester’s voice echoing in Jane Eyre’s head at his
moment of need. As a result Zoshio, who has hardened himself to survive working
for the brutal Sansho the bailiff, feels compelled to weep. Such critique of the image
can give the lie to the utopian claims of presence that hide their allegiance to dystopia.
Music’s abstraction, however, could so whittle away the world that some musicians
(Beethoven, Wagner) came to hear purely orchestral music as needing correction by
language in the “An die Freude” chorus of the former’s Ninth Symphony or in the
latter’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Although music’s emancipation from submission to eccle-
siastical or aristocratic patrons, and its resounding beyond the sites of its making,
could legitimize utopian claims to represent all humanity, that abstraction from élites’
demands was intensified by one from the language an increasingly nationalist era
would promote to the primary carrier of human identity, as well as from the visible
specificities of such identity. It could seem to require supplementation by language’s
relative specificity—or, in cinema, by that more concrete “language,” the neologis-
tic ideogram of the image. Otherwise abstraction could ironically universalize an
alienation well-known to toiling “masses” and unemployed artists alike. Its Sublime
could be seen as “terrifying” indeed: as a “dehumanization” going beyond Ortega y
Gasset’s “dehumanization of art” to encompass all society.
If the Sublime feeds on an opposition of large phenomenon and small observer, it
also entails a dialectical transformation of the small: the individual becomes homolo-
gous with the society mentioned a moment ago. This movement assumes particularly
striking form in cinema, where the small frame passing through the projector leaps
across the auditorium, as if fed by the crowd beneath it, to emerge, writ large, on its
far side. It is seemingly magnified by the force of the crowd it has crossed, picking
up strength like a weather system accumulating water by moving across oceans, as if
the crowd has willed its largeness as its own reflection, its blowing into an enormous
bubble by the room for expansion accorded it, which teases it into unexpected magni-
tude. Here Sublimity is an experience of growth as breathtaking, like a time-lapse film
of a tree’s emergence from an acorn. Insofar as Sublimity is the dynamic enlargement
of smallness, be it that of the object or the viewing subject, the refracting lens can be
nature’s, not a human microscope: that of a Brocken specter.
Political Unconsciousness and the Sublime Object of Ideology: Mikhalkov’s

Burnt by the Sun
In the realm of the political, where it may well be most at home (as it was in the mind
of Burke), the Sublime often accompanies a smallness that is declared merely appar-
ent: that of an individual political leader in fact animated by the force of the crowd
he heads. (Though it usually is he, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Germany, 1926), scripted
by his wife, Thea von Harbou, suggests a female counter-example.) This Sublime
58 Paul Coates
image enters the realm of the dramatic, of narrative, at its peril, and as embodying
peril, for the requirement of narrative is that a rise be paired with a fall. The leader
metonymizing the crowd, or the crowd itself, may be massacred, or cut off in some
other way, as an endless streaming would generate not narrative but a pageant, the
twentieth-century parade totalitarian regimes presented as premodern folk Carnival
and that displayed their own ostensible unending life, as counter-forces could enter
the parade only as caricature. These were, of course, regimes of the quasi-religious,
fascist or communist, type described at the beginning of this chapter.
The Sublime, and the shudder associated with it, obtrudes into Nikita Mikhalkov’s
Burnt by the Sun as what Slavoj Žižek might have termed “the sublime object of ideol-
ogy,” as the mysterious fireball that crosses it twice. If the height Longinus associated
with the Sublime is figured paradigmatically by the solar, the fireball is the sun come
down to earth, its small size indicating that it remains the sun still, its reduction in
scale being readable as continued remoteness. At one point in Mikhalkov’s film Mitya,
the NKVD agent who impersonates the family friend he once was, recounts a fairy
tale about an Upside Down World, whose interactions mirror those between himself,
Marysia (the wife of his host, Colonel Kotov, whom he is to arrest), and Kotov him-
self, by reversing their names. In the Upside Down World, the sun’s approach to indi-
viduals, and the Power’s guilt in their death, are disguised as their coming too close
to the sun, like Icarus. Having returned from abroad, like the Hamlet with whom he
identifies, Mitya himself is “too much in’ th’ sun”: too close to it, but also treated
too much as the son, overshadowed by Kotov, a hero of the proletarian revolution,
whose wife was once his fiancée, as if Hamlet is rendered impotent by a patriarchal
monopoly of power. As Mitya tells his fairy-tale-like story to Nadia, Kotov’s six-year-
old daughter, who substitutes for the Marysia he first encountered when she was that
age, the fireball traverses the house, as if prowling in search of a victim. Its passage
reinforces the sinister air surrounding Mitya and his storytelling, which is the menace
of the disguise he wears explicitly (arriving imitating a frail old man) in order to make
it seem, when he sheds it, that he no longer has anything to hide. On this occasion
the fireball passes out of the house, as if recognizing that the appointed moment of
the family’s destruction has not yet arrived and choosing a substitute victim instead,
a nearby tree—or acknowledging that its agent, Mitya, has things well in hand. At
the film’s end it enters his Moscow apartment. Mitya has destroyed his own life by
destroying Kotov and so destroying Marysia’s, and lies in a bath, his wrists slit. In
becoming blood, the setting sun acquires the status of a symbol of the war that had
driven Mitya abroad and caused the elevation of Kotov: war as the sublime mother
of all things. Its incommensurability with human life is that between the special effect
used to create the fireball and the realism of the work’s remainder. As this Sublime
sun does not just look down on humanity but moves through it like a heat-seeking,
heat-dispensing missile or exterminating angel, the film suggests one way in which
representation of the Sublime can become more original and more telling. Instead of
the large-scale special effects associated with the digital Sublime in particular, there is
a reduction in scale that does not entail any reduction in power, as the fireball is the
sun fired like a bullet none could catch in mid-air. The moment at which the special
effect trigger is pulled is carefully chosen.
The sublime object of ideology that is the fireball is simultaneously demystified by
the ascent, near the film’s end, as death bears down not only on Kotov’s family but
a delivery man unlucky enough to recognize the arrested Colonel and witness his
beating, of a banner of Stalin attached to a dirigible: Stalin is the fearsome sublime sun
rising to scorch Russia. Like the statue of Lenin floating downriver in a barge in Theo
Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (To vlemma tou Odysseat) (Greece/France/Italy/Germany/
UK/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Albania/Romania, 1995),
the other statue of Lenin lifted above Berlin streets in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye
Lenin! (Germany, 2003), or the four-eyed Stalin lifted up in a botched 1950s poster by
Polish medical students in Jerzy Skolimowski’s banned 1960s film Hands Up! (Re˛ce do
gory!) (Poland, 1981) these political figures, metonymies of Power, threaten all who
approach, all of whom may be burnt by a sun that can miniaturize itself into a fireball
that will hunt them down one by one, a heat-seeking, heat-dispensing missile.
Dialectics of an Image: The Sublime and Melodrama, the Uncanny,

Nature, Love
One definition of the Sublime might set it over against melodrama: the former is
concerned with the individual isolated within nature; the latter, with individuality
defined socially, often caught in a web of others’ censorious misconceptions of their
motives. Yet these two forms may be seen as not just contemporaneous, arising at
the end of the eighteenth century, but populated by versions of the same protagonist.
The numinous Nature with which the lone onlooker communes is the a-social form
of the religion society perverts into the morality that condemns her. Nature’s lone
contemplator may be driven there by social condemnation: not for nothing does D.
W. Griffith’s Way Down East (USA, 1920), featuring Lillian Gish as the ostracized
heroine, culminate in her flight into nature, whose ice floes also almost destroy her.
Those floes may second, or metaphorize, the socially pronounced doom she eventu-
ally escapes, with her persecuting seducer being shown the door leading into the
wilds, as if a Möbius strip is continually relaying figures back and forth to sustain the
socially necessary place of exclusion.
Another definition of the Sublime, that whereby Antony Vidler sets it over against
the uncanny,12 may be similarly dialectical. Here morality’s good and evil divide, one
of the key constitutive elements of melodrama, re-forms as one between interiority
and the outer, or self and cosmos. The threatening size of the sublime object permits
its ambivalent manifestation as also the helper of the fairy tale (the Green Knight in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes this apparent): as the large ally that will
compensate for the smallness of an onlooker diminished by a stripping away of all
social supports. The Sublime displays a substratum of the uncanny when digitiza-
tion renders it potentially subject to metamorphosis at any point, starting with any
pixel. Accumulating pixels can become the critical mass of a landslide away from one
form and into another, through or into formlessness, or another dimension (see The
Terminator (UK/USA, 1984) for influential versions of all these phenomena).
The Sublime is also a meeting point of those apparent opposites, the Romantic and
the capitalist who will destroy nature. The lone visionary is the first to stumble upon
new riches, in an isolated setting that can be exploited. The capitalist prepared to
desecrate nature in the interests of accumulation is as transgressive as the Romantic;
indeed, the two may be conceived as twins: as Jacob and Esau, the former the master
of economic strategy, the latter smelling of the wild and living there.
That capacity to couple opposites, the nucleus of which is the encounter of the large
and the small, generates an extremism that stretches the organs of apprehension to
60 Paul Coates
a breaking point. Burke’s Sublime was also the revolutionary moment that would so
fascinate and horrify him. Kant’s mathematical sublime, for its part, corresponds for-
mally to cinema’s breaking of the photograph’s frame, be it in the micro-temporality
within which one frame follows another, invisible to spectators’ eyes, or through
camera movement’s Becoming, the mobile frame. Conceptually and experientially,
however, each is a form of society’s casting beyond its frame of the individual con-
demned for rupturing norms. The mechanisms of identification then pull spectators
beyond those norms’ bounds, establishing an alternative place for value, cinema
itself. The protagonists of the Sublime go up the mountain to encounter the deity,
though their return is validated not by delivering new legislation but by the power
of their account of imitable/inimitable individual experience, which demonstrates the
Űbermensch-like ability to survive beyond the bounds of society already shared in part
by spectators’ inhabiting of the cinematic dark, which redefines darkness as a locale
where one can see, where outcasts are at home.
If the Sublime would seem to disappear along with the places of isolation and inac-
cessibility that mountain typifies, as even the Himalayas subside symbolically under
tourist junk, it reestablishes itself nevertheless as second nature, in the destroyed form
of the culture that has replaced it; in other words, as the ruin. The Sublime may be
available now only in the form of the ruined: in products of human activity that were
never intended to assume this particular, because changeable, form that nevertheless
has the primal form of value, that of the unique (the “distressed” as the object-form of
the above-mentioned melodrama’s “female in distress”?). Considering, for instance,
the simulacrum of a devastated Warsaw in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (France/
Poland/Germany/UK, 2002), one might view the Sublime’s ruin as eroded by the
digitization that replaces nature’s unpredictably chaotic and fractal forms with those
of humanity’s second nature. It is as if the Sublime, despite the eighteenth century’s
construction of artificial ruins in a corner of the estate, remains wed to a notion of
the authentically natural through what M. H. Abrams termed its “natural supernatu-
ralism,” supernaturalism standing for Otherness. If any credibility accrued to those
artificial ruins, it was from their erection well away from the building the aristocrat
inhabited. The Sublime may not be constructed to match the desire of any aristocrats
peering through windows but embody a natural history, the slow-motion social dis-
integration whereby the fruits of labor become as universally alien as the commodity
fetish had been in the traditional Marxist account of the production process. Under
current regimes of image production, however, the Sublime may persist with a degree
of omnipresence that correlates with its universal invisibility as background noise or
condition of being: the images of digital technology resting unstably upon a force of
ruination or randomization that can cause them to crumble, pixel by pixel or in a
pixel avalanche, at any time or point (the aesthetics and economics of catastrophe
converge as small changes may yield something more saleable . . .). It is as if at any
moment the volcano that buried Pompeii might reassert itself—return always display-
ing the sign of difference—by sending up lava through its streets. Every force may
assume a form, but it also always deforms.
Near the end of Jacques Rivette’s debut feature Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous
appartient) (France, 1961) its main protagonist, Anne, is declared guilty by Terry, the
mysterious associate of Gérard, whom Anne loved, because she pursued the Sublime.
What does this mean? Among other things, that for her, as for the social revolution-
ary who fetishizes political images of the kind discussed in the previous section,
the Sublime can take the form of Romantic love. In other words: the link between
Sublimity and Romanticism includes one with Romantic love, which believes it has
found the universal (life’s be-all and end-all) in one individual. The prominence
of mountains among the sites of the Sublime permits this love’s categorization as
a feminized view of a power that is gendered masculine, that can be “craggy” or
“rugged” and not only offset an ugliness inspiring horror but anticipate Cathy’s
feelings of identity with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, or even prefigure mod-
ernism’s “aesthetic of ugliness.” The drawing into a conspiracy of Rivette’s Anne
may be her attraction to the putatively totalizing capacity of the socially privileged
masculine position. After all, the name of the female “Terry” can itself be mascu-
line and suggest the possibility of a quasi-vampirical achievement of Sublime male
power through erotic union with it. In the context of the film’s near-climactic use of
a clip from Lang’s Metropolis, the false Maria might embody just such a union, an
imaginary one with the city’s male élite that is also one with the Sublime’s inventor-
outcast, Rotwang, and hence also with the projector of cinematic fantasies.
Another, earlier example of the association of Sublimity and Romantic love defines
the trajectories of each of the two main protagonists of Max Ophüls’ Letter from
an Unknown Woman (USA, 1948). Stefan, the pianist idolized by Lisa ever since
adolescence, is revealed near his story’s end as cherishing a statue of a goddess
whose arrival he awaits to begin his life. This goddess is the sensualist’s version of
the Unknown God to whom the Athenians erected a statue, and whom the Apostle
Paul, on visiting Athens, identified with the God he preached. Whether or not Lisa,
the woman whose letter Stefan reads after his death, and whose child she bore, can
be described as also “unknown” in the sense of incarnating that (disguised) goddess
is a question left hanging, though her impact upon him at this point of his life is as
decisive as his had been upon her much earlier: instead of fleeing the duel with Lisa’s
husband, as planned, he decides to go to his death. He may realize that homage to
the Idea of the goddess, of the Sublime, had blinded him to the possible wondrous-
ness of human love. On the other hand, he may grasp that Romanticism’s linkage
of death and Sublimity issues logically in a Liebestod that is not love’s end but its
consummation.
The Sublime and the Sense of an Ending

The end of Stromboli, as described earlier, raises the issue of the relationship between
the Sublime and narrativity in a different form than the encounter with the “politically
Sublime” individual discussed in connection with Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun. The
“sense of an ending” may follow from a presentation of an experience that prompts a
radical change in a character and/or (in consequence) the resolution of a narrative, or
the breaking of its frame by the ungraspable infinity of a mathematical Sublime. That
infinity may be that of a nature recovering its ability to dwarf a humanity that mis-
took its ability to destroy it for one to control it. On the level of individual experience,
often in the hills or mountains that were once the homeland of the Sublime, Nature
may rebuke humanity through the sublime sight of deer near the end of Krzysztof
Zanussi’s The Contract (Kontrakt) (Poland, 1980) or Michael Cimino’s The Deer
Hunter (UK/USA, 1978). In Sergo Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini
zabutykh predkiv) (USSR, 1965), where folk aesthetics paradoxically intersect with
Poe’s fixation on the dead female, meanwhile, the deer suggests the sublime/sublimely
62 Paul Coates
feminine/dead female. Such images, reminiscent of the “end-metaphor” of Victorian
poetry, resonate even more deeply in the shape of the actual human dead, like the
casts of the Pompeian couple unearthed near the end of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy
(Viaggio in Italia) (Italy/France, 1954). Sublimity’s stretching of the frame seeks a
place beyond the borders both of one’s particular present and the mortal, material
world in general. Because its images stand with one foot in the deathliness of the after-
image, it is appropriate that one of its most insistent contemporary cinematic expo-
nents, Terrence Malick, locates it, in Days of Heaven (USA, 1978), in an after-light,
the “magic hour” between sunset and nightfall in which he preferred to shoot. The
Sublime may not so much have an afterlife as be one. Malick’s eschatological light is
also the fading light of love evoked in Walter Ralegh’s description of the eclipse of his
own favor in the eyes of Elizabeth I:
As if when after Phebus is dessended

And leaues a light mich like the past dayes dawninge,
And every toyle and labor wholy ended
Each livinge creature draweth to his resting
Wee should beginn by such a partinge light

To write the story of all ages past
And end the same before th’aprochinge night.13
Ralegh’s lament, written long before the eighteenth century’s circling around the
Sublime, suggests its origin in an awareness of the real, imminent, yet endlessly
postponed demise of a beholder who is always too close to the sun, in his case—the
one known as Gloriana. Ralegh himself may be a forerunner of Ophüls’ Stefan. Is
the death, as Ralegh anticipates it, perhaps even that of the Western culture that
engenders more or less contemporaneously the notion of the Sublime and the detailed
historiography Mircea Eliade parallels with the flood of memories proverbially felt to
usher in death?14
Notes
1 Costica Bradatan and Camil Ungureanu, eds., Religion in Contemporary European Cinema:
The Postsecular Constellation (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).
2 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of
the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John Harvey (London: Oxford University
Press, 1958).
3 Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an
Ordinary Church (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000), 32.
4 Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima
to September 11 (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 19.
5 Barbara Claire Freeman, “The Awakening: Waking-up at the End of the Line,” in Bill
Beckley, ed. Sticky Sublime (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), 136.
6 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1971), 54–57.
7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 54.
8 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John
T. Goldthwait (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 47.
9 Kant 48 (emphasis in original).
10 Kant 48–49.
11 Kant 49.
12 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), 39.
13 Sir Walter Ralegh, “The 11th; and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia,” In The Poems of
Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962),
28.
14 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faith
and Archaic Reality (London: Collins, 1968), 232–246.
Bibliography
Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973).
Adorno, T. W., Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).
Beckley, Bill, ed., Sticky Sublime (New York: Allworth Press, 2001).
Bicknell, Jeanette, Why Music Moves Us (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009).
Bradatan, Costica and Camil Ungureanu, eds., Religion in Contemporary European Cinema:
The Postsecular Constellation (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Eliade, Mircea, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faith
and Archaic Reality (London: Collins, 1968).
Kant, Immanuel, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T.
Goldthwait (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).
——, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987).
Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960).
Macaulay, Rose, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).
Ray, Gene. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima
to September 11 (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Vidler, Antony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Visser, Margaret, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary
Church (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000).
Wordsworth, William, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1971).
Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg, Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolubility (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
Popular Sublime and Notional Sublime
3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional

Sublime
James Kirwan
Sublime is a quality that a subject attributes to an object or idea when it is the occasion
of a particular kind of sensation/emotion in that subject. It was extensively described
and analyzed in Europe in the eighteenth century, when the “passion,” “sentiment,”
or “emotion” was variously characterized as a form of pleasurable “elevation,”
“transport,” “enthusiasm,” or “exaltedness,” a “pleasing astonishment,” “enthusi-
astic awe,” or “thrilling and delightful wonder.”1 As with any aesthetic term, it was
most easily identified as the kind of pleasure that might be most predictably felt in
the contemplation (either directly, though from a point of safety, or through artistic
evocation) of a fairly clearly delimited class of objects or ideas: storms, raging seas,
earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, torrents, shipwrecks, conflagrations, high mountains,
precipices, fierce and powerful animals, monsters (even when dead), armies, war,
massive cities, ruins, immense vistas (particularly where uniform: the sea, deserts,
plains), vast caverns, the “great” figures of history, extremes of heroism or magna-
nimity, the ideas of infinity, eternity, or the divine.
It was a pleasure that was felt to “strike vehemently upon the mind, and fill, and
captivate it irresistibly.”2 For the eighteenth century it presented an interesting prob-
lem within psychology (then part of “moral philosophy”) principally because, while
it was obviously a pleasure, it was, in contrast to beauty, one that was felt in the
contemplation of objects that represented the dangerous or overwhelming. Indeed,
the feeling of being overwhelmed seemed inseparable from the kind of pleasure it
was. Moreover, there appeared to be, again in contrast to experiences like beauty
or grace, a distinctly visceral component to the sublime: it was the most markedly
“sensational” of aesthetic experiences.
We shall come back to the way in which the eighteenth century accounted for this
peculiar psychological phenomenon later. First, however, we should note that the
sublime, as described above, is clearly alive, and well, and living on in twenty-first-
century visual culture.
I.
The sublime was always largely a matter of art.3 Only landscape and the ideas of
infinity, eternity, and the divine were directly available to the average eighteenth-
century spectator, and even these were most widely enjoyed principally through
their literary evocation. While writers in that century habitually pointed to Nicolas
Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and, less often, Michelangelo as exemplary of visual sublim-
ity, it is really only in the nineteenth century, with Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph
Popular Sublime and Notional Sublime 65
Turner, John Martin, Francis Danby, and the Hudson River School, plus innumer-
able painters of battle scenes and shipwrecks, that the eighteenth-century sublime
achieves expression in visual art. For the same reason, these are generally still the most
accessible of artworks: there is nothing to “get,” their subjects and treatments, unless
time and taste has rendered them bombastic or melodramatic to the viewer, “strike
vehemently upon the mind, and fill, and captivate it irresistibly.”4 It was, however,
the twentieth century that saw the greatest advance in developing a visual medium
capable of creating sublimity: cinema.
Indeed, as an entirely new medium, at its outset spectacle was its content—to an
extent that is impossible to recapture today. At first, this was a matter of novelty
(representations that actually moved) rather than sublimity, but, as we shall see, it
was not long before this new art began to exploit its inherent potential to create
experiences of the sublime. Indeed, developments in screening technology itself, from
the Vitascope projector of the 1890s through a multitude of wide-screen processes to
today’s IMAX, have all tended toward the enhancement of the spectacular element:
bigger, louder, more overwhelming. Cinema is a medium that adds mass to any form
of narrative. Thus Robert Mitchum on his own stardom:
Once there were a lot of fans under my hotel room window. I turned to Dorothy
and asked her, “Why do they make such a big deal? You’ve been married to me
for years, and you’re certainly not impressed.[”] And Dorothy said to me, “Bob,
when you’re up there on the screen, they’re smaller than your nostril.”5
However, mere size can soon lose a good deal of its ability to impress. No object can
retain its power to precipitate the sublime in the face of familiarity: a fact that was
often noted in the eighteenth century in reference to the attitude of those who actually
spent their lives amidst the landscapes that tourists found so awe-inspiring.6
In the event, the exploitation of cinema’s potential to create the pleasurably over-
whelming began very shortly after narrative itself had become a requisite. (Indeed, if
we think of Edison’s footage of trains or Méliès’s Combat naval en Grèce, it might
arguably be said to predate it.) It is important, however, not to simply identify sub-
limity with spectacle per se, or with the frightening or the thrilling. All of these may
border on the definition of the sublime, but they remain distinct as feelings. There
are non-sublime ways of being spectacular—the feasts in Pastrone and DeMille, the
choreography of Busby Berkeley, and the wuxia films of Zhang Yimou are cases in
point. Likewise, despite the hypothesized moment of fear in the emergence of sublim-
ity, the feeling is qualitatively distinct from both dread per se, or the feeling one has
at the sight of that which makes one actually flinch. The identification of the horror
genre with the sublime is simply lazy. Similarly, though the sublime is a thrill, there
are obviously other ways in which cinematic narrative can be thrilling—from James
Williamson’s Stop Thief! (1901) to this year’s action blockbusters—where it borrows
from the essentially “situational” dramaturgy of melodrama.7
The deliberate attempt to create sublime spectacle appears to have been origi-
nally an ambition of Italian cinema. Thus the closing minutes of Gli ultimi giorni
di Pompeii (1908) provide us with a spectacle of large-scale urban destruction. (It
was remade as a full-length film with more impressive effects in 1913, and again in
1926.) The combined battle, fire, and collapsing masonry that provide the climax to
Pastrone’s La caduta di Troia (1911) must have seemed the apotheosis of sublimity to
66 James Kirwan
contemporary audiences, and his Cabiria (1914)—punctuated with the set pieces of
the eruption of Etna, Moloch, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the burning of the Roman
fleet at Syracuse, and the massive palace at Cirta—set the tone for American directors
like Griffith and DeMille.
The overwhelming power of nature, often with the concomitant spectacle of mass
destruction, has been an enduring trope of cinema. The Danish Verdens Undergang
of 1916 ends with the world destroyed, though not particularly spectacularly, by
a comet. There has been the “fury of nature,” notably in The Hurricane (1937),
and more recently in Twister (1996), The Perfect Storm (2000), and Into the Storm
(2014). Earthquakes, volcanoes, and conflagrations, on the Gli ultimi giorni di
Pompeii model, have featured in Krakatoa, East of Java (1933), Deluge (1933), San
Francisco (1936), In Old Chicago (1938), and The Towering Inferno (1974), as well
as, incidentally, in the numerous versions of Quo Vadis? (1901–2001) and in Gone
With the Wind (1939). Recent years have given us Dante’s Peak (1997), Volcano
(1997), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004),
2012 (2009), Knowing (2009), and San Andreas (2015), with the spectacle moving
increasingly from the role of Deus ex machina to that of leading character.8 The
eighteenth-century sublime of the torrential has also been well-represented in popular
films: on a “small” scale by versions of the Titanic story (1953/1958/1997) and The
Poseidon Adventure (1972/2005), and, on a larger, by Deluge, Noah’s Ark (1938),
Nihon chinbotsu (1973/2006), The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Noah (2014), and
Bølgen (2015). Massive and spectacular urban destruction may also be achieved by
war (for example, Sekai daisensoˉ (1961)), by monsters (Godzilla (1954–present),
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Independence Day (1996), War of the Worlds
(2005), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Independence Day: Resurgence
(2016)), or simply as collateral damage in science fiction (Akira (1988), Transformers
(2007–present), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), Man of Steel (2013), any of the cur-
rent spate of Marvel-based films). Monsters as a source of the sublime are, of course,
well-represented in cinematic history, from King Kong (1933/1976/2005), through
Mighty Joe Young (1949), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Godzilla, and
assorted giant aliens, to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993), and beyond.
The sublimity arising from the spectacle of great crowds, particularly in conflict,
which could only be poetically evoked in the eighteenth century, could now be
shown with a “mighty cast of thousands,” with what had once been verbal prompts
(“glory,” “noble,” etc.) to the appropriate emotion transmuted into cinematography
and scoring. The outstandingly sublime battles of my own lifetime would include
those featured in Waterloo (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), Pearl Harbor (2001),
The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003), Alexander (2004), Troy
(2004), and Red Cliff (2008–2009), as well as the fall of Jerusalem from World War
Z (2013), with its echo of Cabiria.9 The sublimity of ruins or desolation likewise rose
from the page or canvas, mostly in the form of the postapocalyptic: On the Beach
(1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), the final scene of Planet of the Apes
(1968), 28 Days Later (2002), I Am Legend (2007), The Book of Eli (2010), and
Oblivion (2013).
The spectacular events of the Bible, which were additionally imbued with the
sublime of divinity, had been frequently instanced as sublime by the eighteenth cen-
tury, and become the subjects of painting that aimed at sublimity. These, too, were
reproduced in early cinema, most notably in the first part of The Ten Commandments
(1923). However, as my account so far makes clear, such spectacles have largely been
taken over by science fiction, imbued with the alternative sublime of the cosmic. Even
in the 1980s, when examples of disaster as spectacle were thin on the ground, the
sublime of space was well-represented by the Star Trek series (six films between 1979
and 1991), Star Wars (1977/1980/1983), and, to a lesser extent, Superman (five films
between 1978 and 1987): all franchises that have been revived in the 2010s.
Indeed, the eighteenth century’s notion of the “Great Man” has in part passed
into the superheroes or quasi-superheroes (Batman, Iron Man) that are so popular
at present. The superpower is the objective correlative of the sublime will, and it is
on these terms that the spectator can identify with such heroes. The fact that their
potency is not actually a matter of willpower from the perspective of the protagonist
him/herself is a problem that the stories, at least on repetition, must constantly strug-
gle to circumvent—through the introduction of such arch-nemeses as kryptonite,
psychological problems, moral dilemmas, or suit malfunctions—in order to maintain
a sense of drama.
The other aspect of the “Great Man,” as one whose fate is inextricably bound up
with the “sweep” of history, has also been a popular cinematic trope. Early examples
are the “quolossal” Quo Vadis? (1913), Cabiria, and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
(1925), and these “sword and sandal” precedents greatly influenced the subsequent
choice of settings for such epics: The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Robe (1953),
The Vikings (1958), the 1959 remake of Ben Hur, Spartacus (1960), El Cid (1961),
Cleopatra (1963), and, in our own time, Gladiator (2000). The same effect has, how-
ever, been produced by films set in modern times: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor
Zhivago (1965), Papillon (1973), The Deer Hunter (1978), Gandhi (1982), Dances
With Wolves (1990), and, very much in its own way, Mr. Nobody (2009).10 These
are the films one feels one has lived through rather than merely watched; they have a
cumulative sublimity that leaves one with a sense of the enlargement of life. They also
tend to contain discretely sublime elements—disasters, battles, great cities, immense
vistas—that act as visible signs of, and doubtless help to create, that particular sense
of life.
The sublime, then, as described by the eighteenth century, is an enduring element
in contemporary visual culture; it has been drawing in cinema audiences for over
a century. Moreover, the kind of themes I have described are still standard tropes
in other visual media; they are to be found in the cover artwork to science fiction
books, fantasy art in general, photography (from the traditional mountains up to the
images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope), and, increasingly, in the worlds
of video games. They have even spilled over into television, despite the limitations
of the medium—many scenes in, for example, Game of Thrones (2011–present) or
Shingeki no kyojin (2013) appear designed for the large screen. It seems, then, that
the theorists of the eighteenth century did succeed in capturing a fundamental area
of aesthetic experience. Indeed, where their sublime is notably absent from other
areas of contemporary visual culture, it is generally because another emotion now
intervenes to neutralize the effect. For example, we are all familiar with, and therefore
blasé about, massive architecture—unless it is an outsized version of the classical,
where it begins to take on (largely thanks to Albert Speer) the same sinister overtones
that now belong to attempts to create sublimity through sheer size in sculpture: for
example, Mukhina’s Rabochiy i Kolkhoznitsa (1937), Breker’s Die Partei (1939), the
Borglums’ Mount Rushmore National Monument (1941), or Kamil’s Qaws an-Nas.r
68 James Kirwan
(1989).11 Painting rarely tries to vie with photography in the representation of sub-
lime reality, not only because photography comes with the advantage of inherently
asserting the reality of what is shown, but also because the evocation of the sublime is
a markedly dated ambition for painting.
I would argue, then, that the presence of sublimity in twenty-first-century visual
culture, in those areas where it is present, does not stand in need of explanation, any
more than does the contemporary interest in beauty, excitement, or drama per se.
(There is always the temptation to do so, since the ideological is both easier to ana-
lyze than the aesthetic, and also more obviously of general importance.12) The term
“sublime” successfully marks out what is, as it were, an aesthetic constant—at least
in terms of the last few centuries. For this reason, though it is demonstrably the case
that the cinematic sublime has had periods of glut and periods of relative scarcity, it
is not necessary to appeal to Zeitgeist—anxiety over social change, fears about global
warming, audiences’ loss of the ability to deal with narrative per se, and so on—to
account for this pattern.
The rhythm in the aesthetic life of a population, like that in the individual, depends
much less on the spirit of the times than it does on that aesthetic life itself. A fashion
is best understood in relation to the fashions that have preceded it, rather than in rela-
tion to social context. While the sublime may be an aesthetic constant, it is, as already
noted, possible to become indifferent to it when the particular form that might elicit
it becomes too familiar.13 (It was only the first few iterations of a streetful of cars
being flipped that were actually impressive.) Conversely, the film industry, as a high-
investment business depending on a form of demand (taste) that is inherently difficult
to quantify, has traditionally tended to follow a paradigm-based approach: giving the
people more of whatever appear to be the active ingredients of what has previously
sold well, and continuing to do so until diminishing returns force either novelty or the
revival of an older paradigm upon it. In the case of the kind of “mighty spectacles” we
are here dealing with, there is, naturally, a further economic complication. Adventure
films, war films, musicals, and even some comedies may be expensive, but those films
in which the principal draw is the sublime are invariably so. Thus, the financial health
of the film industry also determines how much sublimity will be about at any particular
moment. In the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, for example, film studios, faced with
the challenge of television, were making most of their profits on non-blockbusters.14
At the same time, however, they also gambled (unsuccessfully in the long run) on the
production of the kind of spectacles that demanded a large screen; hence the remaking
of two silent-era epics—The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959)—and
their success at the time. Moreover, precisely because the industry is paradigm-driven,
the seventies saw the production of a large number of disaster films in the wake of a
highly successful few, even as cinemas were closing. To further complicate the picture,
however, there is also the fluctuating cost of producing certain kinds of sublimity. It
was, for example, the development of the Dykstraflex computerized camera motion-
control system that made the effects in Star Wars economically viable, and the rise of
CGI in the nineties is undoubtedly responsible for the character of the current trend in
spectacle (three extras drowned in the making of 1928’s Noah’s Ark).
Even allowing, then, both for the vagaries of taste, which may make any aesthetic
constant—beautiful, comic, erotic—fix upon different objects at different times, and
for the vagaries of film production, the “eighteenth-century” sublime has clearly been
an enduring aesthetic resource in cinema.
II.
As stated at the outset, the concept (as distinct from the experience) of the sublime
originally emerged as psychological conundrum: a pleasure felt in the contemplation
of the idea of the physically or mentally overwhelming. Nevertheless, a consensus as
to the grounds of the sensation/emotion was arrived at quite early in the eighteenth
century. It was held to be precipitated by the mind’s extrapolating from a percep-
tion of the continuation of quantity to that point where the object in question could
no longer be imagined as a single object (mountains, cities, armies, landscapes),
by the idea of the potentially lethal consequences of the object perceived (storms,
conflagrations, dangerous animals), or by a sense of unlimited potency arising from
a perception of the apparently insuperable distance that separated our own potency
from that displayed (heroism, divinity). Where we respond to this symbolic threat to
our power of comprehension or to our own sensuous interests not by simply being
overwhelmed but rather by continuing to try to comprehend or by continuing to feel
the imagined danger not as annihilating but rather as challenging—where, that is, we
continue to measure ourselves against the symbolically overwhelming—we experience
an invigorating, ecstatic, sense of our own mental powers.
This theory of the sublime can be found in Hutcheson as early as 1725, and is
repeated and elaborated through the course of the eighteenth century by, among
others, Hume (1739), Young (1744), Baillie (1747), Gerard (1759), Duff (1767),
Usher (1769), Priestley (1777), and Beattie (1783).15 It is also the theory rehearsed
by Kant at the end of the century: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of
demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”16 The
pleasure, he argues, arises from the fact that it is a revelation of our capacity to assert
our independence in the face of the immeasurability or irresistibility of the external,
to diminish the value of what is “great” externally, and feel the “absolutely great” as
located only within ourselves.17 While this “absolutely great” is, of course, a purely
negative presentation, existing only by virtue of the apparent elimination of the limits
of sensibility, nevertheless, it has the effect of making us feel superior to the sensible
per se: it “expands the soul.”18 I would take this account to be substantially correct,
but, given that “soul” must be interpreted figuratively, would add that this feeling
of rising above every sensual interest cannot actually represent a rising above every
such interest, but is rather the product of a wish-fulfilling fantasy, which the absence
of any real danger enables us to indulge. Insofar as the power imaginatively resisted
appears practically unlimited, so too does the spectator’s power of resistance. It is
the flattering nature of this fantasy, with its momentary denial of our enduring sense
of vulnerability, and, given the unlimited nature of human desire, our ineluctable
consciousness of our own ultimate impotence, that is the cause of the pleasure felt.19
This thesis is not a revision of the eighteenth-century theory of the sublime but
rather a making explicit of what is implicit in that theory. The eighteenth century
could leave open the question of what the “expansion of the soul” signified—the
revelation of our divine origin and destiny or a mere “sport of fancy”—and, within
philosophy, it largely did. However, in the nineteenth century, as aesthetic inquiries
became, on the continent at least, co-opted to the reassertion of religious truth and
moral realism, no opportunity to assert the reality of the transcendental was passed
over. In 1790, Kant had merely said that, in the experience of the sublime, we feel
as if the mind surpasses all boundaries of sense, but within his lifetime, others were
70 James Kirwan
claiming that it actually does.20 (Indeed, Kant himself had been interested in the sub-
lime principally as evidence that we are capable of the kind of non-sensuous motiva-
tion necessary for truly moral willing, though he did not succeed in showing that it
was.21) This tendency to put the aesthetic in general in service of the true and good,
and the concomitant tendency to divorce aesthetics from psychology, thus reifying its
objects and making taste irrelevant, had gained total ascendancy within philosophical
aesthetics by the twentieth century—to the extent that those competing tendencies in
the nineteenth century that had continued along eighteenth-century lines were largely
written out of the history of the subject.22
It is unsurprising, then, that when “the sublime” returns to aesthetics toward the
end of the twentieth century it does so in an almost unrecognizable form. The most
marked difference is that, while the eighteenth century proceeded by determining the
precise constellation of mental symptoms, cataloguing the kinds of objects that pro-
duced this, and then asking (without any reference to truth or goodness) what mental
mechanism might be responsible for such a feeling in connection with such objects,
twentieth-century sublimes start with theoretical constructs themselves and work
outwards to what should be “sublime.” Indeed, all of the sublimes that have emerged
in the last forty or so years can be traced back to Kant’s treatment of the topic, but
reduced to an abstract formula—the negative presentation of the supersensible—that
ignores both the parameters of the use of the word “sublime,” and the essential refer-
ence to pleasure, upon which that treatment was based. In keeping with the trend
in aesthetics described above, this gives such sublimes a functionally transcendental
role: “the sublime” becomes a way of feeling/thinking that allows us access to what
is otherwise inaccessible.
This abstract sublime is perhaps first hinted at in Adorno, who talks of how, in the
“administered world,” those artworks “in which the aesthetic form, under pressure
of the truth content, transcends itself” have come to occupy “the position that was
once held by the concept of the sublime.”23 The emphasis, then, is on the concept,
not the experience. Specifically it is “Kant’s doctrine of the feeling of the sublime”
that “describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an
illusionless truth content.”24 It is, however, Lyotard, also basing his “sublime” on an
abstraction from Kant, and making it a matter of the “presentation of the unpresent-
able,” who is perhaps most directly responsible for the rise of the notional sublime,
by tying it firmly to that contemporary concept of the aesthetic that understands
aesthetic experience almost exclusively in terms of whatever can justify the value of
twentieth-century avant-garde art.25 However, when “sublime” is used to refer to
something as abstract as the notion of the “presentation of the unpresentable”—a
purely verbal construct—there is nothing to which it cannot be made to apply. Thus
Nancy, for example, explicitly rejecting the idea that sublimity is a matter of the
grandiose, monumental, or ecstatic, defines it in terms of “the aesthetic as question”:
“Which means nothing other than: sensible presentation as question.”26
I do not wish to throw doubt on the reality of any of the phenomena that are the
concerns of these theorists, but there are several reasons why “sublime” is an unfor-
tunate choice of terminology, particularly when that “sublime” is explicitly identified
with the sublime of the eighteenth century. The sublime is among the very few peren-
nial forms of aesthetic experience (the similarly sensational disgusting is another) that
has received either a systematic description or an even partially successful explana-
tion.27 There is no “is” in aesthetics, only “was for me,” or “is generally felt at the
present time.” Thus, as with any aesthetic experience, the emotion/sensation of find-
ing a thing sublime is what constitutes the sublime: nothing is sublime unless some-
body finds it so, anything is sublime if somebody finds it so. The present-day notional
sublimes described above are, by contrast, theoretical constructs found, on reflection,
to apply to the properties of certain objects. The result is the attribution of “sublim-
ity” to things that no one has ever found sublime. (The apotheosis of this may be
Shaw’s instancing of “the Jew” as sublime to German fascists.28) It is as if we started
to use the word “funny” not to describe what made us laugh, but rather whatever
conformed to a certain formula. Indeed, so abstract are these notional sublimes that
they can justify the use of “sublime” to describe even quite distinct forms of (usually
non-pleasurable) experience: terror, disgust, abjection, a sense of the uncanny, or even
the feeling of profundity.
Moreover, so far do these sublimes drift from the sublime that it becomes quite
natural for contemporary commentators to simply overlook the sublime even where,
as in the case of cinema, it is staring them in the face. (Deleuze, for example, explicitly
appealing to a highly abstracted form of Kant’s “mathematical sublime,” can ignore
Pastrone and his imitators, to assert that it is with Gance’s use of the triple screen in
Napoleon (1927) that “the French school invents a cinema of the sublime.”29) Thus,
in the last thirty years or so, the majority of discussions of the sublime have revolved
around analyses of the avant-garde and, in particular, abstract art, and have done so
largely in order to prove that they are “sublime.”
As I said above, the shame of it is that the sublime, as described in the eighteenth
century, and as popularly enjoyed, in one form or another (we have not even touched
on music), for at least the last three hundred years, is one of the few aesthetic experi-
ences with a reasonably distinct identity, and for which any kind of plausible ground-
ing has been proposed. It is unfortunate, then, that its theoretical “revival” has so
often been simply a matter of borrowing the glamor of the term to talk about quite
different issues.
Notes
1 See James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of
Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–13.
2 Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses: I. An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism, As It
Relates to Painting II. An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur (London: W.
Churchill, 1719), I, 35.
3 Brady has recently argued that most works of art do not possess the scale, or the formless
and unbounded character, necessary to create sublimity, which is “properly experienced
only in an environmental context”; Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy:
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–128.
There is not space to properly address this thesis here, but I would argue, apropos her claim
that art can “transmit only a vicarious sense of the experience” (122–123), that, while our
experience of the object that inspires the feeling may be real or vicarious, aesthetic experi-
ence itself is not the kind of experience that can be divided into real and vicarious forms.
4 I do not mean to in any way belittle such art, or the possibly serious intentions of the artists
themselves. That this note should be necessary is a measure of the current distance between
aesthetic experience and aesthetics as a branch of philosophy.
5 Robert Mitchum quoted in Roger Ebert, “Mitch and Jimmy: Some Thoughts” (1997), in
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
21–24. 24.
6 Advances in technology reveal the same effect—from the train to the Internet.
72 James Kirwan
7 See Scott Higgins, “Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary
Action Film,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 47 (2008): 74–96. This is not to say that today’s action
films do not also contain a fair measure of sublime destruction, just as the many disaster
films, though their draw may be principally sublimity, will also contain melodrama.
8 I omit Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock (2010), since, despite the impression given by the
Chinese trailer, the earthquake itself is neither the climax nor the main attraction of the
film; it is, rather, a dramatic pretext—as, indeed, the title indicates.
9 Battle sequences may, of course, have other aesthetic virtues than sublimity, which is why I
do not include those—from, for example, The Seven Samurai (1954), Zulu (1964), to Black
Hawk Down (2001), or Saving Private Ryan (1998)—that were equally impressive but in a
different way.
10 It seems, however, to have become more difficult to make this kind of epic; one of the effects
Gladiator had on me was to remind me how long it was since a film had given me that kind
of experience. This may be because such epics are both narrative-driven and very expensive:
one would need a great deal of faith in the power of one’s narrative to risk the expense.
Among recent films with similar effects one could single out Munich (2005), though here
the intimate too far outweighs the sense of history for sublimity to arise: its excellence is
of a different kind. Conversely, Kingdom of Heaven (2006) fails because, while it has all
the elements of an epic, through lack of a sympathetic protagonist it fails to engage on the
intimate level, thus nullifying one of the points of its spectacular sequences.
11 The sublime of nature is still what it always was, though relative ease of access, in com-
bination with a tendency to underestimate the real dangers of wilderness, has probably
somewhat reduced its power to move.
12 This is not, of course, to say that the films I have referred to do not also have an ideologi-
cal content, but only that this is not relevant to the attraction of the sensation/emotion of
sublimity itself. For the ideological neutrality of the sublime per se in the eighteenth century,
see Kirwan, Sublimity, 15–52.
13 The same goes, of course, for every kind of aesthetic experience. So, for example, if you
want to know what somebody’s erotic “type” is, just look at their current lover and think
the opposite.
14 A similar challenge came from cable television and video in the eighties because, while the
studios were themselves making money from these media, theatrical success was still an
important determining factor for uptake in such ancillary markets.
15 See Kirwan, Sublimity, 7–13. The reputation of Burke notwithstanding, his theory—that
the pleasure arises simply from a consciousness of our relative safety—was largely, and
justly, ignored even by his admirers.
16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul
Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), § 25, 134.
17 Kant, “General remark on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgments,” 152; § 27, 141.
18 Kant, “General remark on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgments,” 156.
19 See Kirwan, Sublimity, 161–165.
20 Kirwan, Sublimity, 67–118.
21 See James Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant (London: Continuum, 2004), 59–106.
22 For an account of the way in which aesthetics went from a branch of psychology to an
endeavor almost entirely concerned with arguments for why Art (that is, the twentieth-
century avant-garde or whatever in past art is compatible with the perceived values of
that avant-garde) is good for you, see James Kirwan, Beauty (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999), 93–118, and “Aesthetics Without the Aesthetic?” Diogenes, Vol.
59 (2012): 177–183.
23 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
Continuum, 2002), 196–197.
24 Adorno.
25 Lyotard’s “sublime” is discussed in detail in Kirwan, Sublimity, 143–153. A similar concern
with truth, which transmutes the sublime into something peculiarly a matter of art of a
certain complexity, and the consciousness-raising potential of that art, can also be found
in Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989) and Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Kirk
Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000), and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006). I have dealt
with Crowther and Pillow in Sublimity, 153–156.
26 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Introduction” to Jean-François Courtine et al., Of the Sublime: Presence
in Question (1988), trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1993), 1–3. See also his “The Sublime Offering” and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s
“Sublime Truth” in the same collection. Žižek, too, while he begins by using “sublime” in a
quite conventional, eighteenth-century sense to mean that which is “excepted from the vital
cycle,” nevertheless, in identifying it with Lacan’s jouissance, opens it to a range of objects
that (regardless of their grounds) no one has ever experienced as sublime; Slavoj Žižek, The
Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 134. The abstract “sublime” can also
be attributed to more specific phenomena, as when Jameson applies it to the “emotional
ground tone” of the postmodern by hypothesizing a “camp” or “hysterical” sublime that is
the momentary revelation of the “whole extraordinarily demoralizing and depressing origi-
nal new global space” of late capitalism; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6, 34, 49.
27 The perennially popular beauty can be precipitated by too disparate a range of objects, and
is, in any case, too purely, almost hermetically, positive in nature to be analyzed in a similar
way.
28 Shaw 139–140.
29 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 46–48.
4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes
Temenuga Trifonova
Since the mid-1990s scholars and critics have been hard at work to define the sublime
negatively by specifying what it is not. As a result there has been a steady prolifera-
tion of “fake” sublimes that simulate the sublime without actually being it. In what
follows I consider a few representative moments of this slippage between “real” and
“fake” sublime and the definitional difficulties brought about by it: 1) the environ-
mental sublime; 2) the CGI sublime; 3) the immersive sublime; 4) the fetishization of
the detail as sublime; 5) the forlorn sublime; and 6) the data sublime.
The Environmental Sublime

Sublime: The Tremors of the World, a 2016 exhibition at the Pompidou Centre-
Metz that gathers the work of over a hundred artists, architects, and filmmakers to
reflect on the constantly evolving nature of the sublime claims to offer a historical
survey of our increasingly agonistic relationship with Nature (rarely referred to in
the exhibition catalogue as “Nature,” the preferred terms instead being “ecosystem,”
“environment,” and the awkward “Nature too far”), foregrounding the topologi-
cal, catastrophic, and eschatological aspects of the sublime over its aesthetic aspect.
With the exception of some early works that remind us of the awe-inspiring effects
of the sublime the majority of the works on display dramatize the morbid pleasure
provided by religious, fictional, and scientific fantasies of our own extinction. The
curators’ environmental bias is evident in the exhibition’s didactic layout—from
sections such as “Anthropocene: tale of a predicted catastrophe” and “Altered land-
scape, the landscape tragedy” to “The advent of ecological activism” and “Cure
and invent”—whose purpose is to demonstrate the environmental threat humanity
represents and to recommend the “reenchantment” of Nature as the means to a more
balanced relationship with it. Mark Dion’s Deep Time Closet (wood and mixed
media, 2001) and Adrian Missika’s Darvaza (video, 2011) are representative of the
environmental guilt driving the exhibition, which aims to challenge our ideas about
progress and “punish” us for our arrogant struggle for supremacy over Nature. If
these works evoke the sublime at all they do so only as a means to an end—to situate
the catastrophic present in a larger historical context by reconstructing “deep” geo-
logical time (Dion) or (not so deep) geopolitical time (Missika). The sublime’s defin-
ing effects—awe and terror—are here fully intellectualized on the assumption that
a proper response to the sublime is one of historical reflection rather than a visceral
response of attraction and repulsion, and that the sublime, on its own, cannot affect
us unless it is subordinated to some sort of taxonomy, even one that is intentionally
Of Fake and Real Sublimes 75
falsified (as in the case of Missika, who blurs the distinction between natural and
human-caused catastrophes).
Downplaying the aesthetic aspect of the sublime the exhibition attributes to it a
clear pedagogical function—to “teach” us to develop a more responsible relationship
with Nature by insuring that we remain permanently trapped in an environmental
guilt trip.
The CGI Sublime

There are four main forms in which the contemporary cinematic sublime manifests
itself: 1) a classical, natural sublime (e.g. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015)); 2) a rap-
turous, cosmic sublime (exemplified by films as different as Malick’s 2012 To the
Wonder and Lars von Trier’s 2011 Melancholia); 3) an affectless pop-sublime of aes-
theticized violence (e.g. Nicolas Refn’s “trilogy”: Drive (2011), Only God Forgives
(2013), and The Neon Demon (2016)); and 4) a technically virtuosic CGI sublime
most prominent in fantasy and science fiction films.
Although the cinematic sublime has long been associated with the evolution of
special effects there is still a certain reluctance to equate CGI with the sublime. For
instance, film scholar Greg Tuck distinguishes between “spectacle”—a “fake” sublime
that functions through an overemphasis on quantity (the quantity of special effects)
over quality (the quality of the subjective experience generated by them)—and the
“real” sublime. While the “real” sublime experience is one of “extraordinary meta-
physical density” (Tuck 2008, 252) spectacle is merely about the shallow pleasure of
wondering “how it was done.”1 Unfortunately, rather than explore the possible ways
in which CGI might effect a union between cognition and sensation Tuck reaffirms the
dichotomy underlying the great philosophical debate between empiricism and ration-
alism by identifying “spectacle” exclusively with “the visually perceptive aspects of
cinema” and “sublime” with its “mentally affective aspects” (251) thus contributing to
what Martin Jay has called “the denigration of vision” in twentieth-century thought.2
Although Tuck denies that the sublime can be empirically measured, since it is an
experience of the “Idea of bigness” rather than of the quantitatively measurable size
of certain objects, he also insists that the sublime “must still bear some sort of embod-
ied relationship to our lived human scale of experience” (262). Films like The Lord of
the Rings [LOTR]: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) bear out Tuck’s
claim. Although not as spectacular as other scenes rendered exclusively through
CGI, the scenes in which characters appear against the backdrop of a magnificent
natural landscape produce the sublime precisely by showing the overwhelming scale
of nature as relative to our human scale (e.g. mountains are as bigger than humans
as one would expect them to be in reality). By contrast, when characters are dwarfed
by the spectacular, digitally produced surroundings in the Land of Mordor scenes,
spatial relationships and differences in scale between humans and their surroundings
are no longer understandable from an embodied point of view and cannot, therefore,
be experienced as sublime for, as Tuck reminds us, the sublime is experienced in the
representation of the relationship between things rather than in the sheer size of things
themselves: such scenes produce only a “fake” sublime since it remains beyond the
scale of human experience.
The distinction between “spectacle” and “sublime” foregrounds one important
premise of the contemporary discourse of the sublime—that a distinction ought to be
made between a “real sublime” understood as a human value and a “fake sublime”
referring merely to the technical aspect of value. By contrast, in classical accounts
the sublime is usually distinguished from the beautiful rather than from a technically
perfected version of itself. The distinction between “real” (human) and “fake” (tech-
nical) sublime seems to replay the paranoia underlying the discourse of the waning
of indexicality, which sees digital cinema as tricking us into believing an image to be
indexical when it is not. If the classical sublime is associated with formlessness and
boundlessness, then CGI’s unnatural sharpness and grainlessness—its immaterial,
disembodied nature—appears to undermine its potential for sublimity, limiting it to
the technical aspect of value (the “fake” sublime).
Occasionally, the distinction between the sublime as a “human” versus a “tech-
nical” value seems to overlap with another distinction, that between a horizontal/
panoramic and a vertical/vertiginous sublime. For instance, Terrence Malick’s shots
evoking the natural sublime tend to be composed horizontally, inscribing the human
figure in her natural environment and emphasizing its expansive, panoramic nature.
He frequently shoots from a low angle, pointing the camera up at the sky to suggest
man’s attempts to reach the divine. In contrast to Malick’s transcendental style, in
the Mordor scenes of LOTR the camera swoops vertiginously up and down, rarely
panning horizontally and thus denying the viewer a grounded position. Insofar
as such vertiginous movements are foreign to our bodies—we cannot experience
them except as mentally, rather than viscerally, titillating—these scenes produce
an abstract, virtuosic sublime, which does not provoke an affective response other
than a respectful admiration for the technical know-how that went into producing
them. The sequence taking place in the Old Hall, in which the camera breathlessly
plunges down an abyss and shoots up again as it reveals parallel rows of gigantic
stone columns receding into infinity, is composed of shots reminiscent of Escher’s
self-referential drawings of impossible spaces drawn from impossible angles and
replete with recurring and recursive elements that trap the spectator’s eye in a never-
ending circular movement with no beginning and end. Like Escher’s drawings, the
Old Hall scenes construct a seemingly infinite space that is, however, self-referential,
i.e. bounded: the virtual camera’s movements and angles are so unusual—foreign
to an embodied human perspective—that the viewer cannot immediately find her
bearings and gauge the direction in which the characters, and the camera, are
moving (up or down, left or right) thus making the image appear one-dimensional.
Since unlike our bodies the virtual camera does not obey the laws of gravity and
is free to move in any direction, it takes a special effort on our part to read such
images.
And yet, as tempting as it might be to superimpose the distinction between the
horizontal/panoramic and the vertical/vertiginous sublime over that between the sub-
lime as a “human” and as a “technical” value, this would be to simplify the complex
ways in which the sublime has been visualized across the film screen’s three axes.
Hollywood blockbusters have construed the sublime both along the vertical and the
horizontal axes, as Kristen Whissel has demonstrated in her analysis of “the digital
multitude” in a series of blockbusters that deploy horizontal compositions to articu-
late “historical concepts through the digital multitude’s reorganization of film space”
(Whissel 2010, 96).3 In her latest book, however, Whissel argues that since the 1990s
filmmakers have made increasing use of the screen’s vertical axis with the aid of new
digital technologies, creating
breath-taking imaginary worlds defined by extreme heights and plunging depths,
the stark verticality of which . . . often functions . . . [allegorically as] a rather
literal naturalization of culture in which the operation and effects of (social, eco-
nomic, military) power are mapped onto the laws of space and time.
(2014, 21–22)4
Whissel reads the digital multitude’s sublime horizontality as conveying the inevi-
tability of, and anxiety about, radical historical change, and sublime verticality as
the allegorical mapping of power relations onto the physical law of gravity. While
the merits of her analysis—the attempt to consider the human and technical aspects
of the sublime together rather than in isolation, as well as to overcome the pejora-
tive distinction between “spectacle” and “sublime”—are indisputable, her argument
remains vulnerable to counter-critiques of technological determinism as she seems to
imply that new digital technologies have somehow made filmmakers more politically
and socially conscious since now they have the technical means to represent visually
power conflicts that before were supposedly of no interest to them. However, we need
to analyze the relationship between form and content in a larger sample of contempo-
rary blockbusters before we can hypothesize whether the development of digital tech-
nologies can be said to reveal a shift from a CGI sublime that embodies an anxious,
fearful preoccupation with historical change to a CGI sublime that reflects a greater
politicized awareness and a critique of power relations in contemporary society.
The Immersive Sublime

If the classical sublime is an experience of the limit, can a totally immersive (limitless)
experience produce the sublime? Rina Arya points to Bill Viola’s video work as an
example of the ways in which the intervention of technologies in new media art in the
1970s and 1980s redefined the sublime by creating totally immersive, virtual, hyper-
real works, in which the viewer’s different senses interact.5 By considering two recent
examples—an immersive installation and video games—I hope to point to some of the
transformations the sublime has undergone.
Sound Labyrinth (2013), an audio-visual installation by Mark Pedersen using amb-
isonic sound and immersive video projection and set within a 6-m-diameter geodesic
dome, claims to explore the sublime through an intensification of the relationship
between sound and the body. In his article “Sound Labyrinth: Exploration of the
Embodied Sublime through an Immersive Audio/Visual Installation”6 Pedersen writes
of his desire to use sound to explore the sacred “in the sense of the (transcendent) sub-
lime, that which is beyond the senses.” If the classical sublime allowed us to transcend
the limits of the senses (Kant), Pedersen’s “embodied sublime” promises to reembody
us, and if the classical sublime, despite the moment of terror, was ultimately an experi-
ence of distance and detachment (guaranteed by the fall back on Reason) the sublime,
as conceived by Pedersen, is an experience of total immersion and self-abandonment
to our senses rather than a cool realization of their limits. Pedersen posits the “embod-
ied sublime” as capable of restoring value to sound, “in a time when the reproduc-
ibility of music has reduced even its economic value,” by reconnecting sound to a
site-specific ritual (the installation), that is, he views the sublime as a way of restoring
Benjamin’s vanished “aura” to works of art. Insofar as Pedersen equates noise, “the
ground, the condition of possibility for every significant sound” with the virtual and
with the sublime in the sense of the sublimine (the subliminal), the sublime comes to
signify the condition of possibility for any meaningful perception, whether aural or
visual. The sublime, for Pedersen, is nothing but the oscillation, and its intensifica-
tion, between the abstract/virtual and the embodied/actual, between an increasingly
abstracted soundscape and the very specific movements of the participant as she
wanders through the sound labyrinth, so that at the point of greatest sonic abstrac-
tion she experiences the generated abstract sounds as if they were responding to
her random, unintentional movements. By designing an immersive environment that
seems to respond to our physical movements Pedersen seeks to restore our reciprocal
relationship with nature; however, a subject totally immersed in an environment can
no longer feel the environment but can only feel herself. The pleasurable immersive
experience of Pedersen’s “embodied sublime” is a kind of autoerotic aural experience
far removed from the awe and terror of the classical sublime.7
Eugénie Shinkle’s analysis of the technological sublime in gaming—”the gamified
sublime”—illustrates another important departure from Kant’s “failure formula,”
the idea that the failure of one part of the human apparatus (the imagination) reveals
the superiority of another (Reason), nothing ever being lost in this perfectly balanced
cognitive economy. For Shinkle technology has the potential of becoming sublime
only on certain rare occasions when it unexpectedly reveals itself as “other” to us.8
Since the posthuman subject does not experience technology as “other” but as an
extension of her own body and thus as an affirmation of Reason, the subject can
experience the limits of her subjectivity only when the seamless integration of human
and machine fails, when the player “is confronted by an inexpressive intelligence, a
pure, depersonalized power, a technological other” (Shinkle 7). This happens only on
the rare occasions when the interface fails: the technological sublime, then, is experi-
enced neither in what cultural theorist Sianne Ngai calls “stuplimity” (in which “the
initial dyspheric affect is not overcome by a competing one affirming the self’s supe-
riority [and] instead stuplimity draws together boredom and astonishment” (Shinkle
5)), nor in “flow” (a semi-hypnotic state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) but
rather in the game hardware’s malfunctions (bugs, glitches).
Seemingly remaining within the Kantian “failure formula” Shinkle defines the
gamified sublime in terms of “a failure,” but whose failure is it? In Kant we feel the
limits of subjectivity when one of our faculties (imagination) fails, thereby revealing
the superiority of another (Reason); however, in the gamified sublime it is not we who
fail but technology: the failure of the interface jolts us into an awareness of technology
not as a mere extension of our body but as totally “other.” Paradoxically, we become
aware of the limits of subjectivity only when technology fails, which suggests that
subjectivity is wholly dependent upon something that it is not. What makes this sce-
nario unnerving is the possibility that this “other” could also not fail. That the failure
of the “other” to reveal itself as “other” is not guaranteed leaves open the possibility
of the world becoming, at some point in our technologically perfected future, a mere
extension of ourselves, a perfect simulacrum.
The Fetishization of the Detail as Sublime

Borrowing the term “detailism” from Naomi Schor,9 in Local Transcendence: Essays
on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008) Alan Liu describes a domi-
nant tendency in high cultural criticism to avoid general and universal statements
for fear of perpetuating discredited grand narratives: as he puts it, in detailism the
local “threatens to go transcendental” (Liu 129).10 Tracing the tradition of detailism
from Sir Joshua Reynolds through Hegel, Freud, and Barthes, Schor shows how
detailism overthrew neoclassical generalization and came to occupy a dominant
place in Romanticism and the realistic novel, in which the insignificant detail “was
made subservient to the aesthetics of sublimity” (130). Valorized and fetishized as
containing “an immanent sublime,” the detail was liberated from “past aesthetic
regimes—Hegelian and realist—that had subordinated it to transcendental sublimity
or . . . brute immanence” (294). In Camera Lucida, for instance, Barthes’ unorthodox
phenomenological account of what we might call “the morbid sublime,” Barthes is
“guilty” of “detailism” insofar as he locates the “essence” of photography in the most
contingent aspect of the photograph, the punctum, an insignificant detail recorded
unintentionally by the photographer that “pricks” the viewer as she contemplates
the photograph revealing retrospectively its pathos, which has to do with our own
mortality.
Romanticism’s fetishization of the “detail” did not disappear with the end of
Romanticism but has enjoyed something of a comeback within postmodernism albeit
with a nostalgic twist as, for instance, in Malick’s impressionistic cinema. Critical
responses to Malick’s films, especially to his recent trilogy (The Tree of Life (2011),
To the Wonder (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015)), vary widely, from those who
call the films sublime, through those who dismiss them as ridiculous, to those who
compare them to theological works, raising the question of where to draw the line
between the sublime and the transcendent/spiritual. The visual poetry of Malick’s
location-dependent, improvisational style of shooting attempts to invoke the sublime
in impressionistic, contingent details recorded by the constantly moving camera as
if by chance and barely held together by a nostalgic voiceover. It is not through
foregrounding nature’s grand and terrifying scale that Malick invokes the sublime;
rather, the sublime in his films emerges in fleeting moments, ephemeral gestures,
fugitive glances, lopsided compositions that frame random parts of human bodies
or inconspicuous details of a landscape. Malick’s preferred technique, the jump cut,
captures the sublimity of the fleeting “empty moment,” which consists precisely in
its transience, contingency, and isolation from any supporting structure or narrative.
The Forlorn Sublime

In his reflections on what passes for sublime in contemporary art the painter Julian
Bell links the sublime in the age of spectacle to the global environmental crisis and
the vast, terrifying, unknowable face of global capitalism.11 Regardless of whether
the contemporary sublime is rooted in myth (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) or in
the pure abstraction of spectacular images (the “industrial sublime” of Gursky’s or
Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs) it seems to exist for its own sake, abstracted
from any notion of purpose, free of any ethical concerns. Reviving Burke’s gendered
distinction between the masculine sublime and the feminine beautiful Bell dismisses
the contemporary “forlorn,” “sad,” “dejected,” “vapid” sublime—exemplified by
Rachel Whiteread’s object casts and Luc Tuymans’ Still Life—as a feminized version
of the “hunky machismo” of Barnett Newman’s sublime.
Indeed, there is a strong tendency in contemporary art criticism to conflate the
experience of the sublime with the experience of absence or to assume the sublime can
be produced by monumentalizing its opposite, the banal. For the 2002 Documenta
Luc Tuymans was supposed to present paintings of images related to 9/11; instead he
showed the giant Still Life (oil on canvas, 347 × 500 cm). The sheer scale of the work,
coupled with the utter banality of its content, have been said to evoke the inadequacy
or impotence of language and art to represent unimaginable horror. Other works by
Tuymans, e.g. Recherches (1989), have been read similarly as dramatizing—through
trivial objects and oblique allusions—the unrepresentability of the Holocaust.
Similarly, discarding the objects themselves and providing us with perfect replicas
instead, Rachel Whiteread seems more interested in the absent thing than in the
thing’s representation. Her casts of everyday objects (from a small stool to an entire
house) are not representations of the objects themselves but “negative impressions of
them: the space around or inside an object and not the object itself.”12 Embankment
(2005), an installation she created for Tate Modern, also began as a response to a
disappearance, the death of her mother. While clearing out her deceased mother’s
belongings Whiteread found ten boxes filled with memorabilia from her past; she
monumentalized this now absent life by filling the boxes with plaster and replicating
them as casts 14,000 times. Whiteread’s preoccupation with absence, negative space,
the denial of landscape, and, in Embankment, the denial of the classical sublime
landscape have been erroneously interpreted as a preoccupation with the sublime
without acknowledging that there is a difference between something that exceeds
representation (the sublime) and something that remains after representation (trace,
absence, negative space, the void). The trace cannot be sublime if only because it is
suffused with the pathos of melancholy and nostalgia, unless we believe we can no
longer experience the sublime except as a trace of its former self.
Although both Burke and Kant insisted that the sublime is not a matter of scale—
the infinitely big and the infinitely small can both be sublime—they did emphasize
the intense affective response produced by the sublime. Lyotard, too, insisted on the
violence the sublime does to our senses, pointing to various examples from abstract
expressionist art, which produce the sublime through representational minimalism
(the reduction of representation to the basic properties of the medium). Although
arguably much of contemporary art remains dedicated to representational minimalism
it often produces only a trivialized, reified version of the Lyotardian sublime simply
because a deeply affective experience cannot be a result of the (de)privation either of
our physical senses or of our sense of meaning. While Burke and Kant both conceived
the sublime as a negative pleasure resulting from our experience of the limits of our
senses—an experience of privation, which is then compensated for by the realization
of Reason’s superiority—such attempts to locate the contemporary sublime in sensual
deprivation—either in visual minimalism or in semantic poverty—cannot but produce
only a “fake” sublime. Simply put, something cannot be so underwhelming (banal,
meaningless) that it becomes sublime.
The Data Sublime

Both the “data sublime” and what literary theorist Alan Liu calls “local transcend-
ence” or “detailism”—the attribution of transcendence to insignificant details isolated
from any coherent, totalizing structure or n arrative—are conceived à la Kant in
terms of a blockage to the understanding: in the first case, our ability to interpret the
concrete significance of abstract “Big Data” is blocked; in the second, our ability to
Figure 4.1 Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005, Turbine Hall installation, Tate Modern,
London, 14,000 polyethylene boxes, © Tate Gallery, London 2005, photo credit: Marcus and
Marcella Leith, © Rachel Whiteread; courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York,
Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, and Gagosian Gallery
understand the contextual/general meaning of a concrete detail is blocked, yet this

very blockage is said to reveal the sublime as immanent in the detail.13
The designation of Big Data as “sublime” is no longer a novelty. The term “Data
Sublime” was first suggested by art historian Julian Stallabrass, who noticed a trend
in recent photographic portraiture toward blank and expressionless but technically
astonishing photographs of human subjects.14 Like Tuck’s “unsublime spectacle” this
type of portrait photography (exemplified by the work of Dutch photographer Rineke
Dijkstra) exhibits a preoccupation with technical virtuosity:
subjective, creative choice has been subsumed in favor of greater resolution and
bit depth, a measurable increase in the quantity of data. [. . .] In providing the
viewer with the impression and spectacle of a chaotically complex and immensely
large configuration of data, these photographs act much as renditions of moun-
tain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers.
(Stallabrass 82)
The aim of this type of photography—positioned somewhere between quasi-

ethnographic photography, fashion photography, and high art—is total exposure:
the light is uniformly distributed across the image, banishing any deep shadows that
might give the photograph a sense of depth, and every minutely rendered detail is
visible when the image is blown up to a large negative. Ironically, such technically
perfect images, despite (or rather because of) their vast amount of data, have very low
specificity in terms of making “unambiguous statements about their subjects” (88),
i.e. we are unsure of the proper affective or intellectual response to them. This effect
of the “data sublime”—its blockage of our reading practices—has also been explored
by sociologist and political economist William Davies, who has written on the seduc-
tive fantasy of being controlled by smart technology’s “sublime grid of quantifica-
tion” (Davies 7) and the intense pleasure of “relinquishing control to something one
does not understand or want to understand” (2).15
Insofar as they overwhelm our ability to grasp them and seduce us with their
promise to help us escape freedom, both data art and smart technology function in
ways similar to the Kantian sublime: the blockage to the imagination in the Kantian
natural sublime is structurally analogous to the blockage to interpretation in read-
ing spectacularly dense, high-resolution images. Of note here is, again, the implicit
opposition both Stallabrass and Davies establish between the merely “technical
value” of high-resolution images (the immensely large configuration of data) and
their emotive/expressive/human value. Both read the privileging of technical value
(the creation of technically astounding images) as leading to a simultaneous decrease
in (sacrifice of) human value: while Stallabrass describes the photographic portraits
as “blank” and “expressionless,” drawing their significance precisely from their
insignificance/inexpressiveness, Davies views the difficulty of processing the Big Data
compressed in such images as synonymous with “relinquishing our freedom,” the
freedom to interpret the images. Overwhelmed by the technical perfection of such
images we are incapable of reading them: they are too informationally dense and
thus affectively blank.
Attitudes toward the data sublime range from those who fetishize the sublimity
of Big Data to those who firmly oppose its association with the sublime. Anthony
McCosker and Rowan Wilken are exemplary of the first, pragmatic understanding
of the data sublime, which they believe offers significant extensions to our categories
of knowledge.16 Approaching data art as a version of the Kantian mathematical
sublime, they emphasize the data sublime’s knowledge-production potential, point-
ing to Deleuze’s engagement with the diagram as an example: insofar as the diagram
does not represent but rather operates both as expression and problem resolution17
it is incomplete in the dual sense of never capturing the object’s totality and its
dynamism. The data sublime is here conceived, on analogy with the d iagram, as
belonging to art (expression) and science (problem resolution) and assigned a pedes-
trian function (helping people “make sense of data”).18 Similarly, Kenneth Cukier,
The Economist’s data editor, praises “data manifestation”—a term coined by Karin
von Ompteda to distinguish data objects that convey information through physi-
cal, three-dimensional objects (e.g. Laurence Osborn’s 2013–2014 work Change
Ringing, an aural representation of global warming)19 from “data visualization”
(e.g. Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s 2001 work Black Shoals: Stock Market
Planetarium, an economic take on the cosmic data sublime)20—for allowing us “to
contemplate the sublime not from an ephemeral, spiritual place but from a very
practical, physical dimension” (Cukier qtd. in McCann 2014). New media artist Lisa
Jevbratt also takes a pragmatic stand, attributing to the data sublime a useful “mobi-
lizing effect” that allows us to read data intuitively rather than rationally.21 Others
have been reluctant to embrace this pragmatic concept of the sublime as something
that makes the world easier to comprehend by interpreting data. For Lev Manovich,
for instance, data art is concerned with “the anti-sublime,” for
if Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable,

as something which goes beyond the limits of human senses and reason, data
visualization artists target the exact opposite: to map such phenomena into a
representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and
cognition.22
What such discussions of the “data sublime” suggest is that “data” is beginning to
replace the notion of “medium.” Although various media have responded differently
to the dramatic cultural and technological changes of the last several decades—the
rise of Big Data, the growing precariousness of attention and memory, the increas-
ingly felt need to monumentalize and preserve for posterity what is perceived as easily
slipping into oblivion in the age of spectacle and technological oblivion as ironically
more and more data can be stored—the “data sublime” seems to be produced in the
same way across different media by literally increasing the amount of “data” specific
to the medium in question, i.e. by foregrounding the medium’s specificity. Literature
has responded to these changes by literally monumentalizing itself: in the monumental
novel—e.g. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2066
(2004)—the amount of “data” (words) is increased at the expense of the narrative,
which now incorporates database elements (interminable text, digressions and regres-
sions, listing, and anaphoric singulative stories). Although the monumental novel has
been compared to the nineteenth-century realist novel it is more of a parody than a
homage to it: while the realist novel accumulates insignificant or tangential details
which, however, are all still held together by an overall meaning or structure, and is
premised on the assumption that by amassing more information about an object one
can describe and understand it better, the monumental novel, free of such ambitions,
tends toward greater and greater ambiguity and obscurity as the amount of “data”
increases.
Although “hyperlink cinema” (films like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) or
Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005)) and Manovich’s “database cinema,” both of which
work through correlation rather than causality, appear to be the filmic equivalents
to the monumental novel, a more prominent cinematic response to the socio-ethical
challenges of global capitalism, as I suggested earlier, has been—as if to mock what
scholars have called “the affective turn”—the production of increasingly affectless
subjects. In a radical departure from Lyotard’s tradition linking the sublime to the
unpresentability of trauma, contemporary cinema either repackages the sublime as
slick, cynical, minimalistic, aestheticized violence (Refn’s trilogy featuring a blank,
affectless Ryan Gosling) or deprives it of any affective elements to produce a new
kind of anemic sublime (e.g. “slow cinema”). Like Julian Bell’s “dejected” or “sad”
sublime, “slow cinema” reinterprets the boundlessness and formlessness of the clas-
sical sublime in terms of stillness (as opposed to dynamic movement) and emotional
and narrative minimalism or indeterminacy.23
As we saw with Stallabrass the data sublime in photography is exemplified by
blank, expressionless images of monumental size (shot with large-format cameras,
with photographic data (pixels) multiplied and the size of their display enlarged)
and of very high resolution that exceeds our capacity to read them. The medium is
foregrounded negatively by negating two dominant assumptions about photography:
scale (a photograph is supposed to be smaller than a painting) and artful composition
(the neutrality and anonymity of the images concerns both the human subjects in the
photographs, photographed head-on and instructed not to emote, and the photo-
graphic technique itself (self-negating as opposed to “original”)).
Finally, like the photographic data sublime, which appears to revise modernist
practices like the New Objectivity of the 1920s, the data sublime in painting, exempli-
fied by Julie Mehretu’s work, also revives modernist practices such as foregrounding
the materiality of the canvas (multiple layers of paint that overload our perceptive and
interpretive skills) and the painterly “data” (paint) itself. In short, what critics now
call “the data sublime” seems to be just another name for the return of modernism
within postmodern art practice.
The two main features of the classical sublime concern size (scale) and affect
(terror). Although the sense of overload caused by the “data sublime” can certainly
produce frustration it cannot provoke terror, and while size continues to be an
essential aspect of the sublime in the age of techno-capitalism it is no longer a mate-
rial property of Nature (waterfalls, volcanoes, mountain peaks), referring instead
to “size” in the sense of “data.” This shift in the notion of size—from a property
of matter to a property of data—has important implications. To feel overwhelmed
by the size of natural phenomena like the ones filling the pages of Burke’s Enquiry
and Kant’s Critique (see my discussion of Burke and Kant in the Introduction to this
volume) is to experience the physical limits of human perception. By contrast, feel-
ing overwhelmed by data is an experience of intellectual frustration as we become
aware of our inability to “read” or “interpret” the amount of data we are presented
with. Burke’s lists of potentially sublime objects foreground the material properties
of natural phenomena: angular shapes, rugged surfaces, depth, height, darkness or
extreme light, excessive loudness, etc. Kant’s examples of the sublime also underscore
the materiality of natural and man-made objects (mountain peaks, ocean storms, the
starry vault, Egyptian pyramids, St. Peter’s Cathedral) although, ultimately, what he
considers sublime is our own supersensible vocation rather than Nature itself (for
Kant, Nature exists simply to remind us that we are not limited by our senses but are
endowed with Reason).
Data, however, cannot be described in such material terms, except perhaps meta-
phorically. “Big Data” or “the data sublime” is about the unreadability of data
whether in intellectual (e.g. data visualizations) or affective terms (e.g. Stallabrass’
reading of contemporary portrait photography as failing to produce a proper affective
response). The data sublime represents a failure of secondary intellectual acts (such as
“reading” and “interpreting”) rather than a failure of primary acts of perception (the
inability to perceive the infinitely big in the Kantian sublime). Works of data art, such
as Jevbratt’s 1:1, 1:1 (2), and Migration are a case in point. 1:1 is a graphic database
that sets out to map the address of every website in the world, representing visually
the continuing growth of the Web. The sequel, 1:1 (2), consists of a second database
of addresses generated in 2001 and 2002 and incorporates interfaces allowing the
viewer to compare the two databases, thus constituting a meta-database. Migration24
visualizes the migration of the Web across time as new websites appear and old ones
disappear. Although Jevbratt argues that her works mobilize the viewer to understand
the data intuitively this is not actually the case: without the supplementary descrip-
tions of her objectives the viewer might be able to appreciate the sheer graphic beauty
of the data but would never understand what the data are supposed to signify. In a
reversal of the Kantian formula, in which the viewer feels the limits of her imagination
only to fall back upon Reason, Jevbratt’s spectator feels the limits of her understand-
ing (her inability to read the data) only to fall back upon the aesthetic appreciation
of the graphic aspect of the data. However, a “data visualization” that is experienced
only as an image can no longer be said to “visualize” anything.
The data sublime makes us aware not of a real infinite but of a manufactured
infinite produced through technical virtuosity, e.g. the production of large-format
photographs with higher resolution and bit depth, the overlaying of different types
of material with different physical properties on a painter’s canvas, the exponential
growth of words in the monumental novel, the use of increasingly sophisticated visual
effects in end-of-the-world blockbusters to stage increasingly terrifying, apocalyptic
scenarios of destruction. The migration of the sublime from the domain of primary
processes of perception to that of secondary processes of interpretation testifies to the
continued relevance of Benjamin’s analysis of the atrophy of experience (Erfahrung)
in modernity, a problem that has only been exacerbated in the information age. We
might ask whether what we are witnessing now is a certain routinization or banaliza-
tion of the sublime similar to the routinization of conspiracy in contemporary culture
that has given rise to a new type of “structural conspiracy”: “conspiracy without con-
spiracy.” As I have argued elsewhere, using the contemporary geopolitical thriller as a
case study, while clinical paranoia used to be an irrational response, cultural paranoia
is inherent in the very structure of the new global economy.25 Once conspiracy is
no longer a secret hidden under the surface but has been transmuted into the very
principle of how modern society operates everything becomes transparent: nothing
can be revealed, because nothing is concealed. Is something similar happening to the
sublime today? Are we now faced with a “sublime without sublimity,” an abstract
sublime reduced to a mere failure of the understanding and used to designate anything
that escapes our understanding simply by virtue of being too complex (the Internet,
the megalopolis, global capitalism etc.) or incomprehensible in traditional terms of
agency, causality, and intentionality?
Conclusion
The contemporary sublime departs from the classical sublime either by trying to
translate that which is beyond the sensible into an intense sensuous experience (the
“embodied sublime” of immersive installations, video games, the fetishized sublime
detail, and data art’s mission to make data visualization not just an abstract repre-
sentation of information but an embodied, concrete experience), or by denying the
sensuous through various strategies of privation (formal minimalism, affectlessness,
technical virtuosity, appealing to secondary, intellectual skills rather than to pri-
mary, perceptual ones). We might wonder why it is necessary to qualify the sublime
as “embodied.” Hasn’t the sublime always been an embodied experience? That such
a qualification is felt to be necessary suggests, perhaps, that we feel the awe and
terror of the classical sublime are no longer available to us. If this is the case the
embodied sublime appears as a “corrective” to the impotence of the contemporary
sublime to provoke the strong affective response of the classical sublime. Many of
the examples of the contemporary sublime discussed in this chapter appear to follow
the Romantic sublime’s association with trauma and terror without the Kantian
compensatory fall back on Reason, instead either falling back on the body’s imma-
nence and finitude (as in Viola’s video work for instance26), taking morbid pleasure
in our own extinction as a species (examples range from von Trier’s Melancholia to
the History Channel’s 2009–2010 series Life After People), or exposing the fissures
in the Enlightenment concept of an autonomous subject (“the gamified sublime”).
These attempts to supply a “corrective” to the sublime by emphasizing its affective,
embodied aspect are counterbalanced by an opposite tendency to purge the sublime
of affect (e.g. the monumentalization of the banal in the “forlorn sublime”) or to
aestheticize the terror of the sublime (e.g. von Trier’s aestheticization of our own
extinction and Refn’s affectless cinema). The contemporary sublime emerges in this
constant, irregular oscillation between the intensification and the draining of affect.
Notes
1 Greg Tuck, “When More is Less: CGI, Spectacle and the Capitalist Sublime,” Science
Fiction Film and Television, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2008): 249–273.
2 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).
3 Kristen Whissel, “The Digital Multitude,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2010): 90–110.
4 Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
5 Rina Arya, “Bill Viola and the Sublime,” in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding, eds. The
Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-
publications/the-sublime/rina-arya-bill-viola-and-the-sublime-r1141441, accessed April 14,
2016.
6 Mark Pedersen, “Sound Labyrinth: Exploration of the Embodied Sublime through an
Immersive Audio/Visual Installation” (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2013).
7 For other examples of immersive installations and the challenges they pose to the classical
definition of the sublime, see the work of the Japanese art collective teamLab, especially
their installation Living Digital Space. http://exhibition.team-lab.net/siliconvalley/ accessed
April 14, 2016.
8 Eugénie Shinkle, “Video Games and the Technological Sublime,” in Nigel Llewellyn and
Christine Riding, eds. The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, 2013, https://
www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/rina-arya-bill-viola-and-the-sub
lime-r1141441, accessed April 14, 2016.
9 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London:
Routledge, 2006).
10 Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
11 Julian Bell, “Contemporary Art and the Sublime,” in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding,
eds. The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/
research-publications/the-sublime/rina-arya-bill-viola-and-the-sublime-r1141441, accessed
April 14, 2016.
12 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/rachel-whiteread-shedding-life
accessed April 14, 2016.
13 According to Alan Liu, the most insightful research on the sublime in the late twentieth cen-
tury is psychoanalytically inclined work on the sublime in terms of blockage, e.g. Thomas
Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Neil Hertz’s The End of
the Line (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1985).
14 Julian Stallabrass, “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art
Photography.,” October, Vol. 122 (Fall 2007): 71–90.
15 William Davies, “The Data Sublime,” The New Inquiry, Jan. 12, 2015.
16 Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken, “Rethinking ‘Big Data’ as Visual Knowledge:
The Sublime and the Diagrammatic in Data Visualization,” Visual Studies. Special Issue:
Visualizing Ethnography: Ethnography’s Role in Art and Visual Cultures, Vol. 29, No. 2
(2014): 155–164.
17 Falk Heinrich, “(Big) Data, Diagram Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty,” MedieKultur,
Vol. 59 (2016): 73–94.
18 Charlie McCann, “Sublime by Numbers: How the Art World Is Reacting to Big Data,”
Prospect, July 28, 2014, accessed May 31, 2016.
19 See http://www.change-ringing.co.uk/actual-about accessed March 14, 2017.
20 See http://www.blackshoals.net/the-project-1/ accessed March 14, 2017.
21 Lisa Jevbratt, “The Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations,” Ylem. Special Issue:
Artists Using Science & Technology, Vol. 8, No. 24 (July/August 2004): 4–8, http://www.
ylem.org/Journal/2004Iss08vol24.pdf, accessed July 3, 2016.
22 Lev Manovich, “Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-sublime” (2002), http://users.
fba.up.pt/~ldcag01015/anti_sublime/beauty.html. accessed April 14, 2016. See also Lev
Manovich, “Data as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime” (2008), http://manovich.net/
index.php/projects/data-visualisation-as-new-abstraction-and-anti-sublime accessed April
14, 2016. Ironically, while the sublime is distinguished from spectacle by virtue of its indif-
ference to being seen, Manovich calls data art anti-sublime precisely because it is arbitrary,
not fully shaped by a clear intention.
23 Ira Jaffe, Slow Cinema: Countering the Cinema of Action (London and New York:
Wallflower Press, 2014).
24 http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/3/migration/ accessed April 14, 2016.
25 Temenuga Trifonova, “Agency in the Cinematic Conspiracy Thriller,” SubStance, Vol. 41,
No. 3 (2012): 109–126.
26 In Viola’s video work, which explores two limit experiences (birth and death), the sublime
is invoked through an awareness of “the immanence of the flesh and the transience of life”
(Arya 7). Viola’s vulnerable, fragile sublime, contra Kant’s, is about the impossibility of
transcendence understood not as pleasurable identification with ourselves as rational beings
but as an acceptance of our mortality. For Kant the human condition is defined by the fact
that we are endowed with a supersensible power; for Viola, however, the human condition
is “primarily about coming to terms with the fact that we are embodied and encounter suf-
fering, pain, alienation and death” (9).
Glitter: The Inscrutable Sublime
5 “Black and Glittering”

The Inscrutable Sublime
Barbara Maria Stafford
Catherine: “It’s when everything goes black and glittering. It’s not like when you’re
down in the dumps, which is brown. [. . .] It’s like that car, she said, nodding at a black
Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished looking old man.
The yellow of the early streetlights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflec-
tions streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides and windows.
Nick: “It sounds almost beautiful . . .”
Catherine: “Well, it’s poisonous, you see. It’s glittering but it’s deadly at the same time.
It doesn’t want you to survive it . . . It’s the whole world just as it is,” she said, stretch-
ing out to frame it or hold it off: “everything exactly the same. And it’s totally negative.
You can’t survive it. It’s like being on Mars or something.”1
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 2004
After Dark: Nocturne for Romanticism

I hear nothing but echo, echo of my own speech—am I then alone?2
Despite the bright market rhetoric of transparency, today’s “global network civili-
zation”3 is smudged with fake traffic and tarnished by computer-generated scams.
Pictures are composites, colors are doctored, and online images are aggressively
altered or manipulated. The spread of undocumentable Instagrams and other shape-
shifting platforms has blurred the line between advertising, art, and photojournalism.
Like the opaque Cloud on which the ethereal Web depends, large digital sectors are
not only impenetrable but mute when it comes to revealing what is actually being
sacrificed for “deeper” data, more targeting commodities, and questionable or porous
social media. No hyperlinked supply chains joining invisible users with innumerable
glossy commodities or deceptive personal “stuff” can make up for the loss of credible
connections in our supposedly leveling, yet unfathomable, Age of Connectivity.4
Today, two oppositional spatial concepts—premised on the thrill of surprise and
the perverse protraction of terror—are a distantly familiar legacy from the Romantic
longitudinal Sublime. Less familiar, yet undergirding the entire concept, is the horizontal
notion of glassy inscrutability.5 If Sublimity’s indeterminate dimensionality, its bold soar-
ing into nebulous heights or plummeting into murky depths has leveled in the twenty-
first century into amorphous uncertainty, not so its unaccountable incomprehensibility
and impenetrable vacancy that continue to make us feel out of our depth. Consider IT’s
panoramic dazzle, the superficial sparkle of augmenting special effects, and the resulting
engulfing ambiguity in which decipherable meaning drowns.
Glitter: The Inscrutable Sublime 89
While the late eighteenth-century Sublime showed that shadows are fundamental
to revealing the limits of human understanding, our contemporary epistemological
darkness is fashionably lustrous, smoothed into inscrutable shine. The inflationary
Internet of Things offers an aggressive mimicry of the world alright but as hypnotic
product—coated with the duplicitous gloss of advertising. The global marketing
industry’s shift to smudging the line between ads and media (e.g. in a wide range of
branded content embedded in reality shows, online films, video games) ensures that
we are seeing equivocally, receiving what their algorithms want us to see: directed-
content mirroring these media companies’ point of view and reflecting the general
look and feel of their media properties.6
Belgian artist Joseph Nechvatal’s 2014 series of palimpsestic paintings and ani-
mations, 1% Owns 50% of the World, explore the ruthless compression driving
this surreal takeover. In the animated version, dissonance and glare accompany the
swift erasure of a quick succession of teeming aerial maps. As the tempo speeds up,
the gray-scale encoded terrain eerily dwindles beneath the repetitive, obliterating
stamp of a single percentage point. This startlingly reduced number also functions
associationally, recalling a bargain label or cut-rate price tag—contemporary icons of
devaluation that define a dire situation while concealing it. As a flickering figure, it’s
ominously suggestive of financial volatility, corporate shrinking, store mark-downs,
and slumping sales.
It seems that vaporous darkness has undergone extreme volatilitization. No longer
fumy or miasmatic, the old misty Sublime has sublimed into a new slippery reality—at
once brilliant and sinister, paradoxically hyper-sharp yet lacking clarity. The opening
epigraph to this essay captures the psychological breakdown such a transformation
induces. Although arising from the economic, social, drug, and sexual upheavals of
the 1980s, this sleek, acidic vision remains relevant to the obsidian opacities, the
lack of firm structural supports characterizing our century. In Alan Hollinghurst’s
Hogarthian novel the young, wealthy, and self-mutilating Catherine struggles to
explain to Nick, a gay friend, her unaccountable condition of making nothing of
what is seen, of not seeing for looking, of being unable to get through, or behind, or
under, or above things. All is insubstantial veneer, slick polish eternally returning the
viewer to the image of herself. Similarly, the solipsistic field of view established by
Argentinian artist Sebastian Diaz Morales in his film The Lost Object does not end
in a single thing (in this case, the radiant projection screen) but embraces the inky
expanse of the environment. Here, too, the world is concealed behind its refulgent
presentation. His glinting Cube acts like an oracular mirror—scintillant and flaring—
but icily empty.
In Catherine’s near-pathological state of incomprehension, robust substance turns
menacingly decorative or is inexplicably transformed into illegible ornament. This
hard, cold, glamorous blackness surfacing in Margaret Thatcher’s unraveling England
is unlike Burke’s fusive Sublime inhabiting a melodramatic ecology of matter. Instead
of rushing dizzyingly downward into a gloomy abyss or rising infinitely upward into
the cloudy heavens, it disembodiedly skids over familiar objects and reflexively slips
across all things. Without any blunting atmosphere or three-dimensionality to lend per-
spective, this merciless metallic glare gallops horizontally, robbing identity of its hidden
reality and flattening everything in its wake into vacancy or mirage.
Hollinghurst’s evocation of what might be termed modern mechano-cognitive
phantasmagoria resembles certain illusionistic themes and Gnostic motifs born out of
90 Barbara Maria Stafford
Figure 5.1 Joseph Nechvatal, 1% Owns 50% of the World (2014), 36" × 72" diptych acrylic
on velour painting, courtesy Galerie Richard, New York
a negative or “Tantric” Romanticism, that is, out of an abject or inverted Sublimity

so extreme as to be inscrutable. I am reminded, in particular, of the escalating anguish
abounding in the strange confessions of the pseudonymous author, Bonaventura. His
brooding, fragmentary NightWatches, published in 1804—coincidentally the year of
Kant’s death—register the post-Kantian break with bright Enlightenment optimism
by evoking a quagmire of baffling subjectivism and restless irrationality.
Ironically, in the midst of his disillusioned vigils, the narrator of this compulsive
vagrancy yearns for what he has annihilated: the clear and lucid light of day.
“What is the sun?” I [the Cloaked Stranger] asked my mother one day as she was
describing the sunrise from a mountain. “Poor boy, you will never understand,
you were born blind!” [. . .] But the willful seeker’s fantasy continued to belabor
the question: “my longing mind strove violently to break through the body and
look into the light.”7
All in vain since his obsession remained in thrall to the continuous nightmare. The
reader careens through the twisted streets, lurching along with the crazed voyeur—the
puppeteer-poet-night watchman, Kreuzgang—as he moves through sixteen stormy
episodes. Confined to this prison house of corruption, he and we stop to peer through
a dirty window or through a cracked door where he secretly observes framed irradiant
scenes—as if projected on a soiled magic lantern screen—macabre murders, frenzied
madness, grotesque Blue Beard or Don Juan-sex, each leading to violence and suffer-
ing. All the while, the affronted ghosts of Burke and Kant surreptitiously peep out
between the author’s chaotic lines, the former in Bonaventura’s egotistical glorifica-
tion of the murky unconscious, the latter in his violent disdain for moral imperatives.
The two epochs evoked by Bonaventura and Hollinghurst share fundamental
negative attributes—the loneliness of narcissism, the erosion of insanity, the dis-
gust at ostentation and wealth, the rage at fraud constantly concealed. Yet for the
Romantics, this Manichean foray into the Absurd was still a Sublime invention of a
tormenting Devil or of a recondite God who inexplicably allows the vileness of life.
Contemporary pretense and false appearances, by contrast (Hollinghurst, after all,
Figure 5.2 Sebastian Diaz Morales, The Lost Object, video, 13'28", 2016
is writing in the twenty-first century), are seen as self-generatingly automated, cooly

heartless, fashionably Goth—think of the vampirish aura of the Daimler. Note how
its simultaneously alluring and repellent light-reflecting skin acts as an addictive, if
devastating, symbol of soulless brand awareness. In her bleak reverie, Catherine’s
limbic brain, like ours, is being grooved by unconsciously targeted desires awakened
in a retail twilight.
A Surface Sublimity?
I need the world to have a surface, the same surface everyone sees. I don’t like feeling
like I’m always about to fall through to something else.8
Sublimity—what a concept, especially in an age like ours—secular, disenchanted,

anxiety- ridden, nomadic— simultaneously chilled or overheated, dehumanized or
massively infrastructured. What, then, might serve as an antidote to this Romantic
legacy of the singular self, the branded genius who, inspired, creates inscrutably, eso-
terically for the few in the know? How to signal unequivocally, openly, why and how
things get made? Could the knowing demystification of arcane processes, the putting
aside of private “signature” styles, the rejection of blinding “selfie”-solipsism make
obscured workmanship discernable again?
Photographer Trevor Paglen’s bravura photographs—part of an exhibition, The
Octopus, at London’s Photographers’ Gallery—document the extent and ubiquity
of government intelligence and military surveillance. These voguish abstractions,
composed of Hogarthian wayward lines, lead the eye on a grim chase. Thin streams
of lucent color streak across a glittering black sky with the paradoxical result that
clandestine activity is flaunted in a blaze of spectacle. His work makes us under-
stand just how thoroughly we inhabit a new world of intrigue and deception: “the
allegorical octopus consuming the world.”9 Indeed, such flamboyant images—both
gorgeous and deadly—are the lucid ciphers of an otherwise inscrutable obfuscation.
In the process of making global spying explicit, Paglan discloses the twenty-first
century’s chic armamentarium of concealment: the silvery network of fiber-optics
lines converging beneath sprawling landscapes, shiny bits of electronic information
coursing through submerged ocean cables, motion-dazzle drones fetchingly cloaked
in metallic sheen.
In William Gibson’s prescient Zero History, the author breaks ranks with science
fiction to write about a contemporary material alchemy, hidden from common view,
whose ethical rigors demand a renewal of craft discipline. In the novel, characters
tend to be featureless, paper dolls so deliberately flat as to be almost bodiless.
Descriptive richness, by contrast, is lavished on their minutely analyzed clothes.
Or, more accurately, it’s expended on dismissing trending fashions to track down
gnomic ideograms stitched or woven into garments for which there seems to be no
vocabulary. More generally, it’s about following the evasive route taken by a few
sphinx-like samples cocooned within unadvertised simple, but superb, apparel lines
specializing in what is “almost impossible to find.” As someone admittedly good at
“figuring out what the real products are,” M eredith—one of the book’s discerning
protagonists—opts out of the fashion empire’s “industrialization of novelty” to both
make and search for a “deeper code.”
[At first] I just wanted to explore processes, learn, be left alone. [. . .] Weird inver-
sions of customary logic. That Japanese idea of secret brands. [In the end] I’d have
a brand, I decided, but it would be a secret. The branding would be that it was a
secret. No advertising. None. No press. No shows . . .10
This noble secrecy obliges the devotees of c oveted—even archetypal—garments to

be vigilantly perspicuous in an inattentive, distracted world that cannot tell the differ-
ence between the fakery of imitative “distressing” and the genuine article or natural
“patination.”11 Such moral seekers are counter-revolutionaries not enslaved to the
dictates of fashion but acutely aware of how the kind and quality of fiber, the yarn,
the construction, or weave affect values—all values.12
Gibson’s unflattering take on the dysfunctional aspects of this huge, label-driven,
theme-park industry is contrasted with a rebus-realm of occult creators engaged
in reinventing exclusivity. To my mind, this esoteric plain-style cultural phenom-
enon that worships reticent anti-system design—authentic plushness not poshness
(i.e. unwilling to make mountains of the right stuff but not special stuff)—epitomizes
what might be called the Surface Sublime. It is after the soul of clothes. Not only is
this edgeland wondrous and arduous—requiring Grail-like treks across continents in
search of atelier arcana. But it’s also quasi-mythical, pure, austere. Parsifal-clients are
under the spell of legendary patterns, matte organics that absorb glare, fabled smoky
colors, and richly textured synthetics that sink into muted substance: all made pos-
sible by unobtrusive marvelous tailoring. Like watching flitting shadows, discovering
secret “labels” is both subtle and noticeable—but only to cognoscenti.
My guess is that unlike sensational, meretricious clothing (firestormed with sequins
or studded with sharp hardware) that flash their brands but are dead as if painted
on, the seduction of these veiled, unilluminated pieces lies in their inscrutability, their
resistance to being completely probed. The handful of knowing seekers resemble
citizens of an undiscovered country where such cameo-creations are deemed sublime,
even intensely aspirational. Their overwhelming desirability is at least partly due to
the fact that they thrive without the brandished advertising that makes everyone else
desperately want them.
Perhaps this is what Dutch avant-garde designer Iris van Herpen means when she
speaks of fashion’s most recent marvels, those radical high-tech hybrids or inter-
medial constructions stocking a fantasy landscape. Imagine, for example, a metal
and black-lacquer prosthetic Ahab-spike, algae-green sand-castle platform sandals
that mimic cellular growth, a snap-together garment made from the wearer’s body
scans.
Herpen’s translucent “Water-Splash” dress—a frozen swoop or spray engineered
from a flourish of sheet plastic—impersonally crystallizes the larger literal and meta-
phorical notion of being clothed in liquid. In a utopian vein she questions whether
we will “keep on wearing fabrics in the future, or if dressing will become something
non-material, something that is visible, not tangible or touchable?”13 Gibson could
only glimpse this exciting explosion of customized fabrics with fascinating applica-
tions from environmental sensing, to body armor, to digital camouflage that hint at
the intriguing dynamics between conspicuously structured outfits and a choreography
of emergent concealed devices.
Yet laser-sliced silicone, glinting chain link mail, machine-generated plastic strips,
and special dyes depending on light or heat embedded in textiles and leathers have
important precursors in the work of contemporary sculptors. Sarah Krepp’s powerful
ensembles, for one, composed of slashed, abraded tire treads—harvested from the
wreck-littered graveyard of Chicago’s Department of Motor Vehicles—have a raw
visceral appeal. Her explosive work evokes a violent galaxy redolent of cataclysmic
collisions, shapes plowed together, saber-like jets of gas, smeared and obliterated
color. The visual impact of destruction and resurrection, of tattered and tangled
materials is so powerful that she makes us see familiar flora and fauna in a new and
forbidding light. Consider her mortuary feathers, Baudelairean flayed flowers of evil,
abstract shooting-star assemblages, and rubbery quilled shrouds cascading into space.
Provocatively textured and arrestingly pitch-black these slivered high-relief draperies
forecast a techno-craft fashion that is literally cutting-edge.14
Just as Herpen asserts that innovative design wizardry constitutes an innovative art
form not conventional dresses, Gibson’s story is not just about commercial espionage
and the garment–establishment cabala. To my mind, if anything, his description of
the almost-spiritual pursuit of textile singularities by would-be customers resembles
the obsessive Early Modern chase after unique animal, plant, and mineral curiosities.
In the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, Wunderkammer collections of bizarrely
carved narwhale tusks, exotic animal and plant species, anthropomorphic shells,
talismanic sigils and gem-amulets embodied a searching sensibility, a cryptic perfor-
mance art. Like today’s “somatechnics”—folded, pleated, reactive apparel amalga-
mated from fiber glass, precious metals, and robotics—Wonder Cabinet objects were
experiments in understanding a universe bursting with strange biomorphic mutations,
zoomorphic transformations, and lithic metamorphoses. The visionary hunt after
Figure 5.3 Sarah Krepp, BLOW-OUT: II (#115), approx. 60” x 96”, tire, wire, clamps, oil
paint on wall, 2016
authentic oddities testifies to the spell cast by absolute originals in a world rife with
copies, duplicates, and reproductions—even then.15
In Gibson’s tale, touch or “hand”—as a variable two-way pressure or constant
tactile interchange between sensation and the raw data of p erception—seems as much
his topic as is visualization. He’s after that inscrutable something lurking elusively in
the weave, hovering mysteriously in the threads of a dead-stock swatch or a shrinking
roll of fabric.
It’s significant, then, that perhaps the core discovery of the past decade’s research
into the cognitive phenomenon of touch is “that being skin-smart is as smart as
any other kind of smart.”16 Fabrics from fluttering to sleek externalize what neu-
roscientists are calling “labeled lines,” i.e. startlingly specific neural touch systems
that are not in the least generalized. It’s the “skin” of clothing, the body’s auratic
envelope not bare nakedness, that seems to possess an inner life, automatically and
unconsciously copying our familiar poses, gestures, and actions. Thus the haptic
intelligence of dexterous designers, old and new— working with opulent fabrics
or engineered polymaterials that reciprocate the handling of them—has palpably
infused the Sublime lineage of manual and technical expertise.
Artful Engineering: Toward a Brandless Art

The Freiburg political scientist Wilhelm Hennis once ascribed to [Max] Weber’s work
the central idea of “training the power of judgment . . . for a focus on the power of
judgment springs from an understanding of science . . . namely philosophy as practical
science . . .”17
We are losing a vital cognitive asset, namely, the power of deliberation. In the rush
to get information at hyperbolic speed, we have already lost visible judiciousness,
that core Kantian relational process involving the exhibition of scrutable judgment in
human thought and interaction as well as in a piece of work. Although he doesn’t say
it, Gibson’s aversion to the global panopticon of branding, I think, is his realization
that clever marketers use it to stage-manage our decisions without our realizing it.
One of the negative legacies of the Romantic Sublime in the twenty-first century is
uncontrollable, impulsive action taken without self-awareness by the user. Yet what
else is consciousness exteriorized but the mindful demonstration of attentive practice
embodied in a just, that is, a judicious image? With growing assaults on deliberative
selective attention by such rampant cultural realities as invasive manipulation and
pervasive surveillance, we continue to drown in free-floating ambiguities and chronic
sensations of groundlessness.
This brings me to a contemporary art form that defies both the glassy cacophony
of a repetitive hall of mirrors (Hollinghurst) as well as the Delphic riddle of sectarian
marketing (Gibson). Like gravitational waves generated from black holes or neutron
stars smacking into each other, it’s the crash that’s revealing. Analogous to such
extreme cosmic events, emergent art is also phenomenally energetic. It, too, forms a
new reality. We infer the existence of such scientific and artistic singularities by their
effect on the surrounding universe. In the case of the latter the impact is detected, not
in a bend of light but in the uncommon, expertise-requiring, intellectual/workmanly
slant—not just an automated or impulsive posture—toward the object of inquiry.
Neither blankly “posthistorical” nor uninformatively “New Media,” the room-
sized Aura Calculata is a towering eighteen-glass-pipe water organ constructed by
the German artist-engineer Tim Otto Roth. For those unable to see the Museum
exhibition at Offenburg, a video documentary provides an impressive introduction
to the special features of this monumental audio- visual instrument with its self-
organizing colors and tones. Historians of science will also find it redolent of Baroque
polymathy—evoking those two magi of Early Modern STEAM technology: Ramon
Llull and Athanasius Kircher and their complex combinatorial machines.
Roth points out the distinctive signs of production and attaches the shifting
multisensory effects to specific mechanical and digital processes. His intermedial
Figure 5.4 Tim Otto Roth, Aura Calculata @ XX oder der Mummelsee in der Pfanne,
Städtische Galerie Offenburg 2016, dimensions: 3418 x 2448
art- engineering experiments thus make sound, light, physics, and invisible forces
audible visible, scrutable. There are two versions of the Aura Calculata having
in common that, at the start, the sound pixels play the same tone. The individual
pitches change over time in accordance with “the Pixelsex principle.” As Roth
explains, in the speaker version
all the active sound pixels play a tone at the standard pitch A4 at 440 Hz and light
up green. Step by step the pitches drift up and down, weaving a sound carpet of
beats changing its character depending on the listener’s position. The color spec-
trum of the light is connected to the played pitch. When tending to higher tones
the soundpixel changes its color towards blue. When tending to deeper tones, the
color of the loudspeaker changes to yellow and red. If a sound pixel reaches a
pitch threshold the whole system is reset.18
In the organ version, the water level and, consequently, the starting frequency of all
pipes is determined by timed intervals that open the inflow valves,
so the water levels of the pipes are in balance with the central reservoir column.
During its operation [of the organ] water flows in and out in accordance with the
local activity of the sound pixels. Changing the water level not only changes the
pitch of the sound, but also its timbre.
Depending on how the sounds recompose in space, beats are created that, taken
together, weave an oscillating sound c arpet—the organ’s audible and visible expan-
sion as an instrument by a microtonal dimension.
The Aura Calculata thus defies a hermetic Romanticism as well as a dusky Sublime
by clearly reengineering the system of the Western tone scale before our eyes and
ears. Pitches are changed not logarithmically, but metrically, varying the wavelength
of the generated sine tones in millimeter steps. The audible differences thus become
perceptibly smaller when playing deep tones but become significantly larger at higher
pitches. Again the pitch differences of the water pipes depend on the opening times of
the inflow and outflow valves as well the changing pressure of the water column in the
individual pipe and the water reservoir.
In a recent conversation with Peter Weibel, Director of the ZKM in Karlsruhe,
Roth dismissed the persistence in the art world of both the ironic Modernist tradition
as well as an imitative “signature” Romanticism—when the original’s authority had
long been completed and closed. He claims that this currently “ruinous system”—
ruled by the art market, the gallery system, and by ego-branded or theatrical gestures
that count more than conceptually inflected artful m aterials—was introduced by
Duchamp to the twentieth century.19 He could have added, as we’ve seen, that its
link to mystification extends back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
Sublime and its obsession with irrationality, inscrutability, literal and metaphorical
obscurity.
Weibel argues that—as was true episodically throughout the history of art—Roth’s
real point is that innovative artists are now taking new a udiences beyond those
limiting perspectives by once again becoming serious scientists. Just recall the cross-
field parity formerly achieved by Leonardo, Vermeer, Stubbs, Seurat, the Russian
Constructivists, the Art and Mathematics Group, to name just a few. What he and
other like-minded intermedial artists are urging is an intensive continuous engage-
ment with the technical know-how needed to perform difficult experimental work (in
Roth’s case the advanced physics of light and sound: “to make from all this images,
objects, sound installations”) but extending to synthetic biology, cognitive and neu-
roscience, theoretical physics and network theory.
Roth is not unique. Take the case of Ágnes Mócsy, a theoretical physicist on the
faculty in Pratt Institute’s Math and Science Program, who uses film, art, design,
and, yes, fashion to take her audience back to the earliest moments of our universe
in “little bangs.” She asks, what can pulverizing gold nuclei teach us about the birth
of our universe through strong nuclear interactions? At the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN, Geneva, heavy atomic nuclei, like gold, can be smashed together
with such extreme violence that they melt into a precious cosmic soup that has not
existed since the universe was a microsecond old. These shimmering specks are the
hottest things ever made by humans, the most perfect liquids known in nature, and
when they cool they create the heaviest antimatter nuclei ever observed. How, she
asks in her documentary film Smashing Matters, might epic scientific endeavors like
these provide her students, her collaborators, and her colleagues in the fine arts, film,
design, and fashion fields with “a muse for their creations,” and vice versa?20
In the face of ongoing digitalization, cleverly orchestrated platforms, and digi-
tal ecosystems: “the product changes into a process, something that can easily be
observed in case of the most important software offers in the world, which are
increasingly marketed as subscription-based services.” In light of marketing’s desire
21
to treat all processes (not just objects) as saleable product, what’s important from my
perspective is that both Roth’s and Mócsy’s ambitious, deeply informed, and wide-
ranging work (from acoustics to astrophysics to cosmology) belongs to a growing, as
yet brandless, class of artists/designers/engineers engaged in shaping brandless genres.
That is, the works are allowed to solidify into new authority without being obliterated
or deadened by labels.
To invoke the eponymous label “New Media” is an exercise in vacuity. A host of
polymathic makers, proficient in the latest scientific and technological developments,
are formulating a contemporary aesthetics that is neither “postmodern” nor “retro.”
Profoundly performative and participatory in aim, this still-emergent aesthetics also
calls for the creation of proactive audiences. For one, note the recent performative
project, Realistic Monk, by American composer Carl Stone and sound artist and
composer Miki Yui. The duo focuses on sounds that are so fragile that they move
at the edge of perception and encourage the listeners to attend very carefully. Such
demanding somatosensory and cross-field work needs open-minded as well as knowl-
edgeable participants who bring more than their nostalgia and uninformed impulses
to an exhibition.
So what sort of work might Roth and Weibel have in mind when summoning
artists to escape a secondhand “Romanticism”? Perhaps the kind produced by the
Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, in his video installation, World Light, which
treats Romanticism as if it were a downloadable brand. This weirdly self-reflexive
piece was itself based on the strange four-volume novel of the same name by Halldór
Laxness, Iceland’s only Nobel Prize laureate.
It’s a book about a p oet—not a great poet, but a poor person who longs to be an
artist, longs for beauty. The book is so hilarious, and so sad, and so beautiful. My
father cannot quote from it without crying.
While Kjartansson’s claims to mock the “romantic spirit” (undefined), he offers what
amounts to caricatural retakes, bowdlerized reiterations of the gravely somber land-
scape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. In the version of World Light mounted in
Paris last fall at the Palais de Tokyo, a 24-hour montage of all the collected footage
was projected on four large screens in an empty room. Tellingly, cushions were strewn
over the floor so, as Kjartansson proposed, viewers could lie down and “let it wash
over you.”22
In fact, the art and science of projection has a long and distinguished history
in the enactment of dimensional translation. It’s much more than a tidal wave of
entertainment rolling over a passive audience.23 Projection is the archetypal—the
primordial—medium meant to be seen in the dark. From shadow-casting on cavern
walls, to grisaille video screens, to hovering holography, projection is one of the cen-
tral activities in moving image practices. Since, at the same time, it is a precise geomet-
rical operation and the haunted and haunting underpinning of ghostly artifice, it also
leads a highly ambiguous existence.24 Siegfried Zielinski once dubbed projection “a
media strategy located between proof of truth and illusioning.” Sean Cubitt, in turn,
has underscored how it produces a mobile condition of simultaneous “vanishing and
becoming.” Essentially active, not passive, it articulates the movement from dim space
to bright surface and vice versa, thus bringing forth the performativity of media.25
Coda: Black Hole at High Noon

In the 1960’s, astrophysicist John Wheeler coined the term ‘black hole’ to describe a
gravitationally collapsed star that is so dense, light would be unable to escape.26
“In the Waters, life was a thin, primitive, fragile sheet. [. . .] Photosynthetic organ-
isms crowded to the top, striving for light, while their buried peers split the weaker
sulfide bonds to survive . . . [Then, during the Cambrian explosion] The denizens of
the seas grew to an inch, then a foot, then a meter, in the form of terrifying fishes that
established suzerainties in the depths.”27
Is there, then, something in between the universe seen as dankly Burkean—surely a

distant allusion to the universal Flood recounted in countless origin myths as well as
to the hellish chasm funneling down below ground whose shadowy monsters are still
embedded in our collective m emory—and the absolute black of outer space? This
pristine monochrome or hole punched in the upper air rises mysteriously stretching
steeply to infinity above the domesticated sunshot-band of blue. The Void, however,
is not total nothingness since it contains our twenty-first-century fields (Faraday and
Maxwell’s electro-magnetic fields inherited from the nineteenth century as well as
featureless space-filling mists like the Higgs field).28 Since these spontaneous emana-
tions have a floating life of their own, they are more awe-inspiring than even Kant’s
vision of vast interstellar regions: the Sublime night sky tapestried with glimmering
stars.29 This disorienting omnipresent black, staining the vacuum of space, is the
inscrutable antithesis not only of thick blurry atmosphere and scattered particu-
late sunlight, but of the glassy computer-generated world: thin, abstractly perfect,
everywhere branded, both slickly polished and jarringly interrupted with flares of
photoluminescence.
In the beginning, when the strong sun gilded the deep waters and flickered on
the primordial ocean’s waves, thickness began to thin. It’s been a long road from
brightness to brilliance. Astrobiological research is finding that, in addition to seep-
ing ground water and sagging frost, an eruptive Cryovolcanism shaped the fissured,
slimy, muddy, biomolecular-teeming surfaces of our galaxy. Recall the discovery in
2015 of a vast sea beneath our moon’s icy shell and, earlier, the dull traces detected by
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of plumed geysers and their remains—the “tiger” stripes
slotting the southern pole of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. This ancient foamy, boggy,
mossy, sink-holed matter is dissolving, disappearing, flowing into an augmentable
virtual reality hovering incandescently within the engineered artifact or flush with
the glittering screen. The dark energy of cyberspace has released reams of venting
private information—rage, voyeurism, self-advertising, surveillance, dissipation, and
retail lust—into our world.30 If galactic “black holes” are created when massive
“dark stars” explode and collapse producing a firestorm of X-ray emissions, then its
metaphorical equivalent is the telltale ejection of terrifying material from the burn-
ing core of an indiscriminate Internet. We live in an eerie reality whose engine is the
online environment where secrecy and code have taken on their own energetic forms
of danger, power, and beauty.
Notes
1 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
2004), 15.
2 The NightWatches of Bonaventura, trans. Gerald Gillespie (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1971; 2014), 94.
3 For a sunny view of ubiquitous connectivity, see Parag Khanna, Connectography (New
York: Random House, 2016).
4 See my forthcoming essay “From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable ‘Stuff.’
Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability,” in Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E.
Kalmanson eds. Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Springer
International Publishing AG, Cham, forthcoming 2017).
5 For inscrutability, see “Unintelligibility,” in Roget’s International Thesaurus, rev. by Robert
L. Chapman. 4th edn (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984), esp. 549.1, 8, 10, 11,
13.
6 Suzanne Vrancia, “The Ad Revolution,” The Wall Street Journal (June 22, 2016), R1–R8.
7 Bonaventura 83.
8 William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Berkley Books, 2010), 84.
9 Cited in Alexandra Wolfe, “Prizewinner Plumbs Surveillance,” The Wall Street Journal
(June 11–12, 2016), C12.
10 Gibson 155; 441–442.
11 Ibid. 97; 268. Gibson’s aversion to conspicuous design was, indeed, prescient. See the new
wave of anti-design magazines featured in eyeondesign.aiga.org. See Ruth Jamieson, “The
New Wave of Anti-Design Magazines Will Question Your Sense of T aste—And That’s a
Good Thing” (May 11, 2016). While Gibson favored a timeless minimalist aesthetic, these
exiles from the fashion industry favor the ugly, the untidy, and the cheap.
12 For the marvelous vocabulary describing different textile surfaces, see Elizabeth Dyer,
Textile Fabrics (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1923), esp. 60–77 on how the vari-
ous “finishes” of cloth affect values.
13 See the recent exhibitions: #techstyle (Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2016);
and Andrew Bolton, Manus x Machina. Fashion in an Age of Technology (New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, 2016).
14 For illustrations of plugged-in fashion, see Eric Wilson, “Future Shock,” InStyle (June
2016), 39–41.
15 See my Introductory essay “Revealing Technologies/ Magical Domains,” in Barbara Maria
Stafford and Frances Terpak, eds. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images
on a Screen, Exhibition Catalogue (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2001–2002), 1–142.
16 Adam Gopnik, “Feel Me,” The New Yorker (May 16, 2016): 64–65.
17 This has already become a legal issue. See Hannah Bethke, “Evidence of the Power of
Judgment. An Encounter with Gertrude Luebbe-Wolff,” Koepfe und Ideen No. 11 (2016),
www.wiko-berlin.
18 See Roth’s description of his work at www.pixelsex.org/aura. Voicing the pipes for Aura
Calculata the organ builders Jäger & Brommer made a remarkable discovery. It is common
sense that an organ pipe has a single optimal sound (with a clear fundamental tone) due
to the pipe scaling (mensur). But to the surprise of the organ builders the pipes for “aura”
could be voiced in such a way that, depending on the water level, they can play two optimal
sounds.
19 “Der Grossen Genentwurf,” Badische Zeitung, “Lokales” (April 6, 2016). All translations
from the German are mine.
20 http://www.agnesmocsy.com/
21 Sascha Lobo, “Digital is Sometimes Radical—Risks and Opportunities for Marketing!”
Lecture (Karlsruhe, ZKM Media Theater, June 2, 2016).
22 “Play it Again. How Ragnar Kjartansson Turns Repetition into Art,” The New Yorker
(April 11, 2016), “Profiles.”
23 See my Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education
(Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1994), 42–45 and throughout.
24 See Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder. From the World in a
Box to Images on A Screen, Exhibition Catalogue (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2001–2002).
25 Projection/Geometry/ Performance: A Besides the Screen International Conference and
Exhibition (Coventry University, July, 20–22, 2016). See New-Media-Curating [April 29-
30, 2016], # 2016-44.
26 Terence Dickinson, Hubble’s Universe: Greatest Discoveries and Latest Images (New York:
Firefly Books, Ltd., 2014), 41–42.
27 C. E. Morgan (using the nom de plume K. Aubere) in her novel, The Sport of Kings, citing
a fictitious Darwinian essay on “Limitless Variation and the Ascent of Life.” See the book
review by Kathryn Schultz, “Track Changes,” New Yorker (May 9, 2016), 70.
28 Frank Wilczek, “A Vision of the Void,” The Wall Street Journal (August 27–28, 2016), C4.
29 Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random
House, 1994), 155–160.
30 See the disturbing exhibition of post-2000 photos and videos Public, Private, Secret curated
by Charlotte Cotton (New York: ICP Museum, through January 8, 2017).
6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Seth Perlow wrote a brief but extremely useful online definition of the sublime in
2004, in which he begins by saying that it is a concept central to aesthetics, and ends
by saying that “Though recent political critiques of aesthetics by Terry Eagleton
(1990), Alain Badiou (1998), Jacques Rancière (2004), and others have threatened the
future of aesthetics as such, the theory of sublimity has contributed to and illuminated
many other theoretical fields, so its legacy will undoubtedly live on, under whatever
name. Such a dehiscent fate,” Perlow concludes, “seems wholly appropriate for a
concept that over the course of its long life has never permitted consensus about its
meaning or implications.”1
Twelve years later we see that he was right. In contemporary art discourse “con-
temporary visual culture” stands for an approach that is founded in hostility to the
aesthetic, and even more to the idea of art itself. It is the discourse that dominates
museums and art schools. Simultaneously the notion of the sublime is alive and out of
control, outside and therefore alongside, in all sorts of discourses where the general
topic is that the subject’s mind and body have been reordered or reinvented by the
computer. It is, I think, what the latter yields or is producing that is excluded by the
dominant fashions in the visual arts, in order to perpetuate a version of the subject
and art history, which on examination is not plausible.
Eliminating aesthetics while retaining the sublime has more than one precedent.
Barnett Newman told Suzanne Langer that aesthetics was for artists what ornithology
was to the birds, but that didn’t stop him writing a famous essay titled “The Sublime
is Now” or naming his most important painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis. As with
another example, Newman identified aesthetics with beauty. He wanted something
both more immediate and endless. Another attempt to separate the sublime from
beauty had to do with replacing it with ugliness. Ginette Verstraate has explained
how Friedrich Schlegel rejected Kant’s notion of disinterestedness, showing it to be
in practice “limited by a subjective, at times conflictual, interest in the world,” in
the course of articulating the other (feminine) side of language.2 Here, Verstraate’s
account of Schlegel suggests a similarity with the writers whose contributions to our
culture may, Perlow says, end aesthetics, but I think that’s as far as it goes. Verstraate,
who is writing about Schlegel and James Joyce, concludes by saying that Joyce sought
to “put into practice, rather than conceptualize, the basic structure of literature.”3 It
seems to me that the theorists whose influence may end the aesthetic are quite hostile
to the idea that anyone should alter the basic structure of literature, or art, and that
this distinguishes their wish to replace disinterestedness with interest from, for exam-
ple, Schlegel’s. Their (followers’) positions are more likely to be reflected in a recent
104 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
exhibition whose accompanying notes suggest strongly a preference for seeing works
of art as no more than (anthropological, archaeological, or historical) artifacts, open
to interpretation but not responsible for the production of meaning on their own
account. The notes tell us that the show
plays content against framing to question both how an artifact references a given
historical moment and how different modes and moments of display affect sig-
nification. Or . . . do artworks and artifacts indicate fixed meanings independent
of their context, or are they inherently unstable, and tempered by situational and
institutional inscription?4
My feeling is that this approach ignores the possibility of meanings that are not
fixed in either the sense of being incapable of development or that of being thoroughly
known, especially not of being understood as a proposition might be, and this is why
it shies away from not only the aesthetic but from the sublime too. I think that the
sublime is in some terms what they called uncertainty in the eighteenth century in the
way Namier said that “religion” was the name we gave to politics in the seventeenth
century. T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism has
modernism begin with Jean-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793).5 Were I to write
a history of the modern I’d begin it with Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the
Sea (1809). David’s painting announces a new era by way of commemorating the
end of its beginning. Clark explains that the painting was made after the image had
been taken around as a float, inciting the revolutionary mob. Friedrich’s painting is
important because it is the first painting to be made of almost nothing in the sense
of narrative or historical significance, but of forces ungraspable in the Kantian sense.
The quality that comes with them and how they are experienced, the depth, heavi-
ness, and movement of the sea is hinted at by the surface but otherwise not calculable;
similarly the emptiness but extent of the sky, its weightlessness as opposed to that of
the sea, and its similarly evident but not wholly calculable movement.
In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime I suggested that beauty was in need of a
better discussion than it has traditionally received and that the sublime is now found
in technology rather than nature. The computer is where we now find the limitless and
only partly known, while nature is nowadays contained in and preserved by National
Parks, and I suggested, too, that people have always tended to describe or imagine
the mind as being like the latest technology. We now therefore think of it as like a
computer, and this is true of how we imagine our exteriors too. People used to want
to be an oil painting but now they want to be a photographic—digital—image, with
implications that have changed how cosmetics work, because of what we now want
them, or rather the image they seek to perfect, to do.6
The implications of this are that the terms in which the contemporary subject may
be described and seen to operate include aspects that are Kantian and Heideggerian,
but I think it’s the upside-down version of both rather than what they recommended.
The subjectivity proposed by the techno-sublime is less like that of Kant’s autono-
mous subject than it resembles “the most indeterminate of figures” he warned against;
and we like, while being made uncomfortable in the case of some of them some of
the time, the things about technology that we were warned against by Heidegger.
Everyday life now calls for—and has—a subject that is made by and makes itself
out of a technological context, a delicate and overwhelming array of processes and
Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity 105
images (and each as the other) that requires (“suggests” as both a mild and strong
word) a many-centered respondent,7 one whose mind and body have been reordered
or reinvented by the computer.
If they rarely (if ever) refer to the aesthetic, people who engage in these questions
tend to use the work of Gilles Deleuze and, to a lesser extent, his work with Félix
Guattari. None of them are bound to an idea of history that is as paltry as that which
the art institutions seek to preserve, while in their analyses the notions of the limitless
and the indeterminate are fundamental and thus what they describe may be seen as
a Kantian sublime, modified and developed by subjectivity’s historical and dialecti-
cal growth, made of discourse that is inescapably metaphorical while seeking to be
literal, especially regarding science and most especially about physics and biology. It
is a Kantian sublime that describes a world inseparable from the computer, because
it is one made of information only the computer or computer-assisted calculations
could and have made available. Karen Wendy Gilbert’s “Slowness: Notes Toward an
Economy of Differancial Rates of Being” begins with a paragraph that describes the
history of the body as being a passage from nature to the computer, with the latter
becoming synonymous with how we imagine, and in that seek to administer, it. The
industrial revolution had replaced the earlier body “of the age of water, wind, and
muscle power,” with the “thermodynamic body,” which she says was “composed of
standing reserves and regulated by pumps and siphons, tariffs and regulations.” It
turns into a body that has been wholly absorbed into the language of the computer,
having first “already” imported “all the metaphors of modern warfare”—e.g. friendly
fire in the form of the autoimmune system attacking its own body, camouflaging itself
is what cancer’s known to be good at.8
Similarities with my own summary of the passage from nature until now are of
course gratifying, although almost certainly only coincidental, while it’s certainly not
a coincidence that like my own account Gilbert’s argumentation and description are
also driven by Deleuze and Guattari. She never mentions the sublime but her term
“dynamic matter” sounds very close to one of Kant’s sublimes, the one which con-
nects us to nature or I think it more to the point to say the one in which we see nature
as forces. This “vital matter” that I associate with Kant’s second sublime would not
have been possible to conceive were it not for Turing’s machine opening up the speed
and range with which we could use and be in the universe of pure ratio which is his
first sublime.9 Gilbert describes a version of the body conceived through analogies to
systems unlike those to which we are used to it being c ompared—only a few are even
biological—but which are undeniably there, embodied literally (where that can also
mean “theoretically”) if surprisingly, visible only in terms made possible by the com-
puter. Her essay and its implications expand our sense of what the body is and how
to think about it. There is, à propos the question of contemporary visual culture, no
question that what she is thinking about goes to how we understand and experience
where and what we are.
Robert Pippin has shown how Hegel saw the idea of the human spirit as not fixed
but rather changing as knowledge accumulated and our notion of what reason was
(and how to do it) developed, and I take that to be how it flourishes or festers within
the techno-sublime.10 If it is at once source and context for our subjectivity, then
cyber-technology’s high speed of development needs, I think, to be taken into account
carefully, and in that respect I have suggested recently that when thinking about how
what preceded the digital in many respects anticipated the claims made for it, it seems
to me to be as well when noting such things to recall that it is still true that what
one is aware of is difference rather than similarity when seeing new technologies of
mediation.11 This difference which similarity can obscure obliges one to think of the
subject in a comparably minute or meticulous way regarding historical perception and
self-consciousness. I don’t think people born since the mid-seventies, for instance, see
the world as I do while being aware of sharing the same history. This is because they
don’t share the same starting point experientially—they were born after nature had
ceased to be the model it once was.
With that in mind let me say that I am not old enough to remember Newman’s
response to Langer happening live, but do remember Robert Smithson, and a time
when artists were allowed not only to be involved or interested in science, but to
assume that what it offered could change art, in terms of content or address and
physical appearance, and where any of these could initiate the changes. I have col-
laborated with others in depth twice, both times with people who knew (know) more
about science than I, and the first collaboration involved Smithson and occurred at
that time. John Johnston and I taught a class at Princeton and wrote an essay about
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1973) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.12 The
sculpture and the novel had in common the scientific (and thence poetic) concept of
entropy, and both are encyclopedic works, sublime in pointing to the limitless (or
unimaginably large, complicated, and ungraspable) through the paradox of present-
ing the uncontainable as content.
Smithson brought into art ideas about time that—as with Gilbert’s essay—involve
exceeding history by preceding it. She quotes Deleuze talking about “varying rates
of being” that temporally underlie “species and parts,” and I think this and the rest
of what she has to say would have been attractive to Smithson, who was similarly
concerned with the world as a combination or concatenation of times.13 Her essay,
though, more or less precludes a political a priori for the subject, and I think it sig-
nificant that apart from the title the word “social” only occurs in it once. This is not
the kind of thinking the art world is responsive to now, as is evidenced by my second
collaborator, Rebecca Norton, an artist who nevertheless finds that it is compara-
tive literature, the field in which Gilbert and Johnston function, that is responsive to
what she writes. Rebecca and I have collaborated since 2010; like myself she writes
as well as makes art (in her case not only painting). Her art has developed out of and
through Deleuze’s writing about the “affine,” which points both to the feminine as
the other side, and is a mathematical progression. Smithson would certainly have
been interested, but things being what they were she was recently invited to publish
an essay about it not in a journal about art or for art world people but for the same
audience as Gilbert and Johnston, which is to say comparative literature and related
fields, which include plenty of people involved in visual culture but strikingly few
whose approach is conditioned by the discourse in charge of the official organs of the
visual arts themselves.14
Outside the art museum everything that is concerned with the formless and the
ungraspable, but also made out of the stuff of the contemporary, is discussed. Inside
the museum what the work might be or be about is closely controlled, Hegel is
invoked but there’s little dialectical contradiction to be seen. One may ask why the
sublime should thrive in one place while being repressed in the other. I think it has
to do with the visual being capable of direct, involuntary arousal through vision, and
the threat that ability presents to cultural theory, which is crudely, or perhaps one
should only say exclusively, concerned with seeing history as an economics of power,
and the subject as an internalization or paralleling of that. The repression can take
place because it’s an obvious place for the idea of the anti-aesthetic to settle, the visual
being unavoidable, which is less true of the other senses. Of those, only hearing is less
avoidable than sight (one can’t close one’s ears as one can one’s eyes) and no one has
sought—tellingly—to try to make a musical academy out of the anti-aesthetic.
Richard Shiff has talked about how when he was a kid in the fifties he would stay
up and stare at the signal that came on the television screen after the day’s broadcast-
ing had come to an end.15 In those days televisions were black and white and the
signal was a grid made of a series of grays that only ever turned actually white when
interference caused it to go haywire and extremes were generated. Otherwise it is all
grays except when fuzzy, filled with “snow” as it’s called. Throughout all of this it
was clear that the image was in no way static. Shiff says this was his first experience
of abstraction. He was from New York but didn’t know about Newman, Pollock,
and de Kooning, or that much about art. Later on, however, he would become a
major writer about these artists, and I’d suggest that what he saw in them had to do
in some way with what he’d seen on the screen, or possibly with reinterpreting it. The
blank screen is groundless, there is nothing that can be imagined as an extreme back-
ground. When people painted the sky in the eighteenth century they were instructed
to imagine being in the center of a dome, with the wall coming around and above
them. No such experience is imaginable with regard to the screen with electricity
running through but with no stable image in or on it. It is a space inseparable from
movement.
In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime I made use of Plotinus’ discussion of the
sublime, including the use of the vulgar, to clarify the elevated by puncturing—implicitly
undermining—it. Here I turn to Andrew Cole, who has written about Plotinus and
the refined and the vulgar in the course of discussing the place of medieval philosophy
in Hegel’s dialectic, which he feels misrepresented by the standard line that Hegel
is a combination of Classical philosophy and Kant. Cole explains that Plotinus saw
refined metaphor as making possible ideas (literally) inconceivable without it—i.e.
they lived and could be born nowhere else. Plotinus
knew that his dialectical expositions required a particular kind of prose that ena-
bles the very thought of figures as concepts, concepts as figures. In this (he) both
anticipates Hegel’s own phenomenological style and . . . supplies us with a fresh
perspective on what makes powerful anti-dialectical philosophies, such as we find
in Deleuze and Guattari, dialectical in an elementary way.16
In being an “extended argument for figuration” Deleuze’s supposedly “non-

dialectical” argumentation “resembles what dialectics was in the Middle Ages but
is, in modernity, no longer.”17 This, moreover, emphasizes rather than diminishes
the place of Hegel’s possible influence. Cole goes on to say that Deleuze, whatever he
may claim, never breaks from Hegel because his thinking “already expresses a stylistic
Hegelianism.”18 This is important not least regarding writers who seek to address the
social dialectically, where that would mean doing so through and in relation to the
development of a subject that is not mechanically or even originally historical. For
that an elevated/extraordinary/special language (rhetorical style) capable of making
connections between very different things (concepts) is required.19
In thinking about art and the art world, as opposed to visual culture as a general-
ity, our version of an elevated or special language may be the one that is a given in
Clement Greenberg’s idea of the avant-garde, which Boris Groys has described as
founded in an idea of great art and how it is made.20 Groys says and shows that the
structure of this idea remains unchanged and fully active, but in a form which pre-
tends to have buried what it actually feeds off and perpetuates, so that Greenberg’s
model remains in force but in versions of itself where it is either repressed or refer-
enced in a disingenuously explicit way. Another of Cole’s observations about Plotinus
is important here for its relevance to the present. Coles notes that Plotinus is unlike
Longinus, the other early inventor of the sublime, in asserting that the customary can
be surprising. Longinus said more or less the opposite. Plotinus’ very modern thought
(which we take for granted) has more than the resonance it might have had in even the
fairly recent past, in that in the visual arts it might seem that the vulgar has entirely
replaced our version of what Plotinus regarded as “refined,” and that what used to
define the vulgar is now defined by it. We take Plotinus’ claim that what we’re used to
can be surprising for granted because the art of the modern era, and of what led up to
it and what has followed, have habituated us to the ordinary being used as an implic-
itly critical tool that adds verve and new purpose to the refined. Clark has suggested
that not being able to match the modern’s excessive vulgarity brought modernist art
to a crisis that may have been an ending in the early 1960s, which was certainly when
people in general started talking about modernism as a thing of the past.21
Groys’ book about the avant-garde and its fate(s) has at its center a discussion
of Greenberg’s famous essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939). For Greenberg the
avant-garde had become the property of abstract painting, which was a way of think-
ing about how the art of the past had been made. Now it is a way of thinking about
how he was wrong about what he thought was great in the terms he set. Kitsch is
still the same, although now high art (no longer called that of course) can look more
like it.22 Groys demonstrates that the distinction has survived both the controversy
around it and the examples Greenberg used. Greenberg’s model lives as a distinction
that is no longer between avant-gardism and kitsch (abstract painting and everything
else perhaps) but between varieties of (post-, anti-, etc.) art, whose hagiographers and
makers have wanted to think are the opposite, and resulting from the total elimina-
tion of his thinking.23 Groys’ example is performance art of the sort that is snooty
and minimal, and the kind that’s loud and in his words comes at you from all sides,
like the kind that isn’t art—except if it’s in a museum, slightly or even dramatically
adjusted, in which case it may seek to overwhelm you because it’s actually being
critical of conventions in which one is overwhelmed in a familiar way. Or so one is
supposed to suppose.
With Groys’ insight in mind, and with a view to reviewing the sublime’s fate in
the current art world, I’ll suggest two other involuntary descendants of Greenberg’s
model, Michael Asher and Jeff Koons. Both artists’ work derives from Andy Warhol’s
in that it is about the market, and I think both illustrate the survival of the sublime
as consciously repressed. Both, too, collapse or dumb-down the sublime and art itself
by insisting on certainty about history and a subject that won’t—can’t be allowed
to—change. This repression is at the heart of what is never discussed about their
work and why.
While discussing the early development of the avant-garde idea, Groys draws a dis-
tinction between avant-gardism and propaganda. Art can be the former only before
the revolution, after it can only be the latter. Malevich can be avant-garde and call for
the utter destruction of basically everything in the name of freedom. Tatlin can only
do propaganda: the revolution has occurred and he’s invented a device for propagat-
ing it. No more destroying now we do constructing; freedom is what we have now.
Warhol said that “The business of art is business,” and Michael Asher’s work (and
that of followers of his such as John Knight and Walead Beshty) has commerce as its
fundamental and really only theme (Andy himself being too slippery to be so limited).
Asher is most well-known for a show in which he removed a wall that otherwise con-
cealed the gallerist’s office, thus symbolically unmasking capitalism itself by driving
the hidden transactions of the marketplace into the open or more likely into a nearby
restaurant but there are limits to the literalism of those who otherwise make a fuss
about being literal. Knight makes works about the IMF which are silly, because the
artist clearly doesn’t understand the IMF’s behavior sufficiently to underscore (propa-
gandize) the criticisms of it that should be made. Beshty makes the work’s identity as
a valuable commodity (almost) its exclusive content and is competitive in his silliness.
Duchamp is important to all of them, as of course he was to Warhol. All make a fuss
about exhibitions, underscoring the dependence of their works on the institution as a
context. This is very much an updated, banal, version of Greenberg’s (in Groys’ ver-
sion at least) avant-garde and its concern with high art and how the way it was made
was connected to—expressed or communicated—meaning, which works wonderfully
for an art world which has instituted self-criticism, albeit in name only. Asher was a
regular at the Dokumenta show in Kassel, an exhibition held every five years since
1955, to which I have only been once and to which I’ll not return until they have a
year when they criticize themselves instead of repeating platitudes and being smug.
The one I went to seemed to me most like a warehouse sale of used church furniture,
with booths promoting the positions of various denominations, all severe. In its use
of criticality and its foundation in illustration (for such was Andy’s talent, the empty
and expressionless page as opposed to the active surface of a painting) such work is
perfect for an art world which at the top is about selling (and believing in) art that
is not art but rather useful propaganda of the sort religious art used to be. Having a
pricey picture of Jesus in the house was once a good way to reassure people that one
was prepared to spend real money on piety. The same thing goes for having a bit of
Marxism on the wall nowadays, also art which represents this or that social faction.
The money side or reference assures people that Asher’s and epigones’ work is sophis-
ticated (transgressive while pious) and that Koons’ work is clever (transgressive while
naughty); both break rules that haven’t existed since before either artist was born,
which is why I say that the art world seeks to freeze art and the subjectivity that goes
with it. Its favorite artists’ work depends on a demystification of that which may not
be further demystified, where it is important to deny that that is the case.24 This is one
version of the idea of permanent revolution, and while Groys is sensitive to the place
of Trotskyism in its original context, Greenberg, I think, might have done more with
it as a theme common to the work of his successors.
To turn from Asher’s work to Koons’, I think it odd that no one wants to talk about
the side of his (or Warhol’s) work that addresses the truly terrible in that it glorifies
the detritus that is clogging up the oceans and generally poisoning the world. Instead
we marvel at their ability to make it look wonderful or cute, which some would also
like to believe is ironic. Koons’ is too-big-to-fail art, paralleling in spirit and principle
the capitalism of the same name. His work takes no risk but is always excessive,
Figure 6.1 © Jeff Koons, Hulk (Wheelbarrow), 2004–2013, polychromed bronze, wood,
copper, and live flowering plants, 68 1/16 x 48 3/8 x 81 5/8 inches, 172.9 x 122.9 x 207.3 cm
confirming Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “Nothing succeeds like excess,” and in that
what is excessive about it is its vulgarity and, usually, its production, it will for many
confirm Clark’s perception that modernism could ultimately not keep up with modern
culture however hard it tried to be tasteless. Koons’ works are always more lavishly
made than were Warhol’s and often, but not always, more ugly. What the image of
Marilyn Monroe is to Warhol and his reputation, the Incredible Hulk’s is to Koons. A
sign of its being too successful to fail is its price, which is considered an important part
of the work. On November 13, 2013, Sotheby’s auction house in New York sold a
Warhol painting for the highest price a work of his had ever reached, $104.5 million,
but a day before Christie’s auction house had sold a Koons sculpture for the highest
price reached thus far for a work by a living artist (Warhol died in 1987), just under
$54.5 million. Koons’ work, even more than Warhol’s, brings into view humorously
the elements of the exchange between the terms of art evaluation and market value
that fascinate Asher and co. (while being much more expensive than theirs).25 Hulk
(Wheelbarrow) (2004–2013) looks like an inflatable Incredible Hulk pushing a real
wheelbarrow, but while it and its flowers are really made of wood and flowers, the
figure is not actually inflatable but made out of painted bronze. One can see it was
very expensive to produce. Knowing that under the paint it is b ronze—the stuff of
art—enhances the effect not through displaying the material but through burying it
while the gallery makes sure the viewer knows it’s there. That the word “inflation” is
also familiar to us in connection with money adds to the work’s aura of lighthearted
expensiveness and drollery about popular culture. Koons’ use of concealed bronze
and the prices his works fetch are almost jokes about money being the “social mate-
rialization of wealth as such (universal wealth).”26 Koons brings money as displayed
wealth together with the v ulgar—as both the familiar and as bad taste—through a
rhetoric that is charming. For example, one automatically compares the red of the
flowers with the green figure, but in doing so realizes that one is comparing the real
softness of the flowers with an illusion of a soft inflated figure that is actually more
solid than the wooden wheelbarrow. I know an artist who, when he was a student
(and maybe still), was very moved by the image of the Incredible Hulk, not so much
because of Koons’ use of it but because it is an image that has had a long life in his
family. As he explained to me his grandfather was a fan of the one they had in the sev-
enties, his dad of the one that came next, and he of the one we have now. It has been
in the lives and heads of three generations of readers and now it’s in the museum too.
Asher’s and Koons’ works are perfect for studies of the visual which have an inter-
est in precluding complexity as something other than discursive in an exclusively
literal sense. Along with their alleged criticality never being self-critical, the difficulty
with their work and these studies is that the idea of an independent life for art is no
longer entertained. I think we have become submerged by a banal sublime; its banality
lies in its inability to do anything other than repeat in diluted form arguments with
which we are familiar, without making them surprising. A sublime which is a parody
of the notion of uncertainty and therefore of itself—both artists’ supporters would
insist they are innovative and “take risks,” while ignoring the implications of being
and doing that in a manner which repeats a formula and leaves the art historical nar-
rative with which the artwork began unchanged by it.
The fetishizing of long-past values has converted what was a model for doubt into
an academic formula for certainty, with celebrants who go so far as to tell artists what
properties characterize the work of art and which are the approved ways of violating
it. Such authority depends on freezing what was historical, in the name of history of
course. For instance Jeff Wall identifies qualities in modernism’s past with eternal
standards for us all, the way statues with togas were once: “The aesthetic categories
created or revolutionized by the avant-garde have become objectivities for us, inescap-
able and necessary structures, transcendental conditions for the experience of works
of art.”27 There is no place here for uncertainty, while the statement’s pomposity
invites an art that challenges or ignores the objectivity, inescapability, necessity, and
transcendence Wall claims for what he likes. And what does he mean by “necessity”
anyway? Whether he is referring to historical necessity, or to the Lacanian idea of “a
necessary positionality in language,”28 his version of the necessary is bound up in cat-
egorical definition and rearrangement. One may say that in Wall the work is at least
allowed to be art; however, its maker and viewer are not allowed to think beyond (his
version of) its current institutional definition.
In lecturing on the end of art Hegel asks, “What is the true content of art, and with
what aim is this to be presented?” His answer is that “our consciousness supplies us
with the common opinion that it is the task and aim of art to bring in contact with
our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man.”29
As has also been said, “The truth of subjectivity, however, is also supposed to be
objective . . . subjectivity without reality is like a god without existence.”30 Hegel says
that the goal of art is contemplation, but this generality was thrown into some doubt
from the beginning with Schlegel seeking to be open about interest. Using Groys’
model one might say that the avant-garde must by definition not trust disinterested
contemplation, while having to have an elaborately dialectical relation to the concept
(otherwise not being able to destroy everything including its own foundations). In
practice, it cannot survive its distrust of disinterest, that being the origin of the dis-
trust. Art that seeks to be propaganda, however, may reject the notion of disinterested
contemplation—while of course claiming that it is the relationship to reality that is
objective—but in practice may not do without it entirely. This is the case with for
instance Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850,) and I’ll come to suggest
it’s also true of a work by contemporary artist Kara Walker.
First, though, to return to Hegel’s “all.” Outside of art and its pious yet at the
same time commercial obligations, there is writing like Gilbert’s and the others I’ve
mentioned. Gilbert’s essay is an example of how the social can (should, must) be
approached through what conceivably precedes it and much if not all that does
not directly refer to it, should one want to think about the historical condition of
the subject. Norton’s clear about how much more than an emaciated historicism is
involved in what she’s after. Joyce wrote encyclopedic novels, as full of everything
as is the mind, fully in that respect in accordance with Hegel. In contrast, there is
nothing encyclopedic about Asher, Koons, or Wall, no “all” at all, but instead a very
limited mind, defined by an episteme in which positionality is about history and how
to converge with it (otherwise known as careerism) not changing but confirming being
the goal. The business of art is not necessarily to limit it to being a business but it is
certainly to insist that neither the historical model nor the subject that it needs (insists
on having) doesn’t change. Otherwise, just saying, capitalism would be in doubt.
It is a very self-righteous subject, limited by its faith in good agency being the prod-
uct of the right identity. However, while a recent issue of Artforum advertises a forth-
coming essay on how to write “identity criticism,” a student of mine who went to the
Venice Biennial after she graduated returned to say she never wanted to hear the word
“identity” again. Her last name tells us that she is not of exclusively north European
origin, her sex is automatically (pace Schlegel) “outside” the supposed inside (which
has been on the periphery some time now but we don’t admit it, it would thaw the
subject). Her identity is just as it should be but she thinks that is a bullshit position.
This is the sense in which the current art establishment overlooks the sublime or
the aesthetic or contemplation (aka self-consciousness) in order to conduct business
within categories that remain reliable. We may say it sublimates them for money and
for the sake of a revolution at the same time maybe. My young friend’s response to
Venice suggests the established line is getting creaky; younger people aren’t buying it.
The fate of the sublime in the first part of the twenty-first century is to thrive out-
side the visual arts but to be neglected or rejected within them, mainly because the
institutions—the museums and graduate schools—are in the hands of people who
don’t like art. The three named by Perlow as agents of the potential apocalypse of
aesthetics have had little influence on aesthetics, none or next to none on anything
having to do with the development of the subject as it has been discussed here, chang-
ing with history and inherently—necessarily—possessed of and by not one but shall
we say a thousand centers from which it is to be located in and with the world.31 As
Gilbert and Norton both suggest, our body as well as our mind is not as simple as it
once seemed, and I note in conjunction with that Pippin’s description of Nietzsche
and Heidegger as responses to what it was about Hegel’s view of the world that didn’t
turn out to work.32 It was his idea that there was satisfaction (self-realization) enough
in, and in response to, the institutional. This would be the sense in which Warhol or
Koons, or Asher and Wall, must seem curiously pre-contemporary, and it is certainly
how the contemporary art establishment feels obliged to prevent the subject that is
the content of any art or art substitute not only from developing but from having
developed.
When the sublime emerges in the contemporary, as in any previous situation, it
contains and communicates some uncertainty, and to repeat through paraphrase what
I said earlier, one may put that the other way around. That which communicates
some uncertainty is to that degree sublime. However, in keeping with the current anti-
aesthetic spirit (which is in practice more about being anti-art than art philosophy), if
such a work should occur in an establishment context, that about it which is uncertain
is likely to be overlooked. The curator’s notes about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the
Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) seem to me to be an example of this habit of sublimat-
ing the sublime.
Kara Walker is a black artist whose work looks like propaganda except that it isn’t
so clear for what, and it seems to me better to approach it as art that monumentalizes
historical and political wickedness by complicating the discourse around it rather
than simplifying it. Earlier in her career she did a piece that combines Obama’s image
with a burning cross, for example, which caused rage and confusion rather than a
straightforward reading. Most of her work has used the image of Aunt Jemima, and
A Subtlety put that head on an erotic stereotype—large breasts and buttocks—of
Figure 6.2 Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid
and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the
Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining
Plant, 2014, polystyrene foam, sugar, approximately 426 x 312 x 906 inches (1,082 x 792.5
x 2,301.2 cm), installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, NY, May 10–July 6,
2014, a project of Creative Time, photo: Jason Wyche
a black woman’s body. The work consisted of a very big sculpture of that image,
made of sugar and in the Domino Sugar warehouse in Brooklyn, just before it was
to be torn down. Combining two stereotypes of black women, surrogate mother and
whore, set in a huge sugar warehouse that was once central to the sugar trade, I find it
very powerful and more complicated than a description of its contents makes it seem.
This is because of the smell of sugar, which the gallery notes describe as “acrid” but I
don’t think that’s right. Gunpowder is usually described as acrid; sugar surely smells
sweet. The smell prevents the work from being manageable as an icon, that and the
fact that in the summer heat the work could be seen to be melting. The smell and
the heat embodied the intensity and instability of the dialectic involved, with quite
complicated results (affect) because of that dialectic’s horrible content. At great cost
vast wealth was produced, the greatness and the vastness both immeasurable and
experienced as such, and as totally opposed morally as they were interdependent eco-
nomically. Walker has said that she wanted to create giddiness, but the gallery notes
conclude by saying that:
Looming over a plant whose entire history was one of sweetening tastes and
aggregating wealth, of refining sweetness from dark to white, she stands mute, a
riddle so wrapped up in the history of power and its sensual appeal that one can
only stare stupefied, unable to answer.33
Once one reaches wordlessness, but has not exhausted what needs to be expressed,
one is in the arena of sublimity of some kind, that which is truly terrible by all means
and which makes a mockery of the rational while not leaving (in an immediate and
obvious sense) the logical. The curator tells us that “Walker’s gigantic temporary
sugar-sculpture speaks of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refin-
ing, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human
body to get what it needs no matter the cost to life and limb.”34 In this work interest
not only precludes (renders unbelievable) disinterest but the kind of interest depends
to some degree on the viewer’s identity, racial, gender, and maybe class too. From my
point of view, then, the curator’s conclusion is truism as piety, always a short step
from self-congratulation, and fails to capture what leaves one unsure of what one is
thinking or, actually, feeling. It’s the sugar. The curator notes that back in the bad old
days rich people had little sculptures made of sugar, which they’d admire and then
eat. I think some of them still do. The problematic that the work presents, at least
for white people I’d suggest, is that one can’t have wholly negative associations with
sugar. It’s as simple and as complicated as that, and I think if everyone whose career
is based on the idea of identity was as prepared to be uncertain as Walker, my student
would not have found Venice to be no more than a sickening array of narcissism
pretending to be socialism.
However, other than the rare flash of complexity such as Walker’s, uncertainty is
generally banished from institutions and their discourse(s). This is because the senses
are banned, the work’s physical affect minimized (when it exists) in the interest of the
conversion of active art into passive artifact. The smell throws much into doubt in
Walker’s sculpture, elsewhere it’s what you can’t help but see. The work’s relation to
its time is to more than one period in history, both impersonal and personal. Work
that employs the senses in part or whole to frustrate the literal requires a dialectic with
the scope of that which Cole identifies in Plotinus, and while true of Walker’s work
this is also where Shiff’s experience while staying up late to watch TV when there
wasn’t anything being broadcast returns to this essay. Shiff is the art historian who
explained to us how Newman actually painted his paintings, and much else besides.
I think his childhood interest was prescient: what he saw was half-formed as a pos-
sibility in the painting of the New York school about which he would come to write
so much, and more than a possibility once we come to artists and others born after
the mid-seventies or so.
Newman and Warhol were friends and went around the galleries together; it was
said they’d go to the opening of an envelope. Revisionist art history does not like it,
but it is Newman who was the anarchist (he wrote the introduction to the first col-
lection of Kropotkin’s essays published in America) and Warhol who was a life-long
Republican, loved by Ron and Nancy, and a very close friend of Roy Cohn, Joseph
McCarthy’s right-hand man. Clearly they did not share political points of view, nor
similar attitudes to how they wanted art to work. Andy’s work was as I’ve said that
of an illustrator. There isn’t any space in his paintings; there’s a surface equivalent
to that of a sheet of paper. You may look into it but looking at it won’t automati-
cally and irresistibly make you find yourself looking into it. Newman was a painter
and used the ability of painting’s surface to do that (whether you want it to or not)
because it is itself tangible. Like the TV screen Shiff stared at movement happens in
it and because of it. Abstraction may have been the result of close and protracted
thinking and feeling about older art, but it had inside it a question about another kind
of space, one without a horizon and solid ground and empty sky. Newman’s most
famous painting is also in the proportions of Cinemascope, bringing together nature
and the latest thing in the photographic.
It is the first place to which one may point when accusing the present masters of the
museums of seeking to freeze art and its subject, and this may be seen most clearly in
how abstract or non-representational painting is treated nowadays, not least in how it
is prevented from addressing its context. A recent show at the Tate gallery was talked
about as a show in which painting engaged with (“confronted”) the television or
video screen. It did not do that in any discernable way, instead being made of paint-
ings which showed no sign of being influenced by video, unless it were to emphasize
how painting traditionally conceived is quite unlike it. The exhibition was one more
show of a group of painters of whom many or most have something to do with the
Dusseldorf Academy, as usual Charline von Heyl was an exception to the rule with
which she’s always associated. Its message to painters who pay attention to what’s in
museums was that painting’s identity was fixed some time in the 1960s and has noth-
ing to do but work with characteristics attributed to it at that time.
The show addressed the ungrounded-ness of the video or television screen not at all,
its immateriality even less. It smacked instead of the smug dullness of knowledge that
is believed to be complete. I think that by the mid-seventies people were being born
who would neither believe in nor care about the definitions of the 1960s or, by exten-
sion, critiques of them that rendered the visual even more simplified. They would
want art to be complex in a way that matched the (their) present. Their works’ exclu-
sion from galleries and magazines is an example of how the subject is not allowed to
develop historically, thanks to a shit use of history.
The reason for ending this essay with a couple of paragraphs on painting is that
everything still has an Oedipal relationship to it.35 The work in the Tate show is
overwhelmingly readable in terms of what has become of the notion of positioning.
The few words about Lacan I quoted here come from a work concerned with Julia
Kristeva’s reconciliation of Husserl’s supposed idealism with Lacan’s alleged materi-
alism. Husserl and phenomenology are no longer mentioned; instead, we are meant
to occupy a historically inert world in which painting is readable as part of a system
and causes no bodily surprises. Sensation has been replaced with shock of a sort signs
produce, Andy’s dead surface has replaced the vitality of Newman’s, and when, as in
the case of Walker’s A Subtlety, contradiction comes through involuntary sensation
it’s not mentioned in the official account of what it is—even though it’s clear that the
artist herself is up for it.
Esther Leslie says that when Walter Benjamin first drafted his essay on Baudelaire
Adorno mocked him, saying it was not dialectical but instead just linked the poet to
various things that were going on at the same time; he said he was sucking up to the
Marxists to get it published. Benjamin significantly changed and worked on his essay
but what Adorno complained about in the first version is what visual culture has come
to in the visual arts.36 I think Adorno’s complaint could be directed at much that is and
has been written about the visual arts nowadays and lately from the perspective or in
the context of contemporary (visual) culture. While always prone to vulgarity for the
sake of producing meaning, the sublime now lies prone before it, the relationship of
what artists do to its world circumscribed by an atrophied dialectic. Art, or if you like
“cultural work,” is prescriptively reduced to being a symptom rather than a cause.
Regarding the sublime in its contemporary manifestation, discussion of the techno-
sublime seems to be facilitated by Deleuze rather than any of the three mentioned by
Perlow, his thinking providing the ability to think about Hegel’s “all” for the reasons
Cole describes: he provides a way of describing complexity rather than suppressing it.
This places the discussion of the techno-sublime in a certain antipathetic relation to
Badiou’s influence and thinking that is complicated by his having proposed himself as
the anti-Deleuze, and by having quite a controversial relation to scientific and espe-
cially mathematical ideas.37 I conclude with this complication because it is differences
about how to use ideas that come from mathematics and science that define how to
approach the subject produced by technology and its culture. An approach to the
visual and to culture that evades the sublime can only do so in the interest of reducing
everything to a question about power while repressing what confuses it, hardly a very
useful way to look at things, whether cultural or natural.
Notes
1 http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/sublime.htm
2 Ginette Verstraate, Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James
Joyce (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 122–123.
3 Verstraate 218.
4 Gallery note for In the Belly of the Whale, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art,
Rotterdam, September 9–December 31, 2016.
5 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale
6 See Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Chapter 29, “Moist Attraction: Observations on an Advertisement
which Appeared in Vogue (U.S.), May 1992”, in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the
Visual Arts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Once people
wanted to think in terms of oil paintings, and as with an oil painting face cosmetics were
layered on. Now cosmetics disappear into skin conceived (presented) as an uninterruptedly
flawless surface, as is automatically true of a photograph rather than of a painting.
7 On the heteronomy as opposed to homogeneity of the contemporary sublime, see also
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth Press,
1999), 55 and passim.
8 Karen Wendy Gilbert, “Slowness: Notes Toward an Economy of Differancial Rates of
Being,” in Patricia Tincineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn (Durham,
NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 77.
9 One should note here that there are objections to going too far in comparing the computer
to the mind or at least the brain, which follow from the computer’s relative simplicity.
For example, unlike the computer “when we go from one sentence to another, with the
simplest deduction (‘If . . . then . . . .’) we are not doing any sequence matching” (as with
a computer) “but we move and deform huge networks of communication,” Francis Bailly,
Giuseppe Longo, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, The Physical Singularity of Life
(London: Imperial College Press, 2011), 60.
10 For example, “(W)hen Hegel makes his famous claim that moderns are ‘freer’ than Greeks,
he does not just mean politically freer . . . He means we have become freer, more capable
of the capacity for freedom.” Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational
Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 55. Also, “Virtually
everything at stake in Hegel’s practical p hilosophy—the notion of spirit as an historically
achieved status, the dependence of individuals, even in their ‘inner’ lives on the public
world inhabited by others [. . .] . comes down finally to his own theory of recognition
and its objective realization over time and in modern ethical life” (ibid. 29). Elsewhere, in
recasting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in terms more faithful to what he actually said
by talking not of master and slave but Lord and Bondsman (as is also the case with Cole,
who appears here below) Pippin shows that self-consciousness can only be historical, the
acquisition of freedom being dependent on the capacity of the bondsman (who actually has
a contractual relationship with his boss that a slave does not) to build on his p osition while
the lord cannot develop his. See Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011), in particular 86–87.
11 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “What Does Tom Mitchell Want?” https://lareviewofbooks.org/
article/what-does-tom-mitchell-want/, accessed November 14, 2015.
12 Jeremy Gilbert- Rolfe and John Johnston, “Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty,”
October, Vol. I, Issues 1, 2, & 3 (1976–1977.)
13 Gilbert 80.
14 Rebecca Norton, “Displacement Paths” Network Ecologies, Amanda Starling and Florian
Wiencek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), http//scalar.usc.edu/works-network-
ecologies/displacement paths
15 Richard Smith discussed this as part of his contribution to the conference “Forty Years
of Unexplained Change: Art, History, Subjectivity since 1973,” at Art Center College of
Design, Pasadena, October 2013.
16 Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 155.
17 Cole 155.
18 Cole 159.
19 Cole goes on to say that without that dialectical—Hegelian and pre-Hegelian—rhetorical
style Deleuze is turned into gibberish, of which Todd Cronan has given us several examples
which confirm this as far as the visual arts and particularly painting are concerned. See
Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. (Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press, 2013) for my review of Cronan’s book see Jeremy Gilbert-
Rolfe, “Actually, Images have meanings of Their Own,” https://lareviewofbooks.org/
article/actually-images-meanings/#!, accessed October 4, 2014.
20 Boris Groys, In the Flow (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 61–74. For more of what
I have to say about his argument please see my review of the book: http://criticalinquiry.
uchicago.edu/jeremy_gilbert_rolfe_reviews_in_the_flow/, accessed 2016.
21 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 401: “If the formula were not so mechanical, I would say that
Abstract Expressionist painting is best when it is most vulgar, because it is then that it
grasps most fully the conditions of representation—the technical and social conditions—of
its historical moment.” A moment, Clark goes on to say, that was brief and “almost over”
by 1961–1962.
22 Greenberg defined kitsch as an art made by people who had moved to the city looking for
work and, displaced from their rural origins and cut off from the culture that had formed
them, invented an art for themselves out of classical (elevated) forms, leaving out the parts
that they found of no use. (In reviewing Groys’ book I suggested Liberace explaining that
his version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was only twenty minutes long because he’d “left
out the boring parts”—I got the line from Gene Kaelin during a seminar fifty or so years
ago.) Kitsch is, I think, automatically sublime in being limitless. Culture beneath the lintel
is by definition at least horizontally without end or variety: anything can be used in vulgar
speech. The image is of a rhizomatic shrub rather than towering and ascending redwood. I
think, though, that one ought to recall something that Greenberg likely knew but most of us
have forgotten, which is that during the Victorian era “kitsch” was not thought of as par-
ticularly low but rather as containing the very spirit of the age, and bragged about accord-
ingly. See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990), in particular 104–106.
23 I think one may say that a neo-con/literal pietist alliance that was inherent earlier, for exam-
ple in the assault on assault on Pollock discussed below in footnote 33, is now almost explicit
in the day to day life of the art institutions, propriety allowing.
24 Rancière has made a similar point.
25 The best description of how the contemporary art world/market works is Isabelle Graw’s
High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009).
One doesn’t have to like it—for example, she has a very high opinion of A sher—but her
explanation of how things work is convincing.
26 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1), trans. Ben Foulkes
(London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990), 242. (The editor tells
us that Marx wrote “universal wealth” in English in the German edition, perhaps a nod to
London as the center of capitalism; the English language its lingua franca perhaps even then.)
27 Jeff Wall, “Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings,” in Lynne
Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds. Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, Vol. 1 (New
York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1996), 135.
28 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology
and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 130.
29 Hegel, Introductory Lectures to Aesthetics, translated by Bernard Bosenquet with an intro-
duction and commentary by Michael Inwood (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 51 (empha-
sis in original).
30 Andrew Haas, Hegel and the Problem of Multiplicity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2000), 203.
31 In Eagleton, Rancière, and Badiou, although differently, ideology guides what may be
deemed significant. In contrast, Manuel Delanda begins his book on Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of difference and similarity with a discussion of Fernand Braudel’s exploration of
European history as a crowd of histories and historical durations, all happening at once and
in some constantly changing relation to one another (Manuel Delanda, Assemblage Theory
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016)). I think one reason aesthetics seems able
to comfortably survive being made redundant in art education is because its foundation in
disinterestedness precludes its being founded on one idea or model. This is because disinter-
estedness is in principle not loyal to a cause, and no amount of deconstruction or demystifi-
cation can make it otherwise Fredric Jameson, who as Perlow notes describes the sublime as
the condition of the postmodern, has written an insightful account of Badiou’s relationship
to Sartre, which in passing raises the question of inflexibility in terms which might also
have some relevance to the other two (Fredric Jameson, “From Sartre to Badiou,” New Left
Review (November/December 2016)).
32 Robert P. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 122–123.
33 Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time, http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/
curatorial-statement/
34 Ibid.
35 The history of this relationship is peppered with or even characterized by misrepresentation
and tendentious interpretation but one example worth noting here may be Stephen Naifeh
and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock, An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, Inc., 1989), a Reaganite book about Pollock that was popular with all sorts of
people who would deny being right-wing about anything, in which (for example) the WPA
is said to have been something like a gang of welfare cheats, who became spoiled by the
easy government money which allowed them to live like bohemians. Once that money had
dried up due to the onset of prosperity their depraved lifestyles and expectations to make
money without really working made them easy prey to the new “breed of entrepreneurial
dealers who appeared after the war” (256). I think mine was the only negative review of the
book, which was otherwise overwhelming well received and eventually made in to a film,
although I believe that there Pollock’s image was made more historically plausible thanks to
the intervention of the director and the lead actor (I’ve not seen it). The authors were both
graduates of Harvard Law School who became well-known in business in some manner and
whose only other work of art history as far as I know was a less well-received work on how
van Gogh did not really commit suicide but was, instead, murdered by a group of village
thugs. The point of the Pollock book is never clear; it’s written like a legal charge but one is
never told of what the artist was guilty, except perhaps not admitting to being homosexual
as one gets the impression the authors thought he ought. It’s germane here because it is such
a neo-con piece of rubbish but none of the Institutional Critique or October crowd have
said anything untoward about it as far as I know.
36 Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 191–192.
37 See for example Arkady Plotnitsky, “Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and
Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
Vol. 30 (2012). I have little to say about Badiou as I must admit, as John Johnston has
also confided about himself, I find Badiou’s writing more or less unreadable, aside from
his laugh a minute book about St. Paul. I have read his work denouncing Deleuze—Alain
Badiou, Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999)—and think it journalistic. The last paragraph in the book suggests
that his reading of Hegel is dated to say the least and seriously at odds with the readings
used here.
7 Recentering the Sublime
Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches
Elizabeth Oldfather
In 2014, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience published a study by Ishizu and Zeki

called “A Neurobiological Inquiry into the Origins of Our Experience of the Sublime
and Beautiful.”1 Like the treatise by Edmund Burke echoed in its title, the study aimed
at distinguishing between the aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity, using
twentieth-century functional magnetic resonance imaging to confirm a hypothesis
three centuries in the making: Ishizu and Zeki did, indeed, find a “distinctly different
pattern of brain activity” in experiences reported as sublime. Surprisingly, whereas
beauty has long provoked interest from psychologists, Ishizu and Zeki’s seems to be
the first neuroimaging study to directly tackle the sublime.2 As a subfield, the cogni-
tive study of sublimity is highly diffuse, and consists primarily of speculative work
originating from interdisciplinary humanities scholars rather than psychologists. If, as
Alan Richardson has observed, there has been a “cognitive element to the sublime”
since its inception,3 where are the voices of modern cognitive psychologists?
Not silent: but also not speaking precisely the same language. As psychology has
opened to the study of emotion and of aesthetics, two bodies of research pertinent to
the sublime have emerged under different names. The first, a cognitive model of awe,
corresponds significantly with traditional sublime discourse in both its structure and
its predicted effects.4 The second—neurological studies of pleasurable physiological
chills, or “frisson,” during highly moving moments in m usic—explores a sublime-
like peak response in which aesthetic pleasure tips into something more. The two
research areas do not provide a perfect correspondence, nor does either translate
perfectly to our concept of “sublimity,” although awe comes remarkably close. The
challenge faced by cognitively minded critics is, then, how to integrate the valuable
insights of centuries of sublime discourse with research that cannot simply be slotted
in to explain or extend it, but instead demands a reorientation of certain fundamen-
tal precepts of sublime theory itself. Rather than a threat, I propose that we view the
challenge as generative, offering us an occasion to imagine a sublime discourse recen-
tered on the joys and alienations of insight, not an association with trauma and fear.
A Heterogeneous Field
The diffuseness of the “cognitive sublime” stems in part from a problem of defini-
tion. Not only does the common use of the adjective “sublime” differ greatly from
the critic’s technical term, critics themselves often disagree. These differences have
serious ramifications for psychology: a study on the aesthetics of pleasurable fear, for
example, may have little connection to a study on the perception of massive objects,
Recentering the Sublime 121
stymieing communication and consensus between scholars, and raising the deeper
concern that the disparate features of the sublime will not articulate a psychologically
coherent category at all. However, a few coherent trends have emerged from cognitive
sublime theory proper, most promisingly, research on affective transfer, and theories
of the sublime as a reaction to the failure of a cognitive mechanism.
Theories of the sublime as an emotional transformation of fear into pleasure origi-
nate with Burke, who hypothesized that the intensity of the sublime stemmed from
its origins in the strong passions of self-preservation.5 The idea that negative affect
might be converted to positive resurfaced in twentieth-century arousal-based models
of emotion. Emotions, within this framework, consist of two factors: a state of
physiological arousal in the autonomic-limbic system, and a cognitive appraisal of the
situation that gives that baseline autonomic excitation its qualitative valence. Because
autonomic arousal decays slowly, however, it can persist while the situation changes,
permitting what Zillmann calls “excitation transfer,” a holdover of arousal from one
emotion to the next. In his 1971 study, for example, Zillmann found that watching
intensely arousing pornography promoted aggressive behavior more effectively than
a less arousing stimulus that matched the aggression’s emotional character; the effect
has also been connected to enjoyment of horror.6 More recently, a study by Eskine
et al. found physiological arousal to be correlated with finding an artwork more
moving; moreover, fear, specifically, was more effective in this regard than neutral
arousal triggered by exercise, echoing the structure of the Burkean sublime.7 All told,
excitation transfer research offers a promising account of the rush of exhilaration
that sometimes follows terror, tipping aesthetic experiences into intensities. However,
transfer of fear to pleasure seems to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient element in
sublime experiences: unless rollercoasters are sublime but quiet, meditative ecstasies
are not, arousal transfer alone is not a satisfactory account.
The second possibility is roughly Kantian in its contours: a recursive two-stage pro-
cess in which some cognitive operation is overloaded, followed by a meta-cognitive
judgment in which that breakdown generates meaning. Freeland, for example, posits
that sensory or emotional qualities in the sublime stimulus overwhelm the primal
limbic system, then push us to secondary reflections about that overwhelming effect
and the work’s power, processed in a “higher” cortical neural pathway.8 Holmqvist
and Płuciennik’s linguistic account is more specific: they propose that “Kantian”
adjectives like “endless and boundless” code a perceptual failure to visually scan a
vast object in sequential intervals, which then shunts the cognitive measuring system
to a different, virtual scale, releasing exaltation in the triumph of human imagina-
tion.9 Finally, Richardson argues that the awed delight we experience in response to
optical illusions is a marker of a “neural sublime,” in which we marvel at the alienat-
ing materiality of the brain, revealed in its moment of failure.10 Neither Richardson’s
nor Holmqvist and Płuciennik’s theories are intended to function as comprehensive
accounts of the sublime; while Richardson demonstrates, for example, that aware-
ness of the alterity of one’s mind was a prominent topos of Romantic sublime dis-
course, not all sublime experiences will involve that specific self-awareness. Freeland’s
account, on the other hand, is extremely loose: many stimuli are processed in both the
cortex and limbic system, but very few are sublime. However, the two-stage structure
of all three theories fits remarkably well into a related model of emotion: Keltner and
Haidt’s account of awe as a challenge, and subsequent accommodation, of a cognitive
schema when confronted with radically expanded frame of reference.11
122 Elizabeth Oldfather
Awe and the Sublime

Keltner and Haidt’s model draws upon the long-established principle that our interac-
tions with the world are governed by cognitive schemas—mental models, formed by
experience, that allow us to efficiently process new encounters through categoriza-
tion rather than needing to attend to every detail individually. Most commonly, we
perform schematic assimilation, placing novel information in an extant schema; more
rarely, we perform an accommodation of the schema itself. Awe, Keltner and Haidt
hypothesize, correlates with a specific kind of accommodation, namely, “a challenge
to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of
something vast” that produces sensations of alienation, smallness, and fear.12 Awe
begins, as did Weiskel’s psychologized Kantian sublime, “where the conventional
systems, readings of landscape or text, broke down”13—but unlike Kantian theories,
it does not reflexively locate new order in the collapse itself. Instead, information is
simply reorganized in a new, broader frame, producing, if successful, a pleasurable
sense of “enlightenment and rebirth.”14 Moreover, the challenge to the extant schema
does not always necessarily result in a successful accommodation, which allows
Keltner and Haidt to account for the existence of both triumphal and alienating
experiences of awe.
The process of reframing is not domain-limited, and can encompass a challenge to
any dimension of reference, including spirituality, human ability, and the mathemati-
cal or metaphysical order of the cosmos, depending on the schema in play; Keltner
and Haidt refer to these as distinct emotional “flavours” of awe.15 While researchers
following Keltner and Haidt have used vast nature as the prototypical instance, they
have also found that the corresponding cognitive p rocess—a tendency to reorder the
represented world in a vaster frame—can cross domain boundaries. Take, for exam-
ple, the situation of a hiker who suddenly comes upon an expansive view. At once,
the field of the perceptible is radically expanded, the hiker’s relative reach and power
radically diminished: he must reorganize his representation of the world to encompass
that personal weakness and grandness of scale. As he seeks to make sense of the new
framework, he may glimpse a grander pattern or agency within it. Indeed, Valdesolo
and Graham have found significantly higher instances of supernatural belief in those
who had first watched an awe-inspiring video montage of nature, compared with
those who watched an amusing nature montage; the awe-primed participants also
showed a greater tendency to attribute deliberate patterns to a string of numbers that
had, in actuality, been randomly generated.16 Awe predisposed participants, that is,
to seek out deeper underlying patterns in the world. A number of studies have also
shown a correlation between awe and pro-social judgments and behaviors, indicating
a “small self”—a lowered sense of one’s own relative significance in the world.17
Although Keltner and Haidt are cautious about the relationship between their
cognitive model of awe and the Burkean sublime, the similarities are extensive. One
crucial difference, however, is that while “awe” can describe fairly mild feelings,
“sublimity” is typically reserved for intensities. Konečni’s “Aesthetic Trinity Theory”
offers one possible route to synthesis, treating physiological responses like frisson,
general feelings of “being moved,” and a sublime peak experience he calls “Aesthetic
Awe” as a hierarchical progression of aesthetic experience.18 Whether this kind of
hierarchy reflects a qualitative psychological distinction is not clear. However, the
intense transformative, self-reflexive effects of the sublime described in humanities
discourse seem to indicate, if not a peak form of awe, then at least a very particular
“flavour.” To explore that distinction further, I turn to a theory from cognitive liter-
ary studies that resonates particularly well with Keltner and Haidt’s account of awe:
fictional recentering.
Awe and Fictional Recentering

Media audiences often report feeling that they have been transported to or immersed
in a fictional world. Marie-Laure Ryan employs the term “recentering” for these
processes of fictional world-transition, emphasizing the rebounding effects upon the
self when “the realm of possibilities is . . . recentered around the sphere which the
narrator presents as the actual world.”19 Recentering affects more than the sense of
one’s physical location: one’s beliefs and emotional attitudes may also become relative
to the situation and characters, resulting in persuasive effects that can persist beyond
the conclusion of the narrative.20 Even factual knowledge can be recentered: Gerrig,
for example, has shown that fictional schemas s uppress incompatible facts, such that
reading even a brief narrative in which Lindbergh was not first to cross the Atlantic
makes participants slower to evaluate the truth of the matter when quizzed later.21
Taken together, since schemas and models govern the way we think and behave as
beings in the world, these studies demonstrate a potentially tremendously transforma-
tive, if largely temporary, effect of imaginative recentering.
Reuven Tsur takes the natural next step, suggesting that such recentering might
itself be sublime—a “relinquishing of ordinary consciousness” and its illusions of
world-stability and control.22 In certain cases, he may be correct: Istvan Csicsery-
Ronay Jr., for example, describes the “sense of wonder” particular to science fiction,
whose heavily counterfactual possible worlds “surpass the accustomed and habitual”
with a conceptual vastness of their own, as sublime.23 Most fictional worlds, how-
ever, differ so little from the everyday that readers are able to apply extant schemas
quite seamlessly in order to parse them.24 A new story is no more than a familiar
room populated by strangers, a case for schematic assimilation far more often than
accommodation. Unlike everyday life, however, stories may be deliberately designed
to challenge ideas and raise strong emotion, making them a crucial source for sublime
experiences of alterity that may otherwise be encountered only through rare serendip-
ity. If a reader is sufficiently recentered within the coordinates of a fictional world,
Keltner and Haidt’s model predicts that a “vastness” relative to that world and its
concepts should trigger the same process of awe. In line with this prediction, Schoeller
and Perlovsky report that readers characteristically report the sublime- associated
experience of chills during the “third act” of a narrative—not, that is, during slow
identification processes of immersion, but rather in later startling shifts of anagnorisis
or epiphany.25
Within the accommodation-to-vastness model, all awe is epiphanic. Art, however,
has a unique reflexive capacity to symbolize that moment of realization and make
its work legible. Ironically, that very surface legibility can make a text so overdeter-
mined as a trigger of sublime experience that its etiology becomes nearly impossible
to trace. Joyce’s short story “The Dead” is a case in point. The epiphany experienced
by the focalizing character, Gabriel Conroy, seems a perfect exemplar of an accom-
modation to vastness producing both enlightenment and a morbidly “small self.”
From the story’s start, Gabriel’s schemas are repeatedly challenged, but he ignores or
assimilates the information: he assumes that others are secretly bored by a masterful
piano performance because he is, despite the applause; quizzed by the radical Miss
Ivors, he dismisses her as an empty shill rather than consider her opinion of him; even
a minor rebuff of masculinity from the maid leaves him “discomposed” and strug-
gling to regain his sense of control.26 His chauvinist assimilation of his wife Gretta’s
history, choices, and even appearance to his own schema sets up the story’s crowning
moment of egocentric error: Gabriel assumes, in Gretta’s silence, a reflection of his
own sexual desire. When Gretta instead confronts him with a world in which he
cannot be central—a lover met before Gabriel came on stage, his death for that love,
the whole lost universe of the p ast—the moment of decentering is so profound that
Gabriel experiences it as a morbid attenuation of his selfhood, “his own identity . . .
fading out into a grey impalpable world,” as he prospectively imagines the deaths
of loved ones, and of himself.27 Gabriel accommodates his world- schema to an
objective-historical frame whose externality is ultimate. The text blooms with ghosts
and snow.
Yet Joyce’s consistent undermining of Gabriel’s sympathetic appeal suggests that
the ghosts and snow, or what they represent, may bear more responsibility for pro-
ducing sublime readerly experience than the nearly axiomatic demonstration of
accommodation-to-vastness that his main character performs. Sympathetic recenter-
ing in Gabriel’s perspective might let us experience his insight about the text-relative
world, as it were, in character—but Gabriel’s perspective is repeatedly revealed in
the story as an increasingly untenable bad faith, blocking identification as it lays the
groundwork for revelation. There is another possibility. A reader might be triggered
by the text to perform a process of accommodation relative not to Gabriel, but to a
preexisting schema in her mind. The overloaded tropes and images of sublimity in
Joyce’s denouement are readily available to serve this triggering function. Indeed, the
concluding gesture, a nearly cinematic vision that pans out across Dublin as snow
covers “all the living and the dead,” extends a ghostly sentiment of universality that
seems to include Joyce’s readers in its grand occlusion—an invitation into a schema
of human mortality whose vastness is available to anyone. Recentering in the story
gives salience to its themes and images, including schemas of ego and death, within a
reader’s mind; and the accommodation itself is, in its alienation or ecstasy, all her own.
In other words, the story ultimately becomes sublime because, and to the degree that,
the accommodation it provokes is personally cognitively real.
Joyce’s liberal use of vast spatial imagery—not only the blanketing snow, but also
the “region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead”—at the story’s close also reinforces
a deeply self-relevant kind of sublime accommodation.28 The use of natural (or super-
natural) vastness to signal sublimity is somewhat hackneyed; but its commonplace
status may stem from the special relationship spatial cognition bears to proprioceptive
awareness of the self. Our embodiment determines the way we perceive space in a
fundamental way: experiments indicate, for example, that if our hiker wears a heavy
pack, he may estimate the coming hill as steeper; if he has longer arms, he may judge
a further distance “near.”29 Might the connection also run the other way, making
huge spaces directly alter our intuitive sense of our bodies? Bart Vandenabeele has
hypothesized that when viewing a mountain we both sympathetically identify with
its grandness and consider our relative size, leaving us simultaneously imaginatively
exalted and diminished.30 Embodied spatial cognition may well perform equivalent
functions at a very basic level, inextricably linking impassibly vast terrain to a sense
of smallness, or cognitively representing the vastness in virtual bodily terms—ghostly
mental arms long enough to reach mountains. These connections between proprio-
ception and space are, however, unique to that domain; although the point is specula-
tive, we have reason to posit that spatial vastness is s pecial—that its invocation really
is a “hack,” an artistic cheat code for provoking sublime intimations.
The observation that emerges from fictional recentering is that artistic moments
of sublimity seem to require an accommodation of the reader’s own preexisting
schemas, perhaps particularly those schemas that include an explicit element of self-
representation, if not precisely reflexivity. A further point in favor of this observation
is the phenomenon of the trick ending: the false epiphany. The famous “turn” of
The Sixth Sense (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), for example, is that the focalizing
character has been a ghost all along—a realization that radically alters the situation
model of the film’s metaphysics, altering our understanding of everything that has
gone before. The sudden supernatural broadening of our frame of reference may
well bring on a momentary chill; but the film does not afterwards seem to have been
sublime, but rather clever. I am not a ghost; I have not been observing the living, all
along, from a ghost’s perspective. The insight has been purely context-dependent, and
outside of the film’s own limited frame of reference, it does not mean. Yet the frisson
has been, in that limited moment, a real one—a marker, perhaps, indicating that some
momentary accommodation has occurred without its deeper, more lasting effects. The
existence of the two very different kinds of schematic accommodation, the two kinds
of chills, suggests a real cognitive distinction between awe and sublimity that goes
beyond mere “flavour.”
Frisson
Music, however, poses a challenge to the requirement of real schematic accom-
modation in aesthetic awe. As a non-representational art, music is not likely to
trigger self-relevant schemas, unless the piece is associated with a memory. Blood
and Zatorre’s seminal study of frisson, however, found that music elicited chills
despite “producing minimal personal associations and/or memories”—the experi-
ence of frisson was “intrinsic to the music itself.”31 Yet musical frisson does seem to
have a sublime character: it operates as a peak aesthetic effect that correlates with
intensity of emotion, and exhibits a neural pattern qualitatively distinct from mere
enjoyment.32 Moreover, awe is reportedly a very common trigger for goosebumps,
linking it directly to frisson.33 Finally, despite the lack of autobiographical relevance
reported by Blood and Zatorre’s participants, musical frisson does not have the
qualitative character of a false epiphany: it can feel quite deeply meaningful, despite
stemming from properties that seem purely relative to the internal schema of the
musical work itself.
One solution to the puzzle of music’s genuine epiphanic character is the hypothesis
that music can act as a cognitive signal of vastness. Burke, for instance, perhaps influ-
enced by the contemporaneous “penchant for the musically vast” recently described
by Claudia Johnson, posits in his discussion of the sublime that the sheer impact of
a loud sound might suspend the action of the soul.34 Konečni, more dismissively, has
proposed that music can only be sublime due to personal associations or “being per-
formed in vast architectural spaces,” not through its own qualities.35 Sudden loudness
is indeed a common feature of musical passages that trigger frisson, sudden softness
Figure 7.1 Reduction of measures 325–330 of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, op. 125
can also serve; the most important feature is sudden shifts in general, particularly
unexpected chord progressions and m odulations— properties of music’s structure
rather than its gross sonority. Harrison and Loui even claim that “some level of
violated expectation may be a prerequisite” for chills.36 As Hagendoorn has pointed
out, this structure of expectation-violation constitutes a provocative point of overlap
between frisson research and the Keltner and Haidt model of awe.37
Expectation-violation in music can be analyzed as an instance of adjusting an inter-
nal tonal schema to accommodate a kind of vastness. In Beethoven’s Symphony no.
9, for example, the composer employs an unexpected progression from A to F major
(I to ♭VI) to herald a dramatic shift in the mood, and a modulation to a new key.
The above reduction is a rough sketch of the bars that lead into the F major tonality.
Beethoven first establishes the key of A major with two repeated standard cadences
in the chorus on the text “vor Gott” (“’fore God”), chased by frenetic descending A
major scales in the strings. On the third “vor,” however, the orchestration thins and
all voices converge on an open A; then, on the final “Gott,” while the upper voices
remain on A, the lower voices of the orchestra and chorus drop to an unexpected F
natural, a note not contained in the previous scale or key.
The effect of this pivot is to reorient the “A” in a new harmonic universe. Musical
scales, like cognitive schemas, are systems of salience that predict which e vents—here,
chords and pitches—are likely to occur. In the shift from an A to an F major tonality,
more than half of the pitches in the scale, half the universe, are r eplaced—effectively
opening the music to a whole new range of previously improbable chords. Lest
this appear a radical gesture on Beethoven’s part, I should mention that the I–♭VI
progression is not particularly uncommon, just as panoramic views are not uncom-
mon. What makes it feel revelatory is the way Beethoven builds expectation. With
his twice-repeated, once-violated pattern of chords, the orchestra’s all-possible open
“A,” and the insistent drum-beat through it, we are being cued to expect something
new—something, given the sheer tension and volume of the music, momentous. Tsur,
borrowing musical vocabulary, describes this effect in poetry as “emotive crescendo”:
as in excitation transfer, a poet builds energy in order to stage a peak experience,
often an evocation of death, whose transcendence soars on the affective wings of
what has come before.38 A I–♭VI progression does not represent death, but here, does
open a kind of abyss: the basses drop down, leaving the sopranos floating above, as
the symphony’s range of pitches literally broadens and deepens. E. T. A. Hoffmann
famously described sublime Beethoven as “open[ing] the realm of the colossal and
immeasurable,”39 and the music feels very nearly spatial here, as if we have come
upon the lip of some great, dizzying chasm: no doubt, given the text, the cosmic effect
is quite intentional.
Other composers have used the sublime potential of a I–♭VI progression to rouse
sensations of otherworldliness in a less bombastic style. The “Agnus Dei” of Fauré’s
Requiem, for example, contains a similar pivot on a sustained single t one—a solo C,
in the soprano line, held over two otherwise empty b ars—that resolves into a deeper,
full-orchestra pianissimo A flat major. The unexpected sonority heralds a lush pat-
tern of improbable tonal progressions, the musical equivalent of sinking into soft,
undulating water. Such senses of spatial being within a universe of music—“lost” in
the rhythm, “awash” in sound—suggest that our conceptual mappings of the proper-
ties of music do offer the self some kind of perspectival locus to sit in; however, it is
difficult to conceive of this except as a metaphor applied retroactively, much as other
kinds of schematic “location”—the ethical compass, the great chain of being—are
also metaphorical.
The neuroscience of frisson does, however, point to one provocative link between
the musical sublime and personal salience: neurochemical addiction. Blood and
Zatorre’s study used PET imaging to locate neural correlates of the experience of
chills, and found a pattern of response previously noticed in addiction—notably, there
were decreases in blood flow to regions associated with aversion and negative emo-
tion, such as the amygdala, and concurrent increases to the ventral striatum, which
mediates reward.40 Salimpoor et al., following this trail, found that the activity in
the striatum corresponded to a two-stage release of the neurotransmitter dopamine,
well-known for both its hedonic effects and its role in habit formation.41 In Biederman
and Vessel’s “infovore” hypothesis, the dopamine circuitry in the striatum has also
been tentatively posited as a part of the brain’s endogenous system for rewarding the
creation of meaning from new information. Taken together, these results suggest that
the brain’s “addiction” to music may, in fact, be part of a broader addiction to the
pleasures of insight, the predicted outcome of sublime awe—and, too, that music may
have a particularly direct line on the sense of meaning. Provocatively, Biederman and
Vessel’s paper also references early work on musical frisson, noting that the same
mu- opioid system that motivates learning prevents, when chemically blocked by
naloxone, the phenomenon of chills.42
The possible neuroaesthetic synthesis tentatively promised by this picture is, how-
ever, far too premature to theorize at present: the pattern of Blood and Zatorre’s
functional anatomical results on frisson, for example, shows little overlap with Ishizu
and Zeki’s general map of the correlates of the sublime. Because these experiments
were designed around very different facets of the sublime, the current lack of conver-
gence from neuroimaging studies should not trouble us; further cross-modal research
on frisson and its relationship to awe is needed. In addition, scholarship on music’s
unusually close relationship to the experience of meaning is no less divergent. As Guy
Madison writes, “although many different ideas about the relationship between emo-
tions and music have been proposed in the last 2500 years, there is yet no inkling of
consensus.”43 Given such a timescale, a little more patience seems wise.
Recentering the Sublime

The coalescing research around awe and frisson paints a picture of the sublime
whose most profound kinship is not to fear, transcendence, or alienation, but rather
to the simpler practical delight of learning—presenting an exciting potential new
direction for empirically curious theorists of the sublime. I have begun to raise, here,
some puzzles that collaborative research or simply cognitive criticism might explore.
More generally, however, the experimental findings on awe and frisson also present
a broader discursive opportunity for sublime theorists to do some “recentering” of
our own—to consider how, as scholars working on a phenomenon that is ostensibly
grounded in a psychological experience, we respond to empirical studies of that
experience that clash with centuries of theory. Despite the extensive commonalities of
Keltner and Haidt’s awe model and the theory of the sublime, awe-based sublimity
is more than old theoretical wine in a new neuropsychological bottle; instead, it may
be wine of an older vintage than we are used to. In significant ways, the theory of
awe returns “the sublime” to a pre-Burkean history that has become so discursively
deemphasized that its insights can once again seem new.
Although the theory of awe as a form of cognitive insight arising from schematic
shifts is novel, its thematic associations are not. The preeminent status of nature as an
awe trigger, and its cognitive connection to agency-attribution, raises the old specter
of Romantic natural piety; and its pro-social effects lean away from the Burkean
segregation of sublimity from the “societal” passions of beauty. Meanwhile, although
experiences of alienation, alterity, and terror are not lost in the awe-oriented sublime,
they become far less salient. For some, this categorical shift may disqualify awe’s
vastness-accommodation as a viable paradigm for sublimity. We might also, how-
ever, treat it as a radical reclamation of the phenomenon of sublime experience from
systemic eighteenth-century philosophy. As modernity has critiqued Burke’s more
political categorical impositions upon the sublime—as the masculine, dark, strong
half to beauty’s bright feminine weakness—its systemic association with the passions
of self-preservation may simply be the next to go.
That change would mirror a trend already long at work in the humanities. Feminist
scholars, in particular, have rejected traditional and postmodern versions of the
sublime not only for their “violence, domination, failure,” but also for their overt
thematic sexism, and their emphasis on the triumph of the individual, autonomous
subject.44 Yaeger’s “female sublime,” for example, “spreads itself out into multiplic-
ity” instead of establishing triumphal subjectivity; and Christopher Hitt calls for an
“ecological sublime” whose “transcendence . . . would resist the traditional reinscrip-
tion of humankind’s supremacy over nature.”45 As both Hitt and Richardson point
out, the pre-Kantian and poetic history of the sublime offers ample fuel for a formula-
tion centered on self-effacing unity with nature, or on ecstatic ravishment.46 The cog-
nitive psychology of awe adds more to that fire. Its sublime is outwardly-focused and
self-diminishing; it offers a breakdown of representation that does not require radical
rupture to secondary systems of meaning; and even its most selfish pleasures—the
rush of insight, the sense of oneness with a greater u nity—remain ecological in kind,
generated through the relationality of self to world. We need not view a recentering of
the sublime in light of new empirical research, that is, as a hostile takeover or threat;
it is, rather, part of broader organic processes already at work in our own evolving
discourses of the sublime.
Notes
1 Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki, “A Neurobiological Enquiry into the Origins of Our
Experiences of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Vol. 8, Art.
891 (2014).
2 Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian, “Neuroscience of Aesthetics,” Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1369, No. 1 (2016): 172–194.
3 Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 24.
4 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic
Emotion,” Cognition & Emotion, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2003): 297–314.
5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings [1757], ed. David Womersley (London;
New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 85–86.
6 Dolf Zillmann, “Television Viewing and Physiological Arousal,” in Jennings Bryant and Dolf
Zillmann, eds. Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction ProcessesCommunication
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991): 103–134.
7 Kendall J. Eskine, Natalie A. Kacinik, and Jesse J. Prinz, “Stirring Images: Fear, Not
Happiness or Arousal, Makes Art More Sublime,” Emotion, Vol. 12, No. 5 (2012): 1071–
1075. See also Raymond McBride, “Towards a Sublime State of Consciousness,” Journal
of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 11–12 (2014): 19–40.
8 Cynthia Freeland, “The Sublime in Cinema,” in Carl R. Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds.
Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), 68–73.
9 Kenneth Holmqvist and Jarosław Płuciennik, Infinity in Language: Conceptualization of
the Experience of the Sublime (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008): 29–54.
10 Richardson 27.
11 Keltner and Haidt passim.
12 Keltner and Haidt 304.
13 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 22.
14 Keltner and Haidt 304.
15 Michelle N. Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman, “The Nature of Awe: Elicitors,
Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 21, No. 5 (2007):
944–963, 945; Keltner and Haidt 304.
16 Piercarlo Valdesolo and Jesse Graham, “Awe, Uncertainty, and Agency Detection,”
Psychological Science, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2014): 170–178.
17 Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman; Melanie Rudd, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker, “Awe
Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,”
Psychological Science, Vol. 23, No. 10 (2012): 1130–1136; Paul K. Piff et al., “Awe,
the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Vol. 108, No. 6 (2015): 883–899; Claire Prade and Vassilis Saroglou, “Awe’s Effects on
Generosity and Helping,” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2016): 1–9.
18 Vladimir J. Konečni, “Aesthetic Trinity Theory and the Sublime,” Philosophy Today, Vol.
55, No. 1 (2011): 64–73.
19 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22.
20 For a review of psychological research on spatial and emotional perspective-taking, see
Amy Coplan, “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2004): 141–152. On the connection to persuasion,
see Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye: Transportation- Imagery
Model of Narrative Persuasion,” in Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange, and Timothy Brock,
eds. Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum
Associates, 2002): 315–342.
21 Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of
Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 161–171.
22 Reuven Tsur, On the Shore of Nothingness: Space, Rhythm, and Semantic Structure in
Religious Poetry and Its Mystic-Secular Counterpart : A Study in Cognitive Poetics (Exeter,
UK; Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2003), 92.
23 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “On the Grotesque in Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies,
Vol. 29, No. 1 (2002): 71–99. 71.
24 A. C. Graesser, Brent Olde, and Bianca Klettke, “How Does the Mind Construct and
Represent Stories?,” in Green, Strange, and Brock, 229–262. 254.
25 Felix Schoeller and Leonid Perlovsky, “Great Expectations—Narratives and the Elicitation
of Aesthetic Chills,” Psychology, Vol. 6 (2015): 2098–2102. 2098.
26 James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 178.
27 Joyce 225.
28 Joyce 224.
29 Dennis R. Proffitt, “Embodied Perception and the Economy of Action,” Perspectives on
Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2006): 110–122; Matthew R. Longo and Stella F.
Lourenco, “Space Perception and Body Morphology: Extent of near Space Scales with Arm
Length,” Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 177, No. 2 (2007): 285–290.
30 Bart Vandenabeele, “A Psychological Alternative to Schopenhauer’s Theory of the
Sublime,” in The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 128–142.
31 Anne J. Blood and Robert J. Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate
with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 98, No. 20 (2001): 11818–11823. 11819.
32 Blood and Zatorre passim; Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, “Thrills, Chills, Frissons,
and Skin Orgasms: Toward an Integrative Model of Transcendent Psychophysiological
Experiences in Music,” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 5 (2014): 790, 3.
33 Laura A. Maruskin, Todd M. Thrash, and Andrew J. Elliot, “The Chills as a Psychological
Construct: Content Universe, Factor Structure, Affective Composition, Elicitors, Trait
Antecedents, and Consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 103,
No. 1 (2012): 135.
34 Claudia L. Johnson, “‘Giant HANDEL’ and the Musical Sublime,” Eighteenth-Century
Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1986): 3; Burke 123.
35 Vladimir J. Konečni, “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills,” Bulletin of
Psychology and the Arts, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2005): 27–44. 37.
36 John A. Sloboda, “Music Structure and Emotional Response,” Psychology of Music, Vol.
19 (1991): 110–120; Oliver Grewe et al., “Listening to Music as a Re-Creative Process:
Physiological, Psychological, and Psychoacoustical Correlates of Chills and Strong Emotions,”
Music Perception, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2007): 297–314; Harrison and Loui 3, passim.
37 Ivar Hagendoorn, “The Dancing Brain,” in Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science,
Vol. 5 (2003): 19–34.
38 Tsur 73.
39 Dmitri Tymoczko, “The Sublime Beethoven,” Boston Review, December 1, 1999.
40 Blood and Zatorre 11822.
41 Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release during Anticipation
and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music,” Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2011):
257–262.
42 Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain: A Novel Theory
Explains Why the Brain Craves Information and Seeks It through the Senses,” American
Scientist, Vol. 94, No. 3 (2006): 247–253.
43 Guy Madison, “Cause and Affect: A Functional Perspective on Music and Emotion,” in
Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, eds. Art and the Senses (Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011): 329–350. 330.
44 Judy Lochhead, “The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics,” Women and
Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2008): 63–74. 70; Andrew Slade,
Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), passim.
45 Patricia Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Linda Kauffman, ed. Gender and Theory
(New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989): 191–212. 191; Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological
Sublime,” New Literary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1999): 603–623. 609.
46 Richardson 25–6; Hitt 607–609.
8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime
Lyuba Encheva
In recent years “gamification” has begun to take shape as a concept, a design strategy,
and a theoretical notion. Deterding and team1 have described it as “the use of game
design elements in non-game contexts.” And while this is likely the most comprehen-
sive and functional definition we have to date, it is strictly meant to explain gami-
fication as an action or a practice. On the other hand, its ideational content varies
significantly from one context of use to another, and is often dressed in contradictory
terms. Still, one notion reappears in gamification literature with remarkable consist-
ency, and that is Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow. According to the author himself,
this is a moment of intense involvement when a feeling of easy mastery is combined
with a dissipating sense of time and self. So described, this state of high productivity
and enjoyment constitutes a natural attraction to players, game designers, and gami-
fication specialists alike. Consequently, it is often foregrounded as a design goal or as
the aspiration and supporting rationale behind the gamification project.
By examining the limits of subjective consciousness in the interplay between action
and passion, intentionality and surrender, Csikszentmihalyi’s concept offers ground
for the conceptualization of the gamified sublime. The sublime as a liminal experi-
ence that tests and shapes the boundaries of subjectivity has its roots in its classical
definitions. Edmund Burke speaks of the sublime as “delight” which “turns on pain,”
or a sense of “swelling and triumph” felt “when without danger we are conversant
with terrible objects” (Burke 83–84). Similarly, Kant’s discussion of the sublime as an
aesthetic judgment is only part of his enduring effort to detail the functioning of the
human mind. For him, it is a given that the sublime is “a disposition of the mind . . .
but not the object, which is to be called sublime” (Kant 134). A number of contem-
porary theorists treat the experience of the sublime as foundational to subjectivity.
Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes that “the sublime is a feeling . . . it is the emotion of
the subject at the limit” (Nancy 44), while Hartley points out that the problem of
representation at the center of the sublime is “the problem of the political subject’s
relationship to the social substance,” where the subject is “nothing but the gap,” the
“radical split in the social-symbolic” (Hartley 4, 10). Similarly, in her discussion on
the digital sublime Eugenie Shinkle reminds us that aesthetic discourse itself emerged
as an “inquiry into the subject”; therefore, it is less concerned with “questions of art
than with the reckoning of subjective boundaries” and “definitions of subjectivity”
(Shinkle 94–95). Thus, the concept of the sublime does not merely refer to the quali-
ties of the sublime object but also constitutes the relationship between an object and a
perceiving subject, a relationship that is both rudimentary and extreme as the rupture
of individuation. The sublime encounter, then, can be understood as the moment of
132 Lyuba Encheva
separation of the one from the whole, where the imposing presence of the beyond is
met by an equivalent resistance in the singular that persists regardless.
Since flow and the sublime can be both seen as formative of subjective con-
sciousness, they are also closely associated with freedom as a dynamic relation
between self and world. Csikszentmihalyi is often identified as the original inspira-
tion behind the kind of game design that successfully produces games that are so
fun that they are “addictive” but that also promote a sense of freedom and mastery.
The sublime, and flow as its periphrasis in gamification discourse, points to that
moment of tension between power and submission, individuation and unity. Just
as Csikszentmihalyi talks about the achievement of happiness through “mastery
over consciousness itself” (9), Kant has postulated that “in our aesthetic judgement
nature is judged [beurteilt] as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather
because it calls forth our power [Kraft]” (Kant 145). What we see in Kant, and per-
haps in Csikszentmihalyi, is the kind of freedom Jean-Luc Nancy poetically qualifies
as “the sublime destination of reason itself” (Nancy 27). However, freedom can
also be approached from the perspective of the subject’s submission to the will of
Providence and to instinctual drives, as philosophers like Edmund Burke and Freud
have done. This split in the understanding of freedom, or freedom as the play of
diametrically opposed dispositions, is present in the notion of flow, as well as in that
of the sublime.
To contextualize the promise of empowerment through game design, I align
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of optimal experience with Kant’s vision of the sublime as
a reaffirmation of reason. To study flow as disempowerment or self-dissolution I also
read Freud’s exploration of freedom as submission to instinctual drives as an exten-
sion of Burke’s understanding of human nature as directed by the forces of nature
or Providence. Such an approach is made possible not only by the origin of “flow”
in positive psychology but also by the specific relevance of the above theorists to the
problems of freedom and subjectivity.
Against this theoretical background I argue that the success of “flow” as a promo-
tional banner for gamification consists in its meaning-making capacity as a persuasive
periphrasis of sublime affect. The urge toward a theoretical explanation of the mys-
terious power of video games is also an indication of the felt need among designers
of virtual reality to endorse the virtual experience not only as an event capable of
producing personal fulfillment and meaning, but also as important to the formation
and expansion of subjective consciousness as embodied experience. In this sense, the
concept of “flow” as used by game designers and gamifiers hints at the possibility of
designing and utilizing the sublime, that is, at the equivalence of the virtual and the
real. In addition, by adopting the notion of “flow” as its causa suí, gamification justi-
fies its ambition to coordinate the diverse interests of designers, users, and corporate
clients by attempting a solution to the long-standing challenge of political economy to
reconcile the free-willed subject with the well-utilized one.
The Sublime Effects of “Flow”

The experience of flow as formulated by Csikszentmihalyi and reinterpreted by gami-
fiers can be seen to describe the impact of the sublime encounter as a movement from
the overpowering experience of something greater than oneself to an empowering
sense of being in control. This movement is clearly distinguishable in the writing of
Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime 133
gamification theorists and promoters, who use the notion of flow to justify the capac-
ity of games to simultaneously empower and overpower the gamified subject.
As one of the pioneers and ideologues of gamification, Jane McGonigal sees the
transformation of trivial activities into games as an opportunity for a more positive
relationship to the world that promotes both individual growth and social advance-
ment. On the one hand, she emphasizes the personal agency of players by stating
that “we have to make our own happiness” by engaging in “autotelic”2 activities
that provide “intrinsic” rather than “extrinsic” rewards. On the other hand, she also
boasts that “game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme
effort and reward hard work” (13). Therefore, games are “a unique way of structur-
ing experience” that can generate “extreme emotional activation,” or inspire and
motivate “millions of people at a time” (28–34). As the power of the player appears
to be framed and preconditioned by the power of the game, McGonigal seeks support
from Csikszentmihalyi, whom she credits with founding “the science of happiness.”
His theory of optimal experience explains how, when freely entered, the structure
of “games and gamelike activities” presents the necessary conditions for the experi-
ence of the “intense, joyous engagement” he has called “flow” (McGonigal 35).
McGonigal also points out that game designers—“the most talented and powerful
happiness engineers on the planet”—are specifically trained to “relentlessly pursue
happiness outcomes, including flow,” and their e xpertise should be employed in the
organization of daily life (38).
Tom Chatfield, another proponent of gamification or serious games, discusses the
mysterious attraction of fun and games and how these can be applied in “the realms
of business and public service” (Chatfield 153). Similar to McGonigal, he argues that
a world designed according to the principles of play will be a more ethically elevated
and friendlier place. However, he still treats games as means toward ulterior ends,
and the satisfaction of the player as the necessary condition for their efficacy: “If the
future is looking more and more like a game, it’s because the science of satisfaction
has never before been so precise, so powerful, or so profitable. Where play goes,
the world will follow” (38). The “science of satisfaction” Chatfield is referring to is
again Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of optimal experience. Based on it, the utilization
of play becomes possible by means of isolating flow as the principle of fun and then
applying it to other contexts. Chatfield reinterprets the conditions Csikszentmihalyi
outlines for reaching this mental state as a recipe that calls for the right “balance of
rules, actions and consequences” that create “ceaseless demands on our attention”
(Chatfield 42–43).
If McGonigal and Chatfield are concerned with the humanistic promise of a game-
like world, writers like Zichermann and Hugos are more interested in promoting
games as tools for engagement with considerable business potential. Hugos’ book
Enterprise Games clearly treats the concept of flow as a prescription of how to build
“engagement engines” (Hugos 2). To work reliably these should be designed with
four features in mind: “goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation”
(12). Then, he clarifies that the right balance of the first three is “what induces
voluntary participation” (12). Zichermann, the author of Gamification by Design,
directly states that gamification is a way to “get people to take actions that they
don’t always know they want to take” (Zichermann and Cunningham 15). He is
also quick to admit that it is the idea of flow that is “at the heart of the success of
games” (16). Zichermann’s treatment of the player may be patronizing, but the more
134 Lyuba Encheva
careful language of the rest of the authors still carries a similar message. Unlike the
traditional reward system, which caters to material needs, gamification seeks to
take control over personal motivation by targeting desire and meaning-making pro-
cesses. However, the gamified subject’s “deep” satisfaction is only an interim goal, a
stepping-stone to an even greater purpose. Like games themselves, he is a powerful
agent precisely in order to be transformed into an effective means.
Flow, which serves to explain the capacity of games to subordinate by means
of exhilaration, appears to produce the opposite effects of the sublime encounter.
Without the inkling of a mysterious power that lures us despite our intentions, games
and gamified environments would be no different from other organizational struc-
tures. Hence, the notion of flow is employed by gamifiers to bridge the gap between
mystery and instrumentality, spontaneity and predictability, doing for doing’s sake
and utility. Still the question remains: what is it about the state of flow that supports
both the possibility for autonomous, self-motivated action, and the subject’s vulner-
ability to external manipulation? To answer this, I look at Csikszentmihalyi’s own
definition of the notion. I examine the empowering effect of flow as a method of struc-
turing the contents of consciousness in the context of Kant’s understanding of the sub-
lime as an experience that “awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us” (Kant
134). Then, I study the overpowering effect of flow as a loss of self-consciousness in
view of Freud’s treatment of freedom as submission to instinctual desires.
Flow as Being in Control

In his “Analytic of the Sublime” Kant explains that the feeling of the sublime “is
a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a
momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the
more powerful outpouring of them” (Kant 129). His description of restraint followed
by a release calls to mind a moment of shock and exhilaration when one holds one’s
breath before letting out a scream of excitement. Or perhaps, the “momentary inhibi-
tion of vital powers” refers to a physical or emotional exertion, which mobilizes the
whole being into a strenuous suspense. Csikszentmihalyi’s description of optimal
experience or flow approaches closely this second interpretation. He explains that
optimal experience occurs “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a
voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (Csikszentmihalyi
2008, 3). The experience of flow, he adds, is usually earned through pain, persistent
effort and discipline, while the pleasure we derive from it comes from the “sense of
mastery—or . . . participation in determining the content of life” (4). It appears, then,
that the state of flow, like sublime affect, is about the collision of pleasure and pain,
mastery and deference, that overflow into one another. This is the psychological
drama of the subject at its limit, who witnesses and partakes, submits to but also initi-
ates the formational exchange between self and world. However, while Kant speaks
of the sublime as an encounter that has to be incorporated into consciousness through
a “supersensible” faculty, Csikszentmihalyi develops a technique for “getting control
of life” through “achieved control over psychic energy” and “consciousness itself”
(6–9). From this perspective, flow is not only consciousness expanding but can also be
seen as a kind of intentionally sought sublime affect.
In contrast to classical Freudian psychoanalysis, which is based on the study of
pathologies, Csikszentmihalyi collects his data about the experience of “flow” from
people who describe their happiest moments. According to his respondents, these are
moments “in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to
matter” (4). Distinguishing between pleasure and enjoyment in a way reminiscent of
Kant’s distinction between the experience of beauty and the sublime, Csikszentmihalyi
claims that “enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investment of attention”
or conscious effort (46). Therefore, extreme sports make some of the most effective
flow-inducing activities, where enjoyment, the author stresses, is not derived from
“courting disaster,” but from “the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control
potentially dangerous forces” (60). Thus, Csikszentmihalyi conceptualizes optimal
experience as pleasure earned through pain, or as the result of the imposition of a
structure, which organizes the contents of consciousness in order to produce the
unobstructed flow of psychic energy.
Whether a person creates her own structure or enters an already existing one the
organization of psychic energy into flow is achieved only by a willing and wilful par-
ticipant. As Csikszentmihalyi explains, the produced system of action “takes its form
from the rules of the activity; its energy comes from the person’s attention” (65). In
other words, flow is possible when an activity is embraced, based on a subjective
criterion, as “autotelic”—enjoyable for its own sake, rather than as means to an
end. Thus, the sense of “exercising control in difficult situations” comes as a result
of the voluntary p articipation of an autonomous actor, who chooses to attach value
to specific goals and challenges. So defined, the state of flow closely approximates
modern concepts like intentionality and free will. Remarkably, however, the experi-
ence of control and mastery in flow coincides with a dissipating sense of self. This
momentary freedom from self-consideration and signification is not only enjoyable,
but allows the experience of unity with something other. As the actor becomes one
with the action, “what slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self”
(64). However, as Csikszentmihalyi explains, this “loss of self-consciousness can lead
to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed
forward” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, 64). And though he recognizes that this may seem
paradoxical, he also claims that “giving up self-consciousness is necessary for build-
ing a strong self-concept” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, 65).
In his own description of the nature and conditions of optimal experience
Csikszentmihalyi describes the complex notion of flow as delineated by a constant
movement between extremes. The unobstructed movement of psychic energy is
ensured by attention-structuring mechanisms. Flow is willed by the participant in
the activity, yet it can be addictive. The experience of autonomy and mastery over
an object or an action is emphasized by a feeling of unity and an absent sense of self.
Such fluctuations between order and disorder, control and surrender, autonomy and
dependence, describe the complex ways in which the self is negotiated through its
relationship to an outside world.
Csikszentmihalyi’s awareness of the implicit tensions on which the concept of
flow rests shows at various points in his work. According to his own model of the
self “the most basic fact about persons is that they are not only aware of their own
existence but can assume control of that existence” (Csikszentmihalyi and Halton 2).
After taking “self-awareness and self-control as givens,” Csikszentmihalyi and Halton
explain “self-awareness occurs when the self becomes the object of reflection—that
is the self takes itself as its own object” (3). In view of his own definition of the
self, Csikszentmihalyi has to admit that there is something “paradoxical [in the]
136 Lyuba Encheva
relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emerge
stronger afterward” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, 65), yet he continues to maintain that
retaining self-consciousness in a state of flow indicates a lesser degree of involvement.
Such a claim may resonate with the reader’s own experience but constitutes a contra-
diction in terms according to Western concepts of subjectivity. As Brinkmann points
out, the defining feature of modern subjectivity is precisely the idea that “object- and
self-awareness mutually imply one another,” which also makes “self-referentiality a
necessary condition of intentionality or object-directedness” (Brinkmann 33). If one’s
relationship to objects in the world is preconditioned by self-awareness, how can we
conceive of “flow”?
Csikszentmihalyi’s alternation between emphasizing the need for control over
one’s consciousness and insisting that self-consciousness itself dissipates in the exact
moment of controlled action calls to mind Kant’s statement that “the mind feels itself
moved in the representation of the sublime” (Kant 141). Kant compares this move-
ment to a “vibration” between a “repulsion” and an “attraction”: the first caused by
“the inadequacy of the imagination” stretched to its limits before “an abyss, in which
it fears to lose itself”; and the second caused by the fact that “the subject’s own inca-
pacity [Unvermögen] reveals the consciousness of an unlimited capacity [Vermögen]”
(141–142). This vibration or flow can also be understood as the transition from
representational- conceptual thinking to aesthetic perception. In other words, the
immersion into sensual input is experienced as a momentary detachment from pro-
cesses of conceptualization, which resume shortly after to absorb and distribute the
new stimuli into the existing scheme of meaning. Kant refers to the same movement
from sensual to sensible perception in his definition of the sublime: “That is sublime
which even to be able to think demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every
measure of the senses” (134). Consciousness, overwhelmed by the chaos of sensual
stimuli, is about to lose itself in the abyss, but instead remains intact and integrated
in the face of it.
The tension between empowerment and disempowerment characterizes both the
concept of flow and that of the sublime. However, for Kant and Csikszentmihalyi
the abyss of the unknown, or the immersion into indiscriminate sensual percep-
tion, is that which calls the subject to an awareness of the mind’s power to organ-
ize and structure reality. By emphasizing the consciousness expanding function of
flow, Csikszentmihalyi restores Kant’s faith in the “unlimited capacity” of reason.
However, what distinguishes him from Kant is the claim that optimal experience can
be intended and planned for. His idea of flow as an instrument for self-regulating the
contents of one’s consciousness is precisely what appeals to gamifiers. The problem
is that this leaves us with a self-generating and self-regulating subject lacking an
exterior.
To start this discussion from the opposite end, let’s look at freedom from the per-
spective of the body and instinctual drives.
Flow as Self-Preservation
In as much as the sublime can be conceived as the traumatic but formational process
of the self’s withdrawal from the world, it seems appropriate to extend the explora-
tion of the gamified sublime to Freud’s conceptualization of liberty as the negotiation
between the life and death drives. As a continuation of Burke’s physical sublime,
Freud’s perspective offers an important counterbalance to the modernist precedence
of reason instituted by Kant and still resonating in Csikszentmihalyi’s present-day
positive psychology. Ironically also, the discussion of freedom from the perspective of
the liberated body and instinctual desire implies the submission of reason to sensual
input or material forces beyond its control. In flow, this is marked by the dissolution
of self-consciousness in the moment of intense physical engagement.
The idea of the primary role of body and senses in the organization of human real-
ity goes back to Burke’s discussion of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His classification of human pas-
sions already anticipates what Freud would later call the life and death drives:
Most of the ideas which are capable of making a powerful impression on the
human mind, whether simply of Pain or Pleasure, or of the modification of those,
may be reduced very nearly to these two heads, self-preservation and society; to
the ends of one or the other of which all our passions are calculated to answer.
The passions which concern self-preservation, turn mostly on pain or danger . . .
and they are the most powerful of all the passions. [. . .]
The other head under which I class our passions, is that of society, which may
be divided into two sorts. The society of the sexes, which answers the purposes of
propagation; and next, that more general society, which we have with men and
with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the
inanimate world. The passions belonging to the preservation of the individual,
turn wholly on pain and danger: those which belong to generation, have their
origin in gratifications and pleasures.
(Burke 57–61)
Whether Freud’s notions of Eros and Thanatos are directly borrowed from Burke or
not, the close parallel between their ideas points to a long line of thought that gives
precedence to nature or Providence as a regulating principle, and to the body as their
instrument. Burke’s definition of the sublime is embedded in his understanding of the
human constitution as that “which Providence has framed in such a manner as to find
either pleasure or delight . . . in whatever regards the purposes of our being” (80). The
sublime, according to Burke, can “excite” a myriad of “passions” such as “delight,”
“astonishment,” “awe,” but all of these are founded on a peculiar mixture of pleasure
and pain. Delight is pleasure that “turns on pain,” and astonishment is “that state
of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror” (85,
94). Hence, the “idea of pain and danger,” which is implied in the experience of the
sublime affiliates it with the urge for “self-preservation.” However, the actual absence
of “such [directly threatening] circumstances” also gives us pleasure, or else, affiliates
the sublime with the passions under the head of “society.” Translated into Freudian
terms, Burke’s definition treats the sublime as a liminal state that draws on the ener-
gies of both Eros and Thanatos. It is the experience of the ego confronted with the
fear of death or dissolution into otherness. Yet, the presence of the “terrible,” at an
arm’s length, also reactivates or draws the ego’s boundaries, making them palpable
and vibrant. Thus, Burke’s understanding of the sublime prepares the ground for the
conception of freedom as submission to the body and its demands for pleasure.
At the level of the body and instinct the movement between being in control and
resignation is still present, but it has been redressed. Since pleasure and pain are
138 Lyuba Encheva
first bodily sensations and then psychological principles, the sublime appears as the
unavoidable pain of being, as absolute otherness found in another person or society.
Therefore, rather than speaking about battling faculties of the rational mind, the
presence and absence of consciousness, Freud talks about the struggle of conflicting
desires. For him the problem of freedom is the problem of the origin of the autono-
mous self whose needs are both provided for and frustrated by society.
In Civilization and its Discontents Freud situates the conflict between individual
liberty and society at the very origin of the ego. According to him, the unitary sense of
self emerges as a self-protection mechanism. The distinction between inner and outer
stimuli, which is not yet present in the primary ego-feeling of the infant, is motivated
by the need to separate and protect the ego from outside sources of pain and displeas-
ure. As Freud explains, the infant who feels one with the external world “separates
off an external world from itself” (15). From here on, the ego’s pursuit of pleasure is
regulated by the reality principle, which protects it from frustration by coordinating its
claims with external reality. Further on, pointing at the object-directedness of the self,
Freud explains the origin of civilized life as follows:
The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the
compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of
love, which made man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object [. . .]. Eros
and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization
too.
(55)
Love (as object- directedness) and necessity (as ego- directedness) or “hunger and
love,” as he quotes Schiller later, are human needs which civilization is meant to
satisfy, but which also reflect man’s natural constitution. “Hunger” for Freud signifies
the aggressive ego-instincts “which aim at preserving the individual” (death drive),
while “love” indicates the object-instincts, whose function is the preservation of the
species (Eros) (76).
The familiar conflict between individual and civilization, or self and other does not
simply result from the opposing interests of these two drives. The urge to aggression
does not always protect the individual but neither does Eros always serve the purposes
of the species. Both the instincts of life and death can have an inward or outward ori-
entation. The problem arises from “within the economics of the libido” (106), which
has to be distributed between the ego and its objects. As Freud explains, “any restric-
tion of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-
destruction” (78). Conversely, the love of the other, takes away from the love of the
self. In this system, Eros and Thanatos are the two extremes of the same movement
judged from the perspective of libidinal investment. The same principle underlies the
function of the super-ego, which demands instinctual renunciation out of “fear of loss
of love” (85). The aggression of the super-ego toward the ego, Freud suggests, returns
in equal measure the original aggression of the ego’s desire for an external object. In
other words, the greater the desire for the other, the greater the fear of loss of love,
the greater the self-imposed renunciation.
Clearly, the liberty to indulge one’s instinctual desires is frustrated by inner dis-
cord, rather than external imposition. The ego’s claim to autonomy appears as the
defensive reaction of a spoiled child who has been denied the satisfaction of his whims
and now stomps its feet in defiance. Otherness is hurtful, hence it is expelled; but
otherness is also the source of pleasure that has to be regained. Put differently, the
sublime encounter translated into the drama of emerging self-consciousness teaches
that freedom is a dynamic exchange between self and world. It is a form of breath-
ing where restraint is necessarily followed by release, and where being in control is
preconditioned by surrender. Having started with the capacity of humans to build and
structure the contents of consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi reaches the peak of optimal
experience to find a kind of merging of self with action, and a channeling of energy
that is more akin to release and surrender than to control. Freud, on the other hand,
understands human nature as driven by instincts and aggression, only to observe
how the spontaneous pursuit of pleasure transforms into instinctual renunciation and
sublimation under the threat of loss of love.
Thus, if structured, flow-inducing activities are seen as a product of civilization, and
are treated as the battle ground of Eros and the death drive, it becomes easier to under-
stand how they can be both empowering and subordinating. The blending of a sense
of mastery with a sense of self-dissolution in the state of flow parallels the change in
significance of the libidinal investment, which shifts from Eros to death drive depend-
ing on direction. In view of Freud’s ideas, the “joyous self-forgetful involvement”
that allows Csikszentmihalyi’s subjects to feel at one with the world can be read as a
return to primitive narcissism. At that early moment of psychic development the ego
is still not clearly demarcated and is dominated by a feeling of “limitlessness and of
a bond with the universe” (15). On the other hand, if the “oceanic” feeling, which
Freud also considers the basis of religious thinking, turns out to be present in the
mature individual, it might as well be equated with Csikszentmihalyi’s understanding
of flow. Based on its presently expanded definition, flow is the state in which psychic
or libidinal energy is so channeled that life and death drives are, at least momentarily,
harmonized to serve the interests of both the individual and the species. The non-
distinction between “the inner” and “the outer” in that very moment is a kind of free-
dom founded, simultaneously, upon mastery and submission, because the autonomy
of the self is hardly more important than the possibility of its transcendence.
Flow as the Gamified Sublime

With this we return to the topic of the sublime as the experience of the subject at the
limit. Whether it tests the limits of consciousness, comprehension, imagination, or the
senses, the sublime is that interruption, that flood of world toward the unitary self
that threatens its integrity. For Kant the sublime constitutes an abrupt encounter with
something radically different and greater than the subject, whose senses are intensely
overwhelmed, but whose faculty of reason regains control over meaning-making
processes. His ideas are the foundation of Csikszentmihalyi’s insistence that atten-
tion, psychic energy, and the contents of consciousness can be directed by the will of
a subject capable of control over his existence. However, optimal experience is not
simply consciousness expanding. It is a reach beyond the self, a momentary contact
with otherness that can be intentionally sought after.
At the other end of the spectrum, Burke also speaks of “terror” as the ruling principle
of the sublime, and of the terrible as anything beyond the familiar that is just as hard
to imagine as is death itself. The Burkean sublime delight—the pleasure that “turns
on pain”—is precisely the point of convergence between the urge for self-preservation
140 Lyuba Encheva
and the attraction of “society.” It is the libidinal energy that runs between Eros and
Thanatos. At the level of the body pain and pleasure are harder to reconcile, pointing to
the paradoxical wishes of an ego that makes a game out of life and death as it struggles
to coordinate its autonomy with its “infantile” need for oneness with the rest of the
world. Ultimately, the relationship between flow and Burke’s physical sublime, and its
extension in Freud, demonstrates that human nature expresses itself through a dynamic
relationship to the world, in which action and passion do not stand in contradiction,
self-affirmation tends toward self-denial, and the highest form of control is a kind of
wilful surrender.
The reference to the sublime through Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow has an
important function in the discourse of gamification. On the one hand, it equates vir-
tual and real experience by suggesting that sublime affect is possible in predesigned,
virtual environments. If the Kantian sublime referred to an affect produced by the
abrupt presentation of external stimuli that had to be incorporated by consciousness,
the concept of “optimal experience” or “flow” suggests that the effects of the sublime
can be willed forth with the help of ready structures of engagement and mind tech-
niques. In as much as the gamified subject is an instrument to oneself (and others), and
is enclosed in a technological environment of his own making, his encounter with the
sublime is also predesigned. In this respect, the discourse of gamification promoters
constitutes another example of the ambition to design and utilize the sublime. On the
other hand, flow as a “self-inflicted” sublime affect serves to validate the contradic-
tory treatment of the gamified subject as both a means to an end and the source of an
original intent. As it works through the conflicting desires of humans who want to be
both separate and together, the notion reveals the underlining goal of the gamification
project. It constructs an ideology that seeks to harmonize our claim to power with the
need to belong, the individual desire for mastery with the comfortable predictability
of structured group behavior. The rhetoric of gamification reveals its lofty aspirations;
whether gamifiers can, in fact, fulfill their promise to “design flow” is an entirely dif-
ferent matter.
Notes
1 S. Deterding, D. Dixon, R. Khaled, and L. Nacke, “From Game Design Elements to
Gamefulness: Defining Gamification,” in Proceedings of the 15th International Academic
MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (September, 2011), 9–15.
ACM.
2 Jane McGonigal describes games as “the quintessential autotelic activity” which is freely
chosen and rewarding in itself, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How
They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011, 2
Bibliography
Brinkmann, Klaus, “Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and the Modern Self,” History of the
Human Sciences, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2005): 27–48.
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Chatfield, Tom, Fun Inc.: Why Play is the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business (London:
Virgin, 2010).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2008; 1st edn. 1990).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Eugene Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and
the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., and Nacke, L. “From Game Design Elements to
Gamefulness: Defining Gamification,” in Proceedings of 15th International Academic
MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (September, 2011), 9–15.
ACM.
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1961).
Hartley, George, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Hugos, Michael H., Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business
(Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012).
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Mathews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
McGonigal, Jane, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change
the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, “The Sublime Offering,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jeffrey
S. Librett (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 25–53.
Penenberg, A. L., Play at Work: How Games Inspire Breakthrough Thinking (New York, NY:
Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).
Pink, Daniel, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York, NY:
Riverhead Books, 2009).
Schell, Jesse, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Amsterdam and Boston: Elsevier/
Morgan Kaufmann, 2008).
Shinkle, Eugenie, “Videogames and the Digital Sublime,” in Athina Karatzogianni and
Adi Kuntsman, eds. Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and
Technological Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 94–107.
Zichermann, Gabe and Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design: Implementing
Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011).
9 The Ambiguity Effects of the
Techno-Sublime
Ksenia Fedorova
The concept of the sublime, applied to experiences of technologically mediated, or

digital culture, raises multiple questions that go beyond the redefinition of the sublime
itself and give insights about the effects of technologies on how we conceive of the
“self” and what it means to be human. On the one hand, the sublime is applied to cer-
tain phenomena of digital culture such as: the autopoetic, generative qualities of code;
the extension of the senses that makes new perceptions possible; virtual reality, which
offers an illusion of immersion into “other,” imagined worlds; and datascapes that
are hardly navigable in their immensity and escape our ability to comprehend them
in their “totality.” All these phenomena can be approached through the features that
are most essential to the classical sublime (both Burkean and Kantian)—the encounter
with the unknown, the feeling of being overpowered by a bigger force incommensura-
ble with human cognitive abilities. On the other hand, these same qualities, especially
the quality of ambiguity and the sublime’s affective dimension (its intensity), blur
the boundaries between the sublime and other categories such as the uncanny, the
mysterious, and the subliminal. Yet, most importantly, the confusion—and hence the
difficulties in stretching the concept’s application to questions brought up by artificial
intelligence (AI), the transformation of the human sensing apparatus, prosthetics,
etc. (what Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli calls “ghost effects”1)—comes from the humanistic
origin of the sublime as a category. It is the humanistic grounding of the sublime
described by classical aesthetics, its ties to the perception and judgment of the human
subject, that is being challenged today by the radical changes in the experience of
being human under the influence of technology. The claims of machine intelligence
to represent something about us that escapes our cognitive abilities confront us with
the “alien” within o urselves—an “alien” that undermines the stability of the human
as a subject of aesthetic experience. The phenomenon of the technological sublime is
a response to this challenge: its subject is no more the human being as we know it,
nor is it the non- or post- or in-human. The techno-sublime is positioned within the
feedback loop of reflexive exchanges between the two sides, the human and the non/
post/inhuman, in the space of undecidability.
Before delving into the specifics of the concept of the technological sublime, it is
important to go briefly over the main characteristics of the sublime itself. In its first
eighteenth-century classical definitions as a phenomenon different from the beauti-
ful, the sublime was understood as something transcendent, superior, exceeding the
bounds of the familiar and the explicable. It was Immanuel Kant who first turned the
discussion from a purely psychological and even psychosomatic one (as in Burke) to
a systematic exploration of human apperception, defining the sublime as the result
The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime 143
of a conflict between various cognitive modalities: between imagination and under-
standing, between sense-perception and ratiocination, among others. The sublime, by
implying a breakdown of the accord—the boundary—between the imagination and
the understanding, points to the existence of the inconceivable and the unpresent-
able, something that lies beyond conceptualization and that yet can be imagined and
felt. Moreover, it justifies the universality and totality of the principle of negativity:
there are objects (or a whole field of objects) that exceed our capacity of cognitive
comprehension and resist being “exhibited” as ideas,2 opening up as “the beyond of
representation.”3 We have no concept in mind when we experience the sublime and,
according to Kant, this causes not pleasure but pain, or other negative feelings like
confusion and chagrin. Yet the pleasure here is in recognizing the limits of our under-
standing and the ability of our senses to (re)present the sublime object to cognition.
This fundamental p aradox—the presentation of the infinite through the fi
nite—is not
only cognitive but also ontological (descending from Zeno’s observation of the nature
of movement).4 The questions then are: why try to present the unpresentable? How
does it feel? And what kind of effect does it have on our sense of self?
While Kant places the sublime solely in the mind (to be more precise, in reason,
Vernumft)—and it is through that the human subject establishes its autonomy from
the overpowering world of nature, the sublime has a distinct corporeal dimension
and is first of all an actual or felt (and sometimes, virtual, or imagined) experience.
It is in this experience that one can be aware of oneself as independent of that which
is infinite and ungraspable (the Kantian project). Yet, as can be concluded from later
theories (including most famously Jean-François Lyotard’s), this independence is illu-
sory, and the affective, felt dimension of the experience of the sublime is exactly what
makes it at once inherently subjective and “not one’s own.” As an experience of the
limits of representation, it is also an experience of the shifting boundaries of the self,
and of the foreign and the unknown within the very constitution of human affectiv-
ity, within the prereflexive or, as Lyotard calls it, the “pure perception” of “bare”
materiality. In Lyotard’s philosophy of the Inhuman, the problem of representation
as related to human experience (and the sublime as an epitome of the “differend,” a
rupture within human cognitive abilities) goes hand in hand with the rupture between
form and matter, their incongruity, resulting in a form’s inability to adequately reflect
the qualitative characteristics of material objects and processes (e.g. examples of the
“immaterial matter,” such as timbre, tints of color, gesture, and other qualities that
cannot be expressed or coded in a concept). The confusion of the subjective and
objective that the sublime experience instigates, the paradoxes of the structure of
representation and its effects, as well as the role of creativity as an unfolding of the
potentiality of configurations “self-other” will be the ground for my discussion of the
technological sublime.
The Technological Sublime

The first use of the expression “technological sublime” (in English) is attributed to
American historian Parry Miller, who used the term in his essay “The Responsibility
of Mind in the Civilization of Machines” (1962) to describe the veneration of tech-
nologies in early nineteenth-century America. In 1964, Leo Marx developed further
Miller’s ideas in his classic The Machine in the Garden devoted to the analysis of
the role of the railroad in the transformation of the American landscape from an
144 Ksenia Fedorova
a grarian into a “middle landscape.” Here technology acquires the meaning of some-
thing transcendental, an association it inherits from nature, and, before it, religion.
As Marx points out, the machine became the “obvious” symbol of progress and the
coming of the new Eden.5 In the 1990s, David Nye elaborated further on the concept
of “the technological sublime,” discussing it in the context of American landscape,
nationalism, and religion. Nye’s most interesting observation, for the purposes of this
chapter, is that the fascination with technology and industrialization was the sign of
a “projecting mind” that stood apart from the world, projecting its will upon it and
contemplating the results at a distance.6 The enthusiasm and pathos in relation to
technological development was also one of the defining characteristics of Soviet cul-
ture, with its grandiose industrialization projects, the aesthetization of machine labor,
and the firm belief in the power of Man. The commonalities between these tendencies
led the Italian aesthetician Mario Costa to define the techno-sublime as the current
state of the sublime that follows the “metropolitan-industrial” (nineteenth century),
the “natural” (eighteenth century), and the “rhetorical” (Antiquity) sublime.7
I propose that the concept of the techno-sublime should not be limited by its
application to modern technologies (although they may reveal its specificity most
effectively) but should be seen as an independent phenomenon that has to do with the
inherent potential of a thing and the possibility of its actualization. Thinking of the
sublime through its relationship to technology has deep historical roots. In its initial
introduction by pseudo-Longinus, the concept of the sublime (which Costa calls “rhe-
torical”) is closely related to techne. A speech can bring a listener to a state of rapture,
thanks both to the soul’s capacity for “elevated thought and judgment” and to the use
of special rhetorical techniques, or tropes.8 In a narrow sense tropes are expressive
tools, yet they can be treated as schemas, pregiven repeated figures alluding to preset
and shared expectations, and helping to organize diverse material into a whole (for
Longinus, in a neo-Platonic sense). In Greek thought, techne is considered part of
poiesis and as such it is instrumental in elevating a representation of nature, mimesis,
from a mere copy of nature to something that “unveils nature as logos,” as the univer-
sal order of things.9 The quality of sublimity is inherent in techne but only insofar as
it reflects something beyond human control, thus revealing a logic superior to human
logic yet inherent in nature. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out, the quality of
bringing something from non-being into being, making it present (rendre-présent), is
the main Aristotelian feature of techne.10 The paradox is that the Greeks’ concept of
nature encompasses the concept of the human. Thus, techne helps to “unveil” and
“concretize” not only “nature” in general but also human nature (what it means to
be human). Thus, the “technical” aspect within the structure of the sublime alludes
to the groundedness of the sublime both in subjective human experience and in
nature-in-general (though, of course, from today’s anthropological standpoint, the
distinction between the “objectivity” of “nature-in-general” and human “subjectiv-
ity” is a problematic one). Here techne is responsible not so much for the assertion of
the human over nature, but for sustaining an ontological value of difference between
being and non-being.11 In human experience, this difference can be not only registered
but reflected upon and even reproduced.
This lets us suggest that the objects of the techno-sublime are not natural phenom-
ena but the human capacity to manipulate the laws of nature and create objects with
a generative potential capable of bringing something from non-being into being. Such
objects should not be confused with art. The objects of the techno-sublime are not
fixed images, words, or sounds, not even performances or happenings that may follow
certain rules but be new and original each time they “happen”; these objects should
be capable of reproducing themselves by themselves, i.e. they should be autopoietic.
The best example of this is an algorithmic system with a randomness parameter that
is set to generate unpredictable results, whose “origin” lies not “outside them” (as is
the case with works of art or anything human-made) but “within them.”
In its originative orientation, the techno-sublime is close to what Lyotard calls the
“novatio” mode of the sublime in avant-garde art. On the one hand, he writes, artists
are preoccupied with “the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation,” “the nostal-
gia for presence”—what we know as a romantic quest. He labels this mode “melan-
cholia.” On the other hand, the “novatio” mode places emphasis on “the increase of
being and the jubilation which results from the invention of new rules of the game,
be it pictorial, artistic, or any other.”12 (Lyotard’s examples of “melancholia” include
the German Expressionists, Malevich, and Chirico, while Braque, Picasso, Lissitsky,
and Duchamp exemplify the “novatio” mode of the sublime.) As he admits, the dis-
tinction between these modes is very nuanced, yet it points to an important difference,
that “between regret and assay.” Can there be really anything sublime in assessment
and analytical inspection, or in the feeling of freedom and empowerment that comes
with understanding something and being able to use this understanding? Is it simply
a question of control, or is there something else at stake?
The techno-sublime provokes a special tension between the contemplative and
active modes of human consciousness (in addition to the Kantian conflict between
imagination and understanding) that also has an ethical dimension. On the one hand,
there is a logical plan of actions executed upon a technical object by a human will
(this plan may be compared to what Heidegger calls είδος προαιρετόν, the “look” of
a product envisioned before it gets produced). On the other hand, in order for the
object to work it must be mastered, not in the sense of being controlled, but in the
sense of putting it into o peration—a procedure of active care. The plan switches its
regime from an image to be looked at (Vorstellung) to a list of actions to be performed
(Darstellung).13 The stage of “performance” opens up possibilities for unpredictable
actions, and this is where the object turns from one’s own creation, to one’s own
“other.” Technologies are the product of the mind but as they become autonomous
and escape our direct control they can only be observed and experienced through their
actions, thus serving as an exemplification of both the power of human reason and
its limitations. It is the quality of the potential, the latent knowledge of an automatic
system as an autonomous agency that can never feel complete to us, that instigates the
sublime. Created and navigated by the human, such systems generate a sense of close-
ness and safety while reserving space for the unpredictable and the uncontrollable: the
viewer (or the user) does not know the exact mechanism of the electronic operations
and this is what makes the encounter with the possibilities opened up, for instance,
by artificial intelligence and digital reality more generally so thrilling and uncanny.
Already the classical definitions of the sublime present it as an aesthetic experi-
ence straddling the border between the subjective and the objective: it is felt by the
subject at the moment of encounter with the “other,” standing against the subject’s
consciousness (God, or nature), yet the meaning of this feeling is the affirmation of the
subject’s ability to recognize itself in the other through the procedure of reflecting back
this very ability. Jean-Luc Nancy describes this as a self-reflective process whereby a
“form forms itself through itself for itself and without an object . . . an image serves
146 Ksenia Fedorova
as an image for itself, not as a figure of something else, but as a form that creates itself
from itself.”14 Nancy alludes to Kant’s description of the work of imagination, which
happens in the absence of concepts: “imagination is a unity that forestalls, anticipates
and manifests itself by itself—a free figure precedes any subsequent determination.”15
The sublime is impossible without this closed system, a system that is not about the
affirmation of the reality or truth of an external object but about the change in the
subject’s internal perception of itself instigated by the encounter with something that
is part of it and yet has outgrown it. Thus, the techno-sublime is another form of what
has been called “the postmodern sublime,” since once again we are dealing with a
subject in excess of itself (in a sense of surpassing, exceeding the borders of itself and
its self-reflexivity). The technological (techne) seen as integrated into the structure of
the sublime does not change it in principle. It intensifies the already inherent dynamics
and paradoxes, provokes new effects, and serves as a different source of self-reflection
than any other phenomena. To pose a question about the techno-sublime means not
only to specify a region of sublime effects, but also to reveal something special within
the structure of the human, its creative potential, something that gets activated in the
moment of sensible recognition of oneself through one’s own other.
The Challenge of Digital Technologies

Numerous scholars have discussed the sublime in the context of technological stud-
ies: Vincent Mosco and Rodney J. Giblett have written on the political economy of
the digital sublime and the connections between the sublime and communication
technologies,16 while Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin have introduced the idea of
the “computational sublime” in relation to generative electronic arts,17 and the dis-
cussions of Roy Ascott and Oliver Grau on telematics and the effects of immersion
have relevance to the idea of the sublime.18 Computational technologies have greatly
influenced the ways in which we acquire knowledge. Equipped with advanced digital
technologies, science pushes us beyond increasingly obsolete anthropocentric views
(e.g. Stefan Helmreich’s idea of transductive and immersive methods of research, or
Brian Rotman’s concept of the meta-subject19) toward a new territory that is indeed
quite sublime—nano-worlds, oceanic depths, the genome, the “connectome,” etc.20
However, the free application of the romantic notion of the sublime to these new
projects cannot be done without losing some methodological integrity. How can we
avoid simply calling sublime all new technological discoveries and instead observe
more closely what such discoveries actually do to us?
Information technologies, in particular biofeedback, machine vision, and remote
sensing, radically alter the way we perceive ourselves and the world. Technological
monitoring is automatic and pervasive, and gives us (and others) definitions and
descriptions of ourselves based exclusively on received feedback data. It is an intel-
ligence of its own that bypasses not only cognition, but also natural human sensory
capabilities, offering to augment—but potentially also substitute—the existing human
sensory apparatus. Computational models promise a more accurate, detailed, and
objective analysis free of human subjective judgment, and/or a culturally neutral per-
spective (the principle of “computational objectivity”21)—claims that are not always
fully justified. Machinic behavior is preprogrammed to mimic human expressivity
and create an impression of subjectivity. For instance, this principle is at work in the
case of most virtual agents equipped with facial expression recognition software and
supposed to respond accordingly based on the observed “expression.” In such an
exchange the human also takes over a very particular r ole—not only that of a “user”
but also that of a subject whose expressions are not only mimicked but also limited
by their interpretation by the machinic “interlocutor.” In order to receive the needed
response from the machine the human has to adopt its language, not anymore purely
“machinic” but also not yet reflecting enough of the complexities of human psychol-
ogy, particularly the nuances of emotional reasoning.
The intelligence of digital media manifests itself to us in a form of an interface, making
presentable—
visible/readable/
interpretable— the highly complex inner workings of
machines. An interface also serves as a meeting point between two types of symbolic
order—the one that makes sense for humans, and the one that works for machines. The
feeling of the sublime goes beyond the symbolic register; hence the question at stake
is whether or not an appropriate technical set up is possible to evoke that feeling. The
problem goes even deeper. It concerns the limits of machinic analysis and the problem
of untranslatability. The sublime provoked by an encounter with these systems is
not the sublime in the classical sense of an experience of transcendence and of being
overpowered by something presenting itself in a direct and sensible way. Indeed, the
problem of code and translatability is a problem of not only communication but repre-
sentation, which here means a relation between a form (human and machinic language,
including processing protocols and electronic formats), an electronic signal, and what
this signal can be translated into—an image, a text, a sound, or even a touch.22 Thus,
code provides the grounds for the hybridity of not only the media of expression (repre-
sentation) but also of the senses involved in producing and perceiving these media. This
is the argument of digital essentialism: code serves as a fundament of a system existing
“below” any contingent interfaces. The principle of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine
usually serves as the main reference point for the argument about potential ubiquity and
power of computability/programmability and translatability of media. Due to its purely
formal qualities, numerical language, especially binary code, is considered the ultimate
universal language, allowing us to connect and translate elements of one symbolic
system into another. But what does this mean from an aesthetic point of view and what
are its implications for our understanding of human subjectivity?
So far the claim that potentially everything can be encoded and translated remains
only a claim. This “everything” is not given at once and, thus, there is some amount
of uncertainty and unpredictability embedded in code as an instrument of significa-
tion. Coding itself can be seen as a procedure of transgressing the borders of a specific
material existence and creating of a purely symbolic, totalizing expression. Yet, there
are still latent ties between these two realms: the symbolic implies something taking
place, some particular material and sensible event—be it a transference of electri-
cal signals in a computer, or neuronal firing and synapses in the human brain; it is
incidental to the fact of something happening. The sublime effect of code is caused
exactly by this implication, by the reference to something not fully predetermined that
is embedded in the material conditions themselves (both external and internal to the
human) and that has the capacity to function and change autonomously. This brings
us back to the paradoxes of both the classical and the postmodern sublime—the
Kantian impossibility of the feeling of the sublime being “exhibited” at the level of the
understanding, and Lyotard’s “passibility” (passibilité), “communication . . . without
a concept,” when something is simply happening to us (while we are aware of this
experience as a pure affect).
148 Ksenia Fedorova
One of the specificities of the technological sublime is that it utilizes the capacity
of biofeedback tracking to engage the human perception at the visceral and micro-
temporal level. In his Feed-Forward, Mark Hansen considers the “precognitive voca-
tion of twenty-first-century media” and discusses as its key characteristic the problem
of the “decoupling of effect and awareness” (or “of causal efficacy and presentational
immediacy”).23 A classic of media art, an interactive virtual reality installation Osmose
(1995) by Char Davies, can serve as example of an artistic take on this problem that
tries to “couple” back the effect embedded in the experience and the awareness of it.
The piece invites the participant to immerse herself into an imaginary 3-D landscape
that she can navigate through breathing. As a result, a deeper, more bodily grounded
and integrative experience is created, the artificial environment feels more real, and
an acute sense of presence is produced. As the artist explains, “Osmose is a space for
exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating
awareness of one’s own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.”24 The
usage of breathing as a control interface makes this piece stand out from a multitude
of practices engaging biofeedback. Unlike heartbeat or brainwaves, breathing can
be controlled, but still only to an extent. Navigating an abstract 3-D environment
becomes analogous to exploring the zone of the subject’s knowledge and ability to
control the processes in one’s own body while receiving feedback on it.
To further complicate matters, automatic digital systems claim to reflect (reproduce
and interpret) our own experience. This suggests not only a closed system consisting
of a human subject and technology (as a product of human creativity) but also a
technologically mediated projection of the human of itself. A set of artistic strategies
have been developed that draw upon the effects that appear through the procedure
of becoming aware of the algorithmic processes involved in digital translation and
simulation, and—what is more important—aware of one’s own reaction to them.
Such technologies provide us with a portrait of ourselves, including the features of
ourselves to which we lack any direct access. We are then asked to recognize ourselves
in that portrait, i.e. to look at ourselves through the eyes of our own “other” that
shows us something about ourselves that we cannot know on our own. This situation,
in which an affect reflects on an affect, is reminiscent of one of the definitions of the
postmodern sublime as “the ability of consciousness to be affected.”25
An example of the construction of such relations can be found in Alexa Wright’s
screen-based interactive installation Alter Ego, in which the viewer interacts with
a 3-D rendered mirror version of herself. Initially the avatar only mimics back the
viewer’s expression but gradually it begins to provide more unexpected, intelligent,
and believable responses. The result is unsettling and disconcerting, as we can see (or
get closer to seeing) the inner workings of the machine from its own point of view.
What one sees, then, is another type of life, not a familiar, natural one, but a princi-
pally different one that, yet, presents itself as familiar—an effect that may be called
alien familiarity. The double nature of this image is confusing as it disturbs the self’s
sense of its own boundaries. Curiously, and similar to other cases of interaction with
artificial intelligence (AI), human participants tend to project their own interpreta-
tions on the changes in the avatar’s face: the human eye translates the quantifiable
into its unquantifiable features.
This paradoxical tendency of projecting human qualities onto an algorithm was
first recognized in the 1960s by the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, a creator
of the psychotherapist chatbot ELIZA. Exchanging written messages with a chatbot
Figure 9.1 Alexa Wright, Alter Ego, 2005, screen-based interactive installation
program people tended to entrust it with their intimate dilemmas and believe the
program understood them better than another human being. The “Eliza effect” refers
to people’s tendency to attribute to the machine more human qualities than it actu-
ally has, and to overload with hidden meaning the machinic outputs that feel like
they could belong to a human. These projections appear despite the users’ awareness
of the deterministic nature of the system and its logical limitations, which provokes
a cognitive dissonance. Since the 1960s this effect has been explored by video game
creators, designers of virtual agents, and artists as diverse as experimental filmmaker
Chris Marker, performance artist Stelarc, the net-art group Ubermorgen, and the
mixed reality group Blast Theory, to name a few. One of the most provocative cases
does not come from the realm of art but is a working chat-application by a software
company Luka that simulates the presence of a recently deceased person using text-
messages. Luka was invented by a group of Russian software designers on the basis
of a machine-learning system that was fed a large amount of real-life messages of a
young man named Roman Mazurenko (killed in an accident) in order to recreate the
style of his interaction and thus bring “him” back to life.26
The radical element of the project is that the “inhuman” (or “non-human”) here
is explicitly related to a real human death. This makes it a clear-cut example of one
characteristic of human–technology relations that, perhaps, captures their ultimate
meaning. Technology is an exteriorization of the most essential and inalienable qual-
ity of being human—life itself. This proposition goes back to André Leroi-Gourhan’s
idea that it is through technology (technics, or simply, tools) that a human became
150 Ksenia Fedorova
human.27 But technics is also a material manifestation of the limits of the human as a
live being and a biological species. It gives a sensible form to that which overcomes the
limits of the physical existence of the human, and which is otherwise not conceivable.
Luka’s simulation of the live presence of a deceased human is an attempt to present
to us the inconceivable. The effect is not so much that of the sublime in a traditional
sense but rather that of the uncanny. It is the uncanny that, according to its classical
descriptions by Freud and Ernst Jentsch, his predecessor in these inquiries, captures
the sense of doubt regarding the potential “animate” qualities of the inanimate.28 This
doubt, or the ambiguity effect (that often has to be mechanically or automatically
repeated) is the only way for this feeling to assert itself. And doubt may be considered
as the only type of feeling that characterizes the human as human.
Both the sublime more generally and the technological sublime evolve with the
development of technologies and the cultures that generate them. The compulsive
reflexivity of analytics-driven media of the digital era differs substantially from the
“assay” that Lyotard associated with the “novatio” mode of the sublime in avant-
garde art (with its playfulness and inventive attitude toward “the rules of the game”).
All the autopoietism of Alter Ego or ELIZA can be reduced to their continuous
dependence on the volatility of human expressions and on the psychological projec-
tions behind them. In its simulations machinic intelligence has failed (at least so
far) to cross the “uncanny valley,” that is, to succeed in its attempts to present the
non-human as human. Paradoxically, the techno-sublime today seems to assert the
value of the only quality of the human that technology does not interfere w ith—the
quality and feeling of being alive. It points to the incommensurability of this feeling
with any particular type of subject and with anything to which a human-made meas-
ure may be applied. In the techno-sublime we return to something within ourselves
that cannot in principle be mediated, extended, or reproduced technologically, that
is beyond both the technological and the human and yet serves as the ground and
origin of them both—the originative force of being, the paradox of its unambiguous
manifestation to us and our ambiguous understanding of it, even with the help of
techne.
Notes
1 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects,” Screen, Vol. 57 (2016):
1–20.
2 “The sublime can be described thus: it is an object (of nature) the presentation of which
determines the mind to think of nature’s inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas”
(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), 268). “We cannot determine this idea of the supersensible any further, and hence
we cannot cognize but can only think nature as an exhibition of it. But it is this idea that
is aroused in us when, as we judge an object aesthetically, this judging strains the imagina-
tion to its limit” (269).
3 George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 5.
4 “The limit ontologically precedes its Beyond”—these words by Slavoj Žižek, ascertain-
ing a logical fact, are developed by poststructuralists from the late Foucault to Maurice
Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in their discourse about the “presentation beyond represen-
tation” (the presentation of the unpresentable).
5 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 2nd
edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 194–196.
6 David E. Nye, “The Consumer’s Sublime,” in Robert Hassan and Julian Thomas, eds. The
New Media Reader (New York: Open University Press, 2006), 28. See also D. E. Nye,
American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
7 Mario Costa, Il sublime tecnologico (Salerno: Edisud, 1990).
8 Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H. L. Havell (London: Macmillan, 1890).
9 Plato defines poiesis as creativity: “something coming into existence when it didn’t exist
before” (Plato, The Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994, 205b), and it is techne that makes this possible. For Aristotle, techne “finishes
what nature is not capable of making,” and is a form of actualization of “what does not
have its origin in itself” and the origin of what is in “something else.” See Aristotle, Physics,
trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. W.D. Ross
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 648.
10 “Techne, particularly poetry (art of speech) as its important form, is a production (poiesis)
of knowledge (mathesis). This knowledge comes from mimesis because mimesis is the abil-
ity to represent, not in a sense of ‘recreating’ (imitating) but in a sense of ‘realizing’, ‘imple-
menting’, ‘making present’. Thus, there is something that is in need for such realization”
(Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, “Problématique du sublime,” in Encyclopaedia Universalis
France (Paris: S.A., 1989)).
11 In this regard, Heidegger’s definition of techne as a form of knowledge of the “end cause,”
the original “essence” of a thing may be of relevance. “The άρχή [‘beginning’, essential
element and principle] of artifacts is τέχνη. Τέχνη does not mean ‘technique’ in the sense of
methods and acts of production, nor does it mean ‘art’ in the wider sense of an ability to
produce something. Rather, τέχνη is a form of knowledge; it means: know-how i.e. familiar-
ity with, what grounds every act of making and producing. [. . .] The είδος must stand in
view beforehand, and this antecedently envisioned appearance, είδος προαιρετόν, is the end,
τέλος, that about which τέχνη has its know-how” (Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and
Concept of φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics b, 1,” in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William
McNeill, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 192).
12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
79–80.
13 The German words for re/presentation—Darstellung and Vorstellung—show the analogy
with the re/presentational and experiential mechanisms of cognition. This discussion goes back
to Hegel’s explanations of human cognition in Phenomenology of Spirit. Technically, both
Darstellung and Vorstellung can be translated as representation, yet the former (Darstellung)
means also a play, performance, externalization of activity, enacting a drama, and the latter
(Vorstellung) is used to relate to pictorial exposition and cinema. Vorstellung is described by
Hegel as the presentation of the senses’ data to reason, which is then transformed into its dis-
play, Darstellung, that is a picture we have in mind, as well as “exposition, expression, setting
forth, unfolding.” For further analysis, see Hartley 60.
14 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Sublime Offering,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans.
J. Libbrett (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 29.
15 Nancy ibid.
16 Vincent Mosco and Rodney J. Giblett, Sublime Communication Technologies (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2008); Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime:
Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe,
Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth Press, 1999); see also de Jos
De Mul, Romantic Desire in Postmodern Art and Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1999).
17 Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin, “Art, Emergence, and the Computational Sublime,”
in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Generative Systems in the
Electronic Arts, Victoria, Australia, December 5–7, 2001 (Victoria, Australia: Center for
Electronic Media Arts VIC, 2001), 67–81.
18 Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness,
ed. Edward A. Shanken (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Oliver Grau,
Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press 2003).
152 Ksenia Fedorova
19 Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2009); Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The
Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008).
20 Roald Hoffmann, Ian Boyd Hoffmann, eds. Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and
Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
21 “Computational objectivity” is interpreted by Peter Galison and Loraine Daston as an
updated form of the “mechanical objectivity” associated with the photographic technolo-
gies (Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Image of Objectivity,” Representations, Vol. 40
(1992): 82.
22 A robotic sculpture Blind Robot by Luis-Philippe Demers, where a “blind” robotic hand
softly explores a visitor’s face through touch, focuses exactly on this experience: the feeling
of a machinic touch.
23 Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 362. For Hansen’s theory of embodiment and technol-
ogy see also Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code. Interfaces with Digital Media (New York,
London: Routledge, 2006).
24 Char Davies, “Osmose,” http://www.immersence.com/osmose/, accessed October 10, 2016.
25 Temenuga Trifonova, The Image in French Philosophy (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi,
2007), 125.
26 Casey Newton, “Speak, Memory,” in The Verge, http://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-
intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot, accessed on October 10, 2016.
27 This idea became a ground for Derrida’s conceptions of the “originary technicity,” “arche-
writing,” and “difference.” For Derrida, technics is inherent in nature (physis), life (zoē),
and thought (logos): “At the origin there is technics” (Jacques Derrida, “Nietzsche and
the Machine,” trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews
1971–2000, ed. Elisabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
248). “Différance” is critical as a possibility of establishing something as “other” and
thus creating a relation between the “one” and the “other.” “Exteriorization” is a term of
Bernard Stiegler, indicating that in its “being-toward-death” a human finds a “delay” of
death in technology (Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth,
George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 154.)
28 A “doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt
as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate” (Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie
des Unheimlichen,” trans. Roy Sellars, in Angelaki, Vol. 2, no. 1 (1995), 179–196.)
10 From Diagrams to Deities
Evoking the Cosmological Sublime
Hannah Goodwin
Twenty minutes into Terrence Malick’s part family narrative, part cosmic journey
The Tree of Life (US, 2011), the film breaks away from the story, in which the protag-
onist’s parents have just learned of their son’s death, into a non-narrative sequence. A
softly radiating cluster of light morphs into various shapes, then illuminates clouds of
smoke coalescing into gaseous orbs, recalling the formation of galaxies or stars. At the
same time, we hear the whispering voice of the mother, imploring, “Lord, why? Where
were you? [. . .] What are we to you?” Moving from visual effects of light and smoke
to more familiar images of the cosmos, the camera zooms in slowly on a Hubble Space
Telescope image of a faraway galaxy, and then on other Hubble images of galaxies
and nebulae. As the sequence unfolds, a soprano voice takes over from the mother’s
whispers, singing Zbigniew Preisner’s weeping requiem “Lacrimosa.” The haunting
music inflects these images—the products of high-tech digital equipment—with a
sense of spiritual, cosmological probing. As A. O. Scott wrote in his review of the film,
these non-narrative passages “shine the light of the sacred on secular reality.”1 With
the solo voice accompanying cosmic images, the sequence contrasts the human scale
with the unfathomable depth of the universe, placing fleeting concerns in dialogue
with eternity, and raising questions of our origins in terms both spiritual and secular.
Standing alone, the Hubble images with which the sequence culminates have become
almost banal in the twenty-first century, frequently serving as screensavers that prove
the ever-increasing resolution of the latest television and computer displays, where
their everydayness has numbed us to their spectacular nature. But here, in a context
inflected with spiritualism and the unique intersection of human and cosmic made
possible by film’s mobility across time and space, they open up to the sublime encoun-
ter. Their evocation of otherworldly scales of space and time transcends the confined
space of the screen and instills both the awe and the terror that Edmund Burke, writ-
ing in 1756, characterized as attributes of the sublime. Burke explains:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate
most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in
which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the
mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.2
Burke’s concept of the sublime has long been associated with the immense depths
of space and time of the cosmos. Outer space is a space of wonder but also of terror,
a vast unknown that is as alluring as it is threatening. But as David Nye points out,
concepts of the sublime are not constant, and “each new form of the sublime may
154 Hannah Goodwin
undermine and partially displace older versions.”3 Visions of the cosmos will not
automatically instill a sense of the sublime. Rather, as Malick’s use of the “Lacrimosa”
in combination with the Hubble images exemplifies, they can be redeployed in new
ways that renew their sublimity.
As I stream The Tree of Life from Amazon.com on my 32-inch Mac desktop, occa-
sional pixelated blurs mar the pristine images despite the computer’s high-resolution
“retina display,” Amazon’s HD version of the film, and my high- speed Internet
connection. These technological glitches betray the immense amount of data being
processed behind the screen, calling attention to the digitality of the wondrous images
of nature that form the visual fabric of Malick’s text. I am reminded, for a moment,
of the 1s and 0s that must be translated into the pixels that are the building blocks of
these images, but even so, the power of the images is overwhelming, and I can’t help
but become engrossed in this spectacle of cosmic sublimity. The astonishment I feel
at the unique combination of these images and this music—the horror of mortality
and of human smallness combined with the awe at the immensity of the u niverse—is
too visceral to be nullified by this visible assertion of the film’s reducibility to a digital
sequence.
What, if anything, has changed about the cinematic sublime in the digital era?
Does the binary code underlying the digital text undermine the sense of sublime, a
set of emotions so closely associated with nature? In this essay, by engaging with
texts that predate the digital era, I hope to demonstrate that the manipulation of
cosmic imagery associated with digital films is by no means new, and that a tech-
nologized representation of the cosmos overlaid with religious meaning has long
sought to evoke the sublime for film audiences. The exact forms of representation
have changed, but the complex web of technology, spirituality, and science has
remained at the heart of sublime cinematic depictions of the cosmos. David Nye, in
The American Technological Sublime, argues that technology and the sublime have
never been diametrically opposed. Nye traces the extent to which the two have been
intertwined in the American imaginary, with feats of modern technology like the
railroad, bridges, and dams capturing a sense of sublimity that is not premised on
an encounter with raw nature. Nye’s explanation of the power of the technological
sublime draws on the idea of the mathematical sublime that Kant outlines in his
Critique of Judgment. According to Kant, sublimity emerges from a combination of
a radical sensation of being overwhelmed by the sublime object and the triumph of
reason over this overwhelming sensation.4 The sublimity of the cosmos, then, is not
just the feeling of the vast depths of the great unknown that can never be known, but
the feeling of awe at the ability of the individual consciousness to register it anyway.
The human capacity to quantify and rationalize is ultimately able to contain all else,
no matter its scale.
To illustrate the mathematical sublime, Kant explains the way we experience the
sublimity of the Egyptian Pyramids—a feat of engineering—by registering both their
totality and their component parts. He writes that
in order to get the full emotional effect of the size of the Pyramids we must avoid
coming too near just as much as remaining too far away. For in the latter case
the representation of the apprehended parts (the tiers of stones) is but obscure,
and produces no effect upon the aesthetic judgment of the Subject. In the former,
however, it takes the eye some time to complete the apprehension from the base
Evoking the Cosmological Sublime 155
to the summit; but in this interval the first tiers always in part disappear before
the imagination has taken in the last, and so the comprehension is never complete.
(252)
That is, in order to experience the sublime our minds must 1) register the entirety and
know about the base that it comprises (in this case, the tiers of stones) and 2) in the
process of taking in the entirety, allow the impression of the building blocks to dis-
sipate. My awareness of the digital code underlying this sequence is thus by no means
antithetical to the sublime, at least as Kant describes it—it calls attention to the build-
ing blocks that are then transcended as I take in the totality of the image.
Furthermore, the fact that the film is reducible to a technical distillation of nature
is not unique to the digital era. The cinema, which has engaged images of the cosmos
from its origins—whether the precinematic time-lapse photography of Pierre Jules
César Janssen that captured the Transit of Venus in 1874 or the fantastical journey
of Georges Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon—has always presented a technologized
representation of the sublime. As André Bazin wrote, in cinema, “between the origi-
nating object and its reproduction intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving
agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically.”5 Bazin has
commonly been associated with the idea of film’s indexicality—its direct, incontro-
vertible impression of the object on the other side of the lens—a quality that some
scholars see digital media as lacking. But Bazin also brings out here a fundamental
similarity between film and its digital counterpart: the instrumentality of a non-living
agent that translates the image of the world into an image. However terrible or awe-
inspiring images projected or displayed on a screen are, they are based on a mediated,
technological engagement with their subject. This is no different whether the medium
is film stock or the 1s and 0s that form digital films. Drawing on Nye’s concept of the
technological sublime, Kant’s explanation of the mathematical sublime, and a set of
historical films that were early attempts to register and explain cosmic scales, I argue
that while the technological and the sublime are by no means at odds, the sublime in
films that depict the cosmos is often only accessed through some retreat to religious
language or the invocation of spirituality. The sublimity of astronomy is thus never
the product of simple, indexical representation of the cosmos. Instead, it is forged
out of a dialectic relationship between science and religion, quantification and the
embrace of overwhelming immensity. This is the case in a recent burst of narrative
films with cosmological themes, including The Tree of Life, Melancholia (dir. Lars
von Trier, Denmark, 2011), and Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cúaron, UK and US, 2013),
among others, as well as in earlier, silent-era films, to which I turn now.
In order to illustrate this argument historically, I consider a set of silent-era astron-
omy education films that sought to explain (and sensationalize) scientific concep-
tions of the cosmos in ways that captured, or at least left room for, a sensation of
cosmic sublimity. These films, including The Milky Way (dir. Hoey Lawlon, US,
c.1920), Wunder der Schöpfung (Wonders of Creation, dir. Kornblum, Germany,
1925), Romance of the Skies (Bray Studios, US, 1925), and Die Grundlagen der
Einsteinischen Relitivitätstheorie (The Principles of the Einstein Theory of Relativity,
dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, Germany, 1922) all circulated in the early- to mid-1920s
in the US and Europe. They belong to a nebulous genre of public astronomy education
films that aim as much at conveying the wonders of science’s revelations as explain-
ing any of the details of the science itself. These films were screened in classrooms as
156 Hannah Goodwin
well as cinemas, and often sought to provide entertainment as much as to educate.6
Thus they combine scientific details with sensational images, wavering between dull
pedagogy and the sublime. While this is just a sample of the educational films of the
silent era that took on astronomical themes, the tropes and images that recur across
this set of films make them exemplary of their genre. Their tension between scientific
precision and romantic, even religious gestures makes them a rich ground for explor-
ing the early cinematic sublime, and particularly the interpenetration of the spiritual
and scientific aspects of the sublime.
Depicting cosmic scales and the sensation of the sublime that can accompany
encounters with them presented a great challenge to cinematic representation, par-
ticularly in the pre-CGI era. How can film encompass the large swaths of time and
space that cosmological imaginaries grapple with? How can it convey the vastness
of universal scale that evades our comprehension and touches at a spiritual, sublime
level? It isn’t simple technically to capture astronomical images. Planets and galaxies
at a distance move too slowly for our eyes to detect, generally, and thus need to be
set in motion via cinematic tricks, including time-lapse and animation. And their dim
light isn’t conducive to film’s fleeting exposure times, necessitating other means of rep-
resentation. Thus these early science education films draw on an array of techniques
that are richly imaginative, and that aim to capture the sublimity of the cosmos not
through passive absorption of rays of cosmic light, but through active manipulation,
modeling, visual trickery, and, importantly, the injection of spirituality or religiosity.
The technologized summoning of the cosmos that we know from more current films
like Melancholia, Gravity, and The Tree of Life, then, is by no means new.
The Mechanics of Sublime Scale

One of the characteristics that made cinema especially apt for capturing aspects of
cosmic sublimity was—and is—its scalar mobility. Malcolm Turvey demonstrates in
his survey of what he terms “revelationist” film theory that film was hailed from the
beginning of its history for its potential to extend vision into the micro- and macro-
cosmic realms.7 A sense of the sublimity inherent to cinema’s engagement with scale is
clear in the early writings of French film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, among
others. Epstein imagines film’s ability to represent and unite a vast array of scales,
displaying the “majesty of the planets” alongside “anemones full of rhythm and
personality.”8 Moreover, film could express a cosmic pantheism, which as in Kant’s
sublime relies on a sense of scale at multiple levels; Epstein claims that the cinema
might “unite all the kingdoms of nature into a single order” and “inscribe a bit of
the divine in everything,”9 revealing a beautiful cosmos whose enchantment functions
as an ersatz religion.10 The technology of the camera is central to Epstein’s vision: it
comprises a “harmony of interlocking mechanisms” that can capture and convey a
“sort of euphony, an orchestration, a consonance.”11 The technological mechanism
gives way to a sublimity that could not exist without it.
This interplay between the camera’s mechanisms and the wonders of nature
emerges explicitly in Hanns Walter Kornblum’s description of how he used models
to demonstrate planetary motion in his 1921 film Die Grundlagen der Einsteinischen
Relitivitätstheorie. In a pamphlet provided to audiences Kornblum explains the intri-
cate process of bringing Einstein’s theory of relativity to the screen; the film is by
no means a simple reflection of nature. The sublimity of the cosmos could only be
realized representationally through a process that is remarkably mechanical, and not
just at the level of the camera: each discrete movement had to be finely calibrated
before it was exposed to film. As Kornblum explains,
Entirely new methods of filmic representation had to be found. [. . .] New equip-

ment had to be built that permits complicated adjustments of models or draw-
ing with minute exactitude. The production of this film required approximately
80,000 individual exposures in total, with each exposure differing from the one
that preceded and the one that followed it, sometimes by only a tenth of a millim-
eter. Because 10–20 adjustments had to be made simultaneously between many
exposures, the seamlessly moving film comprises a count of more than a million
individual manipulations. A whole system of moving belts, whose mechanism
runs without a tremor, had to be rigged in order to render the changes in scale
demanded. [. . .] The preparation of the models and diagrams, calculated down to
the smallest fraction of a millimeter, took even longer than the difficult recording
process. Thus a film that runs for barely 2 hours before the eyes of the spectator,
and that shows him images that appear to have come organically into being in
their logical sequence, emerged from one and a half years of belabored work.12
Kornblum’s description of the meticulous adjustment and photographing of models

betrays the immense amount of work inherent to the process of representing the
cosmos, and the technologization of nature that occurs in order to represent astro-
nomical subjects both in the era of celluloid and in films of today.
Another challenge inherent to the cinematic representation of cosmic scales is that
it is necessarily confined to the frame of the screen, which, while varying, is restricted
to a scale that is humanly comprehensible if not exactly human. There is no way to
reveal the actual scale of planets or galaxies; instead, the cinema must operate by
analogies, explaining size from the ground up. This analogizing process is, however,
not antithetical to the sublime. Indeed, for Kant, an integral component of the sub-
lime is the explanation of scale. He explains the way we draw on knowable scales to
comprehend vast ones:
A tree that we estimate by a man’s height will do as a standard for estimating the
height of a mountain. If the mountain were to be about a mile high, it can serve
as the unity for the number that expresses the earth’s diameter, and so make that
diameter intuitable. The earth’s diameter can serve similarly for estimating the
planetary system familiar to us, and that in turn for estimating the Milky Way
system. And the immense multitude of such Milky Way systems, called nebulous
stars, which presumably form another such system among themselves, do not
lead us to expect any boundaries here. Now when we judge such an immense
whole aesthetically, the sublime lies not so much in the magnitude of the number
as in the fact that, the farther we progress, the larger are the unities we reach.
This is partly due to the systematic division in the structure of the world edifice;
for this division always presents to us whatever is large in nature as being small
in turn, though what it actually presents to us is our imagination, in all its
boundlessness, and along with it nature, as vanishingly small in contrast to the
ideas of reason, if the imagination is to provide an exhibition adequate to them.
(257)
158 Hannah Goodwin
The unbounded cosmos, that is, can be dissected into its smallest components, and
thus rationalized by the human mind.
Much of the precise technical effort in these films was devoted to providing the
kind of accurate analogies of scale that Kant posits as inherent to the experience of
awe and terror when faced with the cosmos. Hoping to impress viewers with the
magnitude of the cosmos and perhaps wishing to instill such awe and terror many of
these films display an obsession with scale, heavily emphasizing the relation between
various cosmic bodies’ sizes, various trajectories’ speeds, and the spans of time over
which astronomical phenomena unfold. Hoey Lawlon’s The Milky Way, a short
educational film from the 1920s,13 exemplifies this obsession with scale, and is in fact
almost exclusively a catalogue of scales. After summoning us into a familiar cosmos
with an intertitle reading “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, How I Wonder What You
Are,” the informational portion of the film begins, explaining where various stars
are situated within the Milky Way. To give a sense of scale within the limited frame
of the image, an intertitle informs us of how long a train would take to travel from
Earth to Venus: 58 years. This trip is animated, with a train slowly moving across
the screen—but of course, as much as the interplanetary space is condensed, so too
is the time, and only seconds go by before the train arrives at its destination. The
film continues by comparing distances and sizes of planets: Jupiter is 51 times farther
from the Sun than the Earth, and is 308 times larger than Earth. A trip from Earth
to Neptune would take train 5,055 years and a cannon 285 years. While it is clear
that the film is attempting to capture the grandeur of cosmic scales, it falls short of
achieving this aim since the sublimity of cosmic magnitude is better captured by
fantastic images than sheer numbers, which may account for the complete lack of
journalistic attention to this film at the time of its release. A study published in the
Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers advised that, “Explanatory
titles, if used at all, should not be painfully exact. [. . .] Details are wearying,”14
and other, similar reactions to films that lingered over such exactitudes bolster this
study’s conclusions. One reviewer called the portion of the Fleischer film that deals
with scale “just a labored exposition of the obvious,” a sentiment that seemed to be
widely shared.15 While moving between scales can instill a sense of the cosmological
sublime, as Kant’s passage on scaling the cosmos indicates, simply reciting numbers
cannot—and doing so also fails to register the more complicated sentiments around
space and time that emerge in the more imaginative educational films.
This kind of precision is thus insufficient to evoke the sublime. Siegfried Kracauer
usefully points to the disengagement of such scientific abstraction from the reality of
experience.16 Numerical abstractions of scale fail to capture the imagination, because
they are unreliable. How, then, do these filmic representations of the cosmos over-
come such abstraction? What can elevate cosmic representations from dull rationali-
zation to the sublime?
Science, Religion, and the Emotional Fabric of the Sublime

One path toward the de-abstraction of science in many of these educational films
was the rhetorical elevation of science to a sublime subject, for, as Nye writes, “In
a physical world that is increasingly desacralized, the sublime represents a way to
reinvest the landscape and the works of men with transcendent significance.”17 In
several films science encompasses both the sense of wonder and the triumph of
rationalism and inherent to sublime encounters. The 1925 film Romance of the Skies
(Bray Studios), like The Milky Way heavily invested in science, was part of the Bray
educational film series, and was included in the Educational Film Catalog’s list of
astronomy films as late as 1939, albeit with the note “Old. Authenticity doubted by
some.”18 The film’s reliance on scientific rationalism becomes a celebration of the
access to visions of totality that science affords us, alongside its detailing of under-
girding facts and figures. Rather than resorting to a recitation of numbers as in The
Milky Way, Romance of the Skies posits science as a new kind of religion, replacing
earlier modes of human engagement with the universe. Imagining a timeline in which
scientific knowledge is the ultimate emblem of progress, an intertitle praises science
as the antidote to “prehistoric man’s” understanding of cosmic events as religious
signs, claiming that “astronomy lifted from man the dread of the unknown.” Another
intertitle announces: “This is the Romance of the S kies—that science can peer into
the depths once believed unfathomable, and tell man something of the secret wonders
of the Universe.” In contrast to “primitive man,” modern man is “armed with the
facts of science.” The film thus opens up science to the cosmological sublime: science
is so powerful as an explanatory and revelatory paradigm that it both provokes our
wonder, astonishment, and awe in the face of the unknown universe and overcomes
these sensations with its rationalizing force. Science is thus itself a miracle: a sense of
the sublime surrounds its unfathomable feats, just as it does the unfathomable myster-
ies of the cosmic Beyond.
In a similar vein, other astronomy educational films of the period turn to religion to
counteract the abstraction of measurements and numbers. Scientific progress in astron-
omy has, historically, been premised on differentiating science’s supposedly objective
methods from the mythical relationships with the stars that are relegated to the past.19
Yet the lines between science as a totalizing belief system and a religious connection to
the cosmos are penetrable. A combination of scientific and mystical modes pervades
many of these films, and a sense of spiritual sublimity and a temporality beyond the
everyday is a crucial part of representations of the cosmos in all of them. Wunder der
Schöpfung, Kornblum’s feature-length documentary about the solar system and the
universe, draws on both religious imagery and scientific explanations, bringing the two
together in an uneasy accord, much as in Malick’s cosmic sequences. The intertitles
often quote Biblical verses even as they serve as the launching point for astronomy les-
sons. The film draws on a vast array of representational strategies, including animated
diagrams (see Figure 10.1), stop-action photographs of scale models, paper cutouts,
still watercolors depicting romantic visions of the night sky, actual astronomical pho-
tographs, strikingly realistic animations (see Figure 10.2), and live action sequences
staging historical as well as futuristic engagements with the cosmos.
The seventh and final “chapter” of the film, called “Werden und Vergehen im
Weltenraum” (Growth and Decay in Outer Space) especially emphasizes these con-
nections. It begins with the verse from Genesis, “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth,”20 and then provides a scientific explanation for the birth of
our planet within a larger solar system and galaxy. In a fantastical animation that
illustrates the innovative representational techniques early filmmakers drew on to
artificially accelerate the passage of time, the film depicts the evolution of the solar
system out of a spiral of dust. Before our eyes, gravity pulls together debris and forms
the dense spheres we recognize as the Earth and its fellow p lanets—much like the
formation of gaseous spheres we witness in The Tree of Life.
160 Hannah Goodwin
Figure 10.1 A diagram typical of many astronomy education films, this still from Wunder der
Schöpfung (dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, 1925) illustrates the orbit of the Earth around the
Sun in a way that leaves little room for an experience of the sublime.
Figure 10.2 A still from Wunder der Schöpfung showing solar corona. An intertitle describes
these solar flares as “flung upward” to heights of 700,000 kilometers
This scene provides a compelling visual model of a scientifically explicable phe-

nomenon, but it is also a marvelous spectacle, in part because of the vast swath of
time that is condensed into mere minutes. Animated time-lapse becomes a cinematic
mechanism for translating a cosmic timescale to a human one, while also invoking
a theistic one. Karl Clausberg, a German art historian who traces the philosophi-
cal history of what he terms “cosmic cinema,” writes about how the concept of
the time-lapse was imagined as capturing the viewpoint of an all-seeing God, who
observes history pass on a scale that makes our human timescale seem trivial.21 The
compression of a vast scale of time contributes to a sense of being able to access a
perspective of the world that may replicate a God’s-eye perspective. In setting up this
cosmic history with a passage from Genesis Wunder der Schöpfung invites us to view
this compression of cosmic time as in some way paralleling a godly vision of creation,
rather than being a merely technical feat. The cosmological timescale must be con-
ceived differently than the human one, because it has to cope with the “deep time” of
billions of years rather than the relatively short moments that we zoom in on in daily
life.22 Here, the injection of a theological perspective on time emphasizes the vastness
of the cosmological timescale that the cinematic apparatus has harnessed, achieving
a sense of sublimity that is lost in the mere recitation of relative sizes.
The appeal to a religious register, in dialogue with the precision that scientific
explanation demands, instills a sense of wonder and a sense of trying (and failing)
to grasp what Kant characterizes as the mathematical sublime. So while these edu-
cational films all begin with attempts to explain scales of cosmic space and time by
breaking them down through animated graphs or accurate models set carefully in
motion, they often eventually surrender in this effort to constitute the magnitude of
the cosmos from the ground up, so to speak, and draw on gestures to the mystical, the
spiritual, or the religious.
Conclusion
Films about outer space, both historically and today, are an interesting testing ground
for thinking about technology, science, and the sublime, because they have always
been at the forefront of technical aspects of cinematic experimentation even as they
also try to access spiritual and emotional registers that evoke the sublime. This was as
true for early cinema, with its tricks for radically compressing time and space while
still inspiring a sense of their grandeur, as it is for more recent cinema’s contextualiza-
tion of scientific images—like those from the Hubble T elescope—within narratives
or music that save them from becoming abstractions. The Tree of Life, with which I
opened this chapter, like Kornblum’s film about the theory of relativity, relies on an
intense process of manipulations to bring cosmic images to the screen. The Hubble
images themselves are highly processed data: to form them, the light of a distant
star hits a mirror on the telescope, and from there it is reflected onto light-sensitive
pixels that translate the light into an electronic signal indicating how bright the light
is at a particular point. This signal is then beamed down to Earth, where scientists
use algorithms to translate the coded signals back into visual images and clear out
the noise that clutters the frame.23 To all this is added Malick’s own processing—he
zooms in on the images and adds moving components that do not exist in the origi-
nals, and, importantly, overlays the image with a musical text that guides the specta-
tor’s interpretation. What results is a sequence that is not just a sum of its parts, an
abstraction of the universe that has been set to a soundtrack, but a sublime realization
of the unique combination of technology and mysticism of which cinema is uniquely
capable. This is true in other recent films that address cosmological themes as well.
In Melancholia, a simulated sequence with no pretense of indexing reality depicts a
gargantuan planet colliding with and then engulfing the Earth. On its own, the image
would carry no emotional force, but it takes on a simultaneous horror and awe when
162 Hannah Goodwin
set to Wagner’s eerie, majestic prelude to Tristan and Isolde, and framed by the
implicit question of the meaning of human history in the face of its annihilation. And
despite all its bombast and CGI, Gravity, too, captures moments of sublimity in the
sheer emptiness of sound and space that it depicts.
To draw these connections between silent film representations of the cosmos and
those of digitalized films today is to emphasize that the sublime in the digital era is
part of a continuum, rather than a break from earlier cinematic representations of
the sublime. In films both past and present it is where scientific abstraction ends,
and where reference to some spiritual beyond takes over, that a real sense of the
near-infinite, and thus of the sublime, can take hold. Only through recourse to the
totality, which science gestures toward but always attempts to break down, can we
think the cosmos “as a whole,” “surpass[ing] every standard of sense,” per Kant.
But this sublime feeling is only made possible by the very ineptitude of all the films’
moving diagrams and models to convey the true scale of the cosmos; this inability to
fully mathematize the scale via an “estimation of magnitude by means of concepts of
number”24 is precisely what enables the mind to “go beyond the limit of sensibility”
and feel true astonishment.
Notes
1 A. O. Scott, “Heaven, Texas and the Cosmic Whodunnit,” New York Times (May 6,
2011), www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/movies/the-tree-of-life-from-terrence-malick-review.
html?pagewanted=all, accessed August 15, 2016.
2 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (Adelaide, Australia: University of
Adelaide, 2014 [1756]), ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burke/edmund/sublime/index.html, Part
II, Section I.
3 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), xvii.
4 Immanuel Kant, “The Mathematically Sublime,” in The Critique of Judgment, trans. James
Creed Meredith (London: Oxford University Press, 1911 [1790]), 248–260.
5 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 13.
6 The lack of clear distinctions between entertainment and educational films was pervasive in
this era, according to the editors of Learning with the Lights Off, Devin Orgeron, Marsha
Orgeron and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
7 Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
8 As an aside, one wonders whether Terrence Malick read this passage before filming The
Tree of Life (US, 2011), which captures precisely this interplay of scales, imbued with a
sense of religious fascination.
9 Jean Epstein, “The Cinema Viewed from Etna,” in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds.
Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press), 288–289.
10 Epstein, “The Cinema Viewed from Etna,” 289.
11 Epstein, “The Senses I,” in Keller and Paul, 244–245.
12 Program for Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (Berlin, 1922). This doc-
ument is part of a collection by German silent film historian Herbert Birett, who digitized
a large number of archival materials on German films up to 1945 and made them available
on his website, kinematographie.de. The translation is my own. I cite this passage in a dif-
ferent context in my essay “Relativity in Motion: Refigured Time and Space in Silent Era
Astronomy Films,” in Scott Curtis, Oliver Gaycken, and Vinzenz Hediger, eds. Epistemic
Screens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
13 This film seems to have left no trace in any film journals or newspapers of the period,
making it difficult to pinpoint its exact dates. It was discovered by Skip Elsheimer, an
avid educational film collector who has contributed to the Prelinger Archives thousands
of archival films that he has found at estate sales, auctions, and flea markets. Elsheimer
catalogues this film as a product of the 1920s, which seems very likely given its strikingly
similar content and style to the other films I reference here. Huey Lawlor also made another
film for Service Films called A Trip to the Moon, which blends sci-fi-style visions of future
space travel with some astronomical facts.
14 M. Briefer, “Student Psychology and Motion Pictures in Education,” Transactions of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1925): 17.
15 “Einstein Theory,” Variety, Vol. 69 (February 1, 1923): 41.
16 Siegfried Kracauer, “Film in Our Time,” in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical
Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 285–309.
17 Nye xiii.
18 Dorothy E. Cook, “Romance of the Skies,” in Educational Film Catalog (New York: H. W.
Wilson Company, 1939), 99.
19 See for example Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse
Expeditions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 49–50, which describes
British astronomers’ assumptions about local beliefs during an expedition to India.
20 All intertitles I cite from this film are translated from the original German. All translations
are my own, except those from the Bible, which quote the English Standard Version.
21 Karl Clausberg, Zwischen den Sternen: Lichtbildarchive (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006).
22 This term originates with James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: Transactions of the
Royal Society, 1788), who used it to describe the immense timeframe over which geological
phenomena unfold. It has since been picked up in an array of disciplines, including film and
media studies with Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology
of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006).
23 Jeff Hester, “How it Sees,” PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0303/01-howi-nf.
html, accessed August 12, 2016.
24 Kant 251.
11 Feeling Not at Home in the
Twenty-First-Century World
The Sublime in Contemporary
Environmental Aesthetics
Sandra Shapshay
The coherence and usefulness of the aesthetic category of the “sublime”—to label a
certain kind of mixed, painful and pleasurable response to nature and art—has come
under attack in Anglo-American aesthetics in recent years.1 The main objection is that
a category of aesthetic experience that claims insight into what is unknowable is, for
that reason, incoherent. Along with this trend, contemporary environmental aesthetic
theories have largely left discussion of the “sublime” to the dustbin of history, as the
concept has been seen by leading environmental aestheticians such as Allen Carlson
to be ineluctably tied to religious and/or speculative-metaphysical ideas incompatible
with a secular, scientific world view.
However, terms like “majestic” and “sublime” are still in common usage to denote
grand, overwhelming, terrifying, or vast environments such as mountain ranges,
cascades, or the starry night sky where terms like “beautiful,” “lovely,” “graceful,”
and “picturesque” seem inadequate for capturing their aesthetic effect, and elsewhere
I have argued that this ordinary usage of “sublime” should be retained and that a
coherent, secular account of what I call “thin” and “thick” sublime responses to
nature and art can be formulated.2
What I’d like to do in this chapter is to maintain this basic argument for the rel-
evance of these accounts of the environmental sublime in the twenty-first century, but
to make an important concession to critics of this aesthetic category: in the current
era, often called the Anthropocene, human control over the natural world has turned
much of the world into a built and largely controlled environment. Since sublime
response (especially thick sublime response) to nature depends on a felt recognition
of human limitations (both cognitive and existential), and since more and more of
our environment has been domesticated both cognitively and existentially, affording
fewer of such aesthetic opportunities, it does seem that the relevance of sublime expe-
rience is on the wane . . . at least on Earth.
However, the sublime is still a common and appropriate response to “the final
frontier: space,” as Star Trek put it so eloquently. “The starry heavens above me”
was a constant source of sublime admiration and reverence for Kant—along with
the moral law within him—and it still affords, today, a potent source of the sublime
aesthetic especially as captured in the cinematic imagination. Here I will inves-
tigate two prominent examples of environmental sublime response as provoked
and captured by two recent films Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and The
Martian (dir. Ridley Scott, 2015). These films show that sublime responses to natural
environments—albeit reconstructed and mediated by works of cinematic art—are
important in the twenty-first century and reveal manifold ways in which human
Feeling Not at Home in the 21st Century 165
beings feel not really at home in the world, despite having largely domesticated the
Earth.
Criticisms of the Sublime as an Aesthetic Category

Nearly ten years ago Jane Forsey published a provocative article in the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Against the
prevailing tide of postmodern and Kantian enthusiasm for the sublime she offered a
negative answer to this question, arguing that historical and contemporary theorizing
about the sublime faces a kind of irresolvable dilemma. The dilemma is essentially
this: a theory of the sublime can either explain the sense of epistemological transcend-
ence by making use of “problematic ontological commitments” (Forsey 388), such
as the claim to a transcendent reality or supersensible noumenal self as moral law-
giver (Kant); or such a theory can shed these problematic ontological commitments
(Sircello, Budd), but then will have tremendous difficulty in explaining the elevated
pleasure—as opposed to mere cognitive frustration or existential anxiety—that seems
to characterize genuinely sublime experience.3
For the past few years, I have been working on reconstructing historical theories of
sublime experience for use in contemporary aesthetics, and I appreciate Forsey’s chal-
lenge to aestheticians like myself to become more methodologically self-conscious,
but I believe that such theoretical work in aesthetics can survive the above dilemma.4
Before attempting to resolve the dilemma one needs to clarify what a “theory of
the sublime” is supposed to do. Forsey provides some guidance here. Such a theory
should answer fundamental questions to the tradition like “What kinds of objects are
sublime? What does the sublime tell us about ourselves as subjects? And, centrally,
what does sublime experience illuminate about the limits of our access to the world?”
(Forsey 388). Indeed, a theory of the sublime should answer such questions, but they
are actually secondary to the first order of business: to illuminate a certain family
of aesthetic responses that many people have proclaimed to have, especially in the
European tradition and especially since the eighteenth century to the present.
Further, it is important to be clear on the nature of the object of theorizing. Unlike
objects such as H2O, the laws of thermodynamics, or the Grand Canyon, sublime
responses are subjective human phenomena. By “subjective” I do not mean to say
that there is no objectivity to judgments of the sublime—in fact I think they can
be intersubjectively valid (see Shapshay, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics,”
2013 for the full argument); rather, what I mean by “subjective” is that the sublime
consists in a subject’s affective and cognitive response to perceptual experience of
an object like a work of art or, more paradigmatically, an environment.
What is more, these subjective responses have a history. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson
has argued in her classic study of discourse on the aesthetic experience of mountains,
a profound shift in aesthetic attitudes occurred in the West between 1660 and 1800.
In the period from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, while there was a notion of
the “rhetorical sublime” dating to a treatise by Longinus, there was no corresponding
“natural sublime” response in recorded poetry and literature, at least with respect to
mountainous landscapes. When mountains figured in literature they were described as
“Nature’s Shames and Ills” and “Warts, Wens, Blisters, Imposthumes upon the other-
wise fair face of Nature.” But by the eighteenth century mountains were regarded as
“temples of Nature built by the Almighty” and as “natural cathedrals.”5
166 Sandra Shapshay
Figure 11.1 Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes (1859), Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City
Figure 11.2 Photograph of Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes (1859) in original
exhibition frame and drapery
Although Nicolson’s study does not treat recorded attitudes to other paradigmati-
cally sublime phenomena, the shift in attitudes toward mountains provides evidence
to suggest that the “natural sublime” may not be a perennial human response to vast
or powerful nature but, rather, a category of human aesthetic experience that devel-
oped when beliefs and attitudes about nature helped to enable a response of “delight-
ful horror” rather than horror simpliciter or repulsion.
Another example that points to the dynamics of taste viz. the sublime is the initial
reception of Frederic Edwin Church’s painting Heart of the Andes (1859).
When exhibited in New York City in 1859 the p ainting—displayed in an enormous,
wooden, window-like frame—was illuminated by spotlight, in an otherwise darkened
room, and was adorned with curtains, opening up so that the painting gave the illu-
sion of looking through a window onto an Andean landscape. Spectators, seated on
benches before the painting, were astonished by the sheer expanse as well as the fine
detail of the scene, and many utilized opera glasses to appreciate the meticulously ren-
dered foliage. The exhibit was a total sensation, and within two weeks 100,000 visi-
tors had paid 25 cents each to view the painting. Among these spectators was Mark
Twain, who was captivated by the beauty and detail of the painting and described
the experience of viewing it in the typical pleasurable-painful manner of the sublime:
You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections—your
efforts to grasp an intelligible Something—you hardly know what—will grow so
painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief.
You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture—It remains with you still.
It is in my mind n
ow—and the smallest feature could not be removed without my
detecting it.6
It is less likely that even the casual art spectator would experience the classic phenom-
enology of the sublime (the mixed painful-pleasurable feeling of being overwhelmed
and uplifted) when faced with the painting today. Images of vast, “exotic” landscapes
are more commonplace today, even kitsch, and Church’s large c anvas—enormous for
its day—seems small in comparison with works of Land Art today such as Michael
Heizer’s Double Negative, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Christo and Jeanne-
Claude’s Running Fence, and the like. Of course, closer to home, movie theaters
afford an enormous, immersive canvas on which to project vast and overwhelming
landscapes. As aesthetician and art historian Paul Crowther has put it with respect to
canonically sublime paintings such as those by David Caspar Friedrich and Frederic
Edwin Church, “The infinite vistas and terrifying events [have] become mere signifiers
of an outmoded theatricality.”7 It is thus important for any theory of the sublime to
reckon with the changing taste history of this aesthetic category.
Additionally, there is reason to believe that sublime aesthetic response may not be
universal among cultures. In a comparative study of everyday aesthetics in the Western
and Japanese traditions, Yuriko Saito has pointed to the conspicuous absence of the
category of the sublime in Japanese aesthetics, noting that in depictions and poetic
descriptions of what would be paradigmatically sublime phenomena in the West
(typhoons, for instance), Japanese artists tend to appreciate, depict, or describe the
beautiful calm after the typhoon.8
Given the evidence for the historical and cultural situatedness of aesthetic responses
like the sublime, and the intertwined nature of such responses with ideas about the
human place in the cosmos, any theory of the sublime had better acknowledge that
such responses may come and go in time and be present in certain cultures and
not others. I believe the concept of “the sublime” has various origins and histories
intertwined with the self-understanding of human beings especially as concerns their
relationship with nature. Given these limitations on a theory of sublime aesthetic
response, what productive theoretical work might still be done?
168 Sandra Shapshay
Is There a Contemporary Sublime Response?

Although I do not think sublime response is a perennial, human response to certain
natural environments and works of art, nonetheless, experiences of being both over-
whelmed and exalted, terrified and exhilarated, and humbled and elevated in the
presence of certain natural environments and works of art seems still to be alive in
European and Anglo-American descriptions of encounters with nature and art. Thus,
this aesthetic response is worth recognition by and theoretical attention from contem-
porary aestheticians.
Recently, in an article for National Geographic nature writer Donovan Webster
recounts this experience of exploring a volcanic environment on the South Pacific
island of Vanuatu:
I lower myself into the volcano. Acidic gas bites my nose and eyes. [. . .] The breath-
ing of Benbow’s pit is deafening . . . each new breath from the volcano heaves the
air so violently my ears pop in the changing pressure—the temperature momentar-
ily soars. Somewhere not too far below, red-hot, pumpkin-size globs of ejected
lava are flying through the air. [. . .] Yet suspended hundreds of feet above lava up
to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit that reaches toward the center of the Earth, I’m also
discovering there’s more. It is stupefyingly beautiful. The enormous noise. The
deep, orangey red light from spattering lava . . . It is like nowhere else on Earth.9
Although the author never uses the term “sublime” the phrase “stupefyingly beauti-
ful” seems synonymous with it. Webster experiences the volcanic environment as
fearsome and recognizes that one significant slip of the rope would annihilate him,
but he is able simultaneously to acknowledge the fearsomeness and to bracket the
personal anxiety to appreciate the environment aesthetically. His experience is a
mixed painful-pleasurable one, painful from the threatening nature of the lava, the
“acidic gas” that irritates his nose and eyes, and from the strain on his ears caused by
the “enormous noise” and atmospheric pressure, but also exhilaratingly pleasurable
due to the display of “deep, orangey red light,” the play of “pumpkin-size globs of
ejected lava,” and the environment’s otherworldly appearance. Arguably, Webster is
here describing a sublime response without explicitly utilizing the term.
In addition, take a description of being “emotionally moved by nature” given by
aesthetician, Noël Carroll:
Earlier I conjured up a scene where standing near a towering cascade, our ears
reverberating with the roar of falling water, we are overwhelmed and excited
by its grandeur. People quite standardly seek out such experiences. They are,
pretheoretically, a form of appreciating nature. Moreover, when caught up in
such experiences our attention is fixed on certain aspects of the natural expanse
rather than others—the palpable force of the cascade, its height, the volume of
water, the way it alters the surrounding atmosphere, etc. This does not require
any special scientific knowledge. Perhaps it only requires being human, equipped
with the senses we have, being small, and able to intuit the immense force, relative
to creatures like us, of the roaring tons of water. [. . .] That is, we may be aroused
emotionally by nature, and our arousal may be a function of our human nature in
response to a natural expanse.10
Carroll is making a point here against Allen Carlson’s “scientific cognitivist” theory
of proper environmental appreciation, but in the process he characterizes a version of
the Burkean sublime response of being emotionally “overwhelmed and excited” by
the grandeur of the cascade, while attending to its “palpable force,” which makes us
feel small and vulnerable, but which we behold excitedly at a safe distance.
Two Types of Sublime Response: “Thin” and “Thick”

Much of the theorizing of sublime experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies aimed at explicating the source of pleasure in these kinds of experiences. Of
the three central aesthetic categories of the d
ay—the beautiful, the picturesque, and
the sublime—only the sublime threatened to seem paradoxical. While the “idea of
beauty,” for Burke, was “founded on pleasure” that of the sublime was “founded
on pain”;11 thus, he describes sublime pleasure in oxymoronic terms as a “delight-
ful horror” and a “sort of tranquility tinged with terror.”12 More mildly, Addison
characterizes sublime response as “a pleasing astonishment,”13 and Kant describes it
as a “negative” rather than a “positive pleasure,” in which “the mind is not merely
attracted by the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it.”14
Philosophers took up the following questions: Why do people feel pleasure with
respect to objects that do not conform to the conditions of beauty (e.g. harmony,
proportion, delicacy) and are instead experienced as vast, overwhelming, or terrify-
ing? (Burke); whence the pleasure with objects recognized as contrapurposive for
our cognitive faculties, or which make us feel powerless or existentially insignificant?
(Kant and Schopenhauer). Deepening the sense of paradoxicality is the view that
the experience of the sublime is actually more profound and satisfying than that of
the beautiful, Burke calling it the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling,”15 though, for its mixture with pain, the sublime seems less promising for
aesthetic pleasure.
From this tradition we may derive a distinction between two phenomenological
descriptions of sublime response that I call the “thin” and the “thick” sublime.
Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate emotional
but not highly intellectual aesthetic response (call this the “thin sublime”), whereas
Kant’s (and later Schopenhauer’s) transcendental accounts understand the sublime as
an emotional response in which the cognitive faculties play a significant role (call this
the “thick sublime”).
Due to the differences in the phenomenological descriptions of sublime response,
these accounts also offer differing explanations of the source of sublime pain and
pleasure. While the “thin” sublime accounts for the pain as resulting from a per-
ceived threat to the organism and for the pleasure as a physiologically generated
sense of relief, the transcendental explanations of sublime response understand the
pain as deriving from a more reflective recognition of human existential or cognitive
limitation, and the pleasure from an equally reflective sense of human transcendence
of those limitations. Thus, “thick” sublime response involves reflection on the com-
plexities of the relationship between human beings and the world in which we find
ourselves, whereas “thin” sublime response does not, and consists rather in a bare
cognitive appraisal of the object and immediate affective arousal.
In Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s versions of thick sublime response, these reflections
involve a felt recognition of human rational and moral freedom that is revealed
170 Sandra Shapshay
precisely in the face of vast or powerful natural environments or works of art which
threaten the subject either existentially or psychologically, with annihilation or with
complete insignificance. Given the transcendental-idealist background for both of
these philosophers, one cannot know that one is free because freedom belongs to the
“supersensible substrate” of nature or more specifically to its intelligible character.
But insofar as sublime experiences afford a felt recognition (albeit not genuine knowl-
edge) of freedom they are very important systemically.
In order to utilize the Kantian or Burkean theories of the sublime for c ontemporary
aesthetics, however, one should answer a critic like Forsey, who sees both the thick and
the thin sublime as problematic from a theoretical standpoint. With respect to the thick
sublime (Kant’s theory), she holds that while the theory can account for the source of
pleasurable exaltation (i.e. in a felt recognition of the supersensible part of us, either
rational-cognitive or rational-moral), it gets caught on the first horn of the dilemma
in being ineluctably and egregiously tied to ungrounded, speculative-metaphysical
ideas incompatible with a secular, scientific world view. Thus the Kantian theory
of the sublime seems to involve outmoded transcendent-metaphysical notions that
should have no place in a contemporary aesthetic theory.
The thin sublime experience would seem to fare better by the lights of Forsey’s criti-
cisms, as it sheds such Kantian metaphysical underpinnings, but it gets caught on the
second horn of the dilemma, that is, it is unclear without those moral-metaphysical
underpinnings how the pleasure from the experience is to be generated at all. The
source of pleasure is chalked up to the feeling of relief from cognitive frustration
or existential threat, but this seems to open the floodgates to all manner of not-
exactly-sublime-sounding experiences (giving up on difficult crossword puzzles and
ice-climbing) to be classified erroneously as sublime.
In particular, Forsey cites the safe arrival home from riding one’s bike in traffic as
having all the hallmarks of this kind of non-metaphysically laden sublime response
according to Budd’s rather Burkean-style theory of the sublime, but she holds that
this hardly seems to get at what sublime experience consists in (Forsey 386). Let me
try to respond to the difficulties Forsey has raised for both thick and thin theories of
sublime response in turn.
With respect to the thick variety of sublime experience, recall Marjorie Hope
Nicolson’s account of the change that took place from 1600 to 1800 with respect to
European aesthetic attitudes toward mountains. When people were in the grip of a
theological view that saw mountains as God’s punishment on humankind, as a result
of the Fall, it made sense that mountains would be viewed as ugly and scary. But
when people later came to see mountains not as punishment but rather as evidence
of God’s supreme power and providence, mountains could be experienced with this
revised religious background as sublime. Can a sublime response to mountains, the
starry night sky, or a raging storm at sea be understood nowadays in modern, secular,
non-egregiously metaphysical terms?
I believe that the metaphysical commitments in a theory of “thick sublime” experi-
ence need not be understood as egregious, for one need not follow Kant in the positing
of an actual “noumenal self” in order to cash out the sense of elevation felt in these
experiences. In fact, the “ontological commitments” of the thick sublime may be
understood as modest and reasonable, for instance, as a commitment to an experience
of human freedom and moral responsibility that is very unlikely to be satisfactorily
explained in naturalistic terms; or the experience of the simultaneous limitations on
human knowledge but also the persistent and awe-inspiring desire of human beings to
push all cognitive boundaries. Understood in these ways, an explication of the source
of the elevating pleasure need only be committed to a modest degree of mysterianism,
i.e. the view that there are certain really persistent mysteries of the human condition
relating to, for example, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind
and brain, the feeling of free will and moral responsibility.
A modern scientific world view might rule out certain “ontological commitments”
as extravagantly speculative, but it remains consistent with scientific understanding to
hold that certain facets of the human condition are likely to remain forever mysteri-
ous, such as the oddness of the human being’s feeling of free will; the apparent ability
to act in a non-egoistic fashion, say, even in the face of an existentially threatening
storm; or the strangeness of a human being’s desire to fathom nature in its totality,
as well as the recognition of the difficulty (and perhaps impossibility) of this goal. In
short, such reflection in the course of an aesthetic encounter seems perfectly consist-
ent with what our best science tells us about the relationship between human beings
and nature. Science does not explain many of the oddities of the human condition
nor does it rule out a train of aesthetic reflection on these and other very old, philo-
sophical questions that tend to be sparked by vast and overwhelming environments
or works of art. In a recent book Thomas Nagel put this basic point quite starkly:
“Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not
describable by the physical sciences.”16
In sum, feelings of awe and wonder at various facets of the universe, reflection on
human cognitive and existential limitations, as well as reflection on human powers
and our strangely exceptional status within nature, have been and can be for many
people awakened through aesthetic experience with vast or threatening natural envi-
ronments and similar works of art, and it seems perfectly appropriate—by the lights
of our best science—that this should be the case. In short, the “problematic ontologi-
cal commitments” that Forsey believes are ineluctably linked to such experience are
not so ontological and not so problematic after all.
With respect to the “thin sublime,” we need to take up Forsey’s challenge for a
theory to distinguish between a bona fide sublime response and an experience of mere
relief. To help think through this, recall Carroll’s description of being immediately
emotionally moved by a perceptual encounter with a cascade:
[Imagine] a scene where standing near a towering cascade, our ears reverberating
with the roar of falling water, we are overwhelmed and excited by its grandeur.
[. . .] when caught up in such experiences our attention is fixed on certain aspects
of the natural expanse rather than others—the palpable force of the cascade, its
height, the volume of water, the way it alters the surrounding atmosphere, etc.
This does not require any special scientific knowledge. Perhaps it only requires
being human, equipped with the senses we have, being small, and able to intuit
the immense force, relative to creatures like us, of the roaring tons of water. [. . .]
That is, we may be aroused emotionally by nature, and our arousal may be a
function of our human nature in response to a natural expanse.17
In contrast to Carroll’s description, here are some of the experiences Forsey thinks
might be erroneously caught in the expansive net of a Burkean “relief” theory of the
sublime:
172 Sandra Shapshay
what of the cognitive failure I have occasionally experienced in the face of the
New York Times crossword puzzle, or complex mathematical problems that
truly humble me? What of the rush athletes experience from dangerous sports
such as ice-climbing or heli-skiing? What of the vulnerability I feel when riding
my bicycle in rush-hour traffic and making it—just—home safely? Why are these
sorts of experiences not also sublime or, at any rate, equal candidates for the kind
of pleasure that a subjective account would properly call sublime?
(386)
It seems the key to responding to Forsey’s worries about a non-metaphysical theory

promiscuously casting too wide a net onto non-sublime experiences is to ensure that
the phenomenology laid out by such a theory is genuinely aesthetic (i.e. it involves
attention to the perceptual features of the object/environment) and includes in addi-
tion to some sort of feeling of limitation (cognitive or existential) a feeling of exalta-
tion, not just mere relief.
With this additional stipulation on the theory of the thin sublime the experiences
Forsey describes above could be candidates for sublime response but only provided
that they involve some genuine aesthetic attention to the object/environment, as well
as an emotional response that involves a feeling of being overwhelmed (limitation)
and excited (exaltation). As described in bare form above, the experience of cross-
word puzzles, ice-climbing, and bike-riding through traffic don’t sound sublime, but
they could very well be if they involved actual aesthetic attention and excited/exalted
emotional arousal with a fearsome, overwhelming work or environment.
To sum up, I think the key to overcoming Forsey’s dilemma for a theory of the thick
sublime is to show that the metaphysical commitments really amount to no more than
a well-founded mysterianism about certain aspects of the human condition, that is,
accordingly, not egregiously speculative. And the key to resolving the promiscuity
problem for a theory of the thin sublime is to spell out to a greater extent in the theory
that the phenomenology must involve aesthetic attention and emotional arousal of an
exalted nature.
The Sublime Today

Although the relevance of sublime experience seems to be on the wane in the age
of the Anthropocene the sublime is still a common and appropriate response to an
environment that is far from being domesticated, and that is space. Sublime aesthetic
encounters with the starry heavens above us are flourishing today by way of the cin-
ematic imagination. In recent popular culture, there have been several films that seem
to me aimed in large part to provoke such a sublime response in viewers: Gravity (dir.
Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and The Martian (dir. Ridley Scott, 2015).
In Gravity Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), an accomplished medical engineer
struggling with recent heartbreak—the death of her school-aged daughter—is on
her first space shuttle mission, commanded by the veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski
(George Clooney). Disaster soon befalls this seemingly routine mission, however, in
the form of a shower of space detritus that destroys the shuttle. Stone and Kowalski
are the lone survivors, who manage to tether themselves together and try to spin,
float, and propel their way to another space station approximately 60 miles away,
rather than spiraling indefinitely into the void and into a certain death from lack of
oxygen. Kowalksi eventually sacrifices himself so that Stone might survive, and sur-
vive she does, but just barely.
During much of the film, the viewer takes the perspective of Stone, who is alone and
teetering over the black abyss that is space and death for most of the film. The text at
the start of the film ominously warns us that this is a most inhospitable environment:
“At 372 miles above the earth there is nothing to carry sound. No air pressure. No
oxygen. Life in space is impossible.” Stone is aware of this impossibility which makes
her keenly aware of her fragile humanity, and it leads her at least once to contemplate
hastening her own death by drifting off into a low-oxygen slumber. But she is also
summoned by the hallucinated figure of the heroic, jovial, self-sacrificing Kowalski,
to utilize all of her ingenuity, her power of will, to persevere to the next space station,
which might afford her the means to return to Earth.
The dominant aesthetic of this film is the sublime. Viewers are at once gripped by
the terror of being adrift in this inhospitable, vast, indifferent environment, and the
pristine, astonishing beauty of space and the vantage it affords onto our planet. As
film critic Ann Hornaday put it in a Washington Post review titled “Gravity Makes
Space Sublime”:
after one of the most terrifying, inspiring and masterfully composed visual
sequences to be seen on screen this year . . . What ensues is one character’s
desperate attempt to survive as the oxygen runs out, an anguished scramble
through a vast, unforgiving, pristinely silent universe that Cuarón, his longtime
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and their effects team capture with preci-
sion, elegance and an amazingly expressive sense of existential dread. [. . .]
From its very first shot, Gravity pins viewers back in their seats, very rarely
letting themselves regain their balance . . . With sound, image and perhaps
most chillingly, silence, [Cuarón] leads the audience wherever he wants us to
go—snaking through a blown-out space station, encased within the womb of
an abandoned Russian capsule, untethered and at large in a frigid, indiffer-
ent starfield—with complete authority, astonishing verisimilitude and unsettling
emotional depth.18
As described by this reviewer, the phenomenology of this cinematic experience bears

many of the hallmarks of thin and thick sublime experience: it is “chilling,” “aston-
ishing,” fills the viewer with “unsettling” emotions and “existential dread,” but also
affords the cold beauty of a “pristinely silent universe” and a “frigid, indifferent
starfield.”
In a more comedic vein, The Martian treats a rather similar situation. Astronaut
Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead and left behind on Mars after a
storm disrupts a manned mission to the red planet. Through ingenuity, humor, and
sheer power of will, he survives in an only slightly more hospitable environment than
in Gravity, while mission control back home strategizes various impossible-seeming
rescue missions. As in Gravity, viewers mostly share Watney’s perspective, alone, and
oscillating between a threatening despair and exalted resolve to overcome the odds
and return home. A trained botanist, he quickly realizes that the only way he can
survive is “to science the shit out of this” and to make water and grow food on Mars.
Interspersed in this comedic drama of survival and science are breathtaking vistas of
the red-rock planet reminiscent of landscapes in classic Westerns.
174 Sandra Shapshay
The sense one gets in this space Western is of humanity, distilled in the person of
Mark Watney, being pushed to its limits by this gorgeous-and-hostile environment,
and emerging triumphant through scientific rationality and optimistic (American)
willpower.
These two contemporary films show that sublime responses to natural
environments—albeit reconstructed and mediated by works of cinematic art—are
important in the twenty-first century and reveal manifold ways in which human
beings feel not really at home in the universe, but are all the more exalted for it. Thus,
even in the era of the Anthropocene, when “exotic” environments like that depicted
in Church’s painting of the Andes, or solitary wanderers atop Alpine mountains in
Caspar David Friedrich paintings, no longer tend to evoke the classic painful–pleasur-
able recognition of human existential or cognitive limitation and the pleasure from an
equally reflective sense of human transcendence of those limitations, those limitations
are still made salient in encounters with the outer limits of our domesticated world,
in space.
Notes
1 See Jane Forsey, “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, Vol. 65 (2007): 381–389; James Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” in Roald
Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte, eds. Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Guy Sircello, “How Is a Theory of the Sublime
Possible?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1993): 541–550.
2 Sandra Shapshay, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the
Sublime,” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 53, No. 2 (April 2013): 181–198.
3 In fact, Forsey poses the difficulty as a trilemma, with the third unpalatable option as
offering mere descriptions of sublime experience, but this obviously does not amount to an
actual “theory” of the sublime, so I ignore the option here. For Sircello and Budd’s attempts
to shed problematic metaphysical aspects in a theory of the sublime see Guy Sircello, “How
Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” and Malcolm Budd, “Delight in the Natural World:
Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Part III: The Sublime in Nature,” British
Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 38 (1998): 233–251.
4 For fuller reconstructions of a theory of the sublime for contemporary environmental aes-
thetics, see Shapshay, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the
Sublime.” For a theory of the sublime for contemporary philosophy of art see Shapshay,
“The Problem and the Promise of the Sublime,” in Jerrold Levinson, ed. Suffering Art Gladly
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). I have adapted some of this material for this chapter.
5 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 2.
6 Mark Twain’s Letters, volume I, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros,
1917), 46.
7 Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 155.
8 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Chapter 3.
9 Donovan Webster, in Edward O. Wilson, ed., The Best American Science and Nature
Writing 2001 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 253–254.
10 Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in
Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, eds. Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From
Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 169–187, 170. Carroll’s
essay was originally published in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds. Landscape, Natural
Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–266.
11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful, Harvard Classics, vol. 24 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001), Part III, Section
27.
12 Burke, Part IV, Section 7.
13 Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison (London: H. G.
Bohn, 1854), vol. IV, 7, Spectator No. 489.
14 Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129; Ak. 5: 245.
15 Burke, Part I, Ch. 7.
16 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41.
17 Carroll 170.
18 Ann Hornaday, “Gravity Makes Space Sublime,” The Washington Post (October 4, 2013).
The Sublime in Environmental Photography
12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address

in Contemporary Environmental
Photography
Damian Sutton
This chapter explores the practice of environmental photography within contempo-

rary art and its engagement of spectator empathy in order to highlight and critique
unethical industrial practices. This can be charted via the methods of the photogra-
phers themselves, how their work is perceived, and how the sublime can be under-
stood as a mode of address that is a call or action as well as a reflection on unbounded
nature and human development. It is through the sublime in Kant that we can
understand how photographers resolve the contradiction presented by the ravaged
environment as one of sensational, spectatorial pleasure and immense fear, and how
they seek to turn this toward a communication on globalization that can be under-
stood by the viewer. “Environmental photography” (Peeples 377) is a term used here
to describe a politically engaged subgenre of landscape and humanist photography
that has emerged from a narrative and documentary practice for publication, into
one of producing cinematic-scale, high-definition prints for the gallery. Genre con-
ventions have shifted from the close-up portrait that suited the portable cameras of
the 1930s–1970s toward the distanced, widescreen perspectives and high-definition
resolution that invite comparisons with epic cinema and the veracity impressed on the
viewer by the assault of data (Stallabrass 2007, 83).
Popular interest in environmental photography has much to do with public concern
about the effects of globalization and postindustrial change. Such images, Milbourne
observes, “shape international discourses surrounding sustainable environmental
practices” (116). The features of globalization are perhaps well-known: borderless
capitalism extended by information technology; economic control that supersedes
military control; the outsourcing and offshoring of manual labor; the development
of flexible and casual labor (including intellectual labor); and above all, a reflexive
engagement in this change by consumer and critic alike. It is a point of irony, and
of hope, that the artists and artworks crucial to a sustained critique of globalized
capital are enabled by many of the same features of the network, even as they reflect
on its seemingly uncontrollable impact. Many of the artists discussed here are aware
of this, and some are acutely aware of the politicized way in which their work will be
seen, and also the impotence they feel as individuals in the face of awesome natural
and human-made forces. Artists are routinely seen as agents of political change, or
at least of a heightening of sensibilities toward issues that would overwhelm us in
scale should we look up from our own small, everyday acts. Perhaps it should come
as no surprise then that some aspect of the sublime might naturally be invoked in
images of global catastrophe. However, this still leaves us with the question of what
is being shown to us in environmental photographs and whether the mediated image
The Sublime in Environmental Photography 177
of the photograph can truly present us with the sublime as a meaningful experience.
There is no doubt that the ravaged environment can offer visual pleasure, and that
there is a temptation to feel “nobler” in gazing sympathetically upon it, even while
we proclaim impotence or innocence of the crimes that have caused the devastation
(Milbourne 21).
In what follows I would like to propose a new perspective on this contradiction,
one that does away with the notion that photography cannot represent the sublime.
Photographers exploit the technology at their disposal to create images that situate
and arrest the spectator and that, in some cases, can be argued to have a sublime
effect. Such images do not attempt to express the sublime but instead the photog-
rapher’s experience of it through the photograph as an exclamation. This more
accurately matches Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime as an ability to judge
nature without fear, and in the context of our ability to overcome it as an awesome
power (either as nature or as natural catastrophe). Environmental photography, I
argue, is an attempt to communicate both aspects of this judgment—that this catas-
trophe is boundless and horrific, but that we also have the capability to overcome or
ameliorate it (Kant §28/264). In this sense, we can approach the sublime as a mode
of address—direct communication—for which representation of the sublime is a
tool. The nature of this communication is, in most cases at least, a cry of emergency
that is both declarative of the horror of environmental catastrophe and a call to
action.
The Sublime as Indirect Address

Environmental photography as a practice of landscape emerged early in the history of
photography, and includes work by Timothy O’Sullivan in the 1870s, Ansel Adams
and the Sierra group in the mid-twentieth century, as well as photographers grouped
by the landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered
Landscape in 1975–1976. The more recent wave came in the wake of 1980s Reaganite
and Thatcherite capitalism and includes Sebastião Salgado and Andreas Gursky, who
work on the subject explicitly, as well as Sophie Ristelhueber and Jem Southam. At
the forefront of this group is undoubtedly the work of Edward Burtynsky, whose
“large-scale photographs of vast, unnatural terrains created by the machines, excava-
tions and accumulated detritus of modern civilization” have brought the impact of
globalization to a wide public audience (Diehl 118). Burtynsky’s epic photography
has focused on the impact of human development on nature in terms of transport,
communications, and industrial development, leading to major books and block-
buster shows, including Lori Pauli’s Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of
Edward Burtynsky and Marcus Schubert and Paul Roth’s Edward Burtynsky: Oil. It
is Burtynsky’s work that has attracted the most critical attention with regard to the
sublime, provoking a reconsideration of the sublime as a natural force that preexists
human intervention (Zehle; Lowe; Shore). Indeed, the sobriquets “toxic sublime” and
“industrial sublime” with respect to Burtynsky’s photography have now entered the
academic lexicon (e.g. in the works of Peeples and Schuster). Despite the contempo-
raneity of the subject matter, the debt to art history and the figuring in painting of
industrial change is something we can observe repeatedly in environmental landscape
photography, including Burtynsky’s, suggesting not only that the subject meets head
on our collective experience of industrialization, but also that a certain knowledge
178 Damian Sutton
of art and iconic images is necessary to read these works (Diehl 121). For example,
Rock of Ages #4, Abandoned Section, Adam-Pirie Quarry, Barre, Vermont (1992)
uncannily recalls Timothy O’Sullivan’s Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N.M.
in a Niche 50 Feet Above Present Cañon Bed (1873) in both composition and in scale.
Such a debt to art history, which often also includes inclusion in the museum, can
have its dangers. As Lowe notes, Burtynsky’s critics argue that the artist’s “formal
approach aestheticizes degradation and fails to provide a social critique that properly
historicizes its subjects” (112). This is an issue that deserves further exploration,
not least since it appears as a common criticism of environmental photography
and something that complicates any pretense to political action or intervention. It
does evidence, however, an acknowledgment of a material difference between the
sublime as a direct experience of nature, and the sublime as experienced through the
medium of photography. Thus, Schuster talks of what he calls the “double sublime”
in Burtynsky, referring to the fact that “his photographs at first glance draw awe
at the blown-up, crisp, glossy print (as big as 100 × 150 cm) and again with the
scale of environmental devastation that wracks the large image” (194). For Schuster,
Burtynsky’s work is a necessary framing of environmental issues, and this framing can
be a valid form of communication, even if the stated aims of the photographer fall
short of direct intervention or political action. Peeples goes a little further, asserting
instead that “Burtynsky’s aesthetic choices capture/create the sublime in the toxic”
but this also suggests a nervousness in deciding whether the sublime we see in the
photograph is the sublime of nature or of artistic creation (378).
Political interest in the subject matter of such work has brought Burtynsky and his
contemporaries to wide public attention, almost always in the context of globaliza-
tion. In his discussion of Gursky’s work Ohlin suggests that the Divine power of God
has been replaced or superseded by globalization, not least because as individuals we
only ever catch glimpses of its magnitude and complexity through small, personal acts
of consumption:
the network works mysteriously, transecting the world, even as it impinges on our
daily lives in specific ways [. . .] . [W]hen we buy an inexpensive cellular phone
at a local superstore, there is an entire complex of global factors (economic vari-
ables, international trade, technological developments) that bear on the transac-
tion and that we may never consider, or even grasp.
(23)
For Ohlin, Gursky’s is something of a documentary project—photographing stock

exchanges, shopping malls, apartment b locks—but also an attempt to “invoke the
sublime” in that built structures (and the networks they represent) mimic the bound-
less scale of nature in order to produce a “delightful terror that is our response to the
sublime” (24). For Nanay there is no invocation or representation, and the formula
is instead more simple: “Gursky’s sublime is supposed to be different from Kant’s
and Burke’s . . . inasmuch as he depicts the human-made world, and not nature,
which was the prime example in the eighteenth century” (92). This perhaps is too
easy a solution to the problem of whether the sublime as nature in Kant and Burke
can be expressed through photography as a medium, or mimicked through painting
(and Gursky’s postproduction of images draws them closest to painting). The notion
of photography “invoking the sublime” as an empathetic response in the viewer is
perhaps more convincing, and is closer to the Kantian notion of the dynamically sub-
lime. It is, therefore, worth considering whether there is a more instrumental aspect to
this invocation, one that is intended to express and communicate horror specifically.
This is not an act of mimicry or even a representation of the sublime, but a specific
call as an act of direct communication.
Photography’s apparent indirectness in presenting the sublime is actually a facet
of its direct communication. Consider the viewer in a gallery standing in front of a
photograph by Burtynsky or Gursky, and consider how their experience captures the
moment of reflection in Kant:
We can . . . consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely if we

judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly
want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case
be utterly futile. Thus a virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him.
(§28/264; emphasis in original)
Having the ability to walk away from the artwork, the viewer can choose to be
either engaged or disinterested based on their knowledge and understanding. It is
thus the inheritance of art history in these works that produces the sublime, first for
the photographer who reads the scene, and then for the viewer of the photograph,
which is a communication of the photographer’s experience. This is the modality
of the judgment of the sublime since, as Kant continues, “what is called sublime
by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a
person who is uncultured and lacking in development of moral ideas” (§29/265).
This would suggest that some of the power of the sublime in environmental photog-
raphy comes from its necessary repetition of previous art history, and that it needs
to appeal to the visually literate—gallery visitors—in order to have any personal (or
political) effect.
The Sublime as Intervention

Although largely based in landscape photography, the practice of environmental
photography also inherits many of the political and formal elements of humanist pho-
tography, and particularly documentary portraiture. Given the extraordinary human
cost of globalization and postindustrial change, photographers have turned their
attention also to the dehumanizing effect of modern building programs, industrial
offshoring, waste collection and processing. Milbourne, for example, surveys African
photographers who engaged in the representation of the human subject within indus-
trial waste and whose work has reached prominence at festivals and in publication.
Focusing on the work of Mikhael Subotsky and Pieter Hugo, Milbourne foregrounds
the motif of the figure in the landscape, often framed centrally within a milieu of toxic
waste and postindustrial decay. Such landscapes drift off into the distance, suggesting
endless square miles of devastation, within which the human figure offers an absurd
parody of the bucolic imagery of nineteenth-century painting. So it is that Subotsky’s
Residents, Vaalkoppies (Beaufort West Rubbish Dump) (2006) echoes Jean-François
Millet’s Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners) of 1857. Both present us with one of the hum-
blest of tasks of the working class, sifting through the detritus of industrial produc-
tion and consumption for meager pickings. Both attempt an empathetic depiction of
180 Damian Sutton
(mostly) women’s work among the industrial underclass, and both express tragedy in
the depiction of the oppressive vastness of the landscape around the subject. Other
series to emerge from this group of African photographers include Pieter Hugo’s
work on the Agbogbloshie Market refuse area for electronic and computing waste
in Accra, Ghana and Ed Kashi’s photography of the Trans Amadi Slaughterhouse,
Port Harcourt, Nigeria, for the open access project World of Matter.1 Both focus
on the individual, and small groups of individuals, within the landscape, evoking
both Millet’s painting and Gustave Courbet’s more famous (and now lost) The
Stonebreakers of 1849. In this respect, different sensations are engaged from within
the image, particularly those of smell (refuse fires used to cook questionable meat in
Kashi) and especially the physical oppression of heavy, manual labor, as teenage men
hulk carcasses, or stoke fires built up from melting computer equipment. As with
the stonebreakers, male industrial activity is reduced to its most basic, analogous to
prison labor, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this labor takes place
to extirpate the waste products of consumer lifestyle, rather than produce the raw
materials of infrastructure. Agbogbloshie Market is where home computers go to be
broken apart and recycled—what cannot be sold is burnt, and hence the industrial
calamity of their manufacture is mirrored by the calamity of their disposal. The
images force us “to consider the links between the choices we make and the lives and
landscapes we influence” (Milbourne 135).
But what also emerges from Milbourne’s survey is an acute awareness of the com-
plexity of the journey such images make from the moment of capture to the place
of exhibition and distribution. Many of these works are shot for the gallery, so to
speak, which puts a different perspective on the work. Agbogbloshie Market had
been visited by Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo previously, and Port Harcourt by George
Osodi. Similarly, industrial waste produced by asbestos mining has been the subject
of major series by both Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt. Some have won major
prizes and awards for a chievement—Hugo’s work won a major prize at Recontres
de Bamako in 2011—and many have been purchased for major art collections or
representation by contemporary art galleries. While Kashi’s work was part of a col-
lective research project on the effects of postindustrial expansion, Subotsky’s is part
of the Saatchi collection. Milbourne describes the danger inherent in commodifying
the subject matter and the subsequent complicity of photographer and viewer. At
one and the same time the photograph of industrial catastrophe is an admonition of
our consumer lifestyle, an intervention on our behalf, and an alibi proffered so that
when we turn away and still consume we nevertheless feel better. This is perhaps
due to the fact that the political has become a common criterion of judgment in
the museum and the gallery. Szeman and Whiteman turn to this in a discussion of
the natural benefit of politically engaged environmental photography being in the
gallery, since such images are likely to have an “activist intent” regardless of the
intentions of the photographer (554). Images can powerfully engage the receptive
attitude that viewers adopt within the gallery space. On the other hand, they can
also become merely illustrative of globalization rather than reflective or politically
assertive, and provide an alibi for the viewer (as if to say that, in an exhibition of
mixed political works, here is the one on race, here is the one on gender, here is the
one on consumerism and globalization). The result can be a moralizing one, merely
confirming what one already suspected: the scale of global processes outstrips any-
thing we might be able to do about it. The result is not knowledge leading to politics,
but rather an encounter with art resulting in the comforts of cynical reason (Szeman
and Whiteman 555).
This is not a new story, and it is one that is symptomatic of the problems inherent
in the humanist photography tradition that has been critiqued by Rosler, Solomon-
Godeau, and Tagg, among others, interested in the role of the museum as an institu-
tion in supporting and promoting photographers in their attempts to raise awareness
of social and environmental issues, as evidenced by the rising career of Sebastião
Salgado, whose stark and beautiful black and white work includes series from Brazil
(goldmines) and Iraq (postwar clean-up) which appeared in his landmark exhibition
and book Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. While shooting for the
gallery provides a freedom not offered to photojournalism, Salgado’s insistence on
working in black and white gives it a retro look that only exacerbates the potential to
see these series as a commodification of disaster, with a genealogy that reaches back
to the valorization of mid-century humanist photography. This led Stallabrass to
describe this mode of address as “fine art photojournalism”:
Photojournalism and documentary photography often concentrate on people

who have been passed by—or who have refused—the commodity culture in
which its audience is immersed. [. . .] Photography brings these people in their
pristine state to the image market as commodities; their likenesses are distributed
in books, magazines and newspapers, or as fine prints sold in limited editions to
edify the wealthy.
(1997, 139)
Such a critique has its corresponding analogy in the ethical complexity for pho-
tographers when faced with human suffering in their choice of intervention versus
detached observation. A simple account of this dilemma asks whether a photographer
confronted with individual human suffering should intervene as a human or observe
and call for viewer’s attention (and intervention) as an act of humanism. In such cases
the focus is on the human tragedy as an individual, contained experience, even when
the individual represents or stands for a wider population facing extreme hardship
or trauma. The human subject engages empathy on the part of the viewer but this is
nonetheless an indirect experience of pain. For the photographer this can mean an
experience of impotence in the face of natural d isaster that is difficult to overcome
emotionally and that can prompt feelings of resignation.
This is the experience of David Goldblatt, who shot landscapes in order to express
a specific human tragedy on an unimaginable scale that is otherwise difficult to con-
textualize through portraiture—the visual experience is a direct address to the viewer
through the formal landscape photograph. Goldblatt’s landscapes focus on the waste
created by the poorly regulated mining of riebeckite, or blue asbestos, in the Northern
Cape province of South Africa. Long-term exposure to the microscopic fibers thrown
up by riebeckite mining leads to their inhalation into the lungs, from which they cannot
be expelled. The most common illness caused by this is mesothelioma, a cancer of the
lining of the internal organs, which is almost invariably fatal. The scale of this catas-
trophe is unbearable not only in terms of the physical size of the area or the tonnage
mined, but also in terms of the hideous temporal dimension of its impact. Blue asbestos
was mined by men but sorted and packed by women and children. Waste products,
known as tailings, were dumped without treatment where children play. Added to this
182 Damian Sutton
exposure is the widespread use of the material in infrastructural projects and a signifi-
cant, wicked factor: mesothelioma takes thirty to forty years to manifest itself, leading
to a huge intergenerational health problem likely to spike in intensity over a significant
period. Blue Asbestos Fibers on a Tailings Dump at the Owendale Asbestos Mine.
Postmasburg District, Northern Cape (2002) confounds vision as an expression of the
unearthly, and makes a more visceral connection between the material and the sensa-
tional than even the most shocking of images of disease. The scale and composition
of the photograph is c onventional—an empty landscape of landfill and slag, shaped
by mechanical vehicles, stretches out beyond the frame. But our knowledge of this
material, its consistency, and its danger makes the fibers seem alive, and they engage
our sense of touch through their silky, ethereal presence. This is a haptic experience
of straining against the asbestos fronds, opening up the instant of the photograph to a
sensation of time stretching painfully, and of choking as a tortuous death throe.
Proceeds from sales of the images go toward healthcare provision for victims, but
this is an extremely limited intervention. Worse still, Goldblatt acknowledges that
his political activity is necessarily limited by convention, and the power of the work
is “neutralized” by the conventions of the gallery (Milbourne 129). This echoes
Burtynsky’s acknowledgment that there is only so much of an intervention that a
photograph can make. Burtynsky’s work, and also Salgado’s, requires some coopera-
tion from the companies engaged in the work he photographs, and Burtynsky has
noted with irony that some companies have bought and hung his work in their board
rooms (Burtynsky 156). Burtynsky has argued for amelioration rather than cessation
of industrial practices, sustainability rather than a return to the premodern, perhaps
for these very reasons.
The Sublime as Engagement

It is a commonplace to say that the act of photography, and the image it produces,
forces the viewer to see details in their daily lives that they would normally avoid giving
any attention. The visual strategies of Allan Sekula and Andreas Gursky work on
this principle. In representing the architectural vastness of capitalism Gursky’s images
reflect a distinctly first world experience of globalization. The fact that he uses additive
technologies—digital and photomechanical manipulations to extend (but not stretch)
his vistas of housing developments, shopping malls, and supermarkets—seems appro-
priate to networked, digital globalization. Through this processing of images Gursky
also engages different sensations in the viewer. In his photograph 99 cent (1999)
packed rows of cheap foodstuffs, piled high above the heads of the shoppers, are
framed geometrically by a camera positioned way above them, so that they take on the
shape of breakers on the shoreline rippling in the far distance and eventually crashing
over the heads of swimmers near the shore. The scale of the p hotograph—it is eleven
feet long—enhances this effect to include the viewer poised in front of it. Gursky’s
photographs are routinely large-scale, as are many of Burtynsky’s, to an extent that
they dwarf most traditional, post-Renaissance landscape painting. Instead, they take
on the scale of Renaissance frescoes and murals, many of which used trompe-l’œil and
perspective distortion to change the shape of the viewed interior. By this token, Nanay
observes that Gursky is not the first painter to utilize both the macroscopic and the
microscopic in order to physically direct and situate the spectator within a specific field
of vision:
if one observes the spectators at a Gursky exhibition, this is exactly what they
in fact do: walk away from the print to take in the entire composition and then
walk closer to check some details and then walk back again, and so on. Gursky’s
photos must be among the pictorial works of art that require the most legwork.
(93)
The photographs thus involve a physical engagement of the spectator even while the
images themselves are often tightly composed to express a physical compression or
a sense of infinite expansion that reflects or inheres the forces of globalization. The
array of stockbrokers in his Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Diptychon (Hong Kong
Stock Exchange, Diptych) (1994) suggests the horrific symmetry and closed system
of the movement of capital within one giant space. Alternatively, in one of his most
famous works Paris, Montparnasse (1993), a vast exterior photograph of the 1960s
housing scheme by Jean Dubuisson employs a sense of struggling containment. As
the ends of the building bleed off the image only the white sky is visible as a runner
along the top, emphasizing the uniformity of scale and construction prized in this
example of archetypal modernist, postwar housing. Thus the feeling of compression
remains despite the scale and the forced perspective. This “forcing” in digital and
optic technologies is instrumental to Gursky’s representation of globalized moder-
nity. Begg suggests that Gursky’s photographs reflect the collective experience of
modernity as one of an uneasy fit between the imagined spaces of experience and
their actual, corporeal existence (634). The work is instrumental in being Gursky’s
imagined view, since no single viewpoint can capture the image. This is suggested in
the diptych works, each of which consists of two separate images but enacted in the
digitally conjoined image.
Begg draws a comparison between the work of Gursky and the narrative pho-
tography of Allan Sekula. Begg puts these works into context in a discussion of
the multitude, a concept he draws from the work of Antonio Negri, for whom the
multitude refers to the workers whose lives are now shaped by global capitalism (Begg
628–631). Gursky’s photographs reflect upon one element of this transition—the
spaces and constructions that act as a technology of g lobalization—while Sekula’s
photographs and video stills of the 2001 anti-capitalist protests reflect upon another.
Yet both use as a means of emphasis the notion of scale. The spaces of capitalism
are overwhelming big, and highly structured, in a manner that expresses a wider
network beyond the image. By contrast, the multitude is an expression of numbers
beyond the facility of measure, beyond the description of groups as bounded by class,
race, or social standing. Sekula’s series, Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black],
1999–2000 (2000) focuses on small moments, half seen and narratively complex, that
are captured in still frames taken from video on the street, and that act as glimpses of
the wider action of which the individual is a part.
These themes and strategies come together in Sekula’s photographs and essays
eventually published as Fish Story in 1995. In this work, Sekula uses documentary
practice as well as historical and literary research to detail the “imaginary and material
geographies of the advanced capitalist world” (202). Among humanist documentary
images, however, is a photograph that stands out in its formal similarity to Gursky’s,
but which presents a wider expression of global capital that is intended to overwhelm.
Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993 (1993) is a wide view of a container ship,
taken from its highest point and looking toward the bow, with the ship headed out to
184 Damian Sutton
open sea. The containers stacked on it obscure the vessel underneath and its familiar
shape. The horizon stretches out before us and in the far distance, off to starboard,
the sun shines strongly through low cloud. The effect of this last feature is to evoke,
once again, epic painting, but this is something of a distraction. The containers are
the physical manifestation of the transport of commodities that we purchase on
our laptops and tablets at the click of a mouse. Global capital has relied upon the
oceans for the movement of commodities, people, and materials (and of people as
commodities and material) for many hundreds of years, and the postindustrial expres-
sion of this is the container, which standardizes, protects, and hides its content for
shipping and handling. The containers are a ubiquitous multitude that throws the
political multitude into sharp relief, not least as time has passed and the culture of
the container has emerged in full, postindustrial irony. Containers are increasingly
repurposed as gallery spaces and workshops, including as a method of creating quick
and portable (and removable) artist communities as a process of gentrification.2 The
presence of containers bulging atop the ship’s superstructure visualizes the movement
of commodities and also mirrors darkly their reuse as sites of bourgeois consumption
for which contemporary art appears to have been co-opted.3 The comparison with
Gursky’s Montparnasse is striking, not least through the seaward horizon that echoes
the top of Dubuisson’s apartment blocks, and although an immediate comparison
might be made between the containers and the nearly identical dwellings, it is the sea
that extends the horizon. It is a look out from beyond the containers and the dwellings
toward the unlimited space of globalization, unlimited not because it is endless space,
but because this space is so open and utilizable.
The Sublime as Direct Address

What kind of expression are we talking about when we try to understand the mode
of address that the representation of the sublime in this manner gives rise to? From
what we have surveyed so far, a sense of horror or terror emerges which is felt by the
photographer and communicated to the viewer. What also emerges is that, in follow-
ing the formal codes of landscape, the subject matter is likely to be removed from, or
different from, the direct visualization of human suffering. Nevertheless, reportage of
human suffering does allow us to identify and extrapolate the moment of expression,
and the type of expression, as the photographer turns physical experience and affect
into a mode of address. Jurich considers this engagement of the viewer as a visceral
one in an approach she takes from Susan Sontag and Ariella Azoulay, one that unifies
spectatorial address as sensus communis. Photography of catastrophe, even when
the event depicted is out of field, is an intentional engagement of the viewer “so that
horror describes not only the image, but also the affective embodiment of viewers
themselves. This [for Azoulay] is the basis for an ‘emergency claim’ that needs imme-
diate treatment” (13). As Azoulay writes:
An emergency is a situation involving calamity or mortal peril that demands

immediate treatment. It is produced from a situation entangled in disaster, war,
terrorist attacks, massacres, catastrophes, or accidents, but it also emerges from
ongoing situations of poverty, misery, abuse or humiliation. [. . .] An emergency
claim testifies to three facts: that a disaster exists; that it is an exception to the
rule, one that necessitates immediate action in order to terminate it; and that there
is someone who wants to assume the position that allows immediate action to be
taken in order to terminate it.
(Azoulay 197–199)
A political relationship is, therefore, based in the emergency claim as both descriptive
of the situation and prescriptive of action. It is a “first step” toward political interven-
tion that addresses the viewer in a way that provokes a universal affective response
that undercuts differential readings of images based on conventions of viewing (Jurich
15). We can explore this active engagement finally, as a tactic of description/prescrip-
tion, by considering it through Kant’s Dynamically Sublime and a further recent
example of urban landscape.
Two images from photographer Wing Ka Ho’s series of urban landscapes of Hong
Kong won separately both the Sony World Photography Award (National—Hong
Kong) and the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year in 2016. Childhood,
Choi Hung Estate, Hong Kong, 2015 (2015) is a bright and ordered photograph in
which a teenager runs across a colorful basketball court in front of an apartment
block brightly shaded in an ordered array of pastel. Palm trees interrupt the artifi-
cial environment, punctuating a façade that, like Gursky’s Montparnasse, stretches
beyond the frame as if to infinity. It is an example of how the imposing is made fair in
countenance. Wing Ka Ho’s winner for the IAPY competition could hardly be more
different, yet still holds a debt to both Gursky’s photograph and Sekula’s container
images. In City Lights Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, 2015 (2015) a long night exposure
cast upward has caught the stars crawling across the sky, and has revealed in sharp
detail the otherwise dark tangle of the inner courtyard of a different, more dystopian
apartment block. Here the apartments push and jostle together, crowding out the
night and threatening to crush the spectator. The image is redolent of the waste that
is produced by consumption and the overcrowding of cities such as Hong Kong that
have been the first to feel the effects of globalization. It is as if, for lack of space, the
gleaming city has become its own trash compactor.
However, if pleasure can be had from gazing upon ecological or even urban dis-
tress, how does this pleasure defeat the urge to look away, to be disgusted? How
does it seduce enough, to hold attention enough, for the clamor to intervene to take
hold? This is the “emergency claim” in Azoulay, which ultimately leads us back to
the Dynamically Sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Robert Doran reminds us
that Kant begins his section on the sublime by concentrating on nature as arousing
fear, but this poses a problem if we want to understand the captivating power of
nature. If nature is simply fearful, then we would not find it appealing in anyway
and simply look for escape. If we are not afraid then nature has nothing of the effect
of sublimity—it is weak. For this reason Doran contends that, “if it is to fulfil these
paradoxical requirements, the experience of the Dynamically Sublime must include
an element of virtuality” (241). This, as Doran describes, provides for Kant the
added level of reflection needed to “describe the paradoxical experience of fear-
within-safety” (240). We could argue that this virtuality also runs through the pres-
entation of the sublime through mechanical, mediated means. Azoulay’s description/
prescription is an example of this virtuality, and we could argue that the presentation
of the sublime is thus an aesthetic tactic on the part of environmental photographers
to provoke in the viewer a cry of “emergency.” This is the reality of judgment that is
both aesthetic and moral (Kant §29/269) and that gives photography of the sublime
186 Damian Sutton
its political energy, to be tapped by the spectator directly addressed by the photog-
rapher’s emergency cry.
Notes
1 World of Matter. Zurich University for the Arts and George Foundation, http://www.world
ofmatter.net/, accessed November 1, 2016.
2 See, for example, Boxpark in London’s East End, and the more controversial plans to create
a pop-up container mall at Elephant & Castle.
3 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, for example, sells shipping container desk
caddies: https://www.mcachicagostore.org/mobile/products.cfm/ID/47816/name/shipping-
container-pen-box->, accessed November 5, 2016.
Bibliography
Azoulay, Ariella, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone, 2008).
Begg, Zanny, “Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky
and Allan Sekula,” Third Text, Vol. 19, No. 6 (2005): 625–636.
Burtynsky, Edward, “Interview with Edward Burtynsky,” Perspecta, Vol. 41 (2008): 153–173.
Diehl, Carol, “The Toxic Sublime,” Art in America, Vol. 94, No. 2 (2006): 118–123.
Doran, Robert, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Giblett, Rod, “Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the
Aesthetics of the Future,” Continuum, Vol. 23, No. 6 (2009): 781.
Hugo, Pieter, Permanent Error (London: Prestel, 2011).
Jurich, Joscelyn, “You Could Get Used to It: Susan Sontag, Ariella Azoulay, and Photography’s
Sensus Communis,” Afterimage, Vol. 42, No. 5 (2015): 10–15.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner S.
Pluhar (Cambridge; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987).
Lowe, Meaghan, “Dreamworld and Reality: An Exploration of Environmental Aesthetics in
Contemporary Photography,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 21 (2009):
105–119.
Milbourne, Karen E., “African Photographers and the Look of (Un)Sustainability in the African
Landscape,” Africa Today, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2014): 115–140.
Nanay, Bence, “The Macro and the Micro: Andreas Gursky’s Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2012): 91–100.
Ohlin, Alix, “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime,” Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4
(2002): 22–35.
Pauli, Lori, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Peeples, Jennifer, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental
Communication, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2011): 373–392.
Ristelhueber, Sophie and Bruno Latour, Operations: Sophie Ristelhueber (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2009).
Rosler, Martha, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in R.
Bolton, ed. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989), 303–341.
Salgado, Sebastião, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (Oxford: Phaidon, 1993).
Schubert, Marcus and Paul Roth, Edward Burtynsky: Oil (Gottingen: Steidl, 2009).
Schuster, Joshua, “Between Manufacturing and Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky and the
Photography of Ecology,” Photography and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2013): 193–212.
Sekula, Allan, Fish Story (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995).
Shore, Robert, “Toxicity’s Sublime Seductions: Edward Burtynsky,” Elephant—The Art
Culture Magazine 28, https://elephantmag.com/toxicitys-sublime-seductions-edward-
burtynsky/, accessed July 10, 2016.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991).
Southam, Jem, Red River (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1989).
Stallabrass, Julian, “Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism,” New Left Review, Vol.
223 (1997): 131–162.
——, “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography,”
October, Vol. 122 (2007): 71–90.
Szeman, Imre and Maria Whiteman, “The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary
Photography,” Third Text, Vol. 23, No. 5 (2009): 551–556.
Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988).
Zehle, Soenke, “Dispatches from the Depletion Zone: Edward Burtynsky and the Documentary
Sublime,” Media International Australia, Vol. 127, No. 1 (2008): 109–115.
Artworks
Burtynsky, Edward, Rock of Ages #4, Abandoned Section, Adam-Pirie Quarry, Barre, Vermont.
1992. Dye Coupler Print. 60 × 49 × 2 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, http://
collections.lacma.org/node/200019, accessed October 28, 2016.
Courbet, Gustave, The Stonebreakers. 1849. Oil on canvas. 64 × 101 in. Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden (destroyed), http://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/courbet/1/courb103.html, accessed
November 11, 2016.
Goldblatt, David, Blue Asbestos Fibers on a Tailings Dump at the Owendale Asbestos Mine.
Postmasburg District, Northern Cape. 2002. Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper.
Goodman Gallery, http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/449, accessed November
11, 2016.
Gursky, Andreas, 99 cent. 1999. Chromogenic print face-mounted to acrylic. 811⁄2 in. × 1321⁄2 in.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.714, accessed
28/10/16.
——, Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Diptychon (Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Diptych). 1994.
Chromogenic prints. 73 in. × 176 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.
sfmoma.org/artwork/95.177.A-B, accessed October 28, 2016.
——, Paris, Montparnasse. 1993. Photograph, color, on paper between glass and Perspex.
52 × 125 in. Tate Museums, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ gursky- paris-
montparnasse-p77737, accessed October 28, 2016.
Ho, Wing Ka, Childhood, Choi Hung Estate, Hong Kong, 2015. 2015. Digital image.
12 × 12 in. 500px.com, https://500px.com/photo/146893851/childhood-by-wing-ka-ho,
accessed November 11, 2016.
——, City Lights Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, 2015. 2015. Digital image. 18 × 12 in.
500px.com, https://500px.com/photo/150346831/city-lights-by-wing-ka-ho?ctx_
page=1&from=user&user_id=6344672, accessed November 11, 2016.
Millet, Jean-François, Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners). 1857. Oil on canvas. 32 × 43 in. Musée
d’Orsay, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire_id/
des-glaneuses-341.html?no_cache=1, accessed November 5, 2016.
O’Sullivan, Timothy, Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N.M. In a Niche 50 Feet Above
Present Cañon Bed. 1873. Albumen silver print. 1013⁄16 × 715⁄16 in. Museum of Modern Art,
New York, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/45966?locale=en, accessed October 28,
2016.
Sekula, Allan, Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993. 1993. Photograph. Tate
Museums / Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/
188 Damian Sutton
publications/tate-papers/18/production-in-view-allan-sekulas-fish-story-and-the-thawing-of-
postmodernism, , accessed October 28, 2016.
Subotsky, Mikhael, Residents, Vaalkoppies (Beaufort West Rubbish Dump). 2006. Lightjet
C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. 39 × 45 in. Saatchi Gallery, https://www.saatchi
gallery.com/artists/artpages/mikhael_subotzky_residents.htm, accessed November 4, 2016.
13 Magnificent Disasters
Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema
Stella Hockenhull
In Sarah Turner’s 2009 film Perestroika the British artist/filmmaker travels by train
across Siberia to Lake Baikal, the place where a close friend died twenty years earlier.
Throughout the journey, Turner, who is the producer, writer, editor, and cinema-
tographer of the film (along with Matthew Walter), records her thoughts. The film
documents the landscape and the environmental damage inflicted through indus-
trialization and climate change, as well as the director’s anguish and sorrow. Her
journey is detailed twice in the film: once when she visited the terrain twenty years
previous between 1987 and 1988, and the second between 2007 and 2008. Turner’s
visual style is not only experimental; it is also informed through experience, yet with
the emphasis on ecological concerns. As the director acknowledges, Perestroika
“functions as an environmental allegory. Are we all ghosts passing through as the
world moves outside the frame of our (overheated) windows?”1 However, rather
than focusing on the effects of climate change as a fact-finding procedure, Turner
creates a set of images to produce an aesthetic effect which is “full of ominous por-
tents: steam rising from the water is smoke, tourists taking holiday snaps are dancers
on a volcano and, in an apocalyptic vision, Baikal becomes a lake of fire awaiting
the final sunset.”2 Turner’s film is one of a number of contemporary examples that
have emerged in the twenty-first century which document climate change and envi-
ronmental damage. In these films the aesthetics are wrought from a Romantic and
Sublime vocabulary rather than presented as scientific fact. Indeed, writing in 2013,
Inês Crespo and Ângela Pereira note parallels, suggesting that a number of visual
representations “structure their awareness strategies in similar ways. They begin by
presenting scientific arguments, which they then develop by including frightening
representations. [. . .] One of the elements they use to trigger a sense of agency among
their audiences are fear-inducing representations.”3 This chapter suggests that, in
response to fears of global warming and climate change, the twenty-first century wit-
nessed a revival of Sublime aesthetics in the visual arts translated through represen-
tations of the natural environment. Furthermore, the images adopt “fear-inducing”
aesthetics that is pictorially magnificent yet imbued with a human and personal
dimension rather than operating from a technical base. Indeed, filmmakers, fine art-
ists, and photographers in the twenty-first century tend to depict landscapes to draw
the spectator into what Julian Bell terms the “powerfully other,”4 thus conforming to
an artistic tradition dating back to the eighteenth century, specifically located in the
writings of a number of philosophers on the Sublime, including Sir Edmund Burke.
The relationship between aesthetics and landscape is typically explored through the
discourse of the Sublime. A complex theory with no specific definition, the Sublime is
190 Stella Hockenhull
based on the work of a group of eighteenth-century writers and philosophers, such as
Burke, who promoted a number of attributes as key triggers of Sublime experiences.
These include the notions of “wildness,” “vastness,” “infinity,” and “magnificence,”
all qualities to be found in landscape. Claiming that nature is akin to the divine,
Burke emphasized its numinous qualities achieved through formal compositions,
the use of dramatic lighting, natural phenomena, and sound. Furthermore, for the
Sublime experience to function, the spectator must be involved and participatory.
John Baillie’s Essay on the Sublime (1747), which anticipates Burke, also equates
the Sublime with the Deity suggesting that “it fills and dilates our soul without being
able to penetrate into its nature, and define its essence.”5 He argues that this feeling
is produced by “large prospects, vast extended views, mountains, the heavens and an
immense ocean.”6 It is the “vastness” and “magnitude” of these prospects that create
the sensation of the Sublime. Described alternatively as “Sublime” and “Beautiful”
by Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757, reprinted 1759), the landscape has traditionally been perceived as
falling into two camps: the Sublime and the Picturesque; the former challenging the
latter by contrasting unrestrained nature and the awe-inspiring elements with artifice
and control. Burke links the emotions of pain and terror with power and asserts that
pain is more powerful than pleasure although it should be at a distance to be enjoyed.
He equates the feelings caused by the Sublime with the subjective inner feelings based
on the object—usually nature, but sometimes animals: “it comes upon us in the
gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the
panther, or rhinoceros.”7 The emotion caused by the Sublime in nature, according
to Burke, is “astonishment [where] the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that
it cannot entertain any other. [. . .] Hence arises the power of the sublime.”8 At this
point the Sublime emerges as a visual concept rather than just an ethical or verbal
consideration and may be experienced, as Burke argues, through light: “A quick tran-
sition from light to darkness, or from darkness to light [produces Sublime affect and]
the more highly a room is then illuminated, the grander will the passion be.”9 Among
Burke’s list of sources of the Sublime, he introduces the concepts of sound and color.
For the latter, he dismisses those which are “soft” and “cheerful” in favor of black,
brown, and purple as Sublime. The sound qualities he associates with the Sublime are
“suddenness,” “intermitting,” and “cries of animals,” and he reasons that
the eye is not the only organ of sensation, by which a sublime passion may be
produced. Sounds have a great power in these. [. . .] Excessive loudness alone is
sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror.10
The concept of the Sublime did not die out and was to emerge a century later through
the work of the Romantic artists, who were fascinated with wild, uncultivated land-
scapes. Linking art to feeling and to the notion of the artist’s individual sensibility, the
Romantics were fascinated by the Sublime because it captured the human connection to
nature, highlighting the fact that the latter has its own rules. Romantic artists like J. M.
W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Martin (1789–1854) looked to natural phenomena
for inspiration. These they discovered in remote mountainous regions, and in unpredict-
able and extreme weather conditions, and this subject matter emphasized the artists’
imagination and response to the environment. Frequently, they believed nature to be
imbued with spiritual properties and used light as an expression of the numinous.11 Art
Magnificent Disasters in Post-Millennial Film 191
historian Robert Rosenblum has traced the historical continuity between Romanticism,
nineteenth-century art and contemporary art, arguing that artists like Mark Rothko
(1903–1970), for example, furthered the tradition.12 Indeed, Rosenblum claims that
there exists a Northern Romantic lineage, and he traces this strand through an illustrated
history of the landscape. Undoubtedly, Romanticism is foregrounded during times of
conflict and discord, specifically during wartime,13 and arguably this trajectory is evi-
dent post-Millennium through various visual interpretations of current environmental
concerns. As a result, a number of art exhibitions have been mounted displaying Sublime
artworks. For example, in 2005 an exhibition titled Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in
Contemporary Art was set up in Frankfurt, its purpose being to showcase the work of a
“selection of artists who hold outstanding positions in the Neo-Romantic movement.”14
The content chimed with a growing interest in the Sublime in the visual arts, and confirms
Rosenblum’s claim for the prolongation of such a legacy. Other exhibitions followed:
Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2004–2005), Dark (2006), and Day for
Night (2006, the Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York) all reflected an increasingly
bleak view of our relationship to nature. The British exhibition Dark Monarchs: Magic
and Modernity in British Art, held at the Tate St Ives, Cornwall, featured a variety of
artworks suggestive of the Sublime experience. As Rein Wolfs explains:
Dark spirits walk somewhat hunched, steering their physical centre of gravity
terribly close to the abyss. “Dark” as they are, they choose the path we might
characterise as unfathomable. In such a universe, obscurity can be a positive
quality; enigma is sometimes better than unequivocal clarity. Dealing in riddles,
these dark minds often c ommunicate only with the initiated. With works of art it
is sometimes just the same.15
Recently there has been a strong trend toward recording the ravaging effects of indus-
trial expansion and human conflict on the environment. For example, a 2017 exhibi-
tion titled Ravaged Sublime: Landscape Photography in the 21st Century (2017)
showcases Edward Burtynsky and Richard Mosse, whose work reveals a shift from a
fascination with the wildernesses toward a preoccupation with exposing the destruc-
tion of the landscape. Their photography draws on the Burkean tradition of fear-
inducing aesthetics by demonstrating the ruination of the environment as a result of
human intervention. As Julian Bell has argued, such intervention may be political and
contemptible but it can also be represented as a spectacle, apparently with the aim of
“confront[ing] and perhaps even transcend[ing] the rhetoric of fear that has recently
come to dominate all discussions of the future.”16
Not only is the aesthetic of the Sublime alive and w
ell—it also has a place in various
other discourses. This might be what Raymond Williams once described as a “struc-
ture of feeling,”17 referring to
the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history. [. . .]
Williams uses the term ‘feeling’ rather than ‘thought’ to signal what is at stake
may not yet be articulated in a fully worked out form, but has rather to be
inferred by reading between the lines.18
For him, this is only understood in hindsight and may be examined as part of a
broader contemporary cultural, social, and economic climate. Thus, if artists and
photographers produce visual depictions of global warming, climate change, and
industrial disasters using the vocabulary of the Sublime, then images interact with
language to present discursive packages as continuing narratives on the threat to
the environment. News reportage, too, tends to focus strongly on events in nature
such as extreme weather conditions and natural disasters and, as Darryn Anne
DiFrancesco and Nathan Young suggest, “For the most part . . . media items on cli-
mate change use conflict [original italics] as their primary narrative vehicle.”19 Thus,
media reports of damage to the environment use emotive and evocative language and
include illustrations of the environmental crisis in order to “bring the issue closer to
home.”20
The Sublime lives on in the twenty-first century not only in media discourses and the
visual arts but also in documentary cinema. As I suggested earlier Perestroika draws
on Turner’s art background using experimental aesthetics, and is also told through
her own experience. The film is dominated by traveling shots although it opens with
a static handheld view of Lake Baikal. Turner’s voiceover explains the journey, both
emotional and physical, that she is making, and she cuts between images of the lake
and a completely black screen. Her narrative guides the spectator when she suggests
that she was “manic” and “wreckless” having experienced what turns out to be a fic-
tional cycling accident with a car, her dialogue further investing the imagery with her
own emotional reactions. Turner recounts her own fictional death and rebirth after
the incident, and the film follows an autobiographical vein throughout. To infuse the
film with a sense of the Burkean Sublime, Turner keeps the camera on the same image
for a number of seconds to allow the spectator to assimilate it fully, and at times shots
of the lake’s swell become blurred as she moves to extreme close-up, creating the illu-
sion of the spectator becoming immersed in the water.
Turner never appears on screen and only occasionally does the spectator catch a
glimpse of her face in a night train window, which presents her as a disembodied
specterlike figure, anchored solely by her elegiac voiceover. This is because, as Cecilia
Sayad argues, “what Perestroika attempts to frame visually is less the author’s body
than the landscape that mirrors her subjectivity.”21 In fact, the film is as much about
the landscape as it is autobiographical, operating as a lament and tribute to her friend,
Sîan Thomas, who was killed in the cycling accident.
Perestroika mixes stills with video, and, at times, the diegetic sound matches the
imagery, but at other times she interjects haunting noises and chanting and Turner’s
voiceover description is non-synchronous with the image. She produces vast snow-
covered landscapes as the train speeds by and the branches of trees encroach on the
train window. These, Turner blurs and their colors of purples and dark browns corre-
late with Burke’s ideas, producing a disconcerting and disorienting effect. The infinite
open spaces of Siberia, which are unpopulated, bare, and littered with dead trees,
leave the spectator exposed and, at intervals, huge blocks of mass housing appear
on the horizon denying any other perspective, leaving the spectator dwarfed by the
edifices. These spectacular images of the landscape remain open to interpretation. For
example, toward the latter part of the film, Turner captures the final rays of a setting
sun and the rich orange and red hues permeate the screen, but no story is provided.
Perestoika continues to maintain a separation between the director’s voice, which
fixes her in off screen space, and the on screen images, which are intensely visual, yet
ones she does not fully describe: instead she remains removed, impassive, and unemo-
tional in her explanation.
At the end of the film people gather on the edge of Lake Baikal as the sun sets creat-
ing a wide strand of light across the water. Little sky is visible and the barely distin-
guishable figures are silhouetted and dwarfed against the bright light. Turner then cuts
to a black screen and this remains in place for a lengthy duration for dramatic effect
before she cuts to a low angle shot of a mountain; it is now that Turner informs us that
“a light was going out.” She then deploys time-lapse photography as the sun emerges
from the clouds, thus facilitating a feeling of the numinous, whereby shafts of light
intersect with the dramatic shapes. The rising sun obliterates all else as Turner informs
that “all of the ice is breaking,” then the camera plunges nearer to the sea. Ultimately,
in addition to being autobiographical the film functions as an “environmental alle-
gory,”22 providing a larger picture of global concerns.
Turner is one of a number of filmmakers to deploy such visual vocabulary as an
individual expression of her disquiet. Franny Armstrong’s 2009 semi-fictional film,
The Age of Stupid, is set in 2055, and takes place entirely in a huge tower set in
an Arctic wasteland. In the film the foolishness of the human race is described by a
curator (Pete Postlethwaite) in charge of an assortment of artworks, documents, and
artifacts that have been accumulated in order to be saved from the destruction of
the planet. In documentary style the film tracks imprudent decisions and greed, all
actions which result in the desecration of the landscape. Through real film footage
oil companies, such as Shell, are revealed as aggressive and uncaring in their desire to
make money, operating at the expense of the inhabitants of the area around the Niger
Delta, where the resultant pollution destroys and poisons the local drinking water.
Armstrong creates images of human loss from her own personal vision of this apoca-
lyptic future. This she achieves through rural depictions of uninhabited and desolate
spaces, and her fear-inducing tactics are generated through placing what were once
human-manufactured objects in now deserted surroundings. Indeed, to suggest the
gravity of the situation, a number of different international scenarios are introduced
in a montage sequence: actual footage of alpine areas where redundant machinery
no longer works is intercut with desolate mountain villages which are inhabited by
a mere handful of people who walk about aimlessly, inspecting the damage shaped
by the effects of global warming that the film imagines. On another continent, the
Nevada Desert reveals a fabricated abandoned, windswept Las Vegas, its garish neon
signs now lying dormant in the wake of this ecodisaster; the Sydney Opera House
is viewed from a distance, but is engulfed in flames, the resulting black acrid smoke
shrouding the city’s skyscrapers, which are set against a vivid sky; a low angle shot
of the Taj Mahal in India reveals a scene of decay, where vultures peck at human
remains, and the magnificent building is now in ruins. What makes Armstrong’s film
powerful are her stories of human cost and futility: her visual linking of individual
loss and climate change is far more poignant than certain environmental programs on
the subject that present such damage mainly through statistical facts.
In a similar vein, An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) consists of a
disturbing montage of shots depicting the depletion and destruction of the planet.
Ranging from drought to torrential rain, the inclement weather conditions and ele-
ments are represented in a sequence of shots, accompanied by a voiceover that rein-
forces the severity of the situation. Al Gore’s narration in the film initially describes
America as a tranquil pastoral idyll, and the politician’s gentle intonation is illustrated
through the cinematography as the camera pans slowly across a group of trees
which border a riverbank. At one point, Guggenheim focuses on a tranquil image
of slow-flowing water flanked by trees, which move indiscernably in the breeze. A
thin shaft of sunlight illuminates the left-hand side of the screen, suggesting that
nature is invested with mysticism and spirituality, thereby invoking Burke’s align-
ment of the Sublime with the numinous. An Inconvenient Truth combines stills and
moving images—ranging from all-encompassing shots of the volcanic cones of Mount
Kilimanjaro with its decreasing ice cap, to the disappearance of glaciers in American
national parks—to reveal the effects of global warming leading to the earth’s demise.
As in Burke, the spectator is placed at a safe distance, experiencing a “delightful
horror,” far enough away to appreciate the “powerfully other.”
Two of the central concerns of The 11th Hour (Leila Conners and Nadia Conners,
2007) are new technology and the exploitation of the environment for economic gain.
The camera frames the industrial landscape littered with giant chimney stacks, produc-
ing a dramatic and colorful skyline, as theorists and scholars criticize consumerism
and greed, suggesting that a thoughtless and insatiable humankind is not in touch with
the earth, only with material goods advertised by the media. One of the film’s most
effective montage sequences juxtaposes images of modern technology with human
activities such as watching television, sitting in an aircraft, and working out at the gym,
before the camera cuts to a shot of the Swiss Alps, in particular their highest peak, the
Matterhorn. Prior to this serene landscape, which remains on the screen for a long
time, the shots are arranged in a series of fleeting staccato images suggesting displace-
ment and chaos. From the Alps, a cut takes us to an aerial view of the range of hills,
but the camera rapidly zooms out to disclose a satellite image of the earth, which, as
Stephen Hawkins explains in voiceover, has been irreversibly altered by humankind.
Hawkins describes deforestation and the receding polar ice caps until, eventually, and
accompanied by the voice of the narrator, the camera retracts sufficiently to frame
the earth in its entirety. The images here are far more powerful than Hawkins’ com-
mentary, and the film is explicit, through its metaphorical depictions, that it is human
intervention that has caused much of the damage.
Sublime imagery also appears in the more recent film Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski,
2012), which follows National Geographic photographer James Balog as he tries to
capture the changes that are occurring in icebergs. Like Turner’s personal portrayal of
the Siberian landscape, Chasing Ice is as much about the photographer as it is about
the environment. The film begins with a series of news programs reporting various
natural disasters before we see actual images of these disasters. The film centers par-
tially on the Solheim Glacier in Iceland, which, Balog informs us, is receding. We see
an Icelandic beach, its waves dashing fiercely against huge lumps of ice, demonstrat-
ing their rapid demise. The analogy between the destruction of the beach and “an old
man just falling into the sea and dying” is interpreted visually by Orlowski: while
Balog describes the phenomenon the cinematographer zooms out, diminishing him in
the frame, although his voiceover continues to describe how vast it is.
At one point Balog removes his shoes to enable him to get good pictures of the
ice and literally immerses himself in the water. Orlowski films him from a low angle
that diminishes him further within the frame. The cinematography captures the land-
scape’s pictorial beauty, which coexists with the preoccupation of destruction, pro-
ducing images that seem to transcend the rhetoric of fear. The voiceover describes the
icebergs as surreal, unworldly, and a rchitectural—Orlowski claims to be interested in
the “interaction between human and nature.” Indeed, Balog himself tries to present
nature not in a naturalistic way but in a pictorial, almost abstract mode.
Figure 13.1 James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey, Chasing Ice (dir. Jeff Orlowski, 2012)
Throughout Chasing Ice Orlowski intersperses still images that show the human
form overpowered by nature. As Balog himself explains, the public doesn’t want
statistics—they need physical evidence of climate change, which Orlowski’s time-lapse
photography that captures swirling ice flows readily provides. As Balog describes the
“huge enduring tower of the glaciers,” while passing by on a boat, from a low angle
Orlowski films a white block of ice looming up ahead, nearly blocking out the clear
blue sky from view. He arranges human figures within the frame so as to emphasize
the size of the terrain, with the camera constantly zooming out to reveal their relation-
ship to the environment. At one point Balog lowers himself into a cavern in the ice.
This is shown from an overhead shot initially, before an edit reveals him from a dis-
tance, a red speck dwarfed by the colossal white ice cliffs. The photographer places his
life in danger as he crawls over a precipice and the spectator is lurched into the chasm
through the lens of Orlowski’s camera. Balog photographs at night, which, he argues,
“places your mind on the surface of the planet,” the images becoming increasingly
abstract, engulfing the spectator in the process. Toward the end of the film the camera
crew are watching the glacier when it starts to calve (fall into the ocean). Scenes of
the collapsing edifice result in huge pieces of ice rising 600 feet in the air; this now
becomes a spectacle and is all that is visible to the spectator, Orlowski mustering the
feeling that we are to be crushed by the force of the icefall, even though we are at a
safe distance.
Like Chasing Ice, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
focuses on a landscape covered in ice. The film is set in Antarctica and opens with
the camera literally placed under a sea of ice accompanied by an intimidating choral
chant. As with the other filmmakers discussed here, Herzog is interested in people, in
this case those working in Antarctica, and their relationship with the environment.
The films opens with the story of the original explorers of the area, Captain Robert
Falcon Scott (1868–1912) and Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922), introducing
archive footage of their attempt to reach the South Pole. The spectator familiar with
the events surrounding their expedition will be aware of the arduous topography of
the land and the enormous feats required to enable men to work in this environment.
Extreme close-ups of giant apparatus suggest human presence, and the wheels of the
machinery overpower the screen as men excavate the ground and traverse the vast
spaces of Antarctica. Herzog interviews the continent’s inhabitants to gain a view of
their personal relationship with the area rather than focus on a fact-finding mission
about global change, and he uses aerial shots of the land throughout, including those
from his plane circling enormous icebergs. Viewed from this angle, the images appear
abstract, and, to further this impression, sometimes he films from within an iceberg
or in an ice cave, stalactites hanging from the roof with small shafts of light filtering
through.
Encounters at the End of the World uses proximity and distance between the nar-
rative and the viewer to create awareness. In fact, it is via the land’s inhabitants and
their relationship with the environment that encounters with the Sublime occur. In one
such meeting, a glaciologist, Douglas MacAyeal, who studies the B-15 iceberg, dis-
cusses his work in depth; he recognizes that the B-15 is a dynamic and ever-changing
entity, larger than the country that built the Titanic, looming above us. To exemplify
this, footage of the iceberg is shown from an aeroplane window and, as Ilda Teresa
Castro explains, “the narrative serves as a guideline to the description of everything
he comes across during his journey.”23 At one point Herzog visits a dive station and,
subsequent to an interview with a cell biologist diver, the camera cuts to a hole bored
out of the ice and zooms into its void. The temperature, we are told, is -2 degrees
Celsius. “To me, the divers look like astronauts floating in space, but their work is
extremely dangerous,” states Herzog while showing the diver under the ice sheets,
silhouetted against the light. On another occasion, the scientists effect an explosion
without warning which takes us by surprise: large clouds of snow are blown into
the sky forming a giant pillar. The divers speak of “going down into the cathedral,”
which recalls Burke’s emphasis on Gothic buildings as creators of Sublime affect, and
men are shown on the sea bed, the icebergs rising out of the water above them, thus
diminishing their forms. As Castro argues, Herzog finds correlates “between outside
and inner landscapes,”24 between human experience and the environment. The direc-
tor himself admits that,
For me, a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It

shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul
that is visible through the landscapes in my films.25
On one occasion Herzog films a volcano, making use of an overhead shot, the camera
delving deep into the chasm where a lava lake lies. The gaping hole that appears as a
circular motif in the frame is centered with burning rock formations, his message pre-
dicting that humans will not survive climate change. Herzog invests the images with
a spiritual presence, using choral music to accompany a volcanologist who explores
an ice cavern created by the volcano. It is the people Herzog interviews, “people who
face extreme conditions of survival, who plunge into the waters of glaciers where
they seem like astronauts floating in space, who climb into funnels of ice in the heart
of Earth where the white cathedrals are waiting,” that form the link between the
26
spectator and the Sublime.

The final film to be discussed here is Home (Arthus-Bertrand, 2009), in which the
visual evidence of environmental c atastrophes—sumptuous landscapes photographed
from unusual angles—instills fear in the viewer. As with many of the previous exam-
ples, Home opens with direct address to the viewer: “Listen carefully to this extraor-
dinary story, which is yours, and decide what you want to do with it.” This creates
intimacy between the narrator and the viewer before the screen suddenly turns blank,
as if to suggest humanity’s insignificance in the face of the forces of nature. The black
screen is replaced after some seconds by billowing clouds which complete the fore-
ground of the image almost obscuring the landscape. Airborne, the cinematographer
then pans across a range of mountains revealing an active volcano, which emits a
plume of dark-brown smoke; these colors summon a Burkean vocabulary, and the
camera moves slowly across the mouth of the crater revealing a gaping hole, which
suggests a loss of perspective. At this moment, the spectator is invited to peer in but is
unable to assimilate the complete image, which draws the eye from side to side, and
upwards and downwards. The voiceover explains that this is where the miracle of life
occurred. Not only do such visuals engulf the s pectator—they also appear apocalyptic
in their construction.
At times Arthus-Bertrand places the camera among the clouds, which obscure
any vision and imprison us through their opacity. Conversely, the imagery that the
voiceover also describes creates a graphic pictorial affect, the camera positioning itself
variously at the foot of waterfalls, over the Grand Canyon, and above what initially
appears to be an abstract canvas, although this materializes into animals and flocks
of birds. There follow more domesticated images, static and symmetrical, juxtaposed
with the wilderness of nature, which takes its course despite human intervention.
For example, overhead shots of cattle ranches set out in methodical and organized
pens give way to raging fires, from which smoke rises to the sky to produce bold
Figure 13.2 Home (dir. Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009)

colors—this juxtaposition creates “suddenness” and shocking affect. The culprit,
we are informed, is oil, and the camera moves closer to the fire, eventually seem-
ingly subsumed by the mass of flames. Even the machinery in Arthus-Bertrand’s film
appears menacing, with close-ups of the equipment used for oil drilling taken from
a low angle. Mysterious cloud-filled forests are interspersed with images of people
trying to make a living on the land, and women digging for water in desert areas. To
increase spectatorial involvement the filmmaker alternates between images of flames
emanating from chimneys (oil) and shots of the poor communities whose inhabit-
ants are desperately trying to s urvive—nature and humans are placed side-by-side to
emphasize the immensity of the problem.
In response to fears of global warming and climate change the twenty-first century
has witnessed a revival of Sublime aesthetics in the visual arts. The Romantics’ link
between art, feeling, and the artist’s individual sensibility remains current as an emo-
tive tool and weapon, with contemporary art deploying fear-inducing aesthetics that
are pictorially magnificent while imbued with a personal dimension, making what
might be termed “pictorialism over fear” increasingly a feature of the contemporary
Sublime.
Notes
1 In Chris Darke, “To the End of the Line,” Sight and Sound, Vol 20, No. 10 (2010): 47.
2 Darke 47.
3 Inês Crespo and Ângela Pereira, “Climate Change Films: Fear and Agency Appeals,” in
Tommy Gustaffson and Pietara Kääpä, eds. Transnational EcoCinema: Film Culture in an
Era of Ecological Transformation (Bristol, Chicago: Intellect, 2013), 165–186. 166.
4 Julian Bell, “Contemporary Art and the Sublime,” in The Art of the Sublime, in Nigel
Llewellyn and Christine Riding, eds. Tate Research Publication, January (2013), https://
www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/julian-bell- contemporary-art-and-
the-sublime-r1108499, accessed August 24, 2016.
5 John Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime, 1747,” in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla,
eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 87–100. 88.
6 Baillie 88.
7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 66.
8 Burke 57.
9 Burke 81.
10 Burke 82.
11 Stella Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of
Powell and Pressburger (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
12 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to
Rothko (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994).
13 This is covered in some depth in Hockenhull 2008.
14 Max Hollein, Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, Exhibition Catalogue
May 12–August 28 (2005), http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view 1967, accessed March 5,
2010.
15 Rein Wolfs, “Dark is Like a Contemporary Rumour,” in Jan Grosfield and Rein Wolfs, eds.
Dark (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2006), 57–58.
16 Bell, “Contemporary Art and the Sublime.”
17 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975).
18 Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
455.
19 Anne DiFrancesco Darryn and Nathan Young, “Seeing Climate Change: The Visual
Construction of Global Warming in Canadian National Print Media,” Cultural Geographies,
Vol. 18, No. 4 (2010): 517–536. 520.
20 DiFrancesco and Young 521.
21 Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporality in the Cinema
(London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 60.
22 Darke 47.
23 Ilda Teresa Castro, “Dimensions of Humanity in Earthlings (2005) and Encounters at the
End of the World (2007),” in Tommy Gustaffson and Pietara Kääpä, eds. Transnational
EcoCinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (Bristol, Chicago:
Intellect, 2013), 101-116. 110.
24 Castro 111.
25 Eric Ames, “Herzog, Landscape and Documentary,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 48, No. 2
(2009): 49–69. 51.
26 Castro 112.
14 Psychedelia and the History of the
Chemical Sublime
Joseph M. Gabriel Psychedelia and the Chemical Sublime Joseph M. Gabriel
Psychedelia has a distinct visual style that is easily recognizable in the United States.
Bright swirling lines, wavy fonts, garishly colored images and patterns; these and
other elements identify the image in question as belonging to an aesthetic style closely
associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and its descendants and, of course,
with the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. Disruptive and profoundly chal-
lenging to orthodoxy in the 1960s, the counterculture leveled a fundamental critique
of what was dismissively called “straight” society. The psychedelic visual aesthetic
was an important part of this critique, challenging aesthetic convention and marking
social boundaries between those who embraced the counterculture and those who
chose to remain within the domain of the conventional. Yet today the psychedelic
visual aesthetic is an established part of mainstream culture, loosely affiliated with
a movement that has gone mainstream. The association with mind-altering drugs
has itself weakened enough that although the visual style still evokes the possibility
of altered forms of consciousness, it does so in a manner that no longer provokes
concern or even particular interest. Tie dyes, perhaps the most recognizable artifact
of the psychedelic visual aesthetic, are now just another fashion choice, suitable for
children or wearing to the company picnic, carrying little significance beyond a minor
suggestion of non-conformity.1
In this chapter, I locate the psychedelic visual aesthetic in the context of what I refer
to as the “chemical sublime.” The chemical sublime might be thought of as a type of
subjective experience in which users experience intense visual hallucinations accom-
panied by profound feelings of awe, terror, and a sense of cosmic unity. First popular-
ized in the early nineteenth century, the chemical sublime shared many characteristics
with other forms of sublime experience, such as an overwhelming sense of vastness,
but it differed in that it was clearly linked with the use of mind-altering chemicals and,
as such, has had a long-standing connection to both experimental science and recrea-
tional drug use. Indeed, the shifting significance of the chemical sublime has been one
of the important hinges upon which the conceptual distinction between scientific and
recreational drug use has been articulated. As I will argue, the reduction of the visual
imagery associated with the chemical sublime to the status of hallucination has been
deeply connected with the evolution of how we conceptualize the use of powerful
psychoactive drugs. The mainstreaming of the psychedelic visual aesthetic can thus be
understood as the latest iteration of a long-standing process in which the power of the
chemical sublime has devolved into something approaching insignificance.
The history of the chemical sublime is a long one. Its origins can be found in a
cultural turn toward the intensification of experience within Anglo-American culture
Psychedelia and the Chemical Sublime 201
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period a small
group of European writers began to construct what Marcus Boon has referred to
as the “literary use” of opium, nitrous oxide, and other substances in which drug
consumption enhances the imagination and is linked to the possibilities of creativity,
transcendence, and self-transformation. This new way of using drugs was deeply
intertwined with Romanticism as a literary and philosophical movement, and in
particular with the idea that creativity might serve as a bridge between the mundane
world of the senses and the transcendent world-in-itself. As Lynn Hunt and Margaret
Jacobs have argued, it was also intertwined with the discovery that the intensification
of experience heightened the ability to transcend the here-and-now. Poetry, radical
politics, deep personal friendships, and the consumption of drugs such as nitrous
oxide—these and other means of intensifying experience offered the possibility of
transcendence and self-transformation through the encounter with the sublime.2
As Stephen Prickett reminds us, Romanticism drew heavily on the language of the
Christian faith, and Milton’s version of Christianity in particular, which provided a
model for literary transcendence.3 Romanticism thus offered the possibility of finding
wholeness and unity through the aesthetic power of art to bridge the gap between the
world and the divine. The literary use of drugs drew heavily from this tradition—in
particular by using the binary “heaven and hell” to describe alternating experiences
of wonder and cosmic unity on the one hand and isolation, horror, and despair on the
other. Not surprisingly, however, the literary use of drugs was also deeply intertwined
with the spread of experimental forms of what has been termed Romantic science, in
Figure 14.1 Henry Fuseli, The Shepherd’s Dream, from “Paradise Lost” (1793). Image
courtesy of Tate Images, The Lodge, Millbank, London
202 Joseph M. Gabriel
which chemical and biological investigations became a vehicle for transcending the
division between man and nature. The role of the imagination in the pursuit of tran-
scendence meant that for the Romantics the possibility of moving beyond the here-
and-now was closely connected to the physical workings of the body; following the
work of Locke and others who described the imagination in physiological terms, the
use of drugs to transcend the ordinary world was, in M. H. Abrams’ words, an experi-
mental type of “natural supernaturalism” grounded in the workings of the body.4
One important origin point for the chemical sublime was thus the experimental
work of physicians, chemists, and others who discovered in drugs the possibility of
transcending the limits of the ordinary world. Humphry Davy is an important early
example. Davy was a British chemist who, during the late eighteenth century, experi-
mented with nitrous oxide as part of his broader investigations into the therapeutic
possibilities of medical gasses. Davy inhaled large amounts of the drug and discovered
in the gas a new source of intense experience and sublime knowledge; as he blurted
out after one particularly intense session, “Nothing exists but thoughts!—the uni-
verse is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!”5 As Molly Lefebure
has pointed out, Davy believed that his experimental use of nitrous oxide led him to
important discoveries about a “divine intelligence” that is “wholly independent of
human beings . . . and removed at a great distance from human comprehension.”6
For Davy, the experimental use of nitrous oxide was thus a scientific effort to explore
the mysteries of the universe through the chemical enhancement of the imagination.
It was also quite funny, and accounts of the early nitrous experiments conducted
by Davy, and others in his circle, suggest that the participants enjoyed themselves
tremendously. Yet there was no distinction here between “scientific” and “recrea-
tional” drug use; Davy’s experiments certainly led to merriment and pleasure, but
this pleasure took place within the context of the effort to discover something new
through scientific practice. As Hunt and Jacob argue about other young Romantics
who experimented with nitrous oxide around the same time, this type of drug use
also had radical social and political possibilities. This was serious business, even if, at
times, it was also quite fun.7
Following Davy’s work, nitrous oxide experiments proliferated in the United States.
These experiments initially took place among physicians, chemists, and their stu-
dents, but experimental use of the drug also became popular among the public more
broadly—by the 1820s, for example, traveling chemists had begun to demonstrate
the effects of the gas to fascinated audiences, and small groups of gentlemen formed
private clubs in order to explore its mysteries. Although such use did not take place
within a strictly scientific setting, the boundaries between science and other forms
of social practice were much less rigid than they are today and ordinary people who
investigated the gas saw themselves as part of the effort to understand and explore the
wonders of the natural world. Early nitrous oxide use was not really “recreational” in
the sense in which we use the term today; it was part of a popular scientific tradition
in which the boundaries between those who conducted experiments and those who
did not was much more fluid than it is today. Pleasure might have been a part of these
experiments, and for many it might actually have been the point, but the rhetorical
and conceptual framework within which this consumption took place was that of the
scientific experiment.8
Yet the scientific possibilities of the chemical sublime soon began to recede. The
key moment in this process was the publication of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium Eater in 1821. De Quincey was quite explicit in his text that
although he initially took opium to relieve pain, he did not continue taking it in order
to do so. Nor did he take it for experimental reasons. Instead, he took opium to
enhance his enjoyment of the pleasures of life, such as going to the opera. Of course,
De Quincey also discovered that opium brought its own kind of suffering, both
through the bonds of an overpowering habit and through the experience of “oriental
visions” in which, as Boon puts it, “his mind and body [were] invaded by the world
of myth lying outside European history, transported by the foreign contagion of the
poppy.”9 De Quincey’s version of the chemical sublime was thus both deeply racial-
ized and articulated through the experience of oscillating between the poles of the
“heaven and hell” binary. It was also freed from the logic of experimental science.
De Quincey was probably not the first person to take opium for what today we call
recreational purposes, but he was the first person to write about it explicitly in those
terms. For De Quincey, opium consumption was neither a medical nor a scientific
practice. He took it for pleasure, and in doing so he ironically found himself trapped
within its horrifying bonds.10
De Quincey’s Confessions was tremendously influential in the United States.
Following its publication numerous other explorers wrote similar descriptions of
their own efforts to transcend the ordinary world of sense-perception through the
use of drugs. These accounts typically oscillate between descriptions of cosmic unity,
awe, and majestic beauty on the one hand and profound experiences of isolation and
hellish terror on the other. They are also filled with numerous descriptions of angels,
monsters, and other fantastic images. In one typical account, for example, Walter
Colton described his experiences taking opium in an 1836 essay published in The
Knickerbocker:
At one time I was soaring on the pinions of an angel among the splendors of the
highest heaven, beholding at a glance the beauty of their unveiled mysteries, and
listening to harps and choral symphonies over which time, sorrow, and death
have no power; and then my presumption was checked, my cleaving wings, like
the waxen plumes of Icarus, were melted away, and I fell down, down, till caught
in the bosom of a thunder cloud, from which I was again hurled, linked to its
fiercest bolt upon the plunging verge of a cataract, that carried me down, frantic
with horror, into the lowest depth of its howling gulf . . . Let no one test like me,
the dreaming ecstasies and terror of opium; it is only scaling the battlements of
heaven, to sing into the burning tombs of hell!”11
No illustration accompanied Colton’s tale, but it is easy to imagine what such an

image might have looked like. The textual descriptions provided by adventurers such
as Colton were remarkably rich and detailed, and there is no reason to think that they
were not sincere efforts to capture the visual imagery associated with their experi-
ences. Certainly, early nineteenth-century descriptions of the chemical sublime shared
many visual elements with one another. We now know enough about how drug expe-
riences work to know that this should not be surprising: subjective drug experiences
are profoundly influenced by the cultural context in which they take place, and the
narratives produced by these authors undoubtedly both influenced and reflected the
culture they were a part of. There was a visual culture to this, even if it was one that
was only rarely committed to print. Descriptions of angels and demons, heavens and
hells—these were both efforts to narrate the inexpressible and almost certainly textual
descriptions of visual images that users actually experienced.
During the nineteenth- century numerous adventurers explored sublime realms
through chemical means and recounted their experiences in the pages of literary
magazines, scientific journals, newspapers, and other texts. Yet during the latter
decades of the century these descriptions became increasingly formulaic and lost
their sense of profundity. The number of narratives describing the encounter with
the chemical sublime also declined, and by the first decade of the new century con-
fessional accounts of drug use were only occasionally written in this vein. This was
probably due, in part, to a lack of innovation in the genre and the fact that these types
of narratives became somewhat boring to read. Equally important, the experience
of drug use itself began to change as the chemical sublime was reduced to the status
of the hallucination. By the late nineteenth century the drug experience was usually
narrated in what are now familiar terms of initial pleasure followed by the onset of a
dangerous habit, physical decline, and mental derangement. These accounts strongly
reflected De Quincey’s influence, but they differed from his work in one crucial aspect:
De Quincey’s encounters with the chemical sublime had been rearticulated as visual
expressions of a disturbed mental state. Annie Myers’ 1902 confessional Eight Years
in Cocaine Hell, for example, eschewed any descriptions of the chemical sublime in
the traditional sense. And although Meyers describes visions that she experienced
while using cocaine, these were visions only in a trivial sense: in retrospect, she rec-
ognized them as manifestations of her “degraded and frenzied” mental state rather
than as some sort of indication of the world-in-itself. Her visions of bugs covering her
body may have been terrifying, but they were in no sense sublime. They were simply
hallucinations.12
The experience of users paralleled the reformulation within scientific discourse of
the ontological status of drug-induced visions. As I have argued elsewhere, the rise of
an empirically based medical science during the antebellum period transformed the
experimental significance of statements made under the influence of nitrous oxide and
other anaesthetics; what had once been meaningful statements about the world were
rendered into nonsensical utterances characteristic of delirium.13 The same can be said
of the visual imagery experienced under the influence of opium and other drugs, which
were increasingly described as “hallucinations and illusions,” as Edmund Parish put it
in his 1894 book on the topic.14 These were no longer profound experiences pointing
to deeper truths, and by the turn of the century references to the chemical sublime had
almost completely disappeared from the scientific literature—except perhaps as illus-
trations of the drug users’ mental derangement. Instead, what remained was a grow-
ing scientific interest in drug-induced insanity. Opium, cocaine, and other powerful
substances retained the power to inflame the imagination, but increasingly this power
was seen in a negative sense as leading to altered, and dangerous, psychological states.
Drug-induced changes in visual imagery were now little more than what Parish called
“sensory delusions.”15 They pointed not to the world-in-itself but to the disturbed
inner state of the drug user.
Closely related to these trends was the emergence of the modern distinction between
“medical” and “recreational” drug use. This was an exceedingly complex process,
but after De Quincey’s work—and the changes in patterns of drug consumption
that followed it—perhaps the most important factor leading to this distinction was
the popularization of the temperance movement. Antebellum temperance reformers
recast alcohol from a normal part of daily life into a dangerous force that threatened
the physical and mental health of the drunkard. They also had plenty to say about
other substances, and although they recognized the importance of opium and other
drugs in the treatment of disease, they also distinguished between medical and non-
medical use. Following the Civil War, the impulses behind the temperance move-
ment morphed into a major effort to reduce the use of opium, cocaine, and other
intoxicating substances. Combined with both growing white fears of racial and ethnic
minorities and with progressive concerns about drug safety, these efforts fractured the
meaning of drug consumption into legitimate and illegitimate domains. The reduction
of the chemical sublime to the status of hallucination was an important part of this
process; temperance reformers, for example, described erratic forms of drug-induced
behavior as a type of “frenzy,” with “drug fiends” supposedly posing a dangerous
Figure 14.2 Frederick Burr Opper, Dope! Will John Bull’s “Pipe Dream” Ever Come True?
(c.1902). A pioneer of American political cartooning, Opper depicts British military efforts
during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as a “pipe dream” that may or may not
come true. The cartoon is funny in part because of the surprising difficulties the British faced
in their efforts to defeat Boer forces. Unlike earlier years, in which the dreams of opium eaters
were understood to point to something real and true, here the presumably fictive nature of the
opium dream gives the cartoon its humorous bite. Image courtesy of the United States Library
of Congress
threat to public safety due to their maddened state. Hallucinations such as those of
Annie Myers were nothing more than an indication of this disturbed state—indeed,
the tradition of visual imagery associated with De Quincey became something of a
joke, with these types of visions reduced to something approaching a caricature of
transcendental knowledge. Drugs might be consumed for medical reasons, or they
might be consumed for recreational reasons, but increasingly there was little possibil-
ity that they might be used to explore the world-in-itself.16
This is not to say that drug-induced altered states of consciousness were under-
stood only in negative terms. Influenced by a growing interest in the religious use of
mescaline by indigenous peoples in Mexico and the American West, a small group
of physicians and psychologists also suggested that mind-altering drugs could, at
least potentially, be used to treat psychological p roblems—to take just one example,
after experimenting with mescal the physician Samuel Weir Mitchell suggested that
“for the psychologist, this agent should have value.”17 The ability of drugs to induce
what psychologist Havelock Ellis called an “artificial paradise” also meant that they
had significant implications for the understanding of consciousness itself outside of
their potential therapeutic possibilities.18 In The Varieties of Religious Experience,
for example, William James described his experiments with nitrous oxide as a young
man. James experienced a profound sense of unity while under the influence of the
drug, and his experiences taught him that ordinary consciousness is just one type
of mental state among many possibilities. Yet this was not an encounter with the
chemical sublime. James’ interest was in the meaning and philosophical significance
of altered consciousness rather than in transcendent knowledge of the world-in-
itself. Indeed, James’ version of philosophical pragmatism can be understood as an
explicit repudiation of the notion of a world-in-itself, and as such his experiences with
nitrous oxide represent an important break with the t radition of Davy. This was not
Romanticism. It was its opposite.
The isolation and introduction of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) should be under-
stood in this context. During the 1920s and 1930s a small but steady stream of
scientific studies investigated both the potential use of hallucinogenic plants for the
treatment of psychological problems and the psychology of drug-induced religious
experience. When Albert Hoffman discovered the mind-altering power of LSD in 1943
it was therefore natural for scientists to think that the drug might be therapeutically
useful. Clinical investigations of LSD in the United States proceeded briskly during
the 1950s and 1960s, with researchers testing it for the treatment of depression,
alcoholism, and numerous other psychological problems. Many of these researchers
understood drug-induced altered forms of consciousness as having both therapeutic
and religious significance; indeed, the two possibilities were intimately intertwined
because, according to some proponents of so-called “psychedelic therapy,” the poten-
tial utility of LSD derived precisely from its ability to induce euphoria, tranquility,
and other feelings often associated with mystical experience. Charles Savage’s investi-
gations of the drug are an important example. As Matthew Oram notes, Savage began
clinical trials of LSD as early as 1949 and maintained an active research agenda on the
drug for almost three decades. Savage initially began researching the drug in order to
determine, as he put it in 1952, “if LSD would produce a euphoric state that would
be of therapeutic value and if it would serve as an aide to interview-psychotherapy.”19
In his later work, Savage explicitly connected the ability of LSD to provoke what was
sometimes called “experimental mysticism” to its therapeutic potential. In one 1970
article, for example, Savage and his colleagues described five types of psychedelic
experience, with the fifth, as they noted, being the most therapeutically valuable and
known by various names, including “psychedelic peak, cosmic, transcendental, or
mystical” experience.20
Yet as Oram has shown, efforts by Savage and others to promote LSD therapy
ultimately failed in the face of a shifting regulatory environment. New regulations
ushered in by the 1962 Drug Amendments to the Pure Food, Drug, and Cosmetics
Act required that in order to win federal approval new drug therapies be tested using
“carefully controlled” clinical trials. Given the fact that LSD was primarily used as an
adjunct to psychotherapy and that its efficacy therefore lay, as Oram notes, “in the
psychological impact of the subjective drug experience, which was crafted through a
unique relationship between the patient, therapist, and drug,” the requirement that
efficacy be shown through randomized trials was virtually impossible to meet.21 It
should also be added that validated assessment tools for measuring psychological
change were still in the early stages of development, and that such assessment tools
only awkwardly conformed to the psychodynamic model employed by researchers
such as Savage anyway. Moreover, both researchers and regulators had a tendency
to interpret the different epistemological frameworks at play as demonstrating LSD’s
lack of efficacy. As a result of all this—not to mention a growing suspicion of LSD
among scientists due to its increasing use among the counterculture—researchers had
abandoned the field by the late 1970s.22
Equally important, while some researchers during this period suggested that LSD-
induced “peak” experiences might have therapeutic value, the idea that the drug
might lead to some sort of actual knowledge about the world beyond what was
available through ordinary sense-perception was dismissed as nonsensical. The work
of John C. Lilly is an important example. Trained as both a physician and psychoan-
alyst, early in his career Lilly conducted well-regarded work in neurophysiology and
animal communication, including his groundbreaking work on dolphin intelligence.
In the early 1960s Lilly began to experiment with powerful mind-altering drugs,
including both LSD and ketamine, and over the next two decades reported numerous
experiences that strongly evoked early nineteenth-century descriptions of the chemi-
cal sublime, including travels through interstellar space, experiencing his own death
and rebirth, and the discovery of what he called an alien “cosmic control center”
that orchestrates the workings of the universe. Lilly’s work was highly influential on
the counterculture, but it was met with ridicule on the part of his colleagues. His
descriptions of interstellar travel were too much for them, his use of mind-altering
drugs too far removed from their own experimental methods. Lilly’s colleagues thus
rendered what might have once been considered scientifically meaningful claims into
nonsense uttered by someone who had lost his way.23
The development of popular psychedelic culture should be understood in terms
of these complex dynamics. A significant amount has been written about Timothy
Leary and Richard Alpert’s psilocybin experiments at Harvard in the early 1960s, not
to mention other aspects of how psychedelic drugs were popularized, and I will not
cover this territory here except to note that the methodological critique leveled against
their studies by their colleagues at Harvard reflected the broader epistemological
debate about psychedelic therapy taking place at the time. Both Leary and Alpert were
deeply impressed by the ability of psilocybin to induce what appeared to be mystical
states of consciousness; they also believed that moving beyond the realm of ordinary
sense-perception had both personal and social implications. They were not alone in
these views, and in this sense early proponents of the counterculture occupied a simi-
lar position vis-à-vis broader society as Humphry Davy and his colleagues did when
they inhaled large doses of nitrous oxide so long ago. Indeed, at least some aspects
of psychedelic culture were born through drug experiences that evoked early descrip-
tions of the chemical sublime. One user, for example, described his first experience
taking LSD this way:
I felt myself dissolving into the terrifying apparition, my body melting in waves
into the core of blackness, my mind stripped of ego and life and, yes, even of
death itself. In one great, crystalline instant I realized that I was immortal . . .
Suddenly there was white light and the shimmering beauty of unity. I was dead
and I was reborn and the exultation was pure and holy. My lungs were bursting
with the joyous song of being. There was unity and life, and the exquisite love
that filled my being was unbounded . . . I saw god and the devil and all the saints
and I knew the truth. I felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all
restraint, liberated to swim in the blissful radiance of those celestial visions.”24
This account strongly echoes textual descriptions of the chemical sublime from the
early nineteenth century. Yet despite the initial similarity, a new and distinctive visual
style was also developed by proponents of the counterculture that clearly distinguishes
the two eras. During the 1960s concert posters, underground comic books, clothing,
and other artistic expressions of the counterculture were rendered in a distinctive
visual style that sought to represent psychedelic experience primarily through a ges-
ture to sensory distortion. What Lana Cook has called the “American psychedelic
aesthetic”—the neon colors, wavy fonts, and shimmering images that populated the
concert posters of the time—was an effort to translate drug-induced experience into
a new visual language. The American psychedelic aesthetic can thus be thought of as
a further iteration of the chemical sublime. Yet it was an iteration that often seemed
more focused on changes in sense-perception than on a deeper meaning. Wavy lines
and bright colors are not the same thing as angels and demons.
This should not be surprising. By the time that LSD and other psychedelic drugs
were adopted into popular use, the distinction between “medical” and “recreational”
forms of drug consumption had been firmly established; the declining interest in
psychedelic therapy thus meant that by the late 1970s the scientific community had
little to say about LSD outside of the increasingly dominant narrative of drug abuse.
Moreover, there was an important tension between the “mystical” and the “recrea-
tional” in non-medical forms of use. Leary, Alpert, and others who initially popular-
ized the use of LSD played an important part in this process as they later worked to
recast the interests of the counterculture away from the drug itself and toward medita-
tion and other avenues for pursuing transcendent experience. The psychedelic visual
aesthetic was also rapidly incorporated into advertisements, propaganda posters, and
other artifacts of mainstream society, such as a propaganda poster from the mid-
1960s produced by the United States Information Agency. Perhaps most important,
however, was the simple fact that as LSD became popularized the intensification of
experience was increasingly articulated in terms of sensual distortions as opposed to
mystical experience. Grace Slick’s lyrics to the popular 1967 song “White Rabbit,”
by psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane illustrate the point. Drawing lyrical
Figure 14.3 Victor Moscoso, The Miller Blues Band San Francisco (1967). This concert
poster illustrates the psychedelic visual style associated with the American counterculture of
the 1960s and 1970s. Image courtesy of the United States Library of Congress
inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass, Slick’s lyrics were widely taken to be a description of the effects of LSD and
other psychedelic drugs. Notably, they are focused on surreal visual imagery derived
from a popular children’s story; they have little meaning beyond the simple injunction
to “feed your head,” as the concluding lines to the song put it. Although the song
references strange visual images these have no larger significance.25
By the end of the 1980s the psychedelic experience had been significantly reduced
in meaning under the weight of these trends. LSD-induced visions might be wonder-
ful, or terrifying, or deeply strange, but they were also increasingly understood as
little more than hallucinations. Psychedelia thus receded from whatever connection
to the sublime it might have had and instead devolved into what might be called “the
trippy,” a category of aesthetic experience more focused on sensory distortion and
less focused on deeper meaning. Swirling patterns of light, wavy visual fields, strange
imagery—these and other aspects of the psychedelic visual experience were increas-
ingly distant from the power and awe of the chemical sublime. Psychedelic drugs
undoubtedly continued to play a part in many explorations of heaven and hell, and in
many revelations of cosmic unity. For most, however, the profundity of the chemical
Figure 14.4 Peter Max, U.S.I.A. United States Information Agency (c.1970–1980). This
advertising poster for a government agency tasked with advancing US public diplomacy
demonstrates the way in which the American psychedelic visual style was rapidly
incorporated into different types of cultural production. Image courtesy of the United States
Library of Congress
sublime was increasingly replaced with a watered-down version of transcendence,

one in which the trip might be strange, but it is not really all that strange. As the
original generation of the counterculture aged, the emphasis on discovery and self-
transformation seemed to recede in importance and what increasingly remained was
simply a fading sense of community—and, to many, the tinge of commercialism. The
Grateful Dead’s recent Fare Thee Well tour in June and July 2015 might thus serve as
a marker for the end of the chemical sublime as a part of psychedelic culture: aging
rock stars cashing out by throwing a big party for their fans, a party that was both
saturated with trippy experiences and, to many, reeked of crass commercialism due
to high ticket prices and expensive concessions. The utopian possibilities of the coun-
terculture had gone away, and with it the power of the chemical sublime to transform
people’s lives. In its place remained Phish, a silly jam band that promises little more
than a good time.
The disappearance of the chemical sublime can also be seen in the clinic. In recent
years, experimental research on psychedelic therapy has once again begun to take
place in the United States. In part, this is because the development of sophisticated
instruments designed to measure subjective psychological states through self-reporting
has allowed psychological research to conform to the epistemological framework of
the controlled clinical trial. Much of this research explores the possibility that drug-
induced states of consciousness that resemble mystical states might be useful for the
treatment of depression, anxiety among patients with terminal cancer, and other
problems. In one 2011 study, for example, researchers administered small doses
of psilocybin to patients with terminal cancer and severe anxiety. They then used a
variety of self-reporting instruments to document the effects of the drug, including
the 5-Dimension Altered States of Consciousness Profile, which, among other traits,
measures the experience of “oceanic boundlessness,” “anxious ego dissolution,” and
“visual restructuralization.” It is probably not surprising that the experiences of the
patients in this experiment were quite unlike the experiences of those who consumed
nitrous oxide in the early nineteenth century as a means of exploring the world-in-
itself. As the authors of the study noted,
common themes reported by subjects included examining how their illness had
impacted their lives, relationships with family and close friends, and sense of
ontological security. In addition, subjects reported powerful empathic cathexis to
close friends and family members and examined how they wished to address their
limited life expectancy.26
As I hope is obvious, “empathic cathexis” and “ontological security” have little to

do with the chemical sublime. Indeed, given that the experience of self-destruction in
the face of the infinite was one of the common ways that the chemical sublime was
narrated, the experience of “ontological security” suggests that the two sets of experi-
ences barely overlap. At the same time, the reduction of drug-induced visual imagery
to the status of “visual restructuralization” suggests that the role of an enhanced
imagination in the scientific process was not what it had once been.27 Clearly, this
experiment was not a part of the Romantic effort to use aesthetic experience as a
bridge to the world-in-itself. Instead, it was an effort to leverage the alteration of con-
sciousness to therapeutic benefit at the level of individual experience. The chemical
sublime has no place here.
My goal in this chapter has been neither to question nor to advocate for the thera-
peutic potential of psychedelic drugs. Nor has it been to offer a judgment on the
counterculture, or its passing. Instead, what I have attempted to show is that visual
imagery associated with intense drug use has a history that has changed profoundly
over time. In the early nineteenth century, the sublime visions of nitrous oxide and
opium users grew out of the effort to use these substances as a means to bridge the
gap between the ordinary world of sense-perception and the world-in-itself. If we are
to believe their accounts of their own experiences, and I see no reason not to, this
effort was accompanied by a distinct type of visual experience that conveyed a sense
of profound awe and deeper meaning. By the early twenty-first century, however, the
visual aesthetic style associated with intense drug use had both changed dramatically
and been reduced in significance. Sublime visions are now mostly gone from our
representations of the drug experience, replaced by a visual aesthetic style comprised
of neon colors, wavy lines, and other trippy elements. These visual elements do not
mean what they once did, appearing easily in nostalgic fashion trends, concerts and
music videos, and the corporate advertising strategies that increasingly define the
so-called counterculture. Even strange and terrifying visual images, when they do
appear, have been reduced to the status of hallucination. The chemical sublime has
thus receded in significance, perhaps to the extent that it has disappeared altogether.
And although I do not wish to make the point too strenuously, this reduction in
significance suggests not just that aesthetic styles change over time. It also suggests
that the search for something larger than ourselves no longer means what it once did.
Notes
1 On the development of the psychedelic aesthetic, see Lana Cook, “Altered States: The
American Psychedelic Aesthetic” (PhD dissertation, Northeastern University, 2014). On the
counterculture and LSD, see Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
(New York: Grove Press, 1998) and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social
History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
2 Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005), 23; Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, “The Affective
Revolution in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34 (2001): 491–521.
3 Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 186–221.
4 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: Norton, 1971); George S. Rousseau, “Science and the Discovery of Imagination
in Enlightened England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 3 (1969–1970): 108–135.
5 Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous
Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (London: J. Johnson, 1800),
488–489 (italics in original).
6 Molly Lefebure, “Humphrey Davy: Philosophic Alchemist,” in Richard B. Gravil and
Molly Lefebure, eds. The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 95–96.
7 Hunt and Jacob.
8 Joseph M. Gabriel, “Anesthetics and the Chemical Sublime,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review,
Vol. 30 (2010), 69–74.
9 Boon 38.
10 On De Quincey and opium, see Barry Milligan, Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-
Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); Alethea
Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968).
11 Walter Colton, “Effects of Opium,” The Knickerbocker (April, 1836), 421–423.
12 Annie Myers, Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (Chicago: St. Luke Society, 1902).
13 Gabriel, “Anesthetics and the Chemical Sublime,” 69–74.
14 Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception
(London: Walter Scott LTD, 1897).
15 Parish 47.
16 On the origins of the binary between medical and non-medical drug use, see Joseph M.
Gabriel, “Restricting the Sale of Deadly Poisons: Pharmacists, Drug Regulation, and
Narratives of Suffering in the Gilded Age,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive
Era, Vol. 9 (2010): 323–336; Timothy A. Hicks, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days:
Narcotic Addition and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870–1920 (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
17 S. Weir Mitchell, “Remarks on the Effects of the Mescal Button: An experience with Peyote
Extract,” British Medical Journal (1898).
18 Havelock Ellis, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise,” Contemporary Review (1898).
19 Charles Savage, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25) A Clinical-Psychological Study,”
American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 108 (1952): 898.
20 Walter N. Pahnke, Albert A. Kurland, Sanford Unger, Charles Savage, and Stanislav Grof,
“The Experimental Use of Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy,” Journal of the American
Medical Association, Vol. 212 (1970): 1857.
21 Matthew Oram, “Efficacy and Enlightenment: LSD Psychotherapy and the Drug
Amendments of 1962,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 69
(2014): 231–232.
22 Oram 249. On the history of clinical LSD research, also see Erika Dyck, Psychedelic
Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
23 On Lilly, see D. Graham Burnett, “Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and
Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1968,” in David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds.
Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation & American Counterculture (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016), 13–50.
24 Quoted in Albert Hoffman, LSD My Problem Child and Insights/Outlooks (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 73–74.
25 Grace Slick, “White Rabbit” (1967).
26 Charles S. Grob et. al., “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with
Advanced-Stage Cancer,” JAMA Psychiatry, Vol. 68 (2011): 71–78.
27 Grob et. al. 71–78.
15 The Birds and the Bees
Bill Beckley
I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s

in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
Frank O’Hara
One evening early in September, I took a walk from Houston Street down toward
Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. The closer I got, the more it stank. The smolder-
ing crack-up of grids and Gothic arches had been the Twin Towers.
They had gone up in the early seventies, just as I’d arrived in the city and just as I’d
began working at 112 Greene Street with Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim,
Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Heilmann, and Alan Saret. At
that time, art supplies didn’t come from art stores but from the street and the various
surplus shops, bodegas that sold live fowl, and army-navy outlets that were SoHo,
before SoHo was what it is.
Even then, 112 Greene Street seemed an anti-arena, a non-gallery. No clean white
walls. No isolated objects. No sales. No market. Just bits of rope, piles of dirt, mold
growing in trays, slapdash glass shelters, cornices from roofs, tumbleweeds of tangled
wires strewn across the floor, and an occasional finch or rooster.
The shiny silver grid of the World Trade Center, set on top of pseudo-gothic arches,
was a premonition of postmodernism. And, of course, the towers were the market.
That’s why, thirty years later, on that Wednesday night of September 12, the pile of
wreckage felt so crazily poignant to me.
I do not credit the aesthetics of that experience to hijackers with political motives
rationalized by religion and oil. I credit them to a crack-up of cultures and morality
brought on by peoples who were previously pretty ignorant of each other, as well as
of themselves.
This crack-up is still playing out. We have a pool of horror to draw from as terrorist
acts morph into textured backgrounds for possible sublimes. This isn’t the first time
this has happened. I am sure the horrors of World War II, for example, must have
played some part in the paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko in the years
that followed that war.
The nineteenth-century sublime may be the experience of nature filtered through
the medium of paint, but a medium doesn’t have to be ground pigment. It can be a ski
jump—its apparent danger tempered by a skier’s apparent skill.
The Birds and the Bees 215
Sex can be a medium, as it conspires with love to bring you to a precipice (along
with the inevitable sense of death when it’s over—as you are aware that you are still
alive). Or the medium might be the painterly perils of Niagara, with rumblings of
Viagra, while standing in front of a waterfall by Frederic Church and hoping your
friend will show up for the dance.
In art, the sublime is a distancing act: horror that becomes real as it is filtered
through the pleasure of aesthetic experience.
But it’s a little bit crazy to experience the beautiful as strictly feminine and the sub-
lime as strictly masculine, as was the case in the history of philosophy. Either might
be a bit of each, if you care to think of it that way. It’s perhaps just as mad to apply
those gender definitions too strictly to gender, let alone to the sublime.
I tend to think of the beautiful as being expressed in particulars and the sublime as
pushing us out of our particular experience and into something bigger than ourselves
and the ways we are used to experiencing the world (inhuman in scale, and thus
inspiring terror).
In making the iconic photo Leap into the Void (1960), Yves Kline didn’t smash
into the street. Before Photoshop there were such things as double exposures and a
mattress waiting on the ground.
Gendered Nouns of Eighteenth-Century Prussia

At birth, the first words we hear are either “it’s a girl” or “it’s a boy.” Perhaps as
newborns we don’t know what words are, or that words mean anything at all. As we
bludgeon our way into daylight and find ourselves separated from the dependable
security of our former food source, we are hungry and disconcerted about what has
become of our world.
Still, those simple sentences proclaimed at birth become our first designations—the
first descriptions of our selves. We certainly didn’t hear “it’s an American,” or “it’s a
Mexican,” “it’s gay,” “it’s a tubist,” “it’s bi,” “it’s hetero,” or “it’s a cubist.” Those
designations, self-imposed or whatnot, come later.
In 1757 an Irish politician by the name of Edmund Burke published his Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In 1790 Immanuel
Kant published his Critique of Judgment. Its first section, the “Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment,” distinguished between beauty and the sublime by assigning genders. Both
authors assigned feminine to the beautiful and masculine to the sublime. The impli-
cation is that they felt a need to neatly define a category of experience that really
transcends such definitions. It was a nutty thing to do. They did not give any specific
examples of what masculine and feminine meant in either eighteenth-century Dublin
(Burke) or Königsberg (Kant), but even if they had, it would not be necessarily rel-
evant in the twenty-first century. Yet here and now people do care intensely about
gender assignments as they apply to themselves and their partners.
At some point along life’s way, we might question the assignments and assump-
tions made at our birth and feel a need to make adjustments. Given the rapid cultural
changes we are experiencing, this gets complicated with respect to cultural markers
and what we might call, in the case of gender, biological markers. Biological markers
have a way of morphing into cultural signifiers that create moral conundrums.
Once, Michael Bailey Gates, a semiotics student, artist, and American Eagle model,
raised a hand and claimed that a string of pearls had the same weight as a penis.
216 Bill Beckley
(Metaphorically, I assumed, not actually.) In polite c ompany pearls are visually more
evident than penises, although here in lower Manhattan, I haven’t seen a pearl in
polite company in many a month.
In the not-too-distant past, gender classifications—masculine and feminine—primarily
applied to nouns in Romance languages. Of course, there are no gendered nouns in
English.
Actually, I prefer Nietzsche’s deities, Apollo and Dionysius. They are more compre-
hensive than the simple metaphors of masculine and feminine. Apollo is masculinity,
culture, solidity, and control. Dionysius is femininity, nature, liquidity, and chaos.
Nietzsche suggests that in art, music, and literature there is a kind of push and pull
between these two metaphors. But if one comes out ahead, let it be Dionysius.
Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900. But his ideas have been influential among
contemporary artists, poets, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians—from Nabokov to
Gaga—more so than any philosopher except, perhaps, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
With respect to the politics of gendered pronouns such as “his” and “hers,” maybe
we should just forget about it and dump them all. I have enough r egrets—I certainly
don’t want to feel guilty about a pronoun, personal or otherwise. When we feel we
need to use one, why not substitute a pearl instead? If genuine, it would be expensive
to say or write anything at all. Only the 1 percent could afford to philosophize. It
would be difficult to work online, and certainly lumpy within the pages of a book.
So, for practicality’s sake, when we see gendered pronouns in this essay—“her” or
“him,” “his” or “hers,” etc.—why don’t we simply think “pearl”? It’s more practi-
cal than inserting actual pearls into a text, though that would make for a very pretty
book.
And while I’m at it, I’d like to make another substitution. We have “beauty” and
“the sublime.” “Beauty”? No pretensions, no problem. It turns up everywhere in
everyday speech. “The sublime” is pretentious, always piggybacked with the definite
article. In writing a twenty-first-century essay, why use eighteenth-century vocabu-
lary? We could drop the definite article and say “a sublime,” as we might describe a
perfect tomato. I would much rather follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, one of the
most brilliant twenty-first-century people I don’t know, and use “blimeyness” instead.
I’m serious—not making fun. It’s a nice combination of the English euphemism for
“God blind me” and the suffix Colbert used to coin the term “truthiness.”
As a student in the late sixties, majoring in painting, I was much influenced by
Barnett Newman’s work and mystified by his 1948 essay “The Sublime Is Now,”
wherein he writes,
“The impulse of modern art was the desire to destroy beauty.” But he rebels
against Kant and his theory of transcendent perception (that the phenomenon is
more than the phenomenon) and concludes in his brief t hree-page essay that “Instead
of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or ‘life,’ we are making [them] out of our-
selves, out of our own feelings.”1
In 1998 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, a brilliant West Coast artist, contributed “Beauty
and the Contemporary Sublime,” to my anthology Uncontrollable Beauty (1998).
Around the time Jeremy wrote his essay (1991) our concept of masculinity was in
flux. (Still is and always will be.) We had film stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Jean-Claude Van Damme, to name but two, who were muscular, tough, and mascu-
line but didn’t always take their masculinity seriously. But we also had androgynous
men we did respect, like David Bowie, Prince, and Andy Warhol.
So Jeremy substituted “androgynous” for “masculine,” with respect to his contem-
porary sublime.
Time flies. Some years after Uncontrollable Beauty was published, 9/11 changed
lives and our culture; we again had respectable models of masculinity: the firefighters
who risked and gave their lives saving people trapped in those tragic towers. If we
look at contemporary actors today, at musicians and artists, novelists, poets, includ-
ing persons of both sexes, we find our heroes are not classifiable as any one type of
person, or gender, or anyone who fits any one kind of mold.
Let me pause for a moment to come out of the closet and confess various suspicions
I have regarding the word “gender.”
One suspicion is that Kant may have been led on by the German language itself.
Like French and Italian, German employs gendered nouns. I wanted to double-check
with my friend Andreas van Dühren, publisher of TEXT magazine in Berlin. Perhaps
these gender designations were already in place in the language itself before Kant got
to them in his Critique of Judgment. So I wrote Andreas a late night e-mail, to check
the gender of the German word for “sublime.” Here is his response:
I just wanted to go to sleep.

But I can clarify a few things before:
1. “Sublime,” translated into German, would be “das Erhabene”; so here it
works only with the article, like many nouns deriving from an adjective resp.
abverb. And “das” is not masculine but neuter!
2. I don’t believe in classifications set up by Kant, even less in what he would have
done, in case the German language would have had the opportunity to vote.
Good night!
I replied:
May I quote you? I hesitated to write an essay using the word “gender,” since
it is the most overused word in the American English [lexicon] and I thought it
is often used as a sneaky way of desexualizing sex. Through its overuse, gender’s
impact, like anything else that is overused, is diminished. But still, the word is all
over and everywhere present in our culture.
He replied later that night:
Okay. But you know quite well that suggesting some natural development in
(especially colloquial) language is part of the brainwashing program, whereas this
development is systematically “tuned” in order to turn meanings into the con-
trary, in order to blur any distinctions, in order to reduce any critical approach,
while inducing morals that no one can track down anymore . . .
Words like “anti-utopia” (changed to “dystopia,” in order to eliminate the
idea of utopia—that is, any dialectical moment), like “cool” (its meaning changed
to its contrary, signifying not the object’s quality but the subject’s mood), like
“abuse”” (instead of “mistreatment”), in order to insinuate a sexual motive, like
“gender,” perverted in order to avoid the word “sex,” like “African American”
(instead of “black”), pointing out some (even questionable) heritage and reestab-
lishing a discrimination, by that undermining the concept of the US society—that
218 Bill Beckley
is, of unifying, at least assembling, the people no matter where they come from—
and claiming some political correctness (concerning language) while keeping one-
third of the population almost illiterate and by that politically impotent, etc.
The problem that it gains significance when used by so many is the problem of
“the invasion of the body snatchers,” or, as we said in Germany in the seventies:
Eat shit, guys, 5 million flies can’t be wrong!
Of course, there is a natural development within any language; and even if
some results may not be our cup of tea, some others may have their charm. Also,
sometimes the change of meaning may turn things into something that, in the long
run, may be appreciated as an improvement.
What remains is the problem of totalitarianism: newspeak as a tool for equal-
izing thoughts, but perverting common sense toward blank paper. Again, there
may be something promising about this—otherwise horrifying—tendency, some
creative hip-hop moment, some stop-making-sense approach.
In the last few decades, the word “gender” has gradually replaced “sex.” This
could be for the sake of clarity, separating signifiers of masculinity and feminin-
ity from markers of biology. But what are markers of biology anyway, if not
characteristics the culture accepts as relevant to gender?
Or, like Andreas implies, maybe the switch is the result of good old American
Puritanism rearing its head. “Sex” is way sexier than “gender.”
About Style
In speaking of gender, one cannot ignore elements of style, particularly the way
articles of clothing are used to signify it. In making the experience of the sublime into
a communicable aesthetic experience (art), style cannot be ignored either. Abstract
Expressionism became a style as soon as it was defined as such. Minimalism became
a style. Conceptual art can be seen as a style, though that was hardly its aim. (I speak
with experience here in that my work was included in the first conceptual art exhibi-
tion in the States, in Oberlin, Ohio, titled Art in the Mind.)
But I’ll skip instead to Vogue, the July 2015 edition, to be specific, with Caitlyn
Jenner on the cover. There Bruce Jenner, in collaboration with Annie Leibovitz,
redefined himself as Caitlyn. Traditionally feminine signifiers like a one-piece bathing
suit covering top and bottom helped. Inside the magazine, Caitlyn posed in evening
gowns.
It is interesting that in casual day wear in lower Manhattan circa 2016—and
I would suspect in parts of Brooklyn, Berlin, Naples, Barcelona, LA, Seoul, and
Milan—most everyday articles of clothing lack gender specifics. Shirts, shorts, pants,
sneakers, even shoes—it comes down to what is comfortable and practical, getting the
work done, being warm, cool, while for the sake of modesty and legality not exposing
parts such as penis, vagina, ass (for the most part), and breasts, male or female.
In eighteenth-century Prussia there appear to have been major differences between
formal court wear and peasant/farm clothing but still, as far as I can see, the idea was
dresses for women, pants for men. The court dresses were eccentric, their wide pan-
niers completely broadening the shape of the lower female body.
In Last Tango in Paris, I believe Bernardo Bertolucci is speaking to the sublime,
but his emphasis is on style. When Maria Schneider’s character, Jeanne, describes her
first sexual experience, she says, “It’s not what he did but the way that he did it.”
Bertolucci parodies two film styles: Hollywood at mid twentieth century, personi-
fied by middle-aged Paul; and the French New Wave, personified by Jeanne and her
boyfriend.
At the climax of the film in the shadows of a dance palace, Jeanne jerks off Paul.
He climaxes, then very formally invites her onto the dance floor, where a tango
contest is taking place. He drags her across the floor as she flops around, laughing, in
totally unchoreographed movements, while the other couples continue their highly
stylized dance. When the judges finally insist they leave, Paul moons them all—and
the cinematographer’s camera.
Soon after, Paul’s death by gunshot, at the hand of a fearful Jeanne, is poignantly
sublime. Fatally wounded, he removes the gum from his mouth and plants it under
a banister. As he leans on a balcony overlooking Paris, the last words he utters are,
“Our children will remember.” After a few unintelligible grunts, there he lays, dead, in
a prelinguistic fetal position. I am sorry I can’t provide a soundtrack. My description
of this scene is inadequate and carries nothing of the sublime. It’s the way Bertolucci
does it and the way Brando acts it. (See the film.)
Over the ages, philosophers from Hermogenes to Cicero have written about
categories of style. My favorite dissertation on style is from a more recent source,
Wallace Stevens, an ultimate stylist: “Style is not something applied. It is some-
thing inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is
found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man.” Then he
adds ironically, “It is not a dress.”2
When Bruce Jenner transformed his masculine-seeming self into Caitlyn’s feminine
self, it was in part an adjustment of style: the style of the photograph, the style of
dress, the style of the hair, the style of the smile. (Jenner also had hormone therapy
and surgery.)
Style is deeply meaningful to the comfort of finding one’s self within the fashion of
a time and the fashion of a place.
So, what is fascinatingly confusing to me is this: Throughout the twentieth century
and into the twenty-first, there has been an inclination for casual dress to play down
gender markers (at least in fashion during the day; when the sun goes down, and work
turns to play, articles of clothing are more likely to become gender specific). But in
transitioning, gender markers are played up. In transitioning, we rely stylistically on
traditional gender signifiers.
I should mention two other films that pivot on changing perspectives: The Crying
Game (1992), directed by Neil Jordan and, more recently, The Danish Girl (2015),
directed by Tom Hooper.
In The Crying Game, Fergus, a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army, guards
Jody, a British soldier played by Forest Whitaker. During the course of mostly out-
door scenes, the soldiers become friends. Jody confides lovingly of his girlfriend, Dil,
who lives in London. When Jody tries to escape, Fergus follows, in hot pursuit. He
draws a pistol but cannot bring himself to shoot. The chase continues until Jody trips
and falls under the treads of a passing tank. Fergus flees to London (after all, his valu-
able prisoner, held for ransom, escaped). He finds Jody’s g irlfriend—fragile, feminine,
bashful, beautiful, sexy—a hairdresser.
Fergus falls in love. So did I. After an interlude of friendship, it comes down to the
moment of truthiness, or, to put it more explicitly, the moment of sex.
220 Bill Beckley
Dil reluctantly strips, exposing what seems to be an ultimate signifier: her penis—
full-fledged though still flaccid. This biological marker seems to pull more weight than
the cultural signifiers of dress, hair, coyness, etc., which until moments before had
defined her as female.
The Danish Girl is based on the true story of artists Einar and Gerda Wegener, in
the 1920s. Einar dresses up in Gerda’s negligee, calls himself Lili, and soon begins to
take the persona seriously. In time, he transforms himself with respect to the dress
and fashion of the period. This creates some consternation and jealousy on the part
of his wife, especially when he starts seeing another man. In the end, he opts for a
penectomy, an orchiectomy (the removal of testicles; otherwise known as castration),
and a consequent restructuring to create a vagina. Lili’s frail constitution throughout
the film reinforces the stereotype of the “weaker sex.” The second operation kills her,
as the tragedy inevitably comes to a close.
I am taking my model, here, from Longinus, who spoke of the sublime through the
literature he had available to him in the first century (works of Sappho and Homer).
Obviously, much has been written since. I chose these examples because of their rel-
evance to gender, sex, love, and, ultimately, the sublime.
Both films recall an earlier story, “Sarrasine” (1830), by Honoré de Balzac, which is
meticulously analyzed by Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970).
Sarrasine, a naive, young French sculptor, falls in love with a castrato—but of
course he doesn’t know that. The castrato’s traditionally feminine markers are
there: high-pitched voice, delicate beauty, fear of reptiles (snakes in particular), coy-
ness, etc. Through this case of mistaken gender identity, Sarrasine’s validity as an
artist—and perhaps, allegorically, the validity of art itself—is held in question, one
might say castrated, by the fact that Sarrasine, the artist, doesn’t know what he has
fallen in love with.
From a twenty-first-century liberal perspective, where cultural markers often trump
biology, this story might easily have had a happy ending. Everything does seem to
work out in The Crying Game. Eventually Fergus gets used to the idea. The film has
an ambiguously happy ending—a rare believable love story where love conquers
genitalia.
Not so in “Sarrassine.” When Sarrasine finds out that the castrato is a man, he tries
to kill her. Instead, the castrato’s protectors murder Sarrasine, with daggers, or what
Barthes calls “castrated swords.” And so the castration, including the narrative, is
complete.
***
Bridge over Troubled Waters

You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.
Henry Miller
“Trans,” a flexible prefix, has hooked up with a number of syllables to form words
like “transportation,” “translucent,” “Trans Europe Express,” “transient,” “trans-
fix,” “transfer,” “transcribe,” and “translate”—to name but a few.
I have suggested stripping sublime of its gender—calling it “blimeyness” instead.
Blimeyness is “gender queer”—a foxymoron, where one does not subscribe to
conventional gender distinctions at all but identifies with neither sex or, possibly,
both sexes at the same time.
I am really talking about freeing the sublime of limiting definitions such as gender
assignments. The sublime is the feeling that you’re no longer sure what’s what. The
word “blimey” expresses just that. Just as splitting humans into two groups (male and
female) misses the reality of the situation (including the role of imagination), strict
notions of the sublime (what it is, how it is expressed) lead one astray.
It’s pretty easy to free nouns of genders assigned to them in the eighteenth century.
It may be a little more complicated to free one’s self of gender assignments, whatever
“one’s self” might mean today. But just think of how much freer it is in language
when there is no obligation to make gender distinctions. This may be one reason why
English got ahead of French, Italian, Spanish, and German and became the interna-
tional language. English is lighter: it doesn’t carry the weight of gender, the undeter-
mined logic that requires “moon” (the satellite) to be man or woman.
At the point of gender ambiguity—where courage, terror, and fear come into
play—we free ourselves of self-consciousness for the sake of an indeterminate one.
To get us there, we can take the Trift, a flimsy, bouncy rope bridge, a swinging
walkway with rickety slats, strung high in the Alps. It’s 560 feet long and leads to a
glacier. (Don’t look down.)
We can carry three words with us, “transgender,” “transgression,” and “transcend-
ent,” and walk them over. Do we want “trans” to be normal? To be acceptable? To
be a house husband or wife? To be bourgeois? Or do we want it to keep its edge?
From The Danish Girl, Last Tango, and The Crying Game to Some Like It Hot
(1959)—“trans” has hooked up with “gression.” Every love story stinks of transgression.
Fear often accompanies love. Fear of retribution by the almighty as in Poe’s “Annabel
Lee”—or by an ambiguous secular guild. In a sleeping car during Prohibition, what’s
a manhattan without a Marilyn? Bourbon mixed with murder, jokes, and a sax.
The point here is that the sublime can even mingle with the funny. From transgres-
sion and fear (even the simple fear of getting caught in something naughty), we can
hop to the sublime, because through fear we lose self-awareness. Mix that with beauty
(such as Marilyn) and you have, well, the comic sublime.
Transcendentalism’s American roots go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
explains Kant’s influence in his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1842):
It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day
acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of the term by Immanuel
Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which
insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the
experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of
ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come from experience, but through
which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and
he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness
and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in
Europe and America, to the extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive
thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.3
Emerson’s writings, along with Longinus’ treatise on the sublime, influenced the
works of Thomas Cole and his student Frederic Church. (Did I see or hallucinate
222 Bill Beckley
Longinus among the works on the bookshelves of Thomas Cole’s house on the
Hudson?) These are the painters who, with their volcanoes, storms, and great rivers,
defined the American sublime for the nineteenth century. Of course the sublime Walt
Whitman hovers overhead. In the introduction to Leaves of Grass (1855) he says:
“Re-examine all that you have been told . . . dismiss whatever insults your soul; and
your very flesh shall be a great poem.” 4
And in the first poem he asks:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)5
(If that last line doesn’t allude to the sublime, nothing does!)
The poem had no name. Later he called it one thing, then another, and finally “Song
of Myself.”
In the next century, the paintings of Barnett Newman make plain that artists and
filmmakers of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century America contributed to what
Harold Bloom called, “The American Sublime,” which was a reference to a poem by
Wallace Stevens of the same title. In this brief poem, Stevens defines the American
sublime, with its expansive space as well as its American practicality. His longer
poems like “Esthétique du Mal” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” bring
one to the sublime.
***
I have simply listed the anomalies that have confused and motivated me over the
years. This began at age eleven or so, in Carl Dunlevy’s mother’s lingerie store on
South Third Street in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, where Carl encouraged a dress-up in
his mom’s inventory.
And a stone in Springs reads:
1926–1966
“Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”
(This and the verse at the beginning of this essay, are fragments of O’Hara’s sublime
poem, “In Memory of My Feelings.”)
The Anti-Sublime
In the twentieth-century art world, various attempts have been made to sidestep
transcendence, to see objects for what they are physically and nothing more. I’m not
complaining. These movements were welcome and successful attempts to rid the arts
of tired styles. The anomaly is, when it is art it always is something more.
I remember the first time I stepped on an Andre. I was a student, and it was at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. While reading the caption on the wall, I realized the piece
was under my feet—144 zinc plates on the floor. In the past, sculptors relied on bases to
protect their sculptures from kicks and at the same time to lift them up physically and
metaphorically from the surface we tread on. In Andre’s case, the sculpture is the floor.
Along with Frank Stella and Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert
Morris were important figures in minimalism. Agnes Martin was an early influence,
particularly for Sol. Yvonne Rainier, leader of the dance troupe the Grand Union,
pioneered the minimal aesthetic in the sixties and the seventies with her famous “No
Manifesto”:
NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-

believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no
to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator
no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer
no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.6
The audience sat on the floor. The performers walking a round—no stylized move-
ments, as if the dancers were audience too. The only way to tell the difference was that
we were watching them, not the other way around.
With one exception. Breaking with this “No Manifesto,” or maybe not, one of the
dancers, whom I later found out was Suzanne Harris, leaned over and kissed me. (I
was cute once.) There, on the floor of a loft in SoHo, circa 1971, I wondered if that
kiss was love, dance, sex, or possibly art.
Like so many things in the seventies, especially at 112 Greene Street, you couldn’t
tell the difference between art and the so-called world. There seemed to be no mysti-
cism, no transcendence.
Dada, which one might call anti-art, grew out of disillusionment with the crack-up
of Western bourgeois culture. I believe its purpose in part was to negate the nineteenth
century’s tendencies toward a nineteenth-century sublime. Artists and poets met at
Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The devastations of the Great War had their effects on
Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Hugo Ball, Hannah
Hoch, and Marcel Duchamp. The Dadaists swept away the accoutrements of that cul-
ture, including painterly composition. But in refuting all the cultural markers that led
to the Great War, they found themselves in unknown territory, an undefined sublime
space where Western art hadn’t been.
In Tango Paul insisted on no names. Brando’s character wanted to avoid the over-
definition that led to his failed marriage, his wife’s suicide, and ultimately to the death
of love. But anonymity can only last so long, even when a pseudo-name like Dada is
nonsensical.
I visited Cabaret Voltaire recently and was happy to see a bar of Dada soap for sale
for eighteen euros. Maybe cleansing our twenty-first-century tendencies with bath
soap is the right way to go. In an apartment in Paris, I slept under a shovel by Marcel
Duchamp, one of an edition of six he made in 1960. It’s amazing how a simple shovel
can transcend its basic practical function and become a Duchamp. Art by its nature
transcends, whether you like it or not. Tristan Tzara, the poet of nonconformity my
son is named after, would probably appreciate the irony of Dada soap. Freud’s three
criteria for civilization are cleanliness, order, and beauty.
The Twenty-First Century

The unbridled nature of the American frontier, both beautiful and threatening,
inspired and motivated writers like Emerson and his student Henry David Thoreau,
as well as the Hudson River school of painters, which included Thomas Cole, Frederic
Church, Asher Durand, and John Frederick Kensett. They represented the sublime
224 Bill Beckley
through the vast expanse of nature that surrounded the human figures they painted, if
they painted any human figures at all.
In the twentieth century two wars, the Great and the Second, provided a horrific
backdrop for the vast Abstract Expressionist paintings that followed.
We began the twentieth-first century with a consummate act of terrorism. Since
then, terrorist acts, both homegrown and foreign, have become so common that,
ludicrous as it might be, they are now part of the warp and weft of our society.
I am not saying that acts of terror are sublime, but terror can make the bed and
fluff the pillows.
Indiscriminate murder is our present predicament, our reality. It is not sublime. We
experience it through newspapers (both print and online), blogs, Twitter, and TV.
These mediums all play their parts in giving us the news (so-called reality). They have
also divided the country into warring tribes unlike anything I have known.
Perhaps we should start wearing war paint to differentiate between political affili-
ations? Sephora would greatly benefit from the additional 49, or whatever, percent.
With our political affiliations so ghettoized, why fetishize gender? I have suggested
that we drop gender distinctions with respect to beauty and our contemporary sub-
lime. That’s easy. So why not go all the way and drop them from our sexual perso-
nae? No worries. They will still make an appearance one way or another. If you are
an artist, poet, or chanteuse, the process is called sublimation. If you are a porn star,
none of this even matters.
Nouns are like chickens: They can be free- range, gender- free. They can roam
around and find their own associations in the contexts in which they are spoken.
People can be free that way too.
Time Out for Bees

The queen, in a single maiden flight, mates with many drones, then flies back to
the hive to lay eggs for the rest of her life. The drones’ sole purpose is to mate with
queens. They do no work in the hive. The workers are all females, and it seems
that the females determine the fates of both the queen and the drones. If a queen is
compromised, they will try to raise a new queen. If that is impossible, sometimes
a worker will start laying eggs, but, unfortunately, the resulting hatchlings will be
drones, not workers, so the hive is doomed. Re-queening by a human beekeeper is
usually not successful because the laying worker actually emits a pheromone that
tricks the other workers into thinking there is a new queen in the hive. So if a real
queen is introduced, it is likely that the workers would kill it in protection of the
“false queen.”
As for the drones, the workers apparently kick them out at the end of the summer.
This is not what you would call a compassionate society, nor a society that respects
the individual. It is all in service of the hive’s greater good. (This is sometimes used as
a model for excusing bad stuff that goes on.)7
This is bee gender identity fetishized to the extreme. From a human viewpoint, bee
experience is sublime in the sense that the value of individual experience is entirely
absent.
Removing gender and stereotypes of gender from the sublime is a small suggestion
in the overall discourse of contemporary aesthetics. It may even be a mistake. But the
problem I have with the identity politics that dominate our present discourse is not
Figure 15.1 Photograph courtesy of Bill Beckley, 2016
that they allow and encourage diverse voices to be heard. Diversity of all flavors is
necessary for a society’s health and growth. It is just that categories like gender, when
fetishized to the extent they have been, are limiting in scope. When gender characteri-
zations are deemphasized, other characteristics, other adjectives, and other feelings
like forgetfulness, introversion, slyness, a leaning toward the tragic, hopefulness,
silliness, vulnerability, loneliness, lightness, disgust, heaviness, joy, sadness, delight,
shame, confidence, and many as yet unnamed, unrealized, even unidentified, can sur-
face within a twenty-first-century sublime.
That’s why I am so much in love with O’Hara’s living lines. Writing long before
identity politics, he expanded the parameters and possibilities of self in postwar
America, and thus awarded himself and us a sublime caboodle.
***
It’s difficult to look past the teens of this twenty-first century. Actually, it is difficult
to look past the November election. If you are reading this book you know what
transpired.
As I write, during this October of 2016, I don’t know what will happen. There’s a
void: blinking, blinding, and blank. We may look back in years to come and laugh or
cry at the absurdity of it all.
So what I have to offer here are simple words spoken by a Dionysian, who took the
name of the patron saint of birds. To a question about sexual mores and gender, he
responded, “Who am I to judge?” Given his calling, it was a courageous thing to say.
It was even sublime.
He (pearl) went on to explain, “By welcoming a marginalized person whose body is
wounded and by welcoming the sinner whose soul is wounded, we put our credibility
on the line. Let us always remember the words of Saint John: ‘In the evening of life,
we will be judged on love alone.’”8
Blimey.
226 Bill Beckley
Notes
1 Barnett Newman: Selected Writings, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1992), 170–173.
2 Wallace Stevens, “Two or Three Ideas,” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, eds.
Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 845.
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays and
Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 198–199.
4 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: Preface to the Original Edition, 1855
(London: Trübner, 1881), 11, archive.org/details/leavesofgrass00unkgoog, accessed October
18, 2016.
5 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900), 92.
6 Yvonne Rainer, “No Manifesto,” in Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2006), 264.
7 “Time Out for Bees” was written at my request by my sister, Constance Beckley, perfor-
mance artist and beekeeper.
8 Joshua J. McElwee, “Francis Explains, ‘Who Am I to Judge,’” National Catholic Reporter,
January 10, 2016.
Contributors Contributors
Bill Beckley’s photographic works engage language as fiction and philosophy. His
narrative works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney,
and the Guggenheim in New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the
National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; The Pizzuti Collection in Columbus,
Ohio; The Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The MIT collection in Cambridge, MA; The
Princeton University Art Museum; Sammlung Hoffman, Berlin; The Tate Modern,
London; The Daimler Collection, Stuttgart; the Burger collection, Hong Kong; and
many private collections, including those of Jeff Koons and Sol le Witt. He represented
the United States at the Venice Biennale, The Paris Biennale, The Whitney Biennial,
and Documenta. Recent solo exhibitions (2014–2016) took place in Dusseldorf,
Miami, New York, and Naples. Beckley has edited a series of thirteen books on
aesthetics with Allworth Press and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where
he also teaches, including the anthologies Sticky Sublime (Allworth Press, 2001) and
Uncontrollable Beauty (Allworth Press, 2001). He lives in New York with his wife
Laurie, a sculptor, and sons, Tristan and Liam.
Paul Coates is Professor Emeritus in Film Studies at Western University, Canada,

having taught previously at the University of Georgia, McGill, and Aberdeen. His
books include The Story of the Lost Reflection (Verso, 1985), Words After Speech:
A Comparative Study of Romanticism and Symbolism (Macmillan and St. Martin’s,
1986), The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of
Horror (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Lucid Dreams: the Cinema of Krzysztof
Kieślowski (ed.) (Flicks Books, 1999), The Red and the White: the Cinema of People’s
Poland (Wallflower, 2005), Cinema and Color: the Saturated Image (Palgrave
Macmillan for the BFI, 2010), Screening the Face (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and
Doubling, Distance and Identification in the Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Lyuba Encheva is a doctoral candidate in the Communication and Culture program

at Ryerson and York University in Toronto, Canada. Her areas of interest include
social semiotics, visual culture, and the construction of human subjectivity. She is
currently studying the gamified workplace and the modalities of self-expression avail-
able to the gamified subject. Her research also investigates the meaning of gamifica-
tion as a concept together with the socio-cultural factors that led to its appearance.
Building on observations of technologically subsidized identities, she explores the
relationship between tools of communication and personal agency, the possibility of a
“disembodied” personhood, and the degree to which technologically navigated types
228 Contributors
of self‑relation facilitate the production of autonomous subjects who can become
the active participants in a web-based public sphere. Ms. Encheva’s work has been
published in The International Journal of the Image, Continuum: Journal of Media
and Cultural Studies, and Rhetor: Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of
Rhetoric.
Ksenia Fedorova is a media art researcher and curator. She holds a PhD in Philosophy/
Aesthetics from Saint-Petersburg State University and Ural State University, Russia,
and is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of California
Davis. She is the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (Kabinetny
Utcheny, 2014, in Russian, shortlisted for the national Innovation and Kandinsky
awards) and has published articles on media theory, digital aesthetics, the techno-
sublime, proprioception, transmediality, interfaciality, locative media, and interactive
art. She has lectured on media art theory and history in Russia, the US, and Austria.
She was a founder and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural
branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, Russia) and was
a member of the Jury of Prix Ars Electronica 2012 and the selection committee for
the PRO&CONTRA 2012 symposium (Moscow). The focus of her current research
is the aesthetics of sensing technologies in transmedial affective interfaces and mixed
reality settings.
Joseph M. Gabriel is Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences

and Social Medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine. He is the
author of Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the
Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He lives in
Tallahassee, Florida with his family and two dogs.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Professor/Chair Emeritus at the Art Center College of Design-

Pasadena, is a painter who also writes about art and related matters, both on his own
and with Rebecca Norton, as the collaborative Awkward x 2. His paintings are in
a number of public and private collections, including the Albright-Knox Museum,
the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of
Contemporary Art (Los Angeles,) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami.)
He is the author of Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic
Device (Out of London Press, 1986), Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual
Arts, 1986–1983 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Beauty and the Contemporary
Sublime (Allworth Press, 1999), and (with Frank Gehry) Frank Gehry, The City
and Music (Routledge, 2000), as well as other essays and shorter pieces. Art after
Deconstruction: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, edited by Rex Butler (Editions 3, 2011) con-
tains essays about his work by Rex Butler, Bonnie Clearwater, Penny Florence, and
Rachel Kuchner, as well as three essays by him. He has been awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship in Painting (1997), NEA Fellowships in both painting and criticism (1974,
1979, and 1989) and was the recipient of the College Art Association’s Mather
Award for Art Criticism (in 1998) and of a Francis Greenberger Award (in 2002).
Hannah Goodwin is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa

Barbara. Her dissertation entitled “Archives of Light: Cinematic and Cosmological
Temporalites” traces connections between cinematic and cosmological discourses in
Contributors 229
the early to mid-twentieth century. The project was inspired by her discovery that
early film theorists frequently referenced changing cosmological paradigms and new
astronomical theories like Einstein’s theory of relativity when explaining film’s capac-
ity to expose new scalar realms and dissect visible phenomena across time. A chapter
of her dissertation will be included in the forthcoming collection Epistemic Screens:
Cinema, Art, and the Practice of Science (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). She is
a member of the Media Fields Journal collective, for which she has coedited two spe-
cial issues and hosted a conference, and has worked in the editorial office at Camera
Obscura. Her research interests include film theory, film history, and global studies,
with an emphasis on science and technology studies.
Stella Hockenhull is a Reader in Film and Television Studies and Co- Director
of the Research Centre Film, Media, Discourse and Culture at the University of
Wolverhampton, UK. She has built up a strong research profile in British cinema and
landscape with expertise in the correlation between film and painting in terms of the
Sublime. Hockenhull has published widely on this subject, including the monographs
Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British
Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2014) and Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach
to the Films of Powell and Pressburger (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Her
journal articles and book chapters include: “Escape to the Country: the Accented
World of the Evacuee in Stephen Poliakoff’s Perfect Strangers” in Journal of British
Cinema and Television; “Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen”
in Film-Philosophy; “The Wind Journeys: Global Anxiety in the New Millennium”
in Global Studies; “Sublime Landscapes in Contemporary British Horror” in Journal
of Horror Studies; “An Aesthetic Approach to Contemporary British Social Realism:
London to Brighton (Williams 2006)” in Film International; “Sublime Landscapes in
Contemporary British Cinema: The War Zone” in International Journal of Humanities;
“Neo-Romantic Landscapes: Pictorial Aesthetics in Gone to Earth” in Literature/
Film Quarterly; “Neo-Romantic Visionaries: Picturing Britain in the Second World
War” in The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Aesthetics, Landscape; “An Age
of Stupid? Sublime Landscapes and Global Anxiety post-Millennium” in Cinema
and Landscape; and “Dark Monarchs: Gothic Landscapes in Contemporary British
Culture’ in Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies.
Adrian Ivakhiv is the Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural
Resources and Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of
Vermont. He has published widely in the fields of environmental humanities, cultural
and religious studies, and film and media studies. His books include Claiming Sacred
Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press,
2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Immanence: Philosophical Engagements
in the Shadow of the Anthropocene.
James Kirwan holds a PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University. He has
been a professor of cross-cultural studies at Kansai University Osaka, Japan, since
2004. His publications include Literature, Rhetoric, Metaphysics: Literary Theory
and Literary Aesthetics (Routledge, 1990), Beauty (Manchester University Press,
1999), The Aesthetic in Kant (Continuum, 2004), and Sublimity: The Non-rational
230 Contributors
and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (Routledge, 2005). His current research
is in the fields of aesthetics and meta-ethics.
Elizabeth Oldfather received her PhD in English in 2015 from Rutgers University
and was awarded a Certificate from the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive
Science. In 2015/2016 she was Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UC Colorado
Springs and a participant in the Art and Aesthetics seminar at the Rutgers Center for
Cultural Analysis. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana
at Monroe. Her current book manuscript, Transported Minds, explores the cognitive
and cultural forces that underpinned eighteenth-century Britain’s fascination with
the experience of imaginative presence—a psychological subcurrent that joins poetic,
philosophical, and narrative works ranging from Bunyan to Keats, and presents a
historically grounded challenge to modern psychological models of literary transport.
An article stemming from the project, on the poetics of transport in Thomson’s The
Seasons, has recently appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
An active amateur musician, most recently appearing as principle cellist of the Pikes
Peak Philharmonic, her work straddles disciplinary and generic boundaries to uncover
the fine psychological particularities and interchanges of artistic cognition.
Sandra Shapshay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University-

Bloomington. She works primarily on the history of aesthetics and ethics in the nine-
teenth century, with particular focus on Schopenhauer and Kant, and aims to bring
the insights of this history to bear on contemporary debates. Publications include:
“Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime” (BJA,
2013) and “The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy: Schopenhauer’s Solution
Revisited” (BJA, 2012), among others. Shapshay is currently editing the Palgrave
Schopenhauer Handbook, and with Steve Cahn and Stephanie Ross, Aesthetics: A
Comprehensive Anthology 2nd edn (Blackwell).
Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor

Emeritus in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. From 2010 to
2012 she served as Distinguished University Visiting Professor as well as Distinguished
Critic in the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has
held fellowships from the NEH, CASVA, the Getty Research Institute, Guggenheim,
the Humboldt Prize, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has also been a Sir
John Templeton Fellow (University of Southern California) and a Migunyeah Fellow
(University of Melbourne, AU). Her most recent book is A Field Guide to a New
Metafield: Bridging the Humanities–Neurosciences Divide (University of Chicago
Press, 2011). Stafford is now an independent scholar, writer, curator, and speaker.
Her work reveals the connections between the arts, sciences, and optical technolo-
gies: the Getty Museum exhibition and catalogue Devices of Wonder (co-curator,
2001/2002); geography, geology, and mineralogy in Voyage into Substance (MIT
Press, The Getty Research Institute, 1984); anatomy and the life sciences in Body
Criticism (MIT Press, 1991); neuroscience and cognitive science in Echo Objects
(University of Chicago Press, 2007). She also writes historically grounded manifestoes
on the vital significance of the visual and sensory arts to general education as well as
to society at large (Artful Science (MIT Press, 1994) and Good Looking (MIT Press,
1996)). In her recent work Stafford has examined the revolutionary ways in which the
Contributors 231
brain sciences are changing our view of the total sensorium and inflecting our funda-
mental assumptions concerning perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and
subjectivity.
Damian Sutton is Professor of Photography, Theory and Culture, Coventry University,

UK. He is the author of Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time
(University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and co-author of Deleuze Reframed (I. B.
Tauris, 2008). He writes on photography, cinema, and philosophy, and is on the edi-
torial board of Film-Philosophy published through the Open Humanities Press. His
related research focuses on photography as a process of authorship in contemporary
art and culture.
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York

University in Toronto. She has previously taught at the University of New Brunswick
and the University of California Santa Cruz. Trifonova is the author of Warped Minds:
Cinema and Psychopathology (Amsterdam University Press, 2014), the edited collec-
tion European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008), and The Image in French Philosophy
(Rodopi, 2007). Her articles have been published in The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Film Theory, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, SubStance, Film
and Philosophy, Space and Culture, The European Journal of American Culture,
Studies in European Cinema, Rivista di Estetica, CTheory: Theory beyond the
Codes, Cineaste, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, CineAction, Cinema & Cie:
International Film Studies Journal, Studies in Comics, Quarterly Journal of Film and
Video, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Postmodern Culture, Journal of Screenwriting,
Scope, Alternative Francophone, Kinema, Senses of Cinema, Interdisciplinary Literary
Studies, and in several edited collections. She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist
at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House
(France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in
St. Petersburg (Russia). Trifonova is the writer and director of the feature film Man of
Glass (2012) and of several short films. She is currently fi
nishing her second feature
film, Tourist (2017).
Index
Adorno, Theodor 10, 70, 116; see also the Bruckner, A. 56

sublime, postmodern approaches to; Burke, E. 55, 60, 153–4, 178; see also the
Auschwitz sublime, in Burke; the sublime, and
aesthetics: history of 2–5; materialist 2–4, 23; negative pleasure
see also the sublime, history of Burial at Ornans, A (Courbet) 112
Age of Stupid, The (Armstrong) 193 Burnt by the Sun 55, 57–9
Agbogbloshie Market 180 Burtynsky, E. 177–8, 182–3; see also
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 209 Manufactured Landscapes; photography
Anthropocene 42–7, 74, 164, 172–4; see also
the sublime, anthropocentric Carlson, A. 164, 169
Armstrong, F. 193 Carroll, L. 209
Aronofsky, D. 53 Carroll, N. 168
artful engineering 96–9; see also brandless CGI (computer-generated imagery) 75–7,
art; the sublime, “lowering” of; the 156, 162; see also the sublime, cinematic
sublime, surface Chasing Ice (Orlowski) 194, 195
Arthus-Bertrand, Y. 197–8 chills/frisson 120, 122, 125–7; see also music;
artificial intelligence (AI) 142, 145, 148 the sublime, in music
Asher, M. 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Church, F. E. 166–7
astronomy 155, 159, 160; see also the Cimino, M. 61
sublime, cosmological Clark, T. J. 104, 108, 110
Aura Calculata (Roth) 96–7 climate change 189, 192, 193, 195, 196–8,
Auschwitz 52, 53, 56; see also Nazism; the 198; see also the sublime, environmental;
sublime, as “unpresentable”; the sublime, the sublime, anthropocentric; the sublime,
postmodern approaches to ecological
autopoietic 145 cocaine 204; see also drug use
autotelic activities 133, 135 code 147; see also the sublime, computational
Azoulay, A. 184–5; see also “emergency Cole, T. 221, 222, 223
claim” “common sense” (sensus communis) 184; see
also Kant, I.
Badiou, A. 103, 116 Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Baillie, J. 190 (De Quincey) 202–4
Ball, H. 223 Contract, The (Zanussi) 61
Barthes, R. 79, 220 counterculture 200; see also drug use
beautiful, the: in Burke 5–6; in Kant 6–8; in Courbet, G. 112, 180
Schiller 8–10 Cuarón, A. 164, 172–3
Beethoven, L. van 56–7, 126; see also music;
the sublime, in music Davy, H. 202, 208
Benjamin, W. 12–14, 53, 77, 85, 116 Days of Heaven (Malick) 62
Bertolucci, B. 218 Deer Hunter, The (Cimino) 61
Bonaventura 90; see also Night Watches Deleuze, G. 71, 82, 105–7, 116
Bradatan, C. 52 De Quincey, T. 202–3
brandless art 96 Derrida, J. 49
Brando, M. 219 drug use 200–12
Index 233
Dubuisson, J. 183–4 Hansen, M. 15, 148
Duchamp, M. 223 Harbou, T. von 57
Hegel, G. F. 8–9, 28, 79, 105–7, 111–12, 116
Eagleton, T. 103 Heidegger, M. 104, 112, 145
Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (Myers) 204 Herpen, I. van 94
Einstein, A. 156 Herzog, W. 47–9, 54–5, 195–6
Eliade, M. 62 Hollinghurst, A. 88
Eliza effect 149 Home 197
“emergency claim” 184 11th Hour, The 194
Emerson, R.W. 221 Hubble Space Telescope 67, 153, 161
Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog) Hugo, P. 179–80
195, 196 Hulk (Wheelbarrow) (Koons) 110
epiphany 123–5 Husserl, E. 116
Epstein, J. 156
Eros and Thanatos 137–40 IMAX 65
event 11–14, 27–8, 42–3, 45–50; see also Inconvenient Truth, An 193–4
eventology ineffability 101n4
eventology 45–50 inscrutability 94–6
excitation transfer 121
extrinsic/intrinsic motivation 133 James, W. 206; see also Varieties of Religious
Experience, The
fear 121, 127–8; see also Burke, E. Jane Eyre (Brontë) 57
flow: empowering effect of 132, 134; Journey to Italy (Rossellini) 62
and free will 135; as gamified sublime Joyce, J. 103–4
131, 139–40; and intentionality 135; Judd, D. 222
as optimal experience 132, 135;
overpowering effect of 132–4; as “self- Kant, I. 53, 54–60, 142, 154–8, 164–5,
inflicted” sublime 140 169–70, 177–86; see also the sublime,
Forsey, J. 165, 170–2 and Reason; the sublime, and negative
freedom: as control over one’s consciousness pleasure; the sublime, mathematical; the
136; as submission to instinct 134, 137; sublime, dynamic
as “unlimited capacity” of reason 136; see Keltner and Haidt model 122–3, 126, 128
also gamification Kjartansson, K. 99
Friedrich, C. D. 104 Konečni, V. J. 122, 125
Fuseli, H. 201 Kooning, W. de 107
Koons, J. 108, 110, 111, 112; see also the
gamification 131–4; see also the sublime, sublime, and vulgarity
gamified Kornblum, H.W. 155–7
Garbo, G. 54 Kracauer, S. 158
Gibson, W. 93; see also Zero History Krepp, S. 94–5
Gish, L. 59 Kristeva, J. 116
globalization 176–80, 182–6; see also the
sublime, “cognitive mapping” Lacan, J. 44, 49, 111, 116
global warming 189, 192, 193–4, 198; see Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 144
also climate change Lang, F. 57; see also Metropolis
Goldblatt, D. 180–2 Langer, S. 103, 106
Goodbye Lenin! 59 Leary, T. 207, 208
The Grateful Dead 210 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophüls) 61
Gravity’s Rainbow 106 libido 138
Greenberg, C. 108, 109, 118 Line of Beauty, The (Hollinghurst) 88
Griffith, D.W. 59; see also Way Down Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Herzog) 54–5
East Longinus 2, 4, 5, 58, 108, 144, 165, 220–2
Groys, B. 108, 109, 111 LSD 200, 206–10; see also drug use
Guattari, F. 44, 105, 107 Lyotard, J.-F. 52; see also the sublime,
Guggenheim, D. 193; see also Inconvenient in Lyotard; the sublime, postmodern
Truth, An approaches to; the sublime, posthuman;
Gursky, A. 177–9, 182–4, 185 the sublime, and “event”
234 Index
Malevich, K. 109 1% Owns 50% of the World 89
Malick, T. 62, 153, 154, 161; see also the
sublime, and “detailism” Paglan, T. 93
Manufactured Landscapes 54; see also painting 177–9, 182–3
photography; the sublime, postindustrial Paradjanov, S. 61; see also Shadows of
Martin, J. 190 Forgotten Ancestors
Marx, L. 143–4 Paris nous appartient (Rivette) 60
matter 2–11; see also aesthetics, peak experience 122, 126, 207; see also the
materialist sublime, and “awe”
Méliès, G. 65, 155 Perestroika 32, 189, 192
Metropolis (Lang) 57, 61 Perlow, S. 103, 112
Miller, P. 143 photography 176–86; environmental
Millet, J.-F. 179 176–81, 185; landscape 176–8, 179–82,
Mizoguchi, K. 57 185; humanist 176, 179–81, 183
Mofokeng, S. 180 π (Aronofsky) 53
Mócsy, Á. 98; see also Smashing Matters Pianist, The (Polanski) 60
Morales, S.D. 89, 92 Pippin, R. 105, 112
Moscoso, V. 209 Plotinus 107, 108, 114
multitude (Negri) 183–4 Poe, E.A. 26, 221
music 125–7, 153, 161 Polanski, R. 60
Mysterianism 171, 172 Pollock, J. 107
possible worlds theory 123
Nancy, J.-L. 145 process metaphysics 45
“natural supernaturalism” 52, 60 psychedelia 200–12; see also counterculture;
Nazism 52–3 drug use; the sublime, chemical
Nechvatal, J. 89; see also 1% Owns 50% of “psychedelic therapy” 206–8, 210–11
the World
neuroscience 120, 127–8; see also the Ralegh, Sir W. 62
sublime, neuroaesthetic approaches to; the Rainier, Y. 223
sublime, neurocinematic approaches to Rancière, J. 2, 40n100, 103
Newman, B. 103, 106, 107, 115, 116; see Ray, G. 53
also the sublime, postmodern approaches Recontres de Bamako 180
to; the sublime, as privation religion 52, 158–9; see also the sublime, and
New Topographics (exhibition) 177 “postsecularity”
Nicolson, M. H. 165, 170 Rescue Dawn (Herzog) 54
NightWatches 90 Riefenstahl, L. 56
nitrous oxide 201–2; see also drug use; the Ristelhueber, S. 177
sublime, chemical Rivette, J. 60
non-human 142, 149–50; see also the Romantic/Romanticism 121, 128, 189, 191,
sublime, and posthuman; the sublime, 198, 201–2; see also the sublime, Neo-
postmodern approaches to Romantic approaches to
Norton, R. 106, 112 Rosenblum, R. 191
Nostalgia for the Light 54–5 Rossellini, R. 54, 62
Nye, D. 18, 144, 153, 154–5; see also the Roth, T.O. 96
sublime, American; the sublime, and Rothko, M. 191
national identity
Saatchi collection 180
Ophüls, M. 61 Salgado, S. 177, 181–2
opium 201–3; see also drug use; the sublime, Salt of the Earth, The 54
chemical Sansho Dayu (Mizoguchi) 57
Opper, F.B. 205 Saito, Y. 167
Oram, M. 206–7 Savage, C. 206–7
Orlowski, J. 194–5 Schlegel, F. 103, 111, 112
Ortega y Gasset, J. 57 Scott, Captain R. F. 196
Osodi, G. 180 Scott, R. 164, 172
O’Sullivan, T. 177–8 Sekula, A. 182–3, 185
Ouedraogo, N.L. 180 Shackleton, Sir E. 196
Index 235
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 61 and negative pleasure 5, 12, 26, 80;
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 59 Neo-Romantic approaches to 32, 191;
Smashing Matters (Mócsy) 98 neuroaesthetic approaches to 19–21, 29,
Sontag, S. 184 127; neurocinematic approaches to 21;
Sorrentino, P. 54 neurophenomenological approaches to 33;
Southam, J. 177 notional 28, 70; in painting 22, 56, 66–7,
Spiral Jetty 106 84, 89–90, 99, 103–4, 108–15, 167–8,
Stalinism 52–3, 59 177–80, 184, 214, 222–5; in poetry 22–3,
Stella, F. 222 126, 165; and politics 52–3, 57–9; popular
Stevens, W. 219, 222 25, 28, 66–8, 71, 172–4; posthuman 13,
Stromboli (Rossellini) 54, 61 17–19, 47–50; postindustrial 31, 179–84;
“structure of feeling” (Williams) 191 postmodern approaches to 9–21, 27,
subjectivity 144, 146, 147; see also the 146–8; and “postsecularity” 52–3;
sublime, and affect Presocratic 2–3; as privation 6, 9–10, 12,
sublime, the: and affect 12, 16–17, 20–2, 80, 86; quantum 26; and Reason 7–12,
30–3, 44–7, 75–86, 121–7, 132–5, 140, 17–31, 77–80, 83–6, 132, 136–7, 143–5,
142, 147–8, 165, 169, 184, 190, 196–7; 154–7, 171–81; recentering of 29–30,
American 18, 25–6, 222; anthropocentric 123–5; and religion 52–3; and romantic
22, 31, 146; in antiquity 2–4, 23, 144, love 61; and ruins 60; in Schiller 8–9, 56;
165; architectural 4, 22–3, 67; and “awe” in sculpture 24, 67, 106, 110, 114–15; and
12, 19, 25, 30, 64–5, 74, 78, 86, 100, “the solar” 58; somaesthetic approaches
120–5, 127–8, 137, 153, 158–61, 171, to 19, 21; and “spectacle” 24, 65–8, 75–9;
178, 190, 200, 203, 211; banalization surface 92–6; technological 18, 25–6, 29,
of 85; and boundary/horizon/mirage 78, 142–50, 154–6; in techno-capitalism
56, 62; in Burke 5–6, 17–22, 29, 55, 57, 13, 17–19, 29; “thick”/“thin” 169–72;
60, 79–80, 84, 91, 121–2, 128, 131–2, “toxic” 177; and trauma 12, 44, 49, 84,
136–7, 153–4, 169–71, 178, 189–97, 86, 120, 136, 181; and the uncanny 59,
215; chemical 26, 32, 200–12; cinematic 142, 145, 150; as “unpresentable” 12, 17,
24, 28, 65–8, 71, 75–7, 154–6; cognitive 27, 70, 143; urban 26; and vulgarity 28,
approaches to 29–30, 33, 53, 120–8, 108, 110, 116
143, 149, 164–5, 169–74; and “cognitive Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, A
mapping” 17, 22; computational 146; (Walker) 113
cosmological 28, 153–62; data 80–5; and Subotsky, M. 179–80
“detailism” 78–9; discourse on/of 27; supersensible 7, 8, 12, 17, 70, 84, 134, 165,
dynamic 8, 177, 179, 185; ecological 128; 170; see also Kant, I.
embodied 77–8, 86; encounter 131–2;
environmental 22, 28, 29, 74–5, 164–5; taste, history of 167
and “event” 11–19, 28, 33, 42–50, 55, techne 144, 146, 150
66, 126, 132, 147, 159, 167, 192; and temperance movement 204–5
femininity 54, 61; forlorn 79–80; gamified Through the Looking Glass (Carroll) 209
30, 78, 86, 131, 136, 139–40; gendering time: ethics of 14; restructuring of 13–14;
of 32, 61, 79, 180, 215–25; history of embodied/clock/network 13–18; time-
2–12; and horror 52, 55; immersive 16, lapse 155, 156
77–8, 167; industrial 177; in Jean-Luc Trans Amadi Slaughterhouse 180
Nancy 27, 70, 131–2, 145; in Kant 6–12, trippy, the 209; see also drug use; the
17–22, 25–6, 29–32, 54–60, 69–71, sublime, chemical
78–86, 103–7, 121–2, 131–2, 134–40, Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl) 56
142–7, 154–8, 164–5, 169–70, 177–86, Turner, J.M.W. 56, 190, 192–4
215–22; longitudinal 88; “lowering” of
20; in Lyotard 9–27, 52, 70, 80–4, 143, Ulysses’ Gaze 59
145, 147, 150; Marxist approaches to Ungureanu, C. 52
22, 28; mathematical 3, 8, 53, 82, 154–5, United States Information Agency 208,
161; medieval 5; and melodrama 59–60; 210
moral 7–9; in music 56–7; and national
identity 25, 33; in Nature 6–13, 17–33, Varieties of Religious Experience, The 206
47–57, 59-61, 66, 74–6, 78–9, 84, 104–6, Venice Biennial 112
122, 128, 132–7, 143–5, 153–7, 164–72; Verstraate, G. 103
236 Index
Vidler, A. 59 Whitman, W. 222
Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Newman) Williams, R. 191
103 Wing Ka Ho 185
Wunderkammer 94
Wagner, R. 57 Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 61
Walker, K. 112, 113, 114, 116 Wordsworth, W. 53–4
Wall, J. 111, 112; see also photography
Warhol, A. 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 216 Youth (Sorrentino) 54
Way Down East 59
Weiskel, T. 122 Zanussi, K. 61
Whitehead, A. N. 45 Zero History (Gibson) 29, 93
“White Rabbit” 208 Žižek, Slavoj 58

(Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) Temenuga Trifonova (Editor) - Contemporary Visual Culture and The Sublime-Routledge (2017)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) Temenuga Trifonova (Editor) - Contemporary Visual Culture and The Sublime-Routledge (2017)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contemporary Visual Culture

and the Sublime

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media

1 Ethics and Images of Pain 10 The Uses of Art in Public Space

2 Meanings of Abstract Art 11 On Not Looking

3 Genealogy and Ontology of the 12 Play and Participation in

4 Representations of Pain in Art and 13 Urbanization and Contemporary

6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual 15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art

Edited by Temenuga Trifonova

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Temenuga Trifonova to be identified as the author of the

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-138-23772-8 (hbk)

1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen 42

2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality 52

3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime 64

4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes 74

5 “Black and Glittering”: The Inscrutable Sublime 88

6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity 103

7 Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches 120

8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime 131

9 The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime 142

11 Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World: The Sublime

12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary Environmental

13 Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema 189

14 Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime 200

15 The Birds and the Bees 214

List of Contributors 227

4.1 Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005, Turbine Hall installation,

Writing as an observer rather than as a philosopher, in Observations on the

Ultimately, though, even as Kant points to various natural phenomena as examples

no longer so obvious that it is the task of art to seek reconciliation. [. . .] Indeed, it

Twentieth-century accounts of the aesthetic, particularly those of the sublime, were

Insofar as network time is a “context-created temporal experience” independent from

To the extent that we live in an increasingly disembodied world, which functions

Representation is articulated in terms of conformity and signification. But presen-

2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror

Universality, Music, Sound

Political Unconsciousness and the Sublime Object of Ideology: Mikhalkov’s

Dialectics of an Image: The Sublime and Melodrama, the Uncanny,

The Sublime and the Sense of an Ending

As if when after Phebus is dessended

Wee should beginn by such a partinge light

3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional

The Environmental Sublime

The CGI Sublime

The Immersive Sublime

The Fetishization of the Detail as Sublime

The Forlorn Sublime

The Data Sublime

understand the contextual/general meaning of a concrete detail is blocked, yet this

The aim of this type of photography—positioned somewhere between quasi-­

if Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable,

5 “Black and Glittering”

After Dark: Nocturne for Romanticism

a negative or “Tantric” Romanticism, that is, out of an abject or inverted Sublimity

is writing in the twenty-first century), are seen as self-generatingly automated, cooly

­Sublimity—­what a concept, especially in an age like ­ours—­secular, disenchanted,

This noble secrecy obliges the devotees of c­ oveted—­even ­archetypal—­garments to

Artful Engineering: Toward a Brandless Art

1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen 42

2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality 52

3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime 64

4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes 74

5 “Black and Glittering”: The Inscrutable Sublime 88

6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity 103

7 Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches 120

8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime 131

9 The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime 142

11 Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World: The Sublime

12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary Environmental

13 Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema 189

14 Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime 200

15 The Birds and the Bees 214

List of Contributors 227

The aim of this type of photography—positioned somewhere between quasi-

Sublimity—what a concept, especially in an age like ours—secular, disenchanted,

This noble secrecy obliges the devotees of c oveted—even archetypal—garments to

Is there, then, something in between the universe seen as dankly Burkean—surely a

In being an “extended argument for figuration” Deleuze’s supposedly “non-

Figure 9.1 Alexa Wright, Alter Ego, 2005, screen-based interactive installation

It seems the key to responding to Forsey’s worries about a non-metaphysical theory

For Ohlin, Gursky’s is something of a documentary project—photographing stock

sublime was increasingly replaced with a watered-down version of transcendence,

NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-

Sandra Shapshay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University-