American Technological Sublime by David E. Nye

Abstract

Book Reviews American Technological Sublime. By David E. Nye. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pp. xx + 362; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Nearly twenty years ago John Kasson, following hints by Perry Miller and Leo Marx, offered a brief discussion of the “technological sublime.” Suggesting that technology had offered Americans “a wel­ come source of excitement, an addition [to] but not a fundamental dis­ ruption of the natural order,” Kasson concluded that “to explore fully a subject as large as this one would require a book in itself” (Civilizing the Machine [1976], p. 174). David E. Nye has now responded to that challenge with a provocative, conceptually wide-ranging study reveal­ ing how Americans since the early 19th century have experienced awe­ inspiring new technologies and integrated them into a national identity that was initially more inspired by nature and nature’s God than by hu­ man artifice. The central paradox posed by American Technological Sub­ lime appears to great effect in ajacket photograph (unfortunately not reproduced within an otherwise generously illustrated book) that fore­ grounds three men looking out from a precipice over a vast mountain­ ous landscape in the midst of which towers the massive reinforcedconcrete structure ofBoulder Dam. It is unclear whether they are awed by nature’s overwhelming sublimity or by humanity’s awesome power, or perhaps, as engineers, filled with a sense oftheir own unprecedented power over both nature and humanity. Some of the material in this book will be familiar to readers of Nye’s previous work, Electrifying America (1990), which contained a section on the “electrical sublime” created by the engineers who illu­ minated international expositions and the “Great White Ways” of cities and towns at the turn of the century. But here Nye moves beyond a monographic concern with a particular technology to ana­ lyze various modes of response to the most spectacular technologies the nation has generated and absorbed during its history. In addition to electricity he focuses on the railroad offering the unprecedented experience of speed while spanning a continent, the technically and visually innovative Eads and Brooklyn Bridges, towering skyscrapers and their empowering panoramas, massively scaled and intricately detailed assembly-line factories (visible to tourists on site and to expo­ sition visitors viewing full-scale models), and, more recently, the Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 1021 1022 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE atomic bomb (with its genuinely apocalyptic terror) and the space launch (embodying a nostalgia for past certainty as it reconfirms be­ lief in human control of technology). As initially formulated by Edmund Burke in 1756, the aesthetic category of the sublime encompasses an emotional reaction to a natu­ ral phenomenon or landscape so awe-inspiring as to render an ob­ server speechless before its nearly terrifying transcendence of ordi­ nary reality. After describing straightforward Burkean reactions to such wonders of nature as Niagara Falls, Nye uses a discussion of the railroad to distinguish the “American technological sublime” from Burke’s natural sublime. The primary differences are an emphasis on dynamic motion (in addition to grand scale) and, especially sig­ nificant for a new democracy, the fact that crowds of Americans could share experiences created by national endeavor. It was no accident that the nation typically dedicated its most impressive engineering works, such as canals and bridges, on the Fourth of July. According to Nye, the technological sublime not only “conflated the preservation and the transformation of the natural world” (p. 37); it also “trans­ formed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness” (p. 43). American Technological Sublime is the most complex and rewarding in a distinguished thirty-year tradition of general works exploring the tangled relationship of technology and culture in the United States. Even so, the ambitious scope of Nye’s undertaking almost guarantees a few problems. Moving forward to the present, he would like to argue that the technological sublime has become a matter of mere representation no longer connected to any technology in which a democratic people share real power. Some readers might conclude that the book’s final sections, addressing the rededication of the Statue...