Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk by Joseph Tabbi

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews Badaracco is at her best in constructing a cultural history in these four chapters. Her discussion of avant-garde movements remains on the level of generalization. She might have explored more fully the Bauhaus, whose social agenda was most readily available to commer­ cial printing companies. And she might have discussed specific avant-garde experiments in typography (along with some illustra­ tions) as a way to show similarities and differences between the avant-garde and commercial enterprise. Here and elsewhere Badaracco ’s arguments aboutvisuality are weakened for lack ofexamples. Yet, despite these shortcomings, Badaracco’s account of the relation between culture and business enterprise adds an important material­ ist dimension all too often ignored in cultural studies. Dickran Tashjian Dr. Tashjian is chair and professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent study is A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writingfrom Mailer to Cy­ berpunk. By Joseph Tabbi. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii+ 242; notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth). In a 1932 essay that was once standard reading for students of American literature, Hart Crane insisted that writers had to “ab­ sorb” the machine by “acclimatizing” it instead of “pandering” to readers awed by technology. Crane’s own awe overwhelmed his hope that literature could domesticate industrial wonders; The Bridge, the vision of a poet ravished by Roebling’s masterpiece, genuflects to­ ward networks of transportation, communication, and power. Crane nonetheless believed that the most urgent challenge for the writer was to find a place to stand in a culture defined by science and tech­ nology. Crane’s dilemma anticipates the thesis of Joseph Tabbi’s Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American WritingFrom Mailer to Cy­ berpunk: that technological systems not only have supplanted every­ thing else as a ground for the imagination but also have assumed such environmental proportions that writers are often co-opted by the artifice they want to critique. To an extent Tabbi’s book has been preempted by book-length studies of the technological sublime by Rosalind Williams and David Nye, both ofwhom trace the evolution ofthis 18th-century romantic term. According to these historians, sublimity originally referred to the frisson evoked by magnificent but terrifying natural wonders— a precipice, say, or a storm. Changing concepts of sublimity shifted aesthetic focus away from formal properties of the object to the moral and emotional responses of the observer. As technology grew in size and complexity, its vistas also inspired awe mixed with fear, as in Crane’s response to symbolic spans of steel. One constant re­ mained: the position of the observer as outsider. 958 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Because Tabbi’s argument is historically untethered, what he means by postmodern sublime is never quite clear, though the term apparently refers to the ironic posture of an artist determined to represent corporate syndromes whose totalizing power defies repre­ sentation. Orthodox postmodern paradox, of course, holds that there is no outside, and that power is exercised nowhere and every­ where through a “system” of immeasurable complexity. Tabbi’s book would thus be of interest mostly to those for whom a mono­ lithic “technoculture” is the paranoia of choice, were it not for his fine discussion of the technological expertise of four brilliant au­ thors. Rather than begin with an example such as Crane, Tabbi nostalgi­ cally outlines a “first generation technological aesthetic that origi­ nated when computer and multimedia technologies were still new” (p. 210), as manifest in the fiction of Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon , Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, four pioneering postmod­ ern novelists. All four have dealt authoritatively with subjects as di­ verse as ballistics, chemistry, optics, metallurgy, and engineering, and with the corporate hierarchies that exploit them. All four think of writing as a technology for transcending political dehumaniza­ tion, institutionalized materialism, and the displacement of nature. Each uses language to understand the “real” world; each uses lan­ guage to defend the emotional authenticity of experience against synthetic encroachments. Contemporary critics base attacks against the four on linguistic self-referentiality; language can...