Technological Sublime Research Articles

'Then We Build a System to Deal with It': Waste and the Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s "Underworld"

Over twenty-five years after the publication of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld (1997), which depicts the shift from a naïve belief in technological progress at the beginning of the Cold War to disillusionment as it ended, the novel is more topical than ever, faced as we are with the growing recognition of the failure of both technorationality and capitalism to address humanity’s depredation and despoilment of the biosphere. This article argues that Underworld deploys David Nye’s notion of the technological sublime to depict the attempt to master recalcitrant nature, only to ironically reveal the impossibility of the endeavor. Underworld’s use of waste as a catalyst for the sublime is interesting precisely because waste connotes something valueless, whereas the sublime is occasioned by ‘great’, ostensibly valuable, things. Seen within its own logic, the technological sublime is a project of liberation, a vision of impending omniscience, a permanent deferral of human limitation. Yet when waste becomes sublime, the progression toward mastery does not proceed smoothly. Although the technological sublime “undermines all notions of limitation, instead presupposing the ability to continually innovate and to transform the world” (Nye 60), Underworld’s aestheticization represents it at its limit, when it can no longer regulate the abject threat of waste. Ultimately, I argue that DeLillo asks readers to grapple with abjection by dramatizing the failure of the technological sublime as an aesthetic strategy, which inadvertently reinscribes the boundaries that it seeks to override: the finitude of the embodied human, our relative powerlessness amongst the world within which we are enmeshed.

Folk Tradition at the Creole Red River

Recognized by the National Park Service, the Cane River Creole National Historical Park area of Natchitoches, Louisiana serves as a main intercultural backdrop of history as American, French, Spanish, and Native American traditions once occupied its banks. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, a byproduct of the New Deal documented new oral histories from the region. Nineteenth-century folklore from the Natchitoches Cane River area reveals that French, Cajun, and more importantly African influences cast allegories for the spiritual journey they interpreted. My paper uses African oral origin traditions in places like Natchitoches and elsewhere in colonial America to argue on behalf of a “Time Capsule Hypothesis” where forgetting history happens when the past is obscured and the future is apocalyptic. Preservation of landmark heritage sites through the Cane River’s origin folklore, architecture, and ecological history become a new esoteric medium. Reminiscent structures, such as the famous Magnolia and Melrose plantations on the Cane River have preserved a different history that focuses on conservation and cooperation. For us to understand the history of Natchitoches, Louisiana requires a new perspective on historical memory and technological sublime topics merging oral history and esotericism into an ecological time machine of Natchitoches. Creole Catholics emerged from Louisiana archdioceses and Black Christians became free by transforming mythic identities in their present moment to embrace creativity, literature, and technological acumen over their environment.

From Bitcoin to Farm Bank: An idiotic inquiry into blockchain speculation

Bitcoin’s uptake in Turkey has ranked among the highest in the world. Meanwhile, moral judgment about cryptocurrency has remained unsure about its comparison to other types of investment: what is a scam and what is a legitimate investment? Who is ‘daringly visionary’ and who is merely ‘gullible’ or ‘blinded’ by illusory promise? Displacing decidedly North American stories of Bitcoin’s origins and ‘Web3’ futures, this article considers the local appeal and sociotechnical potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-centric innovation. I analyze the open-endedness of such potential as well as its foreclosures. The case of Turkey shows that speculation regarding cryptocurrency not only implies wagering on price developments, but it also entails speculating about the possible, plausible or expectable futures of technological innovation. Blockchain-based innovation has elicited myths of the technological sublime and utopian sentiment, as it promises to usher in disruptive futures hardly imaginable from the vantage point of the present. Referencing Simondon’s philosophy of technology, my main question is: how do speculative technologies and discourses shape the present, along with the futures that emerge from it? Drawing on interviews with speculators in combination with a digital methods analysis of Turkish ‘crypto Twitter’, my answer highlights the asymmetries and inequalities of media ecologies as well as discursive contestations over the boundaries between the possible/impossible, realism/utopianism and common sense/idiocy. Moreover, engaging theories of utopia by Srnicek and Williams, Stengers, and Jameson, I ponder, what would a speculative engagement with seemingly ‘implausible’ or ‘impossible’ futures comprise that deserves not to be dismissed as simply gullible or as blinded by the technological sublime?

A Poetic History of the Oceans. Literature and Maritime Modernity. SørenFrankAmsterdam: Brill, 2022, 447 pp.

A Poetic History of the Oceans. Literature and Maritime Modernity. SørenFrankAmsterdam: Brill, 2022, 447 pp.

Crisis and Literature: Future Imperfect, or the Case of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

In his afterword to The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008), Joseph M. Comte makes a strong case for positioning the author as a writer of historical liminality, and citing DeLillo himself, he claims that Cosmopolis is a text “poised liminally ‘between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Age of Terror’” (183). Not yet aware of the shift taking place in the author’s interest from all matters historical to his previous preoccupation with corporeality and writing, Comte goes on to argue that DeLillo’s novel of 2003 stages how “[c]yber-capital and terrorism contend within the singularity of global power” (185), inasmuch as the text is preoccupied with what commentators usually identify as “the technological sublime” (186) in DeLillo’s oeuvre, in this case representing the “interaction between technology and capital, the inseparability” of the two (23). Comte and other scholarly commentators praise Cosmopolis exactly for what it was criticized for at the time of its publication, its witty handling of academically embedded ideas, thereby somewhat downplaying how the text, as I will argue, discusses, or indeed embodies, some of these ideas in relation to the white male body and terrorism in a curious temporal structure: written after 9/11, but presenting what one may call reverse déjà vu of the terror attacks. Comte’s estimation is, therefore, in line with the contemporary reviews of the book at the time of its publication, and stresses the intellectual achievement and poetic qualities of the text.

Smooth, Bumpy and Ghostly Rides: (Re)Viewing the American Landscape and Travel Imagery in Bill Morrison’s Night Highway (1990), The Death Train (1993), City Walk (1999) and Ghost Trip (2000)

In this paper I analyze various ways in which Bill Morrison’s travel films, Night Highway (1990), The Death Train (1993), City Walk (1999) and Ghost Trip (2000), tend to challenge the concept of the American landscape through the use of cinematic conventions traditionally associated with early cinema’s phantom rides as well as contemporary travel ride films and road movies. Particularly, I argue that Morrison’s experimental pictures, while simultaneously drawing on and playing with selected phantom ride, travel ride film and road movie tropes, exploit the dynamics between the spectator’s unique frontal perspective, visual mobilities and distant panoramic views as well as evoke a distorted experience of sensational and contemplative voyages, hence challenging panoramic perception and an idealized image of American (film) landscape intrinsically bound with the natural and technological sublime. To achieve this particular effect, the analyzed material incorporates such elements as deteriorated footage, manipulated travel imagery and image looping enhanced by atmospheric scores, slow and fast motion cinematography or more conventional traditions of abstract formalism.

Conflicted American Landscapes by David E. Nye

Reviewed by: Conflicted American Landscapes by David E. Nye Joel A. Tarr (bio) Conflicted American Landscapes By David E. Nye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 201. David Nye is an outstanding and prolific historian of the social construction of technology. Among his numerous books are Technology Matters (2006), America as Second Creation (2003), Consuming Power (1998), American Technological Sublime (1994), and Electrifying America (1990). Conflicted American Landscapes is a collection of ten of his essays, half of which had previously appeared in publications in Britain, Germany, and the United States but were revised for this collection. Others in this volume were specifically prepared to fit his theme of contested landscapes with a more environmental focus than his previous, more technologically oriented studies. [End Page 283] Nations, says Nye, define themselves partly through their landscapes, and in the past, Americans primarily defined themselves with aspects of nature involving elements of both growth and preservation. The difficulty of reconciling these two concepts of landscape throughout American history resulted in conflict, as separate groups wanted different "modified spaces" in the same location. The modifying forces customarily involved the technologies of agriculture, construction, energy, and transportation. Nye maintains that there are six conceptions of nature in the American context—wilderness, pastoral utilitarian, fundamentalist Christian, Native American, and the creation of sacrifice zones. It is, he maintains, impossible to harmonize these six to create a compromise—the result is conflicted landscapes. Nye takes the reader on a journey through various and disparate landscapes over time and geographical space and shows the reader how the six factors interact in a changing discourse on nature. Several of the essays focus on locations in the southwestern United States, including three essays that strikingly explore aspects of the history and transformation of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon as the "natural sublime" of these magnificent landscapes conflicts with proposals for development. In addition, perceptions of parts of the the Southwest region as "empty wasteland" justified their exploitation as nuclear "sacrifice zones" from a utilitarian perspective. Other essays explore the changing meaning of natural bridges; the development, abandonment, and redevelopment of the Ford River Rouge complex; and the emergence of the skyscraper skyline as an expression of the "utilitarian sublime." These complex and fascinating but, from my perspective, largely dystopian essays reinforced my dispirited sense of the devastation and harm that humans have done to the nation's landscape. Given the message of the essays that compose most of the book, I was surprised to read the optimistic message of Nye's concluding chapter titled "Pragmatic Solutions." Nye argues that "culture is part of nature" and environmental destruction and related phenomena are the result of failures of imagination. A more progressive future is possible, he contends, with the inclusion of a broader set of actors collaborating in the formation of a new pastoralism. This new pastoralism would require acceptance by Americans that they are part of nature and not only its exploiters. Thus, an "ecological sublime" could replace the factors that led to the contested landscapes he describes so well. Let us hope so. [End Page 284] Joel A. Tarr Joel A. Tarr is Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor Emeritus of History and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He recently published, with Edward K. Muller, Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Copyright © 2023 Society for the History of Technology

‘Pseudonecromantic spectres’: dark media and the technological sublime in eighteenth-century phantasmagoria

Debuting at the very end of the eighteenth century, the Phantasmagoria (La Fantasmagorie) was an astounding combination of art and science. By projecting painted slides onto a transparent screen, the Phantasmagoria gave the impression that the veil separating the living and the dead had been breached, with spectres summoned to appear before a thrilled audience. The Phantasmagoria has been described as an important milestone in the pre-history of cinema and as a precursor to Tom Gunning’s cinema of attraction. Likewise, the Phantasmagoria, appearing at the tail end of the Enlightenment, has been understood as an attempt to reconcile the waning superstition of earlier periods with the new sciences of physics and optics. While these are valid readings of the phenomenon and its popularity, this paper argues that the Phantasmagoria, with its iconography of spectres and spirits engendered from within the heart of a technical apparatus, represents an early manifestation of Mario Costa’s conception of the technological sublime. According to Costa, the technological sublime is primarily a feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetics, signalling the displacement of the natural by the technological. Where individuals might previously have experienced an overwhelming sense of awe and terror in the face of the natural world, those sensations are now felt most acutely when one is confronted by the extraordinary capacities of new technology. Our paper frames the Phantasmagoria as an early iteration of the technological sublime, exploring how the machine’s capacity to produce spectres engendered terror, awe and excitement in a late-Enlightenment audience.

Beyond the Whiteness

Saverio Salvioni, Cava di Ravaccione, 1810–1813 (Source: Archivio di Stato Massa e Pontremoli) Marble extraction in the Italian Apuan Alps has been known since Roman times, and its historical importance is symbolized by masterpieces of Western art history. However, the Carrara marble industry has recently received harsh criticism for operating in the protected area of the Apuan Alps Regional Park, recognized by UNESCO since 2015. Environmental and social concerns about mining have arisen from the extreme acceleration of all the productive phases of the extractive industry. From the mid-twentieth century, the exploitation of geological deposits of marble grew exponentially thanks to the development of powerful extraction technologies and a global export economy that creates only relatively few occupations in Carrara. Within this context, photographic and cinematographic projects have increasingly focused on the environmental risks created by the marble mining industry. This article shows how visual representations of Carrara have changed in recent years via an analysis of three case studies: the internationally acclaimed documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), the climbing project and Italian short film Carie (Cavity 2019), and Lorenzo Shoubridge’s naturalistic photographs in Apuane: terre selvagge (Apuan Wildlands 2018). These case studies offer an innovative perspective on the landscapes of marble extraction. Previously, these landscapes were represented following other visual trends emphasizing the technological sublime found in the geometric shapes of the white quarries, the working conditions of marble laborers, and the myth of the purity of marble used in artistic sculptures. The three examples analyzed in this paper attempt to go ‘beyond the whiteness’ by focusing on the scale of environmental destruction (Anthropocene: The Human Epoch), the more-thanhuman perspective (Apuane terre selvagge), and the social struggle for preserving a mountain region through creative solutions (Carie). In other words, new aesthetic and ethical sensibilities are challenging established twentieth-century narratives of the Carrara marble quarries by focusing on a new element: the environment.

The Orc—Playing the “Wholly Other”: Investigations of Kant's Sublime and The Technological Sublime in Blizzard Entertainment's Massive Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft

While the complicated scheme of the philosophical sublime may at first hand seem mere platitude when brought to life in computer games, this article claims that the action/adventure game World of Warcraft wedges open a space in which to operate the sublime and navigate radically “other” subjectivities. The hypothesis is that the assembly of fantastic elements in World of Warcraft duplicates the Kantian sublime while at the same time commenting upon and even radicalizing it. The Romantic tradition of the sublime as it unfolds in Immanuel Kant's third Critique is outlined followed by an attempt to topologize elements of the fantastic in Blizzard's game design philosophy leading to a clarification of what we call “the knotted point of play” where game object, game interaction, and game subject intervene. Finally, we explore how the notion of the technological sublime relates to World of Warcraft and beyond.

The horror of communication

This article is concerned with the Lacanian subject of cyberwar and how the Real of network communication in the post-Trump era is experienced as horror. The centrality of the technological sublime and practices of self-divination to the American political imaginary give this moment of the Real a properly cosmic and spiritual scale. What returns are techno-horrors of intersubjective dread and the capitalist Real of the network in which we are fragmented and manipulated by occulted forces. The generalization of cyberwar shapes the liberal/populist entanglement between the hysteria of the disinformation expert and the perversion of the QAnon digital soldier.

In a Different Light: Performative ‘Power’ Generation of the Historic Light Show at Grand Coulee Dam

ABSTRACT The Grand Coulee Dam light show is an audio-visual spectacle unique to the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Federal Government. Its life began as a display of abstract-coloured lights illuminating the falling waters of the dam’s spillways. Its production spans more than 60 years of inspiring people on the history, construction and wonder that is the Grand Coulee Dam, yet the light show or Colorama development and meaning are more than just a collection of light and music. This paper presents a historic entanglement of one of the longest running lightshow displays in the United States. Using performative and assemblage theories, it argues how the light show moves from the ‘technological sublime’ (Nye 1996) towards a multiplicity of agencies of light, water, sound and the concrete of the dam enabling an electric atmosphere. Using historical accounts of the show, imagery and design specifications, the paper explores the interplay of these agencies and the ‘power’ that is exchanged. In a time where industrial heritage is celebrated for its technical acumen and national connection, the light show provides key perspectives into new theoretical avenues of illumination and hydro assemblages.

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe

The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe

NFTs and Digital Art

NFTs and Digital Art

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Herald of progress: Karl Emil Biel’s photographs of the technical modernisation of Portugal

Starting in 1850, Portugal embarked on a technical-scientific agenda (historically known as Fontism, after its main advocate, Fontes Pereira de Melo) that pursued the modernisation of the country or, in its broader sense, progress, until the turn of the twentieth century. These efforts were captured through the lens of a German photographer living in Portugal, Karl Emil Biel. For the purposes of this paper, I have analysed around 200 of Biel’s works in which he recorded progress in Portugal. I argue that Biel felt inspired by the sublime inherent to technology to create a technological landscape and a narrative of progress in Portugal, marked by a variety of icons of modernity, similar to those found in cities of Europe’s most advanced countries, especially structures that promoted mobility and contributed to the territorial appropriation of the peripheral provinces. Furthermore, I contend that the publication of his photographs in the illustrated press contributed to the dissemination of this technological landscape and this narrative of progress nationwide and to the promotion of a nationalism fuelled by technology. Finally, I speculate how the current uses of Biel’s photographs at public events still share similar notions of progress, based on technological modernity and sublime.

'The Technological Sublime': Combining Art and Archaeology in Documenting Change at the Former RAF Coltishall (Norfolk, UK)

Since at least the 1990s, archaeologists and artists have been documenting military installations following the withdrawal of service personnel. They have usually embarked on these recording opportunities separately, experiencing these sites as derelict, lifeless places, with stripped buildings devoid of much of their meaning after their occupants have left. Archaeologists have typically created maps and made photographs. Artists have also taken photographs, but in addition made films and created soundworks. Wherever the medium and the motivation, the assumption is usually made that only those closely familiar with the rhythms and rituals of service life can begin to understand the emptiness of what remains. And being secretive military installations, creating a record during their occupation is never an option. Uniquely, in the months leading to the closure of RAF Coltishall (Norfolk) in 2006, the RAF granted the authors unprecedented access to record the base's drawdown and closure. The project brought artists and archaeologists together to see what could be achieved in unison, while still maintaining some degree of research independence. In undertaking this survey, three related themes emerged: the role of art as heritage practice, new thinking on what constitutes landscape, and the notion of a 'technological sublime'. Following an earlier publication, we now reflect again on those themes. In doing so, we offer this collaboration between art and archaeology (traditionally considered two distinct ways of seeing and recording) as an innovative methodology for documentation, not least after the closure and abandonment of such military and industrial landscapes, where occupational communities had once lived. In this article, the words represent our ideas; the images and films are an example of the result.

Landscape and Its Double: The Technological Sublime

Abstract The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the aura and the decay of the aura in relation to landscape. In the wake of the failure of a transformative praxis to bring about a new social order, the technologically hyper-mediated engagement of man with nature under the conditions of extreme alienation and reification results in the production of the aesthetics of destruction experienced as “supreme pleasure”. In the age of the atomic bomb and technological hyper-mediation, the singularity of the moment of the experience of the sublime is multiply reproduced. The essay ends with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as an example of rendering cinematically the aura’s survival under the conditions of its decay in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Capitalism’s “desert of the real”, as the vast desert in Kuwait in Herzog’s film, is precisely the landscape in relation to which the subject attempts to represent that which evades representation (the event, nature, capitalism, and so on).

Бесстрашие витальности: претворение Возвышенного в живописи 2000-х годов

The article is devoted to vitality in the art of the twentieth century, interpreted as the Sublime. Vitality manifests itself in art in a very diverse way. The dramatic attitude of the world, suffering, and pain are often synonymous with “vitality” today. But the art of oblivion is also permeated with vitality, “intoxicating”, helping to overcome the horror of existence; as well as art, attaching to the metaphysical source of being. It can be defined as sacred optimism and the ancient art and the art of the avant-garde are especially vividly evidence of it. In this case vitality is in direct contact with the Sublime. Seeking out the “other world”, overcoming the limitations of the mortal and suffering world is carried out through the transformation of the Sublime. Today the subject of the Sublime in art is at the peak of research interest. This is evidenced by the project The Art of the Sublime, launched in 2008 by the Tate Modern gallery (London, UK), dedicated to the study of this phenomenon from the Baroque era to the present day. It touches upon all types of visual art from painting to installation. Research shows how evolution goes from the natural Sublime, realized in the depiction of rare and impressive natural phenomena, to the technological Sublime, which declared itself in the second half of the twentieth century, to the distinction between the Sublime and the beautiful. In modern Moscow painting, we meet the implementation of the principle of the Sublime in the work of the artist Vladimir Matveev. Relying on the sacred art of Russian icons, and the avant-garde, the color discoveries of post-impressionism and the energetic abstraction of neo-expressionism, he creates his version of the Sublime in contemporary painting. In his large-format canvases, the artist expresses the essence of the vital as the Sublime, metaphysical and mental principles with the help of rich color and sharp juxtaposi- tion of abstract and natural forms.