Technological Sublime Research Articles

Pattern/randomness. Il rapporto fra testo e lettore in Infinite Jest di David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace questioned the previous literary tradition usually defined as “postmodern” through his narrative and non-fiction production. Following Katherine Hayles, it is possible to consider the decreasing prominence of the presence/absence dialectic typical of deconstructionism and postmodernism and, on a parallel plane, the increasing relevance of a pattern/randomness dialectic. From this point of view, one might argue, many postmodern fictions merely diagnosed the presence of a “technological sublime”, without proposing cognitive solutions to actively deal with it. Through a comparison between some key aspects of neural networks and the narrative structure of Infinite Jest (1996), the primary aim of this contribution is to understand how Wallace's novel may be considered as a literary device that helps the reader to become the manufacturer of new cognitive patterns, by processing and selecting information from the huge amount of data contained in the novel.

Examples of the American Technological Sublime

Examples of the American Technological Sublime

“Bridges Often Go”: Emily Dickinson's Bridge Poems

Emily Dickinson's references to the nineteenth-century science of bridge building culminate in two major bridge poems that apply technical knowledge to transcendent concepts to produce powerful statements of faith. Transforming the technological sublime into the religious sublime, Dickinson captures the mystery of the transition from life to death.

Wasting the Future: The Technological Sublime, Communications Technologies, and E-waste

Literally speaking, e-waste is the future of communications. E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world, much of it communications technologies from cell phones to laptops, televisions to peripherals. As a result of policies of planned obsolescence working computers, cell phones, and tablets are routinely trashed. One of the most powerful and enduring discourses associated with emerging technologies is the technological sublime, in which technology is seen as intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually transcendent. It comprises a contradictory impulse that elevates technology with an almost religious fervor, while simultaneously overlooking some of the consequences of industrialism, as well as ignoring the necessity of social, economic, and governmental infrastructures necessary to the implementation and development of new technologies. The idea that a new technology will not pollute or harm the environment is a persistent, though often quickly passed over, theme in the technological sublime, echoed in discourses about emerging technologies such as the silicon chip, the internet, and other ICTs. In this paper, I make connections between the discourse of newness, the practice of planned obsolescence, and the mountains of trashed components and devices globally. Considering the global context demonstrates the realities of the penetration of ICTs and their enduring pollution and negative implications for the health of humans and nonhumans, including plants, animals, waterways, soil, air and so on. I use the discourse of the technological sublime to open up and consider the future of communications, to argue that this discourse not only stays with us but also contains within it two important and related components, the promise of ecological harmony and a future orientation. I argue that these lingering elements keep us from considering the real future of communications – e-waste – and that, as communications scholars, we must also engage with waste management literature and practices if we take the future of communications seriously.

The Real Future of the Media

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man: Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944).

The Dangers of Driving the Dalton: The Paradoxical Industrial and Environmental Aesthetics of Ice Road Truckers

This essay argues that the third season of Ice Road Truckers employs a hyperbolic language of fear and death in order to endorse seemingly paradoxical industrial and environmental aesthetics The former makes use of a set of ideas about the technological sublime, while the latter makes use of certain theories about the natural sublime. Presenting viewers with a constant barrage of mechanical images and technical terms, IRT glorifies the development of the North Slope's oil fields, the building of the Haul Road, and the construction of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, all of which are cast as marvels of human engineering and examples of the technological sublime. Using the narration and its talk of death and destruction to evoke the natural sublime, Ice Road Truckers shows viewers spectacular aerial footage of the icy, snow-covered mountains of the Brooks Range and the bleak, wind-swept tundra of the North Slope. In the end, this television program effectively sutures these two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the sublime and presents viewers with a vision of the Alaskan wilderness in which the technological and the natural comfortably coexist. By doing so, IRT is able to endorse the industrial development of the Arctic and champion the wildness of nature.

Kafka's Tourists and the Techno Sublime

Kafka's Tourists and the Technological Sublime Arndt Niebisch (bio) Current research that focuses on the transcultural and postcolonial aspects of Franz Kafka's oeuvre concentrates more and more on the motif of traveling in Kafka's texts.1 Most prominently, John Zilcosky worked on the notions of traveling in Kafka's writings. In his book Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing, he focuses on a variety of popular, postcolonial, journalistic, and literary discourses that fuel Kafka's travel narratives. This research does not simply target a small, newly discovered niche in Kafka's writing, but highlights a central aspect of his work: Kafka's writings exhibit the modern subject as a traveling one, and his traveling protagonists are numerous. For example, there is Karl Rossmann, the main character of the novel America, who is sent to the United States by his parents, because he was seduced by the house maid, and has to embark on a disastrous odyssey through a truly Kafkaesque version of America. The strange trapeze artist in the short story "First Sorrow," who prefers to live up there on his trapeze, also needs to travel from time to time, and when he does, it is in a spectacular way, either by traveling in a race car or by inhabiting the luggage net of his train compartment. Also, K. in the novel The Castle is a lonely traveler who arrives in a village and pretends to be a land surveyor. And, of course, there is the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who is incapacitated because when he woke up one morning, he was transformed into a rather ugly bug and was therefore not able to start his journey. This presence of traveling in Kafka's oeuvre is hardly surprising when one takes into consideration the infrastructural changes that Kafka witnessed in his time. From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, new technologies such as the telegraph, the train, and the automobile accelerated traveling [End Page 277] and condensed space. The literature of this era reacted to this revolution in transportation. For example, in 1873 Jules Verne wrote his famous novel about a journey around the world in 80 days.2 Also, Bram Stoker's Dracula constitutes an exquisite piece of media art that documented the journeys of the real estate agent Jonathan Harker to Transylvania and of Count Dracula to England.3 In 1909, a year in which Kafka wrote a travel report about his journey to a flight show in Brescia, Italy, the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti proclaimed in his Futurist Manifesto that space and time had died yesterday, and were re-born under the conditions of mass transit and communication.4 All these technologies and phantasmagorias of traveling were not only accompanied by a first wave of globalization, but also brought about a new form of traveling, namely tourism. Although the tourist industry has its roots in the medieval pilgrimage that required a certain infrastructure to supply pilgrims with food and shelter,5 tourism emerged as a great economic enterprise only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a larger social group, namely the bourgeoisie, had enough funds to travel to places that were solely designed for leisure. This development was also connected to the extension of train and steamship lines, which made traveling safer, more comfortable and also cheaper.6 Larry Krotz, in his book Tourists, identifies Thomas Cook, the founder of the largest travel business company world-wide, as the key figure of the modern history of tourism, because he established in the 1840's the first train services that primarily provided transportation for leisure excursions (7). Taking this expansion of a tourist economy into consideration, it is surprising that Kafka's modern subjects, although frequently traveling, are only in very rare cases tourists. In fact, all of the characters that I have mentioned above do not comply with the definition of "tourist" provided by [End Page 278] the World Travel Organization: "A person travelling outside his or her usual environment for less than a specific period of time and whose main purpose of travel is other than the exercise of an activity remunerated from the...

Under the Surface

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010 Whitechapel Gallery London, England July 6-September 16, 2011 Thomas Smith's interest in photography's mediation of our understanding of the world was immediately evident in his retrospective at London's Whitechapel Gallery, the first solo show of the German photographer's work in the United Kingdom. The gallery space was partitioned to create a narrow passage that forced an up-close-and-personal encounter with the museum visitors captured in the life-size Audience 06, Galleria dell Accademia Florence (2004)--producing a self-conscious identification with the spectators displayed in the work. Some are caught in the act of looking, gazing in awe at objects that are always just out of the frame. Other seem ditracted or even disinterested, like the central couple frozen in the self-conscious pose of a Manet painting recalled by the photograph's composition. Few, if any, return the gaze of Struth's camera, the unseen recorder of the spectacle of spectatorship. Strut's exploration of the facts and fictions of photographic vision and its impact on what we see--and know is perhaps unsurprising, given his training at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf during the 1970s. Having studied painting with Gerhard Richter, Struth went on to study photography with Hilla and Bernd Becher, and the impact of both disciplines comes to bear on his own work's combination of painterly scale with the unmanipulated objectivity that ran as a thread through (he various series on view at Whitechapel. Spanning his career to date, from the early black-and-white cityscapes of the late 1970s to the vast expanse and almost infinite detail of the recent color scenes of global urban sprawl, jungle thickets, and contemporary industry, the capacity of Struth's photographs to reveal the details of the world became ever more complex. In his early shots, European cities are lent an ordered familiarity through the uniformity of the single-point perspective contrived in images of their postwar streets. The painstaking staging of the camera in Milan Cathedral (facade) (1998: brings home its majesty, filling the frame with an undistorted, full-frontal elevation of the building's facade impossible to the unassisted eye. In later series, unseen spaces are opened up to show the workings of contemporary technology. The unimaginable intricacy of wires, ducts, and machines glimpsed in Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral (2008). or Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X, Detail Max Planck IPP, Greifswald (2009) manifest a technological sublime in all its shiny, fetishized glory. While the photographs are often undeniably beautiful in their realization, a documentary film accompanying the show revealed Struth's intention to use them to expose the ugly corners repressed in the modern world. …

Sex and the City: Another Urban Imaginary

Sex and the CityAnother Urban Imaginary Mick Wilson (bio) The Critical Vision When I was an undergraduate student at art school, I was introduced to the representational economy of "the city" in modernity through the twin figures of the flâneur and the prostitute. These two figures were presented as striding through the urban imagery of Modernist culture and criticism from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. They were given to us impressionable students as embodiments and enactments of the metaphorical dynamics of urban imaginaries, eroticisms, and gender politics in modernity. These figures somehow jarred with the contemporary dynamics of late-twentieth-century urban imaginaries that we participated in, through the televisual and cinematic spectacle of the technological sublime and various post-apocalyptic urban dystopias. Our consumption of these contemporary myths was shaped in turn by the new enthusiasms of celebratory and unevenly critical postmodernisms. Such critical and historical essays as Elizabeth Wilson's beautiful essay on the prostitute as flâneur, T. J. Clark's wonderfully researched excursus on Manet's Olympia, and Mary Ann Doane's exemplary treatment of Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Pandora's Box provided us with access to an earlier moment of urban erotic imaginaries and entry points into the critique of gender and representation.1 The feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis provided the most compelling challenge to our received readings of the prostitute as cipher of urban modernity. Decades later, and the question of "the city"—at least for the purposes of critical debate within the orbit of "arts and culture"—has become recentered on the dynamics of shantytowns, poverty and wealth, exclusion, violence, catastrophe, and globalized distributions of inequitable life chances. We now operate a contemporary urban imaginary through the figures of the globally networked slum, ecological catastrophe, the precariat, paranoid cultures of state terror and [End Page 5] surveillance, and the fortress enclosures of gated communities. Various counterdiscourses of neoliberal optimism have also exercised our imaginations with talk of "creative cities," city branding, urban regeneration and renewal, privatized and commercially enlivened "public" space, and many other pleasant stories of smarter economies, more sustainable growth, and participatory planning and development. These discursive practices appear as complementary moments in the contemporary representational economy of "the city." Of interest is the degree to which the questions of gender and the erotics of the city have been in some degree superseded and displaced in contemporary urban imaginaries—notwithstanding the impoverished fantasies of a recent media confection such as the movie Sex and the City II. There are of course key tropes still in play that marry discourses on the prostitute as cipher of modernity with the more recent discourses on multitude and migrancy. Most notable among these is the question of human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade and sex economy. It is well established that the transnational mobility of contemporary urban economies also entails the "transport of people (women, children, and men—generally by coercion or deception" for the purpose of sexual exploitation, as well as for other labor.2 This is a global phenomenon manifesting in Western Europe, North and South America, Africa, South East Asia, Australasia, and elsewhere. However, arguably it is within the formal discourses of nongovernmental organizations and international policy and monitoring agencies (rather than the representational practices of "arts and culture" or cultural criticism as conventionally understood) that these questions of urban sexual economies, exploitation, and the "hidden" dynamics of the contemporary globalized city are being addressed. Nonetheless, that there is a need to attend to the politics of representation in play and to remobilize and re-function the critical frameworks of an earlier moment in cultural criticism is apparent from the following rationale provided for the UNESCO Trafficking Statistics Project: When it comes to statistics, trafficking of girls and women is one of several highly emotive issues which seem to overwhelm critical faculties. Numbers take on a life of their own, gaining acceptance through repetition, often with little inquiry into their derivations. Journalists, bowing to the pressures of editors, demand numbers, any number. Organizations feel compelled to supply them, lending false precisions and spurious authority to many reports.3 Within nineteenth-century discourses on "the city," the urban imaginaries...

Paranoia in Spook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror

After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post‐9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredric Jameson has called a “technological sublime”, in which the ungraspable nature of electronic communications in global late capitalism produces an awe akin to earlier romantic notions of the sublime. Spook Country traces the paranoia of the war on terror across the world, in which the virtual and real have merged in the form of ever‐present technologies of surveillance. The terror in the war on terror, I argue, has become technology itself.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) by Larson Powell

Reviews Mein); Raabe's engagement with Schopenhauer (Soren Fauth), Schiller (Gabriele Henkel), and Thackeray (JeffreySammons); references toWolfenbuttel (Herbert Blume), aswell as rereadings of selected works from theperspective of the period's family journals (Christof Hamann), Homer's epics (Heiko Ullrich), Clemens Lugowski's theory of the novel (Heinrich Detering), and the twentieth-century detective novel (Julia Bertschik). Not all contributors succeed in significantly advancing often well-established knowledge; some resort to rather extensive commentary, others summarize findings or extend lines of enquiry developed more extensively elsewhere. The editors' brief preface wisely resists the temptation of retrospectively imposing coherence on this successful collection of interesting chapters, which often demonstrate the wider relevance of contemporary Raabe research fornineteenth-century literary and cultural studies overall. University of Nottingham Dirk Gottsche The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilkey Benn, Brecht, and Doblin. By Larson Powell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. vii+256 pp. $65; ?35. ISBN 978-1-57113-382-3. For Larson Powell, 'the intellectual techno-rave' is decidedly over. Against the 'thinkliness' of cultural-studies accounts of the world and the text, grouped together here as so many 'Imaginary Theories', Powell poses the 'thingliness' of the natural world. Drawing on Adorno's aesthetics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Luhmann's systems theory, he protests against the exclusion of nature, technology's repressed other, from studies ofmodernity. A diverse theoretical manifesto (variously referencing Kant, Bataille, Kafka, Langs Metropolis, Eagleton, and Jelinek) is followed by studies of fourmodernist writers. These begin with Rilke's short work on painting, Worpswede, inwhich landscape is seen to recede in anticipation of the indifferent Thing of the Dinggedichte. Throughout, Powell's locating of the subject within nature offers refreshing challenges to widely held views, for instance of Rilke's destabilized lyrical subject: the poem Archaischer Torso Apollos' is shown to offer a potential retrieval of voice in the famous imperative to change. The place of the subject figures equally in the comparative reading of Benn's Tkarus' with Goethe's 'Prometheus' and Nietzsche's 'Dionysios-Dithyramben'. Here, Benn's autopoietic subject is situated within modernity's destructive self-referentiality. But it is theDoblin chapter that offers themost pointed critique of technology's fantasies?repeated by contemporary theory?of sovereign self-construction. Addressing itself to a postcolonial and natural Real, Doblin's Die drei Spriinge des Wang-lun is presented as handling more irreducible traumata than those thematized by an academy locked in 'self-styled subversion'. The concluding chapter on Brecht turns to a different mode of subversion: Luhmannian terminology adds to the established political reading a definition of his poetry as second-order observation, which can index and challenge systemic blind spots. MLR, 105.4, 2010 1185 The backbone of the book, Powell's critique of the 'technological sublime' and the related prevalence of 'rhetorical figurality' in cultural studies, is delivered with an often extraordinary rhetoric of its own: Lyotard's sublime is likened to 'self-parodying camp', and JudithButler's gender performativity to 'the "lifestyle" sections of the newspapers'. Meanwhile a theory of gender underlies the project, as Powell comments on Rilke's 'emancipated' Madchen and Nietzsche's hysterical Ariadne. But the gendering of nature and the articulation of psychoanalytic theory around familial models require further critique. The lack of paternal authority inWang-lun is diagnosed as a cause ofmania; this apparent valorization of the (hetero)norm carries through in repeated references to nature's motherliness, and one aside that casts all transsexuals as psychotic. Powell's theoretical agenda occupies as important a place as the subsequent textual analyses. In this sense, those reading for the poetry may be frustrated. However the close readings that do feature are illuminating: an examination of syntax and movement in Rilke's 'Der Ball' elucidates Lacan's extimacy, and Benn's rhythms,metaphors, and metonymies are related indetail to his competing subject-positions. Although its theoretical density may appear forbidding, the book will be of interest to those working on the radical potential of the 'other' (for instance nature) to disrupt totalizing systems. Moreover, as a manifesto for reading literaturewith, or indeed as, theory, it isworth the challenging read. Newnham College, Cambridge...

A publicidade e imagem: a epifania na confluência da iconicidade e das tecnologias

This paper contemplates questions about advertising and images that belong to the camp of visual representation. We intend to examine the possibility of prompting epiphany after the images present in press advertising that can also, by technology, increase its qualitative aspects and tend to become icon. The referential theoretician are the notions of beauty and sublime according to Burke, Kant and the technological sublime of Costa and Peirce’s semiotic – categories of the phenomenology and icon -, in order to connect the qualitative aspects of the images with epiphany by the analysis of the images in press advertising. The relevance of this paper is to emphasize the importance of reading images. Key words: advertising, image, technological sublime.

Ashes in Orbit: Celestis Spaceflights and the Invention of Post-cremationist Afterlives

Americans increasingly cremate rather than bury their dead, and post-cremation memorial services, such as ash-scattering ceremonies over sea and land, have emerged as a new arena of commercial enterprise and consumer spirituality. Celestis spaceflights, begun in 1997, elevate personal ash-scattering rituals into public performances of the technological sublime by sending tiny samples of cremated remains into earth orbit. The company's promotional materials construct the ashes' journey, inspired by science fiction and the space programmes, as a spiritual quest to the stars. Sending ashes into orbit, like cryonic suspension and human cloning, illustrates a cultural imaginary linking technology with the transcendence of mortality. While Celestis spaceflights have remained marginal to mainstream culture, their version of an afterlife journey invents a new kind of gothic undead: the posthumous cremain-astronaut, enjoying a heavenly, once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (review)

Reviewed by: Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. By Nicole Boivin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+269. $85. In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin invites readers to rethink fundamental relationships between people and material culture. With indifference to disciplinary boundaries, her highly original synthesis shows how the material world “plays and has long played a fundamental role in shaping human thought, society and, over the long term, evolution” (p. 225). A post-processualist archaeologist trained at Cambridge University, Boivin became adept at treating material culture as a symbolic medium. Her specialty, however, is geoarchaeology, the study of soils. Through immersion in this science-heavy specialty and repeated visits to Balathal, a village in India, she came gradually to appreciate that symbolic interpretation leaves out what is material about soils—and material culture generally. This problem, she believes, is endemic in the soft side of the academy, and I agree. To most social scientists and humanists, our material life is relatively invisible. She attributes this to the deeply rooted idealism of Western intellectual culture, which has passed down from Plato the dogma that material things are mere projections of concepts and ideas. Material culture, if treated at all, is regarded as a symbolic system like language, whose underlying grammar or code can be teased out. Consequently, scholars need not confront the diverse physical interactions that take place between people and things, and most ignore artifacts altogether. Citing Joseph Corn’s analysis of articles published in Technology and Culture (which appeared in a 1996 volume edited by W. D. Kingery, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies), Boivin highlights the irony that even historians of technology seldom deal with actual objects. Boivin aims to restore materiality to material culture, arguing the likelihood [End Page 677] that the “material world . . . evoke[s] experiences that lie beyond the verbal, beyond the conceptual, and beyond even the conscious . . . [artifacts] do not necessarily symbolise anything else: their very power may lie in the fact that they are part of the realm of the sensual, of experience, and of emotion, rather than a world of concepts, codes, and meaning” (pp. 8–9). The emotive performance of material culture has an affinity with David Nye’s notion of “technological sublime,” the ability of grandiose constructions to inspire a sense of wonder, but Boivin insists that any artifact—whether religious icon or clay pot—can have emotive effects. More general still is her insistence that people, depending on their past experiences, may be engaged by artifacts in any sensory mode, from touch to taste. Clearly, the sensuous engagement of people with things—the very materiality of human life—eludes idealist conceptions. Even so, as behavioral archaeologists have demonstrated, a materialist perspective does not preclude a concern with symbolic meanings. Boivin argues that material culture also exercises agency—i.e., plays a causal role—in human affairs. To take the poignant example satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we note that factory workers’ interactions are caused by the arrival of particular parts on a moving assembly line. Exploring wider implications of artifact agency while questioning social constructivism, Boivin elaborates Langdon Winner’s concept of autonomous technology, which underscores the potential of technologies to reshape society. (She does of course reject simplistic technological determinism.) Applying niche-construction theory from biology, Boivin shows how changes in material culture also affect human biological evolution. Humans create, through material culture, the niches to which they adapt as biological beings. She rehearses the textbook case of how dependence on dairy farming caused genetic change in humans. (Prior to the advent of dairy farming, adults did not drink milk and the production of lactase, needed for digesting milk sugar, diminished greatly. In societies that became dependent on dairy farming, however, adults continued to drink milk, which eventually led to genetic changes that prolonged the production of lactase.) Also, Boivin maintains, our big brain with its extraordinary executive functions evolved under the selective pressures created by tool use. Boivin believes, and I agree...

Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George

122 MichiganHistoricalReview Nelson George. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound. 1985; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 312. Discography. Index. Photographs. Preface. Paper, $24.95. For those who missed Nelson George's excellent history ofMotown Records when itwas first published in 1985, the University of Illinois Press recendy issued a paperback edition ofWhere Did Our Love Go? The Rase andFall ofthe Motown Sound. Unfortunately, the preface for the new edition does not include more current information about what happened to Berry Gordy and Motown in the years since the book's first publication. Nor does the volume include endnotes to identify sources. Still,George's book offers a definitive history and analysis of one of the most important record companies in the history of popular music. The story ofMotown is in large part the story of Berry Gordy, Jr., the company's founder and guiding force. George begins by examining Gordy's family background. Berry learned from his parents the lessons of self-reliance and entrepreneurial ability, as well as the importance of family, all ofwhich contributed to the birth and growth ofMotown. Gordy began his music career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, writing hits such as "Lonely Teardrops" for Jackie Wilson. He then branched out as an independent record producer, eventually founding his own record company in 1959. Within a decade he owned and operated amusic empire that included Motown Records, several other labels, Jobete Music Publishers, and International Talent Management. Gordy and hisMotown enterprises left theirmark on pop music, the entertainment industry, and American culture. Gordy dubbed his Detroit headquarters "Hitsville, USA" and boasted that the "Motown Sound" was the "sound of young America" (p. 103). To a large extent, it was. The original Motown roster included future superstars such as Smokey Robinson and theMiracles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Martha Reeves and theVandellas, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, as well as top-notch songwriters and producers such as the aforementioned Smokey Robinson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Norman Whitfield. Not only did the "Motown Sound" leave its imprint on popular music, but the rise ofMotown also reflected and helped shape the civil rights movement and black enterprise in the 1960s and early 1970s. Nelson George's excellent history tells the entire Motown story, explaining Gordy's role aswell as the stories behind important hits and groups. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in music, African American history, or recent America. It offers a detailed Book Reviews 123 look at an important chapter inMichigan history?the rise and fall of Detroit's "Motown Sound." Richard Aquila Penn State University, Erie Steven High and David W. Lewis. CorporateWasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 192. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $18.95. In Corporate Wasteland, Steven High explores the historical landscape of deindustrialization from a variety of perspectives, offering cultural, aesthetic, and class analyses of issues often relegated to the realm of economics. High considers the cultural side of industrial decline through the prism ofmemory and place. Contributing to the ongoing consideration of memory inmaterial-culture circles, he sees historical understanding of plant closings and decaying industrial sites as shaped by issues of class and community. In other words, middle-age blue-collar workers living in Detroit, Michigan, form a different historical understanding of General Motors's shutdown of the Fisher Division's Fort Street Plant than do a younger generation ofwhite-collar urban explorers. Different memories and different interactions with a particular place compete with one another to shape a broader historical interpretation. After introducingDavid W. Lewis's photographs of postmodern ruins and "modern gothic" (p. 9), High turns to the aesthetics of deindustrialization and the phenomenon of postindustrial urban explorers, those who investigate decaying industrial sites in somewhat the same way nineteenth-century transcendentalists interacted with natural landscapes. Urban explorers tend to experience the "technological sublime" (p. 52) outside of any historical context and certainlywithout any framework of labor history. Emphasizing class-based responses to deindustrialized sites, High notes "these were not the sons and daughters of mill and...

L'esthétique mécaniste dans la musique américaine

This article presents and analyzes the piano music of four twentieth-century American composers — George Antheil, Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and Conlon Nancarrow — who all share an interest in mechanisms and mechanistic conceptions of art. Using as a theoretical framework the concept of the “technological sublime” first proposed by Leo Marx, we intend to show that the radical calling into question of the limit separating the human from the machine in the music of these composers is not the product of an eccentric avant-garde but, on the contrary, is at the center of an American artistic ethos characterized by the problematic relation between the organic and the mechanic. We suggest that what we call an “aesthetic tension” at the heart of such piano music raises issues of performance that are crucial to understanding how the aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions of art are interrelated.

Radio, modern communication media and the technological sublime

Leo Marx and others have argued that the reception of technology in the United States during the nineteenth century was conditioned by the ‘technological sublime’. John F. Kasson defined this as a ‘powerful emotion, utility, and moral purpose’, suffused with the conviction that the health of the republic was indicated and improved by technological progress. This article provides different perspectives on the American technological sublime, as well as an exploration of its transference to radio and then television. Although there was no shortage of enthusiasm for radio, and for its potential to reconfigure the republic, its reception was not as uncomplicated as the idea of the technological sublime suggests. Interwar hopes for broadcasting and its potential social effects spoke as much to American insecurities as to their dreams; deep fears about social cohesion, cosmopolitanism and pluralism underpinned promises of a new age of radio culture and citizenship. Most Americans did not need to be persuaded of the benefits of radio and later media technologies, but those who identified with the cultural and political establishments needed to be reassured that their position and values would not be threatened by it. More than forty years ago, Leo Marx argued that an impulse to primitivism had conditioned reception of technology in the United States. Americans, Marx argued in The Machine in the Garden, sought to reconcile technology and the pastoral ideal by striving for the ‘middle landscape’ in which the machine did not desecrate the garden. This unlikely reconciliation was, Marx thought, distinctively American and initially propelled by the high priests of the American literary renaissance. American conceptions of the environment firstly as a pristine wilderness and then as an orderly garden were affronted and then adapted to accept the place of technology within them. Marx was an avowed American exceptionalist, arguing that the formation of a middle landscape was a peculiarly American literary, cultural and then national achievement (Marx 1964: 195). Marx’s conception of a middle landscape gave birth to an American ‘technological sublime’, which transferred the earlier sense of awe and 129 RJ–ISBAM 6 (2&3) 129–143 © Intellect Ltd 2008 Keywords

Radio, modern communication media and the technological sublime

Leo Marx and others have argued that the reception of technology in the United States during the nineteenth century was conditioned by the technological sublime. John F. Kasson defined this as a powerful emotion, utility, and moral purpose, suffused with the conviction that the health of the republic was indicated and improved by technological progress. This article provides different perspectives on the American technological sublime, as well as an exploration of its transference to radio and then television. Although there was no shortage of enthusiasm for radio, and for its potential to reconfigure the republic, its reception was not as uncomplicated as the idea of the technological sublime suggests. Interwar hopes for broadcasting and its potential social effects spoke as much to American insecurities as to their dreams; deep fears about social cohesion, cosmopolitanism and pluralism underpinned promises of a new age of radio culture and citizenship. Most Americans did not need to be persuaded of the benefits of radio and later media technologies, but those who identified with the cultural and political establishments needed to be reassured that their position and values would not be threatened by it.

MEMORIES OF THE SPACE AGE

In this article the mundanity of contemporary cyberspace will be contrasted with the technological sublime of the space programme, now almost 40 years ago. Using some short stories from J. G. Ballard, I explore the idea that contemporary forms of ‘space’, usually prefigured as ‘cyber’ or ‘virtual’, are insular and privatized in comparison to Apollo. To a certain extent, this contraction of ambition can also be witnessed in contemporary cyberpunk science fiction, and in the combination of capitalist and conspiratorial narratives about space. Though there are many ways in which the space race might be deemed politically suspect, it represents a triumph of a modernist concatenation of progress, technology and organization. In contrast to the introverted couches of the virtual, the sublime space between the stars might suggest a much more expansive relationship between technology and the human.

Just What Is It That Makes Capsule Homes So Different, So Appealing? Domesticity and the Technological Sublime, 1945 to 1975

Of the various technical, domestic, and urban developments in 1960s architecture, none seems as bizarre or ill-conceived as the fascination with capsules and gantries as models for domestic living. Inspired by the fetishistic hardware of NASA and associated military organizations, capsule houses and their service towers celebrated the technological nihilism of the existenzminimum rendered in profoundly late-modern terms. Latent in these radical proposals was the suggestion of a postmechanical sublime, a denial of humane space and experience in favor of systematizing biological and anthropomorphic requirements. This article focuses on capsule home proposals by the Japanese metabolists and contemporaries in Britain, France, and America, including proposals for domestic environments in aerospace situations and domestic capsule-gantry experiments by Kisho Kurokawa and Archigram. Kurokawa's essay “Capsule Declaration” serves as a convenient conceptual summary for an exploration of technical models from aerospace, cultural, and political influences on the capsule-gantry ideal and suggests the lingering influence of this odd yet compelling chapter in the architecture of the 1960s.