Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime

Temenuga Trifonova, Temenuga Trifonova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315299136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

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" (temporal), 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 political 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.

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 proliferating 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, recombination, 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 assimilation. 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 humanity 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 understanding 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 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 posthuman, 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 shadowing 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 simultaneously 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 contentiously called the Anthropocene.⁶ Following the ontological triadism proposed, first, 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 relations between those granted recognition as agents in the world. Our social ecologies work the same way as our material ecologies, with blowback to widening inequalities and horrific injustices coming in the form of movements of growing refugee populations—economic refugees, climate refugees—and ever-present threats of political 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 morethan-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 understanding 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 happe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1. The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen
• 2. Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality
• 3. The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime
• 4. Of Fake and Real Sublimes
• 5. “Black and Glittering”
• 6. Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity
• 7. Recentering the Sublime
• 8. Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime
• 9. The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime
• 10. From Diagrams to Deities
• 11. Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World
• 12. The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary Environmental Photography
• 13. Magnificent Disasters
• 14. Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime
• 15. The Birds and the Bees
• List of Contributors
• Index