The Postmodern Sublime: Local Definitions, Global Deformations of the US National Imaginary: DRAFT more

Rob Wilson The Postmodern Sublime: Local Definitions, Global Deformations of the US National Imaginary: DRAFT What! that wonderful spirit has not expired These stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet" (1844) If the Alpine scenery of mountains and waterfalls could awe an atheist into belief, as Thomas Gray affirmed in 1739, or "The Auroras of Autumn" streaming still induce en Emersonian euphoria of global innocence in Wallace Stevens as late as post-war 1947, the horizon-dominating hyperspace of Sears Tower or the Westin Bonaventure Hotel threaten to induce a new form of ego loss and liberal credulity in the contemporary US subject drifting along Michigan Avenue or under the toxic sunsets of Los Angeles. The props of romantic scenery have changed from mountains to “global city” megastructures and the dematerialized fusions of cyberspace, perhaps, but Thomas Gray's response of awestruck conversion in an Alpine setting remains paradigmatic of the sublime moment as self-interpellation, as captured in his letter to West, Nov. 16, 1739: "In our little journey up to the Grand Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, but there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument.”i The postmodern landscape has emerged as ever more densely technologized and signtextured, but the re-coding of such sublime conversions to a reigning telos remains much the same in the US liberal subject: speaking not so much of a pantheistic God but of the globally beneficent forces of American power, now extended into de-territorialized forms in our era of globalization. Re-imagining postmodern twists upon the sublime, the response to shifting 1 configurations of American grandeur remains one of awe-struck credulity in God, or that equally vast source of American infinitude reified into global power, "Capital." The solitary self of vast forces, semiotic-overload, and media-driven bliss opens up to awesome otherness like Thomas Gray in the religious Alps or Emerson under the wonder-streaming auroras. Long associated with figures and forces of space-conquering technology-- from the transcontinental railway and the Hoover Dam to the Brooklyn Bridge, world-class skyscrapers, and New York City’s Great White Way-- the projection of sublime on to such national icons “was referred to as a way of establishing American moral and political superiority in the world,” as Caryle Honig has observed of the liberal consensus, “but also as a way of establishing various rationales for capitalism, decimation of Native Americans, and obliteration of the environment.”ii Given such a liberal consensus coming down into this era of computerized technologies which Bill Gates of Microsoft has branded “the Internet Goldrush” of friction-free capitalism, there can be little space of psychic indifference; few enclaves of lyric privacy; little territory in which commodification has not already spread its icons and ad-poems, bespeaking some aura of changed infinitudes, global outreach, and new powers. Contingent upon what I would call the inertia of discursive frames and the persistence of liberal-idealist terms coming down through Bradstreet, Whitman, Emerson, Bryant, Tuckerman, and a host of other precursors, the vocabulary of the sublime in American cultural poetics--as an intuition of indeterminate boundlessness and material progress-- has migrated from configurations of natural power and symbolic immensity (as in Bryant, Emerson, Frost, Rexroth, and Stevens) to ones now and again re-centered in technological power, mass mediation, and urban energy (Hart Crane, Williams, O'Hara, Oppen, Ashbery, Ai, Rich, Bob Perelman). The conversion scene of the postmodern American poet- - overcoming known boundaries and humbled to belief in some saving US telos-is likely to occur not in a natural landscape, but, rather, "under the Pyramid" of the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco or drifting within the cybernetic barrages and high-finance transactions of Wall Street.iii The postmodern sublime can occur, more critically, in worrying the mind- 2 quelling forces released at Los Alamos and Hiroshima, the Apollo 11 moon landing, nuclear winter, or superpower explorations of black holes and the ozone layer on Mars.iv At this late point in the sublime genre, maximally aware of the sublime as sheer rhetoric or as displaced theology, the poet comes to resemble not so much Hegel or Paul de Man but the emotionally displaced, weather-beaten figure of Travis in the Sam Shepard/ Wim Wenders' movie Paris. Texas (1984), longing to lose the self end the cultured burdens of self-representation in that atextual vastness of Texas which has haunted frontier Americans: “For the first time he wished he were far away, lost in a deep vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets. And he dreamed about this place [Paris, Texas) without knowing its name." Yet poetry is denied such primal illusions of self-transcendence and freedom from semiotic systems of Capital, as is Travis in his return to social reality (which of course he has never left, the name "Paris, Texas" a hideous reminder) and to his lowly, paternal name. The sublime desert of Texas (or the sublime Mojave which allures Shepard's characters in other texts such as True West not to mention Baudrillard in Amerique [1986)) so hauntingly portrayed through the gaze of Travis can only stand as a metaphor of evasion and of death, an annihilation of the historical self in mute matter. At each turn, the American landscape is pocked with dollar signs of "immense wealth" and ongoing desacralization. This catastrophic theme of human dislocation and the utter rootlessness of the average American identity in the wake of large-scale displacements of the natural sublime by megastructures of Capital runs throughout Shepard's brilliant plays. As Becky advises the disintegrating rock star Hoss in The Tooth of Crime (1972), for example, the megastructures and codes of western capital have already phased out the open pastures of rural America as so much "old time boogie" outside the oil moneys and greenmail mergers of Dallas: HOSS: What about the country. Ain't there any farmers left, ranchers, open space? Nobody just livin' their life. 3 BECKY: You ain't playin' with a full deck, Hoss. All that's gone. That's old time boogie. The only way to be an individual is in the game [of the economic "kill). You're it. You re on top. You 're free.v This phasing-out of the American wilderness as a locus of freedoms and the Manifest Destiny of frontier expansion is graphically depicted in a blunt little poem from Shepard's autobiographical journal, Motel Chronicles (1982): He prowled the pool Of the Holiday Inn And felt a fit of uselessness The sight of a pool At midnight In Texas Poor Texas Carved into Like all the restvi Set inside a standardized motel in desert vastness outside San Marcos, Texas, the poem records the now-commonplace postmodern American feeling of estrangement resulting from the erasure of the natural sublime by the trivializing technologies of the Holiday Inn. What Gary Snyder would call the "bioregional body" of natural Texas has been carved into so much real estate, and the subjective result is a sense of prowling "uselessness" that borders not so much on ecstatic possession as on criminal rage. The atextual vastness of Texas is daily being phased out 4 as a natural force of energy, as primal ground of the American sublime, its myth of wilderness freedom deconstructed by the global projects of multinational corporations. The poem degenerates into more a postindustrial sigh-- exhilarated and drained of resistance- - than a cry of sublime expansion in the self of American exuberance taking imperial and global dominion over space. At its best, the sublime genre can still help-- as in Wallace Stevens's "Auroras of Autumn, " with its thick-descriptive layering and estranging of the problem of rhetoricity before the streaming splendors of nature-- to unmask the linguistic and socially constructed ( "semiotic" ) condition of nation-expanding Americans, what Josiah Royce called, on the pragmatic side of Hegel's century, the interpretive fate of Homo Semioticus: "Man is an animal that interprets.”vii That is, if the modernist Stevens had to produce a majestic concept ("supreme fiction") for his pragmatic community out of the vulgar-real through a lifelong project of sublime poetics ("the theory of poetry"), it was because he did not live this 'majestic' relationship of selfmastery within his daily experience of social totality.viii Stevens remains one telling example that, within the modernist episteme of Late Capital, the sublime has had to be re-produced in hermeneutic labor as compensation for the loss of 'aura' in the actuarial objects of Hartford which the poet's verbal gymnastics left intact as so many “complacencies of the peignoir. " By contrast, Sam Shepard's postmodern evocation of Texas as a synecdoche for the American sublime suffers from an even more atavistic nostalgia that reproduces the romantic mythology of the 'True West' as some moral standard that can be reinvoked for suburbanized Americans, in passing glory, like the purple-mountain majesty of the nationalist lyric, "God Bless America. " Under the image- and sign-laden cultural formations of postmodernism, however, the widely sacralized commodity-form of Capital ("unlimited wealth" ) lingers, beyond such natural infinitudes, to evoke the sublimation of the sublime. This postmodern sublime is now materialized as an object in which the self transcends lack of desire, if only momentarily. This 5 moment of the sublime gets perpetuated into an infinity of willing that paradoxically bespeaks subjective states of eternal emptiness. The "cash-value" of the American sublime, in short, becomes more closely identified with the sublime of cash. Under the social exchanges of Capital, that is, we have moved from alchemical sublimation ('soul-making' through transformations of matter into aura) into daily sublimation of the self into the commodity-form (reification of the spirit into sign). To invoke Jean Baudrillard's unnerving reading of this commodity-as-sign now globally deployed as natural and everywhere: “Enjoyment is radical, value is sublime; so this radical symbolic insistence is sublimated in value. The commodity is the incarnation of the sublime in the economic order. The radical demand of the subject is sublimated there in the ever renewed positivity of his demand for objects. But behind this sublime realization of value, there lies something else. Something other speaks, something irreducible that can take the form of violent destruction, but most frequently assumes the cloaked form of deficit, of the exhaustion and refusal of cathexis, of resistance to satisfaction and refusal of fulfillment.”ix Under the simulacrous order of High Capital, the driving engine of this postmodernization unto global-glut, wherein objects are exchanged not for use-value (Marx's "alibi" of industrial production) but for sign-value (an image of post-industrial reproduction, ES in designer jeans whereby we consume proletarian style and NYC chic in a fetishized label), the commodity all-too-unconsciously transforms into "the incarnation of the sublime in the economic order. As Longinus early lamented of his declining Greek empire, the deification of nature and mind as sublime powers was giving way to the deification of "unlimited wealth" and the forgetting of cultural sublimity: the fetish of rhetorical grandeur in scraps of Sappho and the empire-building epics of Homer: "I cannot see how we can honor, or rather deify, unlimited wealth as we do without admitting into our souls the evils which attach to it. . . . Greatness of mind [a primary source of 'the sublime') vanes, fades, and loses its attraction when men spend their admiration on their mortal parts and neglect to develop the immortal" (Longinus, "On 6 Sublimity" [XLIV. 7-8]). The sublime under capital has, to a large extent, been transformed into the sublime of capital as the force and speed of infinite transformation. This "postmodern sublime” is hardly as satisfying nor as self-empowering as the Longinian version: ambivalence reigns at the site of such perpetual consumption-production, consumption-production. The material object as commodity is simultaneously sacralized and destroyed, fetishized and wasted, as a pseudo-sublime, mock-sublime, resonant with hollow grandeur and the bliss of self-loss. (Venturi's Las Vegas serves as one incarnation of such postmodern sublimity, worthy of half-contemptuous emulation, revealing American architecture's visionary capitulation to the pseudo-vernacular of Capital, aura-less billboards lining the streets with fake gold and pseudo-alchemy.) Admitting that the vastness of American geography encourages a form of spatial thinking on a grand, asocial scale infatuated with speed and power, Baudrillard stages this opposition of the desert emptiness and abject cultural formations of postmodern America in these terms: ALAMAGORDO: the first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand-- the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground. The code of American power calls for continual reproduction out of this primal emptiness, this wild ground of asocial energy. As Baudrillard maps these abstract and infinite semiotics of exchange in The Mirror of Production. "In a work [according to the industrial gospel of Marx/ Rockefeller], man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically over-determined as a producer by the code of political economy.x Consuming the sublime object of Capital unto greenback infinitude, the postmodern subject reproduces this code of production-consumption, hence reproduces the ambivalent sign of fulfillment-frustration, fullness and lack, an immensity and emptiness that is simultaneous in each 7 act of consumption. The history of the self becomes circumscribed within "a gigantic simulation model" under Capital (Mirror of Production 33), a spectacular imagery-machine of global strength that reduces history to nostalgic bric-a-brac, depth to surface, time to space, self to sign (as in "winning image"), natural object to fetishized commodity (the palm tree as paradise-image consumed from a condo vista), or the sublime of post-representational cognition to the sublime of limitless wealth. Working out the by-now-global logic of commodification through para-Marxist essays of "cognitive mapping, " Fredric Jameson has re-theorized this "postmodern sublime" of postindustrial culture as a "camp or 'hysterical' sublime" that entails a scenario of euphoric/anxious selfhood enacted before "the exhilaration of the gleaming surface" of the commodity-sign. The sublime becomes a hallucinatory rapture that is simultaneously euphoric and wired-up and bored, spaced-out and drained, fulfilled and disgusted. This present-day sublime of forces eluding subjective 'representation' or 'totalization' in (defunct) scenarios of self-preservation is no longer an idealist God or vast natural landscape (as in Burke or Kant) but a de-centered, materialist structure (as in Baudrillard or Lyotard) which Jameson reformulates, in rather obsessive versions of cultural logic, as the ever-present yet ever-elusive specter, Capital. As Jameson refigures "faulty representations" of the natural sublime in Burke and Kant as well as present-day technological forces in America’s globalizing political-economy: “Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism. . . . It is therefore in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that in my opinion the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.xi In such a sublime totality, the self touches new limits in a phantasmagoria of dollar signs and fashion ads: nature is displaced into waterfalls of designer jeans and lakes of brand-name sneakers. This postmodern experience of hallucinated selfhood is akin to an experience of ego- 8 loss I would call semiotic overload' : for example, at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, or the Ala Moana Shopping Mall in Honolulu, whereby body and soul become overloaded with signs, commodity-signs, interjecting the effluvia of Capital as if consciousness were some perpetual MTV video without any other purpose than to buy and sell everything on earth from baby shoes to the politicized lyrics of Bob Dylan to the In God We Trust of the multinational corporation. In another 'Bullish on America' television advertisement for Merrill Lynch, for example, lyrical voices intone "To Know No Boundaries" against a Big Sky background of American-wilderness immensity: the American sublime now comes down to endorse the social subtext of Late Capitalist infinitude-- "To Know No Regulations.' Karl Marx's own categories of commodity infinitude were influenced by his early readings in the aesthetics of the sublime, as Gary Shapiro notes: "CF. T.] Vischer's discussion of the measureless [in On the Sublime and the Comic] seems to have helped Marx formulate the economic categories of Capital and later writings. Capital has a tendency toward a continuous and monstrous development in which every boundary or measure is left behind. Like the Kantian mathematical sublime, capital can expand indefinitely as an objective and threatening presence.xii For Marx, as it was for Edmund Burke earlier, “money is a form of monstrous sublimity” defying the forms of beautiful moderation or the temperancec of reason.xiii As a man-made construction of commodity-infinitude, however, the sublime of Capital can also be deconstructed or distanced through less self-alienating human creations than commodity-fetishes or the seemingly sublime trope of becoming a millionaire. Jameson contrasts the "postmodern sublime" of Nam June Paik or Andy Warhol with the more anxiety-laden and self-centering precursor, the romantic sublime of Burke, Kant, and Wordsworth: "Dialectically, in the conscious sublime it is the self that touches the limit; here it is the body that is touching its limits, 'volatized' in this experience of images to the point of being outside of itself. It is the reduction of time to an instant in a most intense final punctual experience of all of these things, but it is no longer subjective in the older sense that a personality is standing in front of the Alps and knowing the limits of the individual 9 subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of non-humanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved [the ego-self humbled, for example, before Portman's Bonaventure Hotel in LA]”.xiv This postmodern self of the sublime is expanded in an infinitude of ungrounded images, as a simulacrous self emerges into a "schizoid text" of fragmented flows: one commodity-sign amid a billion, the self absorbed not into a natural godhead but into a gigantic simulacrous order that one can only hail, mock, demystify, distance, abjure, worship, "map" as the telos of Advanced-LateGlobal-Capital. In this euphoric recycling of the sublime, such a 'self' is lost from history, lost from community, lost especially from itself: the effect is not wholly one of rapture and fulfillment in self-loss or transcendence of ego-boundary, but "hysterical, if a scream, a cry, an orgasmic surrender to commodity capital as in Nam Jun Paik's deployment of image-mongering videos in the lobby of the NY Commercial Bank (fittingly enough), which both affirms and undercuts any symbolic resistance of art to this image-infinitude of self-commodification. Recall that the Kantian sublime needs, finally, no external object, no property or commodity to serve as 'representation' or 'sign' for its grand moral status: the mind transcends "the apparent almightiness" of nature (or society) as faulty representation, a semiotic prop for subjective transcendence into mental grandeur, ungrounded in forces of matter: "true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging Subject, and not in the Object of nature that occasions this attitude by the estimate formed of it. if Or again, this mental grandeur is affirmed even more categorically: "Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, in so far as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature without us (so far as it influences us). "xv The sublime of the Critique of Judgment props up an experience of subject-centered grandeur that was supra-sensory, self-preserving for the liberal subject, sovereign, founded in a recurring moment of material transcendence: the sublime is finally "a state of mind" (121) that can leave the pragmatic world to its own violent, injury- 10 causing transactions of "interest" and pseudo-value. Telescopes and microscopes disclose a merely physical vastness, which the mind is always beyond in its striving towards moral infinitude as the true sublime (88). Yet in the sublime of Capital, this mathematical and moral sublime of Kant has seemingly come to capitulation. In "Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix, if Jean-Francois Lyotard comes around-not so suavely-- to linking this Kantian aesthetic of sublime transcendence (which he has famously ascribed to formal struggles within language-games as an aesthetic-ethical mandate of 'the postmodern condition') to the infinite productivity of ever-new commodities under Capital: "The end of capitalism is not a technical, social, or political work produced according to the rules. Its aesthetic is not that of the beautiful, but of the sublime. Its poetics is that of genius. Creation in capitalism does not bend to the rules; it invents them.”xvi The "new phrases" and "new rules" (if not "new knowledge”) which the genius of Capital invents, however, are all subjected to one bottom-line rule, that of infinitizing profit and performance: the performativity rule that demands the endless optimization of the expense/return (input-output) relation. if Lyotard fears that even Kantian idealism's "infinite desire to know" has already become subordinated to the performativity rule, which is to say, the desire to profit from the eternal production of "the new. if Even the aesthetic of the sublime, as a desire to represent that which eludes representation or to surpass existing boundaries and phrases of the known, can become caught up in this all-engorging will to economic mastery: "Capitalism posits the infinite as that which is not yet determined, as that which the will must indefinitely master and appropriate. Even given his avant-gardist defense of rule-breaking forms of abstract representation arid transformative freedoms, Lyotard's postmodern anxiety lingers that even the language of art can be transfigured, Under Capital, by such an economimesis ("the transformation of language into a productive commodity"), as in the binary reductions of cybernetic communication. Like a Language Poet working in the wrong genre (philosophy), Lyotard tries to hold out for future works of estranged representation. incommensurable phrases, paradoxes that cannot be 11 recuperated into the dominant mode of exchange, turning the "suppleness, speed, the ability [of Capital] to metamorphose" (219) traditions and messages against the reign of economic performativity. This sublime dynamism of Capital, for Lyotard, enacts a rule-breaking, surplus-generating infinitude of willing an infinitude of desiring-production: "Capitalism posits the infinite as that which is not yet determined, as that which the will must indefinitely master and appropriate. The infinite bears the name of cosmos, energy, and research and development. It must be conquered, made the means to an end, and the end is the glory of the will. A glory itself infinite. In this sense, the real romanticism is capital" (215). This will, as we know from the real romanticism of Nietzsche, can will anything, except no longer will, in 'weak nihilism' : the power sought, whether natural or technological, bears the simple name here of a self-perpetuating infinitude-not "God" but, as I have reiterated, the sublime of "Capital." This postmodern infinitude of willing realizes itself not just as a "Dynamical Sublime” of vast force but as a new "Mathematical Sublime" of multiplicity, seriality, and an expansion of commodities substituting for the power of the self. The result feels more kindred to that Kantian experience of "cognitive exhaustion, the mind blocked not by the threat of an overwhelming force but by the fear of losing count or of being reduced to nothing but counting-- this and this and this-- with no hope of bringing a long series of vast scattering under some sort of conceptual unity " than to any (nostalgic) sense of autonomy.xvii The name for such Commodity Infinitude can only take on, again and again, 'the color of money, ' in which a momentary checking of the mind's vital powers to consume-produce is countered by a compensatory movement: the exultation of revinvestment in the world system with each gleaming purchase. To invoke a powerful novelistic instance of this degraded American sublime, Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) offers familial images of such a commodity-sublime, here displaced into TV images of disaster which shock the 12 jaded consciousness of the American masses from sublime stupor of shopping. Gathered for their Friday night ritual in front of the television, Professor Jack Gladney's loose-flowing nuclear family awaits the sublime (or image of the sublime, torn from history) as some new disaster, which turns out to be the Airborne Toxic Event: "We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.”xviii Given that such a 'viewpoint' emanates from a United States culture whose hegemonic icon of sublimity is nuclear force, threatening the destruction of nature and pious mythologies of regeneration, such a craving for images of death is not atypical; indeed it has been culturally produced.xix As a professor friend explains to the dumbfounded Gladney, whose symbolic capital is founded in the perverse glamour of Hitler Studies, such sublime disasters are needed to rupture the deadening flow of information, to break the semiotic overload with an image that cannot be decoded or ignored: "Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information" (66). Only sublime catastrophe can stimulate, awaken awe and terror to the image-and-word numbed senses of somnambulant consumers: "Our fear [of the Airborne Toxic Event, "the black billowing cloud"] was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the one thing that threatens your life [technology/ Capital], to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms" (127). DeLillo's analysis of this American craving for a technological disaster worthy of natural vastness-answered, in Hiroshima-like recycling, by the production of a lethal black chemical cloud floating over their affluent, safe, consumption-centered lives-- is uncanny, right on the sublime of American money. In a global market given to excess consumption and the disciplinary spectacles of market crisis, we would do well to study forms of the “American Sublime” not so much to mimic them as to expose the dangers of this will to global power 13 disguised as national aggrandizement or technoeuphoric spectacles and displaced into so many “airborn toxic events” and the latest disaster movie from Hollywood Incorporated. 14 i ENDNOTES Letters of Thomas Gray ed. John Beresford (London: Oxford UP, 1951), pp. 44-45; Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 307-316. The Bonaventure Hotel by architect John Portman is read as a "total space" that mutates modernist urban space into a "postmodern hyperspace" and both awes and disorients the sublime subject of Capital in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism. or. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1991), pp. 39-44. ii Carlye Honig, “Varieties of Technological Experience,” in European Society for the Study of Science and Technology Review, Vol. 14 (1995): 4-7. Honig is reviewing and expanding upon examples and arguments put forth by David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). iii The attraction and repulsion of American fiction writers towards figures of technology, as well as forms of technologized fiction, are discussed in Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing From Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Drawing loosely upon Jameson’s association of the postmodern sublime with figurations of capitalist technology and the inability to represent the “world-system of present-day multinational capitalism,” Tabbi notes that the dynamism of global capitalism can be said “to have produced a corporate culture that is itself sublime, whose contractions are all too conducive to those contradictory feelings-- ‘pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression’-- that have been traditionally associated with the sublime, p. 11, p. 68. iv In these opening paragraphs, I recapitulate arguments that are more fully exemplified and historicized in Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1991), pp. 197-227. Also see David Nye, Chapter Nine, American Technological Sublime, on the liberal critique that begins to gather historical weight with Hiroshima and Apollo XI, not to mention the spectacle of the commodity form that is Las Vegas. Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime (1972), in Seven Plays. ed. Richard Gilman (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 219. vi Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982), p. 22. v vii Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity [19183, ed. John E. Smith (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1968), p. 298. Because man is a self-interpretive animal, Royce concludes, in Pauline tones affirming semiotic community, that he "lives in communities, and depends upon them for insight and salvation." Building upon the of William James, Royce teases out the consequences of 'leading' ideas (such as 'the sublime' or 'Charity'), using the cash-value dynamics of Capitalist investment to generate surplus-value: "An idea, in this sense, is a more or less practical and active process, a 'leading' as James calls it, whereby some set of conceptions and perceptions tend to be brought into desirable connections. . . . an idea may be an active seeking for a way to translate conceptual 'bank-notes' into perceptual cash" (p. 303). The American sublime, pragmatically considered, must pay off by leading to self-empowerment, an affirmation of the will to imagine (tropes as "conceptual 'banknotes'") and thereby create success (acts of "perceptual cash"). As Royce affirms, echoing the cash-value formula of James, "Each idea aims at its own success" (p. 354). Deconstruction would disable this 'dynamogenic' imaging of the sublime at its linguistic origin, hence disconnect, poetic self-making from such political, national, or cash-vulgar consequences. viii Again, I am here building upon arguments that I exemplify at length in American Sublime [see footnote 2 above], especially chapter seven, "Wallace Stevens: Decreating the American Sublime.” ix Jean Baudrillard, "Desire in Exchange Value, " For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), p. 207. x Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos, 1975), p. 31. Baudrillard evokes the nuclear scene in America trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 4, as a "future catastrophe of the social.” As he urges of the American sublime, "In America, space lends a sense of grandeur even to the insipidity of the suburbs and 'funky towns ' and this French theorist seems, by turns, enchanted and repulsed like a latter-day de Tocqueville (8) : "As soon as you set foot in America, you feel the presence of an entire continent-- space there is the very form of thought" (16). xi See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984), pp. 79-80, and p 76, subsequently rewritten as chapter one of Postmodernism. or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [see footnote one above]. On the "ontological marginalization" brought about by self-dwarfing technologies of Late Capital, also see Fredric Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial 'Sublime,'" Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 247-263. xii See Gary Shapiro, "From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes," New Literary History 16 (1985), p. 228. As Elaine Scarry argues of the material sublimity that is Capital in "The Structure of Belief and Its Modulations into Material flaking: Body and Voice in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx": "Capital. It is colossal. It is magnificent. And it is the capitalist's body. It is his body not because it has come into being through the solitary projection of his own bodily labor, but rather because it bestows its reciprocating power on him, relieving his sentience, acting as his surrogate, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), p. 264. xiii See the commentary on this by Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 59 and fn. to p. 166, in a study which goes a long way towards exposing misogynistic binaries embedded in traditional theories of the sublime, from Burke and Kant to Neil Hertz, as well as to associate modes of feminist sublimity with responses to “an alterity that exceeds, limits, and defines” the female subject of the Anglo-American novel from Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton to Toni Morrison. xiv See Anders Stephanson, 'Regarding Postmodernism- - A conversation with Fredric Jameson," Social Text 17 (1987), pp. 30-31. xv Immanuel Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime," Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1966), p. 104 and ff. For an American application of this Kantian problematic of 'representation, ' see Michael Beehier, "Kant and Stevens: The Dynamics of the Sublime and the Dynamics of Poetry," The American Sublime ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 131-152. xvi Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix," trans. Brian Massumi, Cultural Critique 5 (1986-7): 209-219, esp. pp. 215-216. Also see Jean-Francois Lyotard, "On Terror and the Sublime," Telos 67 (1986): 196-198, and the challenging feminist rejoinder of Meaghan Morris, "Postmodernity and Lyotard's Sublime, " The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminism. Reading, Postmodernism (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 213-239, who argues against any re-theologizing of the sublime, "A new Sublime: what a terrible prospect" (p. 214). xvii Neil Hertz, "The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime, " The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), p. 40. xviii Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 64. On DeLillo as enacting a resistant version of postmodernism in Libra, see Frank Lentricchia, "Don DeLillo," Raritan 8 (1989): 1-29; and, on this aesthetic of the post-industrial sublime, see John Prow, "The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990): 413-429. xix See Klaus Benesch, “Technology and American Culture: An Introduction,” as well as ths entire special issue of Amerikanstudien Vol. 41. 3 (1996).