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The Sublime and The Digital Landscape

Annie Dorsen explores the relationship between the digital landscape of the internet and the Romantic concept of the sublime, suggesting that the internet has become a new form of quasi-natural landscape that evokes both awe and horror. She discusses how the internet reflects the complexities of human engagement and detachment, drawing parallels to historical perspectives on nature and technology. The document critiques the idealistic views of cyberspace as a liberating force, highlighting the realities of control, environmental impact, and the overwhelming nature of digital experiences.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
29 views13 pages

The Sublime and The Digital Landscape

Annie Dorsen explores the relationship between the digital landscape of the internet and the Romantic concept of the sublime, suggesting that the internet has become a new form of quasi-natural landscape that evokes both awe and horror. She discusses how the internet reflects the complexities of human engagement and detachment, drawing parallels to historical perspectives on nature and technology. The document critiques the idealistic views of cyberspace as a liberating force, highlighting the realities of control, environmental impact, and the overwhelming nature of digital experiences.

Uploaded by

Jim
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Annie Dorsen

The Subl ime and t he Dig ital Landsc ape

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1. Lo oking Bac k

Last September, Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece about internet addiction for New York
Magazine. It was illustrated with these two pictures, created by Kim Dong-­k yu:

Above: Kim Dong-­k yu’s Luncheon, 2013. Courtesy of the artist


Right: Kim Dong-­k yu’s When you see the amazing sight, 2013.
Courtesy of the artist

The second of these images uses Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wan-
derer above the Sea of Fog. In the context of its placement beside an essay about the
dangers of compulsive internet use, the image suggests a reproach: the subject is too
absorbed by his phone to notice the real landscape in front of him. But the original

Theater 48:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-4250956


© 2018 by Annie Dorsen 55
D orsen

painting has its own point to make about engagement and detachment. It already treats
the landscape as spectacle— the Wanderer stands on a rocky outpost, a distant observer,
a stand-­in for the viewer of the painting who looks in the same direction, and at a simi-
lar remove. In the magazine illustration, the iPhone performs the same function as the
frame of the original painting, to contain and manage the swirling chaos of the world,
to make it two-­dimensional, decorative, and portable. In that sense, the illustration is

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more an update of the painting than a subversion.
In fact there’s a whole meme industry churning out images of this particular
painting photoshopped with phones, tech logos, and other symbols of the internet.
Here are two still images taken from a moving gif that I copied from someone’s Face-
book page:
Four stills from a gif:
Artist Unknown;
courtesy of the author
Dig ital L andsc ape

The gif makes a less moralistic, and more astute, observation than the illustra-
tion: the “sea of fog” itself has been replaced by Tumblr.
It makes sense that Friedrich’s painting is used so often for this sort of meme.
These days it is something of a shorthand for Romanticism and the sublime. It has
come to stand for the transcendent Kantian subject, as well as its intellectual and cul-
tural corollaries: the opposition between human and world, the spectator’s gaze as a

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form of control, even imperialism.
Seeing this illustration in the Sullivan piece, and then the gif, and then more and
more images like it, got me thinking about how the internet, as it grows in complexity
and scale, and increases its reach into every aspect of our lives, is becoming a new form
of quasi-­natural landscape. And it is one that seems to occupy the same place in our
imaginary as the natural landscape did in the late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­
century imaginary: vast, unknowable, awe-­inspiring.
Like the landscape of the Romantic sublime, the internet is a landscape that looks
back. In the eighteenth century Romantics believed the physical world was animated
by the omniscience of God; our twenty-­first-­century digital landscape is animated by
an equally mysterious and powerful intelligence: that of the Other. Other people just
like us, of course, but also more authoritarian and mysterious Others: corporations,
governmental agencies, “terrorists” and their crack teams of it experts, data miners,
spammers, spiders, and hackers, who may be out there, watching.
Descriptions of the internet frequently take on a Romantic cast. To use one
example, in the opening sequence of Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary Lo and Behold,
pioneering computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock gives the director a tour of the room
at ucla where the first host-­to-­host message was sent in 1969. Kleinrock calls it “a holy
place” and compares that first moment of transmission not to Bell’s first telephone call
(as one might expect), but to the moment of legend when Christopher Columbus first
spotted land across the Atlantic and called it a New World. Watching this scene, I
thought of Keats, who compared his experience reading a new translation of the Iliad to
Cortez’s similar moment of discovery:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies


When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.1

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2. Tec hno Utopias

The sublime began as a literary concept. The first use of the term is in the Peri Hyp-
sous, a kind of handbook for aspiring poets by the rhetorician Longinus in the third or
maybe fourth century ce. Via a series of seventeenth-­century translations into French
and English, the concept gained popularity and emerged as a fundamental category

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of aesthetics, applicable to the appreciation of both nature and art. Analyses of the
sublime proliferated throughout the eighteenth century, by British philosophers John
Dennis and Edmund Burke and, most influentially, by Immanuel Kant in the Critique
of Judgement.
Kant wrote of two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamic. The
mathematical has to do with scale: immeasurability, the seemingly infinite, that which
reminds us of our meager temporality. The dynamic is about the potential for catastro-
phe: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes. In the face of these natural phenom-
ena, we are reminded of the weakness of our bodies, of how easily we can be destroyed
by the superior power of the world around us.
In the 1990s, David E. Nye proposed an “American technological sublime,” a
study of the near-­religious awe that has accompanied technological advances through-
out American history.2 He writes about the grand building projects of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries: railways, dams, bridges, skyscrapers, and monuments.
Nye relates these accomplishments to Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth-century belief
in a moral obligation to conquer and improve the North American wilderness. This
version of the sublime is industrial, collective, popular. It was marked by ribbon-­cutting
ceremonies, mass tourism, and breathless newspaper editorials. That bustling sociabil-
ity is far from the solitary contemplation of Friedrich’s Wanderer. In Nye’s account, the
technological sublime expresses itself in hymns to progress and growth; it is inspired by
humanity’s achievement rather than by its potential destruction.
By now, of course, many of the expansionist triumphs of American engineering
stand crumbling from governmental neglect. Industrial ruins (and the related photog-
raphy trend ruin porn) suggest an even more direct connection to nineteenth-­century
Romanticism, with its fetish for the quaintly decaying monuments of the classical past.
Rust-­ belt wastelands, skeletal factories, dead malls, collapsing bridges, abandoned
theme parks . . . all they lack is a Wordsworth or a Shelley to memorialize them.
Look on my wpa-­funded infrastructure, ye Mighty, and despair!
It’s not only the promise of industrial technology that looks different in hind-
sight. Other forms of techno-­utopia have fared just as badly. John Perry Barlow’s 1996
manifesto, “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” invokes the dream
of the internet as a space of enlightened self-­interest, liberation from state control, and
free circulation of thought. It now reads like parody. “Governments of the Industrial
World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home
of Mind.” lol. But he was serious: this new world would be unbounded, deterrito-

58
Dig ital L andsc ape

Martin “Mandias”
Lyle’s Insult to
Injury, Yamanashi
Prefecture, Japan,
2008. Photo:
Courtesy of the artist

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rialized, free from the intractable problems of bodies, identity, and matter. “All may
enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force,
or station of birth.” He describes himself and his fellow “natives” of the cybersphere as
freedom fighters who will “spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest
our thoughts.”3
Look on my bulletin-­board systems, ye Mighty, and despair.

Romain Veillon’s
Man of Steel series,
2015. Photo:
Courtesy of the
artist

Of course, the supposedly free space of the internet was never really free of gov-
ernmental control. It was originally developed as a military project. And the internet is
hardly dematerialized or disembodied. The environmental devastation from mineral
mining and carbon emissions, the near enslavement of workers on the raw materials
and assembly side of the tech industries, the ubiquity of racist and misogynistic online
harassment . . . the “civilization of the Mind” that Barlow imagined looks a lot like
good old meatspace civilization.

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But while the internet’s landscape is hardly free of “real-world” conflicts and con-
tradictions, it is a source of freedoms and dangers unique to itself. It has its frontiers
and unmapped territories: darknet sites accessible only through the anonymous brows-
ing software Tor, like the now-­defunct Silk Road, an electronic marketplace for drugs,
or the Armory, an arms and weaponry supplier. We navigate the web alert to every
site’s potential for abuse by malicious, almost mythological online creatures: 4chan

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mobs, nsa spies, Putinbots, GamerGate harassers, and garden-­variety trolls. All this
gives the internet a flavor of the more familiar Romantic sublime, which as Kant puts
it “arouse[s] enjoyment but with horror.” We are all familiar with the feeling of “nega-
tive lust” he articulated — during a Facebook binge, perhaps, or down in the depths of
a clickhole — in which attraction and repulsion commingle, and pleasure is touched by
anxiety, pain, and fear.
Nineteenth-­century Romantic depictions of the wild landscapes that character-
ize the sublime were nostalgic, a reaction to Enlightenment regimes of rationalism and
scientific and technocratic ascendancy. Their sublime was the byproduct of a contradic-
tion: the longing for emotional excess in a world that had lost its mystery, and simulta-
neously a recognition of the power of reason to overcome emotion. This accords with
Kant’s description of the sublime as a two-­step phenomenon. In the first moment, we
are overwhelmed by forces beyond our control, and in the second we reassert our ability
to understand and therefore to master those forces:

Now in just the same way the irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us
the recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same
time reveals a faculty of judging ourselves as independent of nature. . . . Therefore
nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates the imagination to a presen-
tation of those cases in which the mind can come to feel the sublimity of its own
vocation even over nature.4

It’s only shorthand to call a natural object, an artwork, or a building “sublime” —


in the Kantian sense, the sublime isn’t a property of a thing, it’s an occasion for human
reason to recognize its own transcendence.
But that recognition can only take place if the would-­be recognizer is not in any
real danger. As Kant writes, “provided our position is secure,” hurricanes, volcanoes, and
so on are “all the more attractive for [their] fearfulness; and we readily call those objects
sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar common-
place, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives
us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature”
(italics added).5 But what happens when there is no repose, no safe place from which to
contemplate?
In the mid-­1970s, Thomas Weiskel examined the sublime in Romantic poetry
from the perspective of structuralist linguistics, reorienting Kant’s sublime toward a

60
Dig ital L andsc ape

feeling of cognitive rupture in which the relation of signified and signifier breaks down
from an excess of material on one side of the equation or the other. In the first case,
bombarded by an excess of signifiers, the subject is overwhelmed by repetitions, a sen-
sory overload, an “on and on” in which “the signifiers cannot be grasped or understood,
they overwhelm the possibility of meaning in a massive underdetermination that melts
all oppositions or distinctions into a perceptional stream.”6 In the second case, an excess

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of signifieds paralyzes the mind with a massive overdetermination, in which one can
read so much into a given image or word that it becomes overloaded, a black hole of
potential meanings. In this second scenario, one risks falling into a schizophrenic state
of “absolute metaphor,” in which anything might plausibly mean anything. The excess
of both types is apocalyptic; Weiskel calls it “death by plenitude.”7
Weiskel’s reading might be a good description of the notion of the digital sub-
lime, were it not lacking a discussion of information technologies and the radical
changes they have brought to aesthetics, linguistics, and our understanding of cognition
itself. Unsurprisingly, given the period in which he wrote, he sees the computer merely
as a “symbol of determinism,” without intuiting the overwhelming indeterminacy that
countless competing determinisms might produce. But he does introduce an important
point; rather than a momentary shock, his sublime extends in time, a relentless mix of
pleasure and pain without relief.
He also notes the possibility of a sublime that descends, in contrast to Kant's
imagery of elevation, lift and raising over or above. The terms that describe wallow-
ing in internet culture (deep dive, clickhole, etc) indeed suggest a spiraling down into
depths—despite the obvious lack of depth to the screens we use. Is there such a thing as
depth to a sequential series of flat images? There’s certainly no span to our encounters
with the internet: one looks in one direction only, at a small rectangle that erases the
space to its left and right. And this perhaps gives a feeling of boring in and down. We
are drowning in “vulgar commonplace” rather than raised above it.
Sianne Ngai has recently coined a new term, stuplimity, the stupid sublime: “a
concatenation of boredom and astonishment — a bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and
what ‘irritates’ or agitates; of sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization,
exhaustion or fatigue.”7 She describes a “thickening” of repetitions and variations that is
both overwhelming and wearying. Thick language layers itself on top of itself, accumu-
lating more and more potential meanings until the cognitive pipes get clogged. Lan-
guage piles up in a “mushy heap” of fragments, repetitions, enumerations, permutations.
The boring part of stuplimity “resides in the relentless attention to the finite and small,
the bits and scraps floating in the ‘common muck’ of language.”9
Ngai tracks this tendency through modernist writers (Gertrude Stein, James
Joyce, Samuel Beckett) and postmodern visual artists (Ann Hamilton, Gerhard Rich-
ter, Janet Zweig), but it is the contemporary poet Kenneth Goldsmith whose work best
exemplifies what Ngai is getting at.

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Kenneth She discusses Goldsmith’s piece No. 111 2.7.93 – 10.20.96 (1997), but I’m also think-
Goldsmith’s
ing of his installation Printing Out the Internet (2013). Over the course of about a month,
Printing Out the
Internet, 2013. Goldsmith invited contributors to print out pages from the internet and send them to
Photo: an art gallery in Mexico City where the exhibition was displayed. Contributors sent
Marisol Rodriguez. in over ten tons of paper. (Notably, the project was inspired by and dedicated to intel-
Courtesy of
lectual freedom activist Aaron Schwartz, and over 250,000 pages of jstor articles were
LABOR Gallery
submitted in his honor.) Here is what the installation looked like in the gallery:
Printing Out the Internet addresses both the mathematical and the dynamic sub-
limes. The project offers a frisson of contemplating the totality of the internet, the sheer
overwhelming amount of it. An infinity of information, and the concrete materiality
of the supposedly ephemeral. Scholarly essays from jstor, and all that disposable lan-
guage we post, share, and tweet, all the data produced by likes and downvotes, logins
and check-­ins and selfies — all this intellectual trash sticks around, accumulating, over-
whelming our ability to metabolize it, like the shards of plastic found in the stomachs
of dead birds who wash up on shore. It also evinces the dynamic sublime, via the envi-
ronmental anxiety it causes. Since the call to “save paper” was one of the earliest and
most basic conservationist demands, the project provokes a kind of gluttonous horror at
the absolute waste it entails.
Borges’s library of Babel is real and we wrote it, all together. But, like the old Ste-
phen Wright joke goes, you can’t have everything; where would you put it?
The question of authorship brings us back to Longinus, the third-­century literary
theorist whose Peri Hypsous originated the notion of the sublime:

For our soul is raised out of nature through the truly sublime, sways with high
spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as if itself had created what it hears.”10

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For Longinus, the sublime engenders a sense of identification with the creator:
we are so touched by what we hear, and touched so directly, we feel as if we’d written it.
But when we contemplate the internet sublime, in contrast to the earlier third-­century
or eighteenth-­century versions, we did create what we hear. And what we feel is prob-
ably not proud joy, exactly. This may be the most sickening aspect of our contemporary
sublime: we look out into the shapeless infinities and see ourselves. The landscape turns

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out to be a mirror, and the unease we feel, the awareness of our insignificance and
frailty — these are provoked by us, in aggregate. It is a world built by the swarm, by bil-
lions of tiny, self-­interested actions taken by billions of tiny, self-­interested people.

3 . T h e G r e a t O u t d oo r s

My 2017 performance project The Great Outdoors uses a model of entropy as its macro
structure — both in the thermodynamic sense (the inevitable deterioration of all systems
of order, the winding down of energy in the world), and in Claude Shannon’s appropri-
ated use of the term in the field of information theory, (the measure of unpredictability,
randomness, and repetition in text).
The cybernetician Norbert Wiener has taken credit for suggesting that Shannon
borrow the term entropy from physics on the grounds that since no one really knew
what it meant no one would object, and he includes a short discussion of it in his 1950
book The Human Use of Human Beings:

It is a foregone conclusion that the lucky accident which permits the continuation
of life in any form on this earth, even without restricting life to something like
human life, is bound to come to a complete and disastrous end . . . . In a very real
sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck,
human decencies and values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most
of them.11

This passage, and particularly the image of the shipwreck, could also be a gloss
on Friedrich’s painting, and as such suggests a relationship between entropy and our
human fragility in the face of the world out there. The “doomed planet” he refers to has
obvious environmental implications for contemporary readers. Even if taken simply in
Wiener’s intended sense, that of the ultimate loss of energy in the universe leading to
what physicists call “heat death,” there’s a decided connection between entropy and
the sublime, the “delightful horror,” as Edmund Burke called it, that both inspires and
overwhelms, seduces and repels.12
On the text side, The Great Outdoors uses internet comments as a corpus from
which to fashion a monologue. The computer programmers I’m working with, Miles
Thompson and Marcel Schwittlick, designed a system that continuously collects com-
ments from a relatively small number of threads on Reddit and a few other chat sites.

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Over the course of the twenty-­four hours before the performance, our average haul is
close to a million comments, from which our algorithm chooses roughly two hundred
for a given show. The system then arranges those from the most common and pre-
dictable to the most dense and complex — eventually so dense and complex that the
sequences of letters are essentially random. Here is a short section from the beginning-­
ish of one output:

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Uh, yeah.
You were.
Uh, yeah.
Nah, bro.
Haha cool!
Can confirm.
and on and on.
Hiya Jonathan!
/tin foil hat
left or right
Actually yes.
Yeah seriously.
A serial killer.
Fucking coward.
O gotcha, thanks.
Orange Julius Caesar
Bullshit stereotype.
They called me a cunt
stuff like this please
Indirectly . . . yeah
Jesus fucking christ.
>Few minutes later.
Little thrill Sikas.
Umm wtf seriously.
Are you sure you aren’t 14?
Before, during, and after.
Fucking Bojack Horseman lol
>It’s also unconstitutional.
That is what it was called!
A crunchy taco weighs 78 grams.
Is it you or is it someone else?

64
Dig ital L andsc ape

And here’s a bit from the end-­ish:

GET YOUR PITCHFORKS HERE>>>Pitchfark emporium Gat ur patchforks


Patchfarks af al cizeslil farks Dem biggun farks-­-­_ _-­-­_-­-­-­_-­-­-­-­E (clearins)-­-­-­-­-­-­-­
-­-­e (smalr akwaman try-­dent-­-­-­F )clearins(-­-­E Dem lil faks-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­
-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­E Dem bigguns!!@!!!@!!!!

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“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m
Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m
Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No, I’m Spartacus.”“No,
I’m Spartacus.”
> how strong family ties can be sadly, political dynasties... leeching off OFWs/suc-
cessful relatives ..T__________________________T
Dog -­* huuuhhhh* ‘woof...’Cat -­* wispers*’don’t.....move.......a muscle’Dog-­*walks
away*Cats-­’when I get my hands on youMMEEARREAWWWW!!’
mmm....{don’t do it}.... *MMMM*....{stahp!}.... ***MMMMMMM***...!!!I
CAN’ T HOLD IT IN AN Y LONGER!!!*notices ur bulge***OWO,***
**^WHAT’S** **^^THIS?**
Mid-­interrupt: “and then...**...we decided...**#to get t... WHY ARE YOU STILL
TALKING, BOB?!”
>I don’t care ~~what~~ **who** it is if ~~it~~ **they** taste~~s~~ good I’ll eat ~~it~~
**them**.FTFY
Seven hells!!! :((((((((((((((( ive done so much tbh :(( okay imma report it to DOLE,
but i dont know how.. :’(
(1.35\*4)A + (8)A = B/12(1.35\*4 + 8)A = B/12A = (B/12)/(1.35\*4 + 8) Ta-­da
-­’6184:_/ lgjsghgng-­#-­!+!//947))’-­@?1+3+?”::*)2’%#+?$+_)@’#&#8”-­$ -­#-­-­# &@%
_6@99!0@)+$= .xhxhxifudjsbdbcjcjdjdbctxxusj

Each of these comments came from somewhere and from someone; each had a
context, an intention, an originating desire of the poster to speak and to be heard. Once
posted, however, the comment accrues other meanings. It collects metadata: time-
stamp, location, keywords, number of characters, number and types of interactions
(replies, likes/upvotes, etc), and other structural or administrative information. These
data can be analyzed statistically, in relation to that of other items within the corpus,
and that statistical information can be used in any number of ways.
About Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Ngai writes, “Words are delib-
erately presented in ‘long strings’ rather than conventional sentences and where the rep-
etition of particular words and clauses produces a layered or ‘simultaneous’ effect.” Ngai’s
use of the word “string” in relation to language brings to mind the term’s use in computer
science, which refers to a finite sequence of characters drawn from the set of all possible
sequences in the alphabet. In algorithmic processes, the semantic meaning of the words
made up from these characters is usually irrelevant to the operations being performed

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on them. Even in some of the more sophisticated techniques we use in The Great Out-
doors, which do select and order comments at least partly on the basis of their semantic
meaning, it’s not actually “the meaning” of the word as a human understands it that
the system deals with. Rather, the algorithm works with a symbolic, mathematically-
manipulable representation of that meaning. This tension between the visible and less-­
visible meanings of digital language suggests new forms of textual organization. If one

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organizes text according to criteria associated with its status as “string” rather than as
sense, one finds an incoherent surface (what seems like a mushy heap) masking a rigidly
logical understructure. In any given performance text of The Great Outdoors, each com-
ment has nothing to do with the others in terms of topic, voice, or argument. But in
fact our texts are ruthlessly organized, according to the parameters we’ve used to model
Shannon entropy. A set of (relatively) simple graphs diagram the understructure, which
is reminiscent of a rather traditional dramatic structure: exposition, development, rising
action to climax, denouement. Despite the absolute difference of each performance text
on the level of actual words spoken, there is absolute uniformity of each text on the level
of structure. As Ngai writes, “where system and subject converge is . . . where language
piles up and becomes ‘dense.’ ” The Great Outdoors is, among other things, an attempt to
access, experience, and inhabit this convergence.

4. The S tupl ime

Is Donald Trump the ultimate artist of the stuplime? In a recent piece for the New York
Review of Books, Masha Gessen quotes from an interview Trump gave to the Associ-
ated Press on April 17, 2017, as an example of his “ability to take words and throw them
into a pile that means nothing”:

Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example,
send out the fifty-­n ine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself,
“You know, this is more than just like, seventy-­n ine [sic] missiles. This is death
that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved,
because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you
know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and
lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet . . . every decision is much harder than
you’d normally make. [unintelligible]. . . . This is involving death and life and so
many things. . . . So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible]. . . . The financial
cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger,
the United States, than the biggest company in the world.14

Gessen then lists the words in this passage (“responsibility,” the number “fifty-­
nine” and the number “seventy-­nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “ham-
let,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” “the United States”) that Trump has rendered

66
Dig ital L andsc ape

meaningless, and writes, “Trump’s word-­piles fill public space with static. This is like
having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that
he is polluting is the space of our shared reality.”15 Are we heading for an environmen-
tal crisis occurring in virtual space? The airwaves of our communications are becom-
ing clogged with unsignifying noise, our political commons filling up with strings of
repetitive trash. We suffer from nonstop agitation and fatigue.

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Historically and now, the sublime is not a cozy aesthetic. It says: everything will
collapse, will be too much for us to bear, will destroy us in the end . . . but temporarily,
from a safe perch, we can enjoy a frisson of the coming catastrophe. Edmund Burke
thought the frisson was good for us, a kind of exercise for the soul, which like physical
exercise is uncomfortable at the time but pays off later in greater strength. Ngai isn’t so
optimistic; in stuplimity, reason is pulverized and it just gives up.
Faced with the overreach and limits of rationalism amidst the current tornado of
irrational actions and events, it is tempting to abandon the hard work of trying to make
sense, to take refuge in overpowering emotions and sensations that are their own jus-
tification and their own reward. We are currently seeing up close the seductiveness of
unreason, the ease with which nostalgia warps into a longing for chaos, how the lulz go
viral. But let’s try to avoid the capitulation that Ngai describes. With luck, the digital
sublime, like Burke’s proto-­Romantic version, will prove to be good exercise, and will
fortify us for the challenges to come.

Not e s

1. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816.


2. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
3. David Perry Barlow, www.eff.org/cyberspace-­independence.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 92.
5. Ibid., 91.
6. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 271.
9. Ibid., 278.
10. Longinus, On the Sublime, VII, 2.
11. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Da Capo, 1954), 40.
12. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 109.
13. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 250.
14. Masha Gessen, “The Autocrat’s Language,” New York Review of Books, May 13, 2017,
www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/13/the-­autocrats-­language/.
15. Ibid.

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