On the techno(logical) sublime

“We cannot deny that our intelligence of the world is intrinsically linked to the technologies that extend our senses”

–Chantal Pontibrand (135).

In his essay “Blankness as Signifier,” Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe uses an interesting phrase: “the post-human techno-sublime” (118). I am not so much interested in the “post-human” part–whatever that means–but I find “techno-sublime” to be fascinating. It recalls my current research into Foucault’s theory, Technologies of the Self, and how “self-care” practices–and the technology which enables and perhaps even expedites or encourages their performance–might work to transform the self, whether that be an individual self, or selves on a grand scale; whether it be in the interest of the individual, or at the behest of the abstract governing “body” as a means to control (no longer to discipline, mind you; for we have moved from the society of discipline to one of control, as Deleuze has argued) what we term individuals. All this plays into subjectivity, freedom, liberation, etc.

Gilbert-Rolfe’s techno-sublime calls itself to my attention in that it shortens the full adjective for “relating to or using technology,” technological, for a more modern-sounding, and therefore more minimalist, adjective of techno. Techno evokes a different feel than the clunky, traditional technological. Due to technology’s multiplicity of transformations, accelerating now at a speed not seen since the printing press, industrial revolution, the steam engine, etc., and having moved from mechanical to electrical technologies, we are moving no longer at the speed of sound, but at the of light. We have bypassed Newton’s mechanics for Einstein’s relativity. To that end, it makes sense that our art would reflect our technology.

As Gilbert-Rolfe puts it, “Contemporary blankness is heir to both the Victorians’ horror vacui and the transparency that sought to deconstruct it” (19). Blankness, minimalist design, has indeed replaced the filling-up-of space in contemporary culture. You thought open concept was big in the nineties and early 2000s, when my parents moved us into a split-level that was so open we couldn’t eat without hearing what someone else was watching on TV or playing on Napster from two rooms away? Now that we’ve minimalized the macro, it’s time to minimize the micro–kitchens are no longer just “open” but their shelves are, too, exposing the dishes and cups for all to see as if to announce: No secrets here! No skeletons buried in this house! (For an even more minimalist view check out the new Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up series on Netflix).

I must caveat this all by saying that I am not criticizing minimalist lifestyle nor art, nor interior design choices, by any means. I am a huge proponent of this. This journal “space” is simply a technology that I am using to examine why, to what end; to take a step back and see why, not just how this all works and has worked. This is why, similar to Gilbert-Rolfe, “I am actually rather keenly interested in the differences between the eighteenth-century and contemporary world” (1). Unlike Rolfe, though, I am not (perhaps yet) convinced, as he wants his “review of the relationship between beauty and the sublime” in his book to do, of his “sense that one could not now find the sublime where it was to be found two hundred years ago” (1). I need to dig more deeply into that (which I will do when I present on Frances Burney’s early diaries as technologies for Foucauldian self-care at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-century Studies–a clunky, non-minimalist name for certain–conference next week).

Along similar lines of Deleuze’s assertion that we have moved on from Foucauldian societies of discipline (correcting the past) into societies of control (correcting in the present so that the future state is controlled), Gilbert-Rolfe argues that the context for “contemporary subjectivity” “would be one which aspired to the condition of the electrical rather than the mechanical” (Gilbert-Rolfe 117). In the eighteenth century in which both he and I were interested, there was a preoccupation culture-wide in the west with regard to automatons. Women were to be mechanical, yet not too mechanical, so as to be desired and not condemned by men–while operating under men’s mechanical prescriptions for what constituted “beauty” (the sublime and the beautiful interacting in interesting ways) and therefore desirability (so that women could be married and not spinsters). This brings up the question, for me, of: If we have moved from mechanical to electrical, and from discipline into control as society’s means of governance (forcing the self to enact these regimens through the discipline of self care) then how are contemporary views/ideals of femininity different now that they are electrical and controlled rather than mechanical and disciplined on the one hand, and on the other hand, how can individuals transcend this? Can they transcend this? I suspect Marcuse and others will be useful in thinking about this.

Note

“Perhaps one might say that the transparent signifier is vulnerable to discursive control until you stare at it for a long time, when, having begun to concentrate on its impassivity, one can think about its indifference to what controls it,” Gilbert-Rolfe writes (120). In the gothic novel I am currently reading, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, and as I have seen in other gothic novels as well, the transparent state is the desired state. Men, for instance, expected females to be transparent so that they knew what they were “buying into” on the marriage market. Similarly, the gothic and other female-authored novels are interested in showing females how to “read,” how to discern countenances to navigate their surroundings. Gilbert-Rolfe’s focus on “impassivity” reminds me of Hamlet’s “I have that within which passes show”–an assertion that there is some part of us that no one else can see or read. Is this freedom? Is this true? Or is “true” power in being in a state of transparency, not needing to be in impassivity, due to “indifference to what controls it”?

Works cited

Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. “Blankness as a Signifier.” Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. Allworth Press, 1999.

Pontibrand, Chantal. “Beyond Work.” The Contemporary, the Common: Art in a Globalizing World. Sternberg Press, 2013.