In Shane Gunster's 'Second Nature': Advertising, Metaphor and the Production of Space in Fast Capitalism there is a section on the sublime. Gunter says that in its most progressive guise, sublime experience marks a humbling revolt of the senses against imperialist Enlightenment and capitalist narratives that define nature as little more than raw material to be studied, transformed and exploited in the satisfaction of (narrowly conceived) human needs and interests.

Gunster then adds:

Yet as many commentators have observed, sublime experience ends with neither terror nor abjection, but more ambiguously with a mixture of fear, joy and delight, and its end result is often an invigorated and even empowered subject. In The Romantic Sublime, Thomas Weiskel (1976) argues that the sublime unfolds over three successive stages or moments. First, that which we perceive is fundamentally in accord with our intellectual faculties: there is an underlying harmony or congruence between the impressions of our senses and our capacity to give them meaning. In the second, this "habitual relation of mind and object" comes to a sudden end before an image, idea, sensation or experience that exceeds our understanding: we are confronted with a space or phenomena that is literally incomprehensible. The final moment involves a restoration of meaning through an intellectual sleight of hand: our lack of knowledge itself assumes deeper significance as expressive of a privileged communion with a transcendent and otherwise unimaginable other (22-25). Via the semiotic alchemy performed by the sublime, absence of meaning (or, more properly, experience of an object that overflows and disturbs the process of making sense) becomes the foundation for deeper forms of meaning laden with affect.

On this interpretation the sublime evolves as a privileged cultural and intellectual strategy for not only managing anxiety when confronted with powerful and dangerous forces beyond one's control, but also as a means of transforming experiences of fear and helplessness into opportunities for aesthetic gratification and the accumulation of cultural capital.