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September 26, 2010
I'm picking up on this earlier post on Shane Gunster's 'Second Nature': Advertising, Metaphor and the Production of Space in Fast Capitalism. In this post I am interested in the transformation of the sublime from nature to the urban.
Gunster says that in the early twentieth century:
attempts to describe the metropolis itself as a coherent totality and, above all, to register how such a complex, multi-faceted and 'monumental' environment was experienced by individuals defied conventional, realist modes of description and explanation..... romantic metaphors and allegories were used to construct the 'urban sublime', a series of interlocking rhetorical tropes that both signify the impossibility of grasping the totality of metropolitan existence and turn such recognition into an occasion for wonder and delight at the marvellous spectacle in which (some) city dwellers find themselves.
He adds that Christophe Den Tandt in The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (1998) locates the origin of sublime experience in a state of perceptual confusion motivated by a sudden surplus of signifiers, as when immersed in an environment with a surplus of sensory stimulation: the semiotic flood simply overflows our capacity to give it meaning. Resolution of this crisis is achieved through the use of metaphor by which the experience of confusion and disorientation is given meaning as expressive of transcendent forces beyond human ken.
Gunster adds that images of nature become, then, not the cause of sublime experience, but rather a metaphorical response to it, the origins of which lie in an urban environment that simultaneously overwhelms the senses and seemingly defies comprehension. In the face of a reified world that appears to lie beyond human understanding and control, spatial agency retreats to the fortification of domestic enclaves on the one hand, and the episodic pursuit of mystical rejuvenation through different forms of spectacular experience on the other.
Images of nature as sublime offer a compelling metaphor through which to recognize (and misrecognize) what it feels like to live within the petrified urban and suburban landscapes of postmodern capital. Yet the ideological significance of these images does not only lie in a literal naturalization of social space, but, more importantly, in how they invite us to actively embrace and even celebrate this fate.
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