In his “Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime,” in The Sublime Now, eds. Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), Luke White refers to Fredric Jameson theory of a “postmodern sublime":

as forming an unthinkable and unpresentable totality within which the subject of global capital must attempt—however vainly—to map him- or herself....Where I depart from Jameson’s analysis, however, is with regard to his understanding of this sublime of global capitalism as an entirely new thing. Jameson discusses the sublime of Burke and Kant as posited in relation not to the totalising “second nature” of capitalist modernity, but to nature itself. However, it is my contention that capital—with its formlessness, its constant passing beyond its own finitude, its implacable force—has always been at the heart of the notion of the sublime, a notion which, after all, arose to prominence in Western criticism and aesthetics alongside the massive transformations of the institutions and practices of modern capital which P. G. M. Dickson has termed a “financial revolution,” and alongside the rise of the discourse of economics itself.

I would argue that the sublime begins as an attribute or effect of first nature—raw nature beyond the human, nature as the non-human that sometimes threatens humanity but nevertheless is a material condition for its existence. But in the twentieth century these complex feelings become associated more with the self-made disasters of society, or second nature. Society hardens into a second nature because the fact that social relations are historically constituted—and thus transformable—is concealed from everyday experience: social relations become reified or naturalized. This shift in the object of the sublime— from first to second nature—is a long time taking hold in critical discourses but is consolidated in the decades following 1945.

The place-name are Auschwitz and Hiroshima. These are shorthand for qualitatively new powers of violence gained by the nation-state and the way that these powers were historically realized should terrify us far more than the random natural disasters of old. The meliorism and Enlightenment notion of progress that inform Kant’s sublime----the encounter with the power or size of first nature is ultimately the occasion for reaffirming human freedom and dignity----becomes naïve.

These sublime new powers of the state are products of capitalist modernity itself: ie., the techno-productive power and instrumental reason have developed within the frame of the modern nation-state and capitalist economy and under the globally dominant logic of capitalist social relations. Second nature is capitalist: it is the society and world system that capitalist modernity produced.