The Sublime Now
The Sublime Now
Edited by
Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska
The Sublime Now, Edited by Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska
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Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of illustrations .......................................................................................x
Preface...................................................................................................... xiv
Introduction..................................................................................................1
Part I: Nature, Ecology and the Sublime
Introduction to Part I..................................................................................18
Chapter One ...............................................................................................24
Thing Power and an Ecological Sublime
Jane Bennett
Chapter Two...............................................................................................36
Icy Scenes from Three Centuries
Esther Leslie
Chapter Three.............................................................................................50
Ecological Aesthetics—With or Without the Sublime?
Eu Jin Chua
Part II: The Sublime after Kant
Introduction to Part II.................................................................................70
Chapter Four ..............................................................................................77
The Sublime and the Possibility of Meaning
Bettina Reiber
Chapter Five...............................................................................................92
The Sublime, a Discourse of Crisis and of Power, or: “A Gamble
on Transcendence”
Cornelia Klinger
viii
Table of Contents
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Part III: Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime
Introduction to Part III .............................................................................
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Luke White
Part IV: Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime
Introduction to Part IV .............................................................................
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The Sublime in the Work of Cornelia Parker
Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska
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Table of Contents
ix
Part V: The Cinematic Sublime
Introduction to Part V ..............................................................................
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List of Contributors...........................................................................................
Index ..................................................................................................................
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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List of Illustrations
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List of Illustrations
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iron nozzles. .............................................................................................
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the assembly line......................................................................................
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List of Illustrations
xiii
Plates
1. Winsor McCay, Nemo departs from his bedroom to the land of
Jack Frost, an episode of Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in
Slumberland,” New York Herald, 1906.
2. Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. By Permission
Damien Hirst / Science Ltd.
3. Cornelia Parker, Drowned Monuments, 1984. By permission
the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
4. Cornelia Parker, Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, 2005.
By permission the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
5. Cornelia Parker, Einstein’s Abstract, 1999. By permission the
artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
6. Cornelia Parker, Inhaled Cliffs, 1996. By permission the artist
and Frith Street Gallery, London.
7. Cornelia Parker, Shirt Burnt by a Meteorite, 1996. By permission
the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
8. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c.1664. By
permission National Gallery of Art, Washington.
9. Video Still from Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal 2006),
distributed BFI video.
10. Stills from Mark Lewis, Rear Projection: Molly Parker, 2006. By
permission the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria,
Toronto, Galerie Serge le Borgne, Paris.
PREFACE
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sublime was for us the rich common ground to a series of very different
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in integrating such scattered and contradictory observations into a coherent
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Preface
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something new which would add to the debate, rather than rehearse a series
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that the sublime as an aesthetic of terrible and destructive nature seems
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cultures of resistance to it. A theme that resounded between the concerns of
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Preface
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INTRODUCTION: THE SUBLIME NOW
CLAIRE PAJACZKOWSKA AND LUKE WHITE
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outside academic circles, should somehow be animating so much of our
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movement can facilitate some incisive retroactive readings of the earlier
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that the textual characteristic of modern culture is its transformation of the
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The Sublime Now
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of visceral agitation and imagination.
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limits of textuality and cultural convention means that there is always a
dimension of the abysmal and abject in its awareness of greatness, which
differentiates the sublime from the merely beautiful.
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is interesting to trace how these limits, boundaries, liminalities differ in
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its own textual sublimity.
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It seems interesting to me that the current rise of interest in ideas of the
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well as Jameson, we have Lyotard, who was such a key theorist of both
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there is little clue that just ten years later the sublime would already have
become something of a buzzword in academic circles. In his introduction to
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more fundamental about our current and ongoing condition than the idea
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of the sublime, and for the forms of authenticity, truth, or immediacy which
it may seem to offer. We should retain our critical faculties in front of such
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the sublime. Having said this, to my mind, one of the best ways of thinking
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artistic and intellectual modernity.
Introduction
I think you are right, however, that we may not agree on Jameson, though.
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which does not entirely reduce this to a series of stylistic traits. Certainly, it
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remains invaluable, because of the continuation—if not acceleration—of
this system, even in the face of a War on Terror and, more recently, the
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very little once business as usual is restored.
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the book which exclusively focuses on the global or on globalisation, but,
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history of a sublime nature which is the imaginative twin of the mutable
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this range of issues. Her work should remind us of the extent to which the
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The Sublime Now
11
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nature suddenly become small.
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that such a sublime is something much older, and much more inherently
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his Dreigroschenprozeß essay argues that with the conditions of modern
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and control which now structure it.%UHFKW¶VDUJXPHQWDERXWWKHOLPLWVRI
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of the sublime—or at least a certain dimension of the historical discourses
on the sublime—in modern culture is very much the stake of my own essay
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is an alternative way of linking the sublime to a rather different, and rather
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between solid, heavy, base matter and more ethereal or immaterial states
of being. Alchemy was notoriously understood to be about the creation of
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as well as aesthetic, moral, intellectual and the like—which is in all these
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Introduction
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according to a whole host of earlier commentators anxious about the effects
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sublime. With the credit crunch we are faced with a vertiginous sense of
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Neoliberal economy, and the terrifyingly material results of shifts and swings
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divided notion. There is not a single tradition of the sublime but many, and
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becomes essentially useless. I am often wary when I discuss the sublime
about whether in fact I am talking about the same thing as my interlocutor
at all! Thus I am interested and fascinated by your discussion of the relation
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