REVIEW: JULIAN STALLABRASS’ ‘THE AI SUBLIME / SUBLIME CALCULATION’ (NEW LEFT REVIEW NOV/DEC 2021)

Julian Stallabrass’ piece in the NLR (Nov/Dec 2021 pp.83-88) traces the application of the sublime throughout Jiyoon Lee’s LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art, which showed at 180 The Strand. Commenting on numerous installations, he suggests that the dynamism and mechanical complexity which confronts the viewer overwhelms the sensory capacity and induces affections associated with the sublime.

Some of the instillations explicitly evoke the use of data to create sublime affect. The scale and the speed of “inhuman intelligence” is constantly evoked (84). Commenting on a’stricts Starry Beach, he suggests that the “mirrored illusion of vastness contributes to what is a textbook example of the Burkean sublime.” The endless networks of algorithmic code which simultaneously subtend and transcend Euclidean spatiality subvert any objective claims made towards either the Subject and its critical distance from the Object. Stallabrass terms this a “new form of the data sublime: one of calculation or computation” (84). Rather than the awesome natural landscape, the “incalculable manipulations” of social media are responsible for a posthuman sublime (84).

This is not a particularly novel idea. As Frederic Jameson (1991, 48) argued of the postmodern condition, the “distance [between subject and object] in general has […] been abolished.” The Brechtian ‘distance effect’ [Veifremdungseffekt] which underpinned the Kantian sublime no longer exists. Readings of Lyotard’s ‘inhuman sublime’ (1989), for example, have long evoked the powers of the omnipotent, seemingly infinite extension of digital flow which overwhelm the subject and its claims towards rationalization and judgment. Themes include the unboundedness and simultaneity engaged in extension (Mosco, 2004; Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999); the incommensurability of distinguishing between surface and simulacrum; and, the synchronicity between diegetic/spectatorial code/space (Jameson, 1991; Tabbi, 1996). Scott Bukatman (1999 [1995], 281) famously argued for the technological sublime in his discussion of cinematic special effects which weave technology into the natural landscape.

An interesting and novel contribution made by Jiyoon Lee’s LUX  was the entwining relationship between the fleshy mutability of the body and the seemingly infinite, fractal like operation of code, algorithm, and artificial intelligence. Some of the instillations revealed “bodily hybrids which teeter between fascinating attraction and horror” (83). Stallabrass suggests that “the monsterous is only ever a step away” (86). This seems to be a popular motif in contemporary explorations of the experience of hybridity and the cyborg. Julia Ducournau’s (2021) Titane pushes the relationship between the body and machine into abject, shocking relief; entwining metal, oil, fire, and flesh to subvert romantic iterations of human-nonhuman co-emergence.

This is a timely turn, because, as Gilbert-Rolfe (1999, 137) suggested 20 years ago, the majority of examples of digital, technological, or posthuman sublime are “still concerned with the human” and a neo-Kantian crisis of the faculty of presentation. Claims towards the infinite omnipresence of digital code work to reaffirm a subject, whereby the “mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself” (Kant 1960 [1764], 45). This is not posthuman, or inhuman, but finitely Human, reflective of a wider ideological incommensurability: the “grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self” (Hayles 1999, 288).

Stallabrass himself concludes by reflecting upon these contrivances; and more broadly on the relevance, and even possibility, of a sublime affect in this era of the digital subsumption of the self. Does an aesthetic experience that is inherently reaffirming of the subject not stand in some form of tension with posthuman philosophies which question the very existence of a subject? Stallabrass suggests that many of the instillations are made “more or less openly, as honey traps for social media users” (83). For this reason “the sublime and the uncanny so insistently propagated fail to take hold on the viewer––that they fall flat in inadvertent comedy and kitsch” (88).

This recourse to the kitsch, or the closely related aesthetic category of the gimmick, then, becomes the general experience of the exhibition. Following SiennaNgai (2020, 1), one might offer a definition of the gimmick as “an ambivalent judgment tied to a compromised form.” She specifically poses the question, relevant in this instance: “[w]hy do we so often find the flagrantly disappointing gimmick in the vicinity of the capitalist sublime […] ?” (31). The answer, Ngai (32) suggests, lies in the fact that both the sublime and the gimmick are “judgments about judging.” They both reconcile an overwhelming aesthetic experience through qualitative cognition. Both are moreover built around acts of ‘estimating […] magnitude’ [die Größenschätzung] that in a sense fall short.

LUX is timely in the sense that it foregrounds this gimmick-prone tendency of sublime affect in late-commodity capitalism. Yet, it would be a mistake to suggest that the political intervention of Lee’s exhibition is completely attenuated by its gimmicky techniques. This is because, as Ngai (2020) suggests, the gimmick is itself an aesthetic category that maintains an element of criticality: “[t]he moment in which the gimmick arouses critical response is therefore simultaneously a dissipation of criticality” (Ngai 2020, 8). The gimmick, in other words, raises questions about the relation between labour and capitalist superstructures which underpin digital and technological subsumption. It foregrounds the contrivances inherent to the capitalist system; and is fundamentally a judgment about the inadequacy of capitalist expression, claims made towards value, or valorisation, and the saving of labour.

The failure of the sublime and the relapse into the gimmick which Stallabrass highlights, then, becomes reflective of wider contrivances within the capitalist mode of production and its claims towards representation. Instead of leaning into genres of body-horror, as we see Julia Ducournau’s Titane and in David Cronenberg’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Crimes of the Future, LUX, albeit probably unwittingly, reconciles some element of criticality through attempts towards sublime affect. Rather than writing this off as either kitsch, or even impossible, as Slovoj Zižek might suggest, it might be better to follow the likes of Sienna Ngai (2020) in forwarding more aesthetically sensitive explorations of works of expression which attempt to grapple with the ever changing positionality of the Human subject, and its interrelationship within systems of capital.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bukatman, S. 1999 [1995]. “The artificial infinite: on special effects and the sublime,” in Kuhn, Annette (ed.) Alien zone II: the spaces of science-fiction cinema (London: Verso) pp. 249–275.

Gilbert-Rolfe, J. 1999. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press.

Hayles, K. N. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: London: Verso.

Kant, I. 1960 [1764]. Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lyotard, J. 1989. The Differend : Phrases in Dispute. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Mosco, V. 2004. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Ngai, S., 2020. Theory of the Gimmick. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Tabbi, J. 1996. Postmodern sublime : Technology and American writing from Mailer to cyberpunk. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press.