On Spiritual Numbness

As members of contemporary culture, we are in constant danger of becoming anesthetized, drowned by the deluge of media input and product choices. That is , unless one has already sunk under the waves. " It's not surprising that (we) have learned to move on so readily to the next, sometimes moving moment. It's sink or surf. Spiritual numbness guarantees that (our) relations with the moving will pass."

I am, however, concerned that we are losing not just our capacity for compassion in the face of disaster, but also the ability to be moved by the sublime. Derrida defines the difference between the sublime and the "merely" beautiful thus; the sublime is limitless, formless and cannot be framed, while the beautiful can be framed. Indeed, beauty depends on the frame to define it. We know what is beautiful because we know what is not. To use an example from another interest of mine, we can best tell when something is camp when we have a firm definition of what camp is and is not. Thus camp will always remain in the realm of beautiful and can never become sublime.

This would complicate the sense in which the sublime has a differential relationship to beauty, which makes them complements but not opposites. Derrida describes Kant as unable to keep the ideas apart, because in defining the beautiful as that which is complete and may in that be framed, he seems to separate it from the sublime, which is for him by definition formless and unframable, but this raises the question of what forms and frames the formless and unframable so that one may see them (Gilbert-Rolfe 43).

Derrida further distinguishes sublimity; while the sublime may also be beautiful, it does not necessarily have to be so. The sublime can also be terrifying or awe inspiring. In fact, technology has effected a profound change in what we define as the beautiful. Where once the beautiful included allowance for imperfection, the omnipresence of plastic surfaces has altered that license.

One may compare plastic, the culminatory techno-surface, to skin, in that both are continuous, which is to say that objects made out of plastic simulate the condition of the body in its original, pretechnological, condition. There had been a plastic surface before, the surface of painting, but that had been a plasticity made out of openings, interruption, and conjuncture. A plasticity of morselation, made out of adding up and layering and even reconsidering. Plastic's most obvious point of comparison to painting is its status as the first continuous surface which, in not being an accumulation or combination—not built or woven or otherwise assembled—is a thing, rather than an image, with the properties of the photograph. In fact, the latter's history is linked to plastic's. As is (I think) well known, the development of widely marketable film required a flexible support for the image, which was first made out of a natural silicate found in Central America but became economically viable on a mass scale only when an alternative, synthetic, early plastic "silicate" could be produced. Photography as we have it was made possible by chemists finding a plastic that can synthesize a skin originally available only in an organic, natural, form. One may add to that the evenness and clarity of plastic, also properties generally found desirable in flesh (Gilbert-Rolfe 27).

So what happens to a society that increasingly changes the definition of unframable? What happens when the most terrifying and awe inspiring experiences are used to sell macaroni and cheese mixes or movie tickets to teenagers? When one is raised with mediated images of ,say, the Grand Canyon, isn't going to see the real Grand Canyon, in person somehow effected? (Not too long ago, the previous sentence about doing something in person would have been redundant, but in a technology of virtual reality, one needs to distinguish between doing something and doing the same thing in one's own flesh.) Doesn't the real experience somehow feel lacking without the swooping IMAX camera pans and a soaring music track?
Where is the room for miracles, grace, nuance, texture? What happens to dreams? To our memories?

The difference between modem dreams and precinematic dreams, apart from the analysis subsequently brought to bear upon them and, therefore, one of their causes, is, as noted, that in modern dreams one takes one's passage from one location to another for granted, but in older dreams, one is transported magically or, same thing, is surprised to find oneself there. Cinema abolishes surprise in the dream as a question of spatial disposition. That's quite a difference. Technology has subsumed the idea of the sublime because it, whether to a greater extent or an equal extent than nature, is terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential, while being entirely a product of knowledge—i.e., it combines limitlessness with pure ratio—and is thus at once unbounded by the human, and, as knowledge, a trace of the human now out of the latter's control. To the extent that it has its own logic it's independent; to the extent that it's parasitic on human logic it's uncontrollable because it does more than it's meant to (transforms rather than serves): The techno-capitalist object is one which is always experienced as indispensable—to experience (no one remembers what remembering was like before things could be recorded, so that memory could always be second-guessed by the record) (127).

Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Beauty and The Contemporary Sublime . New York: Allworth Press, 1999.

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