An Unexpected Foray Into Awe - Nye's American Technological Sublime

My degree program puts me in classrooms at many of U.C. Berkeley's colleges. This semester I happen to be enrolled in a Transportation Policy and Planning course that led me into a book that led me directly back to my prior musings on awe.

Karen Frick, author of a new book on the subject, spoke on the history of the construction of the new Bay Bridge, and particularly on the arguments over the new bridge's aesthetics and meaning as a key part of the formal decisionmaking process. During the course of the lecture, she mentioned David Nye's American Technological Sublime (1994), which just sounded cool to me. So I picked it up and read it.

Awe in American Studies Is "Sublime"

Nye places himself in the footsteps of thinkers in several disciplines. On the one hand, he is tackling "the sublime," following aesthetic philosophers like Burke and Kant. On the other hand, he is focusing his study on particularly American expressions of this more universal concept, which pulls him into the realm of American studies (see Henry Nash Smith). On still another, he specifically is interested in "the technological sublime," as recognized by, for example, American intellectual historian Perry Miller in The Life of the Mind in America (1965), by literary critic (and Nye's mentor) Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1965), and in cultural historian John Kasson's Civilizing the Machine (1977).

On the topic of aesthetic sublimity generally, Nye is particularly interested in Longinus's On the Sublime (1st C. CE), Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), British philosophers of the sublime Dennis, Shaftsbury, Addison (17th century), Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), and the transition from medieval to classical conceptions of natural wonder, as studied in Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959). See also Schopenhauer, Hegel, William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

What was truly remarkable to me was the realization that the subject of this examination ("the sublime") is essentially the same as the thing being described by those who examine the emotional experience of awe. In narrowing in on his topic, Nye refers to the sublime in religion, in nature, in vistas, and - his topic - in technology. Eventually, in trying to define his work, he says: "[The sublime] is about repeated experiences of awe and wonder, often tinged with an element of terror, which people have had when confronted with particular natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements." xvi. His many descriptions align directly with the psychology literature's consolidation of the attributes of awe. 

The difference is that in aesthetics sublimity is discussed as the quality of a thing perceived, while in psychology awe is discussed as a category of experience triggered. Trying to explain what things "are" sublime, rather than trying to understand what attributes cause people to experience awe, leads Nye to argue that sublimity is a social construct, but to neglect that awe is a personal experience. I think that both points must be addressed. People have their awe reaction triggered by certain experiences, which, to them, contain the elements of the awe-inspiring (vastness and a need for accommodation, according to the psychology literature). These people then promote the items that let them experience awe as awe-inspiring (sublime), and this social transmission works because large groups of people have similar references when approaching the putative sublime object. Even so, variation is to be expected as there is a range of "awe-proneness" in the population, even among those with similar references. But I digress. I wanted to lay out some of the interesting highlights of the book.

American Awe; Industrial Awe

Nye says he wrote his book to answer these questions [with my translations]:

What objects have Americans invested with sublimity? [What inspired awe in Americans?] What responses have there been to these different objects? [How was that awe expressed?] What is the larger ritual or political framework within which the sublime appears? [How have Americans organized to generate a shared experience of awe?] What patterns emerge when the sublime [awe] is studied over time?

In these questions Nye seeks to define an American conception of sublimity distinct from prior incarnations of similar concepts. He particularly views technological sublime as the American answer to European religious traditions. He posits that Americans, lacking a royal family, national church, or much history, turned to their shared landscape to build national culture, and a new behavior emerged out of this: tourism. Millions began visiting natural scenery in the United States to experience the awe of the divine. He focuses on Niagara Falls, and identifies a transition in expressions of sublime at that site from the Burkeian/Kantian classical expression of the 1790s, to a common depiction of the viewing experience by reference to religion. Nature was God's creation, and Niagara a divine example. "[T]his rhetoric was woven together with the nationalistic language of exceptionalism, so that Niagara became a sign of a special relationship, or a covenant, between America and the Almighty." 22.

American awe then, was first natural, and then religious, and then both, but it would not stay that way. Nye's idea is that American wonder was transferred to technology - a word invented in 1828 to describe the many new creations then appearing in the world. The transition, for Nye, began with the construction of the Erie Canal, and the public amazement at such a feat of engineering. It repeated itself with the railroads attaining unbelievable speeds across unbelievable distances, and with unbelievable bridges crossing unbelievable spans, and with unbelievable buildings rising to unbelievable heights.

The attribution of sublimity to human creations radically modified the psychological process that the sublime involved. Whereas in a sublime encounter in nature human reason intervenes and triumphs when the imagination finds itself overwhelmed, in the technological sublime reason had a new meaning. Because human beings had created the awe-inspiring steamboats, railroads, bridges, and damns,, the sublime object itself was a manifestation of reason. Because the overwhelming power displayed was human rather than natural, the "dialogue" was now not between man and nature but between man and the man-made. The awe induced by seeing an immense or dynamic technological object became a celebration of the power of human reason, and this awe granted special privilege to engineers and inventors. The sense of weakness and humiliation before the superior power of nature was thus redirected, because the power displayed was not that of God or nature but that of particular human beings. 

Thomas Weiskel wrote of the natural sublime that "there can be no sublime moment without the implicit, dialectical endorsement of human limitations." The technological sublime does not endorse human limitations; rather, it manifests a split between those who understand and control machines and those who do not. In Kant's theory of the natural sublime, every human being's imagination falters before the immensity of the absolutely great. In contrast, a sublime based on mechanical improvements is made possible by the superior imagination of an engineer or a technician, who creates an objects that overwhelms the imagination of ordinary men. Yet this inspiring effect is only temporary. Machines that arouse awe and admiration in one generation soon cease to seem remarkable, and the next generation demands something larger, faster,, or more complex. By implication, this form of the sublime undermines all notions of limitation, instead presupposing the ability to innovate continually and to transform the world. The technological sublime proposes the idea of reason in constant evolution. While the natural sublime is related to eternity, the technological sublime aims at the future and is often embodied in instruments of speed, such as the railway, the airplane, and the rocket, that annihilate time and distance. 60

Eventually, a bridge across a Niagara river would become as awe-infused as the falls themselves - or more so. Engineers become heroes, and man's ingenuity itself was cause for celebration. The interesting thing is that this became a part of American culture in a way that it has not elsewhere. American national identity moved from an agrarian, labor-oriented ideal to a celebration of technical achievement and commerce. In a beautiful description of parades held two decades apart - one prior to rail commerce where various labor groups are ordered in patterns that represent the relationships between them, to one after, where they are randomly assigned as to rail cars, and many are no longer present at all, he notes the collective turning of heads toward the fireworks of progress.

As technological achievements became central to July Fourth, the American sublime fused with religion, nationalism, and technology, diverging in practice significantly from European theory. It ceased to be a philosophical idea and became submerged in practice. In keeping with democratic tradition, the American sublime was for all - women as well as men. Rather than the result of solitary communion with nature, the sublime became an experience organized for crowds of tourists. Rather than treat the sublime as part of a transcendental philosophy, Americans merged it with revivalism. Not limited to nature, the American sublime embraced technology. Where Kant had reasoned that the awe inspired by a sublime object made men aware of their moral worth, the American sublime transformed the individual's experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness. 43

What was lost, perhaps, was society. In the meantime, a contradiction grew that has never been resolved: the interaction between landscape-spanning technology, and the landscape itself.

The sublime was inseparable from a peculiar double action of the imagination by which the land was appropriated as a natural symbol of the nation while, at the same time, it was being transformed into a man-made landscape. One appeal of the technological sublime in America was that it conflated the preservation and the transformation of the natural world. . . . Nineteenth-century Americans saw no irreconcilable contradiction between nature and industry; rather, they enjoyed contemplating the dramatic contrasts created by rapid progress." 39.

The railroads did not cut through the land, they opened it to appreciation. We know what the Hudson River Valley looks like because road and rail traverse it. And skyscrapers did not blot out the sun: they opened the city to a stunning view and a sense of awesome mastery - something that, Nye argues, was so valuable that it itself justified the construction, even when the underlying economics did not.

The vision of the city from the top of a skyscraper materialized a new historical relationship between human beings and their environment. The new "body" that fuses nature and culture presents a historical vision of technological progress as a sequencing of objects. A new organism emerges, built out of materials wrested from nature. It tantalizes the viewer with a vision of the totality of civilization, expressed as Barthes' "concrete abstraction." This vision appears to be the logical development of economic and technological forces. Yet the skyscraper literally cannot be understood as the product of the marketplace. Not merely a center of commerce, it is a symbolic structure: from the outside a corporate icon, from the inside a site of the magisterial gaze. To experience either the jagged skyline in the distance, the immense vistas aloft, or the insect life of the street below validates that power. The geometrical sublime and its fantasies of domain thus altered the phenomenology of the city.

to be continued...

I find the story very compelling so far. If I am disappointed, it is that there is too much focus on the "objects invested with the sublime," and not enough explicitly on "the larger ritual or political framework within which the sublime appears." The excerpts above are scattered throughout the book, but are hard to track, and are not always, or even primarily, its main subject.

As I think through the environmental implications of consumerism, growth, demand, and modernity, I find the story of the collective awe-seeking in technology to be a potential barrier to changing course. Do we, in idolizing cityscapes, become blind to the damage they cause, and the waste they entail? Do we need more, and more, and more? Or do we simply seek it? And if we simply seek - what are the limits of our desires? And if there are none - should there be?

Further chapters on factories, electricity, space flight, and consumerism to be read.

Other books by Nye I want to read:

Consuming Power (1999)
Electrifying America (1990)