Romantic Cybernetics: Jorie Graham, Trevor Paglen, and the Sublime Contradictions of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The Anthropocene sublime is a necessarily hybrid concept, one that is generated from a palimpsest of previous iterations of sublimity, and which is critically modified by contemporary crisis. Alexander R. Galloway’s notion of the “juridico-geometric sublime” captures this hybridity in its combination of Romantic play with the homeostatic model of cybernetics, which brings into effect a synthesis of digital unrepresentability and Romantic freedom. Operating as a figure for the incommensurability generated by the confluence of the Romantic sublime and the cybernetic control paradigm, this version of the sublime also relates the concept to the impact of systems of power on aesthetic representation. This article aims to fill in the ecological gap in Galloway’s conceptualization, while applying this hybrid sublime to the current era of environmental entanglement. In doing so, it argues that a contemporary, Anthropocene sublime reveals both the lingering impact of Romantic modes of environmental thought and the dominance of a cybernetics-derived concept of a mappable technological biosphere. The magnitude of the totality such a hybrid form constitutes is what inspires the experience of terror and awe that characterizes the sublime. The work of the poet Jorie Graham and the artist Trevor Paglen provide vital documents of the hybrid states and representational impasses of this contemporary sublime, as they demonstrate how natural processes are always already folded into economic and technological systems, while nature is both in our devices and irrevocably exteriorized. In different ways, their work demonstrates the essential incommensurability that is generated by the combination of the Romantic and the cybernetic modes of sublimity, while mapping out the political suspension that an Anthropocene sublime necessarily generates.