Technological Culture and Literary Representation, Review of J. Tabbi's Postmodern Sublime

Review of: Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. 243 pp.

Postmodern Sublime discusses the efforts of three postmodern American novelists to engage themselves to the world outside the self-contained linguistic fictions that literary postmodernism is usually identified with. According to Joseph Tabbi, the authors in question - Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and Don DeLillo - attempt to move beyond self- reflexivity and linguistic determinism through their sustained reflections on the implications of contemporary technological culture for the art of literary representation. The book also contains a chapter on Norman Mailer, who is presented as a transitional figure between American romanticism and postmodernism, and a coda on cyberpunk.

Tabbi’s critical stance is fully in keeping with a critique of postmodernism that has reached the stage of maturity. Nowadays, critics do not concern themselves with the delineation of postmodernism anymore. Rather, they criticize the cliches which the primary reactions to postmodernism have spawned forth. To give a few examples of stereotypical accusation that have been fired at postmodern fiction:

as writing about writing, postmodern fiction is a wholly self-contained, solipsistic affair, which negates the representational function of language

postmodern writing approaches each and every subject ironically, espousing a nihilistic anything-goes-attitude; therefore it is entirely devoid of pathos and high seriousness

postmodern writing has abandoned the oppositional, critical stance of earlier generations; it is not afraid of being co- opted into capitalist commodity culture

postmodern writing is devoid of ethical or political commitments, its only commitment is to the radical indeterminacy of linguistic free play

These accusations were voiced in the late seventies and early eighties by critics such as Charles Newman and Fredric Jameson. They are hardly representative of the present state of the art.

Tabbi forms part of a rather long line of critics who have attempted to rehabilitate postmodern writing by demonstrating that scepticism concerning the representational function of language does not necessarily forestall political or ethical seriousness. His respectful references to Slavoj Zizek indicate quite clearly where his intellectual allegiances lie. In many respects, Tabbi firmly adheres to the current dictates of political and intellectual correctness: language cannot represent The Other, in fact, any attempt to recuperate otherness is to be firmly resisted. At the same time, he speaks in favor of an unironic postmodern realism, asserting that the writers he is concerned with “share an exemplary willingness to push beyond the limits of the literary, to bring their writing into contact with a nonverbal technological reality” (pxi). As I shall argue, however, Tabbi does not succeed in having his postmodern cake and eat it too.

Tabbi explains the fascination of Mailer, Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo with technology as an attraction to phenomena that “draw us outside of ourselves”, as McElroy put it. In our present-day high- tech world, technology rather than nature is the force which impresses and overwhelms the individual subject, utterly evading its powers of comprehension and representation. Tabbi claims that Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo have moved way beyond earlier, stalemate literary attitudes towards science and technology. They are entirely free from the romantic opposition to science and technology. They do not try to compete with science either. Rather than trying to claim for literature the professional prestige of the sciences, the novelists in question accept their marginality in contemporary technological culture. They also differ from naturalist authors such as Theodore Dreiser or Emile Zola, who appropriated certains scientific theories (Dreiser’s Darwinism, Zola’s thermodynamics) as a means of interpreting and ordering the complexities of contemporary social reality.

According to Tabbi, the attitude of Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo towards technological culture is in some respects comparable to the way in which the romantics approached nature. The novelists under study have wedded the romantic sublime to technology, BUT with a postmodern difference. This marriage has produced a new mode of writing, Tabbi claims: the technological or postmodern sublime.

What exactly is this postmodern difference? The question is not so easy to answer because Tabbi never stops to define the romantic sublime, but contents himself with an occasional reference to Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976). This is an extremely narrow basis for any book on the sublime, considering the wealth publications which have appeared on the topic during the last fifteen years, about which more later on. Let me first try to paraphrase Tabbi’s argument. The sublime, Tabbi posits in his one and only attempt at defining the sublime, always “locates itself between discrete orders of meaning. It is not a category in itself so much as a term that describes what cannot be categorized” (xi). In this case, we are dealing with the discrete orders of literature and science/technology. Around the turn of the century, Henry Adams already introduced a problematic which has remained a dominant theme in American writing ever since, namely the paradoxical notion that the human mind and the world created by twentieth-entury science are technology are somehow at odds with each other, notwithstanding the fact that science and technology are ultimately products of the human mind. Adams’s autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1918) teems with expressions of Adams’s bewilderment in the face of the new ‘multiverse’ that was being revealed by the latest discoveries in physics. This new world was being presided over by a nonhuman force, ‘the Dynamo’, as opposed to more human and spirtual force of ‘the Virgin’ who had dominated earlier ages. Now more than ever, the rapidly changing technological forces and increasingly complex corporate systems have become too vast for any single imagination to comprehend and represent. Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo all share Adams’s bewilderment, according to Tabbi. Contrary to the romantic sublime, however, the postmodern or technological sublime does not culminate in a moment of transcendence. The romantic sublime as described by Thomas Weiskel is really a twofold process. First, the human mind is confronted with an object too vast and overpowering to take in. The sublime object disrupts habitual modes of comprehension, causing feelings of astonishment and anxiety. This first phase confronts the subject with a striking discrepancy between inner and outer, between mind and world. “Either mind or object or object is suddenly in excess”, as Weiskel puts it (Weiskel 1976: p. 24). During the second phase of the sublime experience, however, the mind overcomes its own impotence by “constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mindþs relation to a transcendent order” (Weiskel 1976: 24). This is Weiskel paraphrasing Kant, but Kant himself is easier to follow. According to the Kantian sublime, the mind is able to transcend itself because different mental faculties come into play at different moments in the sublime experience. When we behold the vastness of the starry skies, for instance, we first experience a shattering sense of inadequacy because the imagination cannot form a mental picture of an infinite object. But then the mind nevertheless triumphs through reason, which is able to think the abstract category ‘infinity’. In this moment of transcendence, the mind suddenly partakes of the sublimity of the object, absorbing its vastness, as it were. The sublime experience instills an awareness in the human subject of its ultimate independence of nature, thereby reminding us of our moral vocation to develop into autonomous creatures who rise above the deterministic laws of nature, freely determining their own fate. Thus, the sublime experience moves from a shattering of our mental facullties to their reunification through the mastery of reason, from loss of self to self- aggrandizement, from ego- deflation to ego-inflation, or however one wants to put it.

Not so in the postmodern or technological sublime, however. According to Tabbi, the excess of contemporary technology, as figured by the insurveyable panorama of computer networks, transportation systems and communications media, utterly defeats the individual consciousness and as such cannot be exploited for the purposes of self- aggrandizement, or so Tabbi has it: “reality is irreducibly decentered and externalized; it is located not in any one human mind or body but in the social relations conducted among human beings through various simulations and abstractions, through bureaucratic institutions, and through the machines that enact ‘the automated thoughtfulness of the community’” (p. 10). Tabbi interprets Norman Mailer’s preoccupations with space technology as a last- ditch attempt to approach contemporary technology in the mode of the ‘egotistical sublime’. The problem with this mode, as Tabbi sees it, is the following: “But the difficulty with all such dialectical resolutions is that they tend to aggrandize self-consciousness at the expense of otherness, be it social, natural, or the objective otherness of the technological, collectively constructed life-world. For this external, incommensurable vastness the mind substitutes its own linguistic infinity and so identifies two categorically separate realms in a willful act of the imagination, a resolution that is at best metaphorical.” (p. 19) As we may gather from Tabbi’s subsequent arguments, ‘at best metaphorical’ is not very good, for the discrepancy between the discrete orders of literature and nonverbal technological reality cannot really be recuperated metaphorically. Some critics have interpreted the linguistic excess of the extremely hermetic, multilayered and encyclopedic novels by the authors under study as a verbal equivalent of the excess of technological culture. Thus, semiotic excess would mimetically match technological mass, and in this way, contemporary writers would still have mastered technological culture. But this will not do, according to Tabbi, because literary excess and technological excess are hardly of the same type: “the individual writer, often a loner with pen and paper, could never compete with the high-budget productions of the various corporate media. Excess in this fiction is not simply more than but other than the technological mechanisms, media, and categories it deforms” (p13).

How, then, do the writers in question succeed in refraining from smoothing over the difference between a consciousness that uses words and a nonverbal universe of force? Where Pynchon is concerned, Tabbi seeks an answer to this question in the psychologies of individual engineers in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). This historical novel presents an elaborate a cast of German engineers working on the construction of the Vergeltungswaffe, the V1 and V2. As we all know, the technological expertise which was developed for this occasion was transported to the United States after the war, in the person of Wernher von Braun, among others, where it was put to further use in the development of the American space program. Pynchon depicts all these engineers as being caught up in forces larger than themselves, thereby supporting the rather familiar point that those who create technology are in turn ruled by their own creations: “In Gravity’s Rainbow the situation of people being absorbed into their own technologies is everywhere in evidence, and the more technical the passage, the more clearly Pynchon reveals how those who would control the means of technological production are in turn controlled by them.” (p. 99) In the case of McElroy, Tabbi focuses on McElroy’s invention of a mythical, nonhuman being in Plus (1976), called Imp Plus, as a speculative search for a creature whose consciousness would be able to encompass the abstract and decentered world of contemporary technology. According to Tabbi, Imp Plus, a creature who grows in space, is as close as you can get to a fictional emobidment of Donna Haraway’s cyborg, where American literature is concerned. These two chapters are really the only corroborations of Tabbi’s theoretical claims, because Mailer is discussed as a belated romantic, while Don DeLillo’s writing is categorized as ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘sublime’. DeLillo’s work exemplifies a mode of writing which Tabbi calls ‘postmodern naturalism’. Postmodern naturalists, according to Tabbi’s characterization, are novelists of waste: “Rather, like Benjamin’s angel of history, the contemporary naturalist writer disappears into the wreckage of everyday culture, wherein the culture might find its own direction against the continuing storm of a progressivist history.” (p. 27) Don DeLillo’s novels recycle the numerous waste products of our hyperreal mediated realiy: newspaper clippings, historical documents, films, photographs, medical reconrds, “the data-spew of hundreds of lives” (DeLillo quoted by Tabbi, p. 175). Strange, that the honour of exemplifying postmodern naturalism should go to DeLillo rather than Pynchon, the American novelist of waste par excellence.

After having absorbed the theoretical claims of the introduction, one cannot help feeling increasingly disappointed while studying the chapters on individual authors. Not that these exercises in literary criticism are uninteresting. On the contrary, they offer thoughtful, thought-provoking and detailed interpretations of a number of extremely intricate and hermetic novels. However, they hardly add anything to one’s understanding of the postmodern sublime. The theoretical observations of the introduction are shamanistically repeated all throughout the book, but they merely hover above Tabbi’s interpretations on individual novels.

Postmodern Sublime suffers from painful and embarrassing omissions. Certainly, Tabbi is not the first to investigate configurations of the postmodern and the sublime. Indeed, in the wake of Lyotard’s rereading of Kant, a whole debate has sprung up around this issue, which is accompanied by the usual flood of publications which has become characteristic for present-day academic communication. Strangely enough, Tabbi hardly displays any awareness of this fact. He has not made a sustained effort to situate himself in this debate, nor does he engage in a confrontation with leading theoreticians of the sublime. Tabbi clearly has not studied classical treatises on the sublime independently, such as the expositions by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Furthermore, he does not show any symptom of having studied influential contemporary commentaries on these classics, such as Paul Crowther’s study of the Kantian sublime. It is a pity that David Nye’s highly lucid and convincing American Technological Sublime (1994) has escaped him, because this would have prevented Tabbi from making unwarrented claims, but Tabbi cannot be blamed for this, considering its date of publication. Most surprisingly of all, he does not really know the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. His bibliography only lists two rather shallow articles by Lyotard, namely “Answering the Question: What is Postmodern?” and “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”. Lyotard’s major work of philosophy which truly broaches the subject of postmodernism and the Kantian sublime, namely Le diff‚rend (1983), does not enter into the picture at all. Tabbi’s discussion of Lyotard comes down to a few scattered remarks, which is rather strange in the light of the fact that Tabbi’s theoretical problematic is identical to Lyotard’s. Lyotard has it that the philosopher and the artist are to continually revitalize our awareness of the unspeakable and the unpresentable, of that which cannot be said because it cannot be accommodated within the confines of extant language games. Philosophers and artists are to direct our attention to the discontinuities and gaps between different language games, to the limits of the sayable. Tabbi’s concept of the postmodern sublime is an unwitting replica of Lyotard’s philosophy. Tabbi does not seems to fully realize the strking similarity between his own ideas and Lyotard’s, subtly (and mistakenly) pretending to move beyond Lyotard instead: “The readings that follow accept Lyotard’s elevation of the notion of the unpresentable; they even accept Baudrillard’s description of the technological culture as mediated through and through. But neither description is a reason for rejecting truth claims in the political and metaphysical realms or, in the aesthetic realm, for denying the power of narrative to transport us out of ourselves. A respect for the facticity of postmodern reality - a reality outside the mind of the artist or historian to which people can respond - saves the four main writers in this study from linguistic solipsism on the one hand and, on the other, from the total relativism that more cynical pragmatists than Lyotard are prone to fall into.”(29). In other words, Tabbi wants to overcome Lyotard’s linguistic determinism in order to attain an unironic postmodern realism.

Can it be a coincidence that the only source from which Tabbi takes his cue has been produced by an American literary critic, while nearly all the others I have mentioned are European intellectuals? I am afraid not. Tabbi’s intellectual parochialism has produced a number of serious blemishes:

I. Postmodern sublime is a taxing book to read for any European student of the sublime whose reading on the subject is not confined to Weiskel only, and who is therefore bound to have some awareness of the diversity among different theories of the sublime. As Tabbi never stops to define his own concept of the sublime, it is very difficult for anyone who is truly knowledgeable about this subject to assess the exact import of his statements.

II. If he would have concerned himself with the European intellectual tradition on the subject in question, he would have realized that there is nothing specifically ‘new’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘specifically American’ about the technological sublime. Burke and Kant already realized that not only natural phenomena, but also man-made artefacts, may be conducive to the sublime experience. As a matter of fact, David Nye’s exposition on the technological sublime begins in the 19th century.

III. If Tabbi would have entered into the theoretical debate on the sublime, he would have realized that he has adopted a self-defeating intellectual strategy. Tabbi wants to rehabilitate postmodern writing by demonstrating that there is more to it than radical indeterminacy, irony and self- contained linguistic reflexivity. Postmodern writers do really engage the outside world, Tabbi claims. In order to substantiate this claim, he draws upon the category of the sublime. But because Tabbi has picked up the notion from Weiskel that the sublime is an essentially romantic affair, he needs to modify it somewhat in order to make it comply with the postmodernism wariness of usurping The Other. Therefore, Tabbi censors the moment of transcendence in which the sublime experience culminates, thereby reproducing the outcome of Lyotard’s reading of Kant (ideas which are, of course, in the air everywhere both in Europe and the United States). This move, however, sends him right back to the point from which he started: to radical indeterminacy and an unbridgeable gap between word and world. Lyotard’s concept of the sublime is hardly the right vehicle for moving beyond Lyotard’s linguistic determinism.

Does Postmodern Sublime not have anything to recommend itself? Yes, it does, but this should not have been published in book format. The chapters on Mailer, McElroy and DeLillo are interesting in themselves and can reach their audience quite effectively as articles in literary jounals. Everything that Tabbi says about these authors could have been said without any reference to the sublime whatsoever. However, the book has nothing to offer to those who are interested in theories of postmodernism and/or the sublime. In other words, it is not really a book.

Publications such as Tabbi’s make one worry over the editorial policies of American academic publishers. How come a prestigious publisher like Cornell University Press has put out a book which is marred by ignorance and faulty arguments? And what is the point of distributing a book on the European book market which only seems to address itself to a small circle of American literary critics? In this time of global communication networks, I find the blatant ignorance of influential and well-known foreign publications on the self-same topic that one is writing about, indefensible, to say the least.