Varieties of Technological Experience

Review of American Technological Sublime by David E. Nye, MIT Press, MA (1994), 362 + xxii p.

It’s always entertaining to generalise about Americans, and in AmericanTechnological Sublime David Nye does it most engagingly. The topic is a born winner: Americans and their glorious toys. The picture on the dust cover says it all, with the Hoover dam apparently clamped into place by even more enormous gorge walls, in the distance an imposing butte and in the foreground several men in contemplation of the scene. The scale of the dam, indicated by a tiny sliver of road curving around a mountain next to the dam, is so vast that even the photograph evokes wonder, awe and speechlessness. Such feelings are the subject, indirectly, of this book. Here the reader will find sublimes of all types: the geometric (Brooklyn Bridge), the dynamic (the Hoover dam power station), the electric (New York’s Great White Way), the technological (the Corliss engine) and the arithmetic (the bliss of large numbers), in various combinations. American Technological Sublime can be appreciated on many levels: as a history of technology in America and to a lesser degree American politics, as a sociological analysis of American attitudes towards nature and themselves, and as an anecdotal examination of the sublime experience. Chapters 2-5 reach into early American history to explore the political, social and economic contexts of the canals, railroads, bridges, dams, skyscrapers and factories which made America great, at least as far as Americans are concerned. It becomes immediately obvious that from the very beginning of American history technology was referred to as a way of establishing American moral and political superiority in the world, but also as a way of establishing various rationales for capitalism, decimation of Native Americans, and obliteration of the environment. In fact, rationales weren’t even considered that necessary. I’m particularly fond of the quote by Andrew Jackson, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?” (p37).

What good man, indeed? Women don’t in fact play much of a part in this story. Granted, women are not immune to the pleasures of the technological sublime, as Nye establishes with stories and quotations. However, their major role seems to be in the domestication of technology — women are not the ones either designing the technology or dying in its construction, and they are not (for the most part) the ones surveying their domains from the top floors of skyscrapers. One can’t help wondering in what ways the story would be different if it were about women’s relationship to the technological sublime, but that is no criticism of the author. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the city skyline and the fascination with lights that resulted not only in the Great White Way but also in the face now worn by most American cities at night. The night-time profile of American cities was apparently created by sign, electricity and lightbulb salesmen; given America’s entrepreneurialism, competitiveness and love of technology, the history of the electric cityscape seems as if it could have gone no other way. But Nye makes a deeper point as well, both about the electrical sublime and the sublime in general, when he says that the “the electrified landscape’s meaning lay precisely in the fact that it seemed to go beyond any known codification, becoming unutterable and ungraspable in its extent and complexity.” (p196) Part of its appeal, its sublimity, is that the “city as a whole seemed a jumble of layers, angles, and impossible proportions; it had become a vibrating, indeterminate text that tantalized the eyes and yielded to no definitive reading” (p196). Nye also discusses how the new electric advertisements used the technological sublime to elevate the status of both the engineer and the product being advertised, as well as to begin teaching people their new role in society as consumers.

Chapter 8 examines the World’s Fair held in New York in 1939, six years before America dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nye points out that all five of the most popular exhibits represented the future, and it sounds as if they did so with a degree of marketing sophistication (and disguised political fascism) that belies the American floppy, jumping puppy dog brand of enthusiasm for technology. Nye’s descriptions of the technological utopias created for that fair are fascinating, and provide a strange, oblique view of an innocence that seems almost wilful in view of the disasters awaiting.

In the following chapter things start to get lively with the atom bomb and Apollo XI, and the infatuation seems to turn into blind, destructive obsession, as infatuations will if they aren’t tempered by some developing realism about the loved one’s flaws. The innocence of American enthusiasm for technology begins to seem insane and show its dark side. The silliness seems, with benefit of hindsight of course, horrifyingly frivolous, with Miss Atom Bomb beauty contests, road maps to the best viewing sites, and calls from local businessmen for bigger, showier bombs to attract the tourists. Nye explores the emerging conflict between the attraction to technology and the growing threat it began to present after the bombing of Japan. This conflict still seems to be in full flower and getting more schizophrenic all the time, as shown by two recent movies that are being advertised together in the theatre in England. First Apollo XIII, with images of the earth from space, looking vast and evoking the quintessential American technological sublime, giving men a godlike viewpoint and liberation even from gravity. Then, The Crimson Tide, with images of men in a submarine, trying to decide whether they are about to be nuked, and whether they should go for what America called in the Viet Nam war a “pre-emptive first strike”. Here they are trapped by technology, not only physically in a claustrophobic submarine deep beneath the ocean, but morally, by the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany technology’s lethal potential.

The last two chapters, devoted to the Statue of Liberty and Las Vegas, examine the way in which America’s relationship with the technological sublime has descended more and more into sensationalism. Early celebrations of technology were marked by speeches that were intensely nationalist and racist and by modern standards thoroughly reprehensible, but these early speeches did invoke political ideas (revealing, in fact, how technology and nationalism were used to justify each other from the start) as well as sentiment. By contrast, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 was marked by no political speeches; Ronald Reagan’s sole contribution was to push a button starting the light show. In the final chapter the author turns an unsentimental eye on Americans and their excesses, particularly in Las Vegas. Once again the photograph - of the MGM Grand entrance - says it all, with people streaming through doors lodged in the chest of a large lion. There has been no effort to make the lion either beautiful or, for that matter, ugly. It is representational only on the most iconic level, with some slight references to the sphinx, and is thus overwhelmingly banal. Yet it is magnificently large and must have involved some engineering ingenuity, and that is obviously the point. In this chapter also Nye discusses modern American reactions to such natural wonders as the Grand Canyon, which had always been appropriated as something uniquely American. Apparently one of the most common questions now asked by visitors is, what tools did they use to dig it? Sarcasm at the expense of such attitudes would be easy, yet they are frightening as well.

So what is the sublime exactly? It is an experience that is by its very nature difficult to define. Unlike Kant and Burke, two of the many philosophers he draws on, Nye does not feel that the sublime is any one thing nor that it is immutable. Central to Nye’s discussion is the idea that American superiority is a crucial element of the American sublime experience, and he convincingly supports this thesis. Over and over, in visitor books at the great natural monuments such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, in Independence Day speeches, at the openings of bridges, dams, railroads, skyscrapers and world exhibitions, Americans go on record with the sentiment that the object of their admiration and wonder could only happen in America and is a sign (often attributed to God) that America is the greatest country in the world. After the Apollo XI launch, a woman is quoted as saying “Great, great, absolutely great! There isn’t another country in the world that’s going to do this - you’ve got to say America’s first.” (Pg. 240) Okay, America’s first. And Nixon proclaimed it the greatest day since the Creation. Nye provides plenty of social, political and economic context for this phenomena. He points out that Americans needed something to bind them together in the early days of the country. It couldn’t be religion, and politics in those days was “expected to inspire vigorous debate and continual self-examination rather than automatic patriotism” (p35).

Furthermore, Americans could, and still can, find in mass contemplation of their own engineering prowess a way to experience the euphoria of belonging not only to a like-minded crowd but to one of the greatest nations in the world. Nonetheless, you cannot read this book without continuing to wonder over the scale of American technological silliness and self-delusion. What may be most sublime in America - at least in the sense of filling one with awe, rendering one speechless and provoking a profound sense of dislocation - is Americans themselves. Along with all his keen and fabulously dry observation of American foibles (and I maintain that they are an easy target, being apparently so unaware of their eccentricities), Nye backs up his thesis with a truly stunning amount of detail. Nye talks about how journalists throughout American history have tried to describe their sublime response by reeling off grocery lists of numbers, and then proceeds to do the same, and it is impressive. Tons of concrete, miles of steel spanning the continent, thousands of lightbulbs illuminating world fairs and expositions. It’s a historian’s dream and should win a prize for research, but sometimes the writing staggers under the weight of all the detail. The scope of the book is equally vast: added to the major categories in the chapter headings are small, meticulously researched forays into fire works, power stations, aeroplanes and the Corliss engine, among others. The chapter on bridges alone, with its fascinating description of the Eads Bridge and its construction, would make the book worthwhile strictly as a reference book. I doubt that there is any area of technology untouched in this book, and it will make an important resource for anyone studying science from an historical or sociological perspective.