Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk White, Luke ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7080-7243 (2012) Nature, the metropolisandtheapocalypticsublime. In: Landscape&Eschatology,Friday,13January2012, Tate Britain. . [Conference or Workshop Item] Presentation This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/8507/ Copyright: MiddlesexUniversityResearchRepositorymakestheUniversity’sresearchavailableelectronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unlessotherwisestated. Theworkissuppliedontheunderstandingthatanyuseforcommercialgain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Works, including theses and research projects, may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from them, or their content changed in any way, without first obtaining permissioninwritingfromthecopyrightholder(s). Theymaynotbesoldorexploitedcommerciallyin any format or medium without the prior written permission of the copyright holder(s). Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author’s name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pag- ination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address: [email protected] The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy “Nature, the Metropolis and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” Paper given at “Landscape and Eschatology,” Tate Britain, Friday 13th January 2012 Notes for presentation of paper at conference Copy for Middlesex University Research Repository. © Luke White 2012. “Nature, the Metropolis and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” Paper given at “Landscape and Eschatology,” Tate Britain, Friday 13th January 2012 “We talk all the time about the end of the world, but it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end, but somehow capitalism will go on.”1 — Slavoj Žižek I would like to start this paper – which aims to think through the peculiarly intimate connection between figurations of the apocalypse and of the city – by invoking a remark by Slavoj Žižek. In this remark, made somewhat before the current financial crisis, Žižek noted the ideological closure whereby alternatives to capitalism seem to have become unthinkable in the current political imaginary, to the extent that it’s actually easier to imagine the end of the planet than to think the end of capitalism and the transition to another – better – way of life. The contemporary obsession with doomsday scenarios to which Žižek seems to refer is most prominently visible in a barrage of blockbuster disaster films that utilize multi-million-dollar CGI effects to imagine catastrophe on the planetary scale – films such as The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, or even the post- 























































 1
Slavoj
Žižek,
cited
by
Rebecca
Mea,
“The
Marx
Brother,”
Lacan
dot
com
 http://www.lacan.com/ziny.htm
visited
01/01/12. apocalyptic Disney animation Wall-E.2 These works, however, might themselves be read as symptomatic of our broader political discourse, in which global environmental catastrophe is a prevalent anxiety. In such cultural products, then, it is nature that appears, as it did in the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime, as terrible, and as marking the limit to human endeavour. However, Žižek’s comments seem to suggest that such a figure of nature may well be a displacement of anxieties that are more properly attached to capitalism itself. My own paper today will set out in something of this Marxian spirit to think the longer history of the modern apocalyptic sublime in its relation to capitalist conditions. It is the figure of the city in such apocalyptic fantasies that will help me start to articulate the relations between nature, the sublime and capitalism. The city, of course, functions as the central location for doomsday or catastrophe films and the images of collapsing, deserted or ruined towers and monuments are key images through which we imagine their eschatological scenarios. The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, for example, used digital effects to carefully reconstruct and then destroy America’s most familiar and iconic cityscapes. In the former, Los Angeles is graphically depicted being destroyed by multiple tornados, whilst New York is hit by tsunami and ice storm. 2012 outdid this, with an even more spectacular version of the destruction of LA by earthquake – its suburbs and freeways collapsing into the ground and its towers crumbling – not to mention the consumption of Las Vegas by fire and Washington by flood. 























































 2
it’s
worth
noting,
of
course,
that
even
the
early
cinema
was
not
immune
to
apocalyptic
 fantasy.
Fritz
Lang’s
Metropolis
would
be
a
prime
and
famous
example
of
a
vision
of
the
 apocalyptic
city
from
the
silent
era,
but
one
could
go
as
far
back,
for
example
as
August
 Blom’s
Verdens
Undergang
[The
End
of
the
World]
(1916). Such a focus on the city, of course, can also be seen in John Martin’s paintings and prints, which also repeatedly give us disaster visited on cities: Babylon, Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah, Rome, Pompeii… Martin’s pictures are remarkable in the extent to which they defied the conventions that composed history painting (and its affects) around the human figure. Instead, Martin organized his works around imagined architectures, lifting them from the scale of human drama to that of the urban catastrophe.3 The apocalyptic city, however, can be found even before this, at the heart of the developing discourse of the sublime. The importance of the concept of the sublime grew through the eighteenth century. It was defined, in particular in Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry (perhaps the first substantial and systematic modern attempt to theorize the sublime) as an alternative aesthetic category to beauty. Where beauty seemed to name the relatively straightforward pleasures of the small, pretty, harmonious and regular, the sublime named the more perverse pleasures that attracted eighteenth-century taste to the stronger emotions circulating around fear, horror, awe and terror, and the contemplation of death, power, pain and danger.4 It was such attractions that drew eighteenth-century tourists, artists and cultural consumers to craggy mountains, stormy seas, melancholy ruins and graveyards, and to scenes of war, horror and violence. In the midst of Burke’s attempts to enumerate the causes and effects of the sublime we find a striking image. Burke wonders what would happen in the case of the 























































 3
See
Martin
Myrone,
ed.
John
Martin:
Apocalypse
(London:
Tate
Publishing,
2011),101.
 4
Edmund
Burke,
A
Philosophical
Enquiry
into
the
Sublime
and
Beautiful
and
Other
Pre­ revolutionary
Writings
(London:
Penguin,
1998). destruction “by a conflagration or an earthquake” of London – already a massive and rapidly growing conurbation, by far the largest and wealthiest in Europe, and (with a population of around three quarters of a million) already at the scale of the metropolis rather than the mere city. Burke recognizes that this would not only be apprehended as horrific, but would also, in its very horror, become a supreme aesthetic spectacle: “what numbers from all parts would crowd to behold the ruins, and amongst [these] many who would have been content never to have seen London in its glory!”5 What, then are we to make of this reiterated connection between the city and the catastrophic sublime? The most simple answer would be to propose that the city stands as a shorthand for a complex of ideas – culture, civilization, technology, the human itself – that are set in binary opposition to nature. Where the sublime, especially as described by Kant,6 is produced in the experience of a mighty nature inimical to human purpose and wellbeing, we would expect the city to provide a particularly strong image of all that such a contra-purposive nature threatens to destroy. Such an explanation, though clearly accurate as far as it goes, is not quite satisfying. After all, the very binary opposition here between nature and civilization is itself hardly neutral; it is a construction profoundly inflected by practices of capitalist socio-cultural organization and their narratives of progress and technological mastery.7 























































 5
Burke,
Enquiry,
“On
the
Effects
of
Tragedy,”
Part
1
§15.

 6
Immanuel
Kant,
Critique
of
the
Power
of
Judgment,
ed.
Paul
Guyer,
trans.
Paul
Guyer
 and
Eric
Matthews
(Cambridge:
Cambridge
UP,
2000),
128‐159.
 7
For
just
how
specific
the
notion
of
the
natural
sublime
may
be,
see
for
example
 Marjorie
Hope
Nicolson’s
exposition
of
the
startling
fact
that
there
is
no
evidence
 whatsoever
of
the
sublime
experience
we
have
of
mountainous
landscapes,
and
which
 forms
the
backbone
of
Romantic
poetry
and
modern
tourism
alike,
until
the
late
 seventeenth
century.
Nicolson,
Mountain
Gloom
and
Mountain
Glory:
The
Development
of My own account here, then, will turn in a different direction – one more in line with the spirit of the Žižek quote with which I started today. This, after all, suggested that the apprehension of sublimely terrible and counterpurposive nature, certainly as it re- emerges in contemporary culture in ecological anxieties, is in fact a displacement of something more properly identified as the image of the sublimely terrible, dynamic, unimaginable and destructive forces of capital itself. My argument, then, is that there is a link between the figure of the city as a scene of apocalypse and a thematic in Western culture where the capitalist city is in fact – in and of itself – an apocalyptic event. Such a theme of “city as apocalypse,” furthermore, is motivated precisely by the sense that the city is an objective correlate of the destructive, dynamic, but immaterial and otherwise unpresentable forces of capital itself. For my money, one of the most haunting eighteenth-century eschatological visions of capitalism is Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, the Dunciad. Pope’s poem, written in the aftermath of the South-Sea bubble, is primarily a satire on the state of literature. However, more than a series of random attacks on the many figures with whom Pope fell out, the poem launches an assault, from the standpoint of Neoclassical order, on the developing commercialization and professionalization of cultural production, which was increasingly being organized as a commodified industry rather than a noble pastime for the cultural elite. Such a commercialisation was, of course, centred in the literary scene of London, and Pope’s poem takes us on a scatological romp through the fallen cultural landscape of the city – from St Bartholomew’s Fair, whose “Smithfield Muses” preside over the piece, through Bedlam hospital, to the heart of 























































 the
Aesthetics
of
the
Infinite,
Weyerhaeuser
Environmental
Classics
(Seattle
&
London:
 University
of
Washington
Press,
1997). the literary industry in Grub Street, to the court, to Drury Lane Theatre, Lord Mayoral processions on the Thames, Guildhall, and even the river Fleet, that had become by Pope’s day an open sewer, and in which the writers in his poem have a competition to see how low they can sink. For Pope, the commodification of culture that this landscape produces spells the death of the ancien regime order for which the Neoclassical stood, and in fact plunges us into a form of de-differentiated chaos. Pope names this “Dulness” – and elsewhere “bathos” – but it also fits precisely with the modern conception of entropy: a cultural version of the heat death of the Universe. The effects of capitalism, then, are more than just bad poetry: they constitute the end of meaning and value, all distinction of kind reduced to the equivalences of exchange; a moral, intellectual, metaphysical – and perhaps even physical – collapse on the cosmic scale, just as we have in Hogarth’s Pope-inspired riff on the end of the world, The Bathos. Pope ends his poem: Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.8 A somewhat different – perhaps even clearer –figuration of the logic of the apocalyptic capitalist city can be found in Bruegel’s famous Tower of Babel, painted around 1563, at a moment of massive innovation and growth of Dutch capitalist enterprise. (This is an image, of course, that, with the wink and nod of intertextuality, also peeks out at us from Martin’s various Babylonian fantasies.) Bruegel’s painting 























































 8
Alexander
Pope,
"The
Dunciad,"
in
Poetry
and
Prose
of
Alexander
Pope,
ed.
Aubrey
 Williams,
(Boston:
Houghton
Mifflin,
1969),
4.652‐6. lays bare the logic that capitalist accumulation – oriented to the limitless – shares with the sublime. The tower spirals ever outwards in a centrifugal compositional movement to encompass and annihilate the landscape in which it is situated, its pastoral green relegated to the distant horizon, giving way in the foreground to an earth blackened and blasted by the little mines and furnaces which surround the tower and supply it with the materials of its manufacture. It also swallows up a vast army of labouring figures, in procession up its ramparts towards its unfinished and unfinishable turret. Bruegel’s tower visits an apocalypse on both its environment, and its population. It is, ironically, a ruin even in its own construction, and in many ways already offers a blueprint of the apocalyptic city in modern culture. It’s notable, then, that Georgian and Victorian commentators on London often take up the language of the sublime to describe the city. Over Martin’s lifetime, its population exploded from around a million to over two and a half million, leaving observers grappling with its huge scale, chaotic, exponential expansion (fuelled of course by cut-throat capitalist competition and speculation) and unthinkable contrasts between magnificent wealth and unspeakable poverty, disease and despair. Thus, for example, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers gathered in Roy Porter’s social history of London repeatedly find themselves shifting between emotions of wonder and terror in situations of cognitive or imaginative breakdown, and drawing on sublime metaphors of the unbounded, the oceanic and the infernal, or of the crushing power of a “vortex” or “maelstrom.” the city was, in itself, as a consumer of lives, something deeply akin to a natural disaster.9 























































 9
Roy
Porter,
London:
A
Social
History
(London:
Penguin,
2000),
see
esp.
115‐124,
248‐ 252,
339‐346 What is remarkable, though, given the language through which London is described, is that the word sublime itself was so rarely used to refer to it. This, it seems to me, is because it offered an engulfing experience that denied the kind of distance Burke and others diagnosed as necessary to transmute horror into aesthetic pleasure. In this regard, Wordsworth’s biographical account of his formation as a poet of sublime nature in the Prelude is instructive. Book VII recounts his arrival in London as a young man, having just finished his studies at Cambridge. Wordsworth describes the city in the terms we have just discussed, terms that closely follow the rhetoric of the sublime: it is an “endless stream of men and moving things!” evoking “wonder” and “awe.”10 The impression of the magnificence and splendour of the city is mixed, however, with a sense of overload and bewilderment: It is a “monstrous ant-hill on the plain / Of a too busy world.”11 As Wordsworth’s description unfolds, the negative aspects of this experience come to the fore, and the pleasures of the city increasingly appear as hollow. Its overload is “deafening” and “dazzling,” offering “blank confusion” rather than any form of sublime transcendence.12 Clearly borrowing on Pope, Wordsworth finds the “true epitome / Of what the mighty City is herself”13 in a scene of Bartholomew Fair, where London appears as destructive and entropic – “A work completed to our hands, that lays / If any spectacle on earth can do / The whole creative powers of man asleep.”14 London, as a marketplace, follows the same tendency noted by Pope, in its reduction of the particularities of use-value to the 























































 10
William
Wordsworth,
The
Prelude:
The
Four
Texts
(1798,
1799,
1805,
1850),
[1850
 version],
Rev.
Ed.
(London:
Penguin,
1995),
7.151‐3.
 11
Prelude,
7.149
 12
Prelude
7.155,
7.157.
7.722.
 13
Prelude
7.722‐3.
 14
Prelude
7.679‐81