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February 27, 2006
SF Theory Roundtable
SF Theory Roundtable
Science Fiction Theory Roundtable March 2006
The American Technological Sublime.
David Nye
MIT Press
1996
Chapter 8: “Synthesis: The 1939 New York World’s Fair” pages 199-224, notes p.
Nye’s book is an exploration of what he calls the technological sublime in American culture. Nye argues that in American culture technology rather than nature took over the role of provoking that sense of awe and wonder that we associate with the sublime and of producing a sort of social cohesion through this shared quasi-religious experience. The book is an exploration of how technology came to play this role in American culture and is organized around the shifting sublime from geometrical, through electrical, to technological sites. Nye argues in his preface that his work is not a history form an engineering point of view but instead “it is concerned with the social context of technology, with how new objects are interpreted and integrated into the fabric of social life” (xv). After providing background about theories of the sublime and the particular American inflection of this concept, Nye develops his argument through chapters on a number of things that have been sites of the sublime in the American experience: the railroad, bridges and skyscrapers, the factory, electrical lighting and signs, cityscapes and lit skylines, the Apollo missions, the nuclear bomb, and the statue of liberty. Nye notes that while the European model of the sublime involved a sense of awe that involved a sense of human weakness or insignificance in the face of the power and grandeur of nature, along with the compensatory empowerment that came with recognizing that the human mind was able to grasp something larger than itself. In contrast 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” (60).
The chapter we will be considering, Chapter 8, focuses on the 1939 New York World’s Fair as a location in which all previous varieties of the sublime – geometrical, electrical and technological – came together to create an experience of the imagined future for a depression-bound American public. As Nye notes, previous World’s Fairs had also focused around technological marvels of the sublime, but the 1939 World’s Fair is unique in combining its displays of such marvels with a narrative about a fantasized future in which science, technology, and major corporations could transform the world, solving the economic crisis and ushering in a technological utopia. This chapter focuses on the way the 1939 World’s Fair worked to create visual models of this future and interpolate the visitor into them. This article, about a material, visual, and phenomenological future one might visit, raises interesting questions about the role of sf images and experiences in our vision of the future, and about the role of corporate/technological innovation in the sf imagination.
Possible issues to discuss include (but are not limited to) questions about whether or not Nye’s arguments about the sublime are similar to the ‘sense of wonder’ often attributed to the proper experience of reading sf. Are technological objects to sf literature what nature was to the Romantic poets? Is there anything particularly ‘American’ about this sublime relationship to technology that helps us to understand differences between American and UK science fiction? Historically, the sublime has been an experience that has been gendered male (women experience emotion instead, or so the theory goes). Is there something about the way technology itself has also been gendered that helps us to understand the marginalized role of women in a lot of sf? Does this focus on technology itself as the site of the sublime have a connection to a tendency in sf to eschew the material and focus on the abstract and transcendent? Nye notes a tendency to erase the labour of human workman and engineers in consuming the spectacle of the technological object itself, separated from the conditions of its production. Is there a similar implication in commodity fetishism in our sense of wonder in sf? The sublime is largely a religious experience. Is there a connection between the sublime and the recent interest in religion in some sf and scholarship on technology and culture? Much golden age sf valorize the role of the scientist or engineer to solve all social problems. Is there a connection between this and the role of the technological sublime in valuing those who can control the power of awe-inspiring machines? The theory of the sublime is rooted in a sense of the sublime experience being a visceral or phenomenological one, often with the visual sense predominating. Does thinking about the visual qualities of the technological sublime help us see new things about sf scholarship and texts? The 1939 World’s Fair was organized around an experience of escape from mundane reality into a better world to be made by technology. How much does this sense of escapism dominate in the sf tradition or how much are such representation critiqued by more sophisticated sf?
Sherryl Vint, Incoming SF Division Head
Posted by ChrissieMains at February 27, 2006 12:32 AM