Notes Against The Industrial Sublime

The pedagogical function of the visual and literary arts is of a long and distinguished lineage. This should go, one would think, without saying. What is one to think, then, of the rather disingenuous and obscurantist rhetoric surrounding the work of photographic artist Edward Burtynsky? Certainly, it’s not hard to find: Burtynsky’s own commentary for the recent documentary film concerning his work Manufactured Landscapes involves an inordinate amount of “objective” hedging that flies in the face of the most fundamental and obvious implications of his images themselves; the film also includes an almost painful “bonus” interview with Burtynsky and film director Jennifer Baichwal in which they both tie themselves in knots in the denial of any ideological context in which to locate the film (which is, of course, an ideological context in itself). And the commentary included in Burtynsky’s latest book of photographs (also rather confusingly called Manufactured Landscapes) also includes the sort of elegant and erudite critical mystifications that John Berger, in his landmark Ways of Seeing, identifies as being in the service of the power relationships implicit in the art works themselves. Much of this process of critical deflection concerns the fairly obvious “dilemmas” raised by the fact that the viewer responds to Burtynsky’s artfully shot and framed scenes of environmental exploitation and despoliation as aesthetically beautiful. This frankly banal observation is an apparently insoluble paradox, and is located by critic Mark Haworth-Booth within the context of the industrial sublime tradition of landscape painting and of a lineage of landscape photographers concerned with capturing “man’s interventions in landscape space” (36). Haworth-Booth, however, takes at face value the formulation that scenes of industrial processes and their environmental degradations can indeed invoke the sublime; he accepts without qualification the notion that the sublime, which in Burke’s definition is nothing less than an exalted state of being provoked by our confrontation with the vastness of nature, can indeed be manufactured by scenes of industrial interventions. Surely, this question has been by no means settled. If anything, the sublime involves a perception of scale far beyond that of global capital and its attendant processes; the fact that our existential responses to wilderness and industry as concepts are subject to this sort of categorical error might be more accurately subscribed to that colonization of consciousness characteristic of postmodernism—how else to explain the conflation of the terror roused by the realization of our own mortal insignificance in the face of The Infinite with the pleasure we take in pretty pictures? Who has the most to gain from this conflation/formulation of industrial society with The Infinite, and might not it be in the service of the mystification of the more general sense of powerlessness we intuit as subjects of (post)industrial society? Isn’t this categorical confusion simply another symptom of the ongoing colonization of culture by capital, in which the Wildnerness as that which was catagorically beyond culture is now subsumed within culture? Aren’t our responses to and definitions of beauty simply the byproducts of cultural convention, the result of our own processes of acculturation? Aren’t the ideologies of the dominant culture in fact rendered transparent via the normative function of aesthetic value and its critical enforcers? Shouldn’t one important question concern the ideological processes that have at this historical juncture indoctrinated us to find manufactured landscapes aesthetically pleasing? Is it enough to be vaguely troubled by these images? Why are his director, his critics and Burtynsky himself incapable of articulating the simple call to action implicit in his photographs? Is didacticism the greater crime here? If it’s simply a question of avoiding a sort of crass or vulgar didacticism, one can surely do so without refusing to acknowledge an ideological reading of works which make explicit the exploitive nature of the system of social relations into which we are all born, and in which we shall remain enmeshed until we die, unless some sort of fundamental change is enacted. Because this is what this is all about, isn’t it? All of this liberal/ bourgeois waffling about the creative and interpretive limitations of didactic (i.e. explicitly political) art really is a cover for a very specific set of qualms and equivalences concerning a very particular range of politically-charged discourse and it’s potentially revolutionary implications. (Author Harold Jaffe makes a very similar argument concerning self-censorship in contemporary American letters in his recent essay “The Writer in Wartime” found in his collection Beyond the Techno-Cave.) And I use the term bourgeois specifically to refer to Burtynsky as a member of the newly emergent creative class, as fully invested in the processes, modes of organization and transparent ideologies of global capital as is Rem Koolhaus (though Burtynsky’s instincts, it must be said without qualification, are far more sound.) Finally, and this is a tribute to Burtynsky’s art and to him as an artist, the critical community surrounding his work aside, the implications of his photographs are so direct, so immediate and so profound as to undercut the attempts to mystify the social dimension of his work. The fact that one of his images now graces the dust jacket of George Monbiot’s climate change polemic Heat needs no explication or qualification; it’s a simple acknowledgement that Burtynsky’s images underscore our own growing awareness that we must, on a structural level, change the way we organize our societies; that such change is inevitable to our own survival to that of the myriad other species with which we share this earth, these oceans and skies; and that time is running short.