antagonist

Mark Fisher (K-punk), while thinking and listening to the re-release of the complete catalogue of Kraftwerk (unsurprisingly called 12345678 The Catalogue) on the Mute label, coins a novel conceptual tool for cultural analysis which he calls the ‘communicational sublime’.

With this term he refers to the sublime which is at  work in the paintings of the early Romantic Caspar David Friedrich which is now replaced  by a new experience of the sublime at work in the vast vistas of communication networks, both digital (computers, digital imagery etc.) as well as logistical (transportation). What I like about Mark’s analysis is first of all the lack of a moral import in his concept of the communicational sublime. And secondly, Mark’s idea can lead to some intriguing ontological consequences.

At work in the communicational sublime are two related concepts. First there is the idea of reflexivity as exemplified by the mirror. The cyberpunks mirror-shades don’t just protect her from high intensity luminosity radiating from neon lights and screen flicker, they also frame and reformat the subject as object. Mirrors are communication media and what they mediate is not a message per-se but the subject itself. That is to say, mirrors communicate subject as objects. Or to put in in Bruno Latour’s words: the mirror has formatting power. It frames and formats a subject into an object and vice versa since Mark continues: objects become animated, they gain or acquire subjectivity through reflexivity.

The communicational sublime, Mark is referring to,  emanates from the awesome or overwhelming formatting power of communication. It involves as Mark writes “a particular kind of jouissance that derives from the subject contemplating objects which overwhelm it” . Secondly, what is operational in the communicational sublime next to this idea of reflexivity is the collapse of distance through the employment of tele-technologies.

What’s interesting about this thread in Mark’s idea is that to Mark this geographical implosion allows for contemplation, or perhaps rather more contemplation. When spatial distance is removed, Mark believes contemplation become more possible then ever before. He finds in Kraftwerk ‘a kind of tele-pathos’ by which he means ‘an enjoyable melancholy of seeing Things from far away’.

To Mark’s credit he does not, like for instance Paul Virilio, spin off into a moral polemic about speed (objects reaching catastrophic momentum and hence escape velocity leading to an integral accident). Instead, Mark approaches speed with melancholy as he hears it in Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’, an apt title since its subject is the system of communication and computer networks an-sich. Distance and reflexivity are at the heart of the communicational sublime so well captured by Kraftwerk. Mark finishes his piece on Kraftwerk with the question where the 21 century ‘Kraftwerkers’ are. An important question indeed, since as Mark remarks, Kraftwerk marks a radical break with what constituted (pop) music. But even more important, to me at least, is whether we will see the communicational sublime further investigated.