My friend Jim recently posted some thoughts on Infinite Jest. My entry here is largely a response to that post. I decided that this might be too long for a comment and that the Black Lodge could benefit from a new post of its own.
In his post, Jim points to a few examples of "postmodern" authors paying particular attention to infrastructure in their novels, noting that "these works are dealing carefully with environments in which space and infrastructure are undergoing radical change. These works seem to want to dig deeper into those changes while also acknowledging that you're never going to get to the bottom." I wanted to suggest the possibility that we approach this attention to infrastructure through a notion of the sublime.
In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson suggests that the “postmodern sublime” must be understood with reference to “the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself…that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (38). For Jameson, the postmodern fascination with technology - particularly the sort of computer and digital technologies that involve a nearly incomprehensible (for most of us) infrastructure - ultimately points toward the global network of late capitalism itself, a network both aw(e)ful and terrifying. Jameson's sublime has a particular Marxist bent in its focus on "economic and social institutions" that have achieved a new level of complexity and ubiquity in postmodernism. Regardless of whether you follow Jameson in locating the sublime in a material network (as opposed to, for example, seeing the sublime as a function of language), he opens the possibility of linking the sublime to postmodern technology, which itself involves a certain attention to infrastructure.
To return to Jim's claim about infrastructure in certain "postmodern" novels, we could say that the "desire to dig deeper" balanced against the sense "that you're never going to get to the bottom" suggests a sort of sublime. Infrastructure here suggests, on the one hand, possibility, freedom, and pleasure (the "desire to dig deeper" corresponds to the freedom to explore as well as to escape and to hide, the sense of space implied by a complicated network). But this freedom can be terrifying; if there's no bottom, there's nothing on which to anchor yourself except provisionally. Also, while you may never get to the bottom, there's often a corresponding paranoia that someone sees the system whole, that someone or something stands outside of the infrastructure, in whose service it functions.
Along these lines, to point to some of Jim's examples, in Didion's Play It As It Lays, the rush that Maria gets from driving California highways gets balanced against the terror she feels whenever she thinks about pipes after having an abortion. The sort of freedom from subjectivity that Tyrone Slothrop experiences in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow by adopting a number of personas as he explores the underground networks of WWII Europe gets balanced against his disappearance as a subject in the novel. In The Crying of Lot 49, the Trystero could either be the promise of a vast network of the dispossessed linked by the desire to reach out and touch someone or an elaborate hoax pointing to nothing more than the bizarre mental network of Oedipa's former lover.
One limitation of this understanding - suggesting infrastructure as a sort of sublime trope - is that it often leads to a sort of critical impasse: the ambivalent tendencies embodied in the sublime allow us to contemplate simultaneously the tremendous possibilities of these different incarnations of infrastructure and their terrifying implications, but this leaves no clear path for moving beyond aesthetic contemplation into some form of praxis. While I wouldn't suggest that these novelists have a political agenda, I do find it interesting to try to chart exactly what these instances of infrastructure perform in these texts. In other words, while I think that examples of infrastructure in part lend themselves to sublime readings, different texts seem to be shaping our attitudes toward these sublime possibilities in various ways. In this sense, I tend to think not that the goal of these novelists is to invoke the sublime for aesthetic reasons but rather to represent it as a particular aspect of postmodern experience.
