Dr. Troy Bordun, Trent University and Concordia University
I teach in Art History and Film Studies, among other Departments, and in this pandemic, I am fascinated by all the charts and graphs and maps. These charts are simple to grasp and the trajectories they imply require no understanding of basic mathematics or science. One could get lost in a sea of data that is, for the most part, aesthetically-pleasing.
There is something to be said of the sublime here. The sublime is an experience that is terrifying, humbling, and satisfying all at once, and this seems to apply (to some degree) to our experiences in the last six weeks. Although the sublime is often discussed with reference to mountains, storms, volcanoes, and certain works of cinema and art, I start by suggesting that some data visualizations of the pandemic and its effects could offer their spectators the sublime. What does the curious and terrified person experience when they see all these numbers, charts, and maps? The latter holds my attention: perhaps they experience the sublime.
The first sustained investigation of the sublime originated with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). His succinct definition is as follows (1993, p. 67): “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” In Burke’s account, the sublime is either an object or a subjective experience, and the degree in which we parse out these two is somewhat unclear from his treatise.
Burke’s unrefined theory thus took Immanuel Kant on a journey a few years later. For Kant, the sublime is a disposition of mind: “an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think of the unattainability of nature as a presentation of ideas” (Kant in Clewis 2019, p. 139). In short, your cognitive faculties experience the sublime “occasioned by the senses” (Forsey in Clewis 2019, p. 322). When the senses perceive something with magnitude (Kant’s favored term), the mind is incapable of processing the size or scale; we then experience the failure of our rational faculties while simultaneously feeling displeasure upon discovering that I am a subject with an unlimited capacity for imagination. Despite the terrifying or magnificent objects, for there to be a sublime experience, one must also experience their astonishment in safety. When stranded, Everest is no longer sublime, nor the Grand Canyon if you are plunging to your death.
So, is a sublime pandemic possible?
We cannot feel or touch the coronavirus (unless we have it) and its images of infected bodies could be images of any kind of health issue (we also see various animations of the microscopic virus itself, hardly seeing it in the true sense). The virus then becomes visible through the pandemic charts and graphs – its data. We track the virus on news and government sites with numbers of confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths on a day-by-day basis. We can see the rate of infection by age and race; its location at local, provincial, national, and global levels; and compare these data sets with other countries. It amounts to a lot of numbers – some stick out as immediately terrifying while others are too vast to comprehend, especially given the global reach of the virus. But there is something about the mapping of the pandemic that offers the sublime – a map offers a spatial representation that demands our imaginations while numbers are, simply, numbers. For example, 200 deaths a day may seem insignificant if we compare average daily death rates prior to COVID-19. In short, numbers aren’t sublime but perhaps the magnitude of a time-lapse world map could be.
Daily New COVID-19 Deaths, Ourworldindata.org, https://vimeo.com/409946713
Time-based maps are available to view for many sets of coronavirus data. In the above, Daily New Deaths, the legend ranging from 0 to >2,500 is significant but to a limited degree given that the changes in colors are not equal sets of measurement. What is sublime here is the explosion of deaths at the beginning of March and its visualization. The map bursts with flashing colors, a stand-in for the invisibility of the virus as well as the death that happens so far from our homes then quickly into our neighborhoods.
Although there is the affected spectator of the sublime, in some kind of physical or mental pain, the early sublime theorists forget that embodied experience includes the experience of temporality: a storm terrifies because the wind shakes trees and houses; the terror of a volcano is the slow movement of lava and eruptions, edging closer to our safe boundaries. While winds and lava are part of our immediate sense perceptions and they have magnitude in terms of the damage they may cause, the above death-toll map (and others like it) has much less to do with an array of senses as it does with the cognitive frustration of trying to comprehend the rapid spread of COVID-19 death from the month of March to the present (April 17). The virus is sublime as it becomes tangible through its hosts that are then transformed into global data. We are frustrated by this display of disorienting time across such a grand space.
Whether we are safe or in crisis determines how we continue our scholarly work. In my safety, coronavirus offers me the chance to think through the use-value of the theory of the sublime.
References
Burke, E. 1993. A Philosophical Inquiry (A. Phillips, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1757).
Clewis, R. C. (ed.) 2019. The Sublime Reader. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 