The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy

[Matt Polotsky's new book, The National Security Sublime, is a tour through the look-and-feel of mass surveillance, as practiced by the most unlikely of aesthetes: big data authoritarian snoops and the grifter military contractors who wax fat on them. This is a subject dear to my heart. -Cory]

The US National Security Agency is big, really big. But its unlikely that most people outside the government can (or would even try to) quantify its size or powers with any specificity. The agency is just massive, a quality that can produce in those who try to contemplate it the overwhelming sense of awe and wonder called the sublime. Triggered by an encounter with something grand (towering mountain peaks) or verging on the infinite (the number of stars in the universe), it describes a generally pleasurable feeling of cognitive breakdown, the sensation that you just cant wrap your head around an object or idea so vast and boundless.

The sublime was an important touchstone for Romantic painting and poetry of the early nineteenth century (think windswept peaks, crumbling castles, and misty vales), but it made a striking comeback in the years after the 9/11 attacks, when the surveillance activities of the NSA and other agencies first became common knowledge to the American public. As I argue in my new book, : On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy, the sublime offered a valuable resource for artists, writers, filmmakers, and television showrunners during the War on Terror. Images of vast size and unimaginable scope gave aesthetic form to the feeling of living under seemingly limitless surveillance. Read the rest