Essay Examines Technological Sublime Through Benjamin and Herzog's Kuwait Film

Angela Harutyunyan's essay, published on April 30, 2021, explores how the sublime manifests in late capitalism through mediatized representations. It revisits Walter Benjamin's 1936 text "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility," focusing on the aura's decay in relation to landscape. The analysis considers the atomic bomb era and technological hyper-mediation, where singular sublime experiences are mass-reproduced. Under conditions of extreme alienation, human engagement with nature produces an aesthetics of destruction experienced as supreme pleasure. Harutyunyan uses Werner Herzog's 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as a case study, examining how burning Kuwaiti oil fields cinematically depict the aura's survival amid decay. The essay frames capitalism's "desert of the real" as a landscape where subjects struggle to represent the unrepresentable—events, nature, and capitalism itself. This inquiry questions whether the sublime, traditionally experienced at representation's limits, extends to contemporary mediatized conditions. It investigates what constitutes a landscape as a sublime site in late capitalism, linking historical representation to modern technological contexts.