Miniaturized Excess 

A Hypermodern Sublime

Defined by excess and the boundless, our period is that of the infinite, immaterial and instantaneous. Furthermore, our everyday space now appears to be endowed with a “virtual halo”1 1  - Louise Poissant, “Colonies et paysages dans le cyberespace,” Revue d’esthétique, no. 39 (2001): 49-55. of interwoven digital circuits and invisible waves which have done away with the notions of distance and time as we understood them less than twenty years ago. Regardless of whether they call it hypermodernity, supermodernity or liquid modernity, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers are in agreement: the network age has brought about a completely different relationship to time, space, and to oneself and the other. So much so, in fact, that they see this as a real anthropological mutation2 2  - See Marc Augé (that is to the ensemble of his work since ­Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity 1995 [1992]), Nicole Aubert (L’Individu hypermoderne, 2004) and Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Life, 2005). Nicole Aubert characterizes:the type of individual we have apparently become as hypermodern.3 3  - Nicole Aubert, L’Individu hypermoderne (Ramonville St-Agne: Érès, 2004). This term is used for its direct reference to excess, the boundless and the extreme. 

The world has always escaped our bounds. And since the beginning of time, it has also been a source of the sublime.However, in a hypermodern era this “pleasure mixed with dread”⁴ 4 - Emmanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Irvine: University of California Press, 1960). seems to take on an entirely new form: after the sublime of nature, we have entered the technological sublime. In fact, for Mario Costa,⁵ 5 - Mario Costa, “Paysages du sublime,” Revue d’esthétique, no. 39 (2001): 125-33. the subject is no longer only submerged in the immensity of the real, but also in the immaterial infinity of the network, in a non-landscape of the too-full, of too big and too numerous possibilities. “Like an insatiable bulimia of the gaze,” Costa states, “I can observe and digest the visual translation of the entire ­universe by allowing myself in a certain way to be absorbed and dissolved in it.”⁶ 6 - Ibid., 129. Today’s world, already ungraspable in its entirety for its inhabitant’s mind, is doubled; and its second form (layer) is all the more difficult to objectify because of its immaterial and invisible nature.