Abstract The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the aura and the decay of the aura in relation to landscape. In the wake of the failure of a transformative praxis to bring about a new social order, the technologically hyper-mediated engagement of man with nature under the conditions of extreme alienation and reification results in the production of the aesthetics of destruction experienced as “supreme pleasure”. In the age of the atomic bomb and technological hyper-mediation, the singularity of the moment of the experience of the sublime is multiply reproduced. The essay ends with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as an example of rendering cinematically the aura’s survival under the conditions of its decay in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Capitalism’s “desert of the real”, as the vast desert in Kuwait in Herzog’s film, is precisely the landscape in relation to which the subject attempts to represent that which evades representation (the event, nature, capitalism, and so on).

中文翻译：

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景观及其双重：技术的崇高

摘要 本文探讨了当代再现的历史条件，同时援引了崇高和景观作为这种体验媒介的现代体验。作为面对再现极限的主体体验的崇高，能否扩展到我们晚期资本主义的媒介化再现条件？什么构成了作为晚期资本主义崇高体验场所的“风景”？这篇文章通过重新讨论沃尔特·本雅明（Walter Benjamin）的“技术再现时代的艺术作品”（1936）来解决这些问题，重点讨论了与景观相关的光环和光环的衰减。在变革实践未能带来新的社会秩序之后，在极度异化和物化的条件下，人与自然的技术超中介接触导致产生了被体验为“至高无上的快乐”的破坏美学。在原子弹和技术超中介的时代，崇高的体验瞬间的奇异性被多重再现。文章最后分析了维尔纳·赫尔佐格 1992 年的电影《黑暗的教训》，以此作为电影渲染光环在科威特燃烧油田中衰变条件下的生存的一个例子。资本主义的“现实沙漠”，正如赫尔佐格电影中科威特的广袤沙漠，正是主体试图与之相关的景观，以表现逃避再现的事物（事件、自然、资本主义等）。