Chapter Two - A Sublime of Data: Information Overload between the Covers

Summary

One of the current developments to which the big novel poses a response, as said, is the growing importance of the database. Manovich (2001) predicted the database's replacement of narrative as our primary means to structure our experiences, but it is more accurate to say that narrative and database increasingly come together to produce hybrid forms. The expanding cultural importance of the database in the current media culture, together with the digitization of more and more information, strongly influences existing modes of representation in analog as well as digital art forms. As Vesna puts it in an essay in her edited volume Database Asthetics, “[i]n an age in which we are increasingly aware of ourselves as databases, identified by social security numbers and genetic structures, it is imperative that artists actively participate in how data is shaped, organised, and disseminated” (2000, 155). This realization has led her and other scholars like Kristin Veel (2009; 2011) to consider the new hybrid forms of film, literature, and art they see emerging under the umbrella term of “database aesthetics.” In Veel's characterization,

[w]hat is termed database aesthetics … inscribes itself in a long cultural tradition of fragmentation, excess and the challenge to linearity, but its prevalence in contemporary culture—from popular films such as Memento (2000) to experimental online artworks such as David Clark's A is for Apple (2002)—justify its identification as a distinct phenomenon. (2011, 310)

Such works, she adds, share a mode of inventory that “prioritizes simultaneity over selection and probes the boundaries of contemporary conditions of attention” (312). And similarly, according to Christiane Paul, “Database aesthetics itself has become an important cultural narrative of our time, constituting a shift towards a relational, networked approach to gathering and creating knowledge about cultural specifics” (2007, 155). Generally conceived as a recent artistic development, this database aesthetics, I propose in this chapter, is rooted in an eighteenth-century tradition of the mathematical and Romantic sublime that revolves around excess, absence, and expendability. I carve out a genealogy that traces it back to its roots in this tradition, and lay bare how the sublime encodes itself in today's big novels as an aesthetics of overload.

This experience of information overload in itself did not originate with the information age.