LITMIR.BIZ

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that reconciles the brutality of empire with the Enlightenment vocabulary in which it is clothed. Luke Gibbons situates Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry against the backdrop of British colonial rule in Ireland. Burke was appalled, Gibbons notes, by both the violent tactics of the Whiteboy movement—which sought to protect tenant land rights—in the 1760s and by the colonial government’s brutal reply.⁵ The government’s execution of Whiteboy agitators and suspected enablers was designed as a display of sublime terror, which would awe the subject population into an unquestioning reverence for the justice (or justness) of colonial rule. Burke advocated for a more measured mode of colonial power, one that would mitigate and obscure the object of terror, and one that would seek to enlist the colonized subject—via the judicious manipulation of the sublime—into the administration of the colonial regime, rather than simply seek their passive submission to its abstract dictums. Burke lamented, though, that social conditions in Ireland did not encourage the articulation of this more subdued, but still sublime, form of colonial power. The British imperial presence had so succeeded in suppressing local customs that no sound social fundament existed within which a more benign, more cooperative, colonial order might take root. Burke identified in India more fertile ground for his ideal imperial government. India, Burke famously avowed, was possessed of rules and principles equal in their legitimacy to, and endowed with an even greater historical weight (“tradition”) than, those of Britain. In his speeches in support of the former Governor-General of India Warren Hastings’s impeachment, Burke railed against the excesses of British power in India, abuses he attributed to the amoral mercantilism of the East India Company, and to the despotic tendencies of the Empire’s “adolescent” foot soldiers. At once an impassioned plea for “sympathy” with the humanity and rights of the Indian people and a plainly orientalist affirmation of Britain’s paternalistic relationship to them—an argument for cultural relativism that appeals to a universal morality and historicity—Burke’s speeches and writings on India are a feat of rhetorical contortionism. In each of the meandering discursive paths down which he travels, though, Burke is guided by an abiding political-aesthetic concern with the sublime. As Sara Suleri observes, Burke deploys the trope of the sublime to describe the unknowable vastness of India (even as he attempts to construct around that vastness a taming taxonomic apparatus).⁶ This vastness is, for Burke, doubly threatening. First, the terror evoked by the immensity of India threatens to overwhelm the imagination—undo the cognitive security—of the youthful agent of empire. Second, the sublimity of India is threatening because of the terror it provokes—the arbitrary, excessive, and punitive reassertion of colonial power. Importantly, at stake for Burke in both cases is the integrity of British social and political order, the danger posed to British society by its exposure and subsequent reversion to the unmitigated power of the sublime. In place of a colonial government guided by the naked pursuit of profit and propped up by the arbitrary exercise of force, the mode of rule Burke imagined would recognize the essential humanity and cultural singularity of the Indian people, and would conceal (or attenuate) the violence of colonial social relations with the “wardrobe of a moral imagination.”

      Whatever its politics, Burke’s account possesses a keen dialectic sensitivity to the irrationality of rationality—the irrationality, specifically, of the putatively rational colonial response to the sublimity of the colonized (or soon-to-be colonized) world. While Kant imagines a second moment in the European confrontation with the sublime, wherein the male subject reestablishes his power over the boundlessness of nature through the exercise of reason, Burke recognizes that “reason” functions in the colonial context as euphemistic cover for the articulation of political terror (the synthetic sublime). The sublime power of nature is countered not with the ascendancy of reason but with the sublime power of the colonial state. Here we can glimpse the genealogical origins of the terror/counterterror cycle that structures the political present. The “terror” invoked in the rhetorical figure of the “War on Terror” signifies an ontological essence as much as a political practice. The legitimate violence of the state, in other words, is responding not just to the ideology and method of “terror” but to its intrinsic residence in the world’s uncivilized spaces and peoples.

       The Colonial Sublime Today

      Burke’s meditations on the political sublime anticipated the term’s contemporary articulation, which evokes less the grandest canyon or tallest mountain and more the great terror produced by human technologies of mass violence. Today, the archetypal image of sublime terror is not a stormy sea or vast desert but the mushroom cloud left by the atomic bomb.⁷ Importantly, though, these two manifestations of the sublime are not contradictory but allied, and their mutual entanglement was as much a feature of the eighteenth century as it is of the twenty-first. In the colonial context, the terror inherent to “first nature” required the production of “second nature” sublimity. Technologies of transport and communication were used to both inspire fear and compel subservience to the ideology of “development.”⁸ To borrow an example from Brian Larkin’s Signal and Noise, the introduction of the railroad in Nigeria did more than transform the economic and cultural geography of the colony, tying together north and south and deepening the connection of the country at large to global processes of accumulation; it also provoked among the rural population a profound feeling of “fear and terror” at the limitless capacities of a colonial power that could transform the landscape itself.⁹ Technologies of extermination were more unitary in their terrorizing effect. The exceptional space of the colony served as a laboratory for new methods of extermination, the lethalness and awe-inducing capacities of which could be tested on infrahuman subjects. In the New World, the introduction of repeating firearms—first the Colt six-shot revolver, and later the Spencer Carbine rifle—transformed the settler-conquest of the American West. Prior to their innovation, the superior horsemanship of Plains tribes such as the Comanche could match the cumbersome technologies and tactics of federal regiments; their advent altered the balance of power in battle and provoked new levels of terror in indigenous communities, for whom such weapons posed a cosmological as well as physical threat. In North and Southern Africa, the Gatling gun enabled the British Empire to expand spatially, and to “pacify” colonized populations terrorized by the specter of mass extermination. The first aerial bombs, meanwhile, were manually dropped from an Italian plane onto Tagiura, an oasis outside of Tripoli, in 1911. The bomb redrew the lines of the battlefield, incorporating civilians and cities into the theatre of war in previously unimaginable ways. It was also a perfect technology of sublime violence. The people lying in wait below turned in terror toward the heavens, pacified—the colonial strategists hoped—by a combination of reverence and fear. A communiqué released by the Italian Air Force in the aftermath of that first fateful attack claimed that the bombing “had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs.”¹⁰ During the interwar period, the bomb was embraced by European imperial powers—most especially Britain—as an essential instrument of colonial governance. “Air control,” or terror from above, preserved the lives of imperial soldiers by targeting colonized noncombatants.

      In the metropole, the bomb carried both utopian and dystopian connotations. In the popular imagination, the potential it contained for mass destruction promised at turns planetary peace and the end of human (or European, or British) civilization. One common trope of early twentieth-century British science fiction imagined a “superweapon” that would cleanse the world of Anglo civilization’s last resistors. Another recurring sci-fi narrative gave expression to darker fantasies; in the latter genre, the inferior races appropriate the “superweapon” and bomb Britain into savagery and oblivion.¹¹ This nightmare inversion of the colonial order of things contradicted the Kantian assumption that “man in the raw” was incapable of actively mediating, and being redeemed by, the sublime.¹² It also prefigured contemporary terror politics and its attendant narrative frameworks. In contemporary popular culture and governmental discourse, the “terrorist” is simultaneously imagined as primitive, prior to the temporality of modernity, and as a potential exponent of the most sophisticated modern weaponry. Before September 11, many prominent members of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, more convinced by the Kantian formulation, thought such an attack ontologically impossible. In the spring of 2001, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Osama bin Laden as “this little terrorist in Afghanistan”—a “man in the raw,” in other words, whose natural habitat was a cave in Tora Bora. But

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