ABSTRACT
The containment element is confusing because, although covered and contained, the area remains vast and beyond our grasp. Paul Crowther, in unpacking the Kantian sublime, identifies the “artefactual sublime” to account for the sublime that arises “when some vast or mighty man-made product makes vivid the scope of human artifice”. The modern subject finally ingests nature as an external reality until it is substituted by the aesthetics of “cognitive mapping” in the late capitalist system if people follow Jameson’s suggestion in this regard. It is not nature that requires mapping anymore, for nature has disappeared for all practical purposes. The steady substitution of nature as the awe-inspiring cause of the sublime, with technology, can be traced amongst other developments to the technological sublime or American sublime. The shift from nature to technology in thinking about the sublime is not unique to North America.
