Dissipating in the sublime: recovering our mattered vitality in the modern environmental movement, American ski culture, and the psychedelic counterculture for a posthuman ethic

Abstract

Dissipating in the Sublime is a project of paradox: I argue that we need to lose our minds to develop an environmental conscience. I target the mind/body dualism at the heart of Western ideology by examining the phenomenon of dissipating in the sublime, which occurs when particularly lively and agentic matter overwhelms the seemingly bounded individual with such extreme affective force that the constructed boundaries between the mind and body temporarily evaporate to produce a material, posthuman, collective, intra-active subjectivity: the mindbody. This subjectivity embodies the contact zone of mind/body and feels the materiality of the immaterial, the nonhumanity of the human, the leakiness of the borders, and the flow of becoming-with the posthuman community. Understanding the seemingly immaterial, intangible, and ineffable components of the human condition, like cognition, as material phenomena – while admittedly risking existential crisis – is necessary to understanding how to truly exist as material beings in a material world. I focus not on the vitality of matter, but on the materiality of vitality. I approach this research through the lens of new materialism, environmental justice, and feminism, and focus on three sociological trends in the United States that contain sublime dissipation: the modern environmental movement, American ski culture, and the psychedelic counterculture. The literary archive ranges from the non-anthropogenic to the wildly affective to the wondrously speculative, including the most innovative forms as well as the most traditional. The diversity of the archive speaks to the disorienting attempt to reconcile material embodied knowledge with rational thought. Dissipating in the sublime becomes a theoretical framework for reading both the experiences and the literature of sublime dissipation in more productive ways, effectively cultivating a non-anthropocentric and posthuman onto-epistemology and extending the limits of human ethical obligation.