TIAGO MESQUITA DE CARVALHO
The negative sublime and our post-apocalyptic landscapes
In this paper, I examine the aesthetic experience of contemporary landscapes through Günther Anders' concept of the Promethean Gap – the widening gap between humanity's technologically amplified capacity for action and our limited ability to imaginatively grasp, feel, or morally respond to its vast spatial and temporal consequences. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, imaginative haunting can bridge temporal gaps between past, present, and future. Drawing on Arnold Berleant's notion of the negative sublime and Cheryl Foster's distinction between ambient and narrative modes of environmental appreciation, I argue that certain landscapes today appear post-apocalyptic not primarily through overt destruction but through imaginative narratives that overlay perceptual surfaces with absent realities: deep geological time, lost cultural worlds, failed modernist futures, and looming anthropogenic threats.
I argue that post-apocalyptic landscapes serve as both monuments to lost meaning and omens that may prompt renewed awareness of finitude and powerlessness in the face of a technological destiny. To this end, I explore how ruins, industrial decay, rural depopulation (e.g., in Portugal and Spain), and extractivism scars serve as indices of slow-burning Anthropocene catastrophes provided by cultural apocalypses, economic uprooting, and uncontrollable technological forces. While ambient engagement often normalizes these scenes through everyday familiarity or playful reappropriation, a hermeneutic-narrative stance can evoke the negative sublime: an overwhelming terror and vulnerability arising from the realization of humanity's unintended, excessive power over nature and society, exceeding both imagination and rational containment. Ultimately, such experiences—haunted by spectral pasts and futures—offer potential for existential transformation (metanoia), fostering humility, dread, and moral imagination capable of dealing with the Promethean gap of our era.