A nineteenth-century journalist writing in the August 1847 issue of Scientific American declared that technological innovation was nothing less than ‘reaching up after our divine title, “lords of the creation” […] It is truly a sublime sight to behold a machine performing nearly all the functions of a rational being’. This familiar claim identifies technical creativity as a near-mystical power, which could elevate machines to the status of sentient beings, and inventors to the status of gods. However, the anonymous journalist was actually harnessing this hyperbolic rhetoric to accentuate the ‘sublime sadness’ of ‘poor inventors’ who had been ridiculed, impoverished and exploited while others profited from or ignored their expertise.As I have argued throughout this book, unearthing the wider contexts of the technological sublime not only exposes the potent grip that its servile dialectics exert on the Western imagination, but also the bathetic contexts of their articulation in culture, which are often occluded or repressed by their sublime counterparts. Despite (or perhaps even because of) the interventions of the techno-bathetic avant-gardes, alternative narratives about socio-technical relations in the West have struggled to come into being. Few authors illustrate the dynamics of these transductive processes more powerfully than Ralph Ellison in the penultimate chapter of Invisible Man. After locating his underground refuge, Invisible flies into a rage after discovering the extent to which Brother Jack has manipulated him. Eventually Invisible collapses and enters a fugue state, and his ensuing hallucination bolts his bildung onto the longue durée of the American Machine Age, and the racially valenced transduction of the technological sublime.

Configuring American history as a ‘river of black water’ running near ‘an armored bridge’ that ‘arched sharply away to where I could not see’, Invisible imagines himself lying prostrate, tortured by a group of his antagonists, including Brother Jack, ‘all of whom had run’ and deceived him. As ‘they came forward with a knife’, he feels ‘the bright red pain’ as they castrate him. They take ‘two bloody blobs’ of the flesh that remained of his testicles ‘and cast them over the bridge’ where they hang ‘dripping down through the sunlight into the dark red water’.