In 1984 Rockwell International bought the rights to use Ansel Adams’s photographs as advertisements. These images are usually presented in art school as examples of the sublime—however, the creative manager of Rockwell International detected a paradigmatic shift in the character and location of the sublime. Namely: that within the cultural imaginary, the sublime now also, or even more appropriately, accounted for the destruction produced by nuclear fusion weapons, the very same reaction taking place in the core of the Sun. As a result Rockwell International began to mix the sublime of nature and Yosemite in particular with the sublime of technology and tactical nuclear weapons in particular—while describing both, perhaps in order to ease the shift, as “national resources.” Such a shift in the character of the sublime can be read as a symptom of the Christian God, and of the Trinity’s mutation into a hydrogen bomb, as a new mutant object of faith and the exact image of our own becoming.
This initial demotion of the natural Sun also set the foundation for its subsequent reverse-engineering—where science would eventually define the Sun as functionally the same as thermonuclear weapons technology. What such a counterintuitive inversion implies (intuition would have culture/science follow nature, the Sun’s power preceding the bomb and not the anthropocentric vice versa) is that the Sun is not unique—and that given sufficient resources mankind could, by way of nuclear fusion, produce its own sun. Should we care to, of course!—and then we could do away with the Sun 1.0—Matrix style. We can see symptoms of this hubris in the various trends that set out to resist it: the raw food diet celebrates the Sun as the sole means of preparing food, while computer apps adjust the screen’s brightness to mimic shifts in daylight, and the Paleolithic diet has given way to a Paleo-lifestyle where people wake and work in sync with the Sun while using stone tools. What each of these trends reveal is a certain anxiety over the resilience of the natural Sun, when posed against the possibility of technological, man-made yet enlightened variants—although what these trends and their romantic embracers don’t recognize, just like the self-styled solar insurrectionaries, is that the Sun was technological from the get-go—already usurped, and always already a priest-slave to technology.
For example: Linkin Park named their album A Thousand Suns, like the rather perverse coffee table book of mushroom cloud images, and Otolith Group named their Fukushima film The Radiant.
The very profitable ubiquity of this now Westernized, neoliberalized, Lululemon version of sun salutations, a once traditional Hindu religious practice, is a clear symptom and consequence of Vishnu’s mutation into a nuclear weapon. When we perform our sun salutations on a sprung wooden floor in a Williamsburg yoga studio we no longer worship the natural Sun, and we certainly don’t have Vishnu, Shiva, or Krishna in mind as we move competitively from downward dog to cobra in our oil-based Lycra.