The Kantian sublime is a peculiarly contradictory aesthetic category. Aesthetics denotes ‘an effort to make sense of sense’ by way of the cultivation and analysis of affect, passion, imagination, and perception, an effort in which ‘taste’ is at once ‘corporeal sense’ or sensation and ‘aesthetic judgment’; the aesthetic, that is to say, is always already about body-feeling-thinking circuits.Footnote ¹ The sublime, for Kant, marks a disturbing limit-experience: it refuses to give itself to the senses, stunning and numbing the body instead. It exceeds comprehension, and can only be recuperable through distance, the reimposition of rational control (which is precisely not, for Kant at least, bodily judgment).Footnote ² But the strange and layered seduction of Angus Boulton's images of decaying Cold War military bases in the former German Democratic Republic lies not in the sublime but in the spectral. A darkly gentle aesthetic unfolds in these images, a kind of necro-erotic spectrality that takes as its very object the awesome machineries that were implicated in the production of the sublime violence and fear of the twentieth century, laying bits of those machineries before the spectator, bare, delicately exposed.

The allure of these images inheres, it strikes me, in the ways in which, in the exposition of some of the abandoned, not-yet-recolonised, detritus of the Cold War, the spectator can see and touch and sense and know more fully, precisely as dead, as detritus, than we ever could apprehend when the bases were alive. Through his lens, Boulton shapes a perspective whereby the spectator experiences the sensuousness of the visual, its tactility and broken, rotted floorboards, its tangibility and organic-metallic composites (almost like a child from a fairy tale, lost in the forest which always holds mysteries, dangers, allures; especially in ‘Bunker Entrance, Altes Lager,10/04/03’). The images are not violent, but patient and thorough and redolent. Distance expands and contracts; but the sense of approaching something somehow forbidden is enhanced by a certain distance always being maintained. These images elicit a peculiar sense of transgression, as the vastness of the Cold War itself is elliptically given up for sense and senses to grapple with.

Dead places are often haunted. Imagination accompanies, affective loops rebound, and the resonances and echoes of the absent, what Boulton calls the ‘trace of human presence,’ tugs.Footnote ³ Approaching the firing range through the sand, gun-fire echoes, a sharp silence, intermittent, but persistent, affectively interrupts the surface of the image, (see ‘Firing Range, Forst Zinna, 22.7.99’). Through the fracture: a negative exposure from imagination; mediated images flash, disappear, known from years of war movies (the crack, the twist, the jerk, the slow-motion fall of bodies). Approaching the bunker entrance, the gate appears suspended, a metallic aspect of the forest itself. Again, absence tugs, imagination imposes: would it have crackled with enough electricity to kill at a touch out of place? (And what's underneath, beyond the camera's perceptive apparatus?) But now (like the tree of iron that burns in the woods in Lantern Waste) the Bunker Entrance animates organic matter as a spectre that is at once at home, yet vividly out of joint.Footnote ⁴ What is dead and past does endure; the composition of images makes the superimposition of past and present tangible to perception, as one lives on in the other.

Affective allure also works through incongruity. Metal dissolves into the organic, the organic sharpens to metal; the firing range amidst the sandy dunes, where sparse trees offer meagre shade; and, inside the military installation that produced, and (not losing the specificity of the GDR) was itself produced by fear and violence, a basketball hoop – (‘Krampnitz I, 9.12.98’). Perhaps this incongruity allows a different kind of spectre to crystallise; at the very least, the Gymnasia shifts tone, from touching the exposed, now dead, sublime, to decoding its composition. Behind the sublime is a machinery, and a basketball hoop (whether as a way of fighting the cold war by fighting boredom among soldiers, or as a way of fighting the cold war by maintaining fitness, or by fighting the cold war by, what, parodying, perhaps? the game of the enemy); a basketball hoop is a part of that machinery. Incongruity here reveals not opposition, but the contiguity of the sublime to the boring. How could the awesomely, powerfully, overwhelming be maintained without the inscription of the sublimely boring in the minutiae of everyday life?Footnote ⁵

As I make an effort to make sense of these images, it strikes me that Boulton helps us refuse the moment of mastery so often associated with the sublime, especially as regards the representation of war, violence, and politics (the sublime ‘invite[s] its own dissolution,’ invites, that is, the attempt to yoke the stunning and incomprehensible back into the dominant categories of political order).Footnote ⁶ He does so by way of an absorbing expository strategy that turns back, confronts and surprises, its initial allure to decode the machineries that at once are the product of, and produce, circulations of violence; he resists mastery, that is, by the refusal to inscribe, however obliquely, a newly ordered reality.Footnote ⁷ His images inhabit the disjunctive untimeliness that allows our vexed and violent present to touch and mutually inhabit a (differently?) violent past. And here, after allure, ambivalence.

Ambivalence: decoding the ostensible sublime, rendering it sensible (but does sensible as sensate mean sensible as reasonable, manageable)? These images evoke mixed temporalities in mixed times. As Atwood writes, ‘I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time, but down through it, like water […] Nothing goes away’.Footnote ⁸ What happens, what crystallises, in the conjuncture of Boulton's images? The conjuncture is of a specific Cold War moment and a Now that is also shaped by sublime fear: a counter/terror that stuns, and that refuses a recuperative moment in the form of a Kantian political solution – Perpetual Peace – to a Kantian aesthetic problem – the sublime. Counter/terror, that is to say, is also future-bearing, and is shaping a stratum of possibilities that cannot be contained or controlled by Kantian geopolitical architecture.Footnote ⁹

Ghosts (like art) are ambivalent; both touch and seduce and disturb without control over the effect of their affect. But, as Walter Benjamin knew, spectral power fluctuates, wanes, and is manifest only in ‘moments of danger’ – those moments when the ‘immanent reality crying out to be brought into being’ is profoundly contested; moments like this one.Footnote ¹⁰ For utopians, even materialist, immanent ones such as Ernst Bloch, untimeliness is productive: ‘unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediated and fulfilled past in the future.’Footnote ¹¹ But I'm not so sure, and neither, I think, are these images. I don't know, finally, what the ghosts said; were they co-opted, complicit, scared? Or, ideologues, utopians, subversives? What of today's military installations that seek to secure a global order that Perpetual Peace can no longer comprehend never mind apprehend? Whose ghosts will echo through Guantanamo? Whose echoes will resonate in detention and rendition sites throughout the globe? Who will be disturbed by those echoes? And who will patiently, thoroughly, and hauntingly mark their traces?