Buying the Wilderness Experience: The Comodification of the Sublime

This study examines some of the implications of guided wilderness trips against the theoretical framework of the sublime as Kant sets out in the Critique of Judgment. In particular, it focuses on the role of professional guides as providers of distancing protection from wild and dangerous nature—at the same time as they attempt to facilitate a possible aweinspiring encounter with nature in its wild otherness. This exercise of power by capital makes the guide an odd locus of power dynamics—at once the site of complicity and resistance. Guides help generate revenue for industry, but they also may use their position to critique industry’s fable of human domination over nature.