From the mystical to the algorithmic sublime: withdrawal and verifiable shortage in AI-generated images

Abstract AI-generated images are usually theorised against photography, as the end of the index or of the photographic; what they cancel, however, has a closer precedent in painting. Twentieth-century painting, culminating in Suprematism, made the withdrawal of the object its programme; generative images carry out the same withdrawal by other means, not as a consequence of that programme but as its translation into a statistical apparatus. Read together, the two cases show what the sublime depends on. In Lyotard's rereading of Burke, the sublime is conditioned on privation, whose core form is the threat that nothing might happen; applications of the category to generative images that invoke scale and unsurveyability substitute its outward marks for its determination. Through close readings of Newman's Onement I and Malevich's sequence from the Black Square to the blank canvas, set against theories of the index and latent space, this article proposes verifiable shortage as a criterion: a cancellation amounts to privation only if it registers as a shortage in what remains. Newman retained scale, viewing distance, the beholder's body and a set of theological references; Suprematism removed them one by one until no recipient was left, yet the shortage remained identifiable throughout. This configuration, in which the unpresentable is pushed beyond speech and image while both ends of the relation stay in place, is termed the mystical sublime. Generative images cancel more thoroughly but leave no shortage. The causal guarantee of the index withdraws while its outward forms remain, a condition termed the statistical index; what diffusion subtracts has been named noise in advance; and on the side of viewing there is neither a position to occupy nor a statement that can be formed. In the resulting configuration, the algorithmic sublime, cancellation proceeds and the sublime's outward forms remain intact while its condition of occurrence has lapsed. It is not a new form of the sublime but the sublime in failure.