Figures for new frontiers,from Davy Crockett to cyberspace gurus

Figures of public discourse and imagination such as Davy Crockett model novel subjectivities and participate in the constitution of new frontiers‐ In the nineteenth century, figures like Crockett embodied the virtues and vices of combining with nature in speech and deed, while in the twentieth century figures such as cyberspace gurus, images of subjectivity from economic and social theory, and popular culture display the virtues and vices of combining with the “second nature” of commodities and computers. Engaging new frontier discourses and their characteristic rhetorical ornaments across time, this essay situates figures of speech and culture between the sublime and the ridiculous, pious awe and impious ridicule, and critiques the representative attitudes they cultivate for publics. The fundamental characteristic of a democratic aesthetic as it has been historically realized and imagined, and of which Crockett is an intriguing representative, may be its figural hybridizing of these two rhetorics, sublime/awe and ridicule/impiety.