Subject: passibility: welcoming nuanced matter (fwd)
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 14:25:53 -0500 (EST)




> 
> "The avant-gardes in painting fulfill romanticism, i.e. modernity, which,
> in its strongest and recurrent sense, is the failure of stable regulation
> between the sensible and the intelligible. But at the same time they are a
> way out of romantic nostalgia because they do not try to find the
> unpresentable at a great distance, as a lost origin or end, to be
> represented in the subject of the picture, but in what is closest, in the
> very _matter_ of artistic work." (my emphasis, pg.126 _The Inhuman_)
> 
> 	Lyotard writes this in 'representation, presentation,
> unpresentable' just after a discussion of avant-garde painting's
> displacement of artistic activity taken as a cultural function (where
> taste is stabalized and comes to constitute an identifiable community
> through visible symbols). this distinction between artistic activity and
> cultural activity is a recurrent motif in Lyotard as much as the notion of
> "matter" which often is a synonym for tone, timbre, nuance and color. the
> question it seems has to do with how it is that an avant-garde practice of
> perception (aesthesis) opens us to the experience (Lyotard doesn't like
> this word mostly because he sees it as implying an interiorization of
> impressions, of the nuance of events in a memory constituting an identity)
> of matter, to an eruption of nuances? In 'After the Sublime: the State of
> Aesthetics' Lyotard writes : "it is hard to grasp a nuance in itself. and
> yet, if we suspend the activity of comparing and grasping, the
> aggressivity, the 'hands-on' [mancipium] and the negotiation that are the
> regime of the mind, then, through this ascesis (Adorno), it is perhaps not
> impossible to become open to the invasion of nuances, passible to timbre."
> (pg. 139. _The Inhuman_). On pg. 110 Lyotard writes that this passibility
> pressuposses a donation, it is the matter that gives food for reflection
> which can never calculate it for it is the big X in Kant and Being in
> Heidegger. Moreover, it is on this donation that Lyotard writes, "that we
> are going to construct our aesthetic philosophy and our theories of
> communication" What co-emerges with the given is a feeling which welcomes
> the given _immediately_, that is, without the mediation of concepts which
> come later. But notice that to welcome the given is itself a manner of
> giving that one has to look at closely, through Derrida's essays on the
> gift for instance. But what I wanted to indicate (all a phrase can ever
> do) was that this feeling is that of the sublime and "what Heidegger calls
> the retreat of being, retreat of donation." Anxiety comes to be just this
> feeling of the sublime which I don't want to get into right now because I
> am concentrating on the notion of recollection, meditative thinking, or
> passibility which brings into play nuances, or to go back to where I was
> before, the "small sensations" of Cezanne. Lyotard by the way becomes much
> more Stoic and in fact starts talking more in terms of anesthesia probably
> taking Kant's remarks in the _Critique of Judgement_ more seriously with
> regards to admiration (bewenderung) where ideas in their exhibition, or
> donation, harmonize without any aesthetic liking (see K272 _CoJ_).
> Cezanne's "small sensations" which are the pure occurrences of unexpected
> color in an event (this word Lyotard often links up with Heidegger's
> Ereignis(event-propriation)) where one is in debt not to forms but to
> "something", to the bare fact "that there is" some quality of chromatism,
> a color timbre. This recollection, or "ascetic attitude indicates a sort
> of conversion of the aims of art, which, I am tempted to say is not
> irrelevant to the question of the law... the goal is to become dependent
> on the "matter" hidden in the "data."" (_Peregrinations_ pg. 20)
>  
> And there I was interrupted,
> a-Tzu! excuse me
> 
> 
> -- 
>                                
>         
> 



--