From: EricMurph <EricMurph-AT-aol.com> Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 20:48:29 EST Subject: Re: presentation, representation Hugh, A couple of points regarding your last post. I wasn't particularly aware of engaging in definitions or infinite regression. I was merely attempting to explicate a section of "The Differend." I find this section somewhat difficult because Lyotard uses Kantian terminology in an effort to develop a critique as well as imply that the concept of the differend implies a fresh approach to the same materials. I am concerned that your approach oversimplifies a relationship which is complex in both Kant and Lyotard in orderto return to a unified "subject." Ink blots may "present" information, but the need for their interpretation directly involves the conflict between intuition and concept that Lyotard discuss. Thus, it is not a case of simple presentation , but a case of conflicting and heterogeneous differends. The case is similar with regard to art. To call art a language and then stress that artists present things from their inner worlds is to engage a communication/expressionist/humanistic model of art. My concern is that this definition tends to be too restrictive. On-the-edge art, or what Lyotard continues to call the avant-garde, is, I believe, the attempt to go beyond precisely this model. Doesn't the c/e/h model, in fact, provide the ideological basis for culture, that Western system of representations that evokes a false totality? Which in turn creates the need for an art which precisely does not express the subjective (soul) but evokes what cannot be remembered and cannot be forgotten. The assorted powers may deny but they cannot efface. Isn't it required that art today be "inhuman" in order that humanity not be lost?
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