File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 77


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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