Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 00:52:34 -0800
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: presentation, representation


EricMurph wrote:
> 
> 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.
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Eric,

I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I don't have enough
knowledge of the meanings Kant or Lyotard intended to interpret either
their words or your comment.  

Words and the words which interpretthem lead to endless interpretation.  

If addressor and addressee don't understand
the other's intended meaning how can they know what they are talking
about, or whether they agree?  
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> 
> 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?
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Maybe for you it does.

Artists are situated in culture; their interaction with
culture produces their art, which may be imitative of previous or avant
garde art or may not.  In other words the artist may have found visual
devices which express what needs, wants, to be expressed.  

This, is somewhat analogous to the human being endowed with language
finding the words, phrases (previously non-existent) to express a
feeling previously inexpressible.

Visual art, like literary art, gets its meaning from the viewer or 
reader. Artists explanation of their intentions (even a poet
or novelist commenting on their own work) have little bearing on
the reaction of readers/viewers.  

In this sense the artist, the subject, soul or whatever, dead or 
alive is irrelevant for the art experience.  
I guess we've all seen art we can't remember and art we can't forget.
Could be the same picture.  I remember, you forget, or vice versa. 
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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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The most "inhuman" painting I ever saw was of an execution in
Spain during the Napoleonic war.  Have we lost "humanity" since?
Yes, in the U.S. Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Two World Wars and other 
wars too numerous to mention.

Cheers,
Hugh