File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 213


Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 12:45:11 -0500
From: Ingrid Markhardt <imark-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Trusting liars to lie


<html>
Perhaps get a hold of Lyotard's _The Inhuman_ for his sense(s) of the
sublime.<br>
Here is a very rough description of Lyotard's sublime, taken from that
book (from a paper of mine):<br>
<br>
<font size=1><x-tab>        </x-tab>In
<font size=1><i>The Inhuman</i><font size=1>, Lyotard, in his
articulation of the aesthetics of the sublime and its relationship to the
avant-garde, describes "the irreversible deviation in the
destination of art, a deviation affecting all the valencies of the
artistic condition" (TI 101) as primarily a deviation taking its
impetus from the <font size=1><i>Ereignis</i><font size=1>, the
occurrence, the event--or, put negatively, in Burke's sense, from a
spiritual terror of privation of the happening:  ". . .the
sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening"
(99).  Other features of the sublime, the disarming of thought
through an agitation of indeterminacy  with regard to "what
is", the shift in the position of the artist as sender to artist as
involuntary addressee and the consequent supplanting of didactic forms
(poetics and rhetoric) by aesthetics (99), the importance of the
marvelous, monstrous, formless, imperfect, shocking as vectors of intense
aesthetic feeling--all contribute to the <font size=1><i>"Is it
happening?"</i><font size=1> of the sublime.  The Kantian
notion of negative presentation stands apart, for Lyotard, in that he
sees the <font size=1><i>"Is it happening?"</i><font size=1> as
fundamentally a question of time, which is not an explicit part of Kant's
problematic (99).  Lyotard believes that the <font size=1><i>here
and now</i><font size=1> of Newman's sense of the sublime marks the
question holding the contradictory feelings of anxiety and joy in
suspension, awaiting the possibility of nothing happening 
(92).  Moreover, this <font size=1><i>here and now</i><font size=1>
announces "the displacement in which consists the whole of the
difference between romanticism and the `modern' avant-garde"
(93).  This is a displacement of the fundamental task of
romanticism, of "bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness
to the inexpressible"  (93).   The difference lies in
that what is inexpressible is not some other thing, being, time or place
rendered through the work, but what
<font size=1><i>happens</i><font size=1>, the event of the work itself
<font size=1><i>is</i><font size=1> the inexpressible:<br>
<br>
"Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and
that's what is sublime.  Letting go of all grasping intelligence and
of its power, disarming it, recognizing that this occurrence of painting
was not necessary and is scarcely foreseeable, a privation in the face of
<font size=1><i>Is it happening?</i><font size=1> guarding the occurrence
before being on one's guard, before `looking'
[<font size=1><i>regarder</i><font size=1>] under the aegis of
<font size=1><i>now</i><font size=1>, this is the rigour of the
avant-garde." (93)<br>
<br>
</font><font size=3>Ingrid<br>
><br>
>Before I go to the Dictionary, I'll venture that the
"sublime" is <br>
>beauty and terror, fear and wonder, emotional transport beyond
any<br>
>previous experience<br>
><br>
>Hugh<br>
> </font></html>


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005