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>
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