Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 15:11:32 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: Trusting liars to lie


What is your paper, Ingrid?
..Lois Shawver

Ingrid Markhardt wrote:
> 
> Perhaps get a hold of Lyotard's _The Inhuman_ for his sense(s) of the
> sublime.
> Here is a very rough description of Lyotard's sublime, taken from that
> book (from a paper of mine):
> 
>         In The Inhuman, 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 Ereignis, 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 "Is it happening?" of the sublime.  The Kantian
> notion of negative presentation stands apart, for Lyotard, in that he
> sees the "Is it happening?" as fundamentally a question of time, which
> is not an explicit part of Kant's problematic (99).  Lyotard believes
> that the here and now 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 here and now 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 happens, the event of the work
> itself is the inexpressible:
> 
> "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
> Is it happening? guarding the occurrence before being on one's guard,
> before `looking' [regarder] under the aegis of now, this is the rigour
> of the avant-garde." (93)
> 
> Ingrid
> >
> >Before I go to the Dictionary, I'll venture that the "sublime" is
> >beauty and terror, fear and wonder, emotional transport beyond any
> >previous experience
> >
> >Hugh
> >