Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 21:44:35 -0500
From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Aesthetics as a super-model


Hugh

So nice to hear from you again, my old cyber-friend.  This group is like
exotic desert flowers who only come to life once every several years
after a sudden burst of spring showers.

Your comment reminds me of Barnett Newman's famous quip; Aesthetics is
to artists what ornithology is to birds.  Of course, that didn't stop
Newman himself, an artist, from engaging in his own aesthetic
theorizing.  One of his essays, The Sublime is Now, had a good deal of
influence on Lyotard himself.

Even you, while you attempt to privilege art over theory, still seem to
be operating with your own implicit theoretical assumptions.  When you
say that artists make art like bees make honey or trees make leaves, are
you arguing for some kind of biological determinism? Should our
scientists be searching for an art gene?

Personally, I do not see how Lyotard can be accused of setting up models
that attempt to limit the artistic freedom of artists.  He has always
argued for a very avant-garde conception of art. Asking the question
what is art? artists extend the boundaries of art in a very fluid way
and this has always been a basic premise with Lyotard.   His conception
of the sublime doesn't invoke nostalgia for some lost absolute, it
encourages experimentation and paralogical artistic moves.

However, beyond this advocacy of art, aesthetics is important for
philosophy because it is often the sole locus where the body emerges. 
Through reflective judgement, subjective feelings and the experience of
pleasure and pain, the philosopher comes to remember that he or she is
also made of flesh and blood.

Through various concepts such as the sublime, the figure, the event and
the differend Lyotard asks of philosophy again and again that it engage
in an anamnesis of the body.  He does not allow these systems of
representation to ever forget who it is we are in the moment of our
nakedness.

Thus, while it remains true for philosophy that aesthetics is not
everything, for those of us who are in the world and have been passed
over, denied, forgotten and obliterated; aesthetics is perhaps the only
truth that continues to matter.