Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 02:23:13 -0400
From: hugh bone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: The differance that makes a difference


All,

> Lyotard points out in this essay the major concern the sublime addresses
> is the underlying fear that the It happens does not happen, that it
> stops happening.

Such is destiny.  One morning eyes don't open.

I thought sublime was a feeling, awe, wonder, sometimes mixed with fear.

Steve wrote of "noise" in a way I construed as metaphor AND art.
One person's noise is another person's music - ask the kids.
And in Le Differend we learn silence "is" communication - like the
poor guy from a large family who had never slept alone til he married.

Also, I think we are mixing the many meanings of "information".
The everyday meaning of "information revolution", Shannon theory and
databanks, is not the meaning in bio-science.

Call the latter "nature's intelligence", which of course includes human
intelligence as a single species-instance.

The morphology of new life "forms" is information proliferating in
rapidly multiplying cells, starting, stopping growth of specialized
substances.

Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





> All
>
> I've been rereading Lyotard's essay  "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde"
> and he discusses the sublime as a kind of agitation that reminds me of
> Reg's point about Wolfram's Class rules.
>
> Lyotard points out in this essay the major concern the sublime addresses
> is the underlying fear that the It happens does not happen, that it
> stops happening.
>
> Here are a quote:
>
> "Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of
> delight.  Thanks to art, the soul is returned to an agitated zone
> between life and death, and this agitation was its life."
>
> Lyotard, in this essay, also makes the interesting point that there is
> something sublime in the capitalist economy.
>
> "Work ...is becoming devalorized, as work becomes a control and
> manipulation of information....the availability of information is
> becoming the only criterion of social importance.  Now information is by
> definition a short-lived element."
>
> "Strong information, if one can call it that, exists in inverse
> proportion to the meaning that can be attributed to it in the code
> available to the receiver.  It is like noise. "
>
> "It appears "the work of art is avant-gard to the extent that it is
> stripped of meaning.  Is it not then like a event?"
>
> "The secret of an artistic success, like that of a commercial success,
> resides in the balance between what is surprising and what is
> well-known, between information and code."
>
> "Through innovation, the will affirms its hegemony over time,  It thus
> conforms to the metaphysics of capital, which is a technology of time."
>
> "The avant-gardist task remains that of undoing the presumption of the
> mind with respect to time.  The sublime feeling is the name of that
> deprivation."
>
> Thus, it appears that if the sublime, like Kant's third critique,
> occupies a middle state, art must also be careful that is it not
> captured to serve the capitalist's interests of innovation as control
> over time. The line that exists here is a thin one.
>
> Also, art cannot be reduced to noise alone, as Steve has been
> maintaining, if I am understanding him correctly.  There is also the
> aspect of redundancy, of the code which creates a pattern between
> information and noise.
>
> It is in this middle ground that art happens. Thus, to paraphrase Reg:
>
>                      information - art - noise
>
> The sublime is related to time and the now of the sublime is that
> something is happening rather than the fear that nothing is or that
> there is merely banal innovation.
>
>