Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 23:13:19 +0100 From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com> Subject: sublime, kant and old notes or the return of facism Plotics Old notes... however in an attempt to shift discussions forward in thes deeply politicised times. (thoughts of fascists being deeply pertinent in europe at present) - the struggle between right and left appearing on the front pages as a general response to the anti-globalisation movement - or does anyone imagine it isn't connected? The dutch and french aesthetic experiments with new-fascisms how should they be 'read' - as a differend or an invitation to violence? was the person who killed the dutch gay fascist simply psychotic or obeying hitler's imperative? Hegel But whilst asking the question and after reading a couple of interesting novels recently I was particularly interested in the collapse of communication and also thought the question of Kant/differend/Lyotard and Lyotards relationship to Hegel might be explored. Sublime The question remains open about the placing of meaning in communication and of course art. With the inclusion of the latter we shift ground towards Lyotard's relations with Kant. "....In the conflict surrounding the word communication, it is understood that the work, or at any rate anything which is recieved as art, induces a feeling - before inducing an understanding - which, constituitively and therefore immediately, is universally communicable, by definition. Such a feeling is thereby distinguishable from a merely subjective preference. This communicability as a demand and not as a fact, precisely because it is assumed to be originary, ontological, eludes communicational activity, which is not a receptiveness but something which is managed, which is done. This in my view is what governs out problematic of.... 'art and postmodernity'... This, as it is developed in the Kantian analysis of the beautiful is well and truly 'anterior' to communication in the sense of theories of communication, which includes communicative pragmatics... This assumed communicability which takes place immediately in the feeling of the beautiful, is always presupposed in any conceptual communication..." The Inhuman P109. Art in this sense is understandable as the noise, the excess which constitutes the whole which is greator than the elements. The forms of encoding are irrelevant which such a framework of thought, whether digital, analogue, hexadecimal it does not matter, all that matters is the feeling of sublimity. For this is what constitutes the excess of aesthetic judgement. For Lyotard argues quite concisely (in agreement with Kant) that art cannot and should not be judged through psychological, social, political or even anthropological methods of definition. To judge art through the latter is to accord it no special status but perhaps the status that we accord it is rightly challenged by the foregrounding of the technique of production which we can percieve in contemporary works of art. The 20thC work bears the traces of the techniques of production. Not only in the immediate contemporary works, because I am also thinking of Walter Benjamin here, but also because any industrial or informational era reproduction pays (economic reference deliberate) its respects to the problematic of 're-presentation' - for in Kant and perhaps Lyotard in consequence, aesthetic feeling and the sublime assumes that there is loss between the immediate presentation of the work and the 're-presentation' of informational representation. sublime regards and best s
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