File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0205, message 68


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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