File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2004/lyotard.0402, message 8


Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2004 08:53:48 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Discours Figure -  the aesthetic and the cultural


Eric/all

i am especially interested in the seperation suggested that 
aesthetics/culture should be considered seperately. But like anyone who 
arrived into these issues through structuralism, and post-structuralism 
especially the theory of ideology and the subject put forward by Screen, 
the willingness to seperate the two things is a difficult move to make 
and the resistance is great.... and nor is necessary to interpret 
Lyotard's postmodern sublime in that way for ... The "avant-garde task 
is to undo the spitirtual assumptions regarding time. The sense of the 
sublime is name of this dismantling..." (Lyotard)  What comes after the 
'modernist period'  can only be know  when there is an idea or concept 
that may be accompanied by a representation, a discourse that can be 
said and undestood to express it.  The sublime however always ensuures 
that the connection, the link between the concept and the representation 
is thrown into dissarray. This is what confirms the sublime as the 
"witness to indeterminacy"  in which thought is always a suspended 
judgement both in the history of representation or in which the common 
thought has become detached and ungrounded.  The return to the sublime, 
which is always postmodern in the sense  that Lyotard thinks of the 
postmodern, or if you wish our "modernity "  raises the questions - when 
did the artistic expression of the sublime begin to appear ? when did 
art renounce representation ? I have no desire or need to repeat 
Lyotard's (his)tory of the sublime,  but do think it is worthwhile to 
suggest that as Lyotard presents it: the experience of the sublime is 
external to history and that the (his)tory of philosophy is marked by 
the attempts to produce discourse adequate, just as the history of art 
is marked by attempts to represent it adequately.  The central concept 
of the sublime is its indeterminacy,  when we are face to face with an 
extraordinary object the subject is thrown into a  crisis, an 
epistemological break that disrupts the human ability to conceptualise 
and relate the object to the human imagining.  The sublime then is as 
Lyotyard suggests can only be thought without the aid of reason, for  
the human imagination cannot  produce adequate representations.

I think then that the sublime is precisely engaged with the aesthetic...

One general point the central aspect of modernity, the enlightenment was 
the turning of art away from representational art (of the human and/or 
the divine) towards the micrological investigation and expermentation of 
art itself,  the importance thus of FORM over content.

regards
s


Eric wrote:

>Steve wrote:
>
>
>I surmise then that we are in agreement that the Kantian turn has the 
>unfortunate side effect of seeming to be unable to address the very 
>areas of work, (esp popular culture) which are most engaged in the
>present.
>
>Steve,
>
>We are in agreement to the extent that a screwdriver can function as a
>hammer.
>
>Without getting caught in the trap of high and low, I think the
>aesthetic and the cultural are quite different categories, just as I
>think Lyotard's formulation of the sublime tends to be more ontological
>than aesthetic.  
>
>What tends to drive culture today is a contradictory dynamic. On the one
>hand, it aspires to art, meaning, gravitas, universal standards of
>truth. On the other hand, it needs to discover and exploit viable
>consumer markets, usually centered upon youth, that holy grail of the
>corporation. It must be commercial and profitable, even as it lifts us
>up. 
>
>It claims to enlighten as it grovels to entertain.  The recent Superbowl
>afforded us an excellent example of culture in action.  
>
>eric   
>
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