Lyotard's favourite example of the sublime in avant-garde art is Barnett Newman, whose work seems to remind me of these gaps, silences, or incisions in communication. Lyotard's sublime is never separable from the silence of bearing witness.
2008-10-09
Lyotard and the sublime.
Speaking of the sublime, Lyotard says that it is the Now, the very Heideggerian moment of Happening, which is always inseparable from his idea of the Differend - the unspeakable, insurmountable silence or aporia. The incommunicable fact of witnessing or non-witnessing. The moment of the Now, in bearing witness, is always inaccessible, cut off. Can we experience the sublime?
Lyotard's favourite example of the sublime in avant-garde art is Barnett Newman, whose work seems to remind me of these gaps, silences, or incisions in communication. Lyotard's sublime is never separable from the silence of bearing witness.
Lyotard's favourite example of the sublime in avant-garde art is Barnett Newman, whose work seems to remind me of these gaps, silences, or incisions in communication. Lyotard's sublime is never separable from the silence of bearing witness.
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Burkean sublime, Kantian sublime, Lyotadiarn sublime, technological sublime (Leo Marx), post-industrial sublime (Dylan Trigg), digital sublime (Mosco) — the sublime seems to demand a prefix if we're going to try and talk about it, or give it historical or social scale. It seems to follow the logic: if a thing cannot be fixed in the ether, add or manipulate it until it stays where it should (it never does, but we try our best...). When the sublime occurs in the Now we don't need signification, description; 'the sublime' becomes homeless until memory gives it shelter; at the moment Now passes into Then.
So, do we experience the sublime? Of course we do, but the sublime is never the event itself.
Precisely. If anything, I think it's really important to draw dotted-lines between each prefixed-sublime and the others. That is, in so many ways Burkean sublime just reminds me of Lyotard, but isn't quite the same thing. And when I read Heidegger, the same thing happens. Clarity is of the utmost.
hi,
do you think Greenblatt's wonder would fit in as a successor of these sublimes? was it influenced by any of these concepts?
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