A&C 10: Lyotard's Postmodern Sublime

Lyotard's interpretation of sensus communis differs significantly from Ferry's consensualism, as it rules out the possibility of achieving a dialogical exchange that could unify the community. This is because aesthetic judgement, which is the origin of such ’sensus’, is not based on concepts and consequently cannot lead to discursively shareable social projects. As Lyotard puts it:

‘What can communitas be which isn’t knitted into itself by a project ... Which has no Idea of what it wants to be and must be? Not having the Idea of its unity even as a horizon?’(‘Sensus Communis’ 5).

Lyotard concedes that sensus communis implies an ‘appeal to the other’ because although it doesn’t require concepts, dialogue or argument, it expects social confirmation. (‘Sensus Communis’ 15). But, he points out that this should not be taken as proof of humanity’s inclination toward the communitarian:

‘it is said that taste prepares, or helps, sociability. However, Kant writes very clearly: ‘This interest that indirectly attaches to the beautiful through our inclination to society, and consequently is empirical, is of no importance for us now.’ (‘Sensus Communis’ 19)

Lyotard also contends that aesthetic experience excludes not just a unified community but also a unified subject. To support this claim, he draws a somewhat strained analogy between Kant’s idea of sensus communis as the voice of the community and the ‘chorus’ of the faculties whose harmonious accord is the basis of the subject’s judgments of taste-

‘The sensus communis is therefore a hypotyposis: it is a sensible analogon of the transcendental euphony of the faculties ... There is no assignable community of feeling, no affective consensus in fact’ (‘Sensus Communis’ 24).

This harmonious ‘chorus’ of the faculties is not a manifestation of the unity of the experiencing subject:

‘The pleasure in the beautiful isn’t an experiencing by an already constituted and unified subject’ (‘Sensus Communis’ 20).

Lyotard states that the coming together of the faculties in the judgement of taste constitutes an ‘event’ that befalls consciousness and, as such, does not require the temporal and subjective unity provided by an experiencing ‘I’. This is a complex point that needs unpacking. In the first Critique, Kant argued that all our thoughts are accompanied by an implicit ‘I think’ that provides the unity of the consciousness of the thinking subject over time. Temporal continuity and subject identity are, therefore, inextricably linked. But, aesthetic experience is not temporal as it has no before or after, the pleasure of the beautiful befalls us when we encounter something beautiful. Hence, no time = no subject. However, Lyotard suggests that the aesthetic entails a subject and a community in the process of emerging. But this nascent state can only exist as it lingers suspended in a perpetual present because aesthetic judgment is intrinsically indeterminate and thus perpetually open.

Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant’s sensus communis is radically anti-foundationalist: the aesthetic is neither grounded on an anthropological base, such as common humanity nor on a transcendental subject, like the Kantian ‘I think’. Being devoid of subject and community, the aesthetic experience is, in Lyotard’s words, ‘bare’ and ‘miserable’ but also:

‘A region of resistance to institutions and establishment’ (‘Sensus Communis’ 25).

To understand why this is the case, one needs to consider Lyotard's discussion of the concept of the postmodern sublime in texts such as The Postmodern Explained to Children and The Inhuman. In these works, the sublime is presented as an avant-garde principle and is set in opposition to what Lyotard calls ‘realism’. Such realism comes in two forms: the totalitarian academicism favoured by Fascist and Stalinist regimes - for example, Socialist Realism - and the capitalist kitsch prevalent in liberal democracies. Referencing the third Critique, Lyotard states that totalitarian academicism suppresses the indeterminacy of aesthetic judgement to enforce fixed principles and criteria for artistic production and interpretation. Capitalist kitsch, conversely, results from the dominance of market forces indifferent to aesthetic value. The cynical ‘realism’ of the marketplace is as oppressive of creative experimentation as the ‘command culture’ of totalitarian regimes (this view echoes similar pronouncements by Clement Greenberg and Theodore Adorno).

For Lyotard, totalitarian academicism and capitalist kitsch are two faces of a fraudulent ‘realism’ intended to hide the ‘loss of reality’ characteristic of modernity. This loss stems from the modern dominance of the cult of efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Increasing efficiency is not put at the service of bettering the human condition but becomes a self-legitimising goal for the achievement of which human authenticity is sacrificed. Lyotard claims that such ideology of efficiency for efficiency’s sake is a historical manifestation of the crisis of traditional criteria for the validation of knowledge systems hitherto provided by the ‘grand narratives’, a thesis he famously discussed in The Postmodern Condition. Performativity is thus a parody of classic ‘grand narrative’ goals such as the progress of humanity, the emancipation of the proletariat or the unfolding of the universal Spirit.

The cultural and artistic production of totalitarian regimes and the capitalist culture industry hides the alienating effects of the market and bureaucratic oppression by promoting forms of aesthetic and epistemological pseudo-realism that are just vehicles of ‘reality effects’ or ‘reality ghosts’ that paper over the loss of authentic human values. Lyotard argues that realism is based on social consensus and aims at securing social unity and uniformity. In reacting against this situation, the ‘agonistic’ ethos of the postmodern avant-garde represents a progressive challenge to consensus aesthetics and its spurious claim to ‘realistic’ representativeness.

The originality of Lyotard’s account of the postmodern avant-garde stems from his reinterpretation of Kant’s theory of the sublime. In his view, the unpresentable ‘absolute’ of the Kantian sublime is nothing but the unifying horizon of human experience that, in previous times, was provided by the grand narratives. The aesthetics of the sublime underpins the activities of progressive avant-gardes in that it testifies to the demise of the grand narratives and, by so doing, unmasks conservative attempts to deny such loss by promoting a realist aesthetics based on consensus and communicability.

At the level of artistic production, the difference between the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’ - which Lyotard does not regard as chronologically separate - hinges on their different approaches to such unpresentable. ‘Modern’ art acknowledges the unpresentable but only in part; it makes it the content or subject matter of the work but does not allow it to affect its formal/linguistic structure. This means that the epistemological ‘loss of the real’ is the subject matter of artworks created through formal, linguistic and technical means that are still representational. In postmodern art, on the other hand, the unpresentable affects the signifier or the ‘form’ of the work as well as its content (Postmodern Explained 15). This approach inevitably leads to the radical and ongoing processes of formal experimentation that characterise avant-garde practices. The aim is to arrive at a negative ‘presentation’ of the unpresentable through a systematic undermining of representational forms and the creation of works that express the pathos of the failure of such a presentation.

The postmodern sublime’s rejection of both instrumental and communicative rationality amounts to a defence of the specificity of the aesthetic against any form of sublation by the discursive and the theoretical. However, it is easy to see that this approach is not conducive to easy accessibility as the avant-garde sublime undermines dialogical exchange and the ‘efficient’ transmission of information.

References

Lyotard, Jean-François.

• The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georger Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Print.

• The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University, 1984. Print.

• The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence, 1982–1985. Trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. London: Turnaround, 1992. Print.

• ‘Answering the question: what is the postmodern’. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence, 1982–1985. Trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993. 1-17. Print.

• ‘Sensus Communis’. Judging Lyotard. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 1992. 1–25. Print.

• The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998.Print.