Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 21:42:11 -0600 From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: In the zone Reg, Steve, Walter, Glen, Hugh, All: Here is the quote I promised Reg from Lyotard, "There is no sublime object. And if there is a demand for the sublime, or the absolute, in the aesthetic field, it stands to be disappointed. When commerce latches on to the sublime, it converts it into the ridiculous. Nor is there some aesthetics of the sublime, since the sublime is a sentiment that draws its bitter pleasure from the nullity of the aisthesis. A sorrow felt before the inconsistency of every object, it is also the exultation of thought passing beyond the bounds of what may be presented. The 'presence' of the absolute is the utter contrary of presentation. The sign it makes escapes semiotics as it does phenomenology, although it emerges as an event on the occasion of the presentation of a phenomenon that is otherwise sensible and sensed." This quote appears in the essay "The Zone" in "Postmodern Fables." What Lyotard calls the zone is contained in the margins of the city, the suburbs, and what is characteristic of the contemporary metropolis is its tendency to obliterate borders - inside and out. To live in the city is to live nowhere because today the Urbs have become the Orbs. Lyotard compares this condition to philosophy itself. "Philosophy is not in the city, it is the city in the process of thinking, and the city is the agitation of thought that seek its habitat even though it has lost it, and has lost nature." Lyotard points to the fact that as the development of the metropolis progresses, style and aesthetics become paramount. He distinguishes between the artistic and the cultural. The latter is strategic. It manipulates the desire for development and makes all politics aesthetic (the society of the spectacle, if you will). The result is to turn culture itself into a kind of museum (like Benjamin's arcades); one that is filled with interesting objects, fascinating because of their style. Aesthetics brands the world with its rule of the imaginary, a price tag upon the lack. Lyotard points out these various modernisms of both culture and the metropolis are all humanisms; religions of Man. What is most characteristic about their theology is that Man becomes Man only by what exceeds him. Development co-mingles with the interesting in an orgy of innovation, under the neon sign of capitalism. Against this, Lyotard opposes the artistic and philosophy. The artistic resists the cultural because it recognizes the imaginary as the denial of desire. Art signals what the spectacle hides. Philosophy too finds its own form of resistance in looking upon culture and the metropolis in a manner that is "squint-eyed." It remains "impassive before the seductions of the aestheticizing megalopolis, but affected by what they conceal in displaying it: the mute lament of what the absolute lacks." Here is where I take issue with Steve's comment that the spectacle has superceded the sublime. In truth, the spectacle only succeeds as a parody of totality. What is hides, distorts, forgets, ignores, obliterates is what art and philosophy must ferret out by looking at the world askew. Reg gives two examples that seem to sublimate the terror in an appropriate way and he speaks of an artful silence that is the closest we can get to the 'is it happening', the monstrous if of an unformed, unpredictable future. Of course, many other gestures are still possible in this dance of Shiva the world has become. Beyond the aesthetics of the spectacle, the sublime remains as the "exultation of thought", the reminder that what is not there remains important. The rabbit hole within the world that goes all the way down. The megalopolis today undergoes permanent renovation in a way that resembles a computer virus. Under such conditions, philosophy can no longer hope to achieve an architecture or lasting edifice, unless it hopes in some Nietzchean fashion to create with a jack hammer, busting up the concrete in tatters all around it. Philosophy shouldn't lament in some melancholy fashion the loss of its architecture and the destiny of ruins. Instead it should create Bilbaos that deconstruct themselves; made of industrial materials that gleam in the night. Philosophy and art laugh amid their own agitated chaos, sharing secrets that can't be told, seeing the world through ebony mirror-shaded spectacles, and sending out smoke signals to the aliens yet to be. The question remains of course how do we make a politics of this, beyond the spectacle, some alternative to what Lyotard calls the strange style of the "precarious and the comfortable." eric
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