Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 10:27:55 EST
Subject: Re: presentation, representation


You raise an interesting problem for discussion here.  Lyotard is definitely
using Kantian terms, but in a critical way that wants to overcome Kant’s
notion of the subject and replace it with the phrase, the differend.  The
terms Lyotard uses are similar, but the orientation is different.

I think that Kant 1 (p. 61-65 The Differend) is relevant to the discussion
here.  Lyotard begins by stating: “Metaphysical illusion consists in treating
a presentation like a situation.  The philosophy of the subject lends itself
to this.”

The implies a criticism of Kant.  However, first of all, let’s look at the
discussion going on in this section.  It is important to understand that
Kant’s notion of the subject is both active and passive.  Through sensation,
the subject receive impressions that are particular.  It act as an addressee.
This is never a simple given because the subject is also active insofar as it
imposes the forms of intuition (such as space and time) upon the sensation.
It brings about what Lyotard describes as an ostentive function situating the
impressions in space and time relative to the subject.  There is thus a
differend between sensation and intuition.

This leads to the discussion of presentation, what Kant calls the Darstellung.
To a certain extent, this is a doubling of what was described above.   Here,
presentation is not a simple ostentation, “but the bridging of intuition with
conception.”  As Lyotard points out:  “the Kantian Darstellung is not at all a
presentation of a phrase universe.  It is the conjunction of two phrases from
different regimes.... More generally, presentation supposes a capacity for
finding the example or the case which fits the rule, or for finding it without
a rule.”

This latter case has both moral and aesthetic instances.  In the case of
morality, it would mean finding the right action without any guidance aside
from the moral law itself (be just!).  In the case of aesthetics,  it results
from the aesthetic feeling which declares an object beautiful or sublime from
a harmonious or impossible relationship between the faculty of conceiving and
the faculty of having objects. (This latter faculty of presentation, Kant
terms the imagination.)

Darstellung is “an ajoining, conjoining, a setting side by side, a comparison,
between an established or unknown rule and an intuition. Thus, the
presentation does not come from anywhere besides the subject.  It is the
display of heterogeneous faculties, phrases subject to different regimes and
genres."

This leads to the conclusion.  “The subject cannot have presentations, but
only representations, not in a theatrical sense where a representation comes
in the place of an absent object, but rather in the juridical sense where the
“faculties’ keep making representations, remonstrances, or grievances to each
other.”

“With Kant, a Dastellung is not a presentation, it is a situating.  The
repression of presentation by representation (situation) is permitted and
encouraged by the doctrine of the faculties, and finally by the metaphysics of
the subject.”

I simply want to raise the question here.  What would Lyotard’s answer to this
implied critique of Kant and the metaphysics of the subject be?  How would
presentation which is not a situating be possible?

A final note regarding the sublime.  For Kant this is not to be found in the
object, in the way that the beautiful may be found.  Instead, it is an
aesthetic response to the conflict of the faculties.  Just one example must
suffice here.  Reason has an idea of the infinite which is of a higher order
that anything the faculty of the imagination is capable of presenting.
Nonetheless the imagination strives to present or find examples of the
infinite, only to end in failure and frustration.  It is in this very failure
or negative result that the sublime is to be found.  To present the
unpresentable is to engage an aethetics of failure.  Beckett knew this long
ago.