Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 12:31:42 -0800
Subject: Re: presentation, representation


EricMurph wrote:

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REPLY:

This is a very careful analysis.  But it is also a reminder of the
infinite regression of definitions.

I suggest the following approach to the "unpresentable", at first 
thought an oxymoron:

Words and phrases are a primary means of presentation/communication.
Lyotard's concept of feeling a need for words and phrases beyond our 
vocabulary, our ability to "say", brings us to the idea of the
"unpresentable".

But there is the language of sight, image, the visual arts, and the 
language of music and the audio arts.  

The interpretation of ink blots and other images by patients suffering
from mental illness "presents" information to psychiatrists.

Thus, creations of abstract painters, and on-the-edge musicians, may be
considered as presentations from their inner worlds, of a reality
"unpresentable" in words.

Hugh

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> 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.