Of course, I don't know for sure what Lyotard felt that day twenty years ago, but it was something big and related to challenge. In any case, the philosopher has left us a very important art-theoretical text about this experience, namely The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, a text that meticulously describes the moment when the mind is pressed inwards into its aesthetic experience, which is to say that it no longer plays with some kind of reliable form or transmits its experience thereof, more or less filtered by the ability of the understanding to form propositions but, rather, does the opposite. In the presence of the sublime, the experience is turned inwards, the imagination's ability to form images is burst like a membrane, while the utmost the intellect can do is to stand there stammering. Thus the mind's ability to get the imagination and the understanding to work together during aesthetic experiences lands in a crisis, so that the mind looks down into its own abyss, which, incidentally, may be monochrome. Let me leave my explanation - a little biography, a little art theory - while (1.) begin all over again with Lyotard's oeuvre and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790|1793).

The Analytic of the Sublime

Lyotard's aesthetic theory, then, falls into two mutually fairly independent parts, each of which was conceived as an independent aesthetics. The first part is libidinal and is based on an economy of the drives depending on an interpretation of Freud; the second is transcendental and is founded on an interpretation of Kant's aesthetic judgement. Even though there was no programme for Lyotard's work after the publication of his great commentary on Kant's aesthetics Leçons sur l'Analytique du sublime (1991), (Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 1991), a subsequent task, according to Lyotard, was to have been a theory of the unarticulated, that is of the affects that cannot be presented or, indeed, even questioned without being violated. The article L'inarticulé ou le différend même (The Unarticulated or the Dispute Itself) and the little book Gestus (Gesture) constitute the draft version of such a theory, and it is probably not wrong to assume that the theory of the unarticulated would also have sought to define a passage or transition from the libidinal economy to transcendental aesthetics and, first and foremost, to the latter's analysis of the sublime. No one knew better than Lyotard that such a transition must pass along a narrow and difficult path. In his book on the conflict or the dispute, Le différend (1983), he had, among other things, tried to define the kind of sentences that contain so much event-dependence or significance that they cannot be »phrased«, that is to say, be translated into communication, into transmittable sentences with sender and receiver positions.

This problem of transmittability is also present in the theory of the sublime. For, in contrast to the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, which stimulates the mind to a feeling of free play between the imagination and the understanding and thereby unites the subject with a kind of criterion of a positive, qualitative and communicable nature, there are problems involved in establishing a measuring rod in connection with the experience of the sublime. The Latin expression »in sublime ferri«, to be raised on high, literally »above the threshold«, e.g., for the understanding, suggests the sharp and divisive character of these problems.

The Latin noun sublime|sublimis thus suggests height, exaltation, even airiness, while the adjective sublim's, besides its sense of exalted and almost haven-borne, was used already in Antiqualy in the more free sense of brilliant (or renowned). The word was reintroduced into aesthetic theory by French Classicism in the second half of the 17th century, while the present everyday use of the word with the meaning of »supremely beautiful« gained a footing at the time of the Enlightenment (e.g., in Voltaire) and in the Romantic period (e.g., in Balzac).

Kant uses the term in the German translation »erhaben« and does so in continuation of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), a work to which Barnett Newman also refers. However, Kant does not dwell - as does the English thinker - on the sense of the sublime as horrific. The philosopher from Königsberg is not particularly interested in the psycho-physiological pressure man experiences when faced by the horror that »nothing is happening any longer«, as Lyotard writes in his Barnett Newman commentary, but in the challenge contained by the absolutely great or the absolutely powerful for the human spirit.

If we permit ourselves to reduce our emotions at the meeting with the sublime into a kind of slow-motion, such an experience of the sublime can be seen to pass through a number of phases. Faced with the absolutely great, the imagination attempts to comprise the contourless or formless totality of the phenomenon within one impression, but in vain. For we are faced by an immeasurable quantity, which as a totality is more related to the all than to a size. Because of this dimension, which Kant also ventures to compare with the infinite, the experience of the sublime cannot even be presented as a rational idea, even though it is a property of the way ideas work that they can be formed when they are given a totality as their object. But not in connection with the sublime; instead some part of the imagination experiences a heightening of its insight, its sense of how ideas work, of the fact that rational ideas involve problems related to their exposition: they can be marked perhaps »grasped« by something, without having an intuitive relation to it. This problem is sensed by the imagination (aesthetically, that is) as adetermination, a kind of obligation in the face of a challenge to establish concurrence, an »appropriate« precision, i.e., a minimum of stylistic coherence and overview when an idea is to represent an object. When the imagination has thus had a sense of powerlessness during the attempt at accounting for the experience of the sublime in one impression, the same negative feelings give rise to a shift, a substitution in the mind. For what could not be done between the subject and the object can - in some way - be done in the subject alone, among its faculties or powers: the feeling of the object is replaced with a feeling of the subject's rationalist vocation, of a respect for the idea of man and his cognitive task; that is to say, of something related to a generalist cognitive readiness, a kind of eidetic mobilisation.

What has grasped the idea of the rational, what can be grasped in connection with the experience of the sublime is called by Kant »the supersensible substrate«, by which the aesthetic-intuitive aspect of the experience is firmly pushed aside thanks to the already mentioned substitution operation. Thus, the aesthetic is turned »inwards«, so that the emotion felt at the experience of the sublime is transformed into something Kant calls a »feeling of the spirit«, a feeling that comes into being on the edge between all and nothing. After first having encountered an inhibition because of the object's extent or strength, the relation between inhibited perception and powerless presentation enters into a state of excitation connection; this is a matter of a meta-stable condition, in which an idea is born without it being an idea of anything, since that which forms the idea is a respectful feeling of an unlimited task, which is in fact to say of nothing. (One could perhaps say that the feeling of the spirit is the substance in an aesthetic idea.)

Much can be drawn from this nexus in transcendental aesthetics, and the hypothesis or theory-creating element in the heuristics of science is probably related to or nourished by this fairly dynamic moment in aesthetic judgement. What especially interested Lyotard in the aesthetic of the sublime is, however, the way in which such reflective stimuli become artistic inspiration and work.

In this connection it is worth noting that what awakened the French philosopher's attention in the many genres of the visual arts is abstract painting, i.e., the work of art that enjoys most freedom with respect to representation of the object. It is therefore also worth repeating that the founder of the genre, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, attached the term »objectless« to the definition of his painting. Thus, with abstract painting we are faced with the problems of »pure« presentation: not even natural conditions and natural substances are represented here, as in Turner's Romantic paintings, or social and technological movements, as in Boccioni's Futurist paintings (even though painters like Turner and Boccioni undoubtedly also made use of such representations in order to make visible or treat more general aesthetic problems connected with the transition from imagination to presentation). What is represented in abstract painting is the transmission of aesthetic impressions, and this can only take place through impressions being rooted in a material, i.e., by processing them chromatically (or plastically, but sculpture does not have Lyotard's interest in this context, even though the surface of sculpture can be conceived of and treated in a »painterly« manner). Here we run into something that could be called the paradox in aesthetic ideas, i.e., the cognitive content of the sublime: abstract painting, then,makes use of a procedure related to the paths taken by reflection when we experience the sublime; for even though the impressions transferred to the surface of the canvas are not exposed to the same trials as the human mind, experiences during the substitutory operation by which an external phenomenon without form is transformed into a relation between feeling and insight within the mind, this relation does not necessarily involve symmetry or a dialectic balance between the related elements in question. What holds them together is the already mentioned respect for the idea of an unlimited task (for cognition, for research, for the curiosity) or perhaps aversion (more about this in part: Global sentiment).

I now permit myself to assume that if this idea, which is a rational idea, can be grasped introspectively, by virtue of the supersensible substrate, then the substrate also acquires a kind of form, which even if it is caused by something objective - the extent or strength of the sublime - can be formed, just like creations of the imagination and especially, perhaps, like traces, in the mind, as if the mind were also a kind of membrane that has a tactile sense of being pressed upon.

On the one hand, this is a matter of some chilly »visionary« quality about ideas, inasmuch as this something is reflectively-rationally founded, namely the possibility of the rational idea to form itself as a concept of a supersensible substrate, in contrast to the cognitive judgement, which determines its object's structure by rational analysis. And on the other hand, it is also a matter of being able to feel ideas, to be receptive beyond the faculties of our minds, to be able to exert pressure on these faculties, placing them on the defensive.

Now, however, the aesthetic challenge in the experience of the sublime also appears as a demand for presentation; but, according to Kant »an aesthetic idea cannot become a cognition, because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found«. And as »a rational idea can never become a cognition, because it involves a concept (of the supersensible), for which a commensurate intuition can never be found«, 1 the analysis of the aesthetically-reflective judgement ends in a complete objectivisation crisis. Kant therefore suggests that »[T]he subjective principle - that is to say, the indeterminate idea of the supersensible within us - can only be indicated as the unique key to the riddle of this faculty, itself concealed from us in its sources; and there is no means of making it any more intelligible«.(2.)

Folded within a supersensible substrate we can, then, only find a subjective principle as a meeting-point for our two types of ideas, the aesthetic and the rational, whose relation is without symmetry and without mutual confirmation, but which each works in its own field, that of the imagination and that of conceptualisation, respectively. And the decisive thing is that in the aesthetic idea the intuition of the imagination is turned outwards, while the conceptualisation of the rational idea is turned inwards. The aesthetically reflecting faculty consists precisely of this: to feel the received, that which comes from outside, as the coming into being of an idea (intuition), and with the help of this receptivity to derive a concept as a substantial idea (consciousness). The aesthetic idea is enlivening and extreme, while the second, the rational idea, is adequate and intense.

One is tempted to presuppose that it is in the interval between them that visual art is possible. That is why visual art can be so abstract or objectless that it covers an idea of the supersensible, of that which can never be confirmed through an intuition or opinion. And in the same way one can at the same time explain why Concept Art defies determination as creation and the created: there is no concept that can be derived from what the imagination experiences. That is why Barnett Newman's monochrome is rational, while Joseph Kosuth's neon sentence is emotional.

Global sentiment

What happens when respect and ideational awakening do not occur in connection with the experience of something without form; provided that this something merely evokes distaste and does not go beyond the first phase of the experience, the phase that Kant assesses as being a »negative feeling«?

A sublimity of this kind will not be »exalted« and transcendental, but on the contrary »low« and immanent: in continuation of Julia Kristeva's attempt at a theory of the destestable or »the abject« (from 1980), Mario Perniola recently developed a theory of distaste. - For we must not forget that the entire Kant-inspired investigation of the aesthetically reflective judgement is an investigation of the judgement of taste. In an enduring feeling of distaste evoked by something formless, taste is not awakened, nor is its possibility of reflection developed. Instead, the positive content in maintaining or cultivating taste is broken down: something sluggish and reluctant occupies the place or possibility of transition that ensured that we could push aside the state of negative feeling experienced in connection with the exalted sublimity: when we feel distaste, nothing is pushed aside, indeed, we are even far from the apathetic tastelessness à la Rabelais of splatter-aesthetics. Distaste is not merry, at the most it is locally sovereign: in continuation of Nietzsche Perniola asserts that the state of distaste is nourished by something paradoxical to which in its initial position he ascribes a kind of oxymoron: the subject feels distaste at himself, and as a kind of self-provocation ungovernable affects are liberated, affects controlled by something other than aesthetic experiences, namely through the bringing about of art. We know the figure, but it is now turned inwards: for Freud sublimation occurred from outside, from society and the disciplinary demands it made of the subject. For Perniola the sublimation process seems to take place as a kind of internal Möbius strip: instead of a clarification as a result of the pressure from the judgement of taste over the sublime, the subject feels only disgust for any such clarification, which is identified with harmony, philistinism, opportunism and the like. Instead the disgust forms a connection with the subject's general aversion toward the aesthetic experience, indeed even towards the art experience through which the thus challenged and disgusted subjectivity is activated: the distaste gives way and assumes a form that appears so insistent that the sluggish and averse subjectivity stabilises the process in question as art: the result is a somewhat uncertain art, but also at times a spacious art, but not an art that is moving forward, in progress towards a work.

As it happens, we have recently had the opportunity to experience such an attempt at presenting and realising, or, rather, derealising, an aesthetic of distaste. Here I am thinking of the second opus of the Dogma 95 aesthetic, Lars von Trier's The Idiots. However, the state of the simple-minded as a kind of derealised positivity had already been examined by Søren Kierkegaard. And I sense, even after Perniola's Nietzsche plaidoyer, that today a physiological, vulgar and conflict-seeking aesthetic of distaste, aimed more at the stomach than the head, cannot avoid evoking splatter associations and thereby making us smile, not least against the background of Zarathustra's kitschy sermons. And that is why The Idiots must be regarded as an apathetic version of distaste.

For we have already been too long and too much in the region of the stomach: our biles had risen long before Kristeva's theory of the abject attempted to inject aesthetics into our less intellectual organs.

Another Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has treated this situation in his, to date, three Homo Sacer books. In the last of these the Veronese philosopher examined the evidence as it has been presented in literature (by, among others, Rilke and Kafka) and after the Nazi extermination camps: It is the evidence of depersonalised subjectivity that is examined, and in the most subtle way, since it is the question of the impossibility of documenting the feeling of shame to be found at the centre of Quel che resta di Auschwits (What is left after Auschwitz), where not least Primo Levi's comprehensive combination of testimony and writing gives the aesthetically oriented philosopher the opportunity to penetrate so deeply into the question of the relation between feeling and life, that the feeling of shame appears as a kind of naked or raw unpredicability.

In his book on the dispute, Le différend, Lyotard had examined the absolute tort, i.e., the form of wrong that could not be articulated 15 years before Agamben, who quotes the French book. While Lyotard was concerned with the violation, i.e., the feeling with which the victim is filled and cannot pass on, Agamben investigates the special relation prevailing between the brutality or special non-articulation of the enunciation and the evidence of shame, i.e., of the feeling we know only in a tactile form, namely as powerful blushing, the urge to hide oneself, and promptings to commit suicide. We cannot »receive« shame aesthetically, and it cannot become style, as in Céline's repellent art, which interests both Kristeva and Perniola. Shame is never overcome, it never acquires form, never becomes art, not even loose installationary artificiality. Shame cannot stimulate, and as opposed to hate and disgust it cannot instrumentalise the stomach: shame has to do with the whole human body, indeed its condition in time, i.e., the consciousness of the species. The only kind of feeling that can in some way comprise shame, not use it, but incorporate it from outside and in an uninvolved way name it almost by neutralising it is global sentiment, which is admittedly also sublime although in a disputed and political form.

The sublimity of global sentiment has long been in a crisis, and satellite surveillance has contributed its part to this. But fortunately Kant - rightly - distinguishes between two kinds of sublimity of an exalted nature: the mathematical and the dynamic. The former has to do with extent, the latter with raw or massive power. Just as the mathematical sublime's magnitude is no longer of this world, so the rawness of the dynamic sublime is no longer attached to nature. But it can be attached to human masses, their demographic growth and their extreme mobility, i.e., the new migrations.

So while Kant's sublimity had cognitive and ethical dimensions and Lyotard's was aesthetic with connotations of justice, I shall here, with due acknowledgement to my sources of inspiration, not least to Agamben's decisive analyses, propose a special sublimity, namely that which derives from mankind's number and explosive development: a quantitative humanism seems to be, in full accordance with our theories of the sublime, impossible in every way; it gives many a feeling of distaste, while the imagination does not seem able to comprehend, for example, six billion people in a representation or in an idea. Nonetheless the experience of the demographic »bomb« is of an aesthetic nature, far more so than is the posthumous experience of the Big Bang in space. Mankind's explosiveness is especially connected to the question of mass as power, but mass also possesses a topological character that has to do with the way in which it seeps or springs from country to country and from continent to continent. Quantitative humanism is thus concerned with an interpretation of space as something that can be struck by other things than communication, goods and money, namely as something that can be invaded, filled up and in the case of the camps, crammed with people. I am convinced that there is a direct line running from Barnett Newman's vertical expansion of space to the horizontal spatial investigations of Installation Art. In the course of the roughly 40 years that separate the two types of work the sublime has toppled over; it has become more dynamically flowing and less mathematically grandiose. In other words, there is a very long art-historical line running from Cubism's over-furnishing of space through the flattening and extensions of space performed by abstract painters - a movement that links Mondrian with Barnett Newman - on to Ad Reinhardt's pioneering examination of a space with low iconicity (1966). After the American painter had placed a series of black monochromes in a room, i.e., often an image without identity in the room, the way was open for the expansion of space in visual art. Omitting some of the intermediary stages that have to do with sculpture and sculptural installation, I shall merely point out that since the 1980s, installation aesthetics (which open sculpture took part in developing) has tried to abolish both the image and the conceptualist dimension in order to instead bring the world into the art space. In the 1990s this was called Contextualism by some artists, even though Pop Art had been pure connotation, in so far as it has been possible for any trend in art to be »purely« that.

The whole context is, however, the whole world: sublime art is therefore today global-contextualist, even when it examines local efforts, such as androgyny (e.g., Robert Gober) and non-final gymnastics (e.g., Matthew Barney). For somehow, installation artists exert themselves for the sake of the exertion, as in von Trier's The Idiots. Thus, artistic intentionality does not deal with the realisation of an idiom of form, whether or not it is skilled from a traditional point of view, but with the expansion of our receptivity, the rearrangement of our expectations and the examination of our readiness. When it is successful, installation art is quite simply aesthetic rearmament, a kind of training in sublimity. It becomes, in other words, an art that makes global sentiment come alive.
 
 
Carsten Juhl