Sublime Art : Towards an Aesthetics of the Future 9780748669998, 9780748670000, 9781474404921

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STEPHEN ZEPKE

Sublime Art Towards an Aesthetics of the Future

SUBLIME ART

Crosscurrents Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences Series Editor Christopher Watkin, University of Cambridge Editorial Advisory Board Andrew Benjamin Martin Crowley Simon Critchley Frederiek Depoortere Oliver Feltham Patrick ffrench Christopher Fynsk Kevin Hart Emma Wilson Titles available in the series: Difficult Atheism: Post-­Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-­Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux by Christopher Watkin Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism by Gerald Moore Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer by Nicholas Davey The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology by Mathew Abbott The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences by Wahida Khandker The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead by Leemon McHenry Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future by Stephen Zepke Forthcoming Titles: Visual Art and Projects of the Self by Katrina Mitcheson Visit the Crosscurrents website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/cross

SUBLIME ART Towards an Aesthetics of the Future Stephen Zepke

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Stephen Zepke, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun­– ­Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6999 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7000 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0492 1 (epub) The right of Stephen Zepke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgments vi Abbreviations viii Series Editor’s Preface ix Introduction: Exiled from Oneself­– A ­ rt and Other Strange Migrations . . .

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1. ‘Contempt for the world’ – Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 14 2. ‘A stranger to consciousness . . .’ – Lyotard and the Sublime 48 3. ‘My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding’ – Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime 109 4. Framing the Abyss – The Deconstruction of the Sublime 164 5. For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime 202 Postscript: ‘Art after experience’­– S­ peculative Realism and the Sublime 241 References 265 Index  279

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a difficult process. Most practically, my sincere thanks to Mark Jackson, Ralph Paine, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Nick Thoburn, Louis Schreel, Claudia Mongini, Chris Penfield, Ashley Woodward and Eckardt Lindner who all took the time to read parts of the book and give me feedback. I regret that my text has not always been able to reflect the incisive nature of their comments. Carol Macdonald at EUP has been very supportive and extremely patient. Various invitations to speak enabled me to develop specific parts of my research. In this regard thanks to Tom Medak and Petar Milat at MAMA, Zagreb; David Quigley at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart; Dan Smith (twice) at Purdue University, West Lafayette; Mårten Spångberg at the Performing Arts Forum, St Erme; Juan Fernando Mejía Mosquera at Javeriana University, Bogotá; Christopher Braddock at AUT University, Auckland; Janne Vanhanen at KAVA, Helsinki; Sjoerd van Tuinen (twice) at Erasmus University and V2, Rotterdam; Elisabeth von Samsonow at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna; Audrone Zukauskaite at the Contemporary Arts Center, Vilnius; and the Masters students at the Bergen School of Art, Bergen. Originally I had wanted to include sections in the book discussing the work of my favourite contemporary artists, and in some cases I had actually written these, but for various reasons they finally had to be left out. So my thanks and heartfelt apologies go to Hannes Schoisswohl, Ralph Paine, Mladen Bizumic, Martina Steckholzer, Yves Mettler, BADco (and thanks to them as well for the cover image), Rosario López and Scott Hayes. Your work is tops! Finally, for their inspiration, friendship and love I would like to express deep gratitude to my wife Anita Fricek, Tom Medak and Ivana Ivković, Nick Thoburn and Runa Khalique, Dan Smith and Catherine Dossin, Nikolas Kolonios, Ralph Paine and Fiona Johnston, Yves Mettler, Mark Jackson and Maria O’Conner, Arturo Silva and Gabi vi



Acknowledgments vii

Jutz, Angelika Reichart and Mladen Bizumic, Claudia Hirtl, Leonardo Kovačević, Scott Hayes, Claudia Mongini, Karma and Lena Percy, Mary Jane and my family­– ­Jeanette Parsons, Josh Parsons, Nick Zepke and Linda Leach. My mother Gay Zepke died during the writing of this book, which is dedicated to her memory.

Abbreviations

Quotations from Kant’s three Critiques are referenced to section numbers, followed by the page numbers of the English and German editions referred to below. CPR Immanuel Kant (1929 [1st edn 1781, 2nd edn 1787]) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. — Immanuel Kant (1956) Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. W. Weischedel, Vols 3 and 4 in Suhrkamp’s paperback edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. CPrR Immanuel Kant (1997 [1788]) Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — Immanuel Kant (1956) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. W. Weischedel, Vol. 7 in Suhrkamp’s paperback edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. CJ —

Immanual Kant (1987 [1790]) Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Immanuel Kant (1956) Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. W. Weischedel, Vol. 10 in Suhrkamp’s paperback edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as mathematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of performing a predetermined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition. Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross-­ disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore ix

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nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-disciplinary enterprise. Christopher Watkin Cambridge February 2011

Introduction: Exiled from Oneself­– ­Art and Other Strange Migrations . . .

His brain convulsed, his mind split open. Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings and launchings came over him, he staggered and flapped desperately, he was revolted by the thought of known places and dreamed strange migrations. (Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray)

The sublime is like that, it fucks you up. It exiles you from yourself in an ec-stasis painfully suspended between cosmic awareness and crushing madness. A state that sends Sweeney careering around Ireland and Scotland as a bird fleeing the fateful spear. But while most of the narrative is spent describing his hardships­– t­he physical and psychic torments of this exile from his ‘self’­– ­there are other moments when Sweeney experiences inhuman and incomprehensible joy in the animal rhythms of nature. I prefer the elusive rhapsody of blackbirds to the garrulous blather of men and women. I prefer the squeal of badgers in their sett to the tally-ho of the morning hunt. I prefer the reechoing belling of a stag among the peaks to that arrogant horn.

(Heaney 1983: 43)

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Sweeney’s life has jumped the boundary dividing men from animals as he joins the hunted, a life dictated by the basic imperative to survive. The pathos of this inversion is expressed in his continuous lament for what he has lost, for his humanity and for the powers of kingship it inferred on him. But through the trials and tribulations of his now nerve-wracked and flighty state shine moments of pleasure, the shivering joy of a life free of the trivialities of being human. Cast out of human form, constantly on the wing, despairing, Sweeney nevertheless sees everything anew, fresh with morning dew glistening at dawn. Living an unmediated life between man and nature, buffeted in turns by hardships and ecstatic visions, continually overwhelmed, Sweeney experiences life’s pain and pleasure, and in losing his human part he gains something greater . . . the sublime. Immanuel Kant established art’s ‘aesthetic’ dimension as that of pleasure and pain, arguing that certain sensations cause us to pass a judgment (‘that is beautiful’, ‘that is sublime’) that is universally true. This is a definition that has remained in place until the relatively recent, and by no means definitive, end of modernism. But Kant offers art, and more specifically contemporary artistic practices, more than just the insistence of, or perhaps return to, an ‘aesthetic’ philosophy. ‘Sublime’ art is distinctly philosophical and political inasmuch as it exceeds the limits of human consciousness, and so gives direct experience of an immanent and transcendental real, an experience of what is that has the power to fundamentally change it. The nature of this ‘experience’ will be the subject of this book, and its indiscernibility from a type of aesthetic ‘thought’ will be one of its aspects that make it relevant for contemporary art. This is no doubt what appealed to the French philosophers of the twentieth century who were so mesmerised by the sublime­– t­his book will focus on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière and Jacques Derrida1­– i­t is an experience that goes beyond the boundaries of the ‘art world’, just as it goes beyond its human conditions, to directly expresses the ontological and political dimension of an infinite and genetic difference.2 Put simply then, Kant provides the opening onto a profound ontology­– a­ nd as we shall see genealogy­– ­of contemporary artistic practices that breaks with the purely formal and medium-­specific inheritance of Kant in Clement Greenberg’s version of modernism, and with the neo-Kantianism of art historians such as Erwin Panofsky, while also providing an aesthetic alternative to avant-gardist efforts to put art directly into ‘life’. So while it is a truism that, as Eva Schaper has said, Kant ‘has become known as the father of modern aesthetics’ (1992: 368), this book will argue that the outlines of a sublime modernism can be found in the



Introduction: Exiled from Oneself 3

reception of the sublime by French philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While, as we shall see, Rancière and Derrida can hardly be considered acolytes of the sublime, Rancière’s political reading of Kant’s aesthetics and Derrida’s deconstruction of the supersensible from a ‘Kantian’ perspective can be considered part of this French embrace of Kant’s aesthetic. Nevertheless, this French reception of Kant’s sublime is also very varied. On the one hand we have a new aesthetic philosophy of art championed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard, and on the other we have a rejection of the sublime in favour of the beautiful in the case of Jacques Rancière, and a qualification of the sublime, and of the aesthetic in general, by and for the conditions of possible experience in Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s work. Finally, we have the recent attempt by Speculative Realism to think the sublime ‘breakthrough’ in a rationalist or ‘object-oriented’ direction that directly confronts the ‘failure’ of contemporary art. The itinerary of this book will follow these vacillations in our sublime inheritance. The emphasis on sensation that is the most obvious aspect of Kant’s aesthetics offers more than the simple contradiction of, or alternative to, a contemporary art organised around conceptual concerns or discursive forms of expression. I am not suggesting, however, that contemporary artistic practices should simply ‘return’ to Kant’s traditional ideas of art. Rather contemporary art should rethink the relationship of sensation to thought, should affirm the ways in which art can and does open experience onto a transcendental realm of genesis, onto the realm of invention, so as to finally take up its political role of creating a new future. This is to give or perhaps restore to art a philosophical function, a function of ‘thought’ that goes far beyond the efforts of ‘art theory’ or art’s relatively recent enthusiasm for both conceptual production and direct political involvement. Sublime art does not, therefore, depoliticise contemporary art, or return it to non-political ‘aesthetic’ concerns, but instead places it at the very centre of contemporary debates by renegotiating the traditional distinction between aesthetics and politics that most contemporary artistic practices insist upon. Indeed, art’s ‘conceptual turn’ founded itself on the rejection of a purely ‘aesthetic’ modernist art, whose ‘autonomy’ supposedly disconnected it from the ‘reality’ of life. While this important historical shift is a fact, its subsequent development into conceptual, discursive and increasingly self-reflexive practices is precisely what will be contested in this book. Instead, it is the singular ability of aesthetic experience (as established by Kant) to take us from the experience of an art work to its transcendental and inhuman c­ onditions

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that remains the most promising political (and philosophical) aspect of art. How this works in a more precise sense, and according to the various thinkers examined here, will be the focus of the chapters of this book. The Kant scholar Gary Banham was entirely correct then, when he wrote: ‘What is now suggested by many different kinds of writers is that the questions raised in the Critique of Judgment will be decisive for how we might think about the nature of politics’ (2000: 1). Paul de Man, for example, has argued that the ‘reflective judgment’ enabled by aesthetic experience mediates (or more accurately examines the possibility of such mediation) between our particular experience and the more abstract ideas by which we interpret it (which he calls ‘ideology’), and therefore ‘critically examines the possibility and the modalities of political discourse and political action’ (1996: 106). We shall look at de Man’s ideas more closely in Chapter 5, but we can already see how he regards the sublime as a way of engaging with the political ‘conditions’ of our lives. The recent work of ‘Speculative Realism’ and its offshoot ‘Accelerationism’ is similar in this regard, as we shall see in the Postscript. But rather than simply being useful for examining or even changing our conditions (of experience, of political life), the philosophers Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari and Rancière utilise Kant’s aesthetic philosophy as a directly political tool inasmuch as it invents­– ­through art­– n ­ ew ways of feeling and of expressing these feelings that directly contest the texture of the present and the colours of the future. In the case of Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard, this process of invention is pushed to its furthest possible extreme in the sublime, which emerges through what Lyotard calls ‘the dispersion of the subjective entity’ (1989c: 327). Sublime art’s move beyond the rational limits of human consciousness (whether this is also a move beyond the ‘correlation’ remains to be seen in our Postscript on Speculative Realism) therefore radicalises the ‘political’ potential of art, because it raises its stakes to the nature of ‘human’ existence. More specifically, all of our authors discuss the role that a sublime aesthetics might play within the realm of contemporary artistic production, and consequently the role such practices might play in political struggle. This is a question that is extended by this book to the last fifty years or so of ‘contemporary’ art, which has been largely determined by its conceptualism, and its desire to move, as the saying has it, ‘from art into life’. Conceptual art’s turn away from aesthetic autonomy (whether understood as the autonomy of aesthetic experience in Kant or as the autonomy of modernist art from ‘life’) supposedly allowed artists to directly engage as artists in the contemporary political issues



Introduction: Exiled from Oneself 5

of their time­– t­ he Vietnam war, women’s rights, environmental issues, etc. In this regard, Conceptual art’s adoption of the modes of production of the wider world was premised on the belief that this would enable artists to directly contest those modes of production. From this point, retroactively marked by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, the defining aspect of ‘art’ was no longer its ontological status (i.e. it was aesthetic), but rather the epistemological ‘decision’ that something was art. Perhaps the most important instance of this shift was made by Joseph Kosuth, who argued that with Conceptual art it was now the remit of art (rather than philosophy) to construct the concepts that defined it­– ­Art After Philosophy.3 Art then, created ideas about what it was qua Idea, ‘Art as Idea, as Idea’ as his famous formula had it, making Conceptual art a kind of immanent and ongoing critique of its own conceptual conditions. The art object was still required to actualise its ‘concept’, but this material and indeed aesthetic manifestation was regarded by Kosuth to be the ‘secondary information’ or signifier for the ‘primary information’ of the concept that was signified. As a result, Kosuth argued: ‘Aesthetic considerations are indeed always extraneous to an object’s function or “reason to be” ’ (1999: 162). The point here is not so much the details of Kosuth’s argument, which we will come back to in the Postscript, but first that he defined art as a conceptual practice, and second that it was a critical practice aimed at freeing art of its conservative or repressive conditions. As a result, today art requires a minimum of ‘conceptual’ reflection (i.e. rational ‘thought’) on its own ‘concept’ to be considered ‘contemporary’. A good example of this minimum condition is a painting that foregrounds its status as a ‘representation’, in this way organising or at the very least premising its aesthetic and material aspects around its conceptual core or condition.4 Conceptual art, like many of its contemporary inheritors and some of its avant-garde predecessors, sought to connect the fundamental democracy of its conceptual genesis (anyone­– ­including ‘R. Mutt’­– ­could designate something a work of art) to a political efficacy released into the world at large. What remained ambiguous, however, was whether this connection was justified, or whether turning art into a more or less banal conceptual event simply opened art up to be appropriated and instrumentalised by the political and social powers that dominated it. While this question is definitively unanswerable, and there are notable examples of art’s successes and failures in this regard, it will be the assumption of this book that contemporary art’s enthusiastic embrace of the ‘conceptual’ was one reason that it has been so effectively instrumentalised by the forces determining ­production.

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For example, Kosuth’s work Second Investigation 1. Existence (1968) reprinted the eight categories organising Roget’s Thesaurus and appearing at its beginning in the classifieds section of various newspapers and magazines. Kosuth celebrated the fact that the work’s insertion into the mass media made it available to all, but it did so only by erasing the work’s status as art, meaning­– ­as Kosuth boasted­– ­‘that people can wrap dishes with my work’ (quoted in Alberro 2003: 49). The political effects of this remain unclear, unless a simple rejection of ‘aesthetic’ art is considered political. Unfortunately, contemporary artistic practices too often assume precisely this, imagining that an anti- or non-art strategy is already politics. Perhaps this is true, but not in the way ‘anti-art’ art imagines. Kosuth’s work, to follow our example, takes a technique for organising language and information as a readymade, one epitomising what Benjamin Buchloh famously called Conceptual art’s ‘aesthetics of administration’ (see 1999). In this sense, while Kosuth’s work clearly escapes the institutions of art to ‘participate’ in contemporary life, it does so only by ‘mimicking’ the operational conditions of the info-economy, its apparatuses of linguistic organisation and normalisation, which allows it to utilise (but not change) the mass media’s reproduction and distribution technologies. If art has become life then this remains a naive or inadequate transformation in political terms, because its ‘anti-art’ priorities allow life to simply subsume ‘art’ for its own gain. In this respect Conceptual art and its contemporary inheritors perpetuate a fundamental misunderstanding; they imagine their negation of art’s aesthetic basis to be a ‘political’ act in itself, but rather than a ‘liberation’ of art from itself, ‘anti-art’ risks subjugating art’s aesthetic powers to that of the concept and language, and so delivering sensibility to the systems determining our everyday lives. Others, of course, would dispute this. Postmodernist artists, as we will see, often made minimal interventions within images taken from the mass media to foreground their ideological content. In this way ideology could be ‘deconstructed’ by art, critically turned back upon itself to reveal its own conditions. While this is perhaps a ‘critical’ practice in a Kantian sense­– ­and indeed the chapter on Derrida will argue this­ – ­it is nevertheless a long way from both an aesthetics and a politics of the sublime, which affirms and explores the political potentials of aesthetic invention. Peter Osborne’s recent book Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art gives a thorough account of these developments and traces their importance to the emergence of contemporary art. Early in the book Osborne claims that the ‘post-Kantian’ tradition of art theory has ‘failed to achieve a convincing critical-theoretical purchase



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on contemporary art, because it has failed to come to terms with the decisive historical transformation in the ontology of the artwork that is constitutive of its very contemporaneity’ (2013: 8). This ‘failure’ is due to the fact that contemporary art is constituted, on Osborne’s account, by the idea, the problem, fiction and global transnationalism, all nonaesthetic features that define its ‘decisive difference from art of the past’ (2013: 8). Osborne argues that post-Kantian art theory’s insistence on the connection between art and the aesthetic is no longer relevant to contemporary practices and so de-historicises and therefore prevents them from having any real political effect. In this respect Osborne’s position is indebted to critical theory, and like much contemporary art rejects any ontology of art in which aesthetic appearance is attributed a privileged relation to Being, and so subordinates art’s historical specificities to the ahistorical and aesthetic event of ontogenesis. The position argued here, on the contrary, is that the aesthetic features of sublime art not only actualise an ontogenetic and undetermined process of emergence, but also directly affect their historical and political conditions by pointing beyond them. Osborne nicely describes this aspect of modernist art and in particular its avant-garde as a ‘ruptural futurity’ (2013: 16), which he contrasts with the ‘con-temporary’ as the drawing together of different times into a temporal unity-in-disjunction. This is already the case with art from the early 1960s, which both rejected the immediately preceding phase of abstract expressionism, while exploring the heritage of Duchamp and Dada through non-medium-specific practices. The dematerialisation of art evident in Conceptual art confirmed and extended these developments. ‘From this point of view’, Osborne argues, ‘contemporary art is post-conceptual art’ (2013: 19). More recently, this generic conception of post-conceptual art means the end of the avant-garde, the integration of ‘autonomous’ art into the culture industry and the globalisation of the biennale, all developments resulting from the transformation of the art world after the post-1989 victory of capitalism. In this sense, the ‘con-temporary’ is a constant process of overcoming modernity in the present, on the one hand rejecting any ahistorical ontology of aesthetic ‘presence’, while on the other denying any spatio-temporal specificity to art through the ‘distributed unity’ (i.e. its ubiquity and instantaneousness) of the photographic image (Osborne 2013: 24). Osborne argues that this ‘unity’ is increasingly expressed and maintained through the fictional strategies, or ‘fictionalization’ (2013: 33) suited to digital delivery systems, particularly those that utilise documentary forms such as the archive. This is the discursive, and fundamentally ‘literary’ aspect of contemporary art (even if it

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still creates ‘images’) and as such, Osborne claims, ‘post-conceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics’ (2013: 33). In this regard, Osborne correctly notes (and on this point Rancière will agree, although for almost the opposite reasons), the modern/ postmodern split ‘fails to provide a theoretical basis on which we might specify the ontological distinctiveness of contemporary art’ (2013: 48). The term ‘post-conceptual art’ on the other hand, registers, he claims, the ‘ontological mutation’ that has occurred in artwork after Conceptual art, and ‘exposes the aesthetic misrecognition of the artwork as an ideological fraud’ (2013: 50). This mutation means that an artwork is no longer defined positively through medium, form or style, but instead by the destruction of the ontological significance of these categories. Conceptual art established the ‘need’ for art to ‘actively counter aesthetic misrecognition within the work’ (2013: 50), and it is this polemical aspect of post-conceptual art that the category of the ‘postmodern’ fails to catch. In this sense, Osborne argues, the expansion of artistic media to an open infinity of possibility reflects the ideological enlightenment that was achieved by Conceptual art and inherited by post-conceptual practices, rather than the more ephemeral chronology of postmodernism. Osborne’s account is more or less accurate in a historical sense­– t­ he conceptualisation of art undeniably happened. But this is also why his account does not directly intersect with or contradict that of this book, which concerns the aesthetic event of a sublime art that is oriented towards the future. Osborne’s account is more or less ‘triumphalist’ inasmuch as it describes the historical trajectory of contemporary art, a trajectory that has clearly taken it away from the accounts of an ‘aesthetic art’ offered by Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari and Ranciére, at least. These ‘aesthetic’ philosophers of art are not deciphering a current state of art (although all of them point to contemporary examples), they instead suggest that the aesthetic dimension of art acts on an ontological and political level to undermine dominant forms of power. For the thinkers discussed here it is important that contemporary art is critical of hegemonic modes of production, and the currently hegemonic ‘conceptual’ theory of art that is based upon them. While Osborne is right to denounce arguments that construct a ‘straw conceptualism’ that reduces all contemporary art to its conceptual nature (2013: 2), he is equally guilty of producing a ‘straw aestheticism’ in which the aesthetic cannot have any meaning apart from its conceptual and historical contextualisation, including, he points out, ‘those instances when it functions as a negation’ (2013: 49). The aesthetic, by Osborne’s account, is a mere ‘ontological support, that derives its meaning in each instance,



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relationally or contextually, whatever its precise form of materiality’ (2013: 49). But this is to make a distinction (between ontology and history) where the authors discussed in this book do not make one, because they understand sublime art’s sensual excess as a ‘ruptural futurity’ that disrupts its contemporary spatio-temporal conditions of emergence, but nevertheless exists immanent to those conditions. In other words, what is political about sublime art is the way it provides an experience (an experience that is also a form of ‘thought’, as we shall see) that is undetermined by its conditions of possibility (whether these are understood as subjective, art historical or, more widely, as social and political). This experience emerges within those conditions as an undetermined ‘event’ that carries with it the possibility of a new future, and so embodies everything within its historical conditions that escape them. For Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Rancière such aesthetic experiences and the art that creates them are essentially political, and all credit Kant’s Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment, as its beginning. Aesthetic judgment in Kant’s sense is not the mere ontological support for a concept, nor is it exhausted in a historically located meaning; it is a particular judgment that indicates a transcendental a priori. In other words, an aesthetic judgment expresses a singular feeling or experience that can be taken to be universal. What makes this an interesting phenomenon is precisely the nature of the transcendental, which in the case of the sublime is an Idea (and not an object or a concept) that escapes our conditions of possible experience. In doing so it introduces into the socio-political world of ‘meaning’ something that cannot be determined in their terms. For this reason, the sublime is an aesthetic experience that is not determined by a concept­– w ­ hether this is understood in a strictly Kantian sense, or in the sense that Osborne understands ‘post-conceptual’ art­– ­but nevertheless indicates a transcendental presence, for all of our authors this presence is the power of genesis inherent in difference. The sublime is therefore an experience of the transcendental condition of the new, of the condition of emergence qua difference, an emergence that we feel when we are radically undetermined and like Sweeney, exiled from ourselves. As we shall see in our Postscript concerning the recent emergence of Speculative Realism, this proposal concerning sublime art faces the significant problem of being uncomfortably poised between a cliché and the ridiculous. On the one hand the history of sublime art is lengthy, and still tends to adhere­– ­in its most popular forms at least­– ­to the exhausted vocabulary of disaster and destruction it has inherited from Romanticism. Think Independence Day and all the clichés of science

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fiction cinema. The sublime is here reduced to banal entertainment, or worse, to the dubious pleasures of the ‘ironic’. On the other hand are the seemingly ridiculous claims made for the revolutionary powers of sublime art, when all evidence points in the opposite direction, towards art’s insignificant political leverage. While acknowledging these pitfalls this book will attempt to respond to them in a variety of ways, all of which begin from a downsizing of expectations. Obviously, the clichés of sublime representation must be rigorously rejected. The fact that the sublime cannot be represented is a cornerstone of the argument here, and it is only as non- or even anti-representational that any understanding of sublime art can begin to emerge. Rather than power or size then, contemporary sublime art offers an overwhelming intensity of experience, an important aspect of which is its creation of new experiences (which is why we will repeatedly come back to the theme of the avant-garde). Our thinkers of the sublime will provide us with numerous examples, but they all have in common this combination of perceptive intensity and its uncategorisable experience. This is necessary if we wish to detach sublime art from its history, and find it again within contemporary artistic practices. Similarly, assessing the revolutionary aspects of sublime art according to the revolutions it has actually caused will surely be disappointing, and indeed making any such political claims for art is a trifle ridiculous­– ­as Speculative Realism so stridently points out. The revolutions sublime art catalyses operate on the micro-political level, and involve the opening of spaces of liberty within our social and historical conditions that may, or more likely may not, crystallise into wider changes on a macro level. While Guattari rather optimistically claims that Modigliani’s portraits led to a change in the regime of faciality, not even he would claim that they bore sole responsibility (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 260). This means that it is enough for an artwork to achieve such a break on the level of its experience, but as well, that this is neither an easy nor common achievement. If Osborne’s account of ‘post-conceptual’ art dogmatically rejects aesthetics as being a deciding factor in contemporary artistic practices, Thierry de Duve’s Kant After Duchamp is a brilliant and provocative attempt to ‘apply’ Kantian aesthetics to contemporary art. De Duve’s wonderfully polemical book, both refreshingly angry and incredibly well-informed, is nevertheless not afraid to play a little fast and loose with Kant in order to actually use him, rather than simply getting distracted like many Kant scholars do (as we shall see in Chapter 1) by the extremely difficult task of making him consistent. As the title suggests, de Duve uses Duchamp to update Kant, ‘replacing’, as he puts it, ‘the



Introduction: Exiled from Oneself 11

[Kantian] judgment “this is beautiful” by the [Duchampian] judgment “this is art” ’ (1996: 314). Both judgments are reflective and so move us from a feeling to an abstract Idea, one that claims universality and thereby establishes a sensus communis. De Duve therefore rejects the medium specificity upon which Greenberg’s understanding of modernism is based and replaces it with the reflective judgment incarnated in the readymade. Where de Duve deviates from the usual story however, is by understanding Duchamp’s ironic conceptualisation of art as an aesthetic judgment, as, that is, a judgment based on feeling rather than a concept.5 In this de Duve is utterly heterodox and subversive: Kant’s sensus communis may be restated after Duchamp as follows: every woman, every man, cultivated or not, whatever her or his culture, language, race, social class, has aesthetic Ideas which are or can be, by the same token, artistic Ideas. This cannot be proven but has to be supposed. [. . .] That all women and men have ‘taste’ and even ‘genius’ is merely a requirement of reason. (1996: 316)

As a result, de Duve argues, by feeling that Duchamp’s urinal is art (i.e. by judging it art) one endorses a certain Idea of modern art that is indeterminate and open, and indeed stands for its own indeterminacy (1996: 321). This would mean, de Duve continues, that all ‘modern’ art begins from the reflective judgment ‘this is art’, but meant in a critical sense. In other words, it is precisely in critiquing the inherited Idea of art that modern art utilises reflective judgment and­– a­ nother important point for de Duve (and also for Lyotard as we shall see)­– ­how the avant-garde continues and remains true to the tradition, that is the Idea, of art. This critical function of modern aesthetic judgment will come to take the place of the Kantian free play of the faculties in de Duve’s account: When I sense that a critical function is active in the work of art I am beholding, it prompts me to activate in myself a similar critical function. The prompting itself (the incitement and the excitement­– ­Kant’s paraphrase for it would be ‘the quickening of imagination and understanding in their free play’) is reflexive and does not guarantee the artistic quality of the work. Art’s critical function provides no criterion. All it does is present ‘something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. (1996: 448)

We get a good sense here of how de Duve plays pretty fast and loose with Kant. He claims that the feeling indicative of modern aesthetic judgment is a critical excitement that is ‘like’ the more technical pleasure of the free play of the imagination and understanding in Kant, and he then unproblematically associates this excitement with the aesthetic

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Idea. But we also sense de Duve’s ambition to re-read contemporary art according to the very thing its hegemonic version rejected­– f­eeling, or the aesthetic as such.6 De Duve does so with the aim of kicking back against the postmodern orthodoxy that has emerged from Duchamp’s readymades, where conceptual framing has overtaken and indeed now determines material composition as the condition of art, a condition that of course removes anything specifically aesthetic from it. De Duve’s reading of the readymade as an aesthetic judgment does not reject its intellectual aspect, but wants to shift it into the ethical/­political realm of Ideas. In this sense, de Duve argues, the modern aesthetic judgment provoked by the readymade makes political engagement by contemporary art possible, inasmuch as it allows the particular aesthetic experience to evoke an Idea that is universal­– ­a political sensus communis. As de Duve puts it: To insist, after and perhaps against Duchamp, that the Kantian-afterDuchamp formula, ‘this is art’, being the paradigmatic formula for the modern aesthetic judgment, be regulated by the modern maxim of emancipation for which the political paradigm remains Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and of which the subjective signal remains sensus communis. (1996: 454)

De Duve’s account is one that we will come back to in Chapter 1 precisely because it offers a reading of Kant’s aesthetics from the perspective of contemporary artistic practice, but it is one that deviates from the one offered here in being based on the free play of the faculties and the sensus communis (both of which Kant associates with beauty rather than the sublime). Furthermore, while de Duve keeps the Kantian emphasis on feeling qua aesthetic judgment, along with the form of the reflective judgment, much else essential to Kant’s account will be jetisoned or left out. Important examples for us will be his rejection of Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime (1996: 34) and his conflation of both Kant’s conditions of possible experience and art theory (1996: 50) and Ideas of reason and aesthetic ideas (1996: 321). Finally, these conflations will be made in the name of the ‘contemporary’ judgment of taste ‘this is art’, whose object exemplifies its idea ‘analogically’ (1996: 321). In this sense, art after Duchamp will be for de Duve a nominalism, inasmuch as ‘art’ is a proper name marking the ‘perfect coincidence of art and the aesthetic experience’ (1996: 294). Despite its distance from the concerns of this book there is something nevertheless important about de Duve’s approach, which is that it exemplifies how extrapolating a general theory of contemporary artistic practice from Kant’s aesthetic philosophy requires a certain level of creative inexactitude regarding its source. In his spirit then, this book will attempt to explore ‘sublime art’ (as we shall see in Chapter 1, already a



Introduction: Exiled from Oneself 13

somewhat controversial term, at least in a Kantian context), and how it operates against the conditions of contemporary artistic production and of contemporary life. Although this will at times require us to contrast such a theory with others concerning contemporary art (and in particular ‘postmodern art’), there is no sense here that such a theory could be, or should be, applicable to all artistic production, or that it even describes an aspect of contemporary artistic practice that understands itself as ‘sublime art’. In this very qualified sense then, this book shares de Duve’s aim of seeking ‘to make sense of Kantian aesthetics, in the light of subsequent art history’ (1996: 317). N OT E S 1. Lyotard, Deleuze and Rancière taught together in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII, and all knew Derrida and commented on his and he on their work. 2. While Kant did not invent the concept of the sublime, which had been in discussion at least since Longinus’ On the Sublime, written in the third century AD, the versions of the sublime discussed here all refer explicitly and almost exclusively to Kant’s version from his Third Critique, which will consequently be our focus. 3. See Kosuth (1999). 4. This is a common and indeed almost ubiquitous aspect of contemporary painting, which often signals by its handling the fact that the image has been painted from a photograph. 5. For Kant, the reflective judgment ‘that is beautiful’ is based on a feeling of pleasure, while judging ‘that is sublime’ is based upon a feeling of pain followed by pleasure. 6. This is something that Osborne seems to completely miss in his reading of de Duve. Osborne claims that what Duve has demonstrated beyond a doubt is: first, that there is more than one philosophical problematic associated with modernism in the visual arts; and second, that while the initially critical dominant one (medium-specific modernism) is ‘aesthetic’ in origin and orientation, the main competing alternative (generic artistic modernism) is not. (2013: 81–2)

While this is clearly what Osborne is arguing, de Duve in fact rethinks­– ­but nevertheless embraces­– ­the role of the aesthetic.

1. ‘Contempt for the world’ – Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime1

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B1, 41/45)

A book on sublime art must begin with Kant’s theory of the sublime. First, because it is the focus of our central authors (Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière and Derrida), whether they affirm, deny or deconstruct it. Second, because Kant’s description of ‘aesthetic’ experience is foundational for ‘aesthetics’ as a philosophical discipline and has been central to the theorisation of art from Romanticism until today. Third, because of the not always simple pleasure of exploring Kant’s amazing system. And finally, fourth, because the sublime provides irresistible drama as it emerges in all its monstrous ambiguity, the paradoxical­– ­but no less necessary­– ­collapse and fulfilment of Kant’s system in an experience of the supersensible rising from the ashes of human experience. But any consideration of Kant’s concept of the sublime that wants to apply it to art immediately confronts a problem: Kant categorically denied that art can supply a sublime experience. Obviously this is not our problem alone, as it challenges all theories of sublime art and has inspired a variety strategies to deal with it. A common response is to offer a reading of sublime art that ‘solves’ the problem in Kantian terms, making it more or less consistent with Kant’s system as a whole (see Crowther 1989 and 1995). While I will discuss some of these attempts, this approach will not be followed here. This book is not one of Kantian scholarship in the strict sense, and consequently it will not be overly burdened with esoteric questions regarding the consistency, or otherwise, of Kant’s critical philosophy. Instead, our question is how the concept of the sublime might be useful in constructing a theory of contemporary artistic practice that draws from Kant but 14



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 15

does not entirely play by his rules. In a broad sense, all of the thinkers considered here take this approach. As a result, while this chapter attempts to give an explanatory overview of the place of the sublime within Kant’s aesthetics, it focuses on those elements that are directly utilised by the thinkers appearing in subsequent chapters to construct a theory of contemporary sublime art. To cut a long story short, the possibility of a sublime art has generally been accepted since Schiller and Romanticism, and this inheritance remains active today, even if its details have changed somewhat. Perhaps, then, the approach here follows Kant’s own treatment of the sublime, inasmuch as he included the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in the Critique of Judgment at a very late stage of its composition, and did so without making it entirely consistent with the rest of the book. Our inspiration is therefore what one of Kant’s leading commentators has called his ‘cavalier treatment of the sublime’ (Allison 2001: 306), as we (and those discussed here) pick up the concept and run with it in the realm of contemporary art. Kant’s Critique of Judgment explores the transcendental implications of aesthetic experience and in particular its impact on the relations between empirical sensation, emotional feeling and thought. It is with the sublime that these relations are thoroughly rethought, as it offers a type of aesthetic experience that takes us beyond the universally shared conceptual conditions of experience, and the predictable and somewhat base emotions that usually determine our subjective interests. In this sense, the sublime takes us beyond the normative conditions of the human itself. As John Zammito puts it: ‘Feeling is possible because man is sensible, but not all feelings are caused by sense’ (1992: 294). There are, in other words, sublime feelings or sensations of something that exists beyond any empirical object and acts as the transcendental condition of both objects and their intuition. Sublime art provides a paradoxical experience of this outside of human sensibility, an outside that nevertheless remains the immanent and real condition of experience. Possibility and impossibility intertwine at this point, inasmuch as the conceptual conditions making experience possible (the schematism connecting the understanding and the imagination) are overwhelmed in the sublime ‘experience’, which subsequently gives an ‘experience’ of the transcendental realm that underlies­– ­but also escapes­– ­the empirical as such. As a result, sublime art does not simply reject our cognitive conditions of experience (i.e. concepts), because the sensation of their overcoming, and the subsequent feeling we have of the transcendental Ideas that emerge in their absence, is proof that our aesthetic judgment­ – ­‘that is sublime’­– ­is true, and universally so. In this way Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, and in particular that of the sublime, allows us

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to rethink the relationship of sensation and thought in contemporary art, such that it will take us beyond this world (and the next) towards a future whose possibilities remain undetermined. KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) was his Third Critique, coming after Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781, second edition 1787) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1787). Unsurprisingly, the Third Critique emerges in response to gaps and problems in the first two, and in particular to the need to unite their descriptions of the conditions of possible experience and of moral action respectively. The First Critique concerns the transcendental conditions determining our representation of nature (i.e. our empirical experience), and the second the supersensible principles that govern our desires and actions. The former operated according to the material determinism ruling nature, while the latter defined a moral realm that assumed human freedom. This meant, as Kant explains: An immense gulf [unübersehbare Kluft] is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible [. . .] is possible, just as if they were two different worlds. (CJ, Second Introduction 175–6: 14/83)

The Third Critique sets itself the ambitious aim of bridging these phenomenal and noumenal realms. As Kant put it: So there must after all be a basis uniting the supersensible that underlies nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically, even though the concept of this basis does not reach cognition of it either theoretically or practically and hence does not have a domain of its own, though it does make possible the transition from our way of thinking in terms of principles of nature to our way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom. (CJ, Second Introduction 176: 15/84)

The sensible and the supersensible domains studied in the first two Critiques will be united in an aspect of experience that is not covered by them: the realm of feeling, or pleasure and pain. The type of feeling that Kant is especially interested in is that underlying two types of judgment, the first claiming ‘this is beautiful’ (pleasure), and the second ‘this is sublime’ (pain/pleasure). These judgments claim a universality for particular judgments, and so move us from an experience of an object in the world to the a priori and so transcendental conditions of this judgment that make it true for everyone. In this way aesthetic judgments are able, Kant claims, to unite the realms of the previous two



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 17

Critiques ‘in a principle that refers the natural thing to the uncognizable super-sensible’ (CJ, Preface to the First Edition 169: 7/76), and does so only in reference to itself. ‘The mediating link between understanding and reason’, Kant announces, ‘is judgment’ (CJ, Second Introduction 177: 16/85). Unlike the understanding and reason, however, the faculty of aesthetic judgment is not a legislating faculty because it starts from particular experiences rather than the conditions making them possible. Aesthetic judgments are what Kant calls ‘reflective’, they reflect only upon their own particularity rather than being ‘determinative’ like empirical or moral judgments. The task of the Third Critique (or at least of its first part on aesthetic judgment) is to discover the a priori principles by which a reflective judgment can be considered true. These principles are the transcendental conditions that make the pleasure and pain associated (a priori) with experiences of beauty or of the sublime universally true. The fact that these principles are immanent within particular aesthetic experiences and can only be discovered through them means aesthetic judgment provides an autonomous type of knowledge independent of the conceptual conditions determining experience (although experience is obviously necessary), and of the moral principles governing our actions (although these will eventually be confirmed by it). Sublime art therefore takes on its philosophical and political significance exactly at this point, the aesthetic judgment it involves opens experience onto a transcendental realm that both evades its rules, but acts as its condition. This realm is entirely free of determining conditions, and when it is experienced as such reveals a force that takes us beyond the now restricting limits of the human. AESTHETIC REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT Aesthetic judgment is ‘reflective’, as we have seen, and so builds a bridge between a particular empirical experience and the transcendental Ideas that support it. Thus the Third Critique connects the previous two, and their respective realms of experience and reason (morality). It is this connection that will be developed in Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of art, and that Derrida deconstructs in the chapters that follow, and so we will need to get a grasp of how Kant develops it in the Third Critique. Objects in nature appear to us, Kant explains, according to both the a priori concepts of the understanding that define our possible experience (as laid out in the table of categories (CPR, §10 B106: 113/118–19)), and to those that determine an object’s end or purpose and so ground

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its actual existence. In a wider sense, however, the natural purposes of things (i.e. efficient causes) conform to a ‘final end’ or ‘purposiveness’ acting as their regulating principle (i.e. final cause), which, Kant writes, would have to be that of a purposiveness of nature for the sake of our ability to cognize nature, insofar as this ability requires that we are able to judge the particular contained under the universal and to subsume it under the concept of nature. (CJ, First Introduction 203: 392/16)2

Purposiveness is therefore the ground of reflective judgment, the condition guaranteeing the possibility of such judgments moving from a particular experience to a transcendental Idea. In this sense purposiveness is ‘the concept of nature as art; in other words, it is the concept of the technic of nature regarding its particular laws’ (CJ, First Introduction 204: 393/17). Nature as art is the way in which nature arranges itself for us according to a set of laws we can recognise. These laws, as Kant puts it, appear according to the principle that nature, in the specification of the transcendental laws of understanding (the principles of nature’s possibility as a nature as such), i.e., in the diversity of its empirical laws, proceeds in terms of the idea of a system for dividing nature, so as to make experience possible as an empirical system. (CJ, First Introduction 242–3: 432/58)

Now while reflective judgment is not concerned with these principles or the empirical laws it makes possible, their necessary relation (Kant calls it their ‘attunement’) does ensure our ability to move from a judgment concerning an object in nature to its universal and supersensible conditions as defined by reason, which in turn ensures (and this is the important point for Kant) the compatibility of the deterministic causality of nature and the freedom of reason. Purposiveness as a teleological principle is thus at once universal and indeterminate, as it does not determine any particular aspect of a natural thing but does guarantee its adherence to the condition of its final end, which underlies our judgment. We cannot discern the purposiveness of nature in our experience of the causal relations of natural objects, nor in their objective ends, because these are all conceptually determined, but to judge reflectively assumes the purposiveness of nature, and this allows us to move from a particular experience of nature to a universal Idea underlying both nature and our judgment.3 This universal a priori underlying nature and thought is freedom, which does not contradict Kant’s insistence on the mechanistic determinism of the natural world, but makes it compatible with humanity’s essential moral freedom. Kant writes, aesthetic judgment



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 19 provides us with the concept that mediates between the concepts of nature and the concepts of freedom: the concept of a purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] of nature, which makes possible the transition from pure theoretical to pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose [Endzwecks] set by the concept of freedom. (CJ, Second Introduction 196: 36–7/108)

Kant’s argument regarding the purposiveness of nature was, as John Zammito has argued, his answer to the growing popularity of the Romantic Sturm und Drang, and in particular their theory of hylozoism (or vital materialism) as the immanent purpose responsible for organisms’ self-organisation. This, Zammito argues, was the motivating factor of Kant’s ‘ethical turn’ in the Third Critique, which sought to ground aesthetic judgment, and hence the critical project, in the supersensible (1992: 6). The emphasis on teleology in the Critique of Judgment, and in particular its importance for reflective judgment, provided an alternative theory of individuation to self-organisation, and led Kant to significantly reformulate his commitments to moral freedom, natural order and theism. Kant’s staunch rejection of hylozoism rested on his insistence that life did not lie in the mechanisms of matter, but in the principles of thought that gave life form (consistent with Enlightenment rationalism). But this, according to Alberto Toscano, only ‘suspended and diverted’ the problem of selforganisation, and remained an ‘unstable resolution’ (2006: 44). As a result, Kant continued to grapple with this problem, and in the Opus Postumum (notes unpublished at Kant’s death) he proposed a new schematism of a priori forces organising matter. This systematisation rests on a ‘transcendental mechanics’ of individuation (Toscano 2006: 47), by which a mechanistic but nevertheless immaterial cause, or ‘life-principle’, determines the forces that organise matter, providing what Toscano calls a ‘psychovitalist postulate of immaterial ideality’ (2006: 50). Bodies, Kant claims, are in this sense ‘natural machines’ animated by transcendental and immaterial forces, with the ‘ether’ or ‘absolute matter’ acting as the ultimate condition of material individuation. In this way he sought to overcome the duality asserted in the Third Critique between inert matter and life (qua principle of organisation). Toscano argues that in the Opus Postumum we find ‘the attempt to think the non-empirical determinations of a single matter understood as the field of individuation for all the bodies that constitute the objects of our cognition, a cognition that cannot experience this matter as such but must postulate it indirectly’ (2006: 54). This, Toscano claims, is a nascent transcendental materialism emerging in Kant’s work, one that inaugurates a line of thought

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he ­ impressively traces through the subsequent work of Nietzsche, Simondon and Deleuze, among others. While we will not venture further into the intricacies of Kant’s dispute with hylozoism, nor follow Toscano’s genealogy of individuation qua transcendental materialism, there are important aspects of these debates that are relevant for us. In particular, both Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari will separate aesthetic experience from its cognitive conditions of possibility in order for it to both express and construct (i.e. individuate) the transcendental forces of a single matter. These forces, in both cases, are associated with Kant’s Ideas (particularly that of freedom), and are both immaterial (i.e. differential) and immanent to matter. For Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari the sublime, and more specifically sublime art, will be the crucial mechanism by which an experience emerges beyond its conditions of possibility, an experience of and as the transcendental as such. As a result, the sublime reveals a transcendental materialism that is submerged and somewhat ‘furtively indicated’ (Toscano 2006: 23) within the Third Critique, and sublime art provides a pre-individual and dynamic experience of this ­transcendental and ontogenetic matter-force. F R E E P L AY A judgment of taste (‘this is beautiful’) concerns our experience of an object, and as Kant had already shown in the First Critique this experience necessarily involves the imagination and the understanding in the schematism­– ­‘a procedure of the judgment which adapts otherwise heterogeneous concepts to the spatial and temporal conditions of intuition’ (Caygill 1995: 360). But because judgments of taste are reflective, and furthermore concern non-subjective feelings (their pleasure is ‘disinterested’), they cannot be conceptually determined. In the case of a judgment of taste then, the imagination and understanding are in free play ‘because’, Kant says, ‘no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition’ (CJ, §9 217: 62/132). For the purposes of reflective judgment the understanding is required to supply a concept that unifies the combination of intuitions supplied by the imagination in a ‘lawful’ manner (CJ, §35 287: 151/217), but beyond providing the conditions under which an object can appear as such, the understanding has no determining function. Judgments of taste are therefore free and spontaneous in a way analogous to moral actions, and so express the moral dimension of reason in a form that humans can experience. According to Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ we are truly free when we choose to act



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 21

in a way that is nevertheless necessary according to the moral law, in a way that is good for everyone and not only for us. In one of Kant’s more sympathetic formulations, this means treating others as ends rather than as means. Similarly­– ­indeed, by analogy­– ­aesthetic taste requires the ability to judge an object according to the free lawfulness of the imagination (CJ, General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic 240: 91/160). On the one hand the imagination is free in an aesthetic judgment because it is not determined by a concept of the understanding, but this freedom remains ‘lawful’ inasmuch as the understanding nevertheless provides its ‘form’, which operates in harmony with imagination’s freedom. As a result, a reflective judgment is ‘free’ in a moral sense, it is non-determined and precisely for this reason it applies to everyone. Similarly, because it is undetermined an aesthetic judgment gives an intimation of the purposiveness of natural objects that subtends the determinism of their mechanical relations. In this sense, a judgment of taste ‘must rest on a feeling that allows us to judge the object by the purposiveness that the presentation (by which an object is given) has insofar as it furthers the cognitive powers in their free play’ (CJ, §35 287: 151/217). In other words, a judgment of taste contains an intimation of the moral sphere of reason (i.e. freedom) through the purposiveness of the form of its object, and so is an indirect indication of morality’s power. What is significant here, is that the feeling of pleasure inspiring a judgment of taste cannot be determined by a concept or articulated in language, but it nevertheless leads us to a type of ‘knowledge’ that is transcendental, and extends beyond our (conceptual) conditions of possible experience. In fact, what is universally communicable and indeed necessary in a judgment of taste­– t­ he pleasure of the imagination and the understanding ‘quickened’ to an ‘indeterminate’ but ‘accordant’ activity­ – ­can only ‘reveal itself’ [kenntlich machen] through sensation (CJ, §9 219: 63/133). Feeling here provides us with an objective principle, with knowledge, but not according to conceptual conditions of experience, which are precisely what aesthetic judgments avoid. It is therefore only in aesthetic judgments that the purposiveness of objects emerge, judgments that ‘do not say that everyone judges like that [. . .] but say that we ought to judge like that, which amounts to saying that they have for themselves an a priori principle’ (CJ, First Introduction 239: 428/53). A judgment of taste (‘this is beautiful’) concerns our experience of the form of an object, because it is the form that is best able to provoke the disinterested pleasure that determines its beauty. Content, Kant believes (here following Aristotle) is simply distracting, because it tends to emerge as a result of a conceptual understanding of personal ends.

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As a result, as Kant puts it, ‘someone who feels pleasure in the mere reflection on the form of an object, without any concern about a concept, rightly lays claim to everyone’s assent, even though this judgment is empirical and a singular judgment’ (CJ, Second Introduction 191: 31/102). Empirical and singular this pleasure might be, but nevertheless its condition is an orderly but nevertheless undetermined form that expresses the purposiveness of nature. In this the free play of the imagination and understanding in the beautiful gives rise to a universal pleasure, because it expresses its transcendental conditions as the higher destination of experience. It is precisely this moment of Kant’s Third Critique that has led to the widespread understanding of his aesthetics as formalist. His argument appeals to long-standing aesthetic distinctions between designo and colore (the former being line and concerns form, while the latter is colour and so involves matter) that privilege the ideal rather than material aspects of artworks. According to Kant, the material aspects of a thing appeal to our ‘barbaric’ interest in the charming or emotional, and makes our pleasure the purpose of experience, whereas a ‘pure judgment of taste’ is entirely disinterested in its object, and therefore determined only by the (universal) purposiveness of its object’s form (CJ, §13 223: 69/138–9). Kant applies this distinction to the visual arts in the most unambiguous manner: In painting, in sculpture, indeed in all the visual arts design [Zeichnung­ – ­more literally drawing] is what is essential: in design the basis for any involvement of taste is not what gratifies us in sensation, but merely what we like because of its form. The colors that illuminate the outline belong to charm. (CJ, §14 225: 71/141)

In a seeming aside, but one that will be fully exploited in Derrida’s deconstruction of the judgment of taste, Kant remarks that ornaments (or ‘parerga’) also follow this distinction, increasing our liking of the object they surround by their tasteful form, or ‘impairing’ it through their crass and material ‘finery’ [Schmuck] (CJ, §14 226: 72/142). In any case, what is important about a judgment of taste is that it is not based upon a purpose of the object (which would be determined by a concept), nor on a subjective purpose (which would be based upon a personal interest), but rather on a formal purposiveness, or as Kant memorably puts it: ‘a purposiveness without a purpose [Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck]’ (CJ, §15 226: 73/143). In this way, the necessary causality determining the natural world (which has produced the ‘beautiful’ object) and the necessity of freedom in the supersensible can be seen to be compatible in an experience that moves from one to the other.



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Although this is a highly philosophical understanding of ‘formalism’, it does have clear links to the modernist use of the term. For example, Kant writes: ‘A liking for beauty is one that presupposes no concept but is directly connected with the presentation by which the object is given (not by which it is thought)’ (CJ, §16 230: 77/147). ‘Formalism’, in other words, applies to a judgment of taste inasmuch as this concerns the form of the object’s intuition, without this form being determined by a specific concept or ‘content’. Such ‘free’ beauties, as Kant calls them, involve no concept of their ‘purpose’, and in presenting them ‘our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape’ (CJ, §16 230: 77/147). Clement Greenberg famously applied the method of Kantian critique to the arts, which were defined, he argued, according to their (modern) search for their essential conditions of possibility (in painting’s case these were flatness and colour), conditions whose ‘beauty’ (not a word Greenberg necessarily privileged) lay in the disembodied and transcendental sensations they produced. Furthermore, modernist formalism privileges both the abstraction and autonomy of artworks, aspects of art that will be important for both Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari, who will nevertheless reject Kant’s insistence on beautiful ‘design’, and emphasise instead a transcendental materialism that emerges in sublime art. Obviously, there is a lot to say here, and we shall return to the specifics of sublime art, and its relation to a genealogy of modernism in our chapters on Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari, but in the meantime we must continue to push into Kant. T H E B E AU T I F U L Kant analyses a judgment of taste according to its four ‘moments’: quality, quantity, relation and modality. These ‘moments’, Kant explains in a footnote, conform to the logical functions of a determinative judgment that he had already laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason (A70/B95). That Kant bases reflective judgment on the logical functions of determinative judgment will be of special significance to Derrida, who argues that it casts doubt on Kant’s claim that reflective judgment gives a rule only to itself. Alternatively, Lyotard will expend a good deal of energy showing how these ‘moments’ are themselves based on feeling and so do not compromise the claims of reflective judgment. We will return to the detail of these arguments, but both highlight how understanding the precise relation between the conceptual determination of experience and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment is central for a theory of contemporary art. If aesthetic judgment does offer an autonomous form of ‘knowledge’ derived from feeling or sensation,

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then it can be used to define a mode of contemporary artistic practice that pushes back against the current hegemony of ‘conceptual’ practices and reclaims the realm of the aesthetic not only as a means of artistic ‘knowledge production’, but as a realm of experience that explores the ontological and political implications of a transcendental materialism. In their different ways, all the subsequent chapters of this book will revolve around this question. The first ‘moment’ of the judgment of taste involves its quality, which is pleasure. In judging something beautiful we feel pleasure, but more importantly we claim that this pleasure is produced by the imagination (the faculty presenting our intuitions) working in conjunction with (but undetermined by) the understanding (the faculty determining the object of our experience according to a set of a priori concepts). An aesthetic judgment of the type ‘this is beautiful’ is therefore grounded in a subjective state rather than in the conditions of possible experience of its object. But in order not to be immediately thrust into the relativism of purely subjective tastes, the ‘liking’ [Wohlgefallen] that determines a judgment of taste must be devoid of any personal interest, it is ‘disinterested and free’ as Kant famously put it (CJ, §5 210: 52/123). There can be no personal motivation to our liking the object, because this would imply that our experience was determined by an ‘end’, and so by a concept. ‘In order to play the judge in matters of taste,’ Kant tells us, ‘we must not be in the least biased in favour of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it’ (CJ, §2 205: 46/117). It is only when we feel pleasure in an object that is not based upon any personal interests that it can point towards an a priori ground of the judgment. This will immediately count out almost all of our common enjoyments (everything we ‘like’), because these experiences indicate only what is ‘agreeable’ [angenehmen] to our senses, and so express no more than the gratification of personal ‘interest’. ‘Taste’ in this sense, Kant complains, provides no possible distinction between liking a kebab (‘sense impressions that determine inclination’ (CJ, §3 206: 47/118)) and liking the morally good (‘principles of reason that determine the will’ (CJ, §3 206: 47/118)). Given that it is precisely the abyss between them that aesthetic judgment will supposedly bridge with an a priori principle, the fact that personal interest can be seen to determine them both discounts such experiences from being judgments of taste. Selfinterest qua ‘end’ determines my desire for a kebab, as much as it does my desire to do ‘good’. Liking the beautiful, however, is something different from these various likes and tastes. A judgment of taste is not based upon the enjoyment of a sensation that gratifies our self-interest, but rather on



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a feeling of pleasure caused by an object whose existence is a question of complete indifference to us (CJ, §5 209: 51/122). It is precisely this indifference that makes our judgment ‘free’ of any self-interest. In this respect the judgment ‘this is beautiful’, while retaining our own experience as its ground, nevertheless reveals an aspect of this experience that is not ‘personal’, but instead claims a universal validity. Kant’s insistence on the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgment and the entirely formal pleasure it involves is certainly difficult for any theory of art that seeks to privilege its production of sensation. Contemporary art has emerged through the often polemical opposition of sensation and conceptual content, and a desire to subordinate the subjective dimensions of the former to the determining drive of the latter. Nevertheless, if we step back a little from the detail of Kant’s argument the concept of disinterest and the ‘formalism’ it presupposes clearly detaches aesthetic experience from the ‘I’, from its personal but therefore entirely relative enjoyment. On a philosophical level this implies that the ‘feeling’ provoking a judgment of taste is not determined by the conceptual conditions of any possible experience, but is an experience that goes beyond them towards a transcendental realm that underlies personal experience but cannot be understood in its terms. This would be an experience that escapes its human conditions, as it escapes the limits of the human who has it, in order to emerge (to individuate) in a way undetermined by concepts and so able to explore and express the transcendental dimension of Ideas such as infinity and freedom. Now this all sounds very grand, and we might indeed point out that as with Kant’s own theory, it seems hard to imagine how artworks might­– ­or even if they should­– ­achieve this. For Kant himself, it seems to have lead to a theory of art that, as Jean-Marie Schaeffer has pointed out, was entirely analogical and symbolic: ‘the sensuous appearance of an ideal otherness’ (2001: 51). Schaeffer’s formulation is useful because it emphasises the dichotomy of the sensible and the supersensible that art can supposedly only indicate and must finally adhere to. If, however, the supersensible was matter (as Toscano argues) then the sensuous experience of otherness would be precisely what art could offer, an individuation free from conceptual conditions and directly participating in the transcendental emergence of life. The second moment of the ‘Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment’ concerns quantity. The beautiful is an inclusive feeling, because if someone makes the judgment ‘this is beautiful’ then they are, Kant says, ‘justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone’ (CJ, §6 211: 54/124). In this sense, the quantity of a judgment of taste is everyone, inasmuch as such a judgment ‘must’ make ‘a claim to subjective universality’ (CJ,

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§6 212: 54/125). This is an interesting and to us perhaps quite bizarre idea of taste. If I tell you that I like a work of art, well, Kant says, ‘no one cares about that’ (CJ, §7 212: 55/126). No one cares because we all understand that this ‘liking’ is relative, and any other personal taste is as justified as our own. We can argue our differences all we want, but we are not going to discover anything that everyone agrees upon. So it is only through personal indifference to a thing’s beauty that someone can claim it is universal. If someone claims something is beautiful, he judges on behalf of everyone (as opposed to themselves), and so, Kant writes, ‘he demands that they agree’ (CJ, §7 213: 56/126). There is thus a strange and paradoxical quantity to a judgment of taste. On the one hand ‘this is beautiful’ describes a single experience had by a single subject, while on the other this judgment is universally communicable and ‘extends that predicate over the entire sphere of judging persons’ (CJ, §8 215: 59/130). Such a principle, Kant tells us, ‘could only be regarded as a common sense [Gemeinsinn]. [. . .] Only under the presupposition of such a common sense, I maintain, can judgments of taste be made’ (CJ, §20 238: 87/157). Kant means ‘common sense’ literally here, because while the judgment of taste gives us a universal knowledge, it does so through aesthetic means, through the feeling of pleasure. As Kant puts it: ‘We could even define taste as our ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation [Vermittelung] by a concept’ (CJ, §40 295: 162/228). And not only does beauty provide universal knowledge through aesthetic experience, but it also involves a certain compulsion, a normative imperative that has a social function: ‘Beautiful is what without a concept is cognized as the object of a necessary liking’ (CJ, Explication of the Beautiful Inferred from the Fourth Moment 240: 90/160). Judgments of taste reveal an aesthetic common sense that defines a universal human community, being the product of ‘human reason in general’ and so escaping the ‘illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones’ (CJ, §40 293: 160/ 225). As Schaeffer points out, the ‘moment’ of quantity in the judgment of taste gives to the aesthetic and its ‘common sense’ an undeniably ‘utopian’ social dimension (2001: 55). This implied politics of judgments of taste has often been remarked upon. Deleuze, for example, will mount an aggressive campaign against Kant’s theory of common sense in order to free the aesthetic from any trace of a transcendental subjectivity and the political implications of its assumed consensus. Similarly, Lyotard will reject the community of taste in favour of an aesthetics of ‘dissensus’. For Rancière on the other hand, art is political precisely when



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it contests the existing sensus communis, and seeks to go beyond its limits in order to include those who have been excluded. The details of this argument await us, but what is shared by our authors is an insistence on the political power of aesthetics, and on the political efficacy of art’s production of sensation. This clearly runs counter­– ­or so I will argue­– t­ o the dominant tendency in contemporary artistic practices to subordinate the sensation under the concept, and so to both limit the political agency of art to its discursive and conceptual modalities. It will be precisely against such a view that this book will arrange itself. The third moment of the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment is that of relation, which in judgments of taste is their ‘purposiveness’ or ‘final end’. Kant maintains that the basis of a judgment of taste in terms of its relation ‘can be nothing but the subjective purposiveness in the presentation of an object, without any purpose (whether objective or subjective), and hence the mere form of purposiveness, insofar as we are conscious of it, in the presentation by which an object is given to us’ (CJ, §11 221: 66/136). As a result, it is the formal purposiveness of a purposeless object (i.e. its non-purposive purposiveness) that causes the free play of the faculties, that gives us pleasure and that we judge to be beautiful. In other words, we like (i.e. feel pleasure) a beautiful form because it presents the harmony of the imagination and the understanding, and it is this pleasure, this feeling that reveals­– ­and so gives knowledge of­– a­ form’s purposiveness. As Kant will later put it, ‘beauty is not a property of the flower itself. For judgment of taste consists precisely in this, that it calls a thing beautiful only by virtue of that characteristic in which it adapts itself to the way we apprehend it’ (CJ, §32 282: 145/211). The form of the flower is beautiful precisely because it indicates what lies beyond both its immediate purpose and our interest, the reality of the transcendental realm of reason and its moral freedom, that underlies them both. The fourth moment of the judgment of taste­– ­modality­– ­is the necessity by which we like the beautiful object without this necessity being logical (i.e. conceptual) or in any way determinative. It is according to this necessity that a judgment of taste claims to be an example of a universal law (CJ, §18 236–7: 85/155–6), a claim demanding our agreement. Admittedly, my account of the beautiful has been rather schematic, but it has been necessary in order to introduce important aspects of Kant’s theory of aesthetics that the sublime will share, and on occasion subvert. It has also been important to make a first sketch of some of the positions that will be of central interest to us as we proceed, both in terms of the philosophers discussed, and of the wider implications

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their work has for contemporary artistic practices. Now, with regrettable haste but undeniable necessity, we must turn to Kant’s theory of the sublime. THE SUBLIME If the beautiful provides an analogue of moral freedom in the free harmony of the faculties, the sublime will actualise this moral necessity in its full force. Indeed, this was arguably what convinced Kant to include the sections on the sublime in the Third Critique at a late stage in its overall composition, and would also explain the sublime’s absence from its other parts.4 In the sublime, aesthetic pleasure arises from our experience of our subjective purposiveness for the Idea of freedom, rather than from our experience of the formal purposiveness of a beautiful object. In this sense, the sublime provides a more immediate experience of the transcendental realm, but one that is also more difficult and ambiguous. Aesthetic judgments concerning the beautiful and the sublime refer to an intellectual power of reason underlying our experiences, but the beautiful does so through the experience of a ‘free play’ of the imagination and the understanding, while in the sublime the imagination and understanding are overwhelmed by a sensation that exceeds our conditions of possible experience and so requires the Ideas of reason to be comprehended. As a result, in the sublime we do not experience an object, nor does this experience induce pleasure; rather we have the uncomfortable and even painful experience of a ‘formless object’. This sublime experience is what Kant calls an ‘intellectual feeling’ [Geistesgefühl] (CJ, Second Introduction 192: 32/103), a feeling that ‘thinks’ the ideas of reason and is in this sense similar to the beautiful; as Zammito comments, ‘the sublime is an experience which occasions self-consciousness through aesthetic reflection’ (1992: 278). But this experience and the self-consciousness it gives is quite different from that found in judgments of taste. As Kant puts it, we present the sublime in its ‘unboundedness [Unbegrenztheit] either in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality’ (CJ, §23 244: 98/165). Reason is the faculty that has such thoughts (Ideas), and as such the sublime reveals the supersensible within us through the feeling of Ideas that have no empirical form and ground experiences that are formless. As we would expect, the affects associated with the beautiful and the sublime are also quite different. The beautiful gives a subjective pleasure derived, Kant says, from ‘a feeling of life’s being furthered’, while the sublime provokes a feeling ‘of a momentary inhibition of



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the vital forces [Lebenskräfte] followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger’ (CJ, §23 245: 98/165). The sublime appears as an imminent threat posed by overwhelming natural forces that we cannot comprehend and so inhibit our action, causing pain, while the revelation of the supersensible Ideas underpinning this experience brings a powerful relief and satisfying pleasure. This complicated game where victory is grabbed from the jaws of defeat gives what Kant calls the ‘negative pleasure’ of the sublime (CJ, §23 245: 98/165). This distinction between the negative pleasure of the sublime and the more straightforward pleasure of the beautiful harks back to Edmund Burke’s landmark study A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, published in 1757. Kant was significantly influenced by Burke’s book, and although his pre-Critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764–5) were written before he read Garve’s German translation of Burke in 1773, he was nevertheless familiar with its content through a review by Moses Mendelssohn published in 1758.5 Although Kant’s Observations (following Burke) is almost exclusively concerned with the psychological aspects of aesthetic experiences rather than their transcendental foundations, his examples of the contrasting ‘aesthetics’ of the sublime and the beautiful are entirely consistent with the Third Critique: ‘Lofty oaks and lonely shadows in sacred groves are sublime, flowerbeds, low hedges, and trees trimmed into figures are beautiful’ (2011: 16). These aspects not only remain unchanged in the Third Critique, but dominate the Romantic tradition that followed: great size rather than contained form, solitude rather than social interaction, shadows rather than light and the sacred rather than the secular. The sublime experience tends to be found in a nature untouched by human hands, and in experiences of it that lead beyond the human and towards the rarified heights of the eternal and the infinite. ‘Casts of mind that possess a feeling for the sublime’, Kant tells us, ‘are gradually drawn into lofty sentiments, of contempt for the world, of eternity, by the quiet calm of a summer evening, when the flickering light of the stars breaks through the umber shadows of the night and a feeling of gaiety’ (2011: 16). In the Third Critique the sublime is similarly associated with experiences of awesome natural phenomena that induce feelings of the eternal and infinite: ‘thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightening and thunderclaps, volcanoes with their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on’ (CJ, §28 261: 120/185). Already with Burke, and confirmed by Kant, the sublime answers to a romantic roll call of identifying features, and

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while this has become a rather clichéd vocabulary today at the time it marked the emergence of the revolutionary movement of Romanticism. Similarly problematic for much of our contemporary sensibility, the sublime experiences of the eternal, infinite, terrifying, etc., display, as Kant puts it, a ‘seriousness, rather than play’ (CJ, §23 245: 98/166). The sublime just isn’t funny. The sublime, as Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe tells us (and this is not a compliment), ‘is always apprehended as the voice of responsibility, because it’s always attached to a serious idea’ (1999: 43).6 Championing irony over seriousness Gilbert-Rolfe argues that the sublime is modern and the beautiful is postmodern.7 Deleuze, on the other hand, will find a kind of ‘humour’ in the sublime that he directly contrasts to irony. Irony, he argues, is a ‘false submission’ to laws that are then subverted through over-identification, but without ever escaping the signifier (1994: 68), while humour is a transcendental materialism, a ‘universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws’ (1994: 5). This humour ‘beyond the law’ is sublime inasmuch as it is ‘the brutal form of the immediate, that of the universal and the singular reunited, which dethrones every law’ (Deleuze 1994: 7). Robert Garnett, in an important essay, has argued for a contemporary art that engages a ‘genuinely affirmative humour’ against irony, one in which a ‘pure event’ emerges beyond the realm of signification and the understanding as a kind of materialised, nonsense ‘joke’ directly connected to the Outside (see Garnett 2010). Perhaps unsurprisingly given its seriousness, the sublime is not something to like, like we like the beautiful. The purposiveness of a beautiful form ‘seems predetermined’ (CJ, §23 245: 99/166) for our power of judgment, but the sublime is formless and in this respect is ‘contrapurposive [zweckwidrig] for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that’ (CJ, §23 245: 99/166). This is the paradoxical heart of the sublime, its purposive contrapurposiveness and pleasurable displeasure. What is sublime cannot be ‘liked’ (the contemporary echoes are apt) because it ‘cannot be contained by any sensible form’ (CJ, §23 245: 99/166), and is in fact the experience we have when our powers of presentation are overwhelmed. Our first reaction to the sublime is pain, but this is soon replaced by the serious and yet in its own way pleasurable feeling of ideas of reason being ‘aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy’ (CJ, §23 245: 99/166). This ‘pleasure’, Kant claims, is ‘respect’, a non-empirical and moral form of pleasure, the ‘feeling’ we have when we feel an Idea that we cannot represent, but whose law we must obey. This affect of ‘respect’ is similar to that we feel for the categorical imperative by which reason legislates



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our moral laws, as is the (non-sensuous) satisfaction gained when we obey these laws.8 As with the categorical imperative, freedom may be part of our ‘intellectual vocation’ insofar as its ‘predisposition’ is part of our nature, but it nevertheless ‘remains up to us, as our obligation, to develop and exercise this ability’ (CJ, §28 262: 121/186). The cause of respect is, in both moral and aesthetic cases, the Idea of our essential nature as an autonomous moral agent (i.e. freedom). This feeling has distinctly political implications, although it implies a type of universality quite different from the sensus communis of a judgment of taste. Rather than creating a community around a transcendental judgment of beauty, a community that therefore coheres around a universal and human aesthetic taste for form, the sublime coheres around a shared respect for what commands us to live a free and moral life, above and beyond any self-regard or interest. Thus the sublime takes us out of our ‘usual middle range’ (CJ, §28 261: 120/185) and, Kant writes, makes us regard as small the [objects] of our [natural] concerns: property, health, and life, and because of this we regard nature’s might as yet not having such dominance over us, as persons, that we should have to bow to it if our highest principles were at stake and we had to choose between upholding or abandoning them. (CJ, §28 262: 121/186)

The sublime then, inspires in us not only respect, but a commitment to a higher transcendental freedom that not even the threat of impending death (as the ultimate consequence of natural causality) can make us question. The sublime inspires us to face what is most unnatural in us, on one side death, and on the other the immutable but utterly inhuman laws of moral freedom. Lyotard will fully explore the political consequences of this aspect of the sublime, as will Deleuze in a different manner, but in both cases the sublime supports a politics that begins and ends with freedom. Political transformation in this sense is always a question of abandoning the world of human communication and consensus (it involves, as Kant said, a ‘contempt for the world’) in order to experience, and thereby embody, the transcendental and so real conditions of non-human life. For both Lyotard and Deleuze this will involve a commitment to the creative freedom of life­– ­embodied first of all in art­– ­as it emerges in an experience unconstrained by any human conditions of experience. Both Lyotard and Deleuze, in other words, will take the sublime beyond its place in Kant’s system, a transformation we can perhaps abbreviate as replacing Kantian morality with a vitalist nature, and so making the sublime a crucial part of their theories of transcendental materialism. More on this later. Rather than making us feel the purposiveness of the form of beautiful natural objects, the sublime offers nothing, at least initially, that

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leads us to think about the objective principles underlying nature and thought. Instead­– ­and once more this is an important point for what will come later­– ­‘it is rather in chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime’ (CJ, §23 246: 99/167). For Kant the sublime is an experience of a chaotic nature because in it there is an ‘utter lack of anything leading to particular objective principles and to forms of nature conforming to them’ (CJ, §23 246: 99/167). In other words, the sublime is a formless experience of ‘crude nature [rohen Natur]’ (CJ, §26 253: 109/175) that tells us nothing objective about nature. So even when sublime experience overwhelms us, or better, because this experience overwhelms us, it cannot be understood according to the mechanistic causality determining what happens in our experience, and reveals instead an experience of those supersensible a prioris (i.e. ideas) that makes this experience ‘free’. So while the beautiful reveals an ‘attunement’ between the deterministic causality of nature and the ‘free play’ of the human faculties in aesthetic experience, the sublime reveals something more, which is the way that humanity is in the final instance free. Kant will divide the sublime into two variants, the mathematical and the dynamical sublimes. This distinction also follows the four ‘moments’ of the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, although here they are split, with quantity and quality applying to the mathematical sublime, and relation and modality to the dynamical sublime. This division of the ‘moments’ mirrors that made in the Critique of Pure Reason where quality and quantity are called the ‘mathematical categories’ and relation and modality the ‘dynamical categories’ (CPR, §11 B110: 116/121). These categories describe two ways of applying concepts to empirical experience: the mathematical refers judgment to objects of intuition in an unconditionally necessary (apodeictic) manner (giving the axioms of intuition and the anticipations of perception), while the dynamical refers to relations between objects, or between objects and the understanding and so only indirectly applies to actual experience (giving the analogies of experience and the postulates of empirical thought). In other words, the mathematical categories concern the conditions of intuition, while the dynamical categories concern the conditions of its conceptualisation. In the mathematical sublime then, intuition goes beyond the conditions of possible experience, while the dynamical sublime reveals how reason is nevertheless able to think this ‘beyond’ (see Banham 2000: 81–3). What is significant about this for a theory of sublime art, and it is something that will be crucial for Lyotard and Deleuze, is that, as Banham puts it, it ‘reveals how there can be an aesthetic orientation to the world which does not rest upon



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representations’ (2000: 92). The formless experience of the sublime is not representational, but it is an aesthetic experience nevertheless. The sublime is the feeling (a ‘negative pleasure’) we have when an experience exceeds any possibility of representation (i.e. it is conceptually undetermined), and so reveals how reason is able to think the ground of experience, qua a priori idea of totality, as both infinite and free. The mathematical sublime refers to an experience of something ‘absolutely large [schlechthin groß]’, something ‘large beyond all comparison’ (CJ, §25 248: 103/169) that is consequently ‘a magnitude that is equal only to itself’ (CJ, §25 250: 105/171). To say something is absolutely large means that it cannot be represented according to a concept of the understanding (most importantly by a unit of measure), and in fact, Kant tells us, ‘it involves no cognitive principle whatsoever’ (CJ, §25 248: 103/169). This impossibility of measuring the sublime rests on Kant’s account of empirical measurement, which operates, he says, through a process of comparison. As the size of things increase, so must our unit of measure, so while a tree is the height of three men, a hill is the height of thirty trees, and so on (see CJ, §26 256: 113/179–80). The problem, however, is that this process can be scaled up or down to infinity because every unit of measure is itself measurable and so finite, meaning that we can never find a measure adequate to the infinite size of the ‘absolutely large’. A multiverse is the size of fifteen universes . . . and there is always something bigger. This is going to lead to the meltdown of the imagination, whose function is to take a ‘quantum’ of raw sense material and immediately apply a measure to it. This, Kant tells us, is the imagination’s function of ‘apprehension’ [Auffassung], which locates the appropriate unit of measure and happily goes about measuring experience. This it can do endlessly, even in the face of the unmeasurable, but a problem arises when imagination attempts to synthesise its measurements into a ‘comprehension’ [Zusammenfassung] of the entire object. At a certain point imagination cannot hold all its measurements together in a single representation, and imagination ‘loses as much on the one side as it gains on the other’ (CJ, §26 252: 108/174). Imagination has reached, Kant says, a ‘maximum [Größtes] in comprehension that it cannot exceed’ (CJ, §26 252: 108/174), and is painfully suspended in the perceptual chaos of an endlessly unfolding and incomprehensible infinity. But at this moment of imagination’s collapse comes the dramatic moment of its redemption, ‘and as it strives to expand that maximum, it sinks back into itself, but consequently comes to feel a liking [that amounts to an] emotion [rührendes Wohlgefallen]’ (CJ, §26 252: 109/174).9 Once more, we encounter the paradoxical efficiency of the sublime, where the inadequacy of our presentation

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gives us satisfaction, where our pain causes us pleasure and where the impossibility of sensibility is nevertheless experienced as a likable ‘emotion’. While the mathematical sublime presents a largely abstract sense of the sublime focused on the endless nature of the infinite, the dynamical sublime is both more objective and more subjective. The dynamical sublime does not refer to the infinite extension of a formless sensation, but to its intense force, a power that overwhelms us and makes us fear for our very lives. Clearly, however, fear is not particularly conducive for passing judgment (i.e. liking something), so Kant will say­– ­following Burke­– ­that the dynamically sublime is only titillatingly terrifying, a wild grandeur that we can (and must) appreciate from a perspective of safety. As Kant very sensibly points out, ‘it is impossible to like terror that we take seriously’ (CJ, §28 261: 120/185). But if we are safe, and know ourselves to be so, then a sublime experience ‘becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is’ (CJ, §28 261: 120/185). From this viewpoint the seeming ‘omnipotence’ of natural phenomena reveal within us a power that is a match for nature’s exuberance, the power to judge ourselves (i.e. our experience) independently of nature. In this way the dynamical sublime shows us how reason provides ‘a nonsensible standard that has this infinity [of nature] itself under it as a unit’, and so demonstrates the superiority of reason over nature (CJ, §28 261: 120/185). The ‘absolutely great’ is in this way shown to be inside us rather than in nature, and as a result it is able to be thought­– ­comprehended by an idea. Nature’s infinite force is no longer terrifying because the sublime reveals the supersensible ideas that give reason to what appeared as chaos, and confirms in this disharmony of imagination and reason the transcendental truth of human freedom. As Kant puts it, in the sublime we ‘look outward toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss’ (CJ, §29 265: 124/190). As a result, Kant tells us: ‘The sublime can be described thus: it is an object (of nature) the presentation of which determines the mind to think of nature’s inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas’ (CJ, General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments 268: 127/193). With the sublime, we experience what cannot be experienced, or as the formula has it, we present what is unpresentable. Indeed, when our experience of nature is in excess of our representational faculties, reason ‘never fails’ to try to make our experience adequate to its idea of an ‘independent and absolute totality’ (CJ, General Comment 268: 128/193). Out of the ruins of the possibility of experience crawls the necessity of thinking what exceeds it, an excessive thought that is not conceptual (it bypasses the understanding) but



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is felt, and indeed has its own distinctive sensation. With the sublime the imagination acquires, Kant writes, ‘an expansion and a might that surpasses the one it sacrifices: but the basis of this might is concealed from it; instead the imagination feels the sacrifice or deprivation and at the same time the cause to which it is being subjugated’ (CJ, General Comment 269: 129/195). The dynamical sublime gives us the feeling of our superiority to nature, a feeling induced by nature but not of it, an intellectual feeling, or feeling with an intellectual cause, that reveals the supersensible and transcendental reality of the Ideas, and the necessity of our freedom. The dynamical sublime is ‘an aesthetic judgment [where] we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us’ (CJ, §28 260: 119/184), Kant writes, and so our humanity avoids being ‘degraded’ [unerniedrigt], even though as human beings we must ‘succumb’ [unterliegen] to nature’s dominance (CJ, §28 262: 121/186). The sublime therefore gives us a very serious pleasure, the pleasure, Kant writes, of ‘a power that is supersensible, whose Idea of a noumenon cannot be intuited but can yet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere appearance, namely, our intuition of the world’ (CJ, §26 255 111/177). Nature is sublime when its experience provokes in us an Idea of its absolute totality, and so reveals a supersensible dimension that underlies both nature and our ability to think. In this the sublime refers to ‘a substrate that is large beyond any standard of sense’, a substrate that is not revealed by an object, but by ‘the mental attunement [Gemütsstimmung] in which we find ourselves when we estimate the object’ (CJ, §26 256: 112/178). The sublime, in other words, is never found ‘in’ nature but ‘only in the mind of the judging person’ (CJ, §26 256: 113/179), a mind at once desiccated and collapsed, and simultaneously transcended by the ‘expansion of the imagination itself’ (CJ §25 249: 105/171) to encompass the infinite power of reason. We cannot perceive infinity, but we can think-feel it, and in the sublime the second is the result of the first. As Kant puts it: ‘Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense’ (CJ, §25 250: 106/172). But this is not to completely detach the sublime from sensation, nor from nature, because it is precisely a sensation of the unpresentability of the infinite in nature that is consequently ‘comprehended’ by an idea of reason.10 As Kant put it, ‘nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity’ (CJ, §26 255: 112/178). This means that the only possible measure of an intuition of the infinite in nature is the Idea of the absolute whole of nature, which, Kant tells us, is ‘infinity comprehended [zusammengefaßte Unendlichkeit]’ (CJ, §26 255: 112/178). In this way, the

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sublime allows us to harmonise our imagination with the Ideas of reason (a ‘harmony in pain’ as Deleuze will memorably call it), but as this harmony is in fact a radical disjunction, its ‘feeling’ will be both violent and paradoxical. While the beautiful provokes a ‘restful contemplation’ (CJ, §27 258: 115/181), the sublime ‘moves’ or ‘agitates’ [bewegt] the mind in a ‘vibration’, as Kant calls it, ‘a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object’ (CJ, §27 258: 115/181). On the one side we are overwhelmed by something ‘excessive [Überschwengliche] for the imagination, [. . .] an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself’ (CJ, §27 258: 115/181), while on the other this ‘abyss’ asserts an undeniable attraction because it confirms reason’s omnipotent and supersensible law and allows ‘the mind to come to feel its own sublimity’ in an ‘exciting liking’ (CJ, §28 262: 121/186). We are at once devastated by the overwhelming power of nature, and redeemed by the way this reveals our independence from, and even superiority to, its violence. Kant puts it like this: Just as, when we judge the beautiful, imagination and understanding give rise to a subjective purposiveness of the mental powers by their accordance, so do imagination and reason here give rise to such a purposiveness by their conflict [Widerstreit], namely to a feeling that we have a pure and independent reason, or a power for estimating magnitude, whose superiority cannot be made intuitable by anything other than the inadequacy of that power which in exhibiting magnitudes (of sensible objects) is itself unbounded. (CJ, §27 258: 115–16/182)

While the human individual is dwarfed by sublime Nature, humanity in its universal and supersensible essence, undetermined by the laws of nature, emerges above and beyond the now paltry thrashings of natural phenomena. This ‘intellectual feeling’ of the sublime is therefore a ‘feeling’ of the superiority of reason to our faculties of representation; it refers us, Kant says, ‘to maxims directed to providing the intellectual and our rational ideas with supremacy over sensibility’ (CJ, General Comment 274: 135/201). James Kirwen has argued that to feel the way reason overcomes sensibility is paradoxical and so ‘simply untenable’ (2005: 65), but rather than attenuate the sublime through accusing it of being a logical fallacy, it is precisely the way this feeling overcomes our conditions of possible experience that is of greatest interest for this book. The sublime, says Kant, ‘becomes interesting only because we present it as a might of the mind to rise above certain obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles’ (CJ, General Comment 271: 132/198). The sublime overcomes the conditions of possible experience, but is a feeling nonetheless: it is, Kant claims, ‘the predisposition to the feeling for



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(practical) ideas, i.e., to moral feeling’ (CJ, §29 265: 125/190). This would be, quite precisely, a sublime sensation, a sensation of what cannot be sensed according to the conditions of possible experience, but no less of a sensation for that. The sublime is a feeling of finality in ourselves that is independent of the finality of nature that gives us pleasure in the beautiful. Nevertheless, this sublime finality appears to us only in a negative sense (because it exceeds our conditions of possible experience), but it nevertheless has a positive outcome, as Kant tells us, because although an ‘exhibition of the negative can as such never be more than merely negative, it still expands the soul’ (CJ, General Comment 274: 135/201). It is this possibility of a negative feeling or, in other words, of a non-human feeling of the transcendental that will captivate both Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari, who make it the model for an aesthetic experience qua individuation of the ­transcendental, a ­transcendental that is material rather than ideal. SUBLIME ART Before moving on to the various recent accounts of sublime art this book will consider, we must first address the question as to whether sublime art is possible in the first place. This is a question that is provoked by Kant himself, inasmuch as for him an artwork is necessarily defined by an ‘aim’ or ‘purpose’, even if this­– i­n Duchampian fashion­– ­is simply to be a place-holder for the concept of ‘art’.11 As a result, Kant will explicitly state that ‘nothing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime’ (CJ, §25 250: 106/172), because ‘we must point to the sublime not in products of art (i.e. buildings, columns, etc.), where both the form and the magnitude are determined by a human purpose, nor in natural things whose very concept carries with it a determinate purpose’ (CJ, §26 252: 107/175). Nevertheless, and as has often been pointed out (e.g. Lyotard 2009: 29), Kant himself refers to various ‘sublime’ objects and argues that the sublime is ‘an object (of nature) the presentation of which determines the mind to think of nature’s inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas’ (CJ, General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments 268: 127/193). Our response to this ambiguity depends on the extent of our commitment to an intra-Kantian consistency, and whether our primary aim is to explain Kant or to use his work to explain art. Not that these two things are mutually exclusive, of course, and the chapters that follow will trace various attempts to do both. But for those primarily concerned with explicating the precise meaning of Kant’s aesthetics, his position on the sublime (among others) requires acrobatic feats

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of textual explication. Kant’s own comments concerning art almost exclusively address its status as beautiful, even if the way art offers an analogical or symbolic presentation of the moral realm of reason seems to bring it towards the sublime. This has led, as we shall see, to some commentators arguing that it is in the genius of the artist and her production of ‘aesthetic ideas’ that art becomes sublime. In the section of the Third Critique named ‘Art in General’ Kant argues that art is a free activity, or ‘production through freedom’ analogous to the freedom of reason. Fine art­– ­as opposed to the agreeable arts (which we like out of personal interest)­– c­ auses pleasure through presentations that are detached from any conceptual conditions (i.e. they are objectively and subjectively non-purposive), but nevertheless produce thought (i.e. they involve ideas). This non-purposive purposiveness of art’s forms are as free of rules as a beautiful object of nature, and in this sense beautiful art must have the ‘look’ of nature, it must look natural and not made by the artist. Such fine art is, Kant famously argues, the art of genius; ‘Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art’ (CJ, §46 307: 174/241). Genius is an ‘innate mental predisposition’ that enables the artist to produce art in a manner analogical to the way nature produces beauty: without any determinate rules. An artwork produced in this way is the opposite of a work that simply imitates nature, because its ‘foremost property’, Kant claims, is ‘originality’ (CJ, §46 307–8: 175/242). In this sense, Kant says: ‘A certain boldness of expression, and in general some deviation from the common rule, is entirely fitting for a genius’ (CJ, §49 318: 187/255). This connection of originality with an undetermined aesthetic production will be a consistent feature of modernism, where it is called the avant-garde, and of all of the accounts of art discussed here. As such, understanding the relation of the sublime to genius is important, because the question of originality will carry significant political claims for the authors ­discussed in this book. Despite the almost superhuman abilities of the genius, Kant argues, the art she produces is not entirely intuitive and spontaneous, because although genius gives rather than follows rules for producing art, it still needs academic training to be able to do so. But the genius is able to go beyond this training and its rules because she has ‘spirit’ or Geist as the animating principle of her creative process, and it is this that enables her to produce ‘aesthetic ideas’ (CJ, §49 317: 186/254). Aesthetic ideas, Kant explains, are a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 39 grasp it. It is easy to see that an aesthetic idea is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational idea, which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (presentation of the image) can be adequate. (CJ, §49 314: 182/249–50)

Aesthetic ideas strive towards the supersensible­a­ nd in this sense are ‘inner intuitions [innern Anschauungen] to which no concept [of the understanding] can be completely adequate’ (CJ, §49 314: 182–3/250). Aesthetic ideas open the artwork onto ‘an immense realm of kindred presentations’ (CJ, §49 315: 184/252); they produce so many concepts that no single one is adequate to it. Finally then an aesthetic idea is a presentation of the imagination which is conjoined with a given concept and is connected, when we use imagination in its freedom, with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that stands for a determinate concept can be found for it. Hence it is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feelings of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit. (CJ, §49 316: 185/ 253, italics added)

For Kant, it is the feeling of proliferating connections provoked by the artwork that indicates the aesthetic ideas produced by art, and it is the undetermined nature of these ideas that symbolises the ideas of reason in enacting the transcendental and creative freedom that the genius shares with God. This is only subsequently described in language. In the case of the verbal arts it is precisely the proliferation of sense that is already implicit in poetic language. The question for us, then, is whether we can understand this symbolic proximity of the aesthetic idea with an Idea of reason as justifying the claim that an art work of genius is also sublime. This would seem difficult for the simple reason that the art work of genius is beautiful­ – ­in a technical sense­– ­rather than sublime. Kenneth Rodgerson has argued that the aesthetic idea is in fact the way the artwork articulates the ‘free harmony’ of imagination and understanding in the beautiful, inasmuch as the aesthetic idea gives a sense of how a ‘free’ manifold given by the imagination is nevertheless rule-governed, without being determined by any particular concept.12 The aesthetic ideas produced by artworks of genius are not used by the understanding objectively, for cognition, but subjectively to raise our cognitive power to the heights of reason, and that of others when we express them in a communicable way. But the aesthetic idea is not the same as an Idea of reason, because it is an intuition for which an adequate concept can never be found, whereas no adequate intuition can ever be given for a rational Idea (CJ, §57 Comment One 342: 215/283–4). So while the aesthetic idea has aspects of both the beautiful and the sublime, it is clearly grounded in

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the free play of imagination and understanding, rather than the collapse of the former and the foreclosure of the latter, as in the sublime. In the aesthetic idea the understanding is unable to determine and limit the ‘content’ of the experience, and this leads us towards reason, while in the sublime it is the failure of the imagination to determine the ‘form’ of the experience that enables it to indicate the supersensible. This distinction in fact expresses a deeper one, as Allison points out, between the moral dimension acting as the ground of the sublime, and the merely subjective conditions of judgment that underlie both the beautiful and the aesthetic Idea. As Allison puts it, ‘the sublime is morally significant because it provides us with an aesthetic awareness of precisely what morality requires of us with respect to all duties, and of what is sufficient for the perfect duties that constitute the veritable foundations of the moral life for Kant’ (2001: 342). The aesthetic idea, on the other hand, offers a proliferation of presentations by the imagination that is in harmony with but undetermined by the understanding, and in this way symbolises the moral realm of reason without giving us a direct feeling-thought of it. If the aesthetic ideas produced by genius emerge from our experience of beautiful art, then can there be a sublime art, and if so, what would its distinguishing features be? From a strictly Kantian perspective it would seem we must answer this question in the negative, inasmuch as the sublime is objectively contra-purposive, and therefore cannot tolerate the obvious aim of being ‘art’ implicit in any artwork. Similarly, the sublime experience exceeds the conditions of any possible presentation, and so could never be identified with an object. Nevertheless, ‘sublime art’ was something that quickly became taken for granted in the Romantic tradition, and it is an assumption that continues until today, being clearly in evidence in both its advocates (Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari) and its enemies (Rancière). As is often pointed out, it was Schiller rather than Kant who argued for the possibility of a sublime art, a claim that rested upon a fairly fundamental reorientation of the Kantian text (see de Man 1996: 129–62). Schiller’s influential version of Kant’s sublime, beginning in his ‘Towards the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas’ (1793) and then developed more extensively in ‘Concerning the Sublime’ (1801), generalised the experience of the sublime to encompass everything that depicts what transcends the  senses. ‘Poetic treatment’, Schiller writes, ‘consists exclusively in the transformation of what is limited into something sublime’ (quoted in Kirwan 2005: 81). In simple terms, Schiller ignores Kant’s qualifications concerning the necessarily non-purposive nature of aesthetic experience, in order to claim that artworks can be sublime in a similar



Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime 41

way to experiences of an overwhelming natural force. This has became the way in which those who have explored the possibility of sublime art have allowed for its existence. There are also moments in Kant’s account of the sublime that encourage such a view, possibly the most well known being his claim that the experience of the pyramids and of St Peter’s are examples of the absolutely large. As Allison puts it, this seems a ‘blatant inconsistency’ (2001: 336) in relation to his later claim that only natural phenomena can be sublime. Allison argues that this inconsistency is only apparent, inasmuch as it attests to Kant’s primary objective of preserving the aesthetic (i.e. reflective) nature of the sublime judgment. According to Allison this makes these architectural experiences (ambiguous) examples of the sublime in nature rather than in art. Others, however, have seized upon this moment as positive evidence that art too can be (according to Kant) sublime. Paul Crowther has claimed that Kant’s examples allow us to ask whether the ‘correspondence between a representation and a subject-matter [in an artwork] must necessarily count as a restriction on our experiencing such a work as sublime?’ (1989: 154). His answer is obviously ‘no’, and he refers to Kant’s discussion of the veil in the temple of Isis (part of his discussion of genius and the fine arts (§49)), which, he writes, ‘clearly concedes that representational artworks can have a content or subject-matter which in-itself is in some sense sublime’ (1989: 154). Crowther is referring to Kant’s discussion of the temple of Isis, and in particular the following footnote: The consciousness of virtue, even if we only think of ourselves as in the position of a virtuous person, spreads in the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings and a boundless outlook towards a joyful future, such as no expression commensurate with a determinate concept completely attains. (CJ, §49 316: 185/252)

The passage describes the feelings associated with the aesthetic idea of virtue as ‘sublime’. While Crowther claims that this ‘could have led Kant to a distinctively artistic notion of the sublime linked to genius’ (1989: 159), Kant’s use of ‘sublime’ here could equally have been a result of his slightly lazy use of a common adjective. Crowther’s argument is, by his own admission, ‘a very liberal, but nonetheless plausible, reading’ (1989: 159) of the aesthetic idea as sublime, and one he uses to disconnect the Ideas of reason from their moral aspect in order to make them essential to the human spirit. ‘It is here’, Crowther suggests, ‘that we can talk with greatest justice of sublime art produced by genius’ (1989: 160). We shall return to this idea shortly. Crowther’s position follows other Kantian commentators such as John Zammito who also accept that the genius of aesthetic ideas marks a

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shift in the Kantian attitude towards art’s possible ‘sublimity’. Zammito argues that Kant’s use of the concept of ‘subreption’ (replacing an idea with an object) to explain how aesthetic ideas are produced by an artwork of genius marks ‘a breathtaking metaphysical revision of the whole project: art offers symbolic access to the ultimate. [. . .] Art is the vehicle through which the supersensible gives token of its real presence’ (1992: 288). The true philosophical value of art emerges here. As discursive reasoning cannot secure the metaphysical ground of thought, art must step into the breach in the shape of the genius. The aesthetic idea is produced by an object (the artwork) that has no corresponding concept, that in fact escapes any concept, and in doing so it offers a symbol of the metaphysical ‘beyond’ constituted by Ideas. The aesthetic idea therefore borrows material from nature, but only in order to ‘denature’ it and so create an analogy of a ‘second nature’, that of the supersensible. Another commentator who associates the sublime and the aesthetic idea is James Kirwan, who sees the latter as a plausible way to ‘save’ the concept of the sublime from Kant’s ‘simply untenable’ (2004: 99) claim that an artwork cannot provide an experience of the unexperienceable moral law. To save the sublime, Kirwen proposes to abandon its claims to universal validity, and instead associate it with the aesthetic idea. The aesthetic idea strives for something that cannot be experienced and so seeks to represent an Idea of reason, which it cannot do, but it can present the proliferation of sense such an attempt gives rise to, which in turn provokes a pleasure that isn’t associated with any object, and is similar to that produced by the overcoming of human limits found in the sublime. As a result, Kirwan argues, ‘the feeling of transcendence that we enjoy in the sublime is, and must be, based on an interest that is unacknowledged as such’ (2004: 100). It is the idea of (i.e. an interest in) transcending one’s condition that gives pleasure, and although this idea is not one of reason (it is an interest) the pleasure nevertheless indicates such an Idea’s presence. This is the pleasure, Kirwen claims, we gain from allowing ourselves to desire the impossible. As a result the experience of the sublime is necessarily constituted by both an entertainment of what would constitute the fulfilment of the desire (the ‘revelation’) and recognition this fulfilment is impossible (that it exists only as an object of desire). It is in not sundering these two contradictory orientations that the pleasure of the sublime lies. (2004: 101)

As we shall see in Chapter 4, this is a particularly postmodern and deconstructed version of the sublime, where the dialectical relationship of desire and its impossibility makes the sublime an at once transcending and ironic sentiment. If this is saving the sublime, we might say, it is only by ‘saving’ it.



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Another, even more influential postmodern interpretation of the sublime has come from Frederic Jameson. For Jameson the ‘postmodern sublime’ is the feeling evoked not by nature, but by the overwhelming and ungraspable power of modern technology driving the economics of late capitalism, and in particular its digital operations (1991: 35). This inhuman power escapes our powers of comprehension, imposing a level of complexity on our lives that transcends our cognitive ability to apprehend and control them. As a result, the ‘postmodern sublime’ (the term is Jameson’s) has led to a new mass-media aesthetics of fragmentation, pastiche and parody, which replaces a culture based on individual identity and its expression with a schizophrenic and ‘radically anti-anthropomorphic’ sensibility associated with a new techno-capitalist ‘reason’ (1991: 34). This postmodern sublime attempts to articulate the realms of immediate experience and abstract knowledge (as Kant’s sublime did, and as ideology does in more recent times, according to Jameson (1991: 52)), but it is forever confronted with its own failure and so reduced to either affirming this failure (the ‘new’ postmodern aesthetic) or positing an ideological ‘Idea’ capable of comprehending it. This latter task is the most difficult, according to Jameson, and tends to resolve itself either in the ridiculous (as in conspiracy theories (1991: 38)) or in highly localised attempts at ‘cognitive mapping’ that connect specific individual experiences with the unrepresentable (i.e. sublime) totality of postmodern society as a whole (1991: 51–4). Crowther mobilises a humanist version of the sublime against Jameson’s vision of postmodernism and its decentred individual and dematerialised life. In this respect, Crowther argues, the core insight of Kant’s sublime­– w ­ hich he directly applies to installation and assemblage art­– i­s the relation of imaginative excess to its rational containment, a relation that ‘revivifies our capacity for rational insight­– ­our very ability to create and discover meaning’ (1995: 11). Against the purportedly purely relative postmodern morality, and the evaporation of meaning it implies, Crowther sees the sublime as being able to ‘resist its potentially desensitising and dehumanising effects’ (1995: 11) so that ‘the self’s relation to the world can be understood and then stabilised’ (1995: 17). Unlike Jameson, then, Crowther does not see postmodernist aesthetic practices as potential mechanisms of immanent critique working within late capitalism, but instead seeks a version of sublime art that would push back against postmodernism, reaffirming older, ‘essential’ aspects of human life. As Crowther concludes: The best art of postmodern times, therefore, restores some notion of an authentic self which is admittedly more complex than hitherto admitted,

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but which cannot be analysed away in a mere play of relations. On these terms, if properly understood and explained, sublime art has the capacity to rehumanise. (1995: 17)

Crowther offers three suggestions as to the identifying characteristics of contemporary sublime art: overwhelming perceptual scale, overwhelming personal significance and the overwhelming character of a general truth embodied in the work. In these ways sublime art would be consistent with Kant’s claims for the sublime, inasmuch as, Crowther argues, ‘the sublime is an item or set of items which, through the possession or suggestion of perceptually, imaginatively or emotionally overwhelming properties, succeeds in rendering the scope of some human capacity vivid to the senses’ (1989: 162). This capacity is not, as in Kant, a moral Idea, but instead a transcendental capacity of human sensibility that provides an experience of the supersensible, and so is a ‘mode of transcendence towards the world’ (Crowther 1989: 167). Unlike Crowther this book does not consider the supersensible an aspect of humanity’s ‘essence’ that might offer us redemption (i.e. transcendence) from the ignominies of the postmodern world, but rather affirms the supersensible as what is inhuman and immanent in our experience, as a transcendental materialism expressed as the negation of our human condition. The question then, is not how to rise above inhumanity, but how to embrace it within ourselves in order to escape our human form. The attempts by Crowther and others to construct a concept of sublime art by combining Kant’s aesthetic ideas with his account of the sublime clearly ignores how aesthetic ideas are integrally connected to judgments of taste on the one hand, and flies in the face of Kant’s insistence that aesthetic judgment cannot apply to any object that has a ‘purpose’, whether this is objective or subjective, on the other. On this account, Allison, the Kantian authority, is scathing: ‘Crowther’s whole treatment of this question is based on an uninformed and rather implausible “reconstruction” of Kant’s position’ (2001: 401).13 Despite this, however, Allison does acknowledge that there are various places in the Third Critique where the possibility of sublime art does seem to be left open by Kant. For example, he claims that a tragedy in verse, a didactic poem or an oration might all combine sublime and beautiful aspects, as does the ‘soul stirring sensation’ given ‘to the readers’ by Bénédict de Saussure’s written observations of alpine landscapes made while mountain climbing (CJ, §29 265: 124–5/190). At these moments, as well as those when Kant himself describes sublime natural phenomena, Kant does seem to associate the sublime with the existing understanding of ‘high-style’, which although quite different from that



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of contemporary artistic practices, does suggest that the sublime could be understood in terms of an artistic mode of expression. In Allison’s view, however, although Kant does not deny a place for the sublime in art, ‘he certainly tends to minimize it’ (2001: 337). From a strictly intra-Kant view, this may well be true, and as we shall see any extrapolation of a sublime art from Kant’s texts will certainly require some creative reworking of the original. But making sublime art as internally consistent with Kant’s texts as possible is neither the aim of this book nor that of those thinkers it will discuss. From this point of view, the problem with Crowther’s approach is not so much its consistency, but his affirmation of the ‘human’ capacities that sublime art renders visible. In direct contradiction to this idea, this book proposes sublime art as an individuation of a transcendental and material plane of existence emerging as inhuman sensations, inasmuch as these go beyond the conditions of possible experience. They do so not through a harmony between the understanding and the imagination, but in the negation of the understanding by a feeling-thought that expresses and constructs the onto-genetic operations of life (i.e. nature) itself.14 N OT E S   1. The quotation in the title of the chapter comes from Kant (2011: 16).   2. As Kant puts it in the Second Introduction: A things harmony with that character of things which is possible only through purposes is called the purposiveness of its form. [. . .] through this concept we present nature as if an understanding contained the basis of the unity of what is diverse in nature’s empirical laws. Hence the purposiveness of nature is a special a priori concept that has its origin solely in reflective judgment. (CJ, Second Introduction 180–1: 20/89)   3. As Kant explains: Judgment must assume, as an a priori principle for its own use, that what to human insight is contingent in the particular (empirical) natural laws does nevertheless contain a law-governed unity, unfathomable but still conceivable by us, in the combination of what is diverse in them to [form] an experience that is intrinsically possible. (CJ, Second Introduction 183–4: 23/93)   4. Allison helpfully informs us that there are only six mentions of the sublime in the Third Critique outside the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ (2001: 305), and that its treatment is not consistent with the structure laid out in the analysis of the beautiful, both architectonically (in relation to its four modalities) and in relation to its purposiveness (2001: 306). For a

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r­ igorous examination of the composition of the Third Critique see John H. Zammito’s The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1982).   5. See CJ, General Comment 277–8: 138–40/204–7 where Kant compares his transcendental account of the sublime with Burke’s ‘exceedingly fine’ but merely ‘psychological one’.   6. This will mean, Gilbert-Rolfe will argue, that beauty is ‘subversive’ because it is always a ‘distraction from the worthwhile’, and, as he continues with impeccable logic, glamour is therefore critical because it is not serious (1999: 77). The fashion model, for example, deconstructs the military tradition from which it comes by not taking it seriously (1999: 92). In light of such argumentation we might justifiably prefer a little seriousness.   7. The connection of the sublime to modernism is a common one. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, explains: ‘The motif of the sublime, then, announces the necessity of what happens to art in or as its modern destiny. [. . .] in the sublime, art itself is deranged, offered to yet another destiny’ (1993: 26). Art, in other words, embraces its avant-garde destiny with the sublime, as it turns away from classical representation towards abstraction (i.e. the formless). Adorno will push this logic even further, claiming: ‘The sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself’ (1997: 257). Gregg Lambert perceptively elaborates Adorno’s argument as follows: ‘The exaggeration placed on this moment in the Kantian exposition is akin to an evolutionary leap in the field of culture, whereby the original state of exception is converted into a normative rule that can be actually deduced from the experience of the modern “artwork” ’ (2015: 300).   8. In the Second Critique Kant writes that the moral law ‘as the determining ground of the will, must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling that can be called pain’ (CPrR, I, I, III On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason: 62/193). But because it is at the same time ‘something positive’, namely an ‘intellectual causality, that is, of freedom­– ­it is at the same time an object of respect [. . .] and so too the ground of a positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cognized a priori’ ( CPrR, I, I, III On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason: 63/193–4). Like the sublime, then, respect for the moral law is a ‘feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground’ (CPrR, I, I, III On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason: 63–4/194). We will come back to this in the next chapter.   9. Paul Guyer provides a clearer translation of this awkward passage: ‘There is a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole, in which the imagination reaches its maximum and, in the effort to extend it, sinks back into itself, but is thereby transported into an emotionally moving satisfaction’ (Kant 2000: 136). 10. As Kant puts it: ‘Nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity’ (CJ, §26 255: 112/178). 11. This would not be a problem for beautiful art, inasmuch as its conceptual indetermination still allows for form and so for an object of experience.



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Thierry de Duve argues that Duchamp’s readymade introduces such an undetermined art work through an aesthetic judgment (now defined as ‘this is art’), which implies a non-purposive purposiveness by making us feel ‘that this something was imposed on you by an idea of the anything whatever that is its rule’ (1996: 364). The readymade, on his account, embodies the undetermined conceptual form of the modern aesthetic judgment, and thereby reveals the regulative idea of its categorical imperative­ – ­the freedom of ‘anything whatever’ as the condition of art. 12. Rodgerson usefully rehearses some of the various interpretations of the difficulties involved in ‘free harmony’ (2008: 13–18), and argues that the ‘expression of aesthetic ideas solves the problem of interpreting “free harmony” ’ (2008: 23). 13. Crowther himself dismisses de Duve’s Kant After Duchamp in very similar terms, claiming ‘much of de Duve’s analysis is incomplete or mistaken’ (2012: 181). 14. Adorno will come to a similar conclusion, if by a very different approach. In Adorno’s often intricate dialectical argument, the sublime reveals the human subject’s spiritual domination of nature, but because the sublime also reveals humanity’s ‘naturalness’ this domination becomes ‘tinged with the nothingness of man’ and the fragility of the empirical individual (1997: 259).

2. ‘A stranger to consciousness . . .’ – Lyotard and the Sublime1

The abyss between what can appear and what can be thought was opened at the outset by the coming of winter. (Lyotard 1998: 191)

Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime is a book collecting his ‘unpolished’ (1994: ix) lecture notes on sections 23–29 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As such, they modestly present themselves as an ‘explication de texte’ while in fact being a highly original interpretation of Kant’s concept of the sublime that focuses on and indeed exemplifies the heuristic function of reflective aesthetic judgment. For Kant this judgment is neither legislating nor provable, and so is excluded from the realms of both pure and practical reason, but as a result Kant hopes it can unite the faculties by revealing the transcendental conditions of an object’s particularity beyond its a priori conditions of possibility. Reflective judgment ‘endeavours’, Lyotard tells us, ‘to “discover” a generality or a universality in them [particular objects] which is not that of their possibility but of their existence’ (1994: 2). For Lyotard, it is precisely the way such judgments, and the art works that embody and inspire them, take us beyond our conditions of possibility that will give them an onto-political impetus. For reasons we will consider, it is the judgment of the sublime rather than the beautiful that Lyotard believes breaks with our received modes of knowledge, morality and subjective production, and so carries with it a radically heterogeneous kernel that remains undetermined by any norm or institution determining who we are or might become. In this sense, the sublime actualises a disruptive and genetic force of the future, it is an unconditioned ‘event’ that erupts within the causal determination of the actual to force the new into existence.2

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THE DIFFEREND For Lyotard, the transcendental and real condition of existence that Kant discovers in the sublime is difference. In the sublime, experience is overwhelmed by something that goes beyond its limits, a feeling that reveals the realm of thought’s genesis­– w ­ hat Kant calls the practical realm of Ideas, and in particular those of the infinite and of freedom­– ­a realm that cannot be represented. This irreconcilable, incommensurable but always necessary (non‑)relation constituting thought is what Lyotard calls the sublime differend: ‘the encounter of the two “absolutes” equally “present” to thought, the absolute whole when it conceives, the absolutely measured when it presents’ (1994: 123). This sublime differend is, he says, both the object and the itinerary of Kant’s critical method, and as such, ‘these lessons try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits’ (1994: x). In this way Lyotard sees the sublime (qua differend) as a feeling-thought that will not only act as art’s model and procedure, but as the most creative and thus important part of thought. ‘A differend’, Lyotard explains, ‘would be a case of conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy’ (1988: xi). To apply the same rule of judgment to both sides would wrong one of them, inasmuch as: ‘A différend is not a simple divergence precisely to the extent that its object cannot enter into the debate without modifying the rules of the debate’ (1988a: 49). For Lyotard, there is no language in general, only various and competing ‘phrase regimens’ (reasoning, describing, questioning, knowing, ordering, etc.) linked according to an end determined by a genre of discourse. In this context of competitive languagegames the function of philosophy is to defend the fundamental (and genetic) incommensurability of the differend, to defend difference, or, as Lyotard more specifically puts it: To defend and illustrate philosophy in its differend against its two adversaries: on its outside, the genre of economic discourse (exchange, capital); on its inside, the genre of academic discourse (mastery). By showing that the linking of one phrase onto another is problematic and that this problem is the problem of politics, to set up a philosophical politics apart from the politics of “intellectuals” and of politicians. To bear witness to the ­differend. (1988: xiii)

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The adversaries of the differend are the indifferences of capitalist abstraction and scientific measure, which presume to master difference by making it relative to their values. Lyotard, on the other hand, claims that Kant’s Third Critique and its theory of reflective judgment along with Wittgenstein’s late work lay the ground work for an at once ‘political’ and ‘honourable’ philosophy that is able to ‘think’ (something, as we shall see, closer to ‘feel’ than ‘understand’) dispersion and the outside, or otherness. In doing so philosophy not only defends the ethical imperative of thought, but also deploys the differend as a demand for new significations, new addressors and new addressees. In doing so philosophy joins art and politics as realms able to create something new through the differend they produce and protect: The differend is the unstable state and instant of language where something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. [. . .] What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. [. . .] In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. (1988: 13)

For Lyotard difference qua differend is the transcendental, genetic and material condition of emergence, and as such the real condition of experience. Such a ‘real’ experience emerges as an ‘affect phrase’, as Lyotard will call it, a sign of itself, because it is purely singular: ‘The signal that the affect-phrase is, is tautegorical: aisthesis, Empfindung. The affect-phrase is at once an affective state (pleasure or pain) and the sign of this state; this is what Kant said about aesthetic feeling’ (2006: 105–6). The sensation that is in itself ‘indifferent to articulation’ is nevertheless the ground of its articulation, which is ‘why the letter wrongs it’ (2006: 109). In this sense then, the affect-phrase (qua sensation) is the ground of its representation and cognition, but as such is what­– ­paradoxically­– ­cannot be represented or thought, and so is also the ungrounding of thought. This ungrounding is the effect of the sublime, where an inarticulable experience cannot be conceptually or intuitively determined (causing pain), and so takes us outside of rational thought in order to generate new thought (causing pleasure), new possibilities for life. As Lyotard puts it: ‘Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking’ (1988a: 73). Thought cannot­– ­but must­– t­ hink this experience of its immanent outside, and it is this immanence of a sublime ‘feeling-thought’ to the everyday rationality (and most importantly to its technological infrastructure and capitalist logic) acting as our normative limits that provides it political significance. This ‘significance’, however, is entirely negative inasmuch as it appears as a negative presentation.



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LYO TA R D ’ S P E R I O D S A N D T H E I R P O L I T I C S This is, as James Williams points out, an odd and rather extreme form of politics, inasmuch as it is not directed against any particular political ideology or formation, but rather affirms the ‘inhuman’ limit to human thought and experience. For Williams this is a problem because it means ‘there is no possible interaction between resistance and a wider politics other than negative moves of limitation and disabling. The problem of nihilism cannot be overcome in a philosophy that cannot posit anything beyond negation and limitation’ (2000: 132). This results in what Williams claims is a ‘withdrawal from the political’ (2000: 135) in Lyotard’s later work, and Williams’s preference for the libidinal period, which, he argues, is ‘more successful in escaping a fundamental reliance on negation, because it has an affirmative orientation with respect to feelings and desires defined as libidinal intensities’ (2000: 135). The libidinal period of Lyotard’s oeuvre, as we shall see, affirms the emergence of the inhuman experiences of capitalism and new technologies, which not only contains new means of oppression but of liberation as well­– ­not least from the human itself. On this account the crux of the difference between the libidinal economy and the differend is that the first seeks to engage with the mutational processes increasingly determining our lives­– ­our new conditions of possibility­– ­in order to explore and even exploit them to the advantage of a new and inhuman life, while the differend fences off a ‘good’ transcendental inhumanity from the ‘bad’ inhumanity of capitalism and new technology, and poses the first against the second through an aesthetic of negative ­presentation (the sublime event). Bernard Stiegler, for example, argues that Lyotard’s turn from the libidinal economy of his earlier period to the aesthetic commitments of the later work ‘leaves the question of the schematism in the shadows of the sublime’, while ‘fleeing’ the questions of political economy involved in the emergence of techno-capitalism to embrace ‘the infinite as the beginning and end of desire’ (2015: 152).3 John Rajchman argues something similar, claiming that the ‘linguistic turn’ of The Differend ‘loses the whole side of “the figural” concerned with body, affect, experimentation­– ­in a word, “sensation”­– a­ nd it is not clear that identifying the unrepresentable with the sublime in Kant resolves the problem’ (1998: 11). Iain Hamilton Grant, the English translator of Libidinal Economy, claims that Lyotard’s later, Kantian inspired work attempts to ‘slam the brakes on’ the earlier libidinal economics by reintroducing a ‘restricted economy of affect within which to resist the general economy of the drives instantiated in capital’. In this sense,

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Grant sees Lyotard’s turn to Kant as a return to the sensus communis of the biological body and a refusal of the ‘machinic-libidinal xenogenesis’ of cybernetic capitalism (2014: 286). For Grant this later work is: ‘Mourning the irretrievable loss of the real and rejoicing in the pain of this incapacitation’ (2014: 288). But Grant also admits that Lyotard’s work on the sublime echoes that of the libidinal phase in being an ‘improper admixture of the proper fields of the imagination and the understanding’ (1993: xxxv). In both Williams and Grant, then, we find the idea that the difference between the libidinal and sublime phases of Lyotard’s oeuvre lie less in their ontological structure (both affirm transcendental difference) than in their possibilities of expression: the libidinal expresses a nihilist affirmation, while the sublime mourns what is lost. This point is crucial, because it has important consequences not only for our understanding of Lyotard’s politics, but as well for the possible political role art­– ­and more specifically sublime art­– ­might have today. Indeed, as we shall see, the recent emergence of Accelerationism has revitalised this critique of Lyotard’s sublime period, and utilises it directly against the supposedly ‘non-political’ ­development of contemporary artistic practices. Against this, I want to affirm the political agency of sublime art in a very real sense, which rather than a ‘nostalgia’ for the infinite is in fact a viable and affirmative political programme based on actualising the eruption of the new in and as art. This would be to understand the sublime, and most importantly its negation of our human conditions, as the real condition of an aesthetic experimentation, as Lyotard calls it a ‘new murder [. . .] a sublime of experimentation’ (1998: 88) that does not oppose or seek to escape from new technology but that explores alternatives to its complete instrumentalisation by capitalism. While it is true that Lyotard’s later work does move away from a ‘libidinal economy’, his use of the sublime nevertheless positions the body and its affects against the ‘techno-consciousness’ of capitalism. On the one hand, then, I wish to argue for the political efficacy of sublime art and its mechanism of negative presentation, while on the other I see this political efficacy as sharing its ontological conditions with those of the libidinal period. Recently, Vlad Ionescu (2013: 149 and 2014) and Kiff Bamford (2012: 43, 134–6) have argued the sublime should be understood through the figural. Similarly, I will make use of Lyotard’s early work inasmuch as it supports what I am arguing regarding sublime art, and in particular their shared interest in negative presentation (a common theme of both the ‘figural’ and the ‘sublime’ periods) and ‘incommensurability’ (which is crucial for both Libidinal Economy and The



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Differend). This is not to entirely ignore the significant shift from the expression of primary processes in the early ‘libidinal’ works to the ethical and linguistic concerns of the differend, but it is to claim that despite this shift (famously marked by Lyotard’s denunciations of his early work4), there nevertheless remain important echoes and similarities between them (something also acknowledged by Lyotard)5 that often congeal around the art work, and ameliorate their starker differences.6 To take one typical example, in Discourse, Figure Lyotard calls the ‘image-figure’ an ‘object’, the ‘form-figure’ the ‘schema’, and the figure-matrix a ‘violation of the discursive order­– v­ iolence against the transformations authorized by this order’ (2011: 268). This early distribution of the figure seems to anticipate the Kantian framework Lyotard later adopts, as well as its emphasis on the sublime disruption, and even destruction, of the understanding by an aesthetic experience that goes beyond it. As John Mowitt suggests in his introduction to Discourse, Figure it is possible to detect here ‘pronounced glimmers of Lyotard’s later sustained engagement with the Critique of Judgment’ (2011: xxiii). In a useful suggestion that encompasses both the libidinal and Kantian periods, Bill Readings has argued that Lyotard develops an ‘aesthetic of incommensurability’, attempting ‘to set to work within and against the system, an otherness that cannot be exchanged’ (1991: xx).7 Readings rightly emphasises how the political valency of the art work consistently emerges from its incommensurability in Lyotard’s work. As a result, the distinction between the libidinal and Kantian phases of Lyotard’s oeuvre is not as decisive for his view on the political potentials of art as his earlier ‘break’ with communism and his subsequent rejection of political activism as a critical dialectics. It is against this ‘biographical’ backdrop that the ‘aesthetics of incommensurability’ shared by Lyotard’s libidinal and Kantian periods must be understood, as must Lyotard’s insistence on the political power of art. LYO TA R D A N D C O M M U N I S M Lyotard’s personal trajectory from being a communist militant to rejecting orthodox Marxism is well known.8 In ‘A Memorial of Marxism: For Pierre Souyri’, written after his friend’s death, Lyotard gives a moving account of his 1963 split from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group (which he had joined in 1954), and his 1966 departure from the splinter group Pouvoir Ouvier that he had subsequently formed with Souyri.9 Part melancholy reverie, part self-justification and part apology, this text nevertheless clearly recounts Lyotard’s emerging awareness that Marxism, and in particular Marx’s version of the

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dialectic, could no longer account for his increasing commitment to the differend. This break is dramatised by Lyotard through his growing distance from Souyri: ‘Our différend was without remedy from the moment that one of us contested or even suspected Marxism’s ability to express the changes of the contemporary world’ (1988a: 49). Lyotard’s doubts regarding Marx’s dialectical method were indeed fundamental; perhaps there was no self to achieve the syntheses of contradictions necessary for knowledge and historical advancement, perhaps thought and history didn’t even need such syntheses and perhaps contradictions were better understood as paradoxes that should not be resolved rather than particular moments of a universal process (1988a: 50). For Lyotard, ‘this perseverance in thinking and acting according to the dialectic [. . .] seemed to me to be more and more alien to the exigencies of thought’ (1988a: 51). Finally, Lyotard would conclude, ‘a différend is not a contradiction’ (1988a: 52).10 This marked a fundamental shift in Lyotard’s political understanding, away from the inevitability of the ideal dialectical and teleological movement that both animated capitalism and meant its end, and towards a strategy of intervention, or better interruption, by the paradoxical differend. The genre of dialectical critique, Lyotard argues, is complicit with the totalitarianism it supposedly analyses, inasmuch as both ‘attempt to exercise complete control over their respective domains’ (1992: 103). This exasperating fantasy of control makes the dialectic complicit, Lyotard argued: ‘Don’t you see that criticizing is still knowing, knowing better? That the critical relation still falls within the sphere of knowledge, of “realization” and thus of the assumption of power? Critique must be drifted out of. Better still: Drifting is in itself the end of all critique’ (1984a: 13). Drifting means moving from a masterful critique to something incommensurable with it, something material, an irrecoupable aesthetic experience that cannot be represented and so captured by a concept. This experience of the aesthetic differend, Lyotard argues, ‘cannot cooperate with a project of domination or total transparency, even involuntarily’ (1992: 103).11 Writing, as Lyotard’s example of Orwell’s 1984 reveals, always approaches what cannot be expressed in the dominant language, even if totalitarianism is able to control and even exploit such outbursts ‘when it enters into symbiosis with the singular passions of those it oppresses’ (1992: 104). But despite the success of totalitarianism in controlling such individual passions, it cannot prevent them from emerging as one side of a foundational paradox; if totalitarianism renounces writing it remains unwritten and so cannot be total, but if it tries to control writing totalitarianism also admits an exterior that remains untotalised. This is the differend



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of totalitarianism and the event, of capture and the uncapturable, of reason and aesthetics and of consciousness and primary process (Lyotard 1992: 105–6). Similarly, the differend of class relations, Lyotard realises, is nonsymmetrical and non-dialectical, because discourses of ‘objective knowledge’­– ­whether capitalist or Marxist­– ­dominate the proletariat and deny them any language except that which dominates them (1988a: 61).12 Resistance­– a­ nd this is an insight Lyotard credits to Souyri­– w ­ as in fact the expression of a class differend in feelings and affects, in ‘the obscure passions, the arrogance of leaders, the sadness of workers, the humiliation of peasants and the colonized, the anger and bewilderment of revolt; the bewilderment, too, of thought’ (1988a: 65). Here, then, is the political role of art, to express the affects of the class differend, not to simply illustrate the affectual life of the oppressed (i.e. socialist realism), but to illuminate the unbridgeable chasm around which society is organised but which it nevertheless attempts to erase. What Lyotard comes to see is that this is an aesthetic question and its salutary example is found in art. As Lyotard writes, if the proletariat ‘does not perceive that there is something absolutely analogous between what must be done today to social reality and what is to be done on a canvas or within sonorous space, not only will it not encounter the problem of art, it will never come upon revolution’ (1984a: 79, italics added). Finally then: ‘There is more revolution, even if it is not much, in American Pop art than in the discourse of the Communist party’ (Lyotard 1984a: 83). This is finally the ‘Marxism’ Lyotard shares with Souyri, the fact that there are several incommensurable genres of discourse in play in society, none of which can transcribe all the others; and nonetheless one of them at least­– ­capital, bureaucracy­– ­imposes its rules on the others. This oppression is the only radical one, the one that forbids its victims to bear witness against it. It is not enough to understand it and be its philosopher; one must also destroy it. (1988a: 72)

Marxism­– ­and in this Lyotard says it is irrefutable­– ­is the declaration of a divisive ‘outside’ that defines historical reality, and the simultaneous declaration of an ‘inner’ differend that prevents the first declaration from being universally true. As such, Lyotard claims, Marxism ‘is the disposition of the field which makes refutation possible’ (1988a: 73). In this sense then he remains a ‘Marxist’ throughout his life, but one that rejects the dialectic and the progress it promises: ‘This is the way in which Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of the differend’ (1988: 171). In this sense he locates political resistance on the level of circulation (of affects) rather than production (workers and the party),

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and as we shall see, seeks a disruption of capital flows through the power of the artistic event. THE PRIORITY OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT Let us return to Lyotard’s ‘lessons’ on the sublime in order to gain a clearer sense of the importance of art for his work. As ‘Kantian Studies’ Lyotard’s account is irregular at the least, if not insubordinate, wishing to read Kant’s entire ‘critical’ project through the sublime.13 This is certainly more than most ‘scholarly’ explicators of Kant’s texts offer, being both more generous and useful.14 Lyotard is not arguing for the ‘right’ reading of Kant (whatever that might mean), but for a reading that he sees as being useful to us today. This is not to ignore questions of textual interpretation, which Lyotard surely does not, but it is to say that there are practical criteria to Lyotard’s reading­– ­not least political and artistic criteria­– ­that this book also embraces. In this sense we might say Lyotard’s reading claims for itself the very efficacy that Kant discovers in reflective judgment; it begins from the particularity of Kant’s text and reads it ‘critically’ to discover its universal and transcendental principle, a principle of exteriority that applies to both Kant’s philosophy and Lyotard’s interpretation of it. As Lyotard puts it: ‘To judge is to open an abyss between parts by analysing their différend’ (1989c: 326). That this principle is a feeling that escapes the limits of thought is precisely what Lyotard finds in favour of Kant’s concept of the sublime, and what he will utilise in his efforts to give to art a political potency and force. The lessons follow Kant’s definition of a reflective aesthetic judgment as, whether beautiful or sublime, a singular experience that is true a priori. But while an aesthetic judgment emerges from the critical method laid out in the first two critiques, Lyotard claims that in its manner aesthetic judgment contains a more important ‘secret’, that of an autonomous and reflective mode of feeling. This is­– L ­ yotard quotes Kant­– ­the manner of Fine Art (1994: 6). By approaching the Third Critique through this ‘manner’ Lyotard is able to make the unorthodox claim that the Third Critique fulfils Kant’s aim of unifying the field of philosophy, not through ‘introducing the theme of the regulative Idea of an objective finality of nature, but by making manifest, in the name of the aesthetic, the reflexive manner of thinking that is at work in the critical text as a whole’ (1994: 8). This manner of thinking is, Lyotard elsewhere remarks, ‘a faculty of aesthetic cognition’ (2009: 21) operating through reflective judgment as ‘a sensitivity to singular cases’ (1988: 8) that is undetermined by the other faculties and so acts autonomously or ‘without criteria’. As Lyotard puts it, reflective judg-



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ment is ‘the synthesis we are able to make of random data without the help of preestablished rules of linkage’ (1988: 8), and as such it answers an ‘ethical call’ to ‘be sensitive to an “it happens . . .” ’ (1988: 28) as the emergence of new modes of experience and life. As such, this ethical call forms, Lyotard claims, ‘the principle for all probity in politics as it is in art’ (1988: 27). Lyotard is therefore unconcerned with the Third Critique’s teleological claims that thought finds its finality in the purposiveness of nature and instead focuses on how reflective judgment­– ­and in particular that of the sublime­– ­brings us face to face with the transcendental condition of thought itself, or aisthesis as an experience unmediated by concepts. This, Lyotard claims, is the endpoint of critical philosophy, where ‘the very possibility of philosophy bears the name of reflection’ (1994: 31). Lyotard argues that reflective judgment provides a sensation that informs thought of its ‘state’ and orients its critical progress. In it, sensation is no longer conceptually determined as a representation of a ‘thing’ (as it was in the First Critique), but is a feeling of pleasure and/ or displeasure that reflects thought’s condition by indicating a harmony (pleasure) or disharmony (pain) among the faculties. This is, Lyotard observes, the ‘tautegorical’ aspect of reflection, where the object and the law of the judgment is one and the same sensation­– a­ sensation that is therefore both the judgment’s form and content (1994: 13).15 Such a judgment does not make any knowledge possible, as the schema does, because it only concerns a particular object and the subjective judgment arising from the sensation it evokes. But this sensation nevertheless casts a ‘shadow’ that reveals itself to be the a priori condition of thought. As Lyotard comments, reflection guides thinking inasmuch as it is ‘the (subjective) laboratory of all objectivities’ and ‘thus seems to be the nerve of critical thought as such’ (1994: 26, italics added).16 Reflective aesthetic judgment fulfils the demands of critical philosophy because it reveals the subjective but nevertheless transcendental conditions under which we are able to have concepts in the first place. This will lead Lyotard to emphasise Kant’s account of the productive imagination, and in particular the way the imagination organises sense experience under ‘headings’, ‘a kind of transcendental pre-logic’ (Lyotard 1994: 32) that allows sensation to be determined objectively through concepts. In this sense Lyotard attributes ‘thought’ to the imagination rather than the ‘inner sense’ of apperception, because self-consciousness is not found in ‘a self-conscious knowledge of data’ but in a reflective ‘feeling of the innumerable forms in which the data can be synthesized’ (1988: 34, italics added). Lyotard separates Kant’s pre-conceptual ‘headings’ of reflective syntheses from their role as

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schematic preparations (or ‘anticipations’) subordinated to the objective categories of the understanding. According to Kant the heading of identity/difference becomes the category of quantity (universal/particular), agreeable/disagreeable becomes the category of quality (affirmative and negative judgments), inner/outer becomes the category of relation (inherence and causality) and matter/form becomes the category of modality (problematic and apodictic judgments). For Lyotard this development is premature, because it assumes that the a priori cognitive categories that are as yet undeduced already determine the differential feelings produced by aesthetic judgment. In fact, the category needs this aesthetic principle of differentiation because, as Lyotard puts it, ‘by itself the category is blind’, and further, aesthetic judgment reveals ‘a “resistance” of the forms of intuition to their unwarranted assimilation into the categories of understanding’ (1994: 38). As a result, Lyotard continues, ‘the relation of the reflective act to the category does not involve a subjection of the former to the latter, but rather the opposite’ (1994: 40). Lyotard argues that Kant’s ‘blurring’ of this fundamental difference between aesthetic sensation and its subsequent categorical (and discursive) representation allows him to establish the categories as ‘principles of discrimination’ within ‘the muteness of pure feeling’ (1994: 46). Lyotard’s lessons on the sublime attempt to restore the priority of this mute but pure experience unmediated by its conceptual determination and so return to thought its aesthetic ‘intelligence’. Lyotard will therefore begin his Lessons by reversing Kant’s ‘twist’ of aesthetic experience into cognition in order to restore the critical priority of reflective judgment. It is Kant’s twist, he argues, that produces the ‘logical monsters’ of the Third Critique: disinterested liking, subjective universality and the presentation of the unpresentable. All are aspects of the work of art that reveal the limits of the conceptual logic of the understanding, but more importantly reveal how reflective judgment is able to ‘feel’ the transcendental conditions of its exercise without determining its objective use. Lyotard therefore sees the a priori condition of conceptual thought to be precisely what it cannot articulate­– ­the singular sensation provoking aesthetic judgment. The differend of sensation and cognitive thought does not preclude the former conditioning the latter, but it does preclude either of them being able to experience/ think the other in its own terms. It is therefore unsurprising that Lyotard finds the model for aesthetic judgment in the sublime, because unlike the beautiful the sublime does not promise a subject unified in the harmony of its constitutive faculties and so reconciled with the Idea of a purposive nature, but gives a feeling (pain) of the faculties’ disproportion and incommensurability in their differend. But in the midst of



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this ‘supremely paradoxical presentation’ (1988: 166) or ‘cacophony’ emerges, Lyotard tells us, a ‘secret euphony of a superior rank’ (1994: 24). The sublime promises ‘another unity, much less complete [than the beautiful], ruined in a sense, and more “noble”. In the singularity of its occurrence, aesthetic feeling is pure subjective thinking or reflective judgment itself’ (1994: 25). This ‘pure subjective feeling’ that challenges thought with its ‘almost insane demand’ (Lyotard 1994: 60) for a real experience unmediated by any human (conceptual) conditions is a demand for ‘doing away with the presumptuousness of the self’ (Lyotard 1988: 36). This is the revolutionary demand of the sublime which, Lyotard tells us, ‘reveals the presence of an independent causality which is incommensurable with any natural force: it is the causality of freedom’ (1988: 40). This marks a significant difference between the beautiful and the sublime, for whereas the beautiful provides a feeling of the ‘fit’ between the understanding and the imagination, the sublime is a feeling of the mind that cannot be connected to any perception (Lyotard calls the sublime a ‘quasi-perception’ (1991: 137)), and so emerges only as the impossibility of any ‘harmony’ between imagination and reason. Rather than a schematism providing an empirical determination of objects according to the concepts of the understanding, then, we have reflective judgment providing aesthetic analogues of Ideas of reason. This is a paradoxical consciousness of our own un-conscious ground, an acephalic consciousness or feeling-thought that negates the cognitive conditions of human experience. It is this experience of what cannot be experienced that Lyotard’s work has consistently sought, an experience, in the words of Libidinal Economy, of ‘the pain of incompossibility’ (1993: 11). The sublime artwork therefore allows us to experience the transcendental ground of our existence, but we can only experience it negatively, as the negation of our conditions of possible experience. As a result, thought recognises its ‘true’ nature in the sublime, because there it sees itself in a state ‘before’ it was ordered by schemas and concepts to produce forms (objects). But this ‘before’ is not a positive state, it is rather the negation of consciousness and time in an Idea of freedom, or more precisely the experience of this negation and thus the feeling that ‘there-is-thought’. In the sublime the mind experiences the freedom of feeling-thought; its infinite inventive capacity is unleashed by negating all the cognitive principles acting as the conditions of its possible experience, or, in other words, by negating representation.

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THE ‘HEADINGS’ OF THE SUBLIME For Lyotard, the judgment of the sublime reflects a more fundamental experience than that given by the judgment of taste found in the beautiful, and he will spend considerable energy distinguishing them.17 Lyotard focuses on Kant’s demonstrations of how aesthetic judgments (both beautiful and sublime) are oriented by the ‘headings’ of reflection through their various ‘moments’ of quality, quantity, relation of purposes and modality of liking (1994: 78). Lyotard is concerned to highlight the significant differences between sublime and beautiful judgments, ‘and even the resistance’ (1994: 77) of the sublime to the beautiful, which will be important for us when we see how he associates capitalism and techno-science with the beautiful, and sublime art to its resistance. Additionally, Lyotard is interested in how Kant demonstrates the quite complex ‘thought’ that aesthetic judgment is capable of without recourse to any categorical determination. Although the beautiful and the sublime share the same quantity (both are singular judgments that are universally valid) and quality (both please on their own account, independent of any interest), and both appeal to a non-determining concept (supplied by the harmonised understanding in the case of the beautiful and the Idea given by reason in the case of the sublime), these similarities are quite shallow and deceptive. Rather than the non-determining concept being willingly produced by the understanding in its harmonious ‘free play’ with the imagination (as in the beautiful), the sublime reveals this indeterminacy and inadequacy of the understanding against its will, causing us pain. As a result, whereas the judgment of taste reflects upon the form of an object, the sublime judgment reflects on something that is formless. It is the quality of disinterested pleasure we take in beautiful form that indicates its transcendental conditions (the Idea of the purposiveness of nature), whereas in the sublime its quantity (i.e. its size) immediately confronts us with a materiality that has real presence but no form and thus cannot be determined cognitively (Lyotard 1994: 77–8). This is the result of the failure of aesthetic apprehension in intuition to produce a viable ‘measure’, giving the sublime ‘object’ an ‘absolute magnitude’ beyond comparison and so unmeasurable (Lyotard 1994: 80). In these terms, then, the sublime is not strictly speaking a phenomenon, because ‘sublime’ is not a predicate of an object. Indeed, ‘sublime’ only predicates the mood of thought (Geistesstimmung) when it tries to represent this formless ‘thing’ to itself (Lyotard 1994: 81). The reflective mode of aesthetic judgment relates this sublime sensation to the Idea this experience provokes, and it is this judgment that connects the respective



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experiences of pain (the lack of an object) and pleasure (the presence of an Idea). Thus, according to Lyotard, the fundamental ‘structure’ of the sublime reflective judgment is the differend: ‘If sensible form cannot contain “the thing”, then the latter has some relation to the Ideas of reason, for the objects of these Ideas precisely never give an adequate presentation of themselves in a form that would be adapted, angemessen, to them’ (1994: 69). In the sublime the pain caused to the imagination by an infinite natural occurrence ‘appeals’ to a greater and non-natural force, an appeal that causes pleasure because it actualises our spiritual faculty, our absolute freedom of thought as it transcends our phenomenal body to swim among the noumena. This ‘intellectual causality’ (CPrR 5: 73: 63/193) within us, Kant writes, is something we ‘respect’ [Achtung] because it ‘weakens self-conceit’ (something Kant also connects with the sublime (CJ, §28 262: 121/186)), and gives ‘a positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cognized a priori’ (CPrR 5: 73: 63/194).18 As a result, Kant says, ‘respect for the moral law is a feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground [i.e. reason], and this feeling is the only one that we can cognize completely a priori and the necessity of which we can have insight into’ (CPrR 5: 73: 64–5/194, italics added). In this sense respect is the ‘intellectual feeling’ or feeling-thought [Geistesgefühl] reflective judgment has when it becomes aware of the transcendental ‘presence’ of reason’s moral law (Lyotard 1988: 35). The sublime causes us suffering because it cannot be represented, but this produces a ‘pleasure’ that is both abstract and inhuman, inasmuch as it is the feeling of a non-empirical and transcendental reason operating within (but not ‘as’) us. This rather ‘blank’ and asubjective feeling explains what Lyotard calls Kant’s ‘persistent timidity’ in granting moral feeling a place in the sublime (1994: 118), a timidity springing from the fact that moral feeling is not an aesthetic feeling (1994: 119). Unlike Kant, Lyotard will emphasise respect as the affect by which reflective judgment moves from a subjective aesthetic experience to an inhuman and ethical experience of freedom. For Lyotard the affect of respect is precisely the experience of an event that cannot be thought because it is precisely an experience of this differend. As such, respect is the affect of thought ‘itself’, as it moves from a singular experience to its transcendental ground. In doing so, thought negates its rational conditions, and its transcendental conditions can be thought-felt as thought’s abyss. Respect in this sense is the affect of the differend itself. Here the category of relation becomes the reflexive ‘heading’ of a ‘pure inner’ (Lyotard 1994: 122), because the delight experienced by thought is that of recognising itself prior to all determination, to all

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humanity, in absolute freedom. This, Lyotard concludes, is the ‘presupposition of Kantian thought­– w ­ hich is no secret­– ­that “there is thought”, and this is absolute’ (1994: 122). This is conceptually undetermined, and hence aesthetic, thought­– ­an absolutely free sensation or ‘feeling-thought’. The sublime is an aesthetic experience of thought ‘unreasonably’ seeking to find a sensible object that corresponds to an Idea, an attempt in which thought ‘gets carried away’, according to Lyotard (1994: 55), because it can only fail in this attempt. But this failure becomes a negative presentation of thought’s transcendental ground by escaping sensibility’s conditions of possibility, and so actually succeeds in giving a ‘sign’ of the Idea of freedom that ‘thinks’ the transcendental ground of thought itself. This is why we ‘enjoy’ this sublime ‘violence’ to cognitive thought; it is a pleasurable pain that, Lyotard tells us, is ‘like lightening. It short-circuits thinking with itself’ (1994: 54–5). The sublime, then, is the moment when thought becomes self-consciousness of its supersensible ground, the moment its ‘deaf desire for limitlessness’ is fulfilled by ‘presenting that it can no longer present’ (1994: 55). Lyotard’s enthusiasm for this moment of negative presentation is inexhaustible, this moment when thinking ‘defies its own finitude, as if fascinated by its own excessiveness’ (1994: 55). This moment is not, Lyotard remarks, ‘insignificant for us today’ (1994: 54). In fact, it will not only be the key to Lyotard’s understanding of modern and contemporary art, but it will also be the ground of art’s resistance to the economic and discursive powers of capitalism. The sublime is a ‘free’ event meaning it is unnatural, unconscious, negative and causes pain. All good in other words! It is an attack on consciousness, and even humanity itself, an attack that is endless and can never truly succeed, giving only a fleeting glimpse of the transcendental, a small taste (although certainly not ‘tasteful’) of what it is to be free, free from ourselves first of all. While the term ‘event’ is not used by Kant it will be crucial in Lyotard’s account of sublime art. The ‘event’ occurs between a cause and its effect but does not belong to succession, nor to the phenomenal and chronological time governing nature. It appears in nature, but it is not determined by it, it is instead the appearance of an undetermined ‘time’ that escapes, as Lyotard explains, ‘the elementary syntheses of intuition, imagination and understanding, that is, respectively, form, schema, and the axiom of time as magnitude added to itself’ (1994: 145). In an argument that echoes that of Deleuze, Lyotard imagines the sublime event ripping the self-consciousness of apperception apart: The ‘subject’ would be deprived of the means of constituting its subjectivity. For, under the name of the ‘I think’, the ‘subject’ is nothing other than the



Lyotard and the Sublime 63 consciousness of the originary synthetic unity to which all representations are imputed. Without this imputation, called apperception, representations would not be those of the subject. (1994: 144)

The atemporal event of the sublime, Lyotard says, ‘strikes a blow at the very foundation of the “subject” [. . . and] threatens to make him disappear’ (1994: 144). Indeed, he continues, one could argue that the feeling of pleasure and displeasure does not require the ‘I think’, even if Kant never seems to doubt this. This opens up a whole new horizon of creation, where the extemporalisation of the imagination in the sublime through an Idea of reason means, Lyotard argues, that reason departs in a leap, in the exaltation of recovering the maximal power that thinking has of beginning a series of givens without being bound to it. The first ‘no time’ threatens the faculty of knowledge, the second ‘no time’ establishes the faculty of pure desire. Thus it is very difficult to classify Kantianism among philosophies of the subject, as is sometimes done. (1994: 146)

In this sense, and it is an important one, the destruction of the subject in the sublime establishes the political efficacy of aesthetic judgment, which is the sensation of thought itself minus the subject. In other words, true freedom is found in an asubjective, inhuman event, an event that is an undetermined affect capable of ‘thinking’ the transcendental and supersensible as such. This event, Lyotard writes, is an ‘act that is incomparable to any regularity’ (1999: 558). We can only reach the real conditions of aisthesis through the sublime ‘critique’ of the human subject, which means that reflective judgment qua critique is ‘political’, Lyotard argues, because politics is being ‘critical’ in the realm of socio-historical phrases (2009: xvii). This critical politics seeks the immanent a prioris that condition sociohistorical occurrences through sensible singularities (i.e. events) rather than pre-existing laws, making ‘politics’ a reflective process creating new laws from the negation of the old, and giving always new experiences. The true function of political ‘reason’ is to operate, as Lyotard very beautifully puts it, as ‘a causality through freedom’ (2009: 26). A revolution in these terms is precisely the emergence of an undetermined and so singular event, a feeling that is a ‘sign’ of its transcendental Idea of ‘freedom’ that, Lyotard claims, ‘appears every time for the first time’ (1994: 20). This appearance is necessarily inadequate inasmuch as it must be a negative presentation, but Lyotard nevertheless celebrates the efficacy of its negation, and the necessity of our continued commitment to its failure.19 In this sense, revolution is sublime, for in it ‘one must come right up against the edge of the abyss to be crossed between [. . .] the domain of the sensible world and the field of the supersensible, and

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one must be able to cross it with a single step without suppressing it’ (2009: 27). But because we cannot do this, because we cannot master the differend, it must always be done again, and its failure demands the necessity of permanent revolution. N E G AT I V E P R E S E N TAT I O N Kiff Bamford points out that not only is this a strange kind of politics, one that apparently culminates in the negative presentation of Ideas, but it also makes an ‘explicit break’ with Kant, inasmuch as it rejects ‘Kant’s attempts to provide grounds for a communicability of the sublime’ (2012: 145). While for Kant the sublime reveals the way reason is able to make sense of an impossible experience through transcendental Ideas that can be communicated and so form the basis for a higher human community, in Lyotard the sublime can only represent a supersensible ground that is utterly unrepresentable within human experience. As Bamford points out, this is a ‘sublime of dissensus’ (2012: 145) and any community can only be formed on this basis. The ‘extreme dissonance’ of the faculties of thought in the sublime is, Lyotard claims, ‘felt as the sublime feeling’s supreme consonance with itself’ (1994: 147). In other words, while the beautiful is pleasing because of the absence of any sensible interest, the sublime pleases in a more militant manner through its destruction of any possible sensible interest. In the sublime, subjective thought is ‘at the mercy’ of the differend of imagination and reason, whose unresolved dissonance attests to a higher, critical, but inhuman finality, ‘a supreme consonance of thought with itself’ (Lyotard 1994: 150). What would such a transcendental consonance be, what would it feel like? Words fail, because the consonance/dissonance of imagination and reason cannot be sensed according to the conditions of representation, and a sign of this limit is as much as the human can bear before the event explodes subjectivity into the unlivable immanence of finite and infinite. ‘When this happens’, Lyotard claims, ‘thought feels itself in the truth of its split’ (1994: 150). At this moment: Thinking is conscious of breaking its moorings in the sensory, it feels the trembling of its objects on the edge of a night. Certainly the object that is the occasion of this distress and of this exile is there, but at the same time it is not there. [. . .] As a phenomenon, the strange event is certainly figured, but in inspiring the idea of an absolute, it does not belong to presentation. It is the sign of the unpresentable. (Lyotard, quoted in Woodward 2016: 118)

This, Lyotard quips, is a ‘philosophical neurosis’, but one synonymous with freedom, not ‘our’ freedom but that of transcendental ontogenesis



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itself. As he continues: ‘The absolute is never there, never given in a presentation, but it is always “present” as a call to think beyond the “there”. Ungraspable, but unforgettable. Never restored, never abandoned’ (1994: 150). This presence/absence of the absolute defines, for Lyotard, sublime art. It is experienced by humanity as pain and suffering, but as the agony proper to the absolute it also inspires a respect for our inhuman and transcendental ground. The unresolvable differend of sublime art is therefore affirmed by Lyotard as a positive incommensurability, one that both protects the potential of the absolute (i.e. its absolute potential or freedom) and restores it to the material world, even if only as the impossible presence of an always already erased event. The negative presentation of the sublime is therefore deeply ambiguous; it is a presentation that ‘ex-ceeds’ the norms of imagination, and so ‘se-cedes’ from imagination’s conditions of possible experience (Lyotard 1994: 151–2). It is an absence produced by imagination to signal the presence of an absolute that cannot be experienced. The sublime is, Lyotard tells us, ‘an almost insane mirage’, the appearance of what cannot be presented, a paradoxical violence to imagination that is also its ex-stasis: ‘In excluding itself from its own limits of presentation, the imagination suggests the presence of what it cannot present. It unbinds itself from its finality and thus annihilates itself according to this finality’ (1994: 152). The sublime is a kind of philosophical selfharm, as Lyotard puts it: ‘Violence must be done to the imagination because it is through its pain, through the mediation of its violation, that the joy of seeing or of almost seeing the law is obtained’ (1994: 180) This, Lyotard tells us, marks a ‘major shift in the stakes of art and literature’ (1994: 153) that can be clearly seen in the catastrophic visions of Romanticism and its rejection of beautiful forms, as well as in the avant-garde and in particular abstract painting, which seeks to present the transcendental absolute itself without recourse to representation. ‘The absolute sign in all simplicity’, Lyotard suggests, ‘gives rise to various “schools”, suprematism, abstraction, minimalism, etc., in which the absolute can signal itself simply in presentation’ (1994: 157). But what is this ‘absolute sign’ or ‘signal’? It is a ‘negative’ sign, inasmuch as it ‘presents nothingness’, and as such, Lyotard argues, ‘this would be a good point of departure for a philosophy of abstract art. If the aesthetics of Romanticism is certainly linked to a philosophy of the sublime, so-called abstract art would be its most radical emanation and perhaps its exit route’ (2009: 31). As an ‘emanation’ of the philosophy of the sublime abstract art is a negative presentation, but as its ‘exit route’ it will become, at least according to Lyotard, the sensation of

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an intensity that cannot be represented in a form. In this sense, the ‘abstraction’ of modern art is an affirmation of the productive imagination, the production of a non-representational and formless sensation, rather than simply a negation of form as such (see Lambert 2015: 305). This sensation is an event, it is the intense individuation of transcendental materialism according to its logic of the differend. Lyotard claims that the avant-garde seeks to escape art’s pre-existing conditions, which is hardly controversial, but he explicitly connects this desire with the sublime, turning the avant-garde against the way representation subordinates its aesthetic qualities to cognitive meaning. This is precisely what abstract art does, and in so doing it gains the ability to legislate for itself, to free itself from the understanding to explore its supersensible conditions. This, as we have seen, implies an inhuman politics in which the negative presentation of the sublime allows thought to go beyond its human conditions and so experience its true freedom. ‘In the space thus created by “negative presentation” ’, Lyotard writes, ‘reason can in effect render almost “intuitable” to thought the Idea of its true destination, which is to be moral [i.e. free]’ (1994: 187). In an early piece Lyotard suggests the political implications of this sublime avant-garde: This is the aspect I would call ‘Dada-reality’: reality insofar as the fabric that holds it together is missing. It is obviously in these regions where something is lacking, either the transformative experience or the words to exchange (because they are impossible to say), that works of art can take place. (1984a: 69)

In this sense, art is the exemplary expression of what Lyotard calls ‘necrophagous life’, a political force capable of punching ‘a hole in the hideous cycle of reproduction through consumption’ (2001: 40). The ‘economic genre’, Lyotard writes, ‘dismisses the occurrence, the event, the marvel’ (1988: 178). In this sense then, Lyotard did not experience a ‘loss of political faith’ when he abandoned militancy, as Julian Pefanis suggests (1991: 89), so much as acquire a new faith in the political militancy of the artistic event. Rather than devoting his energy to Marxism and dialectical critique, Lyotard’s work from the early 1970s instead affirms the libidinal intensities of aesthetic experience, not as a replacement for political activity but as an intense and unmediated attack on existing political power. An aesthetic judgment of taste (‘this is beautiful’) concerns a singular sensation that immediately demands to be communicated because it is a demand for a necessary universality. Its rule is not conceptual but aesthetic, stating that its singular pleasure is also felt by everyone else. Aesthetic judgment therefore assumes an aesthetic common sense,



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a sensus communis that is universally communicable. This means, Lyotard argues, that the beautiful involves an ‘ideal norm’ (1994: 203) as soon as it claims universality, but it is a norm without the authority to force its obligation. The beautiful therefore is not apodictic but exemplary, it is an example that promises community but does not have the means to accomplish it. The judgment of taste therefore allows ‘thought’ to give its private and singular judgments an a priori legitimacy, but it does so by abstracting the judgment from sensation to focus on the formal peculiarities of representation. ‘There is’, Lyotard says, ‘a kind of skimming off of everything that might be “matter” in the representation or the subjective state it produces’ (1994: 221). This is quite different from the sublime judgment, which is, according to Lyotard, an experience of a pure materiality without form. The aesthetic judgment of the sublime, unlike that of taste, evokes a moral law that has an absolute authority that prescribes obedience, or as Lyotard puts it, the sublime is ‘the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field’ (1991: 137). Indeed, there can be no sense of the sublime, and certainly no sublime aesthetics, without the mediation of an Idea of reason, which requires the ethical capacity of the mind (Lyotard 1988: 41). It is this connection of aesthetics and ethics that most clearly projects Lyotard’s theory of sublime art into the political realm. As Ashley Woodward argues, Lyotard expresses ‘a preference for sublime art and sublime aesthetic experience over the experience of the beautiful on explicitly political grounds’ (2011: 61). The sensus communis of beautiful art is a socially and culturally integrated community based on ‘norms’ of shared feeling. Sublime experience on the other hand breaks with all consensus, with all conditions and norms, because as a sign for the moral law it must remain radically undetermined and free. In this sense, Lyotard writes: ‘It seems to me that the only consensus we ought to be worrying about is one that would encourage this heterogeneity or “dissensus” ’ (1988: 44). As Bart Vandanebeele (2007) correctly points out, this does not make the sublime the triumph of reason over sensibility (as it is in Paul Crowther’s account, for example (1995)), but rather the detachment of sensibility from the imagination and understanding so that it might experience the freedom of reason as the ground of ‘aesthetic’ thought. As Lyotard puts it, the sublime ‘is a sort of spasm in which what has been done does not govern what is yet to be done’ (2006: 345). This is the political ­potential of the sublime; according to Lyotard, it is a conflict brought to the point of rupture where the proliferating network of imaginary possibilities becomes shredded and the act or comprehension appears as it truly is in its princely principle: not the rule of knowledge but

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the law of transcendence and the unknowable, the event itself and the act that is incomparable to any regularity [and regulation]. (2006: 347)

So does a sublime judgment also require a universal and necessary agreement? Kant’s text, Lyotard says, clearly replies in the negative. The sublime’s claim to universal participation is not as immediate as that of taste, because it passes through the moral law. The pleasure gained in the sublime is that of contemplating while reasoning, of contemplating a being of reason, an Idea. But as we have seen, this pleasure is itself premised on the displeasure imagination has experienced through being unable to present this being through its own syntheses. Nevertheless, the pleasure of the sublime claims to be communicable through the feeling of respect, which is the only ‘feeling’ that allows us to determine a priori the relation of practical reason to aesthetic judgments. As a result, Lyotard writes: ‘There is no sublime sensus communis because the sublime needs the mediation of moral feeling, and the latter is a concept of reason (freedom as absolute causality) that is felt subjectively a priori’ (1994: 228). This subjective moral feeling only provides a guide to action­– ­‘act as if . . .’­– ­but it is one that through negative presentation can be universally communicated, as Lyotard points out: ‘It is this universality in abeyance or in suspense that is evoked by the aesthetic judgment’ (1988: 168). The sublime, Lyotard claims, ‘is nothing more than a sensus which is undetermined, but de jure; it is a sentimental anticipation of the republic’ (1988: 168). He continues: Because the feeling of the sublime is an affective paradox, the paradox of feeling publicly and as a group that something is ‘formless’ alludes to a beyond of experience, that feeling constitutes an ‘as-if presentation’ of the Idea of civil society and even of cosmopolitical society, and thus an as-if presentation of the Idea of morality, right where that Idea nevertheless cannot be presented, within experience. [. . .] This sign is progress in its present state, it is as much as can be done. (1988: 196)

This is a sensus but not communis, or at least not yet. It begins from the fact that the experience of the event ‘can be shared in its intransitivity’ (Lyotard 1992: 107), establishing a tentative and fragile community, an unthinkable community that can only be felt in its incommensurability, can only be felt as differend. The sublime in this sense is the feelingthought of a community to-come that will be constituted around the Idea of freedom. This Idea, however, has no object, and its intransitivity is a result of it being radically undetermined. Consequently it does not inspire us with a political idealism, as this is normally understood, but rather it inspires our respect, which as we have seen is a rather affectless and abstract inspiration. Nevertheless, given the inhuman dimension



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of the Idea of freedom this ‘disinterested’ sensation is necessary, as Lyotard remarks, because the sublime ‘requires one’s freedom from any motivating pathos; ethics allows only that apathetic pathos accompanying obligation’ (1988a: 166). Respect is the feeling of a reflective aesthetic judgment that an art work is sublime and this, Lyotard says, ‘is an aesthetic feeling, and not merely any delight, because it demands to be universally communicated. But what demands this communication in this aesthetic feeling is not the aesthetic, but, rather, reason itself’ (1994: 231). Respect is therefore the sensation of the differend, which is a rather affectless sensation to the extent it indicates the presence of the Idea of freedom, but a violent nihilism to the extent that it attacks the conditions of being human. ‘The object that occasions the sublime is assuredly a “sign”’, Lyotard argues, ‘the sign of a supersensible sphere, but it disarms the presentation and goes so far as to discredit the ­phenomenality of the phenomenon’ (1994: 237). This latter, nihilist aspect of the sublime art work has a distinctly political dimension, inasmuch as Lyotard calls it ‘resistance’ (1994: 238). This is a resistance to and triumph over life’s ‘temptations’, in favour of an affirmation of the indeterminable (i.e. freedom) ‘itself’. In other words, the only ‘common sense’ in the sublime is the experience of how indetermination emerges from the impossibility of a determinative judgment (i.e. the breakdown of imagination) and it is precisely this impossible undecidability that ‘resists’ the self-evidences conditioning human life. As Lyotard puts it: ‘Such is the resistance of art­– ­a resistance in which all of its consistency consists: determination should never exhaust birth’ (2006: 349). While this resistance is perhaps the ground of a universal community, it is an unknowable community that can never be determined in advance. This is precisely the positive effect of the differend, it embodies an indeterminacy that cannot be conceptualised nor determined but can nevertheless be felt and ‘thought’, and acts as the real condition for the creation of new sensations and new thoughts. ART Lyotard’s claim that reflective judgment reveals aisthesis as both the sensual ground to and operative mechanism of ‘thought’ offers an alternative to the current art-world hegemony of so-called ‘post-conceptual practice’ and its ‘post-aesthetic poetics’, and to its predominantly discursive and conceptual production. But more significantly perhaps, Lyotard uses his account of sublime art to push back against contemporary techno-science and the capitalist economy, whose aesthetic of

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the beautiful implicates and instrumentalises contemporary art. While Lyotard’s anti-capitalism is shared by many contemporary artists, his appeals to such ‘political’ mechanisms as sublime aesthetic sensation and a non-cognitive ‘thought’, his use of transcendental concepts such as ‘presence’ and the ‘event’, and his rejection of representation tout court, all place him outside current art-world debates.20 Despite this seemingly self-evident fact, perhaps even because of it, Lyotard has a lot to offer a material and immanent politics of art. Lyotard’s mature theory of art is based on Kant’s concept of the sublime, but as we have already seen, his reading draws it away from any ideal dimension and instead sees it as the experience proper to a transcendental materialism, an experience oriented against contemporary capitalism, as we shall see, and given through its mechanism of negative presentation. In this sense Lyotard retains a supersensible destiny to the sublime experience, but materialises it, placing it within the art work qua object of aesthetic judgment. Lyotard writes: The artwork means nothing. It is a singular, unexpected arrangement of its constituent elements: words in literature; shapes and colors in painting. It relates to no reference, history, event, or perceptual reality that might have come before it. It in no way expresses the subjectivity of its ‘author.’ No representation, no expression. And, because it signifies no preexisting ‘ideas,’ no symbolism either. No meaning or celebration. (2001: 46)

This radically undetermined and abstract material of the artwork offers a radical ‘negation’ of contemporary forms of power that affirms in the highest possible terms art’s political efficacy. This alone makes it worthy of consideration in today’s climate of political ‘realism’ and the widespread abandonment of hope. Nevertheless, Lyotard’s position on art has often been misconstrued, or at least approached sceptically, because of its perceived emphasis on modernist abstract painting, a result of his two Artforum essays (‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’ (1982) and ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ (1984)) being better known than his other work on art.21 While it is true that abstract painting is privileged in these essays, the theory of the sublime Lyotard extracts from Kant in no way depends on specific artistic practices, nor is it found in any particular art historical style or epoch. In fact, as we shall see, the ‘abstraction’ Lyotard associates with the formless experience of the sublime is a mechanism of negative presentation that operates in a wide variety of artistic practices, from figurative painting (Lyotard’s first essay on Jacques Monory from 1972 utilises it extensively), to abstract painting, to darlings of postconceptual practice such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth and Daniel Buren, to the new-media art presented in Les Immatériaux, the exhibi-



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tion Lyotard co-curated with Thierry Chaput in 1985.22 Clearly, Lyotard was not interested in traditional distinctions between painting and ‘new’ art forms such as performance, installation, new media or conceptual work, nor did he take sides in the ideological debates between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ modes of practice that animated the art world at the time.23 Lyotard’s concept of the sublime is in fact offered as a way not just of understanding contemporary art, his and ours, but of reading it through an ontological framework that would give art a political efficacy in and against contemporary forms of power. It will be to this understanding of sublime art that we shall now turn. J A C Q U E S M O N O RY Lyotard’s understanding of sublime art has a number of components that he consistently drew upon in his examinations of a very wide range of artists and art works. I will not discuss all these components or artists, but will instead focus on the action of negative presentation, the relation of the sublime to the beautiful, and the particular ways in which sublime art disrupts capitalism and its techno-scientific support. We begin with the two essays Lyotard wrote on his friend, the painter Jacques Monory, ‘Libidinal Economy of the Dandy’ (1972) and ‘Sublime Aesthetics of the Contract Killer’ (1981). These often hilarious pieces of criticism exemplify the libidinal and sublime periods from which they come, and illustrate their similarities and differences in relation to the question of the political operations of art in a particularly clear way. Monory’s work, Lyotard claims, is undecidably suspended between two seemingly opposed contemporary possibilities: it both affirms and negates the image-economy capitalism imposes on our experience, or what Lyotard elsewhere calls ‘photographic capitalism’ (2012: 111). As such: ‘The whole oeuvre comes to take its strict place in contemporary pictorial art, between photography and the avant-gardes, or rather at their intersection’ (Lyotard 1998: 88). This is a precise formulation of the problem art faces in ‘resisting’ capitalism; to do so it must embrace the tools capitalism offers, and none more than photography as the technology defining our age of mechanical reproduction. Nevertheless, Lyotard continues­– a­ nd it is a qualification that succinctly states the immanence of art as a political mechanism­– ‘­The decline of experience can always be turned back into the awakening of experiment’ (1998: 88). Lyotard will explore this possibility in relation to Monory’s paintings in the terms of both the ‘libidinal’ and ‘sublime’ periods to which these essays belong.

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Lyotard’s early essay assumes that the human world is an ‘inscription’ of the libidinal forces it both mediates and embodies, making figurative painting qua ‘energetic dispositif’ a direct engagement with the ‘problem of power and force’ (1998: 91). In this sense painting both expresses and negates the libidinal forces that compose it, regulating and containing these incommensurable drives (in particular the deathdrive) in order to defer and instrumentalise their destructive jouissance. Capitalism, Lyotard says, shares exactly the same logic, and it is here that painting (and its theory) finds its ambivalent politics. As Lyotard writes: ‘A libidinal economy of the pictorial dispositif makes it possible to connect directly the fluidities and stases which constitute it with the general circulation of energies in society, which is called political economy’ (1998: 96–7). The social circulation of libidinal energy is both enabled and repressed by the representational ‘bar’ that grounds social order, and which always carries with it the nihilist lure of an explosion of jouissance that would destroy it. Lyotard interprets Monory’s work in these terms, beginning with his use of blue. Blue, he claims, is the colour of jouissance, ‘of the charge’, of a ‘fuck’, a colour that explodes causing the ‘de-differentiation’24 of things, a kind of ‘anti-colour’, a ‘profound erosion of chromatic difference’ that is nothing less than the operation of the death-drive (which along with Eros forms the primary process of the libido) in the field of colours (1998: 98–9). This ‘blue’ therefore operates, Lyotard claims, in the same way as money, as a kind of ‘general equivalent’ that destroys individual identities and so frees us from the I/eye. There is no longer a subject in a world of objects, only the depersonalised forces of capitalist abstraction and circulation evaporating all differences. On this level, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are merely ‘positions temporarily invested by the circulation of energy’ (1998: 165), at which point, Lyotard writes, ‘you are completely inside capital [. . .] where this cynicism amounts to law’ (1998: 102). But as well you’re completely inside the primary processes of the libidinal economy, because the artwork ‘conceals no content, no libidinal secret [. . . its] force lies entirely in its surface. There is only surface. [. . .] we are dealing with transformations of libidinal energy and with devices governing these transformations’ (1989b: 160). This (blue) in-difference enveloping everything ensures that the ultimate and finally incommensurable difference (between libidinal energy and its representation) is endlessly deferred, at once promising and delaying discharge in order to accumulate more and more ‘jouissance-capital’ (1998: 103). In this sense Monory’s paintings do not mimic advertising, as pop art did, but rather catalogues, where the clear images exhibit a ‘good form’ that appeals to our power of ‘discernment’, a power of both ‘under-



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standing and grasping’ (1998: 109). We can see here the outline of a capitalist rationality whose conditions of possible experience are partly economic, and that finds aesthetic ‘pleasure’ in the beauty of industrially produced commodities and their representation by photographs. Monory’s beautiful images are not only painted from the projection of photographs onto the canvas, but these photos are often taken from magazines and catalogues: they exist, Lyotard tells us, in the ‘magazine time’ of suspended enjoyment (1998: 111). Magazine time is effectively a negation of temporality because it is a perpetual now and, like them, Monory’s paintings ‘postpone forever’ that moment when jouissance is finally paid out in the orgy of profit. They refuse any ‘capitalisation of suspense’ (Lyotard 1998: 112), any narrative momentum because ‘there is no story’ (Lyotard 1998: 114). Monory’s paintings are ‘both economical and libidinal’ Lyotard tells us, their de-differentiating blue suspending them between valuation (representation) and exchange (discharge, profit), both a ‘fluidification’ and its ‘canalisation’ (1998: 120) of libidinal forces. It is this immanent ‘duality’, Lyotard claims, ‘which institutes capitalist representation’ (1998: 120). The paintings qua ‘pictorial dispositif’ do not directly attack capitalism, nor merely represent it, rather they offer an ‘exemplary perversion’ of it, a ‘hyperrealism’ as Lyotard calls it, in which capitalist abstraction operates directly within the pictorial field of painting, a ‘dissolution of [painting’s] exteriority inside [capitalism’s] process of exteriorisation’ (1998: 127). In this sense ‘hyperrealism’ is not simply realistic representation, but the artistic embodiment of how ‘reality’ is transformed by (the artist’s) labour, a process of abstraction in which art is indiscernible from capitalism.25 The painting, Lyotard will claim, is ‘a moment in a general process of conversion of libidinal energies [. . . and so] the laying bare of the libidinal and political process of production in “art” ’ (1998: 130). This is a ‘metarealism’ by which Monory ‘represents representation’ (1998: 130) and so reveals ‘reality’ to be at once ­constituted and mediated by this process. Monory’s work does this so effectively because it absorbs the painter’s ‘craft’ into the technology of an optical machine that the painter/worker simply operates. The affirmation of capitalist abstraction by Monory’s blue, and the absorption of ‘art’ into the technological (i.e. photographic) dispositif of ‘capitalist representation’ therefore amounts, Lyotard argues, to ‘the “politicisation” of the production of visual pleasure’ (1998: 133), a ‘politicisation’ that remains deeply ambivalent. Monory, Lyotard says, is a dandy who embraces capitalist abstraction and ‘only believes in the circulation of intensities’, exploring/enjoying/consuming the most perverse and dangerous of them like,

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as Lyotard puts it, ‘a Dionysian with a bad conscience’ (1998: 140). This ‘libidinal wandering’ doesn’t block the erotic body of capital but instead produces a ‘giddy and chancy vagabonding of the libido’ that offers a ‘generous donation of intensities’ in an ‘erotic-financial potlatch’.26 But this ‘expenditure’ (note: the painter’s intervention is on the level of political economy) is simultaneously calculated, quantified and ‘arrested’ by, on one side, a romantic nostalgia for the body and its affects appearing in the work through the physical act of painting, and on the other the calculation, commodification and circulation of this artistic ‘excess’ through its photographic framing (Lyotard 1998: 146). But this process not only ‘reduces’ painting to capital but also intensifies its libidinal energy: ‘The libidinal charge of the motif is ten times greater because of its position of impower [impouvoir] in relation to the principle of exchange value, the only discharge dispositif admitted in the system’ (1998: 153). Monory’s painting is therefore a ‘fissured art’ that on the one hand shows how exchange defers libidinal discharge through its laws and values, and on the other reveals how the very idea or fantasy of an unconstrained and so ‘authentic’ discharge of libidinal energy ‘is there as a counterpoint and exteriority within the system’ (1998: 154). This then is the harsh law of exchange: ‘that Eros and the death drive flow wherever seems right to them is just a matter of cash’ (1998: 154). This is the principle of Monory’s ‘dandy aestheticism’, the ‘combination of the disorder of affects with the metrics of capitalisable values’ (1998: 158) within a ‘work’ that ‘assassinates’ the subjectivity of the painter (and all the modernist myths surrounding it) through the ‘hyperrealism’ of its capitalised experience. This hyperrealist assassination therefore preserves its victim as a circulating commodity, as another libidinal inscription existing in a kind of suspended animation.27 As such, the painter and painting are merely another kind of capitalist ‘libidinal prosthesis’ that both increases our enjoyment (Eros) and unleashes the jouissance of the death drive (1988: 164). These are not separable aspects of capitalism, but rather poles of the ‘erotic field’ traversed by the libidinal flow (1998: 164) for their mutual advantage. Capitalism, Lyotard tells us, ‘is itself only the relationship of optimisation between energy advanced and energy return, extended to all objects. It is the absolute domination of instrumentality’ (1998: 170). Lyotard suggests (following Bataille) that within capitalism painting operates according to an alternative dispositif of libidinal circulation, one based on the gift. Time is expended in painting without thought of return, Lyotard claims; it is a ‘sacrificial expenditure’ (1998: 173) rather than ‘work’, making it the immanent death-drive of the instru-



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mentalism of technological production and its profit (this would be its avant-gardist aspect). Put another way, capitalism optimises the means of production, whereas artistic production optimises its end, a libidinal discharge from which there is no return, no profit ‘because there is no permanent point of anchorage from one cycle to another’ (1998: 175). Painting’s ‘cycle’, Lyotard claims, is ‘of the order of a non-cumulative discontinuity’ (1998: 175), a discharge, ‘an intensity of expenditure’ (1998: 179). This pure expenditure of art, its ‘pictorial hysteria’, is not outside capital’s libidinal economy, however, because it is achieved through its technological prostheses, and in particular photography (1998: 177). In this paradoxical ‘assassination of experience’, Lyotard writes: ‘Enjoyment is organised around the repression of sensuality’ (1998: 181). Monory uses technical machines to delay any human sensual enjoyment by ‘freezing the libidinal-chromatic flows’ (1998: 184–6) so that what we see is a tension: the general working on the ‘creature’ and the caressing style attempt to subordinate the monochrome, the severe lines, the cataloguing; and only succeed in increasing the enjoyment difference because of its encounter with quantifiable indifference. It is the affirmation of capital the wrong way round. (1998: 187–8)

It is the same affirmation of the negation of libidinal force that capitalism exploits, but in the name of the nihilistic jouissance that is always already inseparable from its commodification, circulation and ‘enjoyment’ as profit. In this sense Monory’s paintings affirm and embody the incommensurability but absolute immanence of libidinal forces and the capitalist technologies that circulate them, but (and this is why they are ‘the wrong way round’) at the expense of the human subject who enjoys them. Monory’s paintings amplify this incommensurability by using capitalism’s tools and ‘content’ hysterically, to the point that libidinal jouissance exceeds its ‘inscription’ (i.e. containment) within the conditions of possible human experience (i.e. its ‘enjoyment’). We see here the final point of Lyotard’s ‘libidinal’ or ‘Accelerationist’ phase, Monory’s paintings intensify the incommensurability between human experience and its capitalist-libidinal economy to the point where a new and inhuman ‘experience’ becomes possible. Capitalism is not the enemy here but rather the mechanism by which the libido can be unleashed from the human and embrace its market reality; as Lyotard succinctly puts it, the artist ‘needs to be in love, but with a prostitute’ (1998: 184). Lyotard’s second essay on Monory, ‘Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer’, was written in 1981 to accompany Monory’s exhibition Skies, Nebulae and Galaxies, 1978–1981. This essay remains focused on

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the incommensurable difference constituting both capitalism and the artwork, but Lyotard now understands this as ‘a discrepancy between presence and infinity, between existence and meaning’ (1998: 192). This is the sublime differend, which Monory’s work expresses as ‘the Idea made real, negation made reality, death as a mode of life, which is shown positively’ (Lyotard 1998: 192). The no-longer-libidinal absolute remains immanent in its expression but, Lyotard continues, it does so through a kind of nihilistic romanticism, a negative presentation where ‘what claimed to incarnate the absolute exposed its nullity’ (1998: 192). Monory’s paintings show cosmic vistas, often along with their technological conditions of possibility, to suggest that the absolute Idea of infinity can simply be represented through a technology capable of going beyond our human conditions to capture the cosmos. Once more, Lyotard is interested in how the paintings embody their incommensurable aspects and so express their inhumanity, but they now do so in a ‘sublime’ manner where the absolute can only appear through the negation of its human conditions of experience. While, as we have seen, commentators such as Williams and Grant argue that this removes the possibility of real political engagement from Lyotard’s work, I am more sympathetic to Woodward’s approach, which suggests that the pure negativity of the sublime can also have political purchase. Monory’s paintings contain ‘sublime’ images of stars and cosmic events that are beyond our ability to either perceive and/or comprehend, but can be reproduced by new technologies. As a result, Lyotard writes: ‘The cosmological infinite seems to be effaced behind the technological infinite’ (1998: 195). This would be a romanticism that transformed our Sehnsucht (i.e. nostalgia) for cosmic wholeness into something more useful: a ‘deliberate destruction, active nihilism’ (1998: 196) against the human achieved by employing the ‘active nihilist art’ of photography (Lyotard 1998: 197). Photography, Lyotard tells us with some relish, is a contract killer who utilises its infinite and murderous technological power against our meagre world of human ‘meaning’, dispatching rational understanding and so anticipating ‘what life is in the absence of any experience that can be shared’ (1998: 196). This means the absence of a sensus communis, the absence of a human community constituted around transcendental aesthetic judgment, but this radical negation also ‘rebounds’ into an ambivalent affirmation (1998: 200) inasmuch as the meaning of life is transformed into ‘the sombre enjoyment of non-meaning’ (1998: 202). Lyotard’s argument here is similar to that of his earlier essay (and of his 1977 book on Duchamp, as we shall see), inasmuch as new technology reveals the inhuman ‘abstraction’ of capitalism, an inhumanity now conceived of as ‘sub-



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lime’ inasmuch as technologically produced images reveal the utterly indifferent non-sense found in both cosmological infinity and in the infinity of exchange in technological capitalism (1998: 202). This is the moment where negative presentation becomes a form of affirmation, as Lyotard puts it: ‘A jubilation can proceed from the consciousness of the desert. There is nothing, but I want to present it’ (1998: 202). Here the ‘matter of fact’ of the incomprehensible infinity of technological capitalism replaces the remoteness of Ideas, and the murderous power of this capitalist sublime becomes the whole of reality. Derealisation (i.e. abstraction, or the general equivalent of money) becomes the principle of production and ‘the most elementary bond, once all projects have been destroyed and analysed in programmes’ (1998: 203). This remains an aesthetics of incommensurability, but technological capitalism no longer mediates and contains a libidinal force that can be accelerated through the intensity of art, because capitalism (and Monory’s paintings) is now utterly incommensurable with us and negates all human experience. As a result, Lyotard argues, Monory’s later work is without any aura, without ‘consciousness’ (1998: 205) because their conditions of experience are now entirely technological. Nevertheless, Lyotard claims, ‘the melancholy of not being able to experience the absolute [is] accompanied by the joy of being able to conceive of it. This state of sublimity [. . .] is not ecstasy, but it is at least half-grace’ (1998: 209). This represents a considerable shift from Lyotard’s earlier essay, where the incommensurability of capitalist and artistic dispositifs and libidinal production produced a pure expenditure taking us beyond the human. Now all subjectivity has already been assassinated, all possibility of intense enjoyment has gone, and we are faced with a negation of the human by pure abstraction. Nothing human connects presence and Idea, neither affect nor symbol (1998: 210) and technology ‘conceives’ infinity at the expense of our experience, Monory’s paintings embodying this process like a contract killer. There can be no ‘feeling’ of the technological sublime because it ‘appears’ without a subject and out of time, an absolute present without movement or meaning, the inhuman ‘event’ of pure calculation. As Lyotard puts it, the ‘rule is that of beep and forget: the current state of this mind emerges from nothing and immediately fades away’ (1998: 213) in a ‘nihilism’ that equals an ‘immanence perfect to the instant’ (1998: 214). The painter presents this perfect immanence to us, the human, as if his paintbrush were a revolver (1998: 217). ‘Is it possible’, Lyotard asks, ‘to conceive of an art that would not make appeal to a shared sensibility, an ideal society of affections, but only to the destruction of those who look at it?’ (1998:

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217). Yes, this is what we recognise in Monory’s paintings, Lyotard gleefully tells us: ‘Such is their realism’ (1998: 219). Lyotard now develops his argument in an important way, explaining that what he has called the technological sublime is actually a contemporary version of the beautiful. Monory’s paintings, Lyotard tells us, ‘appeal in the beholder to a pleasure without interest, an agitation which won’t be cashed in on, but consumed as pure affective intensity, as pure loss’ (1998: 221). This ‘aesthetic of the beautiful’ has a major difference to that envisioned by Kant, as Lyotard freely admits: The free adjustment of the sensitive or imaginary to the understanding has given place to an adjusting determined by the techno-scientific means for the production and reproduction of images: photographic space coming from geometric optics, colours coming from industrial chromatic chemistry and optics, page layout from high-circulation magazines. (1998: 223)

Aesthetic experience has been outsourced, ‘exteriorised’ to technological machines and the science that supports them, which cancels the free-play of our faculties because it ‘leaves little freedom to the eye and mind for modulating their relation at the moment of the perception of the painting’ (Lyotard 1998: 223). It is precisely this absence of freedom that makes Monory’s paintings too beautiful, Lyotard continues, because they don’t solicit a judgment of taste, but simply demand that we follow the rules techno-science and media codes impose, and the paintings instantiate. The only positive thing that can be said about this is that the paintings attest to these rules for living and thinking and so provide, Lyotard rather sarcastically remarks, a ‘Critical function?’ (1998: 224). This contemporary and techno-scientific beauty also has something sublime about it, a mathematical sublime Lyotard argues, one also quite different from Kant’s account. ‘The absolute is no longer beyond the senses when there is no more sensibility. It is the quantitative infinite present in each commodity, the infinite of credit present in each payment voucher, the infinite of the cosmos reproducing itself in what we no longer dare call production’ (1998: 224). This technological and capitalist sublime is unpresentable, only becoming present through the negation of the human sensibility subsumed within it. This is the important shift, because while sensibility was detached from humanity in the libidinal phase in order to be instrumentalised as an experimental tool of techno-scientific capitalism, here capitalist techno-science negates all experience apart from the disinterested and inhuman pleasures of beauty. In this new work of Monory, Lyotard writes,the subject has been



Lyotard and the Sublime 79 dismantled into capacities for performing services, or competencies, and he counts as unrecognisable under the regime of general physics and particle systems. Pain and pleasure, and even apathy, are metaphysical denominations for these states and these systems. Positivistic science, positivistic economics, positivistic law, positivistic psychology, positivistic sociology and positivistic politics, which are all figures of the contract killer, in other words of the murderous power of the absolute Idea, relegate the pleasure of conception and the pain of unpresentation to the museum. All that is real is rational, but with the techno-scientific reason governed by ‘social reason’. [. . . Monory] appears to abandon the aesthetic of the sublime, and to return through his art to that of the beautiful, of a harmony between sense and the sense-able. It is only through too much beauty that he attracts attention to the essential fact of post-modernity, the incorporation of the sublime into the beautiful, the synthesis of the infinite and the finite in the figure of experimentation. (1998: 225)

In Monory’s work the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime collapses because it rested upon the assumption that it was possible to discern between the agreement and the disagreement of reason and the sensible. But these distinctions are impossible when the image no longer represents a sensible reality to a subject that has Ideas, but is simply ‘an artefact obtained by knowledge machines’ (1998: 226). The externalisation of knowledge and know-how in machines has now monopolised ‘experimentation’, and the ‘new’ effectively instrumentalises the ‘now’ of sublime experience. This new ‘postmodern’ situation redistributes the infinite and the finite: ‘Infinity is the infinity of competences and performances, past and future, deposited in the finite of an axiomaticised and operational dispositif’ (1998: 227). Monory’s paintings of the stars are not, therefore, images of an unpresentable infinite we can never experience as finite beings, rather ‘it is the finite product of certain transformational dispositifs, and these are actual concretions of an infinite ensemble of possible transformers’ (1998: 227). The ‘fact’ is what remains after the infinity of techno-scientific knowledge has removed its ‘subjective envelope’; this fact then becomes an ‘artefact’ that replaces our experience as the focus of experimental procedures: For the abyss aroused by sublime feeling is substituted the concrete mass of materials and hardware in self-regulating dispositifs. What remains of ‘us’, with our capacity for desiring and suffering, is that ‘we’ have to serve these dispositifs. It is in this respect that ‘we’ are either survivors (but we can only know this from the outside) or experimenters. (1998: 227–8)

This second essay on Monory rehearses many of the arguments Lyotard uses throughout the 1980s against postmodernism, and against techno-science’s inseparability from both beauty and capitalism. Also present is a mourning of the body and its affects, whose

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traces remain visible in the painter’s technique, and give the paintings a softness that ‘reminds’ the ‘survivors’ of capitalism of their condition. This reminder ‘is enough’, Lyotard rather hopefully concludes, ‘to establish the divide that is necessary to make visible what is not seen in illustrations, the quantitative infinite of knowledge and powers which has eaten away at experiences and made us into survivors or experimenters’ (1998: 229). Monory’s ‘realism’ not only allows us to recognise our ‘selves’ as cybernetic parts, but also­– ­although only from the outside­– a­ s ‘survivors’ from a previous time when art emerged from, rather than being inscribed in, human flesh. The exteriority of this sensibility is important, because it reveals a technological sublime where the incommensurables are no longer Ideas and their experience, but our (human) experience and the ‘rationality’ of capitalist axiomatics and technological dispositifs. At this point, Lyotard tells us: ‘The sublime of immanence replaces the sublime of transcendence’ (1998: 229). What is this immanent sublime? It is one in which there are no more unpresentable Ideas that transcend our experience, only material facts of the universe (i.e. the stars) that are not sensible to us but can nevertheless be sensed through the machines of techno-­science.28 It seems as if under these ‘postmodern’ conditions the ‘touch’ of Monory’s brush can only express our melancholy awareness of having lost ourselves, of the negation of aisthesis as the ground of knowledge by machines, and so gives ‘testimony’ to our own disappearance. As Lyotard mourns: The brush paints a world without painting, where there will no longer be a need for testimony. For if only the established is real, in other words what satisfies the requirements of infinite rational verification, then what is real can by definition testify for itself without the aid of any brush or any pen. Neo-technological reality will, by its very constitution, dismiss all testimony other than that of the procedures for establishing this reality. Like the murder of the contract killer, it has no other witness than the infinite capacity of ideas. Monory’s paintbrush is that other witness, saying goodbye. (1998: 229–30)

After art’s survival has ended, it loses the distance that allows it to mourn its own passing and becomes ‘contemporary’. In these circumstances Monory’s paintings become just another experimental branch of the ‘technological infinite’ (1988: 195); they are simply ‘radiations’ of radiations, part of a photo-realism that stretches into infinity (1998: 194–5). At this point it might seem we are faced with two choices, to embrace the capitalist machine or to cling to the doomed humanity that remains to us by mourning our own passing. Now ‘love is impossible’ (1998: 194) and ‘Winter is come’ (1998: 195), because life has become



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‘the absence of any experience that can be shared’ (1998: 196), except perhaps the melancholy of mourning. Lyotard’s essays on Monory seem to develop the incommensurability of experience and its infinite conditions (whether primary processes or capitalist techno-science) in two directions, either towards an intense experience that escapes both our human conditions and our current form of capitalism on a line of active experimentation, or towards a beauty that annihilates humanity’s incommensurable conditions and replaces them with a technological sublime. While the first perhaps offers a way in which art might still influence political developments, the second seems to condemn art to either mourning the death of human experience and political agency or simply taking our new capitalist reality for granted. While the essays on Monory are strong on mourning, they also point forward to Lyotard’s attempts to unleash both the immanent potentialities of capitalist nihilism as it operates in and on art (the book on Duchamp), and to rethink the nihilist finality of an ‘inhuman’ sublime art in a way that develops its political potentials. D U C H A M P A N D I R O N I C A F F I R M AT I O N Lyotard’s book Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, published in French in 1977, the same year as Duchamp’s first major exhibition in France at the Centre Pompidou, clearly illustrates this point.29 Lyotard does not position Duchamp ‘against’ painting, let alone consider his work ‘conceptual’, but reads him as a political artist subverting the dominant mechanisms of representation. As John Rajchman puts it, ‘if Duchamp transforms the field in turn, it is not by rejecting pure “opticality” in favour of purely “conceptual” contents, but rather by exposing “incommensurabilities” to shake up the notion of seeing supposed by the very idea of “opticality” and its ties to good form’ (1998: 7). Duchamp introduces a series of incommensurables into the perspectival common sense of pictorial practice, giving his work another sense of time. One such ‘incommensurable’ is the relation of Duchamp’s extensive notes to his ‘works’, which provide an interminable commentary that never fully accounts for the excess of nonsense they produce. This incommensurability does not mean commentary exemplifies the textuality of all things, nor does it privilege conceptual practice; rather it is the very rule of art.30 It is, Lyotard explains, the affirmation of ‘nonsense as the most precious treasure’ (1990: 12), as something practical (i.e. political) and most certainly Dada through which one ‘begins to live and think according to non-sense’, and by which nonsense becomes a ‘cause to propagate’. Nonsense, or the incommensurable, resists both good and

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bad taste, as it does all conceptual (i.e. determinative) rules, although, as Lyotard notes, Duchamp’s ‘mechanical techniques’ nevertheless utilise a ‘cold’, ‘distant’ and ‘inhuman’ logic (1990: 13). Lyotard connects this ‘inhuman’ logic of Duchamp’s machines to his controversial claims in Libidinal Economy that the industrial proletariat enjoyed a certain jouissance in their oppression by industrial machines, which led, Lyotard claims, ‘to the demeasurement of what was held to be human’ (1990: 15), releasing experience from its human conditions of possibility and introducing this ‘non-sense’ as a kind of ecstatic surplus-value. ‘Let it exceed its givens,’ Lyotard cries; ‘let it invent its possibilities’ (1990: 22), as industrial production invents a new, mechanical body adequate to the new quantities of experience it was forced to endure. If the proletariat is only figured as suffering victims, Lyotard argues, ‘you miss the energy that later spread through the arts and sciences, the jubilation and the pain of discovering that you can hold out (live, work, think, be affected) in a place where it had been judged senseless to do so’ (1990: 16). This clearly repeats aspects of his first Monory essay, but more emphatically. The new mechanised body produced by capitalism also produces and experiences an inhuman excess, a ‘non-sense’ displaying an admirable ‘hardness’ (1990: 16) towards the old sentiments, a ‘mechanical asceticism’ (1990: 17) that is the proletariat’s cybernetic contribution to modernity. As such, Lyotard claims, Duchamp is a ‘model of political thought’ (1990: 25) whose works should be taken as ‘contributions not only to an aesthetics but to a topological politics’ (1990: 26). In this regard, The Large Glass and Given resist the geometric perspectival representation of political space found in traditional concepts of democracy, and act as complex ‘transformers’, as a ‘battery of metamorphosis machines’ (1990: 36) that place ‘the Bachelor-machines against industrial mechanics’ (1990: 49). The non-Euclidean geometry of Duchamp’s machines ‘comment’ on (i.e. introduce incommensurables within) the specular and reproductive mechanisms of both democracy and capitalism by, Lyotard tells us, ‘inventing singularities’ (1990: 62). These singularities have been produced by the machine, but do not belong to it, or at least do not belong to its functional purpose. In the terms of Libidinal Economy these singularities manifest the death drive of industrial processes of (re)production, a jouissance of negation producing ‘pointless’ and ‘dissimulating’ singularities that do not ‘belong to the things of power, to politicians, to technicians’ (1990: 69). These are celibate machines, but ones that for Lyotard are strangely productive. Duchamp likes machines because they have no taste and no feelings. He likes them for their anonymity, which keeps nothing and capitalizes on



Lyotard and the Sublime 83 nothing of the forces that they articulate and transform, and suppresses the question of the author and of authority: and he likes them because they do not repeat themselves, an even stranger thing for minds penetrated by the equation: mechanics = replication. (1990: 68)

Lyotard sees Duchamp replacing the subjectivity of the artist with the creativity of the machine, a machine capable of replicating difference. As a result, and opposed to the stupidity of the painter, the machine enjoys a ‘stupidity of the eye’ (1990: 76), ‘this great stupidity of non-power’ (1990: 101) employed against an optical ‘intelligence’ (1990: 76) that continually sees similarities and causality in everything. Duchamp’s concept of the ‘delay’ is central here, because it forces each singularity (the stupid eye, the imaginative machine) to miss the other, circumventing any possible (organic) unity. As Lyotard puts it: ‘Duchamp wants colors that are unconsumable by the eyes, “a certain inopticity, a certain cold consideration” ’ (1990: 138). These unconsumable colours are quite different to Duchamp’s celebrated ‘grey matter’, they suggest a colour of thought, the colour of hard, cold consideration that cannot be seen (or bought) by human eyes, an incommensurable ‘inopticity’ that is nevertheless productive. Duchamp’s singularitymachines therefore negate capitalist power, but as the death drive of the very machines that make this power global, giving them what Duchamp calls an “ironism of affirmation” (quoted in Lyotard 1990: 68) that adds ‘potency’ to negation (1990: 68). We will return to this question of negation, but in the context of Lyotard’s ‘libidinal’ work, and as art, it operates as an experimental force within capitalism capable of liberating experience from the human. As such, it is a force that is by no means restricted to Duchamp’s work, but one found in the many incommensurable moments of the modern avant-garde tradition. As Lyotard writes somewhat earlier: ‘There is, in modern art, a presence of desire, or rather, a presence in desire of the death drive­– t­he presence of that which, in desire, generates movement’ (1984a: 72). Modernity’s death drive is therefore its immanent ‘revolutionary function’, what Lyotard calls an ‘anti-art’ drive (1984a: 73) or ‘anti-aesthetics’ (2001) that produces the brilliant history of avant-garde movements. It is a negation of its conditions, but is not determined by them because it exceeds all limits by affirming its own process. This would be an affirmative ‘dystopia’ (Lyotard 1990: 106), an ironic ‘twist’ of the world by which it produces its own negation. This, according to Lyotard, is the aim of Duchamp’s ironic commentary on perspectival geometry, which operates as a ‘hinge’ between incompatible dimensions (1990: 81)31 that introduces ‘the possibility of representing unpresentable space’ (1990: 90).32 This phrase obviously

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prefigures Lyotard’s later work on the sublime, as well as making a clearly ironic point; Duchamp does not announce the ‘end of painting’, rather he introduces the incommensurable logic of the hinge (i.e. the differend) between art’s conceptual and material modes of production. As such, Duchamp marks a moment in the underground genealogy of an avant-garde defined not only by its insistence on art’s incommensurability with itself, but by its incommensurability with (i.e. its negation of) the wider technical and political systems within which it is produced. This incommensurability is ontological rather than simply epistemological­– a­ point I have already made in relation to the sublime­ – ­and cannot be reduced to a strategy of institutional critique. (Lyotard once said that the idea of changing the museum for a factory simply exchanges one side of the capitalist coin for the other (1984a: 83).33) Duchamp’s ‘ironic affirmation’ therefore exemplifies, Lyotard argues, the avant-garde’s wider strategic engagement with the mass media and the culture industry: Thus, it is possible to ascribe the dialectics of the avant-gardes to the challenge posed by the realisms of industry and mass communication to painting and the narrative arts. Duchamp’s ‘ready made’ does nothing but actively and parodistically signify this constant process of disposition of the craft of painting or even of being an artist. As Thierry de Duve penetratingly observes, the modern aesthetic question is not ‘What is beautiful?’ but ‘What can be said to be art?’ (1984: 75)

This is no doubt a heterodox reading of Duchamp within an American context, but it is nevertheless important for understanding how Lyotard’s aesthetics cannot be reduced to a simple affirmation of abstract painting nor to a damning contrast between an affirmative ‘libidinal’ phase and the subsequent negations of the sublime. Lyotard affirms an ontology of the incommensurable that makes the ‘celibate machine’ an inhuman but nevertheless aesthetic negation (a ‘transformer’) of its conditions through its experimental production of singular experience. As we shall see, this will also be the purpose of what Lyotard will define as ‘sublime art’. L E S I M M AT É R I A U X The exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou (28 March­– ­25 July 1985) was concerned with how new technologies and materials were effecting experience in art and life.34 In this sense it followed up on many of the concerns of both his essays on Monory and his book on Duchamp (and both artists had important positions in the exhibition), but also directly experimented with the positive political



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effects of the ‘sublime’, even if this was a term he did not use discussing the exhibition. Speaking of the exhibition, Lyotard claimed that what is ‘most interesting’ in the best contemporary art is its ‘critical’ approach, which not only discovers its conditions, but goes beyond them (1985: 3). This clearly Kantian capacity of critique is programmatically extended within the exhibition to a variety of sciences and new technologies, which discover and exceed their most basic assumption, what Lyotard calls ‘Human Being’ (1985: 3), and thus explore the end of ‘anthropocentrism’ (2015: 36).35 In this sense the new ‘immaterial’ technologies are both the completion and disruption of modernity, because although they achieve technological control over matter they also take it out of the hands of humanity.36 In this sense, Lyotard says, the exhibition is ‘contributing to a work of mourning for modernity’ (2015: 32), but unlike the second of the Monory essays, this mourning is not an ‘end’ but a ‘means’ for exploring the positive political implications of new technology and the end of man. As Lyotard says, the exhibition explores ‘a thought and a practice within the framework of the technoscience of interaction which [. . .] would break from the thought and the practice of science, of technology, and of domination’ (2015: 34). This immanent critique of techno-science that explores the experimental capacities of art utilised the concept of incommensurables Lyotard had already developed, but these increasingly took on aspects of what he would elsewhere call the sublime. To begin with the ‘immaterial’ aspect of new technologies dispersed the human in what Lyotard called ‘complex agglomerates of tiny packets of energy’ (1985: 4), formless and imperceptible elements that were translated into machine languages and then recomposed by machines into new objects. As a result, Lyotard writes, ‘there’s no such thing as matter’ (1985: 4), only an ‘immaterialist materialism’ (1991: 41) that Les Immatériaux in fact embodied. Indeed, the exhibition instantiated this im-materialism directly in its technologised ‘interface’ (e.g. the headphones receiving a soundtrack broadcast from each zone, the sustained efforts of the production team to devise a system whereby each visitor was able, through a system of electronic tracking, to receive a print-out of their unique visit upon leaving the exhibition) that made the visitor a ‘transformer’, as Robin Mackay has put it, ‘a synthesiser amongst synthesisers’ (2015: 219). In this way Les Immatériaux filled visitors with uncertainty, on one side about the ‘objects’ they were experiencing, and on the other about the subjectivity that has this experience. In this sense the exhibition offered a ‘critique’ that, according to Lyotard, does ‘not offer any reassurance, especially and above all by prophesying a new dawn’

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(quoted in Hudek 2009: 6), but instead explored this negation of preexisting conditions as the opportunity to experiment with the ‘new’. While having a rigorous theoretical framework,37 the exhibition presented a cacophony of sounds, objects and experiences organised into thirty-one ‘sites’, some of which were further subdivided, all jumbled up and arranged without any obvious logic: ‘There was’, Rajchman informs us, ‘too much “information” to absorb or digest, [. . .] all the “data” didn’t cohere, but rather fell together in strange, even surreal, juxtapositions or unforseen patterns’ (1998: 15). In this sense, the exhibition explored the non-sense of new technologies and what Lyotard called a ‘postmodern sensibility’ (1985: 8) inseparable from a technoscientific rationality and the new body it required and produced. As Lyotard explains, the exhibition was not explicitly sublime, but it nevertheless approached an invisible and ungraspable im-materiality whose experience amounted to a kind of embodied and participatory ‘thought’: The overlapping of mind and matter in contemporary techno-science is the aspect we were particularly concerned to emphasize in the exhibition Les Immatériaux. We were trying to exhibit, not the unpresentable, and to that extent it is not a sublime exhibition, but the retreat of the traditional division between mind and matter; what is important now is this sort of continuity between mind and matter. [. . .] Maybe our task is just that of complexifying the complexity we are in charge of. Perhaps this is a materialist point of view, but only if we see matter not as a substance, but as a series of invisible and ungraspable elements organized by abstract structures. So we can be materialists today and in a sense maybe we must be. (1989a: 20)

Following Lyotard’s reading of Duchamp, the exhibition was an attempt to present the radical transformations of experience and thought achieved through the emergence of new technology, a transformation involving the pain of confusion and dislocation, but as well the pleasure of participating in a new future, a participation ‘without rules’ but one with the directly political aim ‘to formulate the rules of what will have been done’ (Lyotard 1984: 81). Kiff Bamford’s reading of Les Immatériaux usefully focuses on The Differend to make sense of the exhibition’s engagement with the question of im-material communication. The Differend explores the ‘phrase’ as the basic unit of communication whose ‘own’ meaning is entirely contingent, but gains meaning through its relationships to other phrases, which form what Lyotard calls ‘genres’ or ‘modes of discourse’. This understanding of communication removes subjective intention as the source of meaning, while also denying a univocal power to genre, inasmuch as the ‘meaning’ it gives a phrase emerges



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only in its enunciative performance. What Lyotard is interested in is the ‘event’ of performance preventing the phrase being understood according to any genre, a negative presentation that calls attention to the differend: ‘The differend’, Lyotard writes, ‘is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be’ (1988: 13). We are by now familiar with the sense of this phrase, the ‘must’­– ­Lyotard’s version of the categorical imperative­– ­refers to a feeling that cannot be articulated according to any existing conditions of possibility, but which nevertheless emerges within them. Examples from the exhibition were the sounds of breathing and pumping blood greeting visitors at its beginning, a sound of our material substrate that exists beyond­– ­but nevertheless impinges upon­– c­onsciousness (Bamford 2012: 81). Such affect-phrases are ‘im-materials’ inasmuch as they are ‘signs’ for a materiality that we cannot represent but nevertheless engulfs us, and that in fact constitute the future of new technology. Clearly, im-material networks produce new generic stabilities and meanings, but the exhibition detaches these from any anthropocentric understandings, making human experience and thought a nodal point, or passage for im-material processes that clearly exceed them. This cybernetic ‘skin’ is no less libidinal for being detached from organic life, and once more Lyotard embraces the emergence of new technology as a materialisation of the sublime desire to go beyond our own humanity. In this way, Les Immatériaux used the proliferating possibilities of new technology to introduce an aleatory mode of composition that escaped conceptual determination, and in a wider sense resisted its ‘comprehension’ and ‘channelisation’ by capital. Indeed, Lyotard was an early advocate of the collaboration of artists and scientists, although with the proviso that they do so for aesthetic objectives: ‘Nothing is to prevent scientists coming to help the search, by artists, for other, “unheard of” emotions’ (1991: 174). In this sense, Les Immatériaux is perhaps the best rejoinder to the consistent complaints regarding Lyotard’s ‘nostalgia’ and ‘melancholy’ for the unrepresentable presence of the transcendental ground, inasmuch as cybernetic networks materialise this ‘immaterial’ ground within a very contemporary process of transformation. Nevertheless, Lyotard also wishes to make a distinction between an im-material transcendental that frees us from the human and opens up a realm of permanent experimentation (art), and the new technologies (Lyotard called them ‘telematics’) of im-material translation and communication that establish new and perhaps tighter forms of control through valuation and calculation (capitalism and techno-science). In this way, Robin Mackay argues, Lyotard wished to establish sublime art as a ­ ‘prophylactic

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against machinic contamination’ (2015: 238), inasmuch as it offers on the one hand a community of ‘chagrin’ (Lyotard 2015: 32) or ‘inquietude’ (Mackay 2015: 239) formed by the immaterialisation of the human, and on the other the indeterminability (and so freedom) of the im-material differend against the new automatism of technological performativity, and in this way brought the human back through the back door, as it were. This effectively detaches the ‘bad’ im-material of techno-scientific capitalism from the ‘good’ im-material of the experimental affect-phrase. Mackay is perfectly correct when he claims this will become the focus of Lyotard’s consequent work on sublime art, but he subsequently holds this development to account for the ‘institutional calcification of the dogmas of indeterminacy and sublimity’ (2015: 239) it produces, which has distanced, he claims, both art and philosophy from the real forces of political economy shaping our world. We will return to this accusation in our Postscript, but it is one worth bearing in mind. If nothing else, it demands that we demonstrate precisely what the political efficacy of sublime art might be. Les Immatériaux maintains Lyotard’s commitment to an aesthetic production that refuses to moralise on the rights and wrongs of its technological embodiment. While Lyotard is aware that technological innovations strengthen existing genres and even introduce new and more oppressive controls (most often under the auspices of capitalism), he also demonstrates how technology can be utilised to free phrasal production from the limits ‘human being’ might impose upon it. Les Immatériaux attempted to break down our ‘generic’ understanding and ‘human’ mastery of things, but to go further and to use the emerging im-material technologies to evade any position of mastery, and in this delay where we experience our own powerlessness (our ‘chagrin’ or ‘inquietude’), to encourage an event that embodies our absence and creates a new experience according to a cybernetic poetics. It is in this sense that Lyotard’s book on Duchamp and the exhibition Les Immatériaux clearly provide the context within which his more wellknown essays on sublime art must be understood. B A R N E T T N E W M A N A N D A B S T R AC T I O N In the light of his earlier work on Duchamp and new technology, Lyotard’s commitment to the radical heterogeneity of modern abstract painting, and his championing of Barnett Newman in particular, gain a pragmatic sense. While Lyotard affirms modernism’s claims of the autonomy of subjective aesthetic experience, he does so because of the political potential he sees in this. Lyotard argues that Newman’s paint-



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ings are exemplary in giving an experience of the ‘here and now’ that presents itself, qua outside, within the chronological time of a representational subjectivity, a sublime experience of a temporal differend that ‘dismantles’ consciousness (1991: 90).38 As Lyotard writes in relation to André Malraux, art ‘constitutes a hole in perceptual space-time and discursive reason’, and in this sense offers a ‘nihilist poetics’ (2001: 50) that is also a sublime politics.39 As he puts it, ‘the art of art asks how to determine the thought and willed means for making the mute experience of “‘I’ without a self” audible without violating its silence’ (2001: 46). Once more Lyotard understands the end point of Kantian critique as a sublime ‘thought’ that, as Newman’s work shows, is provoked by an experience of a material ‘here and now’ that negates consciousness. When thought ‘thinks’ this a priori condition of experience, or aisthesis, there is nothing to say or think, and this negative presentation produces new thought. For Lyotard this was always the nature of art’s (onto-)politics: Critique’s extraordinary force in the work of art, inasmuch as one is dealing with presences­– p ­ lastic or musical­– s­ prings from the fact that one is always in the order of the here-now: it is here and now that the critical reversal operates. To hang the meaning of the work of art upon its subsequent political effect is once again not to take it seriously, to take it for an instrument, useful for something else, to take it as a representation of something to come: this is to remain within the order of representation, within a theological or teleological perspective. This is to place the work of art, even when one is dealing with non or anti-representational works, within a (social, political) space of representation. This leaves politics as representation uncriticized. (1984a: 78)

For Lyotard the consciousness-shattering and representation-denying power of an autonomous and sublime art is a valid­– ­and perhaps the only­– ­‘political’ objective. Lyotard’s sublime offers a mechanism for a departure from the ‘human’ through a mode of experience that also resists capitalist intrumentalisation, re-empowering artistic practice as an important mode of contemporary political resistance. How does it do this? Let’s return to Newman and avant-garde painting. If they pose the question ‘What is painting?’ then this, Lyotard argues, directly implies the critical question as to what are the a priori conditions of painting itself? The a priori condition of painting is appearance­– ­the here and now of direct aesthetic experience­– ­and avant-garde painting, according to Lyotard, takes as its purpose the presentation of this ­condition and not its re-presentation. As Lyotard puts it: Painting thus becomes a philosophical activity: the rules of formation of pictorial images are not already stated and awaiting application. Rather,

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painting has as its rule to seek out these rules of formation of pictorial images, as philosophy has as its rule to seek out the rules of philosophical sentences. (1991: 121)

Thus the most important ‘rule of formation’ of the pictorial image is the unpresentable presentness of occurrence or appearance (i.e. aisthesis), and painting’s task is ‘to make visible the fact that the visual field hides and requires invisibilities’ (1991: 125). In Kant’s sense, therefore, this unpresentable a priori is an Idea for which there exists no empirical example and can only be experienced in its absence: the sublime. In modern painting the body rises up against intelligence, placing its passive ‘stupidity’ (with Duchamp, but now as an affirmation: ‘stupid as a painter!’) against the determinative calculations of consciousness. ‘Indeed,’ Lyotard claims, ‘the modern upsets the principle of this gap [between the event and its representation]. Its intent is to overcome the division of time’ (2001: 4). The body’s experience is instantaneous, and as a result it is always forgetting its ‘self’ because it lacks the continuous time of memory (1991: 37), or the self-reflection of apperception that institutes it. The ‘now’ of the pure act of presentation cannot be described, because it is always already ‘not yet’ or ‘no longer’ present. ‘Such’, Lyotard writes, ‘is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event’ (1991: 59). Drawing on Henri Bergson, Lyotard claims that mind is matter that remembers its interactions, its immanence in the world as itself. The conscious mind is therefore ‘all about me’, as all experience is represented (i.e. ‘understood’) as relative to its interests. The immediacy of the event, however, demonstrates ‘that duration is in excess of consciousness’ (Lyotard 1991: 79). The experience of pure presence, of the now of experience itself, is inaccessible to the mind, which therefore mourns its absence. This is the Romantic heritage of the sublime, one Lyotard tries to detach from Newman’s work. Rather than mourn its passing, or forever seek its invisible passage, Newman’s work tries ‘to be a visual event in itself’ (1991: 83).40 Lacking Sehnsucht the ‘it happens’ of this abstract empirical event represents nothing, and so materialises the differend between sensibility (the aistheton) and its comprehension in thought, between the presentation itself and what is presented. This sublime event of the ‘now’ characterises, Lyotard claims, not only Newman’s work but modern avant-garde painting in general (1991: 93), whose task, he says, is to provide ‘an index of the unpresentable’ (1984: 78).41 But what is this sublime event of the ‘now’? Commentators on Lyotard endlessly describe its radical exteriority but never its negative presentation (see, for example, Bamford 2012: 156), which is the modality of its appearance and its emergence as a political act. Standing



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up close and in front of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (1969/70) in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin my eyes slowly begin to throb. There is a feeling, a strong one, but it is almost entirely physiological and unconnected to any recognisable emotion or intellectual content. This is already an unusual way to look at art, inasmuch as we inevitably tend to ‘read’ art, to scan it for signifiers that point towards its meaning. Contemporary art typically rests on this meaning, with the objects displayed not being ‘understood’ until this ‘back-story’ is grasped. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, on the contrary, does not give us anything to ‘read’ in this sense, but demands that we simply open our eyes to it, that we stand there and look. This takes a little time, and one must wait in front of the work for its colours to take hold and have an affect. When this happens my vision begins to pulse as the differences between the colours take on a plastic property and project beyond their two-dimensionality. They then begin to exceed their actual colours, as a glowing halo emerges from their edges and where they meet, a throbbing vaguely fluorescent purple erupts from the now dissolving lines separating the colour blocks. This dissolution is not liquid, the colours do not run, rather they vibrate into each other and imbue the image with an intense energy generated out of its differential chromatic relationships. This intense energy is not confined to the ‘object’ of the canvas, it also encompasses my eyes, its distorting qualities making the very act of seeing opaque and visible. My eyes are no longer windows on the outside, but vivid and abstract hallucinations that exclude any exteriority to the object. The painting thereby loses its objective coherency through the process of being seen, it emerges, in other words, in a ‘vision’ of something it is not, in a ‘vision’ in which I am not, a vision that negatively presents the ‘now’ of ‘chromatic matter’ (1991: 85). To be clear, this is not a vision of the ‘now’ itself, only a presentation of its unpresentability clothed in its ‘plastic nudity’ (1991: 80), as Lyotard calls it. This material intensity presents, he claims, ‘time itself’ (1991: 78), or duration contracting into its moment, but is not it. Nevertheless, this is already ‘something else’, even if it is not pure presence, inasmuch as it is an experience that seems to dissolve both subject and object, constructing a new body through its experience. This is a nihilist body, as Lyotard puts it, ‘which removes itself from the world into the darkness of what it has lost, there to come alive’ (1992: 107). It is an unlivable body perhaps, as I am soon sent reeling back to lean on the wall of the gallery to regain my senses, lamely proving Lyotard’s point that ‘the mind never burns enough’ (1991: 185). What kind of experience is this? It is an uncomfortable one, certainly, at its lower scale similar to the disorienting distortion of wearing a pair

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of glasses that are too strong, and at its upper scale a throbbing, mindfucking trip. A pain, in Kant’s sense, a feeling of how the imagination is unable to grasp the intense infinity of this abstract, colour-event. Newman’s work is thereby emblematic of what Lyotard calls modern art, it ‘presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be made visible: this is what is at stake in modern painting’ (1984: 78). If there is a pleasure incumbent to it, it is not the redemptive pleasure Kant finds in the sublime, the reassuring pleasure that an infinite Idea can comprehend this experience. It is a much stranger pleasure indeed, that of experiencing a non-representable presence, and so of experiencing a transcendental level of being at the expense of every faculty by which I might, as a human, ‘know’ it. In other words, this is the sublime pleasure gained from the negation of my subjectivity, the negation of any subjective position from which a subject and an object could take place. It is, as it is in Kant, an entirely subjective experience, but in a ‘twist’ of ‘ironic affirmation’ this experience negates the subject, and destroys the very spatio-temporal a prioris by which any subject might experience their ‘self’. Matter ‘itself’, as pure intensity without form, Lyotard argues, is ‘nuance and timbre’, the ‘scarcely perceptible differences between sound or colours’, or what ‘makes the difference’ (1991: 140). To perceive this unpresentable and formless intensity gives rise to a ‘mindless state of mind’ (Lyotard 1991: 140), an unrequited openness to the ‘instant’ of presence. ‘Nuance’, Lyotard argues, is ‘non-formalised matter’ that escapes the synthesis of apprehension and reproduction, a formless matter that ‘is there only to the extent that, then and there, the subject is not there’ (1991: 157). The chromatic matter of colour or the timbre of sound, Lyotard writes, ‘has broken and deposed the mind (as one deposes a sovereign), made it vomit itself up towards the nothingness of being-there’ (1991: 188). This is an ‘apparition’ of formless and abstract matter, a sublime ‘event’ that is ‘bound to its disappearance’ (2004: 115). This appearance/disappearance of its negative presentation is a genetic differend: ‘It takes place in the world as its initial difference, as the beginning of its history. It does not belong to this world because it begets it, it falls from a prehistory, or from an a-history. The paradox is that of performance, or occurrence’ (1991: 82, see also 2004: 109). As Lyotard writes in his poetic text on the abstract painter Sam Francis, the artist should let the nuance appear in its singular perfection, [. . .] deliver the chromatic timbre from conventional space and time where the look, intelligence and custom imprison it, let it spread its own duration [. . .] these delicate poly-



Lyotard and the Sublime 93 chromies [. . . that] emanate from a blind void and are going to return to vanish in it. (1993a: n.p.)

This is Francis’ ‘lesson of darkness’, a life-long effort ‘to make the visible absent while substantiating its presence’ in order to ‘paint time, time without dimension, instantaneous and simultaneous’ (1993a: n.p.). Abstraction has a special relation to this genetic power of the formless, and so we must, Lyotard argues, ‘go back through the Analytic of the sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to get an idea of what is at stake in modernism’ (1991: 135). These are the political stakes of abstraction qua ‘modern metaphysics’: ‘that the future remains open as the ultimate aim of human history, under the name of emancipation’ (1991: 68). Art, Lyotard claims once more in relation to Francis, ‘ought to do nothing to you other than dislodge you. Make your gaze and your words abdicate. It is not painting, images. It is not for looking at and commenting on. It’s painting’ (1993a: n.p.). Finally then, painting grasps the future as the presence of the unknown: ‘It worries the whole of the visible by making it suffer the intrusion of unknown visual idioms. One paints in order to honour the fleeting angel’ (1993a: n.p.)­– ­an angel of history, perhaps, who does not fly into the future looking back at the wreckage it leaves behind, but resolutely looks forward at what is not yet and is always to come. What kind of politics might be drawn from this experience? Although it begins as a solitary experience, it leads to a perception of matter in which any subjectivity is absent. In this sense it is both an ecstatic and mystical experience,42 an ‘epiphany’, as Lyotard calls it (1991: 79), which operates through a ‘confusion’ of the senses and leads to a feeling of loss of self. This gives rise to a strange kind of ‘communication’ (and in Kantian terms, community) but one stubbornly oxymoronic: ‘The artwork places absolute solitude in communion with each other and with the stridulation of the cosmos’ (2001: 102). This ‘community’ is not ‘fusional’ but rather ‘dynamical’ in Kant’s sense, a community of singularities necessarily united by their absolute heterogeneity, a community formed by the communicative properties of art. Art, Lyotard will say, is the pure feeling or affect of an undetermined event that communicates itself and therefore repeats the singularity of its emergence (1999: 563). This ‘epiphany’ of the event is the negative presentation of what exceeds representation and consciousness, and as such it offers a ‘feeling-thought’ that escapes any human economy. As Lyotard puts it: ‘There is almost nothing to “consume”, or if there is, I do not know what it is. One cannot consume an occurrence, but merely its meaning’

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(1991: 80). The event in this sense cannot be commodified, and its process of ‘abstraction’ therefore opposes that of capitalist valuation. This should not, however, be taken as a naive affirmation of a mystical experience, because we do not experience anything but ‘what is’, the more or less mundane objects found in museums and other markets of the culture industry. As with Duchamp, the event is an ironic ‘affirmative negation’, an ecstatic pleasure (jouissance) that emerges from the capitalist processes it both embodies and negates, both enjoys and escapes. The community built upon this ‘now’, upon this foundational exteriority of the event, inscribes it within an undeterminable process of emergence. While the event occurs in the world, and ‘once it is there, takes its place in the network of what has happened’ (1991: 82), it does so as both a historical moment and as a ‘here and now’ whose untimely freedom can once more provoke a new event.43 In this way, ‘The world never stops beginning’ (Lyotard 1991: 82). Genesis is ongoing and essential, it is the ground that cannot be grasped by understanding or by capitalism, but it insists within the everyday as its condition, as the ‘indeterminate’. This is what Newman’s paintings give us: the pain of our void, the collapse of our conditions of possible experience into the abyss of presence, but within this pain arises a pleasure, ‘the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take “place” and will announce that everything is not over’ (Lyotard 1991: 84). Painting announces being in the imperative, it announces new beginnings beyond our current conditions of possibility. As Lyotard puts it, the event ‘cuts open a wound in sensibility. [. . .] This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you. Such initiation initiates nothing. It just begins’ (1992: 106). Perhaps the best statement concerning the political efficacy of sublime art comes from Barnett Newman himself, who once said: Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism [through . . .] its assertion of freedom . . . its repudiation of all dogmatic life. (Quoted in Jones 1996: 22)

Caroline Jones quotes this remark to illustrate how post-war American abstraction privileged a liberal, male individualism that depoliticised art by withdrawing into the studio, and argues that this movement was ‘corrected’ by the conceptual turn to a critical post-studio practice that directly engaged the world. Jones and many others like her flatly refuse the political claims of modernists such as Newman, or Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno, who argued that



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abstract art offered a sublime negation of subjective and institutional forms of power through the non-rational affects they produced. This is no surprise given that Jones insists that the sublime is ‘always located in the individual’ (1996: 41), when in fact it is more accurate to say, as Lyotard does, that the sublime is more to do with the singular and with difference.44 Laurence Alloway is in this sense much closer to the truth when he writes that the American sublime sought to offer a moral model (i.e. the creative act) for human action that would ‘return art to a central role in society’ (1963: 37). Unlike Jones then, Lyotard sees postmodernism (as an artistic style) as a period of ‘slackening’ because its ‘critical’ stance accepts our capitalist conditions of possibility, our capitalist rationality or ‘taste’, and so is politically complicit. In this sense, Lyotard argues, contemporary art is an inherently anti-political ‘call to order’ by which ‘artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it’. This, Lyotard states, is a call ‘to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes’ (1984: 73). Lyotard’s statement is an early recognition of and resistance to the emergence of a postmodern eclecticism that rejected the model of the avant-garde and the political ambitions of its atemporal aesthetic event. In opposition to this Lyotard will make the avant-garde his political model, one that privileges the repeated demand of starting-again, but always begins from the point the previous attempt reached (Lyotard 1988: 32). As a result, beginning is ongoing, eternally repeated, its progressive events forming a ‘guiding thread’ (2009: 25) out of these ‘signs of history’ (2009: 26), signs of the Idea of freedom and of humanity striving for it (2009: 27). Political action in this sense involves a kind of ‘public thought’, the taking of a position that is ‘disinterested’ in a Kantian sense, and so able to embody the Idea of freedom and our hopes for a better life (2009: 28). The imagination cannot present an object that would ‘realize’ this Idea, all it can do is give a sign of its impossible presence. This, Lyotard suggests, is the political dimension of the avant-garde’s aesthetics of the sublime and as such involves ‘a kind of progress in human history’ implied by a ‘responsibility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively “presented” in the formlessness of such and such a situation’ and acting as a guide to ‘progress towards the better’ (1988: 41). But this should not be understood as art determining an actual community or a form of political ‘engagement’, which would immediately betray its aesthetic disinterest to the finalities of determinate judgments or personal interests. As Lyotard very clearly puts it: ‘We must not continue according to an old political tradition, to subordinate art directly to a

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political function’ (1984a: 77). Instead, the avant-garde inspires a kind of aesthetic-political ‘enthusiasm’, an ‘aesthetic analogue’ (2009: 34) of the Idea of freedom, which it can never actualise but can continue to evoke by materialising its unpresentability. In Soundproof Room Lyotard repeats the connection of a political avant-garde and an artistic one. Writing in relation to Malraux’s ­experiences in Indochina he claims: He doesn’t pay much attention to the success of a rebellion: even victorious, it must succumb to the monotonous redundancy of powers, intrigues, abjection. But resistance, in itself, is a metamorphosis­– ­as if a quasi-poetic fact were affirmed in nothingness, from nothingness, with the indubitable certainty that this nothingness constituted by the humiliated multitudes, that this exists. [. . .] the sole companion of the separated ones, the down-andout, the offended ones is the inhuman. (2001: 58)

Certainly we are a long way from the ‘Marxist’ revolution, no matter how qualified, Lyotard advocated back in the 1970s. Later, Lyotard only allows for resistance, a resistance whose only destiny is redundancy, and whose only hope is to be repeated. As a result, the avantgarde produces techniques of resistance that are inevitably ‘rejected into the all-too-well-heard’. But this is precisely their promise, that each ‘in their turn, [is] exceeded in favor of a more acute hearing by a poetic gesture without precedent’ (2001: 98). T H E H O R R I B L E B E A U T Y O F C A P I TA L I S M Lyotard pits the sublime avant-garde against two connected and contemporary phenomena, the performativity and imperative for profit of capitalism, and the postmodern eclecticism of the ‘transavantgarde’.45 In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard argues that after the Industrial Revolution science has been more interested in technology than nature for the simple reason that it generates more profit. This established performativity, or perhaps better ‘efficiency’ (and so profit), as the criterion legitimating science, and the ‘precise moment that science becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital’ (1984: 45). This, Lyotard argues, means that the function of science today is not to discover truth but ‘to augment power’ (1984: 46). This leads to a self-perpetuating system in which efficiency legitimates science and science legitimates efficiency, and together they provide the a priori criteria of our experience of reality (1984: 47). One of the most important results of this, Lyotard believes, is that the demand for constant innovation in the production and consumption of information and commodities replaces the ‘now’ of the sensible with the infallible



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logic of the ‘new’, and obscures the sublime event in the ‘transparent’ and ‘natural’ experience of capitalist realism (1991: 107; see also 1998: 219). The transavantgarde mixture of styles, on the other hand, ‘squanders’ the tradition of the avant-garde and encourages, Lyotard argues, the ‘eclecticism of consumption’. This homogenisation of experience in the general equivalency of the commodity lacks taste, Lyotard quips, because it expresses ‘the spirit of the supermarket shopper’ (1991: 127). Both performativity and eclecticism, then, revalue aesthetic experience by legitimating it according to the ‘rules’ of the market. This is only a small part of a larger story in which aesthetic artistic techniques are replaced by new technologies, probably the most significant for contemporary artistic practices being the emergence of photography. Lyotard echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis that painting turned to abstraction because photography took over the task of ‘realistic’ representation. After its emergence, photography quickly became a ‘popular’ art, and its technology became integral to the production of standardised visual commodities. As a result, photography’s ‘democratisation’ of image production was not a liberation of the creative potential of the masses but the capture and monetisation of this potential within a new technological ‘format’ of representation. The photographing proletariat clearly lacks, in Lyotard’s opinion, a Duchampian instantiation of its mechanised reason capable of exploiting the incommensurable power of sensation: ‘With the photo’, he argues, ‘the industrial ready-made wins out’ (1991: 121).46 This is at least partly because photographic ‘reason’ not only remains cognitively determined, but completely over-determines sensible experience. ‘Photography’, Lyotard writes, ‘has almost nothing to do with experience. It owes almost everything to the experimentation of industrial research laboratories’ (1991: 122). In this sense, then, photography is a clear example of the way techno-science delivers aesthetic experience to capital, which then legitimates it according to the (conceptual) ­imperatives of efficiency and innovation. Photography and the eclectic tastes of the transavantgarde therefore have more to do with consumerism than aesthetics, making them ‘realist’ in the sense that they uphold the wider ‘communication codes’ of society, the mass media and associated information technologies. These ‘codes’ emerge from a contemporary faculty of the understanding comprised of techno-science and capitalism, whose relation to the imagination produces a ‘postmodern’ art that conforms to a consensual and commodified ‘beauty’ (Lyotard 1984: 74). Here beauty becomes nothing less than the imperative of capital: ‘You must think in a communicable way. Make culture’ (Lyotard 1991: 199). As our consensual

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and commodified condition of experience, beauty is no longer ‘free’ to invent ‘a community of taste to come’, but rather attests to the aura-less and axiomatic beauty of science, ‘the beauty of Voyager II’ (Lyotard 1991: 122). ‘Industrial beauty’, Lyotard writes, ‘which is never too beautiful, opens its arms to us and benumbs us in the dream that we are what we see’ (1998: 228). As Lyotard admits, this is a ‘profoundly modified’ version of Kant’s conception of beauty, but one that is nevertheless determined by ‘a priori laws’, a ‘meticulous programming, through optical, chemical and photo-electronic means’ (1991: 122).47 This would be beauty produced by the determinative judgment of its ‘format’, a ‘beauty of understanding’ that ‘appeals to a taste: a sort of common sense’ uniting a capitalist sensibility with a scientific ­rationality in the disinterested pleasure of consumption (1991: 122). This cooperation of techno-science and capital in the legitimation of knowledge generally, and in the development of photography more specifically, introduces the idea of a cybernetic subjectivity with an accelerating ability to decode and ‘understand’ images. As Lyotard puts it, this technology’s aim is to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives from others­– ­since such structures of images and sequences constitute a communication code among them all. (1984: 74)

It is precisely these rules and codes of ‘realism’ that operate as an aesthetic means of control that instrumentalises art through its demands for communicability and hence ‘beauty’. It is precisely in the face of such ‘beauty’ that Lyotard demands an artistic avant-garde able to ‘reexamine the rules of art’, refusing to peddle ‘realism’ in a ‘career in mass conformism’ (1984: 75). The avant-garde, Lyotard explains, ‘searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’ (1984: 81). The sublime experiences produced by the modernist avant-garde directly resist capitalised beauty, they refuse to conform to a commodified ‘pleasure’ and instead evoke ‘the anguish’, Lyotard says, ‘of maintaining reality in a state of suspicion through direct practices’ (1984a: 79). Such a suspicious anguish is the strange and asubjective ‘pleasure’ of experiencing our freedom, or as he will later put it: ‘What anguish yet what farce to discover that at the bottom of it all is nothing!’ (2001: 60). Postmodern beauty determines the parameters of a shared pleasure establishing aesthetic consensus, parameters modern abstract painting negates in an aesthetic dissensus, or affect of the differend. Modern abstract painting is therefore political in ‘presenting that there is



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something that is not presentable according to the legitimate construction’, and in doing so it ‘reveals that the field of vision simultaneously conceals and needs the invisible’ (1991: 125). ‘The artwork’, Lyotard writes, ‘breaks with convention, with the commonplace, with the flow’ (2001: 50), and has the directly political task of negating the consensual aesthetics of the beautiful (1984: 77). In this sense Lyotard draws on Adorno’s account of Schönberg’s twelve tones, which ‘finds all its happiness, all its beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful’ (1974: 127).48 The irreducible gap between the avant-garde and the capitalist aesthetics of the beautiful release formless ‘monsters’ of ‘purely negative non-entities’ that, Lyotard says, ‘make presentation suffer’ (1991: 125). As a reflexive judgment the sublime takes us from the particular to the universal, from particular ‘non-entities’ to a universal nothing, the radical absence (which is simultaneously a radical presence) of an unpresentable matter. In this way sublime art is a politics of radical negation, a negation of the universals that govern the present ‘reality’ of capitalist consensus, whether these are social ‘communication codes’ or the capitalist a prioris of functionality and profit. But the pain of this excessive sublime sensation is not accompanied by a revolutionary fervour or conviction, according to Lyotard, whose sublime ‘politics’ seems in no way triumphalist nor ecstatic. Quite the opposite in fact: The despair of never being able to present something within reality on the scale of the Idea then overrides the joy of being nonetheless called upon to do so. We are more depressed by the abyss that separates heterogeneous genres of discourse [i.e. sensibility and reason] than excited by the indication of a possible passage from one to the other. (1988: 179)

There is, in other words, no redemption.49 No redemption because the visual event of the painting is both absence and presence, a differend to which the avant-garde constantly bears witness: ‘The message is the presentation, but it presents nothing; it is, presence’ (Lyotard 1991: 81). A sublime poetics/politics does not mean destroying or abandoning new technologies, but releasing the undetermined freedom of a pure material event immanent in these processes. As Lyotard puts it: ‘I think that the question at stake in art today [1986] is whether a programmed synthesis allows the artist to invent new forms which were not possible with the immediate contact with so-called nature’ (1988a: 43). This possibility is something Lyotard insists on in the strongest possible terms, claiming that while ‘it is absurd, impracticable and reactionary’ to turn aside from the ‘post-industrial techno-scientific principle’ that ‘the infinite is in play in the very dialectic of research, [. . .] what has to be done is to slip into it the evocation of the absolute’ (1991:

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128). Avant-garde art must, in these terms, embrace the principle of an infinite process of transformation, but attempt to turn it towards the unpresentable, attempt, in other words, to reveal in the midst of capitalist circulation what goes beyond it. Lyotard gives the example of modern music that utilises new technology to give a very refined calculation of musical material. While this breaks sound material into measurable parts, it also increases both the possibilities of manipulating this material and of isolating it from a surrounding context that would condition its meaning. As a result, while new technology certainly aids the rationalisation and commodification of musical production, it also opens up new possibilities for what Lyotard calls the ‘liberation’ of sound in an ‘ecstatic reciprocity’ between sound and technological techniques (1991: 167). This does seem a response (given in June 1986), no matter how marginal or qualified, to the question Lyotard had already posed (in October 1985): ‘The question I want to dramatize is this: what about communication without concept at a time when, precisely, the “products” of technologies applied to art cannot occur without the massive and hegemonic intervention of the concept?’ (1991: 109). This remains our question today, perhaps even in a more urgent form, as artistic practices seem increasingly committed to a conceptual mode of production supported by the technologies of capitalist life. In fact the marginal nature of Lyotard’s positive example of Edgard Varese’s music indicates an important point: that political ‘success’ in this regard cannot be prejudged according to criteria of effectiveness, or indeed any other ‘ends’. Art is a ‘means’ without ‘end’, a means of negating ends as such, and capitalist ones in particular, and it is on this ability that art’s political efficacy should be judged. This, for Lyotard, is precisely what art offers, an undetermined (i.e. non-calculable) feeling defining an ‘aesthetic community’ that is ‘anterior to all communications and pragmatics’ (1991: 110). This ‘anterior’ is, however, an ‘internal outside’, or ‘immanent sublime’ (1991: 128) as Lyotard calls it, inasmuch as it cannot be represented, but it is nevertheless what is assumed­– ­‘the fact that something is there now’ (1991: 111)­– f­ or representation to be possible. This is the undetermined noumenal existence that representation inevitably mediates, but that can nevertheless be experienced­– p ­ resented­– i­n sublime art. This is a necessarily formless art, an abstract art, inasmuch as form is the inevitable product of a process of representation. As Lyotard puts it: ‘We find sublime those spectacles which exceed any real presentation of a form, in other words, where what is signified is the superiority of our power of freedom vis-à-vis the one manifested in the spectacle itself’ (1991: 113).



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N OT E S   1. The quotation in the title is from Lyotard (1991: 90).   2. This, Lyotard will claim, constitutes ‘the ontological stakes of criticism’ on the one hand, ‘the convulsion in which “before” and “after” lose their co-presence in the discourse’, and on the other the fact that this ‘signal’ ‘discourages’ the transcendental illusion that the Idea could be realized in discourse, because its radical alterity is necessary for it to have creative force (1989c: 325–6).   3. Stiegler has gone in the opposite direction, developing an elaborate philosophy of technology in order, he says, to ‘invent a new libidinal economy’ (2015: 156).   4. Lyotard’s oft quoted description of Libidinal Economy as ‘my evil book, the book of evilness that everyone writing and thinking is tempted to do’ (1988a: 13), is nevertheless ameliorated by his (barely quoted) comments that his aim ‘of inscribing the passage of intensities directly in the prose itself without any mediation at all’ was successful to the extent that ‘the book did perform the ruin of the hegemony of conceptual reception’ (1988a: 13). No small achievement! Finally, he says, the book ‘could be considered an honorable sinful offering’ (1988a: 14).   5. In a 1984 interview, Lyotard claims ‘that it is legitimate to establish congruences between’ Discourse, Figure and The Differend (1984b: 17).   6. James Williams seems to register this possibility when he suggests that the way artists exploit matter creatively to testify to the limits of Ideas in the sublime is similar to the body’s active passivity to intensity explored in the libidinal philosophy (2000: 132).   7. More recently Ashley Woodward has argued that in all his phases Lyotard insists on the ‘abyss’ between meaning and existence, and the importance of inhuman existence resisting the nihilism of human meaning (2016: 108–9).   8. Simon Choat gives a good, although critical, account of this trajectory (2010: chapter 2).   9. Julien Pefanis gives a useful account of this period (1991: 87–9). 10. Indicating, perhaps, Lyotard’s extreme discomfort with the personal consequences of his own ‘drift’ from Marxism, his account adopts the third person: ‘A sort of uneasiness or inhibition came over him at the same time as the reasons to argue began to escape him, and he began to lose the use of the dialectic’ (1988a: 53). 11. Pefanis plausibly suggests that Lyotard’s drift away from the militant Marxism of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group was also due to their not taking art and literature seriously as forms of political action (1991: 88). 12. In the language of Libidinal Economy Marxist critique was a discursive ‘disintensification’ of libidinal intensities, and the only way to escape it was to avoid its negating, dialectical logic: ‘There is no need to criticize Marx, and even if we do criticize him, it must be understood that it is in

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no way a critique. [. . .] We will rather treat him as a “work of art” ’ (1993: 94 and 95). 13. Not only does Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime read the first two Critiques through the sublime, but Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History also reads the collection of texts that constitute, according to Lyotard, the ‘Critique of Political Reason’ via the sublime (2009: 11). 14. James Kirwen is one such ‘objective’ objector who claims ‘Lyotard’s characterization of Kant’s theory is highly selective: it is Kant’s argument stripped to its most abstract terms to be made to apply in a quite unKantian domain of thought’ (2005: 144). This is, of course, to entirely miss­– o ­ r rather suppress­– w ­ hat Lyotard is trying to do in his reading of Kant. 15. As Clayton Crockett rightly puts it, Lyotard ‘constructs a model of reflective judgment which he then claims is a better model for knowing [although perhaps ‘thinking’ is better here] than objective judgment by means of the categories, or the pure concepts of the understanding, developed in the First Critique’ (2001: 3; see also 45). Reflective judgment is a better model for thought because of its proximity to sensibility. As Lyotard puts it: The privilege of aesthetic feeling [. . .] is that in it judgement is exercised in the regime that is the least subordinated to the understanding and to the end goal of knowledge. In it, reflexivity is, so to speak, pure and as close as possible to receptivity, that is to say, to presentation ‘before’ the mind wishes to seize hold of the object and constitute itself over against it as a legislative subjectivity. [. . .] Reception is a pure feeling before it becomes the schematic registration of data that can be processed with concepts. (Lyotard, quoted in Woodward 2016: 99) 16. As Kant puts it in the Critique of Pure Reason: Reflection (reflexio) does not concern itself with objects themselves with a view to deriving concepts from them directly, but is a state of mind in which we first set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which [alone] we are able to arrive at concepts. It is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to our different sources of knowledge; and only by way of such consciousness can the relation of the sources of knowledge to one another be rightly determined. (CPR A260/B316: 276/285) 17. As Crome and Williams point out, Lyotard’s ‘most significant divergence from Kant lies in the revaluation of the sublime over the beautiful and over taste’ (2006: 289). 18. ‘No event’, Lyotard writes, ‘is at all accessible if the self does not renounce the glamour of its culture, its wealth, health, knowledge, and memory’ (1988: 18). 19. ‘This is’, Lyotard writes, ‘the great political question’ (1993: 18), not how to escape representation, or as he calls it in Libidinal Economy ‘inscrip-



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tion’, in order to return to the undetermined freedom of political Ideas and act as ‘the Just, the Blessed, Sages, Equals, Brothers, Comrades, no’ (1993: 18). Rather one must affirm these Ideas in their negative inscription, ‘to love inscription not because it communicates and contains, but through what its production necessitates, not because it channels, but because it drifts’ (1993: 18). The sublime is precisely the relation of incompossible terms, and the Idea is the ‘nuclear night’ (Lyotard 1993: 19) of representation. The experience of this difference constitutes what Lyotard calls a ‘permanent revolution’ (1993: 19), not as a continuous commitment, but as an always already failed project that must always fail again. 20. Something Lyotard already seems to acknowledge in 1986 when he says (in relation to new technologies): The whole idea of an ‘initial’ reception, of what since Kant has been called an ‘aesthetic’, an empirical or transcendental mode whereby the mind is affected by a ‘matter’ which it does not fully control, which happens to it here and now­– ­this whole idea seems completely out of date. (1991: 50)

Nevertheless, he still insists that this ‘here and now’ has led to ‘a profound crisis of aesthetics and therefore of the contemporary arts’ (1991: 50). In this sense, although and as we shall see, the work of Jacques Monory seems to be representational it in fact embodies the primary processes that animate the capitalist image-economy and so is not strictly speaking representational. 21. Kiff Bamford provides an interesting account of the American context within which Lyotard’s two Artforum essays appeared, and in particular their relation to the journal October that had recently started up championing the largely photographic work of the so-called ‘neo-avantgarde’ (2012: 116–19). The misunderstanding of Lyotard as a champion of abstract painting comes from this, despite the fact that, as David Cunningham has pointed out, Lyotard’s Kant is ‘quite different’ from the one who informed ‘the immediate post-war aesthetic of Greenbergian formalism’ (2004: 550; see also 556). 22. Lyotard’s enthusiastic engagement with ‘contemporary’ art can be seen as early as 1973, when he writes: ‘The most modern currents, American abstractionists, Pop and hyperrealist artists in painting and sculpture, poor and concrete music (especially Cage), free choreographies (those of Cunningham), theatres of intensity (do they exist?) [. . .] are producing works which are affirmative’ (quoted in Wilson 1998: 31). In 1993 Lyotard will suggest that a ‘poetics of the present’ (2001: 60) is a contemporary poetics of the ‘ready-made’ (2001: 64). 23. Of course Lyotard’s essays resonate with these debates, as Diarmund Costello (2000) has shown, but they were not written as a response to them. 24. The term comes from Anton Ehrenzweig’s book The Hidden Order of Art.

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Lyotard wrote the preface to the French translation in 1974, and the book was clearly an influence on his libidinal period, in particular its rethinking of the simple opposition of Eros and Thanatos (i.e. the death drive) as a process of rhythmical de-differentiation that forms the ‘hidden order of art’ (Ehrenzweig 1995: 219). 25. As Lyotard puts it in ‘Sketch of an Economy of Hyperrealism’, written a year after his first essay on Monory, ‘hyperrealist representation does not represent a first thing but only the items themselves already represented, reproduction of products already produced’ (2012: 105). 26. As Lyotard describes Monory’s practice elsewhere, ‘the machine-body of the painter upsets the photo-optical machine by making it give more than it has received’ (2012: 113). 27. For this reason, as Lyotard elsewhere notes; ‘Assassination must be considered the art most admired by the unconscious’ (1989c: 347–8). 28. My thanks to Ashley Woodward for this point. 29. Both Duchamp’s collected writings Marchand du Sel and the first French monograph Sur Marcel Duchamp by Robert Lebel appeared in France in 1959, but despite this Duchamp was not well known there until the 1970s. Before this, he was considered part of the Dada and surrealist movements, and his American ‘conceptual’ reception was regarded with suspicion. Significant in this regard was the hostility towards Duchamp shown by the Narrative Figuration movement, of which Monory was an important figure. In their affirmation of realism and history painting the Narrative Figuration artists insisted on the importance of ‘content’ for any politically oriented art, and openly attacked Duchamp (most obviously in the painting Live and Let Die or the Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp by Eduardo Arroyo, Gilles Aillaud and Antonio Recalcati exhibited in the Narrative Figuration exhibition in 1965) for his perceived pro-Americanism. In this context Lyotard’s reading of Duchamp clearly focused on the political efficacy of his work. 30. Commentary is infinite precisely because the work is too, making them necessarily incommensurable. As Lyotard writes, ‘This permissiveness (we can interpret everything, we can interpret in every way) in fact and in principle ranks the interpretive work among the works of contemporary art. [. . .] The commentary enters into the field of the arts, and picks up its experimental imagination’ (2016: 1). ‘Commentary’ acts in this way as a ‘transformer’, inasmuch as ‘interpretation’ is a ‘transforming agent or operative’ placed between the work and its audience. As Lyotard puts it, ‘what do we do when we speak about a work? We do not assign a meaning to the work; we transform it’ (1979: 61). As a result, Lyotard claims somewhat sarcastically, interpretation is ‘not just for Art & Language’ (1979: 62). 31. Clearly a reference to Duchamp’s work Porte, 11 Rue Larrey (1927)­ – ­a single door that swung between two door-frames located in the corner of a room, and was thus both open and closed simultaneously­– w ­ hich in



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Lyotard’s words is ‘a double spatial hinge that completely conceals one of its flaps’ (1990: 147), producing series of ‘strong exclusive disjunctions’ that make each term ‘turn its back on the one before’ (1990: 159). 32. The upper part of The Large Glass, for example, operates according to a principle of ‘an uncontrolled variable in the heart of a group of defined constraints’ (Lyotard 1990: 146). As a result, the forms there obey a principle of projection, but ‘we cannot present to ourselves the laws of this projection’ (Lyotard 1990: 147). Consequently, the move from the various two-dimensional organs on the glass to the three-dimensional body they compose in projection is organised through a hinge that only allows us to see the disorganised bodies on one side, and the unpresentable body it nevertheless projects on the other. Even if we were to envisage the three-dimensional projection, this would in turn project an unknown fourdimensional figure of the ‘woman’. 33. In the same vein, Lyotard makes the unusual claim that Daniel Buren’s work is not institutional critique as this is normally understood, but aesthetic ‘dissidence’ inasmuch as it intervenes on the senses in order to invent a new ‘language game’ (1979: 65). As Lyotard makes clear, however, this is not a linguistic production, rather ‘artists today are engaged not in the deconstruction of significations but in extending the limits of sense perception: making visible (or audible) what now goes unobserved, through the alteration of sense data, perception itself’ (1979: 67). In The Inhuman he is even more specific on this point: I see no reason at all why this aim, this unique aim of painting, this material presence, should necessarily fail from the fact that the yellow of the wall [he is discussing Vermeer’s View of Delft] is hung up in a museum rather than elsewhere, if it is true that chromatic matter owes nothing to the place it can take (and which in a sense it never takes) in the intrication of sensory positions and intelligible meanings. (1991: 151)

Lyotard’s point seems to be that Buren’s ‘institutional critique’ is not aimed at the museum as such, but at wider representational conditions of possible experience that are also enacted by the museum. 34. In a sense then, the exhibition reflected Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report on the state of knowledge that emphasised and privileged developments in the realm of computers and information technologies (1984: 3–4). 35. This point­– a­ nd much else in my account­– h ­ as been influenced by Maria Aroni’s fascinating doctoral thesis The Aesthetics of Curating: Exhibition Making After the Conceptual Turn (Kingston University, 2016) which takes Les Immatériaux as one of its case studies. 36. Lyotard claims that new technologies give complete mastery over matter, inasmuch as they give the observer or worker the ability to immediately intervene in objects’ behaviour, but this mastery is ‘cybernetic’ rather than human (2015: 37).

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37. The show was divided into ‘zones’ organised around terms drawn from communication theory, and given names deriving from the Sanscrit root mât (to make by hand, to measure, to build); the ‘maternity’ of the message (maternité­– ­where does it come from?); its ‘materiality’ (matériaux­ – ­what is the support or medium?); its code or ‘matrix’ [matrice]; the content of the message (matière­ – ­what is it about?); and finally the material of reception [materiel] (Lyotard 1985: 9–10 and 2015: 29–30). 38. The sublime, Lyotard tells us, is ‘what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate, and even what consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself’ (1991: 90). In this sense, as he writes elsewhere, ‘The artwork rises precisely from the invalidation of the ego’ (2001: 36). 39. Nihilist poetics aspires, Lyotard claims, to have ‘the artwork be here­– ­present to “real” presence, as truly “poetic fact” [. . .]. This strict poetics of the fact extends well beyond literature and art into the realm of politics and History’ (2001: 50 and 58). 40. Romanticism and modernism are closely related for Lyotard, who acknowledges that with the sublime ‘aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art, and romanticism, in other words modernity, triumphed’ (1991: 92). Lyotard follows Baudelaire on this point: ‘To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art­– ­that is intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite’ (Baudelaire, quoted in Jones 1996: 9). Newman’s work, however, breaks with the ‘eloquence’ of Romanticism by seeking the sublime in the ‘here and now’. This ‘displacement’ of the infinite from a (romantic) ‘elsewhere’ to something that ‘happens’ to us directly is, Lyotard argues, ‘the whole difference between romanticism and the “modern” avant-garde’ (1991: 93). At this point, Lyotard says: ‘It’s still the sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described and yet it isn’t their sublime anymore’ (1991: 93). 41. Lyotard will place German expressionism, Malevich, de Chirico and Proust under the sign of ‘melancholia’, and that of Picasso and Braque, Lissitsky, Duchamp and James Joyce under that of ‘novatio’ (1984: 80). Later, he will also include Mondrian and Delauney among the ‘novatio’ group (1991: 127) as well as Cézanne, Matisse, certain minimalist, arte povera and Cobra group works, as well as Debussey, Boulez, Cage, Nono, Webern and Varese (1991: 141). 42. The ‘now’ of Newman’s paintings is, Lyotard says, ‘one of the temporal “ecstasies” ’ (1991: 90). Unsurprisingly then: ‘It is permissible’, Lyotard tells us, ‘to call this idea “mystical”, given that it does concern the mystery of being. But being is not meaning’ (1991: 87). In the non-time of chromatic matter, Lyotard writes, ‘all the colours vibrate at once, in a single phase to the eyes of the richest monad, the colour of the god’ (1991: 160). In a similarly mystical register he claims that in ‘all genuine music [. . .] the differentiation of the one and the multiple would not have place or time’ (1991: 163). In an interview, Lyotard calls the ‘poverty’ of a pencil mark on paper ‘almost mystical’ in being ‘simultaneously both everything and nothing’ (1985: 5).



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43. This ahistorical ontology of modern art similarly detaches it from its own art history: ‘The task of having to bear witness to the indeterminable carries away, one after another, the barriers set up by the writings of theorists and by the manifestos of the painters themselves’ (1991: 103). In this sense, Lyotard argues, art always has a value as an expression of its time, but there’s also a way in which it can always be perceived as lying outside of the time that produced it. There is always something that turns art into a tranhistorical truth, and that’s the part of art that I think of as ‘philosophical’. It’s within this part of art that it poses the question of what is at stake. (1985: 2) 44. The sublime in American painting is a well-worn subject that, while connected to the discussion here, is not central to it. Key moments can be found in Rosenberg (2005) and Alloway (1963). On this specific point T.  J. Clarke’s iconoclastic argument regarding abstract expressionism’s ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘petty bourgeois pathos’ it employs (1999: 401) is almost diametrically opposed to Lyotard’s in a political sense, but nevertheless hits the nail on the head when he describes Pollock and Kline’s ‘constant (fruitful) drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the nonhuman and the inorganic’ (1999: 385). Clarke’s amusing idea that abstract expressionism was the ‘vulgar’ style of a petty bourgeoisie that aspired to the aristocracy of total cultural power and was therefore more ‘honest’ than the turn to site-specificity in the 1960s (1999: 401) is certainly preferable to Jones’ formulaic recitations of political correctness. 45. The transavantgarde was an art movement championed by Achille Bonito Oliva in the late 1970s that reacted to the previous decade’s emphasis on conceptual and political practices with a return to painting, but one that now mixed together all manner of historical styles through quotation and irony. 46. Lyotard argues that science, technology and capitalism present themselves as infinite and ‘ready-made in established knowledge, in apparatuses and weapons currently in use, in invested capital and commodities and photographs’ (1991: 123). 47. Lyotard explicitly connects science and the understanding (2009: 21). In The Differend he writes: ‘Cognition through the understanding, that is, the descriptive phrase taken within the scientific genre, is assuredly always possible for those sequences of the series for which there can be intuitive presentations.’ Such sequences, he continues, are regular and repetitive, and ‘no becoming can be derived from them’ (1988: 161). As a result, the ‘cognitive phrase is the one used to refute the right of insurrection’ (1988: 162). In ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ Lyotard discusses a ‘political academicism’ in the arts that operates according to a priori criteria of the beautiful (primarily realism and discursive coherence), which imposes categories and produces determining judgments (1984: 76).

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48. Lyotard’s interest in Adorno is no surprise, inasmuch as Adorno sees the sublime as the aesthetic of modernism (1997: 196–7). Adorno writes: ‘The Kantian theory of the sublime describes an art which shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content, though without, as art, divesting itself of its semblance character’ (1997: 256–7). This is a typically tortuous description of negative presentation. As David Cunningham argues, Lyotard’s sublime ‘does indeed look very much like Adorno’s theorization of the temporal dynamic of avant-garde-ness as a productive logic of non-identity, where non-identity defines the way in which the “new” artwork exceeds any existing positive definition of determination by tradition’ (2004: 557). Lyotard also shares Adorno’s conviction that aesthetic modernism plays an important political function through its negation of the normalising conditions of the culture industry. As Lyotard puts it, ‘capitalism isolates [the avant-gardes], speculates on them and delivers them muzzled to the culture industry’ (1992: 85). Lyotard also shares Adorno’s suspicion of eclecticism as taking art into the realm of consumerism (Bamford 2012: 112), but as Ionescu (2014) points out, for Adorno aesthetic negation is always carried out by an autonomous ‘critical’ individual who resists dominant ideologies, while in Lyotard the very possibility of this individual is negated in the sublime experience. This does not, however, stop Lyotard referring to ‘the negative dialectic of the Is It Happening?’ (1991: 104). John Rajchman has argued that Lyotard thought that Adorno and Benjamin (through the influence of the messianism of Scholem) experienced capitalism too religiously, turning critique into a kind of mourning for what was to come (1998: 12). In an interview from 1985 in which Lyotard praises Adorno and locates Les Immatériaux in Adorno’s wake he also accuses Adorno’s thought of being ‘melancholy’, and still part of a romantic aesthetics that contemporary art must disengage itself from (1985: 6). In his ‘libidinal’ period, at least, Lyotard argues that ‘modern currents’ in art ‘pose a considerable challenge to critical thought and negative dialectics; they are producing works which are affirmative and not critical’ (Lyotard, quoted in Wilson 1998: 31). 49. A point also made by Woodward, who points out Lyotard’s ‘refusal of salvation’ (2015: 189).

3. ‘My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding’ – Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime1 To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 241) Philosophy, with all its method and its good will, is nothing compared with the secret pressures of the work of art. (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 163)

Deleuze’s reading of the sublime reveals both his closeness and distance from his colleague Lyotard. Both thinkers ground their ontology of sensation on the difference between the faculties of the supersensible and the sensible found in the sublime, both seek to reverse the domination of cognitive thought over aesthetic experience in the name of a sublime ‘intellectual-feeling’, and both privilege modernist art as a mechanism by which we can experience this. Lyotard, however, as we have seen, increasingly saw the sublime in terms of the fundamental dualism irrevocably separating the supersensible from its sensible event, and its ‘negative presentation’ in aesthetic experience. While negative presentation also plays a part in Deleuze’s account, this significantly differs from both Kant’s and Lyotard’s versions. In fact, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari criticise precisely this aspect of Lyotard’s Discours, Figure, and subsequently this difference will only become stronger. After some very positive comments praising Lyotard and his concept of the ‘figural’,2 ‘which carries us to the gates of schizophrenia as a process’, Deleuze and Guattari drop a heavy ‘but’. But, they write, Lyotard too often returns this process ‘toward shores he has so recently left behind’, back to the discursive structures and spaces in relation to which these processes can now only be secondary ‘transgressions’, a problem arising, they continue, because ‘Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire, maintains desire under the 109

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law of castration, at the risk of restoring the entire signifier along with the law’ (1983: 244). For Deleuze and Guattari castration is an oppressive ‘universal belief’ that brings everyone together under ‘one and the same illusion of consciousness’, separating it from the ‘inhuman’ and unconscious ‘great Other’, as Lacan calls it.3 Beginning from castration as an a priori of human consciousness therefore condemns desire to being a signifier for what can never be named or appear, what Lyotard later calls ‘the Thing’. According to Deleuze and Guattari then, Lyotard does not manage to escape this logic of lack, and despite the promising developments in Discours, Figure, he is finally condemned for making the subject enter desire through castration. This, they finally say, is a ‘perverse, human, all-too-human idea! An idea originating in bad conscience, and not in the unconscious’ (1983: 295). This passage from Anti-Oedipus encapsulates­– ­perhaps a little harshly­– ­the basic difference between Deleuze and Lyotard’s concepts of sublime difference. Lyotard, as we have seen, insists on an absolute and supersensible dimension that can only be experienced as an unpresentable presence in the visual event or aistheton. This results in an aesthetics of lack, or absence, and Lyotard’s ‘categorical’ or ‘ethical’ imperative to experience this absence as the condition of the ‘new’. While Deleuze also sees the sublime experience as the emergence of a sensation that is beyond human comprehension, he doesn’t understand it according to the irreducible dualism of the differend and its demand for justice, but as the inhuman emergence of an Idea as the immanent principle of sensibility itself, producing a very ‘modern’ merge of thought and aesthetics in an ‘intellectual feeling’ that remains crucial for contemporary art. DELEUZE AND KANT The sublime seems to constitute something of a blind spot in the by now considerable literature discussing Deleuze’s relationship to Kant. Deleuze’s reading is unusual in focusing on Kant’s ‘doctrine of the faculties’ (which is the subtitle of his book on Kant), and more exactly on: ‘one of the most original points of Kantianism, the idea of a difference in nature between our faculties’ (1984: 22).4 This difference subsequently requires and acquires various forms of harmony between the faculties, with the first two Critiques showing how one faculty legislates over the others in cases of speculative (the understanding) or practical (reason) interest. This legislated harmony requires, however, a case of free and undetermined accord to make them possible, which Kant finds in the Third Critique with aesthetic judgment, and eventually in the ‘discordant



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accord’ (Deleuze 1984: xii) of the faculties in the sublime. Deleuze argues that this discordant accord effectively redistributes the faculties, sidelining the representational operations of the understanding by locating the genesis of experience in the direct relationship of the passive synthesis of the imagination (what Kant calls ‘intuition’ (see Deleuze 1994: 86)) and the Ideas of reason.5 This, then, explains Deleuze’s rather old-fashioned claim in Difference and Repetition that ‘the doctrine of the faculties is an entirely necessary component of the system of philosophy’ (1994: 143). What in all this is almost never discussed, at least to my knowledge, is how Deleuze uses Kant’s account of the sublime as the model for his own post-Kantian image of thought.6 This chapter will outline this largely undiscussed ‘sublime’ aspect of Deleuze’s work and its primary insight that thought is a fundamentally aesthetic experience, and attempt to trace its consequences for contemporary artistic production. Kant’s Critique of Judgment is, Deleuze and Guattari tell us approvingly, ‘an unrestrained work of old age’, not least because in it ‘all the mind’s faculties overcome their limits, the very limits that Kant had so carefully laid down in the work of his prime’ (1994: 2). This ‘reversal’ of Kant, achieved, as we shall see, by Kant through the sublime, is perhaps the most extreme example of Deleuze’s philosophical ‘ventriloquism’, a method of tender violence that creates a ‘new’ Kant, or even, as Alberto Toscano has suggested, a ‘Kant-turned-against-Kant’ (2006: 197).7 As Deleuze himself puts it when talking about his relationship to Kant: ‘Good destruction requires love’ (2004: 139). As we shall see, Deleuze’s de-figuration of Kant simultaneously revives him as a Figure for the future, and is crucial to Deleuze’s entire philosophy, establishing its critical method and the scope of its transcendental ambitions. Deleuze’s reading of Kant begins from what he calls the ‘formidable difficulty’ of understanding the ‘mysterious’ harmony of the faculties in common sense (1984: 22). This harmony requires the presupposition of aesthetic common sense, but, Deleuze says, this is an ‘unsatisfactory solution’ (2004: 60) because ‘the Critique in general demands a principle of this accord, of the genesis of common sense’ (1984: 22–3). Kant depends on a theory of common sense inasmuch as he assumes representation and a representative model of thought to be common to everyone, and so underlies transcendental subjectivity as such. This, Deleuze says­– ­and it is not a compliment­– ­is ‘a pre-philosophical and natural Image of thought’ (1994: 131). Once the object has been represented through the empirical syntheses of the imagination and the schematism of the understanding the other faculties all recognise it, reflecting their subjective identity. Deleuze claims that the agreement of the faculties is ‘a constant of the Kantian Critique’ (2004: 57), even

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if it is not without its various negotiations and disputes. The understanding determines reason for a speculative purpose (according to a logical common sense), while reason legislates over the understanding for practical purposes (according to a moral common sense), each producing determinative judgments (‘This x (singular) is of the type X (universal)’). But this, Deleuze claims, should lead Kant into an ultimate problem. The faculties would never enter into an agreement that is fixed or determined by one of themselves if, to begin with, they were not in themselves and spontaneously capable of an indeterminate agreement, a free harmony, without any fixed proportion. [. . .] How could any faculty, which is legislative for a particular purpose, induce the other faculties to perform complementary, indispensable tasks, if all the faculties together were not, to begin with, capable of a free spontaneous agreement, without legislation, without purpose, without predominance? (2004: 58)

In this sense, the Third Critique ‘uncovers the ground presupposed by the other two Critiques: a free agreement of the faculties’ (2004: 58), and ‘in fact, it constitutes the original ground from which we derive the other two Critiques [. . .] free agreement, indeterminate and unconditional’ (2004: 69). The agreement of the faculties is free in aesthetic judgment because our feelings in these cases are undetermined by any empirical, speculative or practical interest, and concerns neither phenomena (legislated by the understanding) nor noumena (legislated by reason), but only legislates over itself (it is heautonomous). But, Deleuze claims: ‘This is where the real difficulty of the Critique of Judgment begins: what is the nature of this esthetic common sense?’ (2004: 60). We can neither affirm it logically (i.e. through the categories) nor postulate it (which would determine it practically), so it seems it can only be presumed. But, Deleuze continues, this is highly unsatisfactory if aesthetic common sense is to act as the ground of all other relations between the faculties and the judgments they produce. As a result, Kant must show how the free agreement of the faculties comes about, and in doing so go beyond revealing the conditions of experience to unveil their ‘transcendental Genesis’ (Deleuze 2004: 61). Deleuze claims the Analytic of the Beautiful stops short of this, and so requires the Analytic of the Sublime that follows. At this point things begin to get interesting, because although the judgment of the sublime reveals the higher harmony of the faculties of imagination and reason this is a deeply ‘paradoxical’ (Deleuze 2004: 61) harmony because it emerges from their ‘painful rending’ (Deleuze 2004: 62). This ‘rending’ of the faculties is a result of the imagination being unable to reflect the form of its ‘sublime’ experience, even though reason demands that we unite the



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infinity of the world into a whole. Reason, as ‘the faculty of the infinite’ (Deleuze 1978c: n.p.) therefore ‘forces the imagination to confront its limit’ (2004: 62). Nevertheless, it is in this ‘paradoxical’ and quite violent ‘agreement’ with reason that experience finds its transcendental genesis, it ‘discovers what the understanding had kept hidden, namely the suprasensible destination of imagination, which is also like a transcendental origin’ (Deleuze 2004: 62). In the sublime, Deleuze argues, imagination awakens reason as the faculty able to ‘conceive a supersensible substratum for the infinity of this sensible world’ (2004: 62); reason has Ideas of the infinite, and in this way the imagination is raised to its transcendental function. In fact, Deleuze argues that all forms of aesthetic judgment discover the ‘transcendental origin’ of the imagination in the Ideas of reason; in the agreement of nature and the  harmony of the faculties in the beautiful, which, Deleuze argues, ‘uses the model furnished by the sublime’ (2004: 64); in the symbol, which is only possible, Deleuze claims, because ‘first it was necessary to go through the genetic model of the Sublime’ (2004: 66); and in genius, which ‘is the subjective disposition by which nature provides art with rules’ (2004: 67), and in this sense is also ‘a presentation of Ideas’ (2004: 67). While the beautiful, the symbol and genius all operate through the harmony of the imagination and the understanding, which then finds its transcendental genesis in reason, the sublime experience that is its model is the result of the failure in the empirical syntheses of the imagination, and consequently of its ‘free’ harmony with the understanding (which plays no role in the sublime). Imagination’s transcendental function, as revealed by the aesthetic judgment of the sublime, is to go beyond any limits legislated by the other faculties and most significantly the impossibility of representing noumena. Although the imagination only transcends this in a negative fashion in the sublime, it nevertheless achieves in this an ‘abstraction’ that marks an ‘expansion of the soul’ (Kant, quoted in Deleuze 2004: 62). It is precisely this ‘abstractionexpansion’ that expresses the supersensible genesis of imagination, one it shares with reason and the understanding, and that guarantees the ‘suprasensible unity of all the faculties’, as Deleuze puts it (2004: 63). Once more, this is a strange kind of ‘unity’, where ‘the faculties which the sublime puts in play point to a genesis of their agreement within immediate discord’ (Deleuze 2004: 63). FOUR PHILOSOPHICAL REVERSALS True to Deleuze’s taste for ‘loving destruction’ the preface to the 1984 English translation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy outlines four

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philosophical ‘reversals’. Three Deleuze attributes to Kant­– ­his new understanding of the form of time, of the effect of time on the subject, and of the form of the moral Law­– ­while one­– ­the unregulated use of the faculties­– ­Deleuze finds in Kant but operating against Kant’s own system, a final ‘reversal’ that is in fact Deleuze’s ‘own’. These reversals all emerge from Kant’s ‘critical’ method, ‘a tremendous event in philosophy’, Deleuze claims (1978: n.p.), by which thought turns to examine its own operation in order to understand its conditions of possibility. As a result, critical philosophy is no longer concerned with what lies outside experience (whether object or essence), but only with the nature of this experience, seeking to discover its transcendental (but nevertheless immanent) conditions. The critical method is therefore the starting point and impetus to the other ‘reversals’, the first of which concerns time. In Kant, time no longer measures movement as it did in ancient philosophy, but now gives the form within which movement is determined (Deleuze 1984: vii). This is the emergence, Deleuze says, of a ‘modern consciousness of time’ (1978: n.p.), where time ‘is the form of everything that changes and moves, but it is an immutable form that does not change­– n ­ ot an eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal, the immutable form of change and movement’ (1997: 28; see also 1984: viii). Time, in this sense, is the first of thought’s transcendental conditions because from this moment on to think contains an absolute distinction between what appears in intuition ‘prior to all thought’ (Kant CPR B132: 153/136), and the form of its determination as thought, which is time.8 To be conscious of this form of time is what Kant calls ‘apperception’ or the ‘I think’, which Kant says goes further than Descartes’ formula ‘I think therefore I am’. Deleuze claims that ‘nothing is more instructive than the difference between the Kantian and the Cartesian Cogito’ (1994: 85), so let’s spend a little time unpacking it. Kant argued that although it is reasonable to say­– ­as Descartes did­– ­that the determination (‘I think’) implies something indeterminate that will be determined (‘I am’), it is not possible to conclude from this that ‘I am a thing that thinks’ because we don’t know the form under which indeterminate being is determinable by a determining thought. Kant fills in the missing link by showing that­– ­in Deleuze’s paraphrase­– ‘­the form under which the “I am” is determinable is obviously the form of time’ (1978a: n.p.). This will introduce what Deleuze calls the ‘paradox of inner sense’ (1978a: n.p.) in which ‘I think’ is an active determination of my existence, ‘but it can only determine my existence under the form of the determinable, which is to say under the form of a passive being in space and in time’ (1978a: n.p.). As a result, while conceptual determination



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may very well provide the conceptual conditions of possible experience, space and time, Deleuze claims, ‘will be the constitutive power of all possible experience’ (1978: n.p.).9 Transcendental apperception (the ‘I think’ qua form of time) therefore provides the real condition of both conceptual possibility and representational thought, and its discovery is for Deleuze Kant’s most important contribution to philosophy, even if it is for reasons that Kant himself does not fully develop. The dramatic consequence of all this is that ‘I is another’, a formula Deleuze draws from Rimbaud to describe Kant’s second ‘reversal’ and, he says, the ‘most difficult aspect’ of ‘the Kantian revolution’ (1984: viii)­– ­difficult, because in it the subject is irreducibly split, fractured, because the ‘I’ of the ‘passive synthesis’ (as Deleuze calls it) of intuition and the transcendental subjectivity of the ‘I think’ constituted by the ‘active synthesis’ of the understanding are, Deleuze says, ‘separated by the line of time which relates them to each other, but under the condition of a fundamental difference’ (1984: viii). The passive synthesis gives a sensation that forces me to think, it is an ‘imperative’ to think, Deleuze says, but ‘imperatives enter and leave only by that fracture in the I, which means that another always thinks in me, another who must also be thought’ (1994: 200). On this reading, time does not ground transcendental subjectivity nor the object constituted by the ‘common sense’ of the faculties, as Kant wishes, but instead immerses us in the irreducible paradox of inner sense where, as Deleuze puts it: ‘Our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end. A giddiness, an oscillation constitutes time’ (1984: ix). T H E T H R E E SY N T H E S E S O F T I M E In Difference and Repetition Deleuze elaborates this splitting of the self in terms of three syntheses of time.10 The first is ‘the original synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants’ (1994: 71), an entirely passive synthesis performed by the ‘imagination’ that constitutes and repeats sensible instants as (here Deleuze follows David Hume) ‘habit’ or ‘what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition’ (1994: 86).11 This is what Deleuze calls the first synthesis of time, a ‘contractile contemplation’, or habitual repetition of instants that constitutes the ‘lived, or living, present’ (1994: 70) of a ‘passive self’, a ‘self’ retaining enough of its preceding instants to form expectations that constitute ‘a living rule for the future’ (1994: 71). The passive self emerges from these ‘events’ of ‘contemplation’, these mysterious contacts of the sensible and sensibility, of experience and what gives rise to it.12 Deleuze locates

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the difference between Kant and Hume precisely at this level of the imagination. Hume assumes an irreducible (and therefore empiricist) dualism between the objects of nature and their experience, while Kant assumes their (rationalist) agreement on the basis of a ‘pure transcendental synthesis of imagination as conditioning the very possibility of all experience’ (CPR A101: 133/164). This transcendental synthesis establishes experience as representational, and the objects of experience (noumena, or ‘things-in-themselves’) as outside the conditions of possible experience or knowledge. Under this regime of representation, as Deleuze points out in his book on Hume: The given is not a thing in itself, but rather a set of phenomena, a set that can be presented as a nature only by means of an a priori synthesis. The latter renders possible a rule of representations within the empirical imagination only on the condition that it first constitutes a rule of phenomena within nature itself. Thus, for Kant, relations depend on the nature of things in the sense that, as phenomena, things presuppose a synthesis whose source is the same as the source of relations. (1991: 111)

Things, in other words, presuppose Kant’s ‘dogma’ (as Deleuze calls it) of representation, but Kant’s theory of the synthesis of time (i.e. ‘apperception’) on which it is based will also provide the conditions of its collapse and the emergence of the ‘real’ in its place. The repetition of instants as habit by the ‘spontaneous imagination’ (1994: 77) constitutes a present that passes (from past to future presents), but if this is the case, Deleuze argues, then there must be another time in which the present passes. This is the ‘more profound’ (1994: 80) passive synthesis of memory (the second synthesis of time according to Deleuze), which forms the past from the passive self’s awareness of itself as a series of former presents (i.e. as habit). At this moment the former present finds itself ‘represented’ in the present one, at the same time as the present is also represented or ‘reflected’ there (1994: 80). Memory is therefore the transcendental a priori synthesis of the pure past that makes it possible for the present to become the past, for time to emerge as such, and so for apperception to be possible. Through memory the reproduction of the past and the projection of the future becomes possible according to the active syntheses of contiguity, causality, resemblance or opposition found in the understanding (1994: 83). What is significant here is that Deleuze does not try to deny representation, but to show how it depends on the passive syntheses of the imagination (habit and memory), and so has an empirical rather than rationalist genesis. As a result, Deleuze will famously refer to his own philosophy as a ‘transcendental empiricism’.13 The question, as Deleuze puts it, is whether it might be possible to



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live the passive syntheses of memory, to live in other words the ‘being in itself of the past’ as we do the passive synthesis of habit constituting our organic bodies, without reducing it to a historical moment or a subjective experience and so subordinating it to the representation that in fact betrays it? The only way is by affirming the transcendental difference dividing the past ‘in-itself’ and the present of lived experience, which does not mean ‘resolving’ or ‘dissolving’ this difference but allowing it to resonate. This is the method of transcendental empiricism, a sublime method because it means following the imagination beyond its limits, beyond its determination by the active syntheses and towards the Ideas that dwell in the ‘in-itself’ of time and provide the conditions (Deleuze calls them ‘problems’) of its transcendental genesis. The present, Deleuze writes, only asks a ‘persistent question, which unfolds within representation like a field of problems with the rigorous imperative to search, to respond, to resolve’ (1994: 85). Deleuze arranges the faculties of passive and active synthesis in a Kantian way, inasmuch as ‘the active syntheses of memory and understanding are superimposed upon and supported by the passive synthesis of the imagination’ (1994: 71). Similarly, Kant’s concept of ‘transcendental apperception’­– ­the form of time allowing the determinable to be determined­– ­is the formal condition allowing the passive self to experience its own thought, and so is ‘that by virtue of which it can say I’ (1994: 86).14 In doing so, however, this ‘empty form of time’­ – t­he third synthesis of time in Deleuze’s account­– ­divides the passive syntheses of imagination constituting the pure presence of experience (the undetermined) from the active synthesis that represents them as the experience of a conscious subject (determination). As a result, the empty form of time (qua form of the determinable) both divides and connects the passive and active syntheses, or more exactly, it connects by dividing. The third synthesis of time is therefore a disjunctive synthesis that brings together the passive contractions of sensation (the event) and the pure past that contains them (memory) with the active syntheses of a conceptual self-consciousness (the act). But this synthesis only works, however, through the caesura it enforces between its terms, a paradoxical relation within which the active subject is at once constituted and dispersed. As Deleuze puts it, the third synthesis ‘refers to the absence of ground into which we are precipitated by the ground itself’ (1994: 114), achieving ‘the formless as the product of the most extreme formality’ (1994: 115). Deleuze describes this moment as the pyrrhic victory of Kant’s augmented Cogito, because at the moment it establishes time as the form uniting the faculties it simultaneously establishes their irreducible difference from the unknowable noumena.

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By ‘reversing’ this relationship and making the passive synthesis constitutive of reality (rather than representation condemning reality to be supersensible) Deleuze makes the disjunctive synthesis of the faculties in the ‘empty form of time’ the genesis of thought (as it is in Kant), but thought now creates reality (qua being) rather than simply representing it. So while Deleuze retains the faculties they no longer submit to the harmony of common sense, but instead find their transcendental genesis in an unregulated and violent disjunction. As a result, Deleuze tells us, passive and active synthesis possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself. (1994: 89–90)

In this sense the a priori condition for thought is precisely what cannot be thought, because the third synthesis of time guarantees the coherence of Kant’s rational subject only by establishing its a priori genesis within the unconscious pathology of the passive synthesis. This, as Deleuze points out, is a ‘reversal’ of Kant that emerges at a ‘precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant’ (1994: 58). This is the moment that grounds the cogito on its own abyss, ‘an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle’ (1994: 58) that, Deleuze says, provides ‘a cogito for a dissolved self’ (1994: 58). This ‘schizophrenia in principle’ is now the ‘highest power of thought’, a power that ‘opens Being directly onto difference’ (1994: 58). To experience this ‘dissolved self’ is to have a ‘real experience’ of the a priori and inclusive disjunction of being and thought, one that turns against Kant’s transcendental subject and its conditions of possible experience, ‘smashes it to pieces’ in fact, to emerge instead in the ‘already-overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image’, an image that ‘makes the sun explode’ (1994: 89). The exploding sun marks the end of the rational transcendental subject reified by Kant’s Copernican revolution and the joyful emergence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s overman in its place. Indeed, Deleuze offers an explicitly Nietzschean version of critique, turning the synthetic unity of apperception discovered by Kant into the ontogenetic difference of will to power (passive synthesis qua sensation), and its affirmation in the ‘concept’ of the eternal return (active synthesis qua thought) (1994: 41).15 By following this furtive moment in Kant then, Deleuze is able to show how an aleatory repetition of difference lies at the very heart of Kantian reason (1983: 52). The ‘third synthesis of time’ frees the future



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from any a priori determination (in particular the logical structure of cause and effect, i.e. chronological time), to announce ‘the repetition of the future as eternal return’ (Deleuze 1994: 90). In this way Nietzsche, Deleuze claims, took critique beyond the point where it was ‘exhausted in compromise’ (1983: 89), the point where Kant himself was ‘the perfect incarnation of false critique’ (2004: 139), to found ‘a radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts’ (1983: 52). As Deleuze will say in Difference and Repetition in relation to Nietzsche: ‘The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself’ (1994: 139). This is a revolution against the Copernican revolution, one that ‘does not allow the sun to return since it presupposes its explosion; it concerns only the nebulae, for which alone it moves and from which it becomes indiscernible’ (Deleuze 1994: 91).16 A truly critical Kant has emerged, one no longer committed to the presupposition of thought’s conditions (i.e. a representational image of thought), but to the nebulous and distributed ‘act of thinking in thought itself’ (1994: 139). What then, is this act of thought? S U B L I M E T H O U G H T A N D P R O B L E M AT I C I D E A S ‘Thought’, Deleuze tells us in a wonderfully Nietzschean formulation, ‘is primarily trespass and violence’, an event that forces us to think, an encounter with ‘the being of the sensible’ (1994: 139). This event forces sensibility into a ‘discordant play’ with the active faculties, a ‘joint labour’ (1994: 140) that only manages to confirm their difference. The being of the sensible can, logically enough, only be sensed, but as such and prior to it becoming an object­– ­or even a quality­– ­in active synthesis, it is ‘in a certain sense the imperceptible’ (1994: 140). The third form of time imposes this paradox, forcing the active or empirical faculties to their very limit as they try to grasp what can only, but also cannot, be sensed. Here, sensation emerges as a problem (1994: 140), a sublime problem in fact, because it can’t be represented by the active syntheses of consciousness, or grasped by any of the empirical faculties, and so pushes these faculties to their limit to the point that, Deleuze tells us: ‘Each faculty is unhinged’ (1994: 141). There is no more common sense, no more subject and object united in a representation, there is only a sensation that goes beyond its active synthesis but nevertheless demands to be thought. At this moment the passive synthesis of

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sensation presents a sublime ‘problem’, a ‘problematic Idea’ as Deleuze calls it, because it is an empirical contraction of the whole of time itself. This strangely disorienting ‘Idea’ dragged from the midst of Kant’s system explodes, Deleuze claims, the ‘vicious circle which makes the condition refer to the conditioned’ (1990: 105).17 This is an objection to Kant’s system that Deleuze inherits from the post-Kantian Salomon Maïmon, who argued that the a priori principles of representation were traced from the psychological structures of perception, and so failed to discover experience’s real and genetic conditions.18 If understanding and sensibility are two entirely separate sources of cognition, Maïmon asks, how is it that the latter only appears in the terms of the former (2010: 38)? Such an appearance tells us nothing about where sensation comes from, about the noumena, which remain necessarily roped off in Kant’s system. Maïmon’s solution­– ­one that Deleuze follows­– ­is to argue that the ‘formal intuitions’ of space and time give matter a sensation that has an intensive magnitude determined by differentials. Maïmon draws on Gottfried Leibniz to argue that space and time are not absolute and ideal forms of intuition, but rather two different forms of differentiation necessary for finite beings to sense an object as such. As a result, we can have real experience of the infinite, intensive and self-differentiating whole, but only from the limited perspective of the sensing being, which leaves most of this noumenal realm in obscurity and darkness. The differential magnitudes composing sensation cannot be grasped by representation or by conceptual thought, but form ‘Ideas of understanding’, as Maïmon will call them, or noumena that only subsequently appear as representations. For Maïmon­– ­and for Deleuze after him­– d ­ ifference qua sensation is real, and as such can pass through the barrier Kant places between phenomena and noumena, and can be followed back from objects to their real genetic differences through the use of differential equations. As Deleuze puts it: ‘Maïmon’s genius lies in showing how inadequate the point of view of conditioning is for a transcendental philosophy: both terms of the difference must equally be thought­– i­n other words, determinability must itself be conceived as pointing towards a principle of reciprocal determination’ (1994: 173). Maïmon locates conditioning within intensive sensations, and while Deleuze also sees sensation as both differential and conditioning, he identifies it with the ‘problematic’ Ideas of thought found in the faculty of reason. For Deleuze, as we have seen, active synthesis is consequent to passive synthesis, making reason­– ­or as Deleuze prefers ‘thought’­– ­a more convenient location of conditioning or transcendental genesis. The only way to discover the transcendental principles of genesis is to assume that the passive intuition of sensation both precedes and



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conditions active synthesis, because, as Deleuze puts it, ‘transcendental empiricism is the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical’ (1994: 144). Only transcendental empiricism, in other words, is capable of carrying a faculty to its limit by synthesising ‘free or untamed states of difference in itself’ (1994: 144). Showing generosity, Deleuze claims that Kant’s Third Critique anticipates these objections ‘at least in part’, inasmuch as it ‘uncovers the ultimate ground still lacking in the other two Critiques’ (2002: 61). The ground it discovers is the faculties’ ‘free agreement, indeterminate and unconditional’, meaning that ‘with the Critique of Judgment, we step into Genesis’ (Deleuze 2002: 68–9). At this point, each faculty would emerge for itself, unrestrained and free to go to its limit, while nevertheless in harmony with the others, a cooperation in which the necessity of each would be established. Here the passive synthesis (sensation) emerges in a free relation to a variety of faculties, allowing them to develop ‘strange combinations’ (1984: xii) within their ‘discordant accord, [as] the source of time’ (1984: xiii). This is the fourth reversal Deleuze ‘finds’ in Kant, once more quoting Rimbaud: ‘a disorder of all the senses, or rather an unregulated exercise of the faculties’ (1984: xi). Deleuze directly associates this ‘deregulation’ of the faculties with the sublime, which goes beyond the harmony of the faculties to the Idea of totality it expresses, but because this deregulation now applies to all faculties and the problematic Idea that conditions them, this discord becomes the condition of thought. ‘Discord of the faculties,’ Deleuze cries, ‘chain of force and fuse along which each confronts its limit, receiving from (or communicating to) the other only a violence which brings it face to face with its own element, as though with its disappearance or its perfection’ (1994: 141). The faculty’s ‘disappearance or its perfection’ is a succinct description of the sublime paradox constituting the transcendental genesis of each faculty, the problematic Idea or ‘differentiating element’ (1994: 142) that the faculty attempts to grasp but cannot. As Deleuze puts it, this Idea is ‘the violence of that which forces it [the faculty] to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise)’ (Deleuze 1994: 143). The unregulated faculties also multiply, with Deleuze adding to Kant’s four imagination (as it is more usually understood), language, vitality and sociability, along with others including those not yet discovered. Each faculty unfolds around its limit: silence for language, anarchy for sociability, etc., each being the problematic Idea responsible for a faculty’s transcendental genesis.

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This Idea is sensation, as we’ve seen, but it is a sensation without extension, without a body or a sign that represents it. It is an intensity, what Kant defined as a sensation grasped in its difference from absolute zero, and that Deleuze glosses as what ‘creates at once both the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility’ (1994: 144). This differential intensity is imperceptible for empirical sensibility, which must first schematise it into an object, but it is ‘perceived’ by passive synthesis (intuition) that apprehends it immediately in the encounter. As a result, and as Deleuze puts it: ‘The privilege of sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an encounter, what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are one and the same thing, whereas in other cases the two instances are distinct’ (1994: 144–5). While the active synthesis can only represent intensities in extension ‘Ideas’ are able to think them as a ‘problem’.19 This ‘thought’ inherent to ‘Ideas’ comes directly from Kant, for whom reason operates by taking up the phenomenon given by the understanding and attempts to move from this conditioned to its conditions, to discover the unconditioned principles that ground it. As Kant puts it: ‘The mind listens to the voice of reason within itself, which demands totality for all given magnitudes’ (CJ §26 254: 111/177). Thus reason operates according to the rules of judgment in seeking to schematise ‘Ideas’ of a ‘problematic’ totality as the unconditioned condition of empirical concepts. Kant recognises that this process of reason gives rise to the transcendental illusion (or antinomy) that the unconditioned can be given, and rather than questioning whether reason does in fact operate according to the rules of judgment (i.e. whether it is representational), decides instead to cast the unconditioned and genetic element of experience (the noumena) out of the realm of representation altogether.20 Deleuze, however, ‘reverses’ this set of relations and seeks the genesis of representation in the ‘problems’ that conceptual understanding represents and ‘resolves’, or perhaps better actualises. In this sense, the application of a concept in a judgment is guided by a ‘problem’ as the consistent intensive ‘structure’ that allows it to be incarnated in a ‘thing’. As such, the problematic Idea becomes the noumena, qua ‘ground’ of experience, but this ‘ground’ is neither undifferentiated (as the inaccessible noumena in Kant is), nor is it unchanging. It is in fact an intense, differential sensation acting as the genetic ‘event’ of experience, a flash of perspective upon the open whole (or being) from which it comes, and that it expresses in a unique individuation. In this sense there remains a distinction between phenomena and noumena for Deleuze, but this distinction is rethought as active and passive synthesis, as actual and virtual, or as experience and problematic Idea, and their



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transcendental difference is genetic to the extent it creates the event of sensation. As a result, Kant did not construct, Deleuze says, a ‘logic of the sensible’ but rather an aesthetic ‘in which the sensible is valid in itself and unfolds in a pathos beyond all logic, which will grasp time in its surging forth, in the very origin of its thread and its giddiness’ (1984: xiii). This, Deleuze exclaims (not without some satisfaction), is a shocking reversal, and quite ‘contrary to Kant’ (1994: 143), even if it is Kant who, in fact, had already achieved it. Deleuze reverses Kant by arguing that the noumenon is sensation, and not only is it genetic qua event but it is also determinable outside of the limits of representation using differential calculus. ‘Difference is not phenomenon, but the noumena closest to the phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1994: 280), it produces phenomena internally and immanently, or in other words it is genetic. The differential calculus will, Somers-Hall argues, ‘allow [Deleuze] to posit contra Kant, the possibility of determinations which, while strictly nothing in relation to representation, are yet not strictly nothing’ (2009: 145). These determinations are Ideas, or more precisely thought is the actualisation of Ideas as the individuation of being itself. As the problematic ‘thought’ of a totality that is outside subjective experience, but nevertheless acts as its genetic condition, an Idea is a question of sense rather than cognition, and of the body rather than consciousness. In this sense, the Ideas provide a systemic ‘unity’ to the faculties that does not resolve their irreducible differences but provide intense ‘structures’ that give coherence to experience.21 The Ideas are, in this sense, the thoughts of a dissolved cogito, they repeat the three aspects of the Cogito: the I am as an indeterminate existence, time as the form under which this existence is determinable, and the I think as a determination. [Ideas . . .] are undetermined with regard to their object, determinable with regard to objects of experience, and bear the ideal of an infinite determination with regard to concepts of the understanding. (1994: 169)

As we have seen, such a thought explodes the stellar centre of the transcendental subject, drowns it in variability, confronts thought with its real conditions qua problems, and demands solutions that are, as Deleuze puts it, ‘composed in a thousand different manners’ (1994: 169). Deleuze, with a cheeky grin, admits that ‘perhaps this does not appear sufficiently clearly in Kant’ (1994: 170). Nevertheless, it does appear in Kant, in the sublime. There, Deleuze argues, the Idea emerges from the wreckage of transcendental subjectivity, able to be ‘thought’ by an imagination finally unleashed from the understanding. Deleuze writes:

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In effect, the schematic imagination of the Critique of Pure Reason is still under the logical common sense; the reflective imagination of judgments of beauty is still under the aesthetic common sense. Yet with the sublime, according to Kant, the imagination is forced or constrained to confront its own limit, its phantasteon, its maximum which is equally the unimaginable, the unformed or the deformed in nature. (CJ §26) Moreover, it transmits this constraint to thought itself, which in turn is forced to think the suprasensible as foundation of both nature and the faculty of thought: thought and imagination here enter into an essential discordance, a reciprocal violence which conditions a new type of accord. (CJ §27) (1994: 321)

As a result, Deleuze continues: The harmony between the faculties can appear only in the form of a discordant harmony, since each communicates to the other only the violence which confronts it with its own difference and its divergence from the others. Kant was the first to provide the example of such a discordant harmony, the relation between imagination and thought which occurs in the case of the sublime. (1994: 146, italics added)22

In the sublime, then, Kant discovers a faculty unregulated by common sense and so ready to explore its transcendental exercise in the realm of Ideas. Deleuze argues that Ideas are virtual and ‘supra-historical’ ‘structures’ that are actualised through a ‘static genesis’, an ‘event’ that ‘may be understood as the correlate of passive synthesis’ (1994: 183). An Idea therefore emerges when certain structural and genetic criteria have been met that are specific to the domain of its arrival, but are neither determined by this domain, nor are they fixed, and are continually overcome as a faculty develops beyond its previous limits. As Deleuze puts it, the two elements of a virtual Idea and its actualisation are ‘echoing without resembling each other’, inasmuch as ‘the ideal series enjoys the double property of transcendence and immanence in relation to the real’ (1994: 189). The Idea is therefore actualised as the critical/­creative moment, the moment when thought discovers its real conditions in overcoming its limits­– ­its real conditions are difference (the differential Idea) that thought actualises in becoming. These are the moments of transformation, moments of revolution, moments of an utterly undetermined passive synthesis qua event that give rise to an act. This, Deleuze exclaims, is ‘a sublime occasion [. . .] which makes the solution explode like something abrupt, brutal and revolutionary. Having an Idea is this as well’ (1994: 190).



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N E G AT I V E P R E S E N TAT I O N A N D T H E ‘INTELLECTUAL-FEELING’ OF THE SUBLIME This then is the significance for Deleuze of the sublime. It is the moment in the Critique of Judgment that collapses the conceptual determination of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason and announces a new relationship between the imagination and reason found in aesthetic experience, an ‘intellectual feeling’ [Geistesgefühl] (CJ, Second Introduction 192: 32/103) of the ‘mental attunement’ of the imagination and reason in the sublime. In this sense, a sublime ‘intellectual-­feeling’ is consistent with Deleuze’s understanding of Nietzsche’s reading of critique: ‘The point of critique is not justification’, Deleuze writes in his book on Nietzsche, ‘but a different way of feeling: another sensibility’ (1983: 94). This ‘feeling’ or sensation is highly unusual, inasmuch as the sublime experience exceeds our ability to represent it, causing us pain, but at this moment we find within ourselves the power of reason and Ideas, which are able to think this excess, causing us pleasure. The sublime is therefore an experience of this ‘dissensus’ (Deleuze 1984: 51), an intense experience of the ‘reciprocal violence’ (Deleuze 1994: 321) constituting its intellectual-feeling, and the way we are able to­– ­somewhat masochistically­– ­find ‘harmony in pain’ (2002: 62). All of these formulations point towards the role of negative presentation in the sublime, towards the fact that the active syntheses of the schematism cannot represent the Ideas produced by the sublime, which can in fact only appear as the absence of what is essentially unpresentable. So far, so Kant. But Deleuze, as we have seen, insists on the ­materiality of Ideas, on their problematic existence as the intense genesis of passive synthesis, and so sensation itself. Sublime ‘intellectual-feelings’ do not, therefore, suffer from a lack of presence but from its excess, they are too present for the active synthesis of representation, which cannot grasp them within the framework of conscious, logical thought. The sublime is therefore needed to reveal this inadequacy, and to forge a connection (albeit a negative presentation) between intuition and infinity through an expressive ‘sign’ of the passive synthesis, of a genetic force that must­ – ­but cannot be­– ­sensed.23 As Deleuze puts it, there is ‘in this excessive presence, the identity of an already-there and an always-delayed’ (2003: 51, italics added), meaning that ‘resemblance then emerges as the brutal product of nonresembling means’ (2003: 115). Sensation is what we experience when our conditions of possible experience have been overcome, but even as this sensation comes to be it simultaneously evaporates, inasmuch as the Idea of infinity that it ‘thinks’ cannot appear in its intellectual-feeling. The sensation actualises the infinite Idea, and

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in doing so gives a presentation, an ‘analogical expression’ as Deleuze will call it in the book on Francis Bacon, of what cannot be presented. To this extent, then, it is not that, but because the sensation also goes beyond the conditions of possible experience found in active synthesis, it manifests its real conditions qua passive synthesis in and as experience: it experiences its real conditions in a real experience. The formless sensation of an infinity that utterly exceeds it is the paradoxical status of a sublime ‘intellectual-feeling’, it involves negative presentation, but it is not confined to it nor defined by it. Negative presentation is therefore the positive presentation of what cannot be represented, and as such it is negative only in relation to active synthesis. As the actualisation of what causes the actual to differ from itself, however (i.e. the problematic Idea), the sublime intellectual-feeling is entirely positive, and is the presence of a non-actual but genetic infinity. ‘Nonsense’, Deleuze says, ‘is not the absence of signification but, on the contrary, the excess of sense’ (2004b: 187). In this sense a sublime sensation ‘thinks’ difference in itself qua virtual infinity, not as an object, but as a ‘problem’ that drags the virtual into matter, where it is not ‘itself’ (and so is ‘negatively presented’) and so can only be present as ‘something else’. This is a transcendental and permanent ‘something else’ we might say, which can only be present as the ‘not yet’, as the future of the third synthesis of time, as the new. Thus intellectual-feeling articulates its ideal structure, explores it and extends it but never exhausts it­– a­ nd certainly never is it­– i­n a process of material creation.24 This process of material creation also animates art, or perhaps better it is art, whose works, Deleuze says, ‘are developed around or on the basis of a fracture that they never succeed in filling’ (1994: 195).25 In this sense, then, painting tries to make invisible forces visible, just as music tries to make non-sonorous forces audible, cinema ‘is directed to what does not let itself be thought in thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 168), and poetry tries to articulate ‘the secret word that has no sense’ (Deleuze 1994: 291), each art developing its unique problem (i.e. its transcendental condition) in sensations (intellectual-feelings) of its own defining difference. This is, Deleuze is happy to admit, a ‘modern ontology’ of the arts, one that seeks its own a priori conditions through a process of immanent ‘critique’. While on the surface it may seem that this process ends with the discovery of the a priori conditions that determine an art (colour and line for the visual arts, language for poetry, movement and time for cinema, etc.), these conditions in fact supply the material of experimentation specific to each art, which undergoes radical shifts and mutations as it actualises its structuring and genetic ‘problem’. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:



Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime 127 It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recodings and axiomatics: the pure process that fulfils itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfilment as it proceeds­– ­art as ‘experimentation’. (1983: 370–1)

Thus the modernist form par excellence is the series as it emerges from modernism’s constant process of experimentation. In this sense, Deleuze clearly ascribes to an avant-garde understanding of art, but with the important proviso that its ‘model’ is desubjectified, dehistoricised and even ‘universalised’ in a sense, as the model for life itself. As a result, ‘there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life’ (1994: 293), which is a succinct statement of Deleuze’s views on the politics of art. As Deleuze explains in terms of poetry: Repetition is the power of language, and far from being explicable in negative fashion by some default on the part of nominal concepts, it implies an always excessive Idea of poetry [Deleuze calls this ‘silence’]. The coexistent levels of a psychic totality may be considered to be actualised in differenciated series, according to the singularities which characterise them. These series are liable to resonate under the influence of a fragment or ‘dark precursor’ which stands for this totality in which all levels coexist. (1994: 291, italics added)26

Modernism in this sense is a process of critique that discovers its conditions only by going beyond its previous limits, only in other words by actualising its own problems, its own Ideas, which forever escape before it as the leading edge of a creative and open infinity. Unlike our usual understanding of modernism then, Deleuze does not see this process as purifying ‘art’ so that it might emerge anew and autonomous­– ­quite the opposite, for what is ‘modern’ in every art is precisely its ability of permanent creation. DELEUZE’S ‘STRUCTURALISM’ Before going further let us more critically consider this convoluted account of the sublime ‘negative presentation’ of a virtual and genetic ‘structure’ in Difference and Repetition and indeed of Deleuze’s work before meeting Guattari. After this seminal ‘event’ Deleuze offers the retrospective self-criticism that despite his liberation of critique from the common sense of representation the eternal return of the problematic Idea in ‘thought’ remained too conceptual, preventing transcendental genesis from ever being completely immanent with its material.27 As Eric Alliez has put it, before Guattari, ‘materialism remains an Idea

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[. . . and the] conceptual operations can’t be made as physical ones’ (2003: 19–20). For Alliez, the shift from Difference and Repetition to Anti-Oedipus is one from bio-philosophy to bio-politics, a shift finally answering Deleuze’s abiding question as to how material singularities might meet up with concepts. The problem in the earlier work is that the thought of ‘eternal return’ is effectively an active synthesis that ‘explains’ passive synthesis, rather than the other way around. Alberto Toscano locates the kernel of this problem in Deleuze’s insistence on the ideal and ahistorical nature of transcendental genesis, which means virtual Ideas can only be actualised through what Toscano calls the ‘sublime intervention of a Dionysian thinker’ (2006: 174). This intervention is required if the ‘sufficiency of the virtual’ (2006: 175) is given, and ‘ultimately betrays’, Toscano argues, Deleuze’s attempt to move from Kant’s conditions of possible experience to their conditions of realisation. Some commentators have suggested that Deleuze’s argument for a ‘reciprocal determination’ of the virtual and actual in passive synthesis is a valid response to this problem of his ‘Structuralism’. As James Williams has it: The condition is determined in different ways by each given and each given is justified as varying and resistant to identification by the condition. Here ‘determined’ means given its singularity as something that stands out from either an indeterminate multiplicity of variations (for the condition), or from a set series of identities, in the case of the given. (2005: 16)

While this does present the virtual and actual as reciprocally determining each other, it does not account for Deleuze’s insistence on ideal genesis, nor that actualisation cancels the virtual in this sense. Deleuze returns to this theme in Foucault, where he seems to restate the case for ideal genesis in the terms he uses there, differential virtual forces and the relations of knowledge that actualise them: It is true that the former would fade and remain embryonic or virtual without the operations that integrate them; this is what leads to mutual presupposition. But if there is primacy it is because the two heterogeneous forms of knowledge are constituted by integration and enter into an indirect relation, above and beyond their interstice or their ‘non-relation’, under conditions pertaining only to the forces. (1988: 81–2, italics added)

So despite reciprocal determination genetic priority remains on the side of the virtual, and in these terms it would seem that the ontological structure of ‘thought’ (as pertaining to the Ideas) in Difference and Repetition remains, as Toscano claims, ‘Idealist’ (2006: 177). But Toscano suggests a solution to this problem, which he finds in



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those parts of Difference and Repetition discussing spatio-temporal dynamisms. In such dynamisms the disjunction between the virtual and the actual, between the ideal and static genesis of Ideas (qua ‘structure’) and their actual solution becomes internal to the process of ontogenesis (Toscano 2006: 176). It is this approach that will be developed in Deleuze’s work with Guattari, where the material plane of consistency or composition contains its genetic relations of unformed elements and non-subjectified force along with that to which they give rise (see Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 267–8). While I am sympathetic to Alliez and Toscano’s reading in so far as it seeks the maximum quotient of immanence in Deleuze’s work, and does so in the name of an effective and radical bio-politics, the question remains as to whether the sublime as Deleuze understands it is in fact compatible with spatio-temporal dynamism? One answer to this question comes from Louis Schreel’s perceptive interpretation of Kant’s description (in the Third Critique) of how the synthesis of comprehension ‘cancels the condition of time’ in order to ‘make simultaneity intuitable’. In ‘comprehending in one instant what is apprehended successively’, the imagination thereby ‘does violence to the inner sense [of apprehension], and this violence must be the more significant the larger the quantum is that the imagination comprehends in one intuition’ (CJ §27 259: 116/182). This moment of ‘regression’ in the imagination clearly culminates in the sublime, Schreel argues, where the passive synthesis (intuition) escapes its determining conditions (the active syntheses of space, time and the categories) and senses matter directly as a ‘Vielheit in die Einheit’ or ‘multiplicity in a unity’ (CJ §27 258: 116/182) rather than within the ‘Mannigfaltigkeit’ or ‘manifold’ (as Kant usually refers to it) of empirical perception. Kant describes this multiplicity in the First Critique as an ‘intensive magnitude’­– ­‘the real of sensation’ inasmuch as ‘sensation is not an objective representation’­ – ­that is only sensible relative to its degree zero, rather than in relation to the a priori ‘anticipations’ of empirical perception (see CPR A166/ B208: 201–2/208–9).28 But significantly for us, as Schreel explains: ‘The state of mind that experiences sublimity is provoked by an intensive sensory impression that does not serve here as an anticipation of perception, but that “directs” it at the “supersensible” ’ (2016: 12). Schreel’s point is that the ‘sufficiency of the virtual’ can be overturned through the sublime by demonstrating how its aesthetic experience is indiscernible from the spatio-temporal dynamism serving as its transcendental and genetic condition.29 Schreel argues that Deleuze pursues precisely such a reading in his account of the excessive presence of sensation in Chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition, where he claims

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the presentation of the whole (i.e. problematic Idea) in aesthetic comprehension determines the parts experienced in time and space, making spatio-temporal dynamism what is experienced in the sublime. Kant’s ‘mistake’, Deleuze argues there, ‘is to subordinate aesthetic comprehension to spatio-temporal a prioris, rather than recognizing it is a spatiotemporal dynamism’ (1994: 231). Deleuze connects intensity, the sublime and spatio-temporal dynamism in his third seminar on Kant in a very similar way. The imagination, he explains, ‘apprehends’ a series of spatial and temporal intuitions, and then ‘comprehends’ that they belong together. In doing so the imagination operates a transcendental synthesis that determines a specific space and time, after which the object-form or ‘object = x’ will allow this space-time to be identified (i.e. perceived as a specific object) according to the categories of the understanding. But true to his critical project Kant will ask, OK, but what is beneath the synthesis that makes it possible? What makes it possible for me to apprehend the intuitions in the first place? Clearly, Deleuze says, ‘it already implies something like a lived evaluation of a unit of measure’ (1978b: n.p.), but at this stage of perception there is no unit of measure because a unit of measure is determined by a concept of the understanding. Instead, in apprehension I choose a unit of measure that is appropriate to the object being measured: a tree is ten men, a mountain ten trees, the Earth’s diameter hundreds of mountains, the Milky Way thousands of Earths, and so on (Kant CJ §26 256: 113/179). This, Kant argues, is an ‘aesthetic comprehension’ that supplies a unit of measure to the imagination’s apprehension of intuitions, and this, Deleuze says, is an evaluation of rhythm. Why rhythm? THE RHYTHM OF AESTHETIC COMPREHENSION Aesthetic comprehension is the most fundamental aspect of the transcendental syntheses of the imagination, and as such is called by Kant ‘intuition’. Intuition is as close to the noumena as perception can get, attesting to the existence of something ‘out there’ but unable to tell us anything about it. Instead it provides us with a sensible ‘intensity’, as Kant calls it in the ‘Anticipations of Perception’ of the First Critique. As Kant puts it: ‘The principle which anticipates all perceptions, as such, is as follows: In all appearances sensation, and the real which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phaenomenon), has an intensive magnitude, that is, a degree’ (CPR A166/B208: 201/208). This degree is intensive because extension only applies to representations, and emerges in relation to ‘pure intuition = 0. [. . .] This magnitude is generated in the act



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of apprehension whereby the empirical consciousness of it can in a certain time increase from nothing = 0 to the given measure’ (CPR A167/ B208: 202/208–9). A sensation then is an intense magnitude or degree ‘measuring’ the distance between itself and 0, traversing this intense difference in a ‘rhythm’ as Deleuze (but not Kant) calls it, an aesthetic and pre-conscious ‘anticipation of perception’ (Kant) or ‘passive synthesis’ (Deleuze) that provides sensation for representation, but in the case of the sublime carries imagination to its limit and casts representation into an abyss. ‘Beneath the measure’, Deleuze says, ‘there is the rhythm. But this is the catastrophe’ (1978b: n.p.). This catastrophe indicates, he continues, the ‘fragility’ of the synthesis, which can at any moment be ‘overwhelmed’ by a ‘thrust coming up from underground’ (1978c: n.p.). This ‘thrust’ is the sublime, which confronts the imagination with its own limit, liberating it from any conceptual determination. Here, Deleuze’s method of ventriloquism is aggressive, finding in Kant’s sublime the ‘catastrophe’ of his own system­– ­a catastrophe that is in fact its true meaning. This is what Deleuze says: ‘We have seen that aesthetic­ – ­even though Kant does not say it, but it is what he is thinking of­– ­was the grasping of rhythm as the basis of measure and the unit of measure.’ The result is appropriately dramatic: My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding. Why? My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding because we have seen that this whole perceptive synthesis found its foundation in aesthetic comprehension, which is to say the evaluation of rhythm. Here it’s as if this aesthetic comprehension, as evaluation of a rhythm that would serve as a foundation of measure, thus the synthesis of perception, is compromised, drowned in a chaos. The sublime. (1978a: n.p.)30

In the sublime the rhythms of differential intensity emerge from chaotic infinity, rhythms as passive aesthetic syntheses or sensations. These rhythms are genetic but fragile, as Deleuze puts it: ‘The rhythm is something that comes out of chaos, and the rhythm is something which can indeed perhaps return to chaos’ (1978b: n.p.).31 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze associates rhythm directly with spatio-temporal dynamisms, which ‘constitute’, he says, ‘a time of actualisation or differenciation no less than they outline spaces of actualisation’. In this sense. ‘it is dynamic processes [i.e. rhythms] which determine the actualisation of Ideas’ (1994: 216), leading Deleuze to ask: ‘Are not these spatio-temporal determinations what Kant called schemata?’ (1994: 218). But there is an important difference­– ­whereas schemata for Kant converted logical into transcendental possibility, for Deleuze spatio-temporal dynamisms are ‘internal to Ideas, [they . . .] immediately incarnate the differential relations, the singularities and

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the progressivities immanent in the Idea’ (1994: 218). Spatio-temporal dynamism is the ‘schemata’ of passive synthesis, the real conditions by which the active synthesis can be made (and so ‘reverses’ Kant once again). But passive synthesis qua productive imagination itself emerges on the condition of the sublime third synthesis of time, which detaches it from conceptual determination and puts it into direct contact with the ‘problems’ that sensation develops. The sublime is therefore the moment that puts virtual and actual, Ideas and passive synthesis, into direct contact, and the spatio-temporal dynamisms or rhythms that result are both the real conditions of experience and real experience itself (before their representation in active synthesis). Art will create and explore these rhythms and give them to ‘us’, a poison chalice perhaps inasmuch as it is a ‘gift’ we will not survive. N I C K L A N D A N D T H E S U B L I M E A C C E L E R AT I O N O F C A P I TA L I S M Of all the readers of Deleuze it is Nick Land who has most violently affirmed this disruptive reading of the sublime and developed it into a ‘sublime politics’. To begin, Land broadens the Kantian schematism into patriarchal, racist and capitalist a prioris, and explores the sublime as a mechanism immanent to but ultimately destructive of modernity’s ‘inhibited synthesis’ (2011: 63). Land’s aim is to restore to exteriority and otherness a radicality that counteracts our ‘rational’ interest in novelty, and capitalism’s desire to turn this into a commodity from which to profit (2011: 67–8). In capitalism alterity is materialised when it is synthesised according to conditions of possibility that are as much economic as epistemological (Land 2011: 262). But in the sublime moment a material alterity emerges in excess of its cognitive and commercial schemata, overcoming both in a new kind of experience and existence. The sublime eruption of ‘unrestrained synthesis’ and its ‘voluptuous excess of exogamic conjunction’ rages against the homogenising conditions of global capitalism, making the sublime, Land claims, a kind of ‘radical international socialism’ that attacks ‘the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits’ (2011: 77). Land soon abandoned his ‘sublime socialism’, however, as he became increasingly intoxicated by capitalism’s power of innovation and invention, which he saw as a nihilistic death drive, an anti-humanism that was already liberating us from our-‘self’. Land took inspiration from how Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus sought to connect capitalist social production with its outside, with the realm of schizophrenic desire itself. Land nevertheless



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tempered this enthusiasm with Lyotard’s claim that the book had not gone far enough (Lyotard 2014), and in separating schizo-desire from its Oedipal and capitalist ‘capture’ had separated desire from the world that expressed it. This, Lyotard insisted, prevented us from seeing exactly what capitalism was capable of once we recognised that there was only one libidinal economy and it was capitalist.32 As we saw in the previous chapter, this led Lyotard to affirm the proletariat’s ecstatic pleasure at being crushed by the wheels of industry, and to their perverse desire for self-destruction in the name of a machinic afterlife. Lyotard imagines this as a joyous process of rebirth, as a feeling that escapes the rationality of production as a sublime excess that negates the schema of capitalism through the affirmation of what is most ­inhuman within it. As Land writes: If one is to gain some purchase upon the gloomy cathedral of our history, along with a little fresh air, it is important to begin with the sublime rather than aesthetic contemplation in general, and to read the sublime as generative rather than revelatory in its relation to reason. (2011: 137)

For Land, Kant’s critical system is erected in order to restrain the excesses of pain-pleasure that unrestrained synthesis­– ­or in Deleuze’s terms ‘transcendental empiricism’­– ­ might produce. This is hardly surprising, given that such a sublime pain-pleasure is an expression of thanatos, a desire for death. Land draws this thanotised form of vitalism from Nietzsche (qua creative destruction) and Lyotard, but it can also be found in Deleuze’s ‘mortuary betrothal’ (1994: 95) of a dead God with the dissolved Self in the event of eternal return in Difference and Repetition. ‘Is this not’, Deleuze asks, ‘the face of death?’ (1994: 115). The third synthesis of time enforces a future in which only our death can return, Land argues, a death that is accelerating towards us in the nihilism of cybernetic technology and neoliberal capitalism. This is, according to Land, a project of reason and so essentially moral: Kant’s theory of the sublime is an extreme point in the history of Occidental mysticism. It is concerned with the supernatural delight experienced by the self when it intuits the splitting of itself. The task Kant sets himself is that of grasping the connection between the finite animal part of the human being (sensibility), and its transcendental moral part (reason). (2011: 133)

Land makes this connection by destroying the schematism that allows the subject to take ‘pleasure’ in the confining of pure sensibility in the ‘martyrology’ of ‘bourgeois austerity’ that defines modernity (Land 2011: 129). The sublime goes beyond this schematism in an ‘antipathological [i.e. moral] eroticism’ (Land 2011: 136) that takes the body beyond its own humanity, and creates new pleasures from its

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self-destruction. It is precisely this paradoxical tension at the heart of the sublime that gives it, Land claims, its ‘mystical persuasiveness’, its alluring promise of ‘the delights of catastrophic rupture’ (2011: 136). While this offers the possibility of pursuing rupture on the side of the animal, it also points to Kant’s ‘idealist tendency’ where the agonies of the imagination liberate reason and allow for the ‘pure presupposition’ of an absolute abstraction (i.e. a sublime capitalist reason) without any intuitive content (2011: 137). The ‘thanatropic frenzy of reason’ (2011: 144) allows us to jettison the meat. This ‘frenzy’, Land will say, is art. It emerges from the Third Critique with the force of ‘trauma’ (2011: 145), refusing the beauty that was Kant’s attempt to ‘staunch’ this ‘freely flowing wound’ by making it obey our ‘reasonable’ conditions of possible experience. Similarly, Land argues, we must also go beyond Kant’s quasi-religious formulation of the sublime, because it limits art to a ‘negative-pleasure’ that ‘humiliates and ruins that part of ourselves that we fail to share with the angels’ (2011: 150). Instead art is the irruption of a ‘ferocious exteriority’ (Land 2011: 153) within the rationality of the human subject, an asubjective ‘will’ that negates the intellect in a ‘Dionysian pessimism’, a libidinal intoxication that cannot be thought (Land 2011: 168), but is instead an ‘active nihilism’ of violent expenditure (Land 2011: 170). This is the ‘genius’ of schizophrenia, where knowing­– t­ he joy of knowledge­– ­is death (Land 2011: 179). In this sense, Land writes: Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. (2011: 322)

Schizoanalysis, in other words, is a radicalised sublime, a nihilistic thought of the ‘outside’, a materialist intellectual-feeling of a pain and pleasure that goes beyond both the human organism and its rational conditions of possible experience. What is most problematic about Land’s work is its association of schizophrenic desire with the revolutionary effects of contemporary capitalism, and especially those of globalisation and digital technology. Land associates these forces with the thanatos of desire, making capitalism ‘an automatizing nihilist vortex’ (2011: 444) liberating desire from its cage of humanity. This is what Land calls capitalism’s ‘anti-political economism’, its ‘incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization’ and its inevitable evolution from ‘production-forprofit’ to its true nature as ‘production-for-production’ (2011: 265), or the permanent repetition of difference (2011: 276). As a result: ‘The



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revolutionary task is [. . .] to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness [. . .]. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its own undoing’ (Land 2011: 278). Here Land’s Accelerationism is at its most explicit, conceiving of capitalism and schizophrenia as two sides of the same sublime process in which schizophrenia’s escape from history is nothing less than the history as capitalism itself (2011: 305). As Land spectacularly­– ­and now famously­– p ­ uts it: What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent species that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation. (2011: 338)

By the mid-1990s capitalism has taken over from art in Land’s thinking as the nihilistic principle of desire, and political revolution now takes ‘deregulation’ as its ontological principle. The creative force of thanatos that Land associated with the ‘critical’ (in a Kantian sense) power of art has become an ontological force ‘pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’ (2011: 340). And finally, it became real. Land himself began to speak as if what he had previously been describing was true. The breakdown was obvious, but was this also a breakthrough that could be communicated, shared, made into a contagious ‘viral amnesia’ forcing us to forget we were human? Land’s writing begins to take admirable risks in its efforts to register the destructive creation that techno-capitalism, qua ontological principle, produced in his own work. Here art returns in an increasingly unreadable style where sense and nonsense seem to fight over the future of human ‘intelligence’: Competitive just-in-time innovations delete storage CA CA capacity, flu flu flu fluidizing energetic and informational stocks into and and or and and or orphan-vampire re re transversal IIOIIIIOOOIOIOIOIO vir vir virocommunication process, expressing a surplus-value of code (content) as xenoreplication-behaviour (and/or con/nective dis) junction). (2011: 387)

It is a poetics of meltdown, one that suspends sublime art between its necessary failure and its dissolution into madness.33 ART AS SUBLIME RHYTHM While Land’s work is no doubt a brilliant exploration of sublime art as a rhythmical emergence from and descent into chaos, it is useful to

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contrast it with the way Deleuze develops this idea, most explicitly in his third and fourth seminars on Kant where he refers to both Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne. There, he also distinguishes between the ‘beautiful’, where ‘there is a representation of the Idea’, and the ‘sublime’ where the Idea appears in itself (1978b: n.p.). For Deleuze art ‘as such’ will emerge from the sublime. ‘An artist’, Deleuze says, ‘operates through blocks of space-time. An artist is above all a rhythmicist. What is rhythm? It’s a block of space-time, it’s a spatio-temporal block’ (1978c: n.p.). From Deleuze’s perspective, art develops transcendental empiricism for real, it is the culmination of the critical project in the creation of transcendental force. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Deleuze understands rhythm in relation to sensation, which he explores through the art of painting, an art he defines by the ‘very special violence’ of colour and line (2003: x). This violence of sensation produces a sublime rupture that enables us to perceive­– ­and more than perceive, to share­– ­the invisible forces animating the writhing flesh of Bacon’s figures. Indeed, the logic of sensation will proceed through a sublime break with representation, one that will reveal the differential forces (field and Figure, diastole and systole, flat fields and broken tones, meat and bone, etc.) animating the painting for us and in us, forces that emerge as rhythms that we sense. Indeed, Deleuze tells us, in Bacon’s triptychs we discover rhythm as the ‘essence’ of painting (2003: xv), because the rhythms of painting ‘capture these nongiven forces in what it gives us, to make us sense these insensible forces, and raise itself to its own conditions’ (2003: 57). Rhythm, understood as the abstract but nevertheless real sensation of forces beyond­– ­but also beneath (2003: 46)­– ­representation (Deleuze will call them ‘matters of fact’), animate Bacon’s Figures as they escape representation and simultaneously construct a new body (a body without organs, as Deleuze will call it) within which space and time form an intense and co-determining block. ‘The variations of texture and color on a body, a head, or a back is actually a temporal variation regulated down to the tenth of a second’ (Deleuze 2003: 48). Deleuze analyses the formal and technical aspects of Bacon’s ‘diagram’ in order to discover ‘the precise elements of the system’ (2003: 7), including the important role the sublime will play in it. We have already seen that Foucault, at least according to Deleuze, searches for the ‘diagram’ by which visibilities (imagination) and statements (understanding) are put into relation according to their genetic and real conditions qua force. These conditions constituting Foucault’s diagram are ‘power-relations’ or ‘differential relations which determine particular features’ by being integrated or ‘stratified’ by institutions,



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and thereby constitute ‘knowledge’, including that of ‘Art itself’ (1988: 75). As such, Deleuze claims, the diagram is the thought of the outside, ‘an exercise of the non-stratified’ that ‘evades all stable forms of the visible and the articulable’ (1988: 73), although it is what gives the visible and the articulable to be seen and said. In other words, as Deleuze goes on to explain, the diagram ‘establishes contact’ between unformed matter or ‘receptivity’ and unformalised functions or ‘spontaneity’ (1988: 77), and so is similar to the spontaneous ‘schemata’ of Ideas within passive synthesis in Difference and Repetition. The diagram is in this sense a kind of genetic ‘non-place’ that organises active synthesis but also carries it to its limit in a process of mutation (1988: 85); it does ‘not lie outside strata [i.e. active synthesis] but forms the outside of strata’ (1988: 84).34 Thinking, Deleuze will conclude, means ‘to reach the non-stratified’ or Outside, the diagram of power that is the real condition of what we experience and articulate, but that in itself ‘belongs to the outside’, to the ‘abstract storm’ of forces that are both assumed and effaced by the active synthesis (1988: 87). Thought must therefore think the outside, it must fold the outside into ‘an inside that lies deeper than any internal world’ (1988: 96), and is therefore ‘not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside’ (1988: 97), making, presumably, the outside the outside of the inside, without there being anything else that would be outside in itself. Deleuze offers another account of the ‘diagram’ in his book on Bacon, one that offers us something like a ‘method’ of sublime art. As with Foucault’s diagram, Bacon’s will embody the forces of the outside, ‘think’ them if you like, by opening directly onto chaos and ‘folding’ it into sensation. Bacon’s diagram­– h ­ ere unlike Foucault’s­– ­begins with a deliberate ‘catastrophe’ or ‘accident’, a random mark produced by throwing paint at the canvas. In this way the painting ‘grounds itself in scrambling’ (Deleuze 2003: 117), a scrambling of the received codes and clichés that order our images­– t­hat ‘measure’ them perhaps­– i­n terms of the representational image of thought. Deleuze argues for the political necessity of the sublime experience here, which blasts through the clichés that oppress us. The catastrophe is this political ‘event’ and is, Deleuze tells us, ‘the preparatory work that belongs to painting fully’ (2003: 99). It clears the canvas of its conditions of possible experience­ – ­ the ‘figurative givens’ (Deleuze 2003: 100) acting as the ‘optical organization’ (Deleuze 2003: 101) of what we see­– o ­ pening the canvas onto the ‘outside’ forces that are its real conditions, but would normally remain invisible and mute. This ‘clearing’ of the canvas requires, as Deleuze describes it, an unconventional but certainly sublime kind of brain surgery:

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It is as if the Sahara were suddenly inserted into the head [. . .]; it is as if the two halves of the head were split open by an ocean; it is as if the unit of measure were changed, and micrometric, or even cosmic units were substituted for the figurative unit. [. . .] It is like the emergence of another world. (2003: 100)

This is clearly a rather dramatic description of aesthetic comprehension, and the way it leads to the intense sensation of intuition, or what Deleuze has called passive synthesis. In any case, it is what happens when a painter starts to think, there is a ‘collapse of the figurative givens’ (2003: 111) and the emergence of new units of measure, both large and small, adequate to the ‘new world’ emerging in the paint. This is what Deleuze calls the operation of a ‘chaos-germ’ (2003: 102), which allows the painter to ‘embrace the chaos’ in a sublime ‘collapse’ of their ‘visual coordinates’ (2003: 102), but as a result sensations emerge whose differential intensities turn chaos into rhythm, into a ‘germ of rhythm’ (2003: 102), giving rise to ‘the new order’ of a ‘pictorial experience’ (2003: 102). This is ‘an optical catastrophe that remains present in the painting itself’ (Deleuze 2006: 184), because it gives rise to ‘free marks’ that act as a ‘geometry in the service of “problems” or “accidents” ’ (Deleuze 2003: 46), a ‘stubborn geometry’ as Cezanné called it, providing a ‘pre-pictorial’ set of ‘visual givens’ (2003: 93–5), ‘acting beneath or beyond representation’ (2003: 46) (i.e. a diagram) and giving rise to the sensations that compose Figures. This is a practical method then: Bacon throws paint at the canvas and the resulting ‘free marks’ compose the figures they give birth to. Although the catastrophe is a purely manual mark, it nevertheless expresses what Deleuze calls a ‘spiritual will’,35 a ‘thought’ which seeks the beyond of the organism in the body itself, in the body without organs (2003: 47). This thought of the outside convulses the body without organs, traverses its nerves in a hysterical impulse, passively undergoing the cruel attentions of what constantly evades and invades it. But this ‘powerlessness’ of thought (taken from Artuad) is its greatest strength, because it is the condition allowing it to create the new out of its own ruins, its own ‘problems’, ‘as though from so many thefts or trespasses in thought’ (Deleuze 1994: 147). Passivity is power, the power of the unthought, the ‘stupidity’ of the painter animating Bacon’s heads, which ‘are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveler immobile in his capsule’ (Deleuze 2003: 58). Switching metaphors, Deleuze says that Bacon is a ‘butcher’, he flays bodies and faces, reduces them to the twitching nerves of dead flesh, but he does so with reverence and a higher purpose. For Bacon visits the butcher’s shop ‘as if it were a church’ (2003: 24), to abase himself



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before the dissolving boundaries of the meat as it is ‘effaced on the wall of the closed cosmos, to melt into a molecular texture’ (2003: 27). Describing Bacon’s quasi-religious reverence in the butcher’s shop Deleuze is at his most mystical and sublime: ‘At this extreme point of cosmic dissipation’ (2003: 29), he writes, the Figure’s flesh attenuates towards the infinite modulations of the flat field, its scream opening up ‘like a vertical sky’ (2003: 31), a violent rip in the fabric of time from which bleeds a molecular immanence. The sublime experience ushers us into the realm of the infinite, it shows us­– ­as does the tense relationship of the field and the Figure in Bacon’s work­– ­that ‘this most closed of worlds was also the most unlimited’ (2003: 32). The Figure is located precisely at the intersection of finite and infinite illuminated by the sublime, where intellectual-feeling (‘the nervous wave or vital emotion’ (2003:45)) experiences the transcendental forces (Ideas) that condition and constitute it in ‘spasms’ of sensation (2003: 41). But these forces are invisible in themselves, maintaining their noumenal presence, their transcendental reserve of un-thought that is nothing less than our future (2003: 61). This sensation can only be discovered, Deleuze tells us, ‘by going beyond the organism [. . .] at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night’ (2003: 44). Beyond the organism, in the chaos of the night, an unthinkable future emerges . . . both a horror and a comfort. The future as time-in-itself, as the empty form of time encompassing passive and active synthesis, is what Bacon’s Figures express to us and in us: ‘There is’, Deleuze writes, ‘a great force of time in Bacon, time itself is being painted’ (2003: 48). Artaud will usher us into this screaming night, and the body without organs that inhabits and expresses it. The body without organs describes (in Anti-Oedipus) the transcendental field constructed by passive synthesis by producing desiring machines that interrupt its flows, that establish break-flows, or spatio-temporal rhythms (‘part-objects’). The schizo’s experience of this ‘body’ is sublime, because she lives ‘that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it’, a ‘consumption of pure intensities’, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, a thought ‘starting from zero’ (1983: 20).36 In the Bacon book Deleuze explains the hysterical sensation by referring to Kant’s account of intensity in the Critique of Pure Reason. A sensation, he claims, is an instantaneously apprehended multiplicity qua real experience that appears only in relation to its negation = 0 (2003: 81). First, the agony, the sublime catastrophe, the experience of the imagination’s limit. And then the ecstasy as the limit is overcome by a feeling that goes beyond it, a sensation that expresses the infinity that has produced it­– ­the (problematic) Idea in the heart of passive synthesis. The sensation

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is, Deleuze says, ‘a function of degree zero as the principle of production of all reality in space and time­– p ­ roduction starting from zero or the principle of extinction’ (1978a: n.p.). But we experience sensation before we experience its zero, and as a result: ‘The fall is what is most alive in the sensation, that through which the sensation is experienced as living. [. . .] The fall is precisely the active rhythm’ (2003: 82). This, Deleuze argues, is the ‘irrational logic, or this logic of sensation, that constitutes painting’ (2003: 83). And not just painting; ‘Most artists [. . .] seem to have encountered the same response; the difference in intensity is experienced as a fall’ (2003: 81). Artaud’s body without organs and its schizophrenic experience therefore leads us, strangely enough, back to Deleuze’s understanding of aesthetic comprehension (i.e. intuition) as the ground of transcendental empiricism. T H E S U B L I M E A N D P O S T- C O N C E P T U A L A R T While Deleuze suggests that all painters pass through the diagram, confront chaos and experience the intense fall of sensation, each does so in their own way. Deleuze suggests that there are three ‘great paths’ introduced in the twentieth century, each designating a ‘modern’ function of painting: hard-edged abstraction, abstract expressionism and Bacon’s own method of the Figure (2003: 103). In historical terms Deleuze’s account seems to beg a big question about art work that is not painting, and in particular about those more recent practices that are known as ‘post-conceptual practices’. This is a difficult question to answer for two reasons. First, Deleuze and Guattari will reject Conceptual art, arguing it produces neither concepts nor sensations. Second, while there is a line that can be drawn from their brief discussions of Duchamp towards post-conceptual practice, their understanding of ‘thought’ goes against what most artists working in a ‘post-conceptual’ manner take it to mean. Nevertheless, I will briefly trace this line, before turning to Deleuze’s books on cinema where he will once more return to the role of ‘thought’ in art, this time connecting it to the explicitly ‘sublime’ conception of time we have already seen in Difference and Repetition. Although Deleuze does not name him explicitly in Difference and Repetition, Duchamp’s readymade was possibly what he was thinking of when he wrote that the ‘highest object of art’ was to repeat. ‘Even the most mechanical’, Deleuze continues, ‘the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition finds a place in works of art’ (1994: 293). This is perhaps to significantly undervalue the original significance of Duchamp’s readymade as repetition (which after all



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succeeded in repeating anything-at-all as art), and although today the gesture of the readymade is not only banal but ubiquitous, it nevertheless provides some of the most important features of what constitutes a ‘post-conceptual’ artistic practice. First, they come ‘after’ painting and in significant ways reject painting’s perceived aestheticism, autonomy and­– ­perhaps most importantly­– ­materiality, which Duchamp dismissed in favour of what he drolly called ‘grey-matter’. Second, and as we saw in the Introduction, such work is organised according to conceptual conditions, whether the ‘work’ is understood as being entirely dematerialised (i.e. Kosuth’s ‘Art as idea, as idea’), or that the genesis of the work is conceptual, whether it is actualised or not (i.e. Sol Le Witt’s ‘instructions’ for wall-drawings, or Lawrence Wiener’s famous ‘Statement of Intent’).37 Providing the impetus for this approach, Duchamp tells us in The Green Box (1935) that the readymade is a ‘snapshot’ or ‘sign of accordance’ between it and the laws governing its choice (1973: 27–8). For Duchamp, this choice is entirely independent of the readymade object, which merely exists as ‘information’ (1973: 32) indicating that a conceptual decision (a ‘nomination’ as he called it) has taken place­– ­‘this is art’. This ‘decision’ not only liberates art from any medium specificity, but from any aesthetic conditions at all, involving as Duchamp famously put it ‘a complete anaesthesia’ (1973: 141). In fact, the conditions of the art work’s appearance have become almost entirely linguistic, and so independent of any material actualisation. While the question ‘what is art’ no longer animates artistic practices to the same extent today (art’s conditioning nomination being more or less taken for granted), since the late 1960s the conceptual ‘conditions’ of art have been generally accepted to the point that contemporary art is now considered ‘post-conceptual’ and has shifted towards what Peter Osborne has dubbed a ‘post-aesthetic poetics’ (2013: 33). This does not mean, as Osborne hastens to point out, that aesthetics has evaporated from art, far from it, but it is to say that the aesthetic dimension tends to be determined by its conceptual conditions­– ­as it was in Kant’s First Critique. In this sense ‘post-conceptual art’ could be said to adapt Kant’s own definition of the concept, inasmuch as concepts condition any possible appearance. A concept in this sense is, as Kant has it, ‘something universal which serves as a rule. The concept of body, for instance, as the unity of a manifold which is thought through it, serves as a rule in our knowledge of outer appearances’ (CPR A106: 135/167). Concepts, however, require ‘schemata’ to prepare intuitions to be determined by them. Kant again: ‘In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the representation of the object must be homogeneous with the

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c­ oncept; in other words, the concept must contain something which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it’ (CPR A137/ B176: 180/187). In this sense, schemata provide ‘rules of synthesis for the imagination’ (CPR A141/B181: 182/189), and as such it is hardly surprising they are a target for Deleuze. In contemporary artistic practices the ‘concept’ or ‘schema’ can be anything from the rules followed in a work’s production to generally accepted and abstract ‘truths’ such as the evil of capitalism or the effectiveness of the undetermined as an aesthetic-political strategy (two ‘truths’ we will see Speculative Realism challenge in the Postscript). In these cases the ‘concept’ cannot be intuited as such but nonetheless organises what is experienced and can be deduced from it. Deleuze objects to the schemata on two grounds. First, they convert logical possibility into transcendental possibility, determining all experience according to their rules. Second, the schemata themselves rely on the spatio-temporal dynamisms of passive syntheses ‘which act within or beneath it, like a hidden art’,38 and that will become Deleuze’s own version of ‘schema’ (1994: 218). In this sense, it is the dynamisms emerging from passive synthesis that act as schema, not of the concepts that are merely the results of their operation, but of Ideas. Deleuze is following Kant to a certain extent here, inasmuch as Kant also explores a schema of the ‘concepts’ of reason (i.e. Ideas) that operate through analogy or symbolism, or as Deleuze calls it ‘dramatisation’. In a footnote Deleuze notes that in the Third Critique Kant associates this form of schema with art, and in particular with the aesthetic Idea, but as we have already rejected the aesthetic idea (see Chapter 1) what is more important here is that dramatisation is a form of the schema that operates between reason and imagination, rather than the understanding and imagination (1994: n.  30, 328). In Difference and Repetition it is precisely the Ideas that act as schema through spatio-temporal dynamisms and it is precisely this ‘dramatisation’ as ‘intellectual-feelings’ that we must confront to any post-Conceptual artistic practice. From here we can perhaps see two sides of a possible story involving Duchamp. On the one hand there is Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: ‘The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference’ (1994: 293). Admittedly, Deleuze is probably talking about Pop art here, but in any case the readymade was the source of this idea that a minimal repetition of the objects of daily life could introduce a genetic and so transformative difference into them (i.e. ‘art’ in Deleuze’s sense). This is perhaps a ‘Dada’ interpretation of the



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readymade, and as such one that was more common in France than in America. On the other hand is the problem, to put it simply, that the readymade shares its conceptual conditions of possible experience with ‘any-object-whatever’, inasmuch as these conditions are a linguistic rule of ‘nomination’ that is entirely independent of the object to which it applies. In this sense the aesthetic dimension of the art work is entirely subordinated to its conceptual determination, the first being­– i­n Kosuth’s terms­– ­‘secondary information’ as opposed to the latter’s ‘primary information’. While this grounded Conceptual art’s political claims of being ‘democratic’ (its conceptual conditions of possible existence can be applied to any perceivable thing by any perceiving human), it is, Deleuze and Guattari claim, a ‘dematerialization through generalization’ that turns the art work into simple ‘information’, and makes the sensation depend on the ‘opinion’ of the spectator who decides whether or not it is art (1994: 198). This, in Deleuze’s terms, is clearly not a good democratisation because it is the conversion of logical possibility (i.e. the active syntheses of representation) into transcendental possibility (i.e. the conditions of possible experience). For Deleuze all this achieves is the reification of cliché and the human to the level of the transcendental, a move preventing the problematic Idea and its material dramatisation from being experienced. On the other hand, however, the conceptual shift clearly had the positive effect of breaking art out of the rarefied realms of galleries and museums and opening it up to an extraordinary plethora of practices. But nevertheless, if ‘art’ as such is simply a conceptual determination of our experience then it must accept the ontological limitations that Deleuze and Guattari see as being those of ‘conceptual determination’ as such. We have already seen Deleuze’s objections to ‘representation’ in this respect, and similarly, inasmuch as conceptual determination requires discursive expression (‘this is art’), and discursive conditions of possibility are mechanisms that control our experience, then art produced according to its rules is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, already complicit. Complicit here perhaps means nothing more than failing to produce a sensation or something new, which is the other risk of democratising art­– ­banality. Banality is the flip side of wanting to turn art into life, the risk that art becomes an empty repetition of what everyone already knew in the first place. This is the criticism of the readymade, and by extension post-conceptual practices, implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of Conceptual art in What Is Philosophy? But there is another reading of the readymade that emerges in A Thousand Plateaus that is more useful in understanding post-conceptual

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artistic practices in terms of a sublime aesthetics and ‘thought’. There, Deleuze and Guattari claim that: ‘Territorial marks are readymades’ (1987: 349, see also 1994: 184) using the English word ‘readymade’ in order to emphasise its connection to Duchamp (see 1980: 389; 1991: 174). The fundamental artistic gesture of the readymade, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is the appropriation of something in order to use it in a completely different way, like the stage-maker bird that turns over fallen leaves to mark out the ‘stage’ on which it sings, composing a refrain, ‘a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates’. In this the stage-maker bird is, Deleuze and Guattari say, a ‘complete artist’ (1994: 184), composing readymade objects and song into a Gesamptkunstwerk. Here (i.e. from the beginning) the readymade, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is ‘the base or ground of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression’ (1987: 349). In this sense the readymade is a technique used to create a ‘refrain’, a material object that expresses (i.e. repeats) a genetic difference. In the case of the stage-maker bird it both establishes a territory and opens it onto an outside, because the maintenance of one involves the necessity of the other, as with the drive to reproduction expressed in the mating call-dance. ‘As thought’, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘the circle tended on its own to open onto a future as a function of the working forces it shelters’ (1987: 343, italics added). But if the functional purpose of this ‘art work’ is to perpetuate the species, its aesthetic dimension (i.e. the song’s refrain) celebrates the principle of its emergence. While biological reproduction requires relations with the ‘outside’, this is achieved by a creative expression that also introduces ‘lines of drift’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1987: 344). In one sense this reading of the readymade is familiar, inasmuch as it makes the simple gesture of appropriation the fundamental creative act, and is entirely consistent with Duchamp’s quip that a readymade is simply an object that has ‘changed direction’. But it is this change in direction that Deleuze and Guattari radicalise, as it can lead to something like Bacon’s ‘catastrophe’ opening territorial limits to the outside and allowing chaotic forces to act as ‘directional components’ or as the ‘ecstasies’ of ‘chaosmosis’ (1987: 345). This makes all of us, as Duchamp would agree, artists­– ­although he drew the line at birds.39 What is quite different from Duchamp, however, is that the change in direction achieved by the readymade is both material and aesthetic, although rhythmical chaosmosis is precisely a (sublime) ‘thought’ in Deleuze’s sense. It is this that makes it possible to speculate about a form of contemporary artistic practice that incorporates the readymade as its foundational moment, but rather than being post-­ conceptual involves, instead, the experience or affect of a sublime thought.



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Guattari discusses Duchamp’s first readymade, the Bottle Rack (1913), precisely in this sense. The act of appropriation, Guattari writes, can produce a ‘problematic Affect’ (2013: 206) in which various components suddenly appear together without obvious subjective intention or meaning (i.e. passive synthesis). This irruption of the problematic affect in the midst of ‘my’ activity is a chaotic incursion or ‘event’ that ‘speaks through me’ and ‘devalues the clarities and urgencies which imposed themselves on me several instances earlier and it makes the world sink into a void [intensity = 0] which seems irremediable’ (Guattari 2013: 205). From this ‘catastrophe’, however, emerge a multiplicity of perceptions, memories and feelings. Guattari writes that the Bottle Rack functions as the trigger for a Constellation of universes of reference that sets off intimate reminiscences­– ­the cellar of the house, a certain winter, beams of light on the spider webs, adolescent solitude­– a­ s much as it does connotations of a cultural and economic order­– t­ he epoch in which bottles were still washed using a bottle brush . . . (2013: 209, translation modified)

The Bottle Rack appears here in the by now familiar double register of passive and active synthesis and of the ‘refrain’ that composes their disjunctive synthesis.40 Beginning from the problematic affect, from its singular and intimate ‘feeling of being’ (2013: 213), or ‘irremediable void’­– r­ eminiscent of the non-subjective ‘being-in-the-world’ (or BwO) of the schizophrenic identified by Ludwig Binswanger (2013: n. 2, 276; Binswanger is discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983: 22))­– ­a sudden rush of associations and their ‘procedures of elucidation threaten to flee in every direction’ (Guattari 2013: 206). But as with the refrain, this chaotic irruption is also a ‘directional component’ for what is to come, because it is from this ‘infinite movement of fractal virtualization that its power of existential self-affirmation results’ (Guattari 2013: 206).41 Chaosmosis. It is not that the sublime operation of passive synthesis replaces active synthesis, but that active synthesis itself has become unhinged from transcendental forms of subjectivity and emerges in spatio-temporal rhythms expressing the passive synthesis that is its real condition. The appropriation of the readymade therefore produces a ‘fractal virtualisation’ of the object by isolating it from its context (as Bacon’s ‘accident’ did to his canvas), and so from any pre-given and self-evident function or significance. It is this that allows it (or even impels it) to produce a new ‘meaning’. Guattari is here drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whom he always mentions when he talks about Duchamp. This process of isolation produces what Bakhtin calls an ‘active indetermination’ (1990: 275), opening the object (Bakhtin is concerned

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with text) up to eccentric and undetermined trajectories of creation. This is what Guattari, echoing the discordant accord Deleuze found in the sublime, calls the art work’s ‘consummation as disjunction’ (2013: 211), its rupture with received meaning (cliché) turns its material (for Bakhtin a text’s ‘content’) expressive, allowing it to explore a potentially infinite number of virtual transformations through which it can become something else. Influenced by Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bakhtin understands the aesthetic object to be both a material body and an image, an actualisation of the virtual dimension of duration that also offers a thread (i.e. through the readymade’s appropriation) that leads back into this encompassing element of living force. The aesthetic object is therefore ‘alive’ according to Bakhtin, because its ‘content’ is in a state of constant becoming, making it a ‘self-sufficient [. . .] segment of the unitary open event of being’ (1990: 306–7). The ‘artistic act’, according to Bakhtin, opens the ‘aesthetic object’ onto an infinity of subjective ‘content’, encompassing object and subject in a process of expression, or what Guattari calls a singular ‘existential refrain’ (1995: 15). ‘Content’ emerges in a rhythm of chaosmosis, which is ‘expressed’ in refrains that both establish and continually go beyond their limits, carrying us into and out of the chaos-cosmos, folding the outside into life. This is where the political potential of artistic creations lies, Guattari claims: ‘Expressive fractalisation is not just repetition; it produces an added value, it secretes a surplus value of code. It is always ready to pull something out of its pocket’ (2013: 134). The readymade is a ‘multiplicating’ (Guattari 2013: 211) process that produces an aesthetic rupture of representation and its categorical conditions, while simultaneously actualising this process in a ‘subjectivation’ (i.e. an active synthesis no longer determined by its representational conditions). As a result, the readymade’s ‘mutating becomings’ (2013: 205) or ‘heterogenesis’ enable the aesthetic object, Guattari claims, to act as a ‘reappropriation, an autopoeisis of the means of production of subjectivity’ (1996: 198). In this sense, the poetics of the readymade resingularise the conditions of life by immersing experience in chaos, and draw from this sublime moment a transcendental and infinite power to express the passive syntheses that are its real conditions. The readymade is a refrain that contemplates material and force at their most ‘deterritorialised’, passively synthesising a molecular matter and cosmic force, a process that defines, Deleuze and Guattari say, our modern age, where such refrains have taken the place of the a priori categories of space and time as ‘the ground in a priori synthetic judgment’ (1987: 378–9). This understanding of the readymade as a Bahktinian ‘aesthetic object’ is therefore consistent with Deleuze’s insistence that Kant’s two senses



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of the aesthetic­– ­as a theory of perception and as a theory of art­– ­must come together, or in other words that the reflective aesthetic judgment found in the Third Critique must replace the conceptual understanding determining experience as it appears in the First Critique. Eric Alliez has significantly extended Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that chaosmosis is immanent in Conceptual art by exploring how the power of painting, and in particular colour, directly participates in the realm of ‘thought’.42 A good example is his recent reading of Daniel Buren’s stripe paintings, which, Alliez argues, ‘reifies a conceptual process that reduces the concept itself to an object without colour’ (2013: 349), so dissolving their antagonism into the terms of the spectrum. As a result, Buren offers ‘the vector of a post-conceptual “painting” ’ (Alliez 2013: 350) in which painting does not choose its colours or forms, and is only distinguished from non-art by its place in the institution, where its purely material visibility interrupts the various conceptual and architectural ‘structures’ that surround it. This is the visibility of painting’s degree-zero, achieved through the zero degree of artistic intentionality (Alliez 2013: 354). This ‘interjection’ is, in fact, as with Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Duchamp’s readymade, ‘the talent to take a thing out of its original context. That is to expose it’ (Buren 1973: 35). Buren doesn’t understand this as a ‘conceptual’ gesture, but a material one, that of ‘painting’, or more precisely of a ‘painting practice’, a practice ‘conceptual’ only insofar as it is ‘decorative’, and in this sense aimed by Buren against painting’s ‘Idealist’ capture by the museum (1973: 60) in order to reveal it as the condition of possibility (the ‘frame’ we could say) of ‘art’ as such. In this sense, Buren’s paintings are ‘visual tools’ as he calls them, whose sole purpose is to reveal the ‘onto-political conditions’ of its own appearance (2013: 354), or as Alliez also puts it ‘a totally performative counter-effectuation that cannot appear except as what it does’ (2013: 360). In the ‘new’ context of the ‘revealed’ institutional space Buren’s paintings are able to assert their material-visibility, or in other words the repetition of difference (passive synthesis or rhythm) constituting their visibility as such, constituting that is the ‘expansive virtual becoming of the spectator’s visual field’ (Alliez 2013: 373) operating as the ‘catastrophe’ of any institutional intention to determine them as ‘art’ or ‘painting’ (i.e. painting = 0), but nevertheless gaining a new visibility (precisely the visibility of the new in its emergence) through this ‘disappearance’. In this they utilise the logic of sensation, a negative presentation that nevertheless breaks with what contains and conditions it, enabling, Alliez writes, ‘the release of a new smooth space out of the most actual conditions of striated space’ (2013: 377).

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SUBLIME CINEMA In Difference and Repetition Deleuze remarks that ‘passive synthesis’ is ‘this living present’ or ‘duration’ of independent ‘disturbances or excitations’, which are then ‘restored’ within an ‘auxiliary space, a derived time’ in which we can reproduce them, ‘count’ them as external perceptions (1994: 72). But what if this duration of passive synthesis could have its own image, one that directly expressed the forces of the outside in and as the passive synthesis that contemplates and contracts them? At this moment the image would be the most contracted ‘moment’ of all of time, the moment in other words, where it was in the process of producing the new and so embodying the future as such. We have here a ‘derived’ image and a ‘direct’ one, both images of duration and both produced in the cinema. But whereas the derived image takes place in the ‘auxiliary space’ of perception, and so can only ever give an indirect image (a movement-image as Deleuze will call it) of the infinity of creation (duration), a direct image of duration will emerge in modern cinema (a time-image) that embodies and so expresses its mysterious rhythms in a sublime art that Deleuze also calls ‘thought’. In fact, both of these images are sublime in the sense Deleuze takes from Kant, but in different ways. Let’s begin with the movement-image, as Deleuze explains it: Something was in play, in a sublime conception of cinema. In fact, what constitutes the sublime is that the imagination suffers a shock which pushes it to the limit and forces thought to think the whole as intellectual totality which goes beyond the imagination. The sublime, as we have seen, may be mathematical, as in Gance, or dynamic, as in Murnau and Lang, or dialectical, as in Eisenstein [. . .] (but the whole of the analysis is valid for classical cinema, the cinema of the movement-image, in general). (1989: 157)

The mathematical, dynamic or dialectical sublimes of these films emerges in the editing, or ‘intervals of perception’ as Deleuze explains it in the Bergsonian terms of the cinema books, to reveal the greater whole that contained it (the narrative world of the film, the ‘out-ofshot’ and at its extreme duration itself). For Deleuze the ‘interval’ is the brain, and this movement towards the whole­– ­or duration­– ­is that of ‘thought’. Cinematic thought has the sublime features we have already encountered in Difference and Repetition, it experiences its limits at the very moment it represents itself in time (i.e. in the active synthesis of the ‘shot’), and attempts to go beyond those limits by ‘thinking’ (i.e. shooting) an Idea, by thinking an infinite whole that exists outside of, but nevertheless gives the condition of the shot. In ‘classical’ cinema (as Deleuze calls it), this relationship retains the distinctive features of negative presentation inasmuch as the schemata of the interval-shot



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(perception-image/intuition, affect-image/memory and action-image/ understanding) can do no more than give the conditions for an ‘indirect presentation’ of the whole. As a result, the movement-image can do no more than represent the whole (qua Idea) within the limits of its (representational) image of thought. In all these cases, Deleuze argues, ‘the movement-image remains primary, and gives rise only indirectly to a representation of time’ (1989: 40). Let’s see how this works. Deleuze first introduces Kant’s sublime in relation to the French ‘Impressionist’ school, and in particular to the films of Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier. Neither ‘organic’ (D.W. Griffith) nor ‘dialectical’ (Sergei Eisenstein) in the way they related part and whole, Impressionism instead accelerated the movement-image, attempting to extract the maximum movement from any given shot and from their edited sequences. It did so primarily through the appearance of machines, mechanical engines most obviously­– ­the train (Gance’s La Roue), car (Epstein’s La Glace à trois faces) or merry-go-round (Epstein’s Coeur fidèle)­– ­but also the ‘machine’ of the dance (Jean Grémillon’s obsession with the farandole), or a ‘mechanical’ narrative where the object of desire acts as a spring, launching the movement of the whole like clockwork (René Clair’s Le Million). This maximum of movement in the machine (whole) produced a kinetic movement of the protagonist’s soul (part), and this union of man and machine often produced a passion so intense it led to the individual’s death (Deleuze 1986: 42). In any case the objects (organic and inorganic) entering the shot along with its technical components (lighting, frame, lens, etc.) were the numerical units measuring the greatest possible movement of a shot. This was an ‘algebra’, as Gance called it, able to calculate movement beyond that of its organic participants (and viewers­– ­ the sixteen superimpositions appearing at one point of Gance’s Napoleon could not be ‘seen’) and up to the limit determined by the machine that encompassed them. At this limit the ‘Ideas’ of nature or the universe are evoked, and expressed as an outside of the frame that cannot be represented. This, Deleuze says, is a cinematic expression of Kant’s mathematical sublime: The imagination devotes itself to apprehending relative movements, and in so doing quickly exhausts its forces in converting the units of measurement. But thought must attain that which surpasses all imagination, that is, the set of movements as whole, absolute maximum of movement, absolute movement which is in itself identical to the incommensurable or the measureless, the gigantic, the immense canopy of the heavens or limitless sea. (1986: 46)

The mystical and supernatural evocations of the sea in Epstein’s Le Tempestaire, for example. French impressionist cinema launches the

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image beyond the limited movements of its human protagonists by creating a machinery of ‘simultaneism and simultaneity’ (Deleuze 1986: 46) that attained the spiritual movement ‘which can only be conceived by a thinking soul’ (Deleuze 1986: 47). In this way, Deleuze concludes, French impressionism ‘gives birth in the spirit to the pure thought of a quantity of absolute movement which expresses its whole history or change, its universe. This is exactly Kant’s mathematical sublime’ (1986: 48). This sublime ‘thought’ of French impressionism seeks to express the excessive movement of the whole that underlies, but also escapes, the calculations of the imagination. In this way impressionism went beyond the various attempts, notably in surrealist films, to represent the thought-process of the protagonist, or to explore memories through flashbacks (something Griffith had attempted). Impressionism instead wanted to show that beyond the logical or representational organisation of images cinema could approach a power of nature that transcended us, but that we could nevertheless think. This confrontation with the limits of human perception defines, Deleuze argues, impressionism’s sublime conception of cinema, one that is also valid for classical cinema as a whole inasmuch as the movement-image expresses the open whole of duration that is its condition, but that it can only indirectly represent.43 In German expressionism Deleuze finds another example of sublime cinematic ‘thought’, but one that is dynamical rather than mathematical. Expressionism does not seek an absolute of extensive movement, like French impressionism, but rather ‘it is intensity which is raised to such a power that it dazzles or annihilates our organic being’ (Deleuze 1986: 53), a ‘non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism’ (Deleuze 1986: 50–1). This is the vital life of a ‘pre-organic germinality’ that gives birth to ‘a violent movement and perpetually broken line’, the eternal return of difference, the expressive emergence of an intense and differential force. As with his analysis of impressionism (and for that matter Francis Bacon) Deleuze focuses on formal aspects of the films, in particular the way they oppose light and shadow along a diagonal or jagged line, and how this opposition also structures the montage of the films and their narrative. Searching for the immanent conditions of these ‘signs’ or ‘symptoms’, Deleuze argues that they express an ontological intensity that has its origin in Kant. In German expressionism, Deleuze writes, ‘light as degree (white) and the zero (black) enter into concrete relations of contrast or mixing’ (1986: 50), this intensive degree constituting the narrative’s ‘extensive quantities’, which ‘are like the mercury which indirectly measures the intensive quantity, its rise and fall’ (1986: 49).



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As such, the films’ intense forces of inorganic life cannot­– ­but must­– ­be perceived. This explains the intensity of the expressionist storyline, where the luminous fall into black (intensity = 0) is actualised in the ‘real or material fall in individual beings’ (Deleuze 1986: 50). This fall describes the narrative arc of Robert Wiene’s Dr Caligari, Fritz Lang’s Siegfried or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (or indeed any of Murnau’s films­ – ­Sunrise or The Last Laugh for example), as well as the underlying philosophical motif Deleuze finds animating them: Kant’s dynamic sublime. This expressionist fall typically ends in a sensible and supernatural infinity where the organic self is overwhelmed by the powerful forces of evil, madness or chaos. Evil enters through the incantatory circle of flame in Paul Wegener’s Golem and Murnau’s Faust, it appears in the disorienting and eventually fatal hallucinations of Murnau’s Tabu, and finally dawn breaks on Nosferatu’s insatiable desire and the light of the rising sun consumes him. In this last example another important aspect of expressionism emerges when the supernatural symptom of non-organic life­– ­Nosferatu­– ­is overcome by the truth and purity of Nina’s self-sacrificing spirit. This is what Deleuze calls a ‘supra-organic spirit’ (1986: 52), the ‘divine part in us’, the ‘non-psychological life of the spirit’ where we are alone with ‘God as light’ (1986: 54). In a film relentlessly ‘falling’ into the black, redemption can only be found in a death that spiritually purifies us. We abandon our sensible attachments to the world of humans, embracing this sublime sacrifice, and through it discover the abstract, immaterial and divine truth of the Ideas of reason. This death worthy of the rising sun reassures us ‘that our spiritual “destination” is truly invincible’ (Deleuze 1986: 53). In this way the dynamic sublime of German expressionism perfectly illustrates the dilemma of the movement-image, which cannot actualise the infinite whole of duration (i.e. non-organic life) except at the very limit of the human sensory-motor schema, as it falls into death and blackness or leaves for the ‘other side’, its body transcended in the blinding light. Cinema will have to reinvent itself if it is to directly express this supersensible beyond of human consciousness and its sensory-motor schema. This ‘beyond’ is cinema’s immanent ground of genesis, and as a ‘critical’ art in the Kantian sense cinema is destined to discover it. The genetic force of cinema is time, Deleuze claims, and cinema after the war will directly present it in the time-image. In this sense ‘modern’ cinema produces time-images of passive syntheses, direct images of onto-genetic emergence like the sensations or refrains produced in the visual arts or in music. In the movement-image, as we have seen with German expressionism, this search for the genetic force of cinema led to sublime images in a strictly Kantian sense, but with the time-image

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cinema will produce sublime images in a Deleuzean sense, images that directly actualise their virtual dimension, but as well continually thrust us back into it, continually dissolving representation in a superior empiricism. In this sense modern cinema, and the time-image that is its fundamental element, gives us a sensation of the transcendental difference constituting time itself. In Cinema 2 Deleuze admits that, like the movement-image, the timeimage poses a problem ‘on the level of reality’ (1989: 1), but whereas the movement-image gives an indirect representation of this reality mediated through the brain-interval of the sensory-motor schema, the time-image emerges according to an entirely new image of thought. In the time-image the brain-screen will be in direct contact with the real, with the infinity of duration, with the vital matter of time that it thinks. In his Preface to the English translation of Cinema 2 Deleuze says that modern cinema makes time ‘appear for itself’ (1989: xi), just as it did when Kant discovered that time was out of joint, the moment philosophy (like cinema) transitions from its classical to modern form. Indeed, Deleuze will explicitly make this connection towards the end of Cinema 2, writing that the time-image ‘is no longer empirical, nor metaphysical; it is “transcendental” in the sense that Kant gives this word: time is out of joint and presents itself in the pure state’ (1989: 271). As Gregory Flaxman has pointed out, the time-image introduces a ‘Kino-Kant’, and modern cinema is ‘Kantian’ in the sense that Deleuze understands the philosopher (2015: 310). Indeed cinema, Deleuze tells us, ‘has repeated the same experience, the same reversal [as Kant], in more fast-moving circumstances’ (1989: xi). It is no surprise then that the difference between the movement- and time-images are ‘mental’ and understood by Deleuze ‘in terms of thought’ (1989: 1). The time-image no longer extends perception into action, but rather puts perception in direct contact with the problematic Ideas that emerge from a disjointed time, giving rise to a new image-thought. This, Deleuze continues, is a ‘pure-optical situation’ (1989: 2), an encounter or event that cannot be processed by the sensory-motor, and causes us to experience a kind of sublime pain. It is ‘a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable’ (1989: 3). Here the time-image goes beyond the limits of our sensory-motor schema, producing­– ­much like the figures of Bacon­ – ‘­liberated sense organs’ that hallucinate the real (1989: 4). Beyond the limits of the organism time emerges for itself, a supersensible and problematic Idea that ignores the old distinctions of what is ‘mental’ and what ‘material’, what subject and what object, what real and what imaginary. The time-image brings ‘a principle of indiscernibility’ (1989: 7) to these terms, constructing a pure optical or sound situation, a ‘reality’ in which



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mind and body merge. In the films of Yasujiroˉ Ozu, for example, an ‘any-space-whatever’ incubates a pure optical- and sound-situation that ‘reaches the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation’ whose mental and physical aspects are identical (1989: 16). Deleuze gives an account of the shot of the vase in Late Spring that utilises the same formulas we are familiar with from Difference and Repetition: ‘There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. There is time, time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced’ (1989: 17). Here the ‘emancipated senses’ enter into direct relation with ‘time and thought’ (1989: 17) and the opsign, Deleuze tells us, ‘makes time and thought perceptible, makes them visible and of sound’ (1989: 18). Clearly this is quite different from the indirect presentation of duration by the movement-image. There, we were constantly encountering the organic limits of the sensory-motor and of the narrative, of the protagonist and their world. In these images a whole ‘appeared’ beyond the limits of the protagonists’ sensibility or the world in which they lived, a whole evoked in moments of supersensible excess that expressed their ‘beyond’. As a result, the direct presentation of duration will require a new brain­– a­ brain-screen as Deleuze will call it­– ­a whole new image of thought. But as well it will require a new body capable of living the experience, capable of grasping this ‘intolerable and unbearable’ thing (Deleuze 1989: 18). The intolerable and unbearable are negative presentations in relation to the sensory-motor, but insofar as they ‘outstrip our sensory-motor capacities’ (Deleuze 1989: 18) they make us aware of something else, of a power lying beyond the limits of the organism. Pure optical or sound situations are the Ideas of modern cinema, they are the real experience of time, time-images expressing spatio-temporal dynamisms. At this point cinema finds ‘a means of knowledge and action out of pure vision’ (Deleuze 1989: 18), out of passive synthesis, out of a politics of passivity (Deleuze 1989: 19).44 But what do we actually see? What is this ‘vision’ actualised in the time-image, this vision of time itself? We do not see ‘something’, just as ‘we’ are no longer there in the sense we might normally understand it. ‘Vision’ is neither of the subject nor the object, but exists only in their dissolution into a ­sensation, into an event. What then is an event? An event is the emergence of life and time undetermined by a transcendental subjectivity, whether we understand it in Kant’s terms as the conditions of possible experience, or as the sensory-motor ‘schemata’ (Deleuze 1989: 20). The event, Deleuze tells us, is ‘the part that cannot be reduced to what happens: that part of

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inexhaustible possibility that constitutes the unbearable, the intolerable, the visionaries part’ (1989: 19–20). Vision qua passive synthesis is an undetermined event that constructs its own conditions of emergence. What we see in the time-image (a vision, remember, without subject or object) is therefore the supersensible, ‘the thing in itself’ as Deleuze explicitly calls it (1989: 20), the virtual in its undetermined infinity expressed in the actual as its problematic Idea. But despite the grandiose dimensions of the language, such ‘visions’ can be banal even while being overwhelmingly sublime (Ozu). The time-image will emerge from the wreckage of the sensory-motor schema­– ­from the wreckage, we are tempted to say, of enlightenment rationalism caused by the war (which Deleuze rather cavalierly describes in a paragraph)­– a­ fter the actual is ‘cut off’ from any pre-existing reality it once inhabited, and the virtual is purged of cliché and ‘starts to be valid for itself’ (1989:127). ‘For the time-image to be born’, Deleuze tells us, ‘the actual image must enter into relation with its own virtual image as such [. . .] An image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual, must be constituted’ (1989: 273). The time-image is actual and virtual ‘at the same time’, its components being, Deleuze tells us, ‘totally reversible’ (1989: 69) and in ‘continual exchange’ (1989: 70) to the point they ‘exchange their roles and become indiscernible’ (1989: 127) within the transcendental brain-screen. This ‘coalescence of an actual image and its virtual image’ (1989: 127). This sensation, an intellectual-feeling that creates the future by actualising the undetermined, the event, the catastrophe of chaos cleansing its medium of everything that went before. Once more the cast and terminology of Difference and Repetition returns, as Deleuze introduces Nietzsche’s deconstruction of truth by ‘the power of the false’ to explore post-war documentary cinema. Here, ‘I is another’ (1989: 133) Deleuze repeats, an irreducible multiplicity that escapes political control. This is a politics of the new, a transcendental politics in other words, because: ‘What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence’ (Deleuze 1989: 146). In Cinema 2 the sublime time-image animates a new figure (although one drawn once more from Artuad), the ‘spiritual automaton’ whose passivity is inhuman but who is all the more alive for it, automatically dancing to the rhythms of the virtual (and it is not a revolution if there is no dancing!). Here the real unfolds itself directly in an image that seems animated and animating in the same way that the Idea was, ‘producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’ (1989: 156).45 This



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spiritual automaton, Deleuze explains, is both what forces thinking and what thinks under this shock, it is both thought and feeling, a sublime irruption of intellectual-feelings within the multiplied and now fully artistic brain-body, a dispersed and inorganic body pulsing with the dynamism of a passive self, a creative self, a self always in the process of being destroyed and reborn. This is the culmination, but also the overcoming of the ‘sublime cinema’ of the movement-image (Deleuze 1989: 157), because in it the brain is finally able to ‘truly’ think the whole. Those early, valiant experiments in the movement-image showed the way, because Eisenstein (in particular), Epstein or Murnau all understood that thought in cinema was achieved through montage. Through montage­– ­which they pushed to its limits within the confines of the movement-image­– ­the shock that causes thought is transmitted to us, overwhelming our sensory-motor so we can no longer say ‘I see’ or ‘I hear’, but in their place see and hear a nothing that goes beyond us and makes us say ‘I FEEL’. With the spiritual automaton we have, Deleuze writes, a ‘totally physiological sensation’, which is nothing less than ‘the cinematographic I THINK’ (1989: 158). It is this passive self, this spiritual automaton, this figure acting under ‘higher control’ that connects conscious and unconscious thought (Deleuze 1989: 165) and allows ‘this powerlessness to think at the heart of thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 166). This powerlessness is the fissure or crack acting as the vital core of thought, its impetus and its absence, and that animates modern cinema in all its forms. It is the thought of the impossibility of thought, a thought that can only be thought but can never be comprehended consciously as such, an unthought that is forever producing a thought, an art, and a cinema that continuously returns us to its mysterious source. Thought, Deleuze tells us­– p ­ araphrasing Nietzsche’s eternal return­– i­s the ‘repetition of its own birth’ (1989: 165). And what is this birth? What is this genetic event giving rise to thought? It is, Deleuze says ‘a little time in its pure state’ (1989: 169), the pure form of time, the third synthesis of time, the future as it emerges in its unthinkable and so utterly undetermined freedom. There is no longer a necessary link between humanity and the world, quite the opposite because it is precisely the lack of any link that is the driving force of the time-image. The time-image is an image of this intolerable gap, this abyss or crack, this difference between imagination and reason, between passive and active synthesis, between virtual and actual, finite and infinite. This fissure can never be thought or seen but can nevertheless be felt, it is an outside that can be folded inside as images of itself. In its variants (Paolo Pasolini’s theorem, the

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i­ncommensurable in Jean-Luc Goddard, the impossible in Marguerite Duras, etc. (Deleuze 1989: 182)) modern montage does not try to associate images, even at the limits of what can be sensed, rather it is an operation of ‘differentiation’ that establishes various potentials and produces something new from them (1989: 180). Indeed, for Deleuze this is the essence of modernism itself, which is in this sense both ‘critical’ and ‘experimental’. We end where we began, or at least where Deleuze began his book on Kant, with a philosophical reversal (here there is only one): ‘Give me a body then’ (1989: 189). What does this enigmatic phrase mean? It means the body is no longer an obstacle to thought, but its source, the source of what is unthought, which is life. And as a result, it will force us to think outside the Kantian categories and instead according to the categories of life, the postures and attitudes of the body itself. ‘It is through the body’, Deleuze tells us, ‘that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought’ (1989: 189). What this means in cinematic terms, he explains, is an irrational cut that constitutes new bodies and attitudes­ – t­he ‘unknown body’ (Deleuze 1989: 201)­– t­hrough disjunctions. This, Deleuze claims, is the way modern cinema invents new worlds and ‘restores our reason’ (1989: 201), reorienting ‘thought’ around the sublime disjunction that is its very heart. Here is the affirmation of the excess that cannot appear, but gives everything that appears, the genetic power of cinema qua negative presentation that overcomes itself through its very inadequacy, an inadequacy that is nothing but its greatest power. For cinema must restore ‘the world and body to us on the basis of what signifies their absence’, like, Deleuze tells us, Cézanne (1989: 202). In this way the sublime hallucination of the time-image is not simply neo-Realist, but embodies a thought that has become indistinguishable from art. Sublime art for Deleuze, we might say, is a ‘transcendental realism’ (1986: 177). N OT E S   1. The quotation in the chapter title comes from Deleuze (1978: 13).   2. Deleuze often acknowledged his debt to Lyotard’s ‘great book’ Discours, Figure (1971), ‘a schizo-book’ whose ‘importance’ was ‘that it marks the first generalized critique of the signifier’, and of the structuralist ‘canker’ that ‘has contaminated art or our comprehension of art’ (2004: 214; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 243). Lyotard’s book (which was the publication of his PhD, for which Deleuze had been on the examining committee) went beyond, Deleuze claims, the dialectical and representational relation between signifier and signified that dominated Structuralism



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to explore ‘figure-images’ on the one hand, and the ‘pure figural’ on the other. The first explores the embodiment of designation, its materialisation, and the second elucidates a figural matrix that connects images to their libidinal production (Deleuze 2004: 214–15). Lyotard’s concept of the ‘figural’ was especially important for Deleuze’s analysis of the paintings of Francis Bacon. For a good account of the relationship between Deleuze’s book on Bacon and Lyotard’s early work see Slaughter (2004).   3. For an account of Lyotard’s relation to Lacan, see Myers (2001).   4. In particular, Deleuze focuses on the fact that, as Kant puts it, ‘an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible is possible’ (CJ Second Introduction, II, 175–6: 14–15/83). Christian Kerslake gives an excellent account of the internal variances of Deleuze’s position on this point, and their relation to the wider field of Kant studies. Kerslake argues that the ‘task’ of Deleuze’s book on Kant is to explore the relations between the three Critiques through an analysis of the organisation of the faculties. ‘The difficulty of the book’, he claims, ‘lies in its foregrounding of this neglected doctrine as the key to the critical project’ (2009: 76). This is the key that Deleuze turns to reorganise the relations between the faculties in his own work. As Kerslake puts it: ‘The attainment of immanence is conditional upon the coherence of the reorganisation or redistribution of the faculties’ (2009: 224). Dan Smith, with his usual clarity, also outlines Deleuze’s position here in 2000.   5. As Edward Willat correctly notes: ‘Deleuze develops Kantian Ideas so that they can be realized in sensation and in the way we engage with experience without concepts playing a mediating role’ (2010: 43).  6. Kerslake gives a useful account of Deleuze’s position within the post-­ Kantian tradition, without giving much significance to the sublime (2009: 7–8 and 48–50), while Smith claims that ‘Deleuze will ultimately substitute for the ‘major’ tradition of post-Kantian philosophy­– ­Fichte, Schelling, Hegel­– h ­ is own ‘minor’ tradition comprised of Maimon, Nietzsche and Bergson’ (2006: 44). Smith also does not discuss the sublime.   7. Even more colourfully, Lambert calls both Lyotard and Deleuze ‘Kant’s Bastards’ (2015). Kerslake more soberly calls it Deleuze’s ‘ambivalent Kantianism’ in which: ‘The point is not to simply criticize Kant, but to completely do justice to and attempt to master his system, so that it can generate all its possibilities, its most subtle harmonies, and its deepest meanings or senses’ (2009: 82). More precisely, and quite correctly, he claims Deleuze argues ‘for a revised Transcendental Aesthetic, in which intuition in its intensive form is capable of making more subtle and differentiated connection with the ideal (the space of problems or Ideas) than Kant appears to have suspected’ (2009: 139).   8. For Kant all representations whatever their origin ‘must, as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense. All our knowledge is thus finally subject

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to time, the formal condition of inner sense. In it they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation’ (CPR A98/9: 131/162).   9. As Deleuze puts it in his discussion of Foucault’s ‘neo-Kantianism’: ‘The form of determination (I think) does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time)’ (1988: 61). 10. For an excellent, although differently weighted (and finally critical) explication of the three syntheses, see Ray Brassier (2007: 174–85). We will return to Brassier’s reading in the Postscript. 11. Kerslake points out how Deleuze exploits the ambiguity of Kant’s own account here, which moves between grounding experience in the subject (rationalist representationalism) and in the object (empirical sensation or intuition). ‘Kant’s project is riven between a radical anti-representationalism and an inability to sustain this radicality’ (Kerslake 2009: 171). Deleuze’s reading affirms the anti-representationalism of Kant’s account by resting heavily on the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason where synthesis is understood in terms of apprehension and reproduction. 12. In this sense, we are sensibility ‘all the way down’, inasmuch as perceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are, Deleuze tells us, ‘like’ the sensibility of the senses and refer to a primary sensibility that we (and all else) are. On this level the lived present is constituted by a past of ­cellular heredity and a future of need (1994: 73). 13. Anne Sauvagnargues, in her important book Deleuze: l’empirisme transcendental, writes: ‘Transcendental empiricism is defined thus: to recast transcendental critique while expurgating its conformism; to dissolve Kantian idealism in a renewed empiricism’ (2009: 35). 14. Representation therefore depends on relations of resemblance and contiguity: ‘In order to be represented the former present must resemble the present one, and must be broken up into partially simultaneous presents with very different durations which are then contiguous with one another and, even at the limit, contiguous with the present present’ (Deleuze 1994: 80). This passage supports Henry Somers-Hall’s elegant argument that Deleuze’s three syntheses of time repeat (with difference, obviously) the three syntheses that for Kant articulate the imagination and the understanding, and make representation possible: apprehension (habit on Deleuze’s account), comprehension (memory) and apperception (the empty form of time) (2013: 60–1). 15. As Deleuze puts it: ‘In the eternal return, univocal being is not only thought and even affirmed but effectively realized’ (1994: 41–2). 16. Identity revolving around difference would be, Deleuze explains, a ‘Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept’, this concept being the eternal return (1994: 40–1). It would only be in this sense then that we could accept Christian Kerslake’s argument that ‘Deleuze represents the late flowering of the project, begun in the immediate wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,



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to complete consistently the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy’ (2009: 5). 17. A complaint that Deleuze will often return to, ultimately in his last published essay where he writes: ‘The transcendental is entirely denatured [when immanence is attributed to a universal subject or object], for it then simply redoubles the empirical (as with Kant)’ (2001: 27). 18. The fundamental problem is, as Deleuze has it: ‘Transcendental philosophy discovers conditions which still remain external to the conditioned. Transcendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of ­internal genesis’ (1983: 91). 19. Deleuze is once more following Kant closely here: ‘Kant never ceased to remind us that Ideas are essentially “problematic” ’ (1994: 168). Or again, ‘Kant was without doubt the first to accept the problematic not as a fleeting uncertainty but as the very object of the Idea and thereby as an indispensable horizon of all that occurs or appears’ (1990: 54). Reason in this sense is the faculty of posing problems, inasmuch as its objects are outside possible experience and so can only be posed as problems. This, Dan Smith will claim, ‘is the only component of Kant’s theory of Ideas that Deleuze will adopt without question’ (2006: 47). 20. On the respective roles of the transcendental illusion and antinomy in Kant and Deleuze, see Somers-Hall (2009). 21. While Deleuze describes this aspect of thought as the ‘love’ it has for traversing and connecting its various faculties, it also implies an ‘anger’ that defines a ‘revolutionary situation’ which, Deleuze writes, ‘causes the Idea to explode into the actual’ (1994: 246). This would be a loving destruction, or what Deleuze also calls a ‘sublime occasion’ (1994: 190). 22. This point has generally received little attention in the secondary literature. Among the few exceptions, Janne Vanhanen puts it very precisely in his great book Encounters with the Virtual when he writes that Deleuze’s theory of the discordant operation of the faculties in Difference and Repetition is ‘derived from Kant’s concept of the sublime’ (2010: 15). We will examine Nick Land’s use of Deleuze’s understanding of the sublime in more detail a little further on. Numerous commentators have surprisingly tried to make links between Deleuze’s philosophy and Kant’s theory of the beautiful and its various attendant concepts (aesthetic idea, genius) in the Third Critique. I have not tried to engage with these, hoping that my own account is convincing enough. The most developed account in this regard is Steven Shaviro’s Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics (2009). 23. My thanks to Louis Schreel for this point. 24. In his book Foucault Deleuze clearly articulates this genetic force in terms of an unrepresentable ‘outside’. Foucault’s research into conditions was, Deleuze claims, ‘a sort of neo-Kantianism’, but differs from Kant (and aligns with Deleuze) in investigating the conditions of real experience, and so being on the side of the object rather than that of the ­transcendental

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s­ ubject (1988: 60; see also 2006: 245–50). Foucault divides these ­conditions into visibilities (i.e. intuition) and statements (i.e. understanding), which he understands as being always already historicised. According to Kant these faculties are coordinated by schema, which Foucault understands as being the historical distribution of power. Power, he argues, is established through a ‘diagram’ of the relation of forces that underlies it. This diagram can never be actualised, because it is the virtual genesis of the differential but mutually determining relations between the two ‘heterogeneous forms of knowledge’ (i.e. faculties) constituting power (1988: 82). The diagram then, cannot be seen or articulated but is nevertheless the real condition of the visible and the sayable, and what we see and say is in this sense necessarily the presentation of the unpresentable (1988: 83). Power is therefore the ‘outside’, but it is a transcendental outside, one constituted by the moving matter that is seen and said, ‘folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside’ (1988: 97). Equally, the outside is the outside of the inside, and has no existence outside of that inside. This would therefore be the nature of Deleuze’s ‘negative presentation’, it is the inside of the outside and does not express what it lacks, but merely what of itself must not be seen or said in order for it to continue to become. As Deleuze very beautifully puts it: ‘Thought shelters in itself what resists thought’ (1978b: n.p.). 25. Similarly, in the last chapter on ‘The Image of Thought’ in Deleuze’s book on Proust (which contains the first formulations of a sublime aesthetic that will appear more or less unchanged for the rest of his career) he writes: ‘The signs of art force us to think: they mobilize pure thought’ (1973: 163). 26. The ‘dark precursor’, or as Deleuze also calls it the ‘object = x’, is a concept that I have not developed here, but obviously refers to what Kant calls the ‘object = x’, or the transcendental synthesis of the imagination allowing the understanding to recognise an intuition as an object, and so apply categorical judgments that determine its features as a representation. Deleuze reinterprets this ‘object’ to refer to the transcendental synthesis by which different intensities are able to maintain consistency within the repetitions that actualise them, and by which they communicate with other intensities to form systems. As Deleuze writes: ‘Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated’ (1994: 119). In other words, the dark precursor articulates the ‘divergent series’ of the virtual and the actual, making ‘this singular object the convergence point of the divergent series as such’ (2004b: 184), but ‘in itself’ it has no place (2004b: 185). The ‘object = x’ is therefore a formula for the sublime schema of disjunctive synthesis in Deleuze, which is also a far better description of ‘negative presentation’. As Deleuze writes: ‘This void [the ‘object = x’] is, however, not a non-



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being; or at least this non-being is not the being of the negative, but rather the positive being of the “problematic,” the objective being of a problem and of a question’ (2004b: 189–90). 27. Deleuze commented later that ‘Anti-Oedipus marks a break’ (1995: 144), a break instigated by his collaboration with Guattari, who, he said, had ‘gone further than I had’ in engaging with real political processes (1995: 13). In this sense, the problem with the ‘structuralism’ of Difference and Repetition is that actualisation of the ideal genesis of the virtual ‘cancels’ this genetic element (see 1994: 228), meaning that despite its materiality the passive, or ideal genesis of sensation (i.e. genetic ‘structure’) can nevertheless only be ‘thought’ as the ‘sufficient reason’ (Deleuze 1994: 222) of actualisation. In this sense, and as François Dosse has concluded: ‘Anti-Oedipus is conceived as a veritable war machine against structuralism’ (2012: 135). It introduces a new term­– ­‘machine’, and in particular ‘desiring machines’­– i­ntended to ‘dethrone’ the notion of structure (Dosse 2012: 135). 28. Kant writes: ‘All knowledge by means of which I am enabled to know and determine a priori what belongs to empirical knowledge may be entitled an anticipation [. . .] sensation is just that element which cannot be ­anticipated’ (CPR A166/B208: 202/209). 29. Another of Schreel’s essays, ‘ “Empty Time”, the Temporality of SelfAffection in Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime’ (2015), pursues this moment in the Third Critique in relation to Lyotard’s understanding of it. 30. As Kant puts it, it is ‘in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation’ (CJ §23: 99–100/167). 31. Deleuze had already explored the genetic role of chaos in his book on Hume. For Hume the mind was constituted by Ideas in the imagination (the Ideas being principles of human nature­– ­or the ground of habits), but in its depths the mind was delirium (Deleuze 1991: 23). Delirium is pure change and indifference, but the Ideas allow us to find order in the chaos (habit), and then to transcend the limits of our mind through the process of association. This is the moment at which the subject is constituted, ‘subjected’ as Deleuze will put it (1991: 31), the moment at which the ‘fiction’ established by the Ideas of the subject emerges from and finally overcomes the natural delirium of the mind (1991: 80). But despite this, reason and delirium cannot be distinguished in the depths of the mind: ‘Madness is human nature related to the mind’, Deleuze writes, ‘just as good sense is the mind related to human nature; each one is the reverse of the other. This is the reason why we must reach the depths of madness and solitude in order to find a passage to good sense’ (1991: 84). 32. In ‘Energumen Capitalism’, Lyotard’s review of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, he praises their subversion of Marx and proposes to do something similar through his analysis of the ‘libidinal economy’, which focuses on circulation as what is most unconsciously political in Freud,

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and what is most unconsciously libidinal in Marx (2014: 170). In this hybridisation of Marx and Freud, ‘the only untouchable axiom bears on the condition of metamorphosis and transfer: exchange value, [. . . which] defines both economic and libidinal economy’ (2014: 188–9). As a result, the law of value is the only principle of energetic connection, and while capitalism instrumentalises what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘desiring production’ for its own purposes, capitalism also embodies what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘schizophrenia’. In this sense, capitalism is also, according to Lyotard, a ‘positive delirium’ that puts authorities and traditional institutions to death, it is, he says, the ‘active decrepitude of beliefs and securities. Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities, of imaginations, of bodies’ (1993: 254). In this sense, art is the exemplary expression of what Lyotard calls ‘necrophagous life’, a force capable of punching ‘a hole in the hideous cycle of reproduction through consumption’ (2001: 40). This element of Lyotard’s thought was very influential on Land. 33. The artistic expression of this stage in Land’s thought is the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman, who supply the title page and the title of Land’s collected works, Fanged Noumena. Jake Chapman did a Masters degree supervised by Land at Warwick University in the 1990s, and published his own book of experimental writing­– ­Meatphysics­ – v­ ery much in Land’s spirit: ‘The “poetic” ’, he writes there, ‘permits the inhuman to evade the imperatives of rigid communication exactly within the privileged terms of human essence’ (2003: n.p.). ‘Death is the thinking womb-man’s delirium’ (2003: n.p.). 34. Thus it is, as Deleuze will say in a phrase he often repeats, ‘an outside which is further away than any external world and even any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer’ (1988: 86). 35. Der Geist in Geistesgefühl (‘intellectual-feeling’) can also mean ‘spirit’. 36. As Deleuze and Guattari have it: ‘The Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill up, to varying degrees, matter that has no empty spaces, is profoundly schizoid’ (1983: 19). 37. Wiener’s statement was: 1.  The artist may construct the piece 2.  The piece may be fabricated 3.  The piece need not be built Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the condition of receivership. (Lawrence Weiner, quoted in Alberro 2003: 97) 38. Here, Deleuze is ironically echoing a famous passage in Kant: ‘This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze’ (CPR A141/B180–1: 183/190).



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39. In Duchamp’s 1955 interview with James Johnson Sweeney he says: ‘I believe that art is the only kind of activity in which man, as man, shows himself to be a true individual capable of going beyond the animal phase. Art is an opening toward regions which are not ruled by space and time’ (1973: 137). Deleuze and Guattari argue the opposite, claiming that ‘art begins with the animal’ (1994: 183). It should be obvious here that Peter Osbourne’s criticisms of Deleuze’s philosophy of art as being ‘a principled exclusion of both its conceptual and historical aspects’ and of having no way of distinguishing art and non-art (2013: 10) are all correct, albeit in a positive sense. 40. Guattari says that this is a ‘discordance of different ways of beating time’, which is ‘set into refrains’ (2013: 206). 41. As Guattari puts it in Chaosmosis, the art work has an ‘essential dimension of finitude: the facticity of being-there, without qualities, without past, without future, in absolute dereliction and yet still a virtual nucleus of complexity without bounds’ (1995: 84). 42. In the Introduction to The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting, Alliez writes that ‘the sole object [of this book] is to bring to light a thinking at work in “modern painting” (to show that it thinks and how it thinks)’ (2016: xxi). 43. Deleuze was very influenced by Jean Epstein’s writing in this regard, indeed perhaps even to the point, as Jacques Rancière has claimed, of simply ‘repeating Jean Epstein’s dramaturgy’ of cinema (2006: 6). Epstein theorised the nature of cinema’s ‘thought’ in terms of Bergson’s philosophy (beginning, as Deleuze does, from the idea that an image is a thing (Epstein 2012: 284)) and in this regard, Epstein certainly pre-dates Deleuze in locating movement as the ‘essence’ of cinema. This Epstein (and other Impressionists) called ‘photogénie, which was movement in its widest, most spiritual sense, movement as the ‘life’ that animated all things and merged them in an open and changing whole (2012: 294–5). As Epstein writes: ‘Cinema and literature, everything moves, the rapid angular succession approaches the perfect circle of impossible simultaneous action’ (2012: 273). 44. As Deleuze puts it: ‘It is not the cinema that turns away from politics, it becomes completely political, but in another way’ (1989: 19). 45. We are reminded of Difference and Repetition again at this point: ‘Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter’ (1994: 139).

4. Framing the Abyss – The Deconstruction of the Sublime

Both Derrida and Deleuze develop transcendental philosophy in the direction of difference, and both use the sublime to dissolve the bridge it supposedly forms between the sensible and supersensible, just as both see the foundation of experience to be transcendental difference. As well, they share a conception of difference that rejects the principle of contradiction, a difference that conditions everything but is not itself given. Perhaps it is this that inspired Derrida to claim ‘nearly total affinity’ with Deleuze’s philosophical ‘theses’ (2001: 192). Nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between their respective accounts of difference. For Derrida, transcendental différance deconstructs the possibility of any supersensible ‘outside’ emerging from the sublime experience (différance is the condition of its impossibility, we might say), and so poses itself against any form of empiricism, including Deleuze’s ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ version. As Derrida clearly puts it: The profundity of the empiricist intention must be recognized beneath the naiveté of its historical expressions. It is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretension or modesty. We say dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens. (1978: 151)

Empiricism dreams of the outside, dreams of its outside, and this dream forever stands in the way of its fruitless desire to break through. So although différance deconstructs these ambitions, it also locates itself within the Kantian distinction of transcendental and empirical realms as the condition of their deconstruction. This is Derrida’s version of Critique, one in which the deconstruction of metaphysics is ‘this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between the inside and the outside of philosophy’ (1982: 6). In this sense, the abyss between 164



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the Kantian faculties remains the subject’s condition of possibility and impossibility, and Derrida’s work hovers unfaithfully on the edge of a recognisably Kantian project. Although, as we have seen, Deleuze finds the conditions for his own version of transcendental philosophy in Kant, and specifically in a close and arguably ‘faithful’ reading of Kant’s sublime, this leads him to a ‘higher power’ of difference, one by which its repetition as sensation destroys any transcendental subjectivity as it launches itself onto a path of experimentation to create the new. In this sense difference is the transcendental condition for what is, but according to Deleuze it is a condition of real rather than possible experience (1994: 154). For Deleuze difference is thought, whereas for Derrida différance is the condition of thought, a thought in which the subject and its sensibility are not shattered but continually re-inscribed in a playful and infinite deferral. As Derrida categorically puts it: ‘By definition, difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude’ (1976: 53). As a result, Derrida’s ‘sign’ inscribes the limit of thought, a limit whose appearance describes, and in describing defers, the real. Deleuze on the other hand, couches his transcendental or superior empiricism in almost opposite terms. The sign, he says, marks the overcoming of the subject, and pushes experience into a ‘lived reality’ where ‘pure presence’ appears with the ‘ “disparate” as its unit of measure’ (1994: 69). At this point, as Deleuze and Guattari will later say: ‘Writing functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes’ (1987: 141). Understood as an expression of pure difference that simultaneously constructs the infinity of a world, the sign goes beyond any linguistic conditions to participate directly in the real. It is in this sense that Deleuze, not without irony, claims he was not the most brilliant philosopher of his generation, but rather the most naive and innocent. In a remark that could be taken as referring to Derrida he said: ‘I’ve never worried about going beyond metaphysics or the death of philosophy, and I never made a big thing about giving up Totality, Unity and the Subject’ (1995: 89). In many ways this remark sums up the differences between the philosophers, and most importantly their different visions of the future of transcendental philosophy. On one hand is the infinite task of mourning the loss of presence and the death of metaphysics, and on the other the infinite task of creating a future in excess of the human. To put it in the simplest possible terms, this is the difference between the impossibility of the sublime (Derrida) and its immediate presence and joyful reality (Deleuze).

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WRITING ON/AS ART When Jacques Derrida seeks the truth in painting, or at least when he poses the question as to what ‘the truth in painting’ might mean, or what is, as it quickly becomes, ‘the idiom of truth in painting’ (1987: 5), he draws our attention to the way thought ‘circles’ this abyssal truth and to their necessary but elliptical presupposition in any discussion or disclosure of truth.1 This ‘circling’ of truth emerges in the Heideggerean attempt to locate the es gibt or there is of the art work ‘itself’ through a conceptual frame that differentiates it from what it is not. To ask about the truth in painting is therefore to inscribe­– o ­ r better de-scribe­ – ­art within the frame of its question, a question that already traces the form of its answer, revealing and concealing its object, the truth in and of art.2 To reveal and conceal, this is the economy of the abyssal truth, the abyss of a presence or origin that is constituted ‘reciprocally by the nonorigin, the trace’ (1976: 61). As a result, ‘The trace is the différance which opens appearance and signification’ (1976: 65) but cannot itself be sensed or even, perhaps, understood.3 The art work therefore presents its truth, it is the appearance of the truth that it is, but because appearance attains its sense through the trace, through différance, Derrida argues: ‘Representation mingles with what it represents’ and ‘the point of origin becomes ungraspable’ (1976: 36). Différance is a ‘mingling’ of presence and its frame, and means representation rests upon ‘an order which no longer belongs to sensibility’ (1982a: 5), but equally is not entirely of the order of the concept. ‘What makes possible the presentation of the being-present’, Derrida argues, is that ‘it is never present as such’ (1982a: 6). As a result, différance resists one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, that between the sensible and the intelligible, an opposition that is central for Kant’s understanding of the aesthetic. ‘I owe you the truth in painting’, Cezanne famously said, but the truth in painting is, according to Derrida, the abyss of truth. As if the there is of painting, of its metaphysical presence, was ‘split in itself’ (1976: 36). The very presence of the es gibt of painting is always already split from itself­– ­falling into the abyss­– ­because it requires the trace of what it is not (i.e. the frame) in order to appear as such. Presence is always already re-presented, which means, Derrida argues, ‘The thing itself is a sign’ (1976: 49). This has radical consequences for experience as much as for art, as Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment will show, or rather write. ‘Experience’ is a metaphysical concept describing our relationship with a presence, and as such must be deconstructed. This, Derrida argues, is ‘the only way to escape “empiricism” ’ (1976: 60).4



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Derrida shares this escape with Kant, and indeed the deconstruction of the empirical presence of an object of experience is broadly ‘critical’ in the Kantian sense. Derrida’s project would in this sense be the discovery of experience’s transcendental conditions of possibility in the differential trace and its economy of the sign, giving painting­– ­and more widely aesthetics­– a­ fundamentally linguistic base.5 In this sense, all texts (i.e. everything) gain their meaning through a process of writing ‘in which the central signified, the original and transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely’ (1978: 281). In this way Derrida reads Kant’s Third Critique in terms of the first, inasmuch as différance and its infinite play is the condition of all possible experience, including the experience giving rise to what Kant calls aesthetic judgment. But unlike Kant, différance qua condition of possible experience is not strictly speaking conceptual for Derrida, just as the conditions of moral freedom are not supersensible. As a result, there is no necessity for aesthetic experience to bridge the ‘abyss’ between them, because the differences between the faculties are all conditioned by the same differential logic. This logic therefore disqualifies in advance the Kantian claim that aesthetics is able to produce a reflective rather than a determinate judgment (but it also disqualifies a determinate judgment in Kant’s sense), inasmuch as any judgmental bridge between the particular to the universal inevitably falls into the abyss of différance. Perhaps then, the most succinct formulation of deconstruction in this context might be: the bridge is the abyss. This is not to say, however, that art will not have its own realm of operation for Derrida, but its experience will ultimately emerge through the same textual deceits as every other, and its difference will never be more than relative. Derrida understands the sensation of an art work (i.e. the intuition of its presence) as a linguistic sign, and any claim that art escapes this logic­– ­that it ‘restores in authoritarian silence an order of presence’, as Derrida puts it (1987: 156)­– w ­ ill be vigorously deconstructed. Asked some years later about this passage Derrida explains that it is precisely the mutism of the art object, its ability of ‘taking the breath away’ (1987: 156), that ‘produces an effect of full presence’ (1994: 12, italics added), a presence that is therefore contradictory. The silence of art is due to it being unable to speak, and while this could mean that it is ‘completely heterogeneous to words’, in fact its silence demands interpretation, making an artwork always already full of ‘virtual discourses’ (Derrida 1994: 13). As Marie-Claire RopasWuilleumier has succinctly put it: ‘That would be the truth no longer in painting but rather of painting: to escape the truth whose simulation

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it permitted’ (1994: 68). A ‘stranger to discourse’ (Derrida 1987: 156) perhaps, but art, as soon as it is experienced, is read, it is discursive, it is, Derrida tells us, simply one of the ‘discursive institutions that do not have the form of a written discourse’ (1994: 14).6 What does this mean for us, for a possible aesthetics? It would be a mistake, I think, to imagine that Derrida denies the power of aesthetic affect, he simply wants to inscribe this power within the overarching economy of différance. This does, however, constrain the art work in certain ways, because it makes any claim to a ‘pure’ sensation impossible. Any such claim would always already be inscribed within the transcendental conditions of inscription itself, and so art writes its sensation, as it does its silence. Unlike with Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari, there simply is no ‘real’ experience in Derrida’s terms, the art work always emerges in and as its inscription, especially any art work that claims otherwise. Nevertheless, art’s condition of possibility qua inscription (i.e. différance) is ‘itself’ ahistorical and transcendental, even though this condition only exists as its historical manifestation, however this is ‘read’. For Derrida, this does not ‘erase’ experience, even if it puts its metaphysical claims ‘under erasure’. The thing as sign­– ­for example the work of art­– ­appears in its ‘truth’ through what Derrida calls a ‘generalized writing’ (1976: 55), or ‘arche-writing’ (1976: 61). This inscription of différance is thus the transcendental, or as Derrida puts it the ‘ultra-transcendental’ (1976: 61) condition of everything (including transcendentals),7 rather than only, as in Kant, the conditions of possible experience of a finite consciousness.8 This ultra-transcendental is, he writes, ‘the formation of form’ (1976: 63), it is what gives experience, but is not itself experienced.9 In framing the abyss writing as différance, as the play of the trace, draws out form, it draws the thing and its experience. And in fact­– ­it is no surprise­– ­when he writes about art Derrida is going to prefer to write about drawing, about the drawings of Valerio Adami and Gérard Titus-Carmel for example, or more significantly in Memoires of the Blind Derrida explicitly connects drawing and writing through the abyssal trace (his example is the presence/absence of the ‘object’ of the self-portrait) that is ‘the invisible condition of the possibility of drawing’, or, as Derrida puts it, the ‘transcendental blindness’ (1993: 41) of drawing, and indeed art ‘itself’. This transcendental blindness is the condition for visibility as such, because one cannot see the thing ‘itself’ and simultaneously draw it. To draw is to defer, to look away, to betray the mute presence of the ‘Thing’ in order to represent it, in order for it to be experienced in its spacing. To see something, for example the truth in painting, requires drawing a line around it, a line which always already defers noumenal



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presence, plunging it into our abyssal blind spot.10 Drawing/writing the line that forms the thing, that reveals and conceals it, this, Derrida claims, is the transcendental condition of any experience or truth, the condition of ‘things’, of their appearance as such: The possibility of the difference between light and shadow traces a line that I can then retrace with the point of my pencil. [. . .] the possibility of this repetition, this iterability, marks in advance the very threshold of perception. Activity is at the service of a certain passivity. And yet this passivity is not passive with respect to some given thing, light or shadow, but with respect to a difference. Activity and passivity touch together or are articulated along a differential border. This is the very moment of the trace. (2010: 17)

Framing and so circling the abyss, that is where we start, and that is where we will remain, because we cannot avoid it, even when, as Derrida warns, one rushes towards the alternative, the ‘false exit’ of ‘empirical chit-chat’, a ‘spring-green impulsive avant-gardism’ (1987: 30). As we have already seen this is the realm of contemporary art and one of its most cherished political ambitions, the production of a ‘spring-green’ new that is the presence of the unconditioned. We will return to this seasonal optimism of avant-garde contemporary art, and the withering of its blooms under a melancholy deconstructive gaze­– ­winter is coming­– ­but first we must trace its origins in Derrida’s reading of Kant.11 Later in this chapter I will consider Derrida’s influence on the historical development of contemporary artistic practice, which is considerable. But the point that can already be made is that différance does not privilege conceptual or post-conceptual artistic practices over aesthetic ones, inasmuch as both operate according to the economy of ‘writing’ that Derrida elaborates. What can be said, as I will later argue, is that Derrida’s philosophy did contribute to the new formal and t­heoretical approaches art developed in ‘postmodernism’. T H E P L E A S U R E S O F T H E PA R E R G O N Kant’s Third Critique was designed to ‘unite’ (CJ Second Introduction II, 176: 15/44) the abyss between the first two Critiques, ‘and all the irreducible oppositions which the first two Critiques had determined’ (Derrida 1987: 35). This was achieved through an aesthetic judgment of beauty giving, and these are Kant’s words, a ‘sign’ or a ‘trace’ (1987 §42, 298 and 300: 165 and 167/231 and 234) of a transcendental principle of agreement between nature and the imagination. As we have seen, this ‘sign’ is a feeling of pleasure, a pleasure derived from the harmonious free play of the faculties that is its a priori condition,

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a ­pleasure that is, then, purely formal and ‘disinterested’. Such judgments are purely subjective, but nevertheless claim universal objectivity, meaning pleasure acts in subjective experience as an analogue of transcendental reality. As Derrida explains, ‘it will not be a question of constituting an aesthetic [in the sense of an artistic taste], even a general one, but of analyzing the formal conditions of possibility of an aesthetic judgment in general, hence of an aesthetic objectivity in general’ (1987: 42). The ‘formal conditions of possibility’ of aesthetic judgement establish an analogy between subjective aesthetic experience (and in particular ‘pleasure’) and its universal, supersensible and so objective ‘truth’. But this analogical ‘bridge’ can only be established through examples, through analogies representing the aesthetic analogy that ‘bridges’ the faculties and crosses the abyss separating subjective and objective experience. In the purity of the formal auto-affection of pleasure lies the hetero-affection of an object. In this sense, Derrida claims: ‘The abyss calls for analogy, but analogy plunges endlessly into the abyss as soon as a certain art is needed to describe analogically the play of analogy’ (1987: 36). The truth in painting that bridges the abyss, according to Kant, emerges through its power of analogy, but this power itself appears analogically, in its examples (judgments of beauty concerning art for example), meaning the appearance of the truth in painting (the sign or trace inscribing its transcendental condition) is simultaneously its endless deferral. Another way we can understand this is through the distinction Kant makes in the Third Critique between transcendental and metaphysical principles, a distinction Paul de Man usefully develops. A transcendental principle gives the universal condition under which an object can be an object of cognition, while a metaphysical principle gives the a priori condition under which an empirical object can be further determined. ‘The difference between transcendental and metaphysical concepts’, de Man tells us, ‘is that the latter imply an empirical moment that necessarily remains external to the concept, whereas the former remain entirely interconceptual’ (1996: 71). Derrida’s strategy in reading the Third Critique is to argue that the frame of analogy it employs purports to establish a transcendental bridge between imagination and reason, but can only do so by resorting to empirical examples that keep the argument in the realm of metaphysics, always already returning us to the abyss of truth, something made even clearer, as we will see, in Derrida’s analysis of the oral economy of mimesis in the Third Critique. For de Man this means that ‘transcendental philosophy is always the critical philosophy of metaphysics’ (1996: 71), which could be understood as a description of the ‘Kantian’ nature of Derrida’s own project



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inasmuch as it counterposes the transcendental principle of différance to the empirical object required by metaphysics. For Kant the art work is the occasion­– ­or empirical analogy­– ­of aesthetic analogy ‘itself’ qua transcendental principle (i.e. qua aesthetic judgment), and so only reveals the truth in painting by concealing it. As Derrida’s first words on the Third Critique have it: ‘Abyss and satire of the abyss’ (1987: 17). The analogical aesthetic judgment operates, by analogy, through the art work, meaning it has always already inscribed the deferral of its supersensible truth, because its analogical description of this truth betrays its ‘representational fidelity’ (Derrida 1993: 30). This, once more, would be art’s ‘transcendental blindness’, as the analogy of analogy it can never reveal the truth of analogy itself. What can never be shown is ‘the invisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of drawing’ (Derrida 1993: 41). In fact art’s truth, or rather the analogical appearance of its truth, will have always already involved ‘a radical and a priori necessary infidelity’ (1976: 39). The truth in painting is therefore a transcendental infidelity. In this sense, Derrida’s reading of the Third Critique seeks to perform the very parergonality that he identifies as the ‘logic’ of Kant’s text, to ‘frame’ it, to show how the example­– ­and first of all the example of a reflective judgment­– ­always already obeys the law of the parergon, a law that determines it and so undermines the very distinction between reflective and determinative judgment) that Kant is attempting to establish. As Irene Harvey points out, Derrida thereby ‘performs by his very betrayal the parergonality that he will later thematize’ (1989: 59). As David Krell has aptly named him, Derrida is The Purest of Bastards (Krell 2000). Derrida finds this transcendental infidelity conditioning­– ­ which means deconstructing­– e­very attempt Kant makes to construct a ‘bridge’ between sensible phenomena and supersensible noumena, the bridge leading us to pure presence. On the most general level Derrida argues that Kant’s bridge begins from the assumption that his system ‘lacks’ something, it lacks the bridge over the abyss between the First and Second Critiques, and it is this very assumption of a ‘lack’ that frames what attempts to fill it. As a result, Derrida writes, ‘the lack formed the frame of the theory. Not its accident but its frame. More or less still: what if the lack were not only the lack of the theory of the frame but the place of the lack in a theory of the frame’ (1987: 42–3). What is lacking creates a frame that in turn determines it, forming a circle that endlessly reveals and conceals its object, forever reopening the abyss. More specifically, the bridge that is lacking will itself be built from lack inasmuch as aesthetic judgment and the pleasure that it gives

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lacks concept, object or enjoyment. As a result, in its generality and specificity, lack will be the condition of possibility for an aesthetic judgment that allows it to (never) bridge the abyss. In this sense Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, Derrida argues, confirms the most fundamental requirement of any discourse on art, which, he says, is to distinguish between the internal or proper sense and the circumstance of the object being talked about. This organizes all philosophical discourses on art, the meaning of art and meaning as such, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. This requirement presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object, here a discourse on the frame. (1987: 45)

And this is the way in which Derrida will frame the Third Critique, making the frame Derrida’s own form of reflective judgment, inasmuch as his close reading of a text frames it and by so doing reveals its ultratranscendental and so universal condition of possibility: the frame itself. As Derrida says in ‘Economimesis’, ‘The fine-arts are always of the frame’ (1981: 7). In other words, the truth in painting emerges through its frame, the ‘truth’ is always a “framing”­– a­ s if by the cops­ –m ­ aking the frame the paradoxical truth in painting, the necessary and universal condition­– ­and so the impossibility­– ­of painting’s truth. As a result, the political application of deconstruction appears first of all, and most urgently, as a form of thought that forever undermines its own limits, and resists those forces that police them, making deconstruction, Derrida quips, ‘an inquiry into the police’ (1987: 331). But the condition of this political intervention is that nothing exists beyond such limits, because the limit itself can never be established as such. Freedom exists only in playing with the limits rather than in going beyond them, and politics only exists on this condition. It is never simply a matter of breaking the rules, but of showing how the rules fail to enforce themselves and inevitably lead, Derrida says, to ‘play’ and ‘chance’ as the ‘real’ ‘economy of language’ (1987: 4). We will see what this means for art soon enough. The frame, Derrida writes, ‘is what separates the internal from the external, with a border that is itself double in its trait, and joins together what it splits’ (1987: 331). Here Derrida’s satirical stratagem becomes clear, as he turns Kant’s example of the frame into the very logic of Kant’s argument, at once the transcendental condition of the bridge of aesthetic judgment and its equally necessary collapse. In this way it is the analogical bridge supplied by aesthetic judgment, the bridge that gives, but in giving endlessly takes away the truth in painting ‘itself’. This is a strange kind of truth indeed, a satirical truth, sarcastic even, a



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truth forever written in and so displaced by the transcendental infidelity of its frame. We ‘interrogate’ (1987: 22) the art work, Derrida says, but in vain, as the art work­– ­for example the shoes painted by Vincent van Gogh­– ­simply ‘look at us, mouth agape, that is, mute, making or letting us chatter on, dumbstruck before those who make them speak’ (1987: 262).12 When asking about the truth in painting it is only the interrogator that speaks and answers with their ‘originary metaphors’. In this sense writing, or the frame, is the supplement that allows presence to present itself, ‘The sign’, Derrida says, ‘is always the supplement of the thing itself’ (1976: 145). Operating from inside the Kantian argument, the better to explore it, the better to explode it, Derrida shows how the reflective aesthetic judgement is a kind of hinge between the empirical particular and the transcendental universal. The question, however, and once more it is the question of the frame, will be how to make a decision about what, exactly, is the essential part of the beautiful object that reveals its universal truth, and what is merely ornamentation or, as Kant calls it, parergon. To identify that it is on the border, on board and overboard, it is the supplement or trace acting as a ‘general predicative structure’ (Derrida 1987: 55).13 Derrida’s examples are Kant’s examples: the clothing on statues, the columns on buildings and the frames of paintings. All of these examples cause problems, because in each the general predicative structure of the parergon­ – ­‘both product and production of the frame’ (Derrida 1987: 71)­– ­constitutes the essence of the inside and outside as such. ‘What constitutes them as parerga’, Derrida writes, ‘is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon’ (1987: 59). As a result lack is constitutive of the essentially beautiful, because it is only by lacking the parergon that the essence can be beautiful. The frame, as Derrida says, ‘is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit (between) the interiority of meaning and all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely’ (1987: 61). We can clearly see here how Derrida’s deconstruction of reflective judgment feeds back into a wider reading of the First Critique. The frame is the schematism, which both requires and rejects the something (noumena) acting as the object of experience. This ‘double-bind’ of what Derrida calls in a discussion of photography an ‘acti/passivity’ (2010: 12) means that the logic of experience demands the supersensible while simultaneously barring its presence. Not by accident, photography will play a crucial role in the art of the 1980s that utilises a Derridean frame,

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because in its very process of ‘reproduction’ it produces an image, an analogy of the analogical itself. ‘So of course’, Derrida tells us, ‘there is a concept of photography as the simple recording of the other as he was, as he appeared there, but it is immediately contaminated by invention in the sense of production, creation, productive imagination’ (2010: 43). The ‘ultra-transcendental’ status of différance, present in the Third Critique in the form of the parergon, present, in other words, in the examples by which it frames its own claims to bridging the abyss, causes this bridge to collapse and sends us back to the conceptual determination of experience­– w ­ ithout remainder­– o ­ f the First Critique. This is deconstruction as immanent critique, whereby thought discovers its own conditions in the impossibility of establishing any such conditions in the first place (see Harvey 1989: 62). Neither form nor ground, the parergon gives, it gives the truth in painting, and the truth in painting is this it gives. But it is impossible to say where this gift takes place, because it has no place, it has neither internal nor external limit and as such is, Derrida says, ‘the unlocatable center of the problem’ (1987: 63) both straightforward and complex. As Derrida puts it: ‘There is frame, but the frame does not exist’ (1987: 81). The parergon, it seems, is nothing less than deconstruction at work, making ‘framing’ a highly satirical version of Critique, and especially of the Third Critique, inasmuch as deconstruction is, Derrida tells us, ‘a certain textual work that gives great pleasure’ (1982: 6, italics added). ECONOMIMESIS While Derrida himself did not explicitly concern himself with modernism as an artistic movement (or at least there is no discussion of it in The Truth in Painting), he did take aim at some of its more cherished assumptions in ‘Economimesis’, an essay he published in 1975 on Kant’s Third Critique. In particular he attacked the autonomy of the art work, the ‘genius’ of the artist (or, more exactly, the theological implications of its analogical structure) and the hierarchy of the arts. All of these ‘deconstructions’, as we shall see, would find their echo and application in ‘postmodern’ art.14 Almost the first words of the essay already make the crucial point: ‘Politics and political economy, to be sure, are implicated in every discourse on art and the beautiful.’ No wonder, when we learn that no philosophy ‘ever had an identity external to its functioning’ (1981: 2), and by implication neither does any art or art work. The question here is what the nature of this ‘functioning’ might be. We have already seen enough to know this functioning is linguistic



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inasmuch as ‘it is’ the necessary deferral, the re-presentation, at work in any metaphysical claim of presence. Beginning from Heidegger, Derrida will claim that ‘différance is certainly but the historical and epochal unfolding of Being or of the ontological difference’ (1982a: 22). Being, to appear, must unfold (within) its own frame, and so can only exist as difference-from-itself. This then, is Derrida’s framing of Kant’s theory of mimesis in the Third Critique; it is, he says, a theory that attempts to bridge the first two Critiques, and so show how the supersensible noumena can appear in the phenomena of art. Derrida therefore seeks to understand what the commitments are of a certain ‘politics’ of inclusion and exclusion­– ­of the frame­– ­that presents ‘mimesis’ in Kant’s text, and the devices, the technology we might say that Kant uses to achieve it. It is the general ‘economy’ of these operations and devices that are ‘political’, but they do not, Derrida hastens to point out, imply a specific political economy in particular. Nevertheless, he notes, the Kantian theory of mimesis is bracketed in the Third Critique by two remarks concerning salary (in §43 and §51). The first defines ‘fine art’ as being a ‘free’ rather than a ‘mercenary art’ (i.e. one undertaken as ‘work’), and the second expands this ‘freedom’ in teleological terms as a practice without ends. As a result, and as David Rodowick succinctly puts it: ‘Art appears only in the absence of money’ (1994: 101). This ‘freeing’ of art from any financial goal will frame the operation of mimesis as analogy, Derrida explains, as it will be art’s ‘freedom’ that provides us with an analogue to the operation of nature, and ‘genius’ will be the mechanism by which this analogy is achieved, because through it art will receive its ‘rule’ from nature.15 Genius, then, is not the imitation of nature, but the way in which nature reflects itself in art, the way in which art is the production of freedom by freedom. So despite the fact that beauty is found in the forms of nature, art is not beautiful when it simply reproduces those forms because such imitation would tie art to external ends and compromise its freedom. Analogy, then, is the mechanism by which beautiful artistic forms mimic rather than reproduce nature. In this way, art (as mimesis) is what embodies ‘natural’ human freedom, lifting us above the physical necessities of animal life. On one side genius separates art from science, because simply ‘knowing’ how to do it is not enough to actually do it, while on the other it separates art from craft, which is ‘work’ that produces things to sell. Art is very similar to aesthetic judgment in this sense, according to Kant, as it is a type of ‘free play’, a pure productivity in which the spontaneous operation of the imagination emerges in conformity to the rules of the understanding in general, but without those rules ­determining

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any actual judgment. Nevertheless, there is also a crucial difference; in being incarnated in an art object natural freedom must draw upon the theoretical and practical knowledges of science and craft in order to become an art work. Genius achieves this transformation through the art of analogy, whereby free play creates a work to the extent that art appears ‘as if it were a product of pure nature’ (1981: 9). The ‘as if’ here marks the crucial articulation achieved by analogical mimesis, through which the undetermined, autonomous and spontaneous power of production (i.e. ‘pure nature’) animates art as it does nature and, as the argument will continue, animates nature as it does divine action. As such, Derrida writes, there is an analogical relation (i.e. mimesis) between art and nature, and beyond this ‘a divine teleology secures the political economy of the Fine Arts’ (1981: 9). The genius makes art like nature makes the world, and nature makes the world like God makes nature. Analogy here articulates a cosmic chain of mimetic necessity­– ­signed, sealed, delivered­– i­n which, as Derrida somewhat sarcastically remarks: ‘God is a poet’ (1981: 12).16 It is the economy of this mimesis that interests Derrida, because once one unpacks its operations the distinction it seeks to draw between general and restricted economies, between freedom and necessity, art and science, play and work become more and more difficult to sustain. In fact, Derrida will argue, these increasingly delirious but nevertheless necessary distinctions supporting the good ‘taste’ of aesthetic judgment will culminate in a disgusting experience that must be vomited from the system. Derrida’s argument is by now familiar: any attempt to demarcate a realm of pure production around the ‘economy’ of the spoken word­– ­even, or especially, one that produces the ‘presence’ of aesthetic pleasure­ – ­involves the re-presentational economy of différance, or writing as its condition of possibility. Derrida writes: ‘The analogical process is also a refluence towards the logos. The origin of analogy, that from which analogy proceeds and towards which it returns, is the logos, reason and word, the source as a mouth and as outlet [embouchure]’ (1981: 13). Art’s analogical mimesis of nature’s productive power, its embodiment of freedom as its teleological Idea, and so its present-ation of supersensible presence, speaks through the mouth and so passes through the ‘body’ of language. Art speaks the words of God, of nature, announcing (once more) the onto-theological claims of logos, but something gets stuck in the artist’s throat, and her beautiful work is accompanied by a reflux that is disgusting. Derrida, we might say, sticks his finger down the throat of God and what comes out is language. Logos emerges as the ‘law’ of mimesis (i.e. analogy) in numerous ways in Kant’s text. Art’s analogy to nature centres on its freedom and



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autonomy, transforming imitation into free production and external effect (i.e. experience) into a subjective auto-affection modelled on the self-presence of the voice. We recognise here Derrida’s abiding enemy, perhaps we could call it the teleological ‘interest’ of his every utterance, a consciousness that announces­– ­and in doing so grounds­– ­its selfpresence in and as speech: ‘This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the element of our thought that is caught in the language of metaphysics’ (1982a: 16). Genius operates according to the rule of free production analogous to nature and so creates a ‘second nature’ like the word of God creates nature itself. It is no accident that the highest art, according to Kant, comes from the mouth of the poet. This analogical hierarchy forms a society of the logos, a ‘logoarchy’ (1981: 14) as Derrida calls it; nature falls from God’s mouth like art from the artist’s, in the full self-presence of its divine utterance. But, Derrida claims, ‘analogy is always language’ (1981: 13). As a result, and despite all of Kant’s claims to the contrary, he cannot banish the outside from his analogical economy of artistic utterance and its immediate self-presence. Once more, the presence of the Idea in the object acting as an aesthetic bridge between experience and a priori truth plunges into the abyss. Différance is always already there, the invisible condition of beauty as pure auto-affection and transcendental presence. Although supposedly disengaged from interest or object, beauty nevertheless depends, Derrida claims, on ‘encrypted signs, a figural writing that nature speaks for us’ (1981: 15). The ‘good taste’ of the artist or of the aesthete provides an experience of their own freedom, speaking the presence of a universal Idea, of truth. But such an operation is only possible by denying the hetero-affective moment on which it depends and the various deferrals on which its based (the hierarchy of ‘signs’­– a­rt-nature-God­– b ­ y which it is announced), meaning the linguistic economy of analogy (its différance) must be vomited before the sweet fruits of presence can be tasted. These ambiguous utterances of the mouth continue, Derrida claims, in Kant’s ‘On the Division of the Fine Arts’ (CJ §51), which operates through a hierarchy of the organs of expression: the mouth (speech­– ­poetry), the hand (gesture­– ­painting), the mouth and ear (tone and taste­– ­the external sensations of music and food). Here poetry as the highest of the arts transforms external sensations into pure auto-affection (beauty) and, Derrida writes, ‘everything moves back to language; analogy is produced by language which therefore puts everything in relation to itself, as both the reason for the relation and the ultimate term of the relation’ (1981: 17). Poetry therefore presents the plenitude of thought free from the limits of sensible nature, free from any dependence it has

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to something external to it. But it is this very economy of separation, of spacing as Derrida would put it, that grounds art’s mimesis of nature on the exigencies of language, and implicates the excluded within the very economy of its forceful rejection. The mouth therefore speaks the truth only once it has vomited, ejected the corporeal refuse of signs that taints the spiritual economy of analogical presence. For this will finally be the true economy of speech­– ­Derrida never seems to tire of making his point (despite our own exhaustion)­– ­its presumption of presence depends on a repression that acts as its condition of possibility, the endless metaphysical gesture that guarantees its own deferral, its own différance. Différance, Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, is ‘an economic concept’ (1976: 23), ‘the economical concept’, he continues in Positions, ‘and since there is no economy without différance, it is the most general structure of economy’ (1982: 6). As a result, and now Derrida is once more writing specifically on the Third Critique: ‘Vomit lends its form to the whole system, beginning with its specific parergonal overflow’ (1981: 21). In the economimesis of the Third Critique ‘a single “thing” is unassimilable. It will therefore form the transcendental of the transcendental, the non-transcendentalisable, the non-idealisable, and that is the disgusting’ (1981: 22). The disgusting is in-sensible and un-intelligible, unrepresentable and unnameable, the absolute other of the system. But this absolute other, what disgusts, nevertheless lies as the impossible ground of the entire system. What then, is this disgusting object? One cannot even ask the question, because this ‘object’ simply has no possible means to exist except as the impossible itself, as the ‘absolute other of the system’ (1981: 22), as an existing non-existence, a paradoxical necessity implied by the very system that is built on its expulsion. This is the deepest level excavated by analogy, the work of language, and the différance upon which art, in spite of ‘itself’ (an itself no longer pure or even possible), depends, the level such work creates but by necessity can never touch. As David Rodowick has noted, ‘the paradox of Kant’s analysis is that his solution to the specificity of aesthetic judgments­– ­is what in fact produces the divisions between object and subject, inside and outside, mind and nature, that the Third Critique claims to transcend’ (1994: 98). Is the disgusting object sublime? TO T H E S U B L I M E .  .  . According to Kant the pleasure we feel in experiencing something beautiful reveals its transcendental condition of possibility in a free-play of



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the faculties of imagination and understanding, this pleasure constituting an aesthetic common sense (sensus communis) or community of good taste. This undetermined agreement of the faculties is the condition for their determining relations, which Kant had already outlined in the previous two Critiques. But Kant must show what gives rise to this undetermined harmony of the imagination and the understanding that emerges in the beautiful, and this is the function of the Analytic of the Sublime. The sublime is where reason will emerge in experience, and will thereby establish the transcendental foundations of the ‘free play’ of the faculties as freedom. The sublime, then, is the irruption within experience of something that seemingly goes beyond its conditions (the Idea), and in Derrida’s account of the sublime he focuses on Kant’s description of this ‘appearance’ as the ‘colossal’. The colossal is the measure of what is unmeasurable and so gives a sensation of the supersensible (Derrida 1987: 119). The sublime is, Kant informs us, ‘incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination’ (CJ, §23 245: 98/166). In fact the sublime not only exceeds the frame of the imagination, but it exceeds the frame of art, being, Kant tells us, an experience rather than an object. But if the sublime exceeds the frame of the imagination then how might we find its essential and universal element and so arrive at a reflective aesthetic judgment? As Derrida puts it, ‘there cannot, it seems, be a parergon for the sublime’ (1987: 127). The sublime is in fact formless, unframed, without natural end, and so ‘annihilates and reduces to nothing the end which constitutes its concept’ (Derrida 1987: 125). The prodigious, monstrous or sublime object cannot be framed by experience because it has no limit and defies all measure, overflowing its concept. But despite this all is not lost. For while the beautiful presented an indeterminate concept of the understanding, the sublime in fact ‘presents’ an indeterminate concept of reason or Idea (1987: 127). It does so by provoking quite a different feeling from the pleasure we get from the beautiful, one that is negative and violent, a displeasure in fact, a pain. This negative pleasure will be the ‘sign’ for an experience beyond measure, or as Derrida puts it: ‘The measure of the sublime has the measure of this unmeasure, of this violent incommensurability’ (1987: 129). This feeling of pleasure/ displeasure is the sublime’s unmeasurable measure, as Kant puts it, a ‘rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object’ (1987, §27 258: 115/181). This ‘point of excess’ opened in the imagination is, the word is Kant’s, ‘an abyss’ (CJ, §27 258: 115/181). But the sublime’s violence against the imagination is in fact what allows the imagination to discover the necessity of its own law,

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beyond itself, in reason. The failure of the imagination reveals, Kant claims, that ‘it must have within itself a power that is supersensible, whose idea of a noumenon cannot be intuited but can yet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere appearance’ (CJ, §26 255: 111/177). In this, Derrida says, ‘it gains by losing’ (1987: 131). The sublime cannot be an object, which can never be truly infinite, but it is the feeling produced in the mind that reveals the presence of an infinite Idea. This is a strange kind of inadequate, excessive, incommensurable and finally violent perception, where, as Derrida puts it: ‘Presentation is inadequate to the idea of reason but it is presented in its very inadequation, adequate to its inadequation. The inadequation of presentation is presented’ (1987: 131). It is this inadequacy that gives us the feeling, the affect, of a finality independent of and so transcending empirical experience. What is presented is what Derrida calls the ‘yawning gap’ (1987: 132) between imagination and reason, a negative presentation of what cannot be presented. Reason smashes imagination in the sublime, and by doing so, Derrida says, ‘expresses itself by marking in its expression the annihilation of expression’ (1987: 133). The abyss of the sublime reveals the presence of the Idea in the impossibility of its presentation. How does the sublime achieve such a paradoxical outcome? It does so, according to Derrida, through a slight of hand on Kant’s part, a foundational repression perhaps, one that is implied but not stated in the Third Critique. Derrida argues, it is the question that Kant does not pose and yet which we can pose from inside his discourse. And if we can pose it from inside his discourse, this is because without being posed there, it is not without posing itself there. Questions can also be parergonal. Here it is. (1987: 135)

Derrida’s question, the one Kant doesn’t­– ­but does­– ­ask, is how the ‘absolutely large’ of the colossal sublime can be a magnitude (which it must be inasmuch as it can be represented under the category of quantity)? The answer lies, Derrida tells us, in Kant making a subjective and comparative measure the foundation of the reflective judgment of the sublime. Derrida’s reading of the sublime here parallels Deleuze’s, inasmuch as its focus is also on how Kant uses an aesthetic and subjective unit as the basis of measurement. Measurement, Kant argues and as we have seen, is based on a comparative process (aesthetic comprehension) that begins from the human body. I measure the tree according to my height, the mountain by trees, the distance to the sun by mountains, and so on forever. While the mathematical sublime pushes into infinity by continually apprehending units, it cannot comprehend them in a single perception, whereas the dynamic sublime collapses apprehension as



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well because it is an intensive rather than extensive experience. What is inadequate in both cases, however, and hence acts as the shadow presenting the sublime’s blinding light, is measurement. ‘Double bind!’ Derrida triumphantly cries (1987: 129). ‘Kant has introduced comparison [i.e. aesthetic comprehension] where he says it should have no place’ (1987: 137), and not only this, but this introduces a subjective measure as the basis of the sublime reflective judgment, a judgment that is supposedly disinterested. Kant has reintroduced comparison, Derrida says, ‘in an apparently very subtle manner [. . .] by comparing the comparable with the incomparable’ (1987: 137). With this sleight of hand, Derrida continues, ‘he throws a bridge across the gulf, between the unpresentable and presentation’ (1987: 138). But to do so, and this is Derrida’s point, Kant had to break his own rules, for only by defying the oppositional logic of inside/outside, of comparable/ incomparable, of measurable/unmeasurable could he produce the sublime reflective judgment that emerges on their basis. It is this precise moment in Kant’s argument, Derrida will conclude, that in fact reveals the transcendental truth of the colossal, which no longer resides in the Ideas of reason, but lies instead ‘between the presentable and the unpresentable, [in] the passage from one to the other as much as the irreducibility of the one to the other’ (1987: 143). This ‘double trait’ of the colossal, this limiting and unlimiting of its size by which it comes to incise or present itself (as unpresentable), this is, Derrida says, the truth of the sublime.17 The sublime, yet again, is nothing other than différance at work, a frame allowing us to pass from the presentable to the unpresentable, from experience to Idea, a vibration without end, a passing that never passes: ‘Cise, edging, cut edges, that which passes and happens, without passing, from one to the other’ (Derrida 1987: 143). The colossal is therefore limited by what it presents, which is too large for it, and unlimited in what it presents, or by what presents itself through it­– ­the infinite. The sublime is thus both potent and impotent, ‘potent in its very impotence’ (1987: 146), Derrida writes, which is precisely the ‘obscenity of its abyss’ (1987: 145). The sublime as the bridge between the imagination and reason collapses in the process of its own erection, its own presentation, which finally cannot present anything but the ultra-transcendental condition of its own différance, which now appears as the condition of the supersensible itself. In this sense the sublime’s presentation of the unpresentable is the figure of deconstruction. This is a possibility suggested by Jay Bernstein, who argues that ‘the deconstructive sublime is but a “higher”, more sophisticated repetition of Kant’ (1992: 158), inasmuch as the unpresentable work of presentation achieved by ­différance is the ­ultra-transcendental

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condition of all possible experience. ‘Deconstruction’, Bernstein continues, ‘the working of the frame, is sublime. It produces/discovers the sublime. [. . .] Sublimity, the figure of what is without figure, is the figure of deconstruction’ (1992: 171). Bernstein argues that deconstruction finds itself­– fi ­ nds itself in losing itself­– b ­ y presenting the unpresentable, in the sublime; ‘For what is deconstructive reading, the reconnoitering of what cannot be presented in the text but is yet of the text, but the production/discovery of the sublime moment in each text of the tradition?’ (1992: 158).18 Perhaps Derrida already suggested as much in Of Grammatology: ‘Nature denaturing itself, being separated from itself, naturally gathering its outside into its inside, is catastrophe, a natural event that overthrows nature, or monstrosity, a natural deviation within nature’ (1976: 41). Is the sublime, then, to return to our question that ended the previous section, the disgusting object that is vomited by the Third Critique? Quite simply, Derrida says, it is not. Vomit is certainly the parergon of the Third Critique, ‘considered as a general synthesis of transcendental idealism’ (Derrida 1981: 21), but although the sublime is repulsive in its excess, in provoking a reflective judgment it is not the ‘absolute other’ of the beautiful. In fact, Derrida suggests, it is more like an ejaculation than vomit, ‘because it is still productive of pleasure and the system of reason can account for it’ (1981: 21). In this sense, that is in the sense of the sublime as negative presentation: ‘The sublime itself can dawn in art’ (Derrida 1987: 21). The art of deconstruction, on the other hand, is not concerned with erecting something colossal and enjoying its transcendental ejaculation, its ‘sublimity’ is instead vomited from metaphysics through the act of re-presenting. This is a sublime art because it presents the ultra-transcendental condition of différance, the condition of presence and its impossibility, negatively. But what does this mean for art? What, finally, is the truth of painting? The ‘truth’ is the impossibility of truth, and this ‘fact’ opens any work, and any experience of it, to the infinity of textual dissemination. This uncontrollable and ultimately creative space of slippage and play is the infinite Idea that sublime art­– ­now in a deconstructive sense­– ­is always re-presenting. Sublime art in this sense is a textual operation that reflects upon its own limits­– i­ t presents its unpresentable condition (i.e. vomit)­– ­and this is a succinct expression of what will come to be called ‘postmodernism’. As the famous line of Of Grammatology that has become the aphorism representing Derrida’s thought has it: ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ (1976: 158). And because every text operates analogically in framing presence, in deferring and differing it from itself, we might imagine that this ‘nothing’ is precisely presence itself.



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What could be more ironic than the history of metaphysics vomiting its very object as soon as it opens its mouth? This retching ‘origin’ would be the eternally repeated ‘birth’ of thought itself, its very condition. The consequences of this are clear: ‘Presence would mean death’ (Derrida 1994: 16 see also 1982a: 19). Death lurks outside the text, and it is only the play of its signifiers that perennially elude its grasp. Write! Derrida exhorts us, strain language with the creative arts, for it is our only hope! A Heideggerean ‘hope’, the one Derrida mentions at the very end of his essay ‘Différance’. The unique name of Being (presence/death) will never be spoken, and this fact must be affirmed in a Nietzschean manner, with laughter and dance, but nevertheless we might hope otherwise, and it is this (ironic) hope that continues to drive us on, makes us continue to live on the borderlines, where every thoughtful word is important. (1982a: 27)

Deconstruction then­– ­ the eternal deconstruction of deconstruction itself­– i­s a hope in the future, the continuing effervescence of the life of différance: And so it [deconstruction] gets displaced and deformed. That is the condition for the future. If there is to be a future, it is on condition that it not be ‘that’, that it be elsewhere. [. . .] That is the future by definition. If there is a future, we can say nothing about it. (Derrida 1994: 29)

We cannot determine the future, because the determination of experience by metaphysics is what must always be deconstructed (including the naive and metaphysical claims empiricism makes against metaphysics). And while this establishes the necessity and Nietzschean dance of textual play, it also implies an ethics. We must act ‘as if’ there is no ground, no truth or transcendent rule of any kind, which means that any decision proceeds only from itself and can only appeal to a justice to come. This, Claire Colebrook has argued, gives Derrida’s conception of the future a ‘Kantian or hyper-Kantian’ aspect, where an ‘Idea’ of freedom emerges in the way the ‘differential condition of language generates a promise beyond any actualised content’ (2014: 130). D E M A N A N D T H E M AT E R I A L I S T S U B L I M E Let us turn to another account of the Third Critique, that of Paul de Man in his essay ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’.19 This essay shows how it is precisely the ‘poetics’ of Kant’s argument, its production of affects, that defies its philosophical objectives. Like Derrida then, he is interested in ‘how the substance or structure of a transcendental discourse can be determined’ (1996: 72)­– o ­ r not­– a­ nd

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more specifically how the aesthetic is the condition of possibility for philosophy ‘articulating’ transcendental and metaphysical discourses (1996: 73). Unlike Derrida, however, de Man will insist that ‘the place where this articulation occurs is the section on the sublime’ (1996: 73), where a certain aporia will emerge between a poetics of pure sensory experience and its conceptual understanding, an aporia that will produce a paradoxical experience of a transcendental Idea. It is precisely here, de Man argues, that Kant’s poetic metaphors describing the sublime introduce a materialism into his account that cannot be recouped by the sublime and effectively deconstructs his idealist project. De Man’s approach effectively extends the idea that art is deconstruction by showing how art’s production of sensory affect (i.e. its ‘materialism’) is irreducible to its metaphysical and transcendental claims. This is to give art a particularity connected to its modes of production, whereas Derrida tended to assimilate art into the textual (and one could argue conceptual) economy of différance. It is with de Man, then, that we see how art’s affects operate to ‘disseminate’ a text­– h ­ ere Kant’s Third Critique­– ­by producing a material excess that evades its conceptual determination and its metaphysical claims. The surprising gambit of the sublime, as we know, is to base its existence as the transcendental ‘bridge’ of imagination and reason, and of the first two Critiques, on its own impossibility. As de Man puts it: Out of the pain of failure to constitute the sublime by making the infinite apparent (anschaulich) is born the pleasure of the imagination, which discovers in this very failure, the congruity [what Derrida calls the ‘analogy’] of its law (which is a law of failure) with the law of our own supersensory being. Its failure to connect with the sensory world would also elevate it above it. (1996: 76)

In other words, the sublime claims to exist ‘by dint of the impossibility of its existence’ (de Man 1996: 76), or yet again, it exists outside space and time while space and time nevertheless remain the necessary conditions of its existence, meaning, de Man concludes, ‘the sublime is a metaphysical principle that mistakes itself for a transcendental one’ (1996: 76). Perhaps predictably, de Man identifies this ‘mistake’ with the fact that the operations of the imagination on which it rests­– ­the processes of apprehension (syntagmatic) and comprehension (paradigmatic)­– ­are ‘linguistic’, and the sublime is subsequently ‘a linguistic principle’ (1996: 78). De Man’s reasoning on this point is worth noting. The linguistic (syntagmatic/paradigmatic) ‘model’ of the mathematical sublime, de Man claims, ‘reminds one of a simple phenomenology of reading’ (1996: 77, italics added), suggesting a ‘reading’ of the sublime as a



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metaphor for reading, or as a metaphor for the operation of metaphor ‘itself’. This kind of ‘forcing’, while consistent with de Man’s reading of ‘reading’, is nonetheless notably absent from Kant’s text. As a result perhaps, de Man’s argument suddenly veers off into a citation of Pascal (‘One is reminded of Pascal . . .’ (1996: 78, italics added)) in order to show that ‘the model [Pascal’s, but also Kant’s and de Man’s] that is being suggested is no longer, properly speaking, philosophical, but linguistic’. What is being described then, is not the sublime per se, ‘but a potentiality inherent in language [. . .]. It is a model of discourse as a tropological system’ (1996: 78). De Man implies that Kant’s aim of showing how the empirical experience of the mathematical sublime ‘articulates’ its transcendental ground is only possible within the ‘purely formal system’ (1996: 78) of language. As a result, de Man writes: ‘The sublime cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as a linguistic principle’ (1996: 78). The dynamic sublime, de Man argues, will go beyond this metaphorical operation in utilising a model of performativity (1996: 79). The linguistic performativity of the dynamic sublime emerges in Kant’s literary descriptions of natural phenomena and the affects, moods and feelings they evoke. Overpowered by forces that go beyond it, the mind must free itself of these constraints in order to ‘discover within itself a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of cognition’ (de Man 1996: 79). In staging this moment of overpowering Kant utilises a series of descriptions that perform, de Man claims, this ‘deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity’ (1996: 79), because they are no longer accessible to transcendental philosophy. This break becomes obvious, de Man tells us, in an ‘apparently tranquil, because entirely unreflected, juxtaposition of incompatibles’ (1996: 79) in Kant’s ‘architectonic’ metaphors describing nature (e.g. the starry night as a ‘vault’, the ocean as a ‘clear mirror’ bounded by the heavens) that are necessary, Kant claims, to avoid any teleological understanding of these phenomena that might inhere to them in descriptions utilising conceptual knowledge. Instead, Kant writes, we must view these phenomena ‘as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye’ (CJ General Comment, 270: 130/196, italics added). Kant’s subsequent descriptions are unsurprisingly similar to Romantic poetry­– ­de Man compares them to some passages from William Wordsworth­– b ­ ut for Kant their most important aspect is that they describe pure sensations, without subjective interest or wider purpose. As such, de Man claims, they express ‘a material vision’ which is not metaphorical or otherwise figurative (1996: 82). This ‘formal materialism’ of the description of the dynamic sublime, de Man continues, ‘runs counter to all values and

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characteristics associated with aesthetic experience [i.e. it is not transcendental]’ (1996: 83). This aspect of the sublime has been ignored by its tradition of interpretation, de Man tells us, and in particular the fact that this ‘pure ocular vision’ (1996: 83) cannot be reconciled with the representation of Ideas they are supposedly capable of. The sublime vision must therefore sacrifice the materiality of its own figurative power, the pathos of its empirical form, in favour of the higher and ‘tranquil’ freedom of reason. This ‘somewhat devious scenario’, as de Man calls it, ‘accomplishes the aim of the sublime’ (1996: 86) by mediating the realm of affect with the formal necessity of supersensible reason. Operating as it does through the performative agency of its metaphors, the sublime in the Third Critique is not an argument, de Man claims, but a ‘a story, a dramatized scene of the mind in action’ (1996: 86) in which the faculties of imagination and reason are anthropomorphised, and their relation becomes interpersonal­– ­sacrifice, nobility and cunning. The faculties act, and act freely, as if they were conscious human beings, making the faculties ‘tropes’ rather than ‘mental categories’ in Kant’s ‘allegorical tale’ of ‘sacrifice and recuperation’ (de Man 1996: 87). Indeed, de Man continues, the whole ‘story’ is not a description of mental functions, but of performative ‘tropological transformations’ governed by the ‘the laws of figural language’ (1996: 87). As with the mathematical sublime then, the dynamic sublime is also ‘determined by linguistic structures that are not within the author’s control’, but what makes this remarkable is that it occurs ‘in close proximity’ with the passage on the architectonic and formal materialism of vision, ‘with which it is entirely incompatible’ (1996: 87). De Man now goes on to explain how this architectonic and material vision of nature in the sublime is also opposed to Kant’s own descriptions of ‘The Architectonics of Pure Reason’ in the First Critique, which describes the organic unity of parts (cognitions) and whole (Ideas). It is precisely the disarticulation of this organic architectonic that is required by the ‘pure ocular vision’ of the dynamic sublime and leads in the Third Critique to, de Man repeats, ‘a materialism that, in the tradition of the reception of the Third Critique, is seldom or never perceived’ (1996: 88). What makes this conclusion so remarkable is that the purpose of the Third Critique and its ‘full investment in the aesthetic’ (de Man 1996: 88) was to articulate the architectonic unity of Kant’s system, while it in fact, de Man says, ‘marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category’ (1996: 89). De Man’s deconstruction is complete: The critical power of a transcendental philosophy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with an ideology­– ­for transcendental and ideological (metaphysical) principles are part of the same system­



Framing the Abyss 187 – ­but with a materialism that Kant’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to. This happens not out of a lack of philosophical energy or rational power, but as a result of the very strength and consistency of this power. (1996: 89)

This moment is marked in the text at those points where there is a shift from a tropological to a performative mode of language. These are the moments when the language of the argument itself tends, de Man claims, towards ‘the fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters’ (1996: 89). De Man points to the wide variety of results produced by Kant’s translators as evidence of how ‘decisively determining the play of the letter and of the syllable’ are and how ‘the way of saying is opposed to what is being said’ (1996: 89). It is this ‘aporetic incompatibility’ (de Man 1996: 90) that therefore organises the argument, meaning that the ‘bottom line’ of the ‘prosaic materiality of the letter’ can never be transformed into ‘the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment’ (de Man 1996: 90). In The Rhetoric of Romanticism de Man will identify this ‘prosaic materiality of the letter’ with the change in ‘poetic diction’ typical of Romanticism. In Romanticism there is, he writes, ‘a proliferation of natural objects that restores to the language the material substantiality which had been partially lost’ (1984: 2). De Man reads (i.e. deconstructs) Kant’s Third Critique as a poetic text that works against its philosophical objectives, or, perhaps better, he shows how a philosophical text cannot escape its poetic conditions. It is precisely these linguistic conditions which make Kant’s project impossible from the beginning­– ­and here we see the closeness of de Man’s position to Derrida’s­– ­because ‘it is the essence of language [i.e. writing] to be capable of origination, but of never achieving the absolute identity with itself that exists in the natural object’ (1984: 6). Such an ‘absolute identity’ can therefore never exist. De Man’s reading is subtle and impressive, but what does it mean for us? Two things are important: first, the way de Man insists that the materiality of a text (i.e. its linguistic mechanisms) subverts its ideological claims; second, that this resistance foregrounds an inherent undecidability within the exercise of textual authority, an openness by which any text escapes its metaphysical constraints or transcendental ambitions through the operation of reading. Both of these points will become central to the methods of artistic production that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and that was commonly known as ‘postmodernism’.

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DECONSTRUCTION AND POSTMODERNISM Craig Owens can be regarded as the main conduit through which Derrida arrived on the American art scene. He was the translator of the second chapter (‘Parergon’) of the longest essay in The Truth in Painting and wrote an accompanying essay for its publication in October, issue 9, in the summer of 1979. Following this, his two highly influential essays on allegory, heavily influenced by Derrida’s work, came out in issues 12 and 13 published a year later. Owens essay accompanying ‘Parergon’ points out some of the themes that would go on to become central concerns of postmodernism.20 First, and most importantly, it outlines, Owens explains, ‘the permanent complicity of Western aesthetics with a certain theory of the sign’, which in turn reveals how the discursive operates within the aesthetic as ‘the occupation of a nonverbal field by a conceptual force’ (1979: 43). The term ‘conceptual force’ is significant, because it connects Derrida’s text­– ­and postmodernism as an artistic movement­– ­with the already well-established tendency of Conceptual art (a connection already made by the artists, as we shall see). Derrida is Kantian insofar as the conceptual provides the conditions for all possible experience, but unlike Kant these conditions are fundamentally discursive and do not require an additional analysis of aesthetic experience because they already include it. In this sense, the conceptual is the ‘spacing’ that always already gives a discursive structure to the non-verbal realm of art. Derrida, somewhat after the fact, clearly explains the situation: There cannot be anything, and in particular any art, that isn’t textualized in the sense I give to the word ‘text’­– w ­ hich goes beyond the purely discursive­– ­there is text as soon as deconstruction is engaged in fields said to be artistic, visual or spatial. There is text because there is always a little discourse somewhere in the visual arts, and also because even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualisation. (1994: 15)

This means that the claims to aesthetic ‘presence’ made by modernism (with Greenberg, also made in the name of Kant), and more particularly modernist painting, will be flatly rejected by postmodernism.21 But this will not necessarily mean the outright rejection of sensation as an artistic tool, nor even its complete subordination to conceptual content. As we have seen in de Man’s reading of the Third Critique, the material aspects of poetic affect can have a powerful disruptive influence on metaphysics, not least through their tendency to uncontrollably proliferate. Postmodern artists will utilise this disruption in the political sphere of images.



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Owens’ essay is quick to point out how Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ of the Third Critique means that the frame (parergon) Kant erects to exclude the concept from aesthetic judgment collapses into the abyss of ‘truth’, establishing instead the concept (or at least the ‘conceptual force’) of discursive spacing as the ultra-transcendental condition of both the frame and its truth. Owens’ appreciates how this marks a radical ‘reframing’ of contemporary artistic practices, inasmuch as their ‘material’­– ­as what defined their aesthetic realm of operation­– ­could no longer be understood as being specific to art or even to aesthetics, because all material and experience as such appeared through the operation of différance. In postmodernism we therefore see a shift in artistic practice following Derrida’s deconstruction of aesthetics, as artists begin to understand art­– ­and in a wider sense the production of ‘texts’ in general­– ­as being a matter of form and not matter, as being just another frame. This is a significant shift from art being defined by its material conditions, or as being fundamentally aesthetic, by, as Owens puts it, ‘that definition of the work of art which organizes all philosophical discourse about art’ (1979: 46). Instead, postmodern art is defined by its form, and indeed as a form, as a frame that defers the immediate communication of empirical presence (modelled on speech) and defines its content as first of all ‘conceptual’ inasmuch as its conditions are discursive (i.e. Writing and Difference). As a result, content doesn’t give form to matter; rather, matter is understood as being always already formed by a discursive ‘spacing’ that makes it appear as a material. As Owens elaborates: If in ‘The Parergon’ Derrida offers no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, ‘The Parergon’ signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition. And such a transformation has no better point of departure than that which has always been excluded from the aesthetic field: the parergon. (1979: 49)

The result, arguably, was the transformation of the work of art. A transformation that art was already­– ­and indeed always already­– ­involved with, inasmuch as it both ‘framed’ its own experience and so gave itself to be ‘read’, but as well because since the end of the 1960s it had been exploring its non-aesthetic aspects as ‘concept’. In this sense, deconstruction was being unpacked by its contemporary artistic developments as a real break with the aesthetic assumptions of modern art, and thrust into life as a politically engaged artistic practice examining the cultural assumptions of images and their institutions in the widest sense.

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For Derrida deconstruction was a ‘philosophy’ aimed at deflating the metaphysical ambitions of philosophy, which sought in all its ‘objects’ of study (whether philosophy or art) ‘what in the work represents its force of resistance to philosophical authority’ (1994: 10), and in this sense it was an extension of Kantian critique. It was this ‘critical’ aspect of his work that was also instrumental in the emergence in the late 1970s and early 1980s of postmodern art, which understood the art work as a text that critically ‘read’ other texts. Art was no longer a practice defined by its medium, nor by its autonomy, and its ‘meaning’ was no longer found in the pure sensations of its affects or any other revelation of truth, spirit or Idea it had previously claimed to present. Art, Derrida seems to suggest, is just like anything else, just a humble text, a re-presentation of a representation, the presentation of the ­textual abyss. Derrida’s influence on art had two significant effects. First, it meant that ‘images’ qua texts could be deconstructed in the same way all texts could­– ­by revealing the paradoxical consequences of their own internal logic. In partnership with the then emerging field of ‘cultural studies’ this meant that high and low art, mass media and museums all shared certain rhetorical tropes that could be ‘deconstructed’. That this deconstruction is a form of politics becomes immediately obvious once the internal logic of such structures is understood as being ideological. As Paul de Man put it in 1982: ‘The possibility of juxtaposing ideology and critical philosophy is the persistent burden of contemporary thought’ (1996: 70). Nevertheless, de Man continues, ideology and its critique can never be fully separated, and deconstruction is of necessity an interminable project (1996: 72). In this sense, and for example, the art works in museums along with their institutional display not only embodied certain modernist assumptions concerning art, but also assumptions about race and gender that underpinned widespread social injustice. Deconstruction was therefore a political tool that art could use in attacking not only the bastions of modernism­– ­the hierarchy of the arts, medium specificity, the autonomy of art­– ­but as well the wider political mechanisms governing life. As Derrida put it: ‘Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom’ (1982a: 22). Postmodernism’s political ambitions clearly remain with us, and in the context of contemporary artistic practices could even be said to be hegemonic. Writing in 2000 David Krell perfectly summarises the point: ‘Ours is the time in which frames fail to protect their contents, so that our works of art, literature, philosophy, fashion, and culture generally leak to the outside at all four corners’ (2000: 26). Art’s ‘leakage’ into life not only changed the nature



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of art, it challenged wider assumptions about the nature of critical practices. In this sense ‘theory’ was not ‘applied to’ art, but something that art too applied to life. As Brian Wallis in his introduction to the influential postmodern primer Art After Modernism put it: ‘The issue is less how art criticism can best serve art than how art can serve as a fruitful realm for critical and theoretical material’ (1984: xvi). This, as Gregory Ulmer points out, meant not only that postmodern art could critically intervene in those areas of the mass media (for example) from where they drew their imagery, or in the institutions in which they were exhibited, but also ‘in the institutions of the disciplines creating knowledge and learning effects’ (1994: 81). Ulmer will even evoke the possibility of deconstructing the opposition of theory and practice itself (1994: 85). It was at this point that art began to understand itself as a critical form of what is now known as ‘knowledge production’ and established many of the intellectual and aesthetic modes of what we call today ‘researchbased practice’. The second important consequence of this ‘textual’ and ‘theoretical’ shift in art production was that any critique launched by the art work had to include itself within its scope. Deconstruction as a practice meant, as Craig Owens put it in 1979, ‘the implication of the defined within the definition’ (1979: 46). Obviously, this meant that any ‘critique’ could not itself escape examination, and that the mode of reading outlined by deconstruction­– w ­ here the aporias of the textual object were used against it­– ­was contained in any and all ‘texts’. Deconstruction, Derrida writes, ‘attempts an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding edifice, the instruments or stores available in the house, that is, equally, in language’ (1982a: 135). This radicalisation of critical re-presentation accounted for the most significant aspects of the postmodern aesthetic, in particular the widespread use of photography and appropriation. While these aspects of postmodernism clearly demarcated it from its modernist predecessors, they also contained their own dangers. Any political critique inspired by deconstruction risked falling back into a teleological politics where it became its own aim and accomplishment, one that would silence self-reflection or unjustly glory in the illusion of its own achievement. As Derrida puts it: ‘The continual process of making explicit, moving towards an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure’ (1982a: 135). To be fair, most postmodern art was well aware of this problem, and tended to limit itself to a quotational framing foregrounding the racial or gender politics of the image (e.g. Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) (1980–4) that re-framed the

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iconic Marlboro man advertisements), leaving this undermining of discursive self-evidence deliberately open as to what would come after it. The risk was that by highlighting the discursive operations of representation the art work does nothing but foreground the obvious and leaves its organising prejudices intact. This is perhaps a problem that was not immediately evident. Douglas Crimp, for example, claimed in 1980 that Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of Edward Weston’s photograph of his naked pre-pubescent son Neil revealed how it was itself a quotation of classical sculpture. Levine’s work, he argued, showed how the desire of representation exists only insofar as it can never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always is deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place. And representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation. (1993: 118, the photos are reproduced on 8)

When this essay was published this may well have been news, but today we take this deferred original of representation for granted, and instead these photos have an unsettling effect that give Crimp’s claim that Levine ‘has shown him [Weston] what he really meant’ (1993: 118) a somewhat sinister after-effect. I am certainly not casting any aspersions on Weston’s motivations, merely making the point that no image, including Levine’s thoroughly postmodern one, can separate itself from the context in which it is seen and so fully control the vivacious and not necessarily liberatory production of meaning that is the result. This is even more so today when the revelation of the univocity of representation is our reality and truth. The strategy of appropriation­– ­or as another of Crimp’s essays has it ‘The Appropriation of Appropriation’­– ­was so central to postmodern art that it was nearly ubiquitous. The images appropriated were nevertheless of a wide range and used in various ways, whether from advertising (paired with stridently political texts by Barbara Kruger or more ambiguously re-framed by Richard Prince­– b ­ oth of these artists previously worked in the mass media22), cinema (the fake23) or the photography of art works within their various contexts (Louise Lawler). This embrace and affirmation of reproduction rejected the idea that art’s autonomous and ‘free’ production was analogous to nature’s, while locating postmodern art entirely within the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ that was by this time utterly hegemonic.24 As the arts became increasingly implicated in the mass media’s production of commodified images, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that an entirely autonomous mode of art production could even exist. Consequently, even when ‘original’ images were constructed, these



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were often designed to ambiguously mimic the popular images they critiqued. Cindy Sherman’s work would be one of the most famous examples, which by ‘implicating the mass media as the false mirror which promotes such alienating identifications, Sherman registers this “truth” as both ethical and political’ (Owens 1980a: 78–9). In other words, this strategy included itself within the scope of the critique it launched, giving rise to a certain ‘realism’ or even ‘cynicism’, depending on your point of view. The extent of this cynicism perhaps rested on how seriously one takes Derrida’s affirmations of play as the immanent freedom of economimesis. The affirmation of ‘play’ goes furthest towards what we might call the ‘style’ of deconstruction and of postmodern art. Certainly, artists like Sherman seemed interested in ‘playing’ with popular cultural imagery in order to explore its ambiguities and slippages, while at the same time critiquing the way it constructed stereotypes of women. In this sense, we could perhaps connect ‘play’ with ‘irony’, inasmuch as irony became (and remains) one of the most dominant ‘affects’ of postmodernism (not only in art but by now in all aspects of life). The quotation marks are here performative, inasmuch as the ironical tone of postmodernism required a certain knowing relationship of the viewer to what the image represented. The viewer had to ‘get’ the work, to understand its references, and it was this knowledge that then produced not only the critical ‘point’ of the work, but an affect of critical enjoyment. That this enjoyment was (and is) sometimes limited to the self-congratulatory could also be seen as a limit to the work’s ambitions of connecting with people outside of its art-world audience. Prince’s legal difficulties over a work reproducing a photo of the naked and pubescent Brooke Shields is a good example, inasmuch as his innocence hinged on it being recognised as ‘art’. It must also be acknowledged, however, that much of the work (Kruger, Prince and Sherman’s for example) had a c­ onsiderable influence within the popular culture i­ndustries it critiqued. The strategy of ‘play’ employed by artists such as Sherman not only revealed the textual strategies employed by the mass media to construct and maintain gender stereotypes (for example), but also utilised a critical tone to detour the ideological ambitions of the images by inserting ambiguity and polysemic elements. Interestingly, it is precisely this element of ‘the regulated disorder of words’ that Derrida claims opens language onto ‘the nonverbal arts’ (1994: 20), and we have already seen de Man explore this possibility within the midst of Kant’s Third Critique. Non-verbal, however, is not non-textual, because this distinction between verbal and non-verbal arts can only exist within the more inclusive category of ‘text’. Such play is contingent, joyful, inventive,

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beautiful even, in the sense that Derrida defines beauty as something both desirable and inaccessible, something that cannot be totally consumed and so always presents us with a remainder. ‘That’, Derrida says, ‘is a work of art’ (1994: 23). ‘If there is a work,’ he says, ‘it means that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say, make room [laisser la place], in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions’ (1994: 28). In this sense, the discursivity of images always implies an unmanageable excess that escapes their intention and installs an undetermined element as being necessary to the process of ‘reading’. This is another element of postmodernism that has become almost ubiquitous in contemporary artistic practices, the claim that the undeterminable aspect of art works has a political efficacy, to the point where foregrounding this element has become a by now banal strategy of art. We will return to this by way of Speculative Realism’s passionate critique of this aspect of contemporary art, but it is a strategy that can clearly be seen in Prince’s reproduction of images of motorcycle gangs, for example, which ambiguously hang between a critique and uncritical enjoyment. It is precisely this ambiguity that on the one hand implicates the viewer in the chauvinism of the originals, allows the viewer to reflect upon this implication, and produces the displacement that opens the images and their viewers (these being inseparable when the author is well and truly dead) onto something else. Appropriation in its ‘progressive’ form, Crimp suggests, reflects upon its own action in this way, a form of ‘postmodern’ criticality that quickly became associated with the device of ‘allegory’. Derrida attributes the formulation of this allegorical understanding of writing/ reading to Paul de Man: In his [Paul de Man’s] eyes, allegory is not simply one form of figurative language among others; it represents one of language’s essential possibilities: the possibility that permits language to say the other and to speak of itself while speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying something other than what it gives to read, including the scene of reading itself. (1989: 11)

In the realm of art it is Craig Owens’ two essays on allegory and postmodern art that inscribe allegory as central to contemporary artistic practices. While allegory emerges with modernism (Owens cites Claude Monet, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin), he argues that allegory takes a postmodern form when art allegorises its own function, as an allegory of its emergence as allegory. This self-reflective function of art foregrounds its own textuality, placing art qua critical mode of image production against the modernist art work understood



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in the purity of its medium and gesture and as composed of exclusively non-discursive signs and affects. This will effectively place the artist qua image-worker against the artist as heroic genius, an understanding of the artist that has become so ubiquitous it arguably dissolves the category of ‘artist’, or perhaps extends it to everyone living in the West. Indeed, Owens observes that ‘an unmistakably allegorical impulse has begun to reassert itself in various aspects of contemporary culture’ (1980: 68). The major feature of this revival is the redemption of history for the present, a process achieved, he says, ‘whenever one text is doubled by another’ (1980: 68). This practice of rewriting one text in terms of its figural (allegorical) meanings follows the logic of the supplement, which both explains and obscures its origin. This is, of course, the potential of photography, ‘an allegorical art’ (1980: 71) Owens tells us, and one which constitutes the nature of experience itself, as Derrida tells us (2010). This makes of the ‘original’ a necessary ruin. Indeed ruins, following Derrida’s own interest in them, play an important role in Owens’ descriptions of postmodern art, symbolising its site-specificity and the nevertheless contingent nature of its meaning, a meaning that is always already allegorical and whose ‘original’ state is necessarily decayed, fragmentary and incomplete. This is the impermanence and transience of the ephemeral postmodern work as it accumulates an in-principle open number of ‘readings’ or ‘meanings’. Différance is, as Derrida puts it, ‘irreducibly polysemic’ (1982a: 8). This gives postmodern art a serial structure that is often ‘ritualistic’ or ‘repetitive’ (Owens 1980: 72), but this is non-teleological because it does not seek closure, rather the opposite. Allegory, Owens says, ‘must forever remain suspended in its own uncertainty’ (1980a: 61), for it is precisely this uncertainty which is its greatest productive resource, its never ending surplus. It is always becoming something else. Much postmodern work directly foregrounds this polysemic element by withdrawing any ‘meaning’ that might be able to direct its ‘understanding’. Owens praises a work of Troy Brauntuch that reproduces drawings by Hitler along with those of concentration camp victims, but without identifying which is which or even providing any way of telling them apart. The process of removing the contextual ‘frame’ of the drawings means its ‘meaning’ is lost, and this both becomes the ‘meaning’ of the work and opens the work to new ‘readings’ and experience. This gesture of making the arbitrary and open process of allegory the ‘meaning’ of the work is a favourite among postmodern artists, and perhaps defines an aesthetic of différance, inasmuch as this, Derrida claims, ‘unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions’ (1982a: 26).

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As a result, postmodernism, Owen writes, has a ‘blatant disregard for aesthetic categories’ (1980: 74), which cannot contain postmodernism’s polysemous movement. Indeed, the categorical descriptions of allegorical images tend to be broad descriptions of how they function more generally, such as how their commentary on what they ‘show’ make them ‘essentially pictogrammatical’, a ‘hieroglyph’ or ‘rebus’ (1980: 74), a ‘synthetic’ work­– ­both image and text (whether literally or structurally)­– t­ hat ‘crosses aesthetic boundaries’ (1980: 75) and first of all the boundary of the aesthetic as such, as Derrida has shown us. These are some of the ways in which ‘contemporary art’ (Owens is writing in 1980, but many of his descriptions still apply today) ‘is distinguished from its modernist predecessors’ (1980: 75), making allegory the single coherent impulse defining postmodern art (1980: 75). Allegory was repressed by modernism, Owens claims, which inherited its aesthetics from Romanticism, in particular the theory of the symbol as the indissoluble unity of form and substance endowing the work of art with pure presence, and the theory of organicism by which a part expresses the whole, because the essence of the whole can always be found in its every part. Unlike this tautological completeness and self-evidence the allegorical art work is always in excess of both its ‘model’ and ‘its self’, because it is always at least two contents inside one form, a doubling that is also a ‘spacing’, a dissemination of content that is not controllable by author or reader and tends to take on its own life. If we should still be in doubt, Owens irrevocably ties the allegories of postmodernism to Derrida, inasmuch as allegory ‘is essentially a form of script’, and as such it ‘is of course within the same philosophic tradition which subordinates writing to speech’ (1980: 84, italics added). No doubt Derrida is the most significant influence behind Owens, and indeed the whole October understanding of postmodernism as a critical and politically engaged art. They use it in their ongoing rejection of modernism, a ‘rejection’ that was more of a recoil, as if from vomit . . . Clearly modernism had been a vexed issue within the art world for at least fifteen years before Owens wrote his landmark essays, and its rejection was also responsible for Conceptual art and its development of discursive strategies for and as art. Indeed, many of the features of postmodernism that Owens points out in his essays on allegory can already be found in artists’ work from the 1960s. This is not the place to establish a thorough genealogy of postmodernism, but just to say that the vehemence of its rejection of modernism (epitomised by Owens) had already been around for some time, significantly shaping this aspect of his rhetoric. Indeed, for someone supposedly interested in



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deconstructing oppositions, where modernism is concerned Owens is remarkably determined to set them up: When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence. It tells of a desire that must be perpetually frustrated, an ambition that must be perpetually deferred, as such its deconstructive thrust is aimed not only against the contemporary myths that furnish its subject matter, but also against the symbolic, totalizing impulse which characterizes modernist art. (1980a: 80)

The postmodern transformation of art envisioned by Owens must be total, because if, as he claims, ‘the suppression of allegory is identical with the suppression of writing’ (1980: 84), and if, now following Derrida, we accept that writing can never be suppressed because it is the basis of every suppression, then once allegory has been liberated and even made its own object we can never go back. But is this actually the case? Certainly, the modernism/postmodernism split is definitive and central to the historical emergence of post-conceptual artistic practice, even if modernist practices persist, and at least according to Lyotard and Deleuze still retain a power and relevance. Nevertheless, post-conceptual contemporary artistic practices accept their status as ‘texts’ and seek to exploit this for ‘critical’ purposes (whether this consists in reflecting upon mainstream image-production or inserting ‘play’ into this, or both). To what extent these aspects of contemporary art are hegemonic, however, remains an open question, one that in the next chapter on Rancière we will see directly contested. At the time some of the strongest critics of postmodernism were Deleuze and Guattari (no surprises there), with Guattari calling it a form of ‘ethical abdication’ (1996: 114) because of what he saw as the complicity of its so-called ‘immanent critique’. Certainly postmodernist practices of quotation or allegory remain influential and indeed have become part of the basic lexicon of contemporary art, but they have also been hybridised and adapted into new forms that also draw on more ‘aesthetic’ traditions and their politics (the ‘Re-Modern’ movement of ten years ago would be a case in point). As we know, this is something different from saying that postmodernism in its theoretical sense is over, because if it hadn’t changed its modes of expression it would not have remained itself­– ­which is precisely the paradoxical form that defines it. When Derrida was asked to speak about ‘Deconstruction in America’ for the 1984 Wellek Library lectures, one of the reasons he gave for why he did not was that ‘one cannot and should not attempt to survey or totalize the meaning of an ongoing process [. . .]. To do so would be to assign it limits which are not its own; to weaken it, to date it, to slow it down’ (1989: 15).

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N OT E S   1. This circle around the abyss has no centre and so is elliptical, both as a figure and as a grammatical device­– m ­ y thanks to Mark Jackson for this point and many others in this chapter. For Derrida’s deconstructions of the centrism of the circle see ‘Structure, Sign and Play of the Human Sciences’ (1978) and ‘The Linguistic Circle of Geneva’ (1982a).   2. Derrida argues that this is always already an asymmetrical relationship: As for painting, any discourse on it, beside it or above, always strikes me as silly, both didactic and incantatory, programmed, worked by the compulsion of mastery, be it poetical or philosophical, always, and the more so when it is pertinent, in the position of chitchat, unequal and unproductive in the sight of what, at a stroke, does without or goes beyond this language, remaining heterogeneous to it or denying it any overview. And then, if I must simplify shamelessly, it is as if there had been, for me, two paintings in painting. One taking the breath away, a stranger to all discourse, doomed to the presumed mutism of ‘thething-itself’, restores, in authoritarian silence, an order of presence. It motivates or deploys, then, while totally denying it, a poem or philosopheme whose code seems to me to be exhausted. The other, therefore the same, voluble, inexhaustible, reproduces virtually an old language, belated with respect to the thrusting point of a text which interests me. (1987: 155–6)   3. As Derrida puts it: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. (1982a: 13)   4. As Derrida had it very early in his work: ‘The absence of intuition­– a­ nd therefore of the subject of the intuition­– ­is not only tolerated by discourse; it is required by the general structure of signification, when considered in itself’ (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, quoted in Krell 2000: 10).



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  5. Derrida’s concept of the trace would therefore be the condition of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic: ‘Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of experience’ (1976: 65–6). On the linguistic character of art Dissemination is quite clear: Writing is not the living repetition of the living. Which makes it similar to painting. [. . .] Thus, just as painting and writing have faithfulness to the model as their model, the resemblance between painting and writing is precisely resemblance itself: both operations must aim above all at resembling. They are both apprehended as mimetic techniques, art being first determined as mimesis. (1983: 136–7)   6. As Derrida elaborates: ‘So the works of art that are the most overwhelmingly silent cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure’ (1994: 15).   7. As Claire Colebrook notes: ‘There can only be quasi-transcendentals precisely because any condition that we posit for knowledge (such as language, trace, the subject, culture or history) is itself given after the event of the differential dispersal that makes knowing and experiencing possible’ (Colebrook 2014: 129).   8. In Margins of Philosophy Derrida argues that différance is at once a deferral, or temporalisation of presence, and its spacing. It is the deferral of presence into the distinctly ‘spaced’ signs that represent it; ‘the becomingtime of space and the becoming-space of time’ (Derrida 1982a: 8; see also 13, 18). Différance as temporalisation and as spacing are, he says, ‘conjoined’ (1982a: 10), and are the non-metaphysical condition of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. As Martin Hägglund puts it: ‘The spacing of time is an “ultratranscendental” condition from which nothing can be exempt. [. . .] the spacing of time has an ultratranscendental status because it is the condition for everything all the way up to and including the ideal itself’ (2008: 19).   9. As Derrida comments (in a remark that illustrates his closeness and distance to Heidegger): ‘Since Being has never had a “meaning”, has never been thought or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in beings, then différance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) older than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being’ (1982a: 22). 10. As Derrida insists: The visible as such would be invisible, not as visibility, the phenomenality or essence of the visible, but as the singular body of the visible itself, right on the visible­– s­ o that, by emanation, and as it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness. (1993: 51–2)

As we shall see, the ‘medium’ secreted by visibility is ‘writing’, which conditions and so deconstructs any modernist claims to medium specificity in

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art. As such, it will play an important role in the turn to ‘postmodernism’ in the visual arts of the 1970s and 1980s. 11. This is my only mention of mourning, and as such is an example of how my own framing of Derrida excises a crucial term in his vocabulary. This is, of course, inevitable, and even necessary according to Derrida’s own logic of the frame, as we shall see. For an excellent account of mourning in relation to art see Krell (2000). 12. In this sense, Derrida claims: ‘These shoes are an allegory of painting, a figure of pictorial detachment’ (1987: 342). Painting is a frame that both preserves and extinguishes its supersensible ‘truth’, and at best renders truth invisible and mute. 13. The parergon is, like the pharmakon whose logic it borrows, ‘an element that is in itself, if one can still say so, undecidable’ (1983: 138). 14. While this term is often contested in the literature, I use it here to signify a historical style of art that emerged in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was often associated with Derrida’s work. 15. As Kant puts it: ‘By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason’ (CJ, §43 303: 170/237). 16. Although Derrida does not lay it out, we recognise another economy at work here, that of Romanticism and the privileged position given to art as the (analogical) expression of the organic whole of which it is a part. That Kant mimics this relation while anchoring it to a divine source perhaps gives in short-hand a sense of his somewhat disingenuous (and certainly ambiguous) relation to the hylozoism (vital materialism) sweeping through Germany at this time. 17. As Ropars-Wuilleumier usefully paraphrases: ‘In this way the sublime truth concerns the “sublime” nature of truth, and the sublime offering refers back to the experience of the sublime; the offer of limitlessness that is made to it in the very limit of the work’ (1994: 97). 18. Taking a slightly different line, but to the same end, Steven Shaviro writes: Derrida follows Kant’s program in that he ceaselessly interrogates these illusions that are built into the very nature of rationality itself and endeavours, patiently and carefully, to undo them, while remaining aware that such an undoing will never be definitive or final. In sum, Derrida is the great twentieth-century thinker of the Kantian sublime. (2009: 10) 19. De Man’s essay was first delivered as a lecture in 1982, and so post-dates both The Truth in Painting and ‘Economimesis’. Unsurprisingly, then, de Man rehearses many of Derrida’s points, but not without casting an interesting light on them. 20. Once more, because of the highly contested nature of this term, I must point out I am using it here to refer to the artistic movement that emerged at the end of the 1970s, primarily in New York, and was associated



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with writers from the October magazine, primarily Owens and Douglas Crimp. 21. Douglas Crimp’s 1981 essay ‘The End of Painting’ would be exemplary in this respect (see Crimp 1993). 22. Speaking of his work for Time Life Prince describes his fascination with the advertising images he handled: ‘Their fiction seemed terrifyingly beautiful’, he says; they appeared as ‘the virtuoso real’ (1997: n.p.). 23. Sherrie Levine, Craig Owens argues, ‘reinflects Duchamp’s readymade strategy, utilizing it as an unsettling deconstructive instrument’ (1980a: 67). 24. As Douglas Crimp writes in ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’: ‘Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined’ (1993: 58).

5. For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime

Disagreement is not only an object of my theorization. It is also its method. (Rancière 2011a: 2)

The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant’s Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant’s work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities. H E D I S A G R E E S W I T H D E R R I DA .   .   . Rancière was taught by Derrida, but denies being his disciple (2007b: 84) and so unsurprisingly he has inherited some of Derrida’s methods and rejected others. On the one hand they share a commitment to a linguistic epistemology, a deconstruction and deferral of clear oppositions, and a belief in the power of art to generate performative and aleatory events. On the other, however, and as Rancière puts it: ‘I have 202



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read Derrida with interest, but from a certain distance’ (2003: 208). This distance­– ­one approaching disavowal­– ­is clearly stated in ‘Does Democracy Mean Something?’, a lecture given by Rancière as part of a series celebrating Derrida after his death: ‘I was never a disciple of Derrida or a specialist on his thought’, Rancière begins, justifying, perhaps, presenting a lecture on his own work containing only a few asides comparing it to Derrida’s (2007b: 84). These asides nevertheless locate Rancière’s work in relation to Derrida’s, a relation that begins from broadly shared interests. Like Derrida, Rancière claims, he is also interested in ‘an internal difference’ that defines democracy, one that draws together Derrida’s work on the aporetic structure of democracy and what Rancière calls his own interest in the ‘democratic paradox’ (2007b: 84). Both philosophers, perhaps, could accept Rancière’s description of his own work in Disagreement as ‘the aporia of politics embraced as a philosophical object’ (1999: xii). This aporia or paradox consists in the fact that democratic government must continually repress, control or otherwise absorb its excess, an excess that is nevertheless its base: democratic life. This democratic paradox indicates an even deeper one, Rancière claims, that of politics ‘itself’, where ‘the very ground for the power of ruling is that no ground exists’ (2007b: 89). Democratic government, as with all forms of government, requires the ‘partition of the sensible’ as Rancière calls it, the division of the polis into rulers and ruled. To justify these divisions a further ‘supplemental qualification’ is required, one that is common to both rulers and ruled, and this is the radical and unqualified equality of democratic life. As with Derrida’s supplement, democratic life supports the partition of the sensible that establishes and protects power, but simultaneously introduces a necessary excess into democracy that its governments cannot control and that Rancière famously calls ‘disagreement’. While acknowledging these similarities Rancière nevertheless claims his version of democracy is ‘more radical than Derrida’s’ (2007b: 91). Rancière is here discussing parts of Derrida’s later work that did not appear in the previous chapter, but Rancière’s objection is nevertheless relevant for us, and applies in a general sense to Derrida’s claim (that ended the last chapter) that we can only continue to live by maintaining the ‘(ironic) hope’ of finding a better word with which to name Being, for it is only through such a hope that an event might arise that could truly change the future. This hope is for a ‘democracy-to-come’, a hope that can never be fulfilled, and indeed must never be fulfilled, because it is the conduit through which a genuine otherness, a genuine future, remains a (supplemental) part of the democratic system. ‘My objection is very simple’, Rancière explains, ‘Otherness must

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not come to politics from outside. Politics has its own otherness, its own principle of heterogeneity. Democracy is precisely this principle’ (2007b: 92). In other words, like Derrida, Rancière believes democracy cannot ground itself on itself, because its condition is in fact a principle of division or difference. But unlike Derrida, this division does not separate any given democratic system from its outside (a transcendental condition that Derrida calls ‘auto-immunity’), an outside it nevertheless requires to open onto a new future. This ‘Other’ is too exterior, and Rancière instead proposes a mobile border as the interior condition of the democratic system, one constantly being negotiated between those qualified to rule and the utterly unqualified demos. This mobile border is disagreement, or as Rancière also often calls it, dissensus. Similar to Derrida’s différance, disagreement is a transcendental power that conditions the political space, but against Derrida, it only exists in its effects, in its actual historical manifestation. As a result, disagreement is not located on the (quasi-) transcendental level of the necessary opposition of a democratic government to an outside that never actually arrives. Instead, disagreement for Rancière is an operative principle continually in action: ‘This is what politics means: displacing the limits of the political by re-enacting the equality of anybody with everybody else as the vanishing condition of the political’ (2007b: 93). Rancière therefore disagrees with Derrida over the nature of the openness that both exceeds and defines democracy, and which for Rancière cannot be opposed to ‘actual’ democratic governments because it is forever at work within them. As we shall see, Rancière cannot abide any theory of absolute alterity, something he will take both Deleuze and Lyotard (in particular) to task for. The problem with such a transcendental Otherness, he argues, is that it encourages a ‘science of the hidden’ rather than analysing actual distributions of systems of possibilities. ‘Political dissensus’, he argues, ‘is not the appearance or the form that would be the manifestation of an underlying social and economic process’ (2011a: 1). Instead, democratic equality announces itself according to the conditions of its possibility and does not exist outside of this appearance. Indulging in a science of the hidden merely establishes expertise and authority over what, quite precisely, involves none: ‘Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent’, Rancière argues, ‘a position of mastery is established’ (2004: 49). In this sense Derrida is also guilty of the ‘substantialisation of otherness’, and so is also part of what Rancière calls ‘the contemporary ethical trend’ (2007b: 98). ‘In my view’, he explains, ‘Derrida gives too much presence, too much flesh to the inexistent. While deconstructing identity, he is always on the verge of reinstating



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it by overstating the ‘identity of alterity’ or the presence of the absent’ (2011a: 13). No doubt this ambiguous tightrope walk is precisely the thrill of deconstruction, and the ‘ironic hope’ of naming the other is what gives Derrida’s texts both their literary quality and productive thrust, but despite this Rancière is having none of it. Rancière’s texts are always short and to the point, unmannered in style apart from perhaps a tone of weary disappointment at the pretensions paraded in the name of ‘politics’. There is no need for him to try to capture a force that escapes both language and political domination, because the differential force of equality (i.e. disagreement) is constantly being articulated, constantly appearing, within the realm of the given.1 Politics is never ‘to come’ for Rancière, because it is always already happening. The problem with deconstruction, then, is that it offers us an opposition that tends to evaporate all its power: on the one hand it risks affirming the law of heteronomy (the law of the other that supports the ‘soldiers of God’ (Rancière 2007b: 99)), and on the other it insists on an infinite task of deconstruction to avoid any pre-emption of the other, and to always keep the future open. Both options miss what Rancière places at the centre of his theory, the permanent negotiations between the policing of the partition and those who are not recognised by it. ‘There is’, Rancière tells us, ‘not one infinite openness to otherness but many ways of inscribing the part of the other’ (2007b: 99), or in other words, again aimed directly at Derrida, ‘the framing of a future happens in the wake of political invention rather than being its condition of possibility’ (2011a: 13). On this point, Rancière strongly disagrees with his teacher: In my view, what disappears in this opposition between an institution and a transcendental horizon is democracy as practice. This practice leads to the political invention of the Other, or the heteron; a process of political subjectivization, which keeps creating ‘newcomers’, new subjects enacting the equal power of whoever and constructing new words about community in the given common world. (2007b: 98)

Rancière here states in clear terms the fundamental axiom from Disagreement: ‘Politics occurs when there is a place and a way for two heterogeneous processes to meet’ (1999: 30). Rancière is not interested in the ontology (or its erasure) of ‘meeting’, because he is not interested in an ontology of politics, which he contrasts with its action and practice.2 Politics is the meeting of an inside (as partitioned) and its internal-outside or democratic aisthesis, the pure equality of a capacity for feeling. Politics in this sense is fundamentally aesthetic because politics is constituted by the meeting (i.e. the disagreement) of an unequal distribution of social bodies and the equality of experiencing beings.

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If disagreement is always in some way articulated, then clearly language is going to be necessary to its appearance, although this ‘language’ is not necessarily discursive. Turning to Aristotle’s Politics Rancière takes up his definition of the human as a speaking animal, and of political life as the debate over laws, rights, good and evil, which define who and who does not belong to the polis. In this sense, logos defines who is part of society and how they may participate within it. Logos is contrasted by Aristotle with another form of expression, one humans share with animals, which is the voicing of pleasure and pain, the inarticulate utterance of feeling or aisthesis. This voice is that of the demos, utterly democratic and belonging to all without distinction. This voice must then be recognised in and as language, it must be recognised as speech in order to find the words by which to redistribute the partitions that heretofore excluded it. This­– ­and this is perhaps a distillation of our interest in Rancière­ – ­is the aesthetic condition of politics. ‘Politics is a question of aesthetics,’ Rancière writes, ‘a matter of appearances’ (1999: 74), and equality struggles to appear because it ‘has no vocabulary or grammar of its own, only a poetics’ (2011a: 6). Equality can only utilise the given to articulate what is not given, and when it does so it no longer states a ‘fact’ but succeeds in changing the criteria determining what a ‘fact’ is, by inserting the ‘fact’ of the demos. Politics qua disagreement therefore intervenes directly in what Rancière calls a society’s ‘allegories of inequality’ (2009a: 12). Those who belong participate according to a society’s rules and systems, articulating and reproducing those systems as they do so. But when a voice arises from a part apart, a part that has no part, a part unable to utilise the language of power but nonetheless able to make its voice, its pain, its anger heard in a clear articulation of the wrong of its exclusion, it emerges as political disagreement, and as a direct contestation of the system upheld by the police. Such a voice articulates the community as a whole, stages it, forging a new political community through the fundamental dispute over who takes part in it. In this sense, disagreement expresses the democratic political desire for totality, for the inclusion of all parts without remainder; it is the dream of total social visibility where all are equal actors in the theatre of life. In this sense, any political community is constituted on the basis of a wrong, on the count that excludes a part by denying its right to speak, denying it access to the partition of the sayable and the seeable that excludes it. This founding wrong is, however, the paradoxical impossibility of the community it projects, because it always constitutes a part that contests the partition that has created it. The demos, the part



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that has no part, that part is the poor: ‘The party of the poor embodies nothing other than politics itself as the setting up of a part of those who have no part.’ In this sense, and here Rancière is admirably direct: ‘The war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics’ (1999: 14). The poor are what mark ‘ultimate anarchy’ as the foundation of politics, inasmuch as the poor, the part without part, are excluded from the social body but are nevertheless its necessary condition of existence. The poor qua democratic equality are therefore what reveals the ‘sheer contingency of any social order’ (Rancière 1999: 16; see also 30). It is only when a social system confronts its own condition, the condition of pure unconditional equality that it erects itself against, only then does politics happen. Politics then­– ­and here Rancière is at his most strident (and appealing)­– ­is nothing but class war, with the proviso that the poor or ‘proletariat’ is not really a class, but the ­dissolution of all classes (1999: 18).3 The poor appear, Rancière argues, through a process of ‘political subjectification’, a process through which a body or its speech that were not previously identifiable emerge, and so reconfigure the given distribution of the sensible. In this sense, such subjectifications are also a dissolution of identity, or a process of ‘disidentification’, producing, Rancière says, a ‘polemical’ and ‘paradoxical scene’ (1999: 41) expressing the existence of a non-existence. Negotiating this ‘gap’ (rather than playing with it, in Derridean style, or affirming its reality as in the sublime) is the role and the realm of politics, because as a ‘political incommensurable’ disagreement is not irrational, as Rancière is quick to point out (1999: 43), it simply measures the relationship between logos and animal life. The latter is not the ‘unconscious’ of the other, nor is it a hidden transcendental waiting to be ‘revealed’. Returning to Rancière’s relation to Derrida, we can perhaps see why he might claim his own views are more radical. As he writes: Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signalling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt. (1999: 22–3)

In Derrida logos is also not simply speech, but it always, we might say, has the ambition to be speech, it is modelled on speech, inasmuch as the self-presence of speech gives to metaphysics its model. For Derrida, writing is what both founds and deconstructs the claims of logos, and as such it certainly has a political aspect. But for Rancière, the other of logos is the voice of sensation, and it is precisely the inscription of this

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voice into speech that defines the arena of politics ‘itself’. This makes aesthetics the ground of politics rather than aesthetics and politics mere aspects of the logos, or of its deconstruction. As a result, Rancière argues, ‘social revolution [is] the daughter of aesthetic revolution’ (2013: xvi) while art is a ‘specific scene of revelation’ (1999: 25) within it. H E A G R E E S­ – ­M O S T LY­ – ­W I T H K A N T (AND SCHILLER) For Rancière art is political inasmuch as it introduces a previously unseen or unsaid part into the partition of the sensible, and in this sense art is always (or at least should be) a question of political intervention and articulation. More specifically, Rancière identifies three historical ‘regimes’ of art: the ‘ethical’, the ‘representative’ and the ‘aesthetic’, which he associates with Plato, Aristotle and Kant (along with Friedrich Schiller). Within the ethical regime art does not exist as an autonomous form and is evaluated only in terms of its faithfulness to an Idea, and the effect this faith has upon the community within which it appears. The representative regime is understood as ‘classical’ and is articulated in its clearest form by Aristotle: art is mimesis and represents an action by imposing a form on matter. This imposition is then divided into a hierarchy of arts and genres, each one corresponding to a social class and the type of action appropriate to it (e.g. history painting for the rulers or those who act according to ends, genre scenes for the worker or ‘the repetitive lives of men without quality’ (Rancière 2013: xiv)). Finally, the aesthetic regime emerges at the end of the eighteenth century and remains the regime of contemporary artistic practices. Here aesthetics is understood as an autonomous form of life, one that abolishes the established representative forms of acting and making and assumes instead an equality of subjects, genres and materials. Similarly, the audience of art is ‘democratised’, inasmuch as anyone can now appreciate it. The aesthetic experience is thereby freed from a strictly ‘cause and effect’ relationship (that is, from the determinism and hierarchies of the mimetic relation and their policing of wider social divisions), enabling it to produce undetermined experiences­– ­a part without part­– ­that change the partition of the sensible when they are universalised into a new sensus communis. Rancière will draw this theory of the aesthetic regime from Kant, but perhaps more significantly from Schiller, who was the first to outline its political potential in On the Aesthetic Education of Man. As Schiller writes: ‘Art must abandon actuality and soar with becoming boldness above necessity; for Art is a daughter of



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Freedom, and must receive her commission from the needs of spirits, not from the exigency of matter’ (2004: 26). What is important for Rancière here is freedom and escape rather than the needs of the spirit. The normal (i.e. normalising) equation of sense experience and thought within mimetic perception is precisely what is disrupted in the aesthetic regime. A new sensible mode of being emerges specific to artistic production, ‘a heteronomous power’, Rancière tells us, ‘the power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself’ (2004: 23). This ‘form of thought’ will be, now in Kant’s terms, that of an aesthetic reflective judgment, which is precisely the thought consequent to an experience of ‘freedom’ that introduces this singular experience as a new universal, a new eruption of equality within the partition of the sensible. Historically, art (in the singular) emerges at this time as a unique and autonomous power, although as we have seen this does not separate it from the life it depicts, just the opposite. Aesthetic experience emerges as an autonomous realm, but one constituted by its new-found openness to all objects and every spectator. As Rancière puts it: ‘Art exists as a separate world since anything whatsoever can belong to it’ (2013: x). In this way art did, and in some cases continues to offer the means for an active political subjectivation, one that is not predetermined according to an existing political or artistic programme, but emerges instead as the new equality and freedom of an undetermined experience, an experience nonetheless concrete and particular and having a direct effect upon the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière develops his ‘politics of aesthetics’ in the wake of Foucault’s historicisation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. Following Foucault, Rancière claims there is an ‘ “aesthetics” at the core of politics’ that operates ‘as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’ (2004: 13). These forms are not, however, transcendental conditions of possible experience in general, but the specific historical conditions pertaining to the ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes.4 Each regime is a ‘partition of the sensible’ that determines the conditions of possibility for what can be seen and said, and so establishes the limits of a given community. Politics is the articulation of an aesthetic ‘disagreement’ with these conditions by what Rancière calls a ‘polemical universal’ (2004: 51), the emergence of an aesthetic reflective judgment or ‘part that has no part’, and which only exists as actualised in concrete disputes. As I have mentioned but not yet explained, Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’ is based on the Kantian concept of the beautiful and the ‘freeplay’ of the faculties it expresses. According to Kant the pleasure given by the beautiful is caused when a sensible experience is undetermined

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by the understanding (i.e. the conditions of possible experience) and so enters into a ‘free’ relationship with the imagination (the schematism organising intuited sensation into an object form). This produces an aesthetic judgment that is able to translate this experience of nondetermined beauty into discourse. ‘It is this neither . . . nor . . . [neither understanding nor imagination] that defines the experience of the beautiful as the experience of a kind of resistance’, Rancière argues, a dissensus at once aesthetic and political because it disengages the aesthetic experience from existing regimes of the sayable and the seeable (2010: 173). This new realm of experience expressed by an aesthetic judgment suspends the existing partition of the sensible, and so indicates a new ‘autonomy’ of art, but this autonomy paradoxically guarantees, and indeed depends upon, art’s ability to act in the world. It also attests to a new autonomous subjectivity, a revolutionary with taste perhaps, whose aesthetic judgments are free and independent of any abstract law or current a priori. Indeed Kant, on Rancière’s account, introduces ‘the definition of a form of judgement freed from the hierarchies of knowledge and those of social life’ (2007a: 258). Beauty is at once a singular difference arising as a ‘dissensus’ within the realm of the given, but it is also the promise of a new equality emerging beyond the current conditions of domination and disparity. As Rancière puts it: ‘What is offered by the free play of art is free appearance. This means that free appearance is the product of a disconnected community between two sensoria­ – ­the sensorium of artistic fabrication and the sensorium of enjoyment’ (2009a: 64). It is reassuring to know that for Rancière the revolution will certainly involve dancing! The aesthetic judgment, Rancière claims, ‘opens up an aesthetic community, in a Kantian fashion, a community that demands the consent of the very person who does not acknowledge it’ (1999: 90). This demand constitutes the ‘political dispute’, and marks the appearance of subjects that are ‘distinct from all conflicts of interests between constituted parties’ (Rancière 1999: 100). Politics in Rancière’s sense is therefore the appearance of an experience that is radically undetermined; it is subjectively disinterested and so is universal, and it has no end in a teleological sense and so is free. As we shall see, this will have radical consequences for what we might normally consider ‘political art’. What Rancière therefore draws from Kant’s aesthetic judgment is not the question of its ‘self-referentiality’ or autonomy as this is normally understood, but rather how the invention of new aesthetic particulars (experiences and the judgments that express them) are able to create a new totality. As Rancière puts it in a passage worth quoting at length:



Rancière and the Sublime 211 The modern emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous discourse determining an autonomous division of the perceptible is the emergence of an evaluation of the perceptible that is distinct from any judgment about the use to which it is put; and which accordingly defines a world of commands and lots that gives everything a use. That a palace may be the object of an evaluation that has no bearing on the convenience of a residence, the privileges of a role, or the emblems of majesty, is what, for Kant, particularizes the aesthetic community and the requirement of universality proper to it. So the autonomization of aesthetics means first freeing up the norms of representation, and second, constituting a kind of community of sense experience that works on the world of assumption, of the as if that includes those who are not included by revealing a mode of existence of sense experience that has eluded the allocation of parties and lots. There never has been any ‘aestheticization’ of politics in the modern age because politics is aesthetics in principle. But the autonomization of aesthetics as a new nexus between the order of the logos and the partition of the perceptible is part of the modern configuration of politics. [. . .] Modern politics is first played out in this distinct notion of a virtual or dual community of sense experience beyond the distribution of commands and jobs. (1999: 58)

We can already see how this radical expansion of the political powers of aesthetic judgment works against more traditional understandings of ‘political art’. In the first place, the ‘political’ aspect of art is not connected to its ‘content’, and indeed Kant’s understanding of aesthetics makes disconnecting an object’s ‘content’ part of the process by which its aesthetic (and so political) qualities can emerge. As Rancière’s example (taken from the Third Critique) clearly shows, the aestheticopolitical potentialities embodied by the palace has nothing to do with it belonging to the king, just as an art work discursively engaged with the politics of immigration cannot be in his sense ‘political’, because it remains determined by the police partitions of the sensible that govern immigration, most especially when it directly condemns them. Similarly, when such an art work attempts to ‘educate’ its viewers, or ‘raise their consciousness’, it also simply confirms various hierarchical divisions of society (teacher/pupil, knowledge/ignorance, active/­passive, etc.) that structure the very problem that the art work supposedly critiques.5 In this way, then, Rancière gives more power to art as a political mechanism, but in doing so he also rejects most of the ways in which contemporary art has imagined itself to be political. In this, he is similar to Lyotard and Deleuze, who also affirm the political potential of a purely aesthetic invention qua ontological force, but unlike them he does not, as we shall see in some detail, champion a sublime sensation that escapes all conceptual content. Instead he prefers Kant’s beautiful form whose sensible and intellectual aspects are in free play,

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and the aesthetic idea produced by art, which Rancière glosses Kant as a ‘representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definitive thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it’ (2011: 41). Once more, we see how art’s ability to produce an active indetermination (both sensible and conceptual, and perhaps most important, of the relation connecting the two) is its major political force, rather than any ontological privilege it might have or express. In this sense, Rancière claims: The ontology of the dissensus is actually a fictional ontology, a play of ‘aesthetic ideas’. The set of relations that constitutes the work operates as if it had a different ontological texture from the sensations that make up everyday experience. But there is neither sensory difference nor an ontological difference. The aesthetic work takes the place of­– i­ s a substitute for­– ­the work that realizes the law of the medium (according to Greenberg’s notion) or the law of pure sensation (according to Deleuze’s view). (2009a: 67–8)

Rancière offers Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ as the ‘first manifesto’ of the aesthetic regime (2004: 24) and its ‘unsurpassable reference point’ (2004: 27). This aesthetic state marks both the ‘fundamental identity’ of an active thought and a passive receptivity of sensible matter, and their ‘dual cancellation’ in the single reality defined by the ‘free play’ of the faculties (2004: 24 and 27; for Schiller on the necessary complementarity of sensibility and thought see 2004: Letter 13). It is this ‘play’ that allows beautiful art to develop ‘a sensorium different to that of domination’ (2009: 30), and for Schiller it is aesthetic education that shows people how to ‘play’ in this new, free political community. Political revolution is in this sense a fundamentally aesthetic process achieved through the material realisation of a common humanity that had to this point only existed as an Idea. In this way, Rancière argues, Schiller ‘translates’ Kant’s aesthetics into political propositions (2009: 31), because aesthetic play creates ‘the material realization of an unconditional freedom and pure thought in common forms of life and belief’ (2004: 27). These common forms, whether generated by an autonomous modernist art or a heteronomous postmodern art of the everyday, offer an experience ‘which appears as the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life’ (2009: 32). Schiller holds out the promise of a free community, Rancière argues, because he sees the art work as neither speaking nor acting, as actually doing nothing, desiring nothing (it is indifferent), and so offering no model to us. This operation of ‘aesthetic separation’ or ‘original disjunction’ (2009a: 73) turns art works away from their intended meaning or institutional destination, and instead appeals to the ‘free gaze (2009a: 71) of the demos. Art works are therefore in no way beholden, note,



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to the supersensible, which plays no role in Rancière’s account. Beauty is not an expression of the teleological ‘reason’ of nature for Rancière, and its undetermined but therefore political valence does not illustrate Nature’s supersensible purposiveness. In this sense, ‘political art’ does not try to persuade us what the ‘right’ thing to do might be, nor does it attempt to produce a community according to utopian ideas; it instead reframes the relationships defining bodies and communities in order to evade given cause-effect relations and thereby produce new forms of collective engagement. This is a process of ‘dis-identification’ (2009a: 73) that allows new subjectivations to take (their) place, without predicting or determining them in advance. As Rancière clearly puts it: ‘The very same thing that makes the aesthetic “political” stands in the way of all strategies for “politicizing art” ’ (2009a: 74). Rancière uses Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ to transform art into ‘real’ politics, an anarchist politics that bypasses all ‘representation’: The suspension of power, the neither . . . nor . . . specific to the aesthetic state announces a wholly new revolution: a revolution in the forms of sensory existence, instead of a simple upheaval of the forms of state; a revolution that is no mere displacement of powers, but a neutralization of the very forms by which power is exercised, overturning other powers and having themselves overturned. Aesthetic free play­– o ­ r neutralization­– d ­ efines a novel mode of experience that bears within it a new form of ‘sensible’ universality and equality. (2009: 99)

How, then, does this aesthetic politics play out in relation to contemporary art? H E D I S A G R E E S W I T H C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T .   .   . Rancière’s aesthetic regime has radical consequences for contemporary artistic practices, because it takes away both the clear distinction and historical specificity of modern and postmodern practices. Not only are modernism and postmodernism artistic movements that draw upon both autonomous and heteronomous strategies, but both have, according to Rancière, been around since 1800! As he puts it: The aesthetic regime of art institutes the relation between the forms of identification of art and the forms of political community in such a way as to challenge in advance every opposition between autonomous art and heteronomous art, art for art’s sake and art in the service of politics, museum art and street art. [. . .] Thus there is no conflict between the purity of art and its politicization. (2009: 32)

Art into life (postmodern non-art) and life into art (autonomous modernist art) therefore converge ‘in the same initial kernel’ (2009:

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34). This ‘kernel’ is their shared attempt to ‘reframe material and symbolic space’ by creating a ‘dissensus’ (2009: 24–5), inasmuch as ‘dissensus means a difference between sense and sense’ (2011a: 1). Both of these approaches therefore create a ‘fissure in the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception, thought and action with the “inadmissible” ’ (2004: 85). An art work is therefore ‘political’ when it produces a heterogeneous experience that ‘suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and sensibility’ (2009: 31). Art is political by first of all dissenting from the sensible givens that regulate ‘life’ (i.e. by being an autonomous ‘art’ undetermined by life), and then by seeking to create a new ‘life’ in which this dissensus disappears (i.e. by being ‘life’ rather than an autonomous ‘art’). As a result, the ‘two vanishing points’ of Rancière’s aesthetic regime­– a­ rt and non-art­– e­ ach imply their opposite, causing the aesthetic regime to constantly ‘shuttle between’ its constitutive poles (2010: 132). This classic piece of deconstruction (it offers a dialectic without sublation) means that there is no chronology or priority to these positions in aesthetic or political terms, leading to what in our present context is Rancière’s surprising conclusion: ‘There is no postmodern rupture. There is a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work’ (2009: 36). In this very positive sense, art-into-life is more than simply the angry erasure of art’s autonomy, just as art for art’s sake is more than a solipsistic insistence on medium specificity. Both draw upon aspects of the other in directly contributing to the construction of a new distribution of the sensible. This is the ‘founding paradox’ of both modernism and postmodernism, one Rancière continually repeats: ‘Art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other than art’ (2009: 36; see also 2004: 206; 2010: 118; 2011: 35). Art is ‘non-art’ not in the sense of not being art, but in the sense that art is art because of its ability to transmit experiences that lie outside the spectrum of what can be seen and said, including about art. Let us immediately note that this power of art is not only sensible, but can also emerge in, or require the support of, discursive and intellectual mediation. Unsurprisingly, the relation of the sensible and conceptual aspects of art are for Rancière similarly paradoxical, inasmuch as they each implicate the other, and are equally ‘suspended’ within the undetermined experience articulated by an aesthetic judgment. While the aesthetic regime does seem to place the sensible qualities of art at its base, formalist understandings of modernism are nevertheless ‘incoherent’ according to Rancière (2003: 25), because they are based on the overly simple distinction of representative and



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non-­representative art. In fact, non-representational aesthetic strategies emerged with the end of the representative regime and can already be seen in the literary realism of the nineteenth century. Realism, Rancière argues, reverses the hierarchical organisation of representation and in particular the priority of the narrative over descriptions of details, or ‘close-ups’. In this way the strict distinction of fact and fiction, objective and subjective, typifying the representative regime, breaks down as realism utilises both, often without distinction. Details rush to the surface independent of the narrative, emerging simply as themselves through the ‘silent speech’ of art, a speech in which they articulate themselves but also maintain a certain muteness that defies translation. What emerges in realism’s non-representational details, then, is the foundational tension of the aesthetic regime itself, the unresolved tension between thought and experience, ‘between the unfolding of inscriptions carried by bodies and the interruptive function of their naked, non-signifying presence’ (Rancière 2007: 14). While Rancière rejects formalist modernism such as that advocated by Adorno or Greenberg, he nevertheless insists on the political potential of abstract painting, which is not political through its ‘negative dialectic’ with life, but because it introduces a new kind of social ‘interface’ (2004: 16). The flatness of abstract painting, Rancière claims, emerges from the much earlier breakdown of traditional distinctions between artistic and artisanal practices that gave rise to the ‘flatness’ of posters, tapestries and other applied arts. On this reading, the breakdown of representation traditionally associated with art’s autonomy (i.e. modernism) is in fact a result of its heteronomy, of artists looking outside the realm of the traditional figurative arts to find a different aesthetic ‘surface’ in the objects of everyday life. In borrowing and exaggerating these surfaces, in turning them into ‘art’, artists fed them back into the social body as dissensus and became ‘revolutionaries who invent new forms of life’ (Rancière 2004: 16, see also 2009: 33).6 Abstract painting, Rancière argues, ‘was invented not as a manifestation of art’s autonomy but in the context of a way of thinking of art as a fabricator of forms of life’ (2007a: 257). As a result, abstract art was concerned with inventing new but nevertheless common experiences that contested the existing distribution of the sensible. This, Rancière claims, is the very definition of contemporary art, no matter when it arises (2007a: 257). ‘From this perspective’, Rancière remarks, ‘it is possible to challenge a good many imaginary stories about artistic modernity’ (2004: 19.) You know he is going to enjoy that. For a start contemporary art goes wrong in either positing the

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image’s simple sensible presence, or in positing its impossibility within the (historical or ahistorical) ubiquity of representation, instead of acknowledging the constitutive tension between these terms that established the aesthetic regime­– ­i.e. the regime of ‘Art’­– ­in the first place. According to this ‘mistake’ Rancière proposes a division of contemporary images into the ‘naked image’, the ‘ostensive image’ and the ‘metaphorical image’ (2007: 23–4). The ‘naked’ image declares itself non-art inasmuch as it involves absolutely no dissemblance, and is unquestionable indexical evidence of something, usually horrific, Rancière’s favourite example being photographs of the extermination camps. The second ‘ostensive’ image is one that claims a pure presence in the name of art, outside of any mass-media or institutional frames (2007: 23). The third ‘metaphorical image’ is the opposite of the second, querying the possibility of art’s presence and merely seeking to intervene in the circulation of images in general, of which it is one. These postmodern images ‘aim to play with the forms of and products of imagery, rather than carry out their demystification’ (Rancière 2007: 25). Rancière rejects all three approaches for their insistence on the presence of the image, or of this presence’s impossibility, because the ultimate undecidability of these images compels them to borrow something from the others. All require, and here Rancière is close to Derrida, a ‘supplement’ (2007: 29), all images in other words appear through the relations they establish between visibility and signification, between a presence and its narration, and those images that can operate politically, as we have seen, are those that are able to hold this tension in suspension to the point where a new (new because undetermined) experience and its thought can emerge. Most attempts by contemporary art to be political fail, Rancière insists, because they misunderstand both the powers of art and the nature of politics. As Rancière argues: The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. (2003: 63)

Once more, Rancière is clearly echoing Schiller: ‘But how does the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion’ (Schiller 2004: 52). In this sense, then, ‘there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue’ (Rancière 2004: 61). ‘Political’ art in Rancière’s sense does not simply represent or



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enact a received political dogma, nor should it ‘raise consciousness’ about an issue in the world because such practices cannot confront their own conditions of possibility on the level of the seeable or the sayable. As Rancière puts it, ‘modes of narration or new forms of visibility established by artistic practices [must] enter into politics’ own field of aesthetic possibilities’ (2004: 64). Irony­– ­and its bedfellow appropriation­– ­seem hopeless strategies under these conditions because they offer nothing new on the level of aesthetic experience. Similarly, artistic practices that attempt to put art at the service of a political movement have simply got things the wrong way around because, as Rancière puts it: ‘It is up to the various forms of politics to appropriate, for their own proper use, the modes of presentation or the means of establishing explanatory sequences produced by artistic practices rather than the other way around’ (2003: 65). Once more, for Rancière social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution . . . today, could such a statement be more incredible? In this context it is no surprise to see ‘critical’ practices, and especially those with explicitly political objectives, take a savaging. Such art offers two things, Rancière tells us: first, an awareness of a hidden and shocking reality that provokes a sense of guilt in the spectator; and a raised awareness leading to political mobilisation. Unlike its illustrious forebears, however (i.e. the paintings of George Grosz or the collages of John Heartfield), contemporary ‘critical’ art of this type tends to be defeatist in its approach, and avoids or downright denies the possibility of emancipation. Instead, this work looks to reveal the ubiquity of current powers and the impossibility of stepping outside them. This leaves such work with an overriding feeling of disenchantment, disillusion and hopelessness­– w ­ hat Rancière calls a ‘melancholic leftism’ (2009a: 35) or ‘postmodern nihilism’ (2009a: 45)­ – ­which now often stands for ‘political’ content. As he bitingly puts it, here it is ‘the impotence of the critique that unveils the impotence of the imbeciles [i.e. audience]’ (2009a: 48). On the other hand, however, Rancière is obviously not advocating a return to the right-wing myth of a harmonious community where everyone is in their place and enthusiastically obeys the police. Instead, he argues, we must refuse the way contemporary art connects a desire for emancipation with the recognition of our incapacity to achieve it. We must begin instead from the assumption that the incapable are capable of emancipation, are capable of, as Rancière has it, ‘an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearance nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing itself on all’ (2009a: 48).

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Every situation can be cracked open from the inside by a necessarily singular event that reconfigures the regime of perception and signification and offers new possibilities to all. Emancipation in this sense, Rancière argues, ‘is the collectivisation of capacities invested in scenes of dissensus’ (2009a: 49). But how, we might justifiably ask, is this conflation of a singular event and collective political transformation possible? It is possible, and this is precisely the unexpected resource of Rancière’s version of micropolitics, because the singular sensible event is the eruption of equality itself, it is the singular emergence of the common, and when it is recognised as such it is able to produce a political shift in collective conditions. A recurring example offered by Rancière is the films by Pedro Costa about drug addicts living in the slums of Lisbon. Rather than ‘explaining’ the politics of their situation, or advocating solidarity, Costa ‘focusses on the possibilities of life and art specific to that situation of misery’ (Rancière 2009a: 79). These films focus, in other words, on the aesthetic capacities found in anyone and everyone, and explore how these create a dissensus within a specific situation that can be translated to a wider audience. This is not to suggest that the seemingly forlorn gestures of cleaning and tidying performed by an addict in a house about to be demolished, for example, is a generalisable strategy­– ­clearly it is not­– ­but to show how aesthetic dissensus operates everywhere, how it is both ubiquitous but also fleeting and fragile. It is precisely this refusal to offer a political ‘content’ or ‘criticism’ that gives Costa’s films their strength, Rancière claims, because instead they choose to focus on moments of meaningless but nevertheless essential aesthetic pleasure. Rancière also rejects the recent ‘populist’ artistic strategies of ‘over-identification’, of ‘hacking’ mainstream media, or practices that attempt to turn art viewers into participants in political movements. As Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield has pointed out, Rancière wishes to save the heterogeneous sensible that lies at the heart of the autonomy of art, preventing it on the one hand from being entirely evaporated into the everyday (art-into-life) or on the other from becoming a pure sensible without any political conditions (i.e. a transcendental ontological force, as in Lyotard or Deleuze). Art in this sense establishes a dialectic between the separate and the non-separate, ‘a dialectic that would provoke political intelligibility yet retain sensible foreignness’ (Dronsfield 2008: 41). In fact it is the difference between the regime of the sensible and that part of itself that cannot be sensed (yet) that art makes thinkable, and it is this that enables it to become politically active. The simple beauty of Costa’s images, for example, appeal to us from outside the policed limits of our community, but rather than offering an



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escape from those limits instead revise them, their sensations provoking thoughts that together redefine the conditions of their own appearance. Rancière’s aesthetics therefore seek to think the future by opening the given to a necessarily undetermined but nevertheless concrete possibility, one that is universal. For Rancière political aesthetics expands our possibility of experience on the assumption that these conditions are always already composed from the seen (imagination) and the said (understanding), and that a reflective judgment, which universalises a new experience­– ­and so a new future­– ­can introduce equality into our unfair world. As Rancière says: ‘I don’t offer any formula for the future, but I strive to describe a world open to the possibilities and capacities of all’ (2008: 58). What is extremely refreshing about Rancière’s conception of political art is that it rejects its historical connection to anti-art. It has become a truism today that ‘political art’ must free itself of the repressive institutions of art (and in particular the idea of an autonomous art) by repudiating its own status as ‘art’. The ridiculous paradoxes of this position do not need rehearsing, except to say that the link between a ‘political’ art and anti-art rests on the rejection of art being understood as ‘political’ in the first place. To be political, so the argument goes, art must escape its self-inflicted confinement as itself and go into the world, into life, where it might do some good­– ­where it might act ‘politically’ in other words. Rancière clearly shows us how this approach breaks down at the point where its foundational negation of art no longer has any meaning (i.e. at the exact point where it is no longer art and so loses the ‘political’ motivation of ‘anti-art’), a point that anyway requires a university degree to recognise, somewhat clouding its claims to have escaped art’s elitism. As Rancière argues (but one wonders why contemporary practices have found this so hard to understand), the aesthetic is the basis of politics rather than what prevents politics taking place, and the fact that art is aesthetic is therefore to its political advantage and to deny this is not simply ‘anti-art’ but ‘anti-politics’. Rancière, inasmuch as he is always seeking to blur existing oppositions, advocates neither autonomous (art for art’s sake) nor heteronomous (art-into-life) approaches, first of all because according to him neither exists without the other in the first place. H E D I S A G R E E S W I T H LYO TA R D Rancière utilises Schiller’s understanding of Kant’s formula for beauty to include autonomous modernist sensations and postmodern conceptual heteronomy within the same ‘aesthetic state’ or ‘regime’. But

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in doing so he must also confront and combat the eruption­– ­in Kant and in recent French aesthetic theory­– ­of another aesthetic state, the sublime. In Lyotard’s and Deleuze’s affirmation of the sublime the free play of the faculties is overturned and the sensus communis is gleefully and irremediably shattered. In their place emerges difference in itself, a supersensible but nevertheless immanent element that is the vital and virtual principle of sensation, a sensation-event that is expressed or actualised in an art work adequate to its sublime dimensions. Rancière will specifically condemn both Lyotard and Deleuze for their sublime aesthetics, along with the wider problem of which they are symptomatic: The reinterpretation of the Kantian analysis of the sublime introduced into the field of art a concept that Kant had located beyond it. It did this in order to more effectively make art a witness to an encounter with the unpresentable that cripples all thought, and thereby a witness for the prosecution against the arrogance of the grand aesthetico-political endeavour to have ‘thought’ become ‘world’. In this way reflection on art became the site where a mise-en-scène of the original abyss of thought and the disaster of its misrecognition continued after the proclamation of the end of political utopias. (2004: 9–10)

In this regard Lyotard is Rancière’s bête noire, whom he never stops attacking.7 Lyotard in particular, Rancière claims, is guilty of reifying the pure Other to the extent that any chance for political utterances are silenced by its inarticulable difference. As Jean-Louis Déotte points out: ‘Rancière effectively circumscribes a genre of discourse­– ­the political­ – ­that has no specific place in Lyotard’s Le Différend’ (2004: 79). For Rancière disagreement is the articulation of a wrong (inequality), an articulation that always already assumes an equality that is ‘wronged’, and so a common language. For Lyotard, on the other hand, the differend is the presence of the inarticulable as such, the very Thing that escapes articulation in the various expressions defining what Rancière calls a disagreement, but nevertheless acts as their foundation. Once more Déotte makes the point succinctly: ‘One could say that for Lyotard, the naked figural (mode of appearing) is the condition of the device, of the system, on condition of being absorbed, whereas for Rancière its the opposite: the System (police, culture) is the condition for appearances’ (2004: 84). This is an important distinction in relation to Lyotard and Rancière’s respective views on art. Lyotard affirms an ontological substrate that appears only as unpresentable, as witness to the permanent differend distancing an appearance from the ontological layer underlying it. Art is therefore committed to an abstraction that will only ever echo



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its beyond, a melancholy expression that can only attest to its foundational absence. This is, at least according to Rancière, the opposite of a political disagreement. For Rancière nothing is inarticulable, and politics is nothing but the articulation of what lies outside the police lines in order to create a new inside, a new community. Lyotard’s ‘radical re-reading’ of Kant gives the avant-garde, Rancière elaborates, ‘the paradoxical duty of bearing witness to an immemorial dependency of human thought that makes any promise of emancipation a deception’ (2010: 130). Why? Because in Lyotard’s version of the sublime reason’s inability to conceive of matter and its events causes it to break down, powerless, while in Kant imagination’s collapse clears the way for reason to display its power (Rancière 2009: 92). Thus, in Kant, the sublime leads us from the autonomy of the beautiful experience to the ‘superior autonomy’ of reason and the supersensible world, while ‘Lyotard’, Rancière argues, ‘turns this logic strictly on its head’ (2009: 93). If ‘the aesthetic condition is enslavement to the aistheton’ (Lyotard, quoted by Rancière 2009: 93), then the avant-garde event, Rancière continues, can only bear witness to its own paradoxical alterity making ‘this passage out of the realm of art the very law of art’ (2009: 127). This is why, according to Rancière, aesthetics and politics are obliterated by ethics in Lyotard, because the singularity of the sensation simply ‘becomes a submission to the law of the Other’ (2009: 128). This ‘overturning’ of aesthetics into ethics, Rancière claims, ‘forgets’ that modernity is constituted by the two poles of the aesthetic regime (the sensual and conceptual conditions of possible experience), and instead evaluates an image according to its faithfulness to an Idea. Interestingly, Rancière connects Lyotard’s ethical aesthetics to his criticism’s of Derrida’s understanding of democracy, inasmuch as both affirm aporia as their determining logic. In this sense, the postmodern art that both thinkers, in their different ways, champion is, according to Rancière, inadequate: The postmodern reversal had as its theoretical foundation Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime, which was reinterpreted as the scene of a founding distance separating the idea from any sensible presentation. From this moment onward, postmodernism came into harmony with the mourning of and repenting of modernist thought, and the scene of sublime distance came to epitomize all sorts of scenes of original distance or original sin. (2004: 29)

While the celebration of an ‘original distance’ does seem a good description of both Lyotard’s and Derrida’s general approach, it does not account for the very wide differences in their understanding of the function of art. Nevertheless, Rancière’s philosophical point is that postmodernism cannot achieve political change, because it establishes

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an outside that demands an ethical response from us (its affirmation in the differend in Lyotard’s case, and the affirmation of its impossibility in Derrida’s), one that obliterates the political efficacy of aesthetic disagreement. For Rancière the problem with postmodernism understood in terms of its grounding aporia is that it does not allow art the opportunity of changing the distribution of the sayable and the sensible conditioning its own emergence. Rancière will argue against Lyotard’s postmodernism at some length, beginning from the accusation that he turns dissensus into an ethics of absolute wrong (2011a: 9). For Rancière this ‘ethical turn’ of Lyotard was obscured by his Anglo-American reception, which emphasised his poststructuralist critique of the subject and the end of grand narratives. On the one hand, Rancière disagrees with Lyotard’s argument (or lack of it) concerning the end of grand narratives, as his own research into proletarian life produced no evidence, he claims, for the end of the grand narrative of the proletarian as victim nor for its dissolution into local narratives. On the other hand, Rancière claims that Lyotard erected his own grand narrative around the Holocaust as the absolute crime appearing as the result of western thought’s attempt to forget the original debt owed to the Other, ‘the Untameable or the Unredeemable’ (Rancière 2011a: 10). For Lyotard the radical alterity of the aistheton and thought becomes the law, and the Jewish obedience to this law was precisely what the Nazi’s sought to obliterate, a disaster arising from the denial of the original disaster. Although Rancière takes Lyotard to task in his specifics, there is also a more general principle at stake, that of Rancière’s desire to, as he says, ‘set aside all analysis of political matters in terms of metaphysical destination’ (2011a: 12). It is precisely this general principle that demands thinking politics in terms of specific relationships, or specific disagreements rather than the ‘grand narrative’ of the unnameable Other. More specifically, then, Rancière claims that Lyotard disconnects artistic modernism from the ‘grand narrative’ of the emancipation of the proletariat and reconnects it to that of the extermination of the Jews. The avant-garde thereby moves from inscribing the contradiction between capitalism and art to mourning the absence of the Other from the sensible, forcing the subject to either submit to the violence of the aistheton or undergo its absence. Lyotard thereby effaces what Rancière posits as the original link between aesthetic suspension and political emancipation. Instead of Schiller’s ‘freedom or death’, Rancière quips, Lyotard gives us ‘servitude or death’, ‘a joint suppression of both aesthetics and politics’ in which ‘there is nothing to be done except obey the immemorial law of alienation’



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(2009: 105). But Rancière overstates the case when he claims Lyotard effaces the critique of capitalism in bearing witness to the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Lyotard does privilege heterogeneity as the ethical mechanism of art, but he does not drown his critique of capitalism in the tears of mourning. Indeed, Steven Shaviro (2006) is one of many commentators that have pointred out that Rancière’s work lacks any account of political economy, and indeed it seems that artistic dissensus does not directly engage with the commodification of visual culture, but rather precedes it. In this sense, then, political aesthetics is productive (as is Delueze’s and Lyotard’s in a general sense), but for Rancière this productive capacity is defined negatively by what already exists and remains fleeting in its emergence, in as much as its articulation also means its absorbtion into the structures of the possible. As a result, there is the suspicion that ‘dissensus’ could be another name for capitalist ‘innovation’, or at least something that does not directly interfere with it, and that its ‘resistance’ is merely the research and development arm of commodity production. If this is true then we are right to take seriously the more radical aesthetic attacks on capitalism proposed by Lyotard and Deleuze. Rancière’s own commitment to postmodernism is partial, for while he clearly embraces the hybridisation of materials, discourses and genres within postmodern artistic practices for challenging the system of historical a prioris providing our underlying social ‘syntax’, he also sees the presence of purely aesthetic experience as a crucial aspect of art and politics. Indeed, his treatment of art always looks for the co-implication of these two factors in creating ‘fictions’ that have the potential to create new forms of reality and new forms of life (2004: 39). This is precisely the position that Rancière finds in Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, where the ‘reality’ of intuitive experience is not determined by a given conceptual ‘narrative’. This crucial insight is continued by Romanticism, according to Rancière, where thought becomes sensible just as the sensible is able to be thought, and art becomes the privileged mechanism by which sensible matter is transformed into the self-presentation of a new community. Rancière’s objections to Lyotard are therefore made strictly from his own perspective, a fact we should always keep in mind, but they also imply wider objections about the destiny of the avant-garde that makes them relevant for contemporary art. Rancière objects to how Lyotard’s sublime event refuses to link art’s specificity to a future emancipation, but connects it instead ‘to an immemorial and never-ending catastrophe’ (2009: 129). This, Rancière continues, ‘transforms every promise of emancipation into a lie’ and makes ‘resistance’ an ‘endless work of

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mourning’ (2009: 130). Lyotard, Rancière claims, gives an ‘implicit refutation of Schiller’s vision’ by placing art and aesthetics on this ‘oneway detour’ to ethics, and in doing so only succeeds in ‘blocking the originary path from aesthetics to politics’ charted by the avant-garde (2010: 131). For Rancière: Ethics is thinking that hyperbolizes the thought content of the crime to restore thought to the memory of its native impotence. But ethics is also thinking that tars all thought and all politics with its own impotence, by making itself the custodian of the thought of the catastrophe from which no ethics, in any case, was able to protect us. (1999: 135)

Rancière, as we have seen, rejects this ‘fantasy’ of art’s impotence in the face of its own catastrophe in favour of a tension between art and politics that constitutes his own aesthetic regime, but he will go beyond a simple rejection of Lyotard’s account of the sublime by making it a part of his own understanding of the ‘aesthetic’. Rancière extends the differential logic (between sensibility and thought) of the aesthetic regime to the ‘tension’ Schiller finds between the beautiful statue’s charm and its self-sufficiency (the statue is the Juno Ludovisi). The statue, he claims, both attracts us and makes us recoil, calms and agitates us. ‘There is then’, Rancière argues, ‘no rupture between an aesthetics of the beautiful and an aesthetics of the sublime. Dissensus, i.e. the rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible, already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and repose’ (2009: 98). Rancière therefore reduces the difference between sensibility and thought and the attack on subjectivity mounted by the sublime to the relative differences of attraction and disgust or of agreement and disagreement that define, but do not go beyond, our historical conditions of possible experience. In this way Rancière can claim for Schiller’s aesthetic state a political significance over and above the promise of social mediation implied by Kantian common sense, but he cannot have it both ways and also equate this with the sublime. ‘Aesthetic common sense, for Schiller, is a dissensual common sense’ (2009: 98) Rancière writes, but this is not the same as the destruction of all common sense in the sublime that Lyotard­– ­and Deleuze­– ­turn into the very principle of art. Lyotard’s ‘anti-aesthetic’, Rancière argues, depends on a primal scene that grounds both art’s autonomy and the promise of human emancipation in the experience of a ‘sensorium of exception’ where the active/passive, subject/object and form/matter oppositions conditioning experience are negated. Schiller, on the other hand, offers a community to come that doesn’t have to endure the pain of aesthetic alterity where



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art is an impossible exception bearing witness to an ‘unseparated collective life’ (Rancière 2009: 100). The neither . . . nor . . . of the aesthetic regime replaces ethics with politics, it replaces passivity with activity, mourning with resistance, alterity with intervention. For Rancière the choice is clear: ‘Either dissensus is reduced to the conflict between appearance and reality, or a new consensus is formed for the purpose of transforming the appearance of art into the realities of common life, in other words, of transforming the world into the product and mirror of human activity’ (2009: 100). Rancière­– ­and he is speaking of Lyotard­– ­is ‘motivated by a certain intolerance for an inflated use of the notion of the unrepresentable’, which is surrounded, he claims with an ‘aura of holy terror’ (2007: 109). This has given rise to the privilege of the witness within contemporary art, a witnessing of a there was that exceeds thought. Once more, Lyotard is to blame for this hubris of a sublime art capable of presenting what cannot be thought, and is only achieved, Rancière argues, through the subreption of ‘something unthinkable at the heart of the event and something unpresentable at the heart of art’ (2007: 130–1). From here confusion is stacked upon confusion, as Lyotard connects the aesthetic possibilities of a type of art (the avant-garde, and more specifically abstract painting) with an ethical denunciation of representation, and does so by superimposing two regimes of art (abstract and representational) over Kant’s distinction of the beautiful and the sublime. This is wrong, Rancière continues, because the sublime is not, for Kant, a regime of art, but what takes us out of the sphere of art as he defines it (i.e. aesthetic experience produced by the play of the imagination and the understanding) and into the realm of Ideas where images are prohibited. It is clearly paradoxical, Rancière claims, that the sublime could be both the prohibition of images and the image witnessing this prohibition. This, finally, is the reason for Lyotard’s ‘superimposition’ of Kant’s moral sublime onto Burke’s poetic sublime, which makes it possible to suggest that sublime art is a negative presentation testifying to the presence of the Other. For Rancière this move actually achieves what it set out to deny, because although it claims to reveal the unthinkable Other that resists rationalisation, it in fact offers ‘the principle of complete rationalisation’ (2007: 134) by combining a concept of art with a concept of what exceeds art. This concept is not a reflective judgment at all, Rancière continues, and instead offers a concept that ‘is itself highly determinate’ (2007: 135). In order to equate an anti-representative art with the unthinkability of the event, Lyotard has rendered this event entirely thinkable, meaning, as Rancière triumphantly announces: ‘The

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logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it’ (2007: 138). Rancière’s reading of Lyotard places him entirely on the side of the sensible in his own aesthetic regime, and in doing so it also highlights aspects of Rancière’s regime that from Lyotard’s perspective remain problematic. The first is the way Rancière relativises heterogeneity by making its common sensibility only articulable as disagreement, and as such the condition of possibility for democracy as such. But this means, it seems, that there is no room for radical exteriority within Rancière’s politics and indeed he insists (against Lyotard) that there is nothing that is unrepresentable, including the Holocaust (2009: 126).8 Rancière goes so far as to claim that the dissensual democracy of his aesthetic regime, and the representational model that underpins it, is the best response to our contemporary demands for a philosophy of immanence. But is this really the case? From another perspective Lyotard, in a way very similar to Deleuze, locates an interior outside (the inhuman) as the genetic difference that insures immanence remains ontologically (rather than discursively) grounded. If immanence is tied to its discursive representation then difference can never be more than a relative disagreement. In this sense the search for ‘justice’ that Rancière finds so offensive in Lyotard’s aesthetics (and in Deleuze’s­– ­see 2004b: 6) is neither a moral cause nor does it necessarily replace political activism with passivity, but is instead the way art acts as an ontological stimulant to life in Nietzsche’s sense, a stimulant by which the given produces something new and unknown from out of its own difference. This is the ‘justice’ by which the ‘Figure disappears’ in the ‘Sahara’, according to Deleuze, the ‘justice’ of overcoming the human in the sublime (2003: 27). Certainly the future takes on an ethical aspect, but only as the imperative that motivates art and life to return us to the world as that world made different. In this sense the aim of aesthetics and politics in Lyotard and Deleuze is not to produce a new sensual community, a new political body whose discursive framework allows it to negotiate relative differences, but instead aesthetics as politics would present an immanent outside, a difference that was productive inasmuch as it was absolute and it eternally returned. In this sense it is not surprising that Rancière does not spend much time reading Lyotard’s texts that do not insist on the pre-eminence of painting or on the unrepresentability of the Holocaust and so are not so easily condemned as ‘modernist’ within his aesthetic regime. For example, Lyotard’s book on Duchamp explores the event through an ironic and playful ‘politics of incommensurables’ (1990: 28), introducing nonsensical elements into the ‘common sense’ of



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pictorial practice. As Lyotard remarks: ‘The uncommentable thing has nothing mystical about it: it’s simply the incommensurable brought back into commentary’, under the principle that ‘nonsense is the most precious treasure’ (1990: 11). In his texts on Duchamp, for example, the incommensurable differend produces humour and uncertainty as textual affects, and shows a way in which aesthetic ambiguity, especially in relation to the given, might proliferate into both poetic and political consequences. In this sense, as Wortham points out, Lyotard’s writing on sublime art cannot be so easily condemned as ‘melancholic reflection or paralysing lament’ but also demonstrates that ‘the effort of translation must be endlessly renewed’ (2015: 62). The aim of politics and aesthetics for Lyotard is not to overcome alienation in a new community, but to orient the community around alienation as its productive principle. As John Rajchman has perceptively commented, this could lead to an understanding of Lyotard’s work as ‘an immanent materialism [. . .], appealing to experimentation rather than judgment’ (1998: 11). This immanent materialism would be precisely what Lyotard shares with Deleuze, an ontological commitment to difference ‘in itself’ that is rejected by Rancière’s wager on discursive disagreement. H E D I SAG R E E S W I T H D E L E U Z E Rancière’s disagreement with Deleuze, as it was with Lyotard, can perhaps be boiled down to one sentence: ‘I think there’s no general formula of Being from which the practices of art and politics can be deduced’ (2008: 58). This means, in fact, that Rancière doesn’t think there is a ‘general formula for Being’ full stop. The sensible in itself does not exist because it cannot be sensed without being represented, it has always already come into existence. In this sense, all aesthetic experience is historical, already determined or undetermined in relation to the given distribution of the sensible, always already distributed or redistributing. Consequently, Rancière will condemn Deleuze’s ‘sublime aesthetics’ for the same reason he attacks Lyotard’s­– a­ lthough perhaps not with the same vehemence­– ­for an ‘ethical turn’ obliterating the tension between art and politics. Rancière offers, in this respect, a perceptive reading of Deleuze’s work that begins with the observation that for Deleuze: ‘Art is politics’ (2010: 172). The art work, for Deleuze, tears a raw sensation from the clichés and banalities of the world in such a way as to allow this genetic difference to become productive. This sensation is in no way representational and it opens onto­– i­nasmuch as it is part of­– a­ ‘molecular world, in-determined, un-individualized, before representation, before the principle of reason’ (Rancière 2004a: 150). As we have

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seen, the art work for Deleuze and Guattari opens onto chaos. This, Rancière claims, is a world undetermined by concepts and therefore is prior to ‘the discovery of fraternity’ or the shared experience of a transcendental reality (2004a: 150), being associated in Deleuze as it is in Lyotard with the inhuman. Deleuze offers a series of terms for this inhumanity, perhaps best expressed in A Thousand Plateaus by the breathless progression of becoming-woman-girl-animal-molecularindiscernible, a progression qualified­– ­and certainly politicised­– ­by the equation of minority with the proletariat (1987: 521). In any case, and as in Lyotard, it is the sublime break the sensation makes with human conditions of possibility that both expresses and constructs a future community or ‘people to come’. On this account Deleuze’s aesthetics, like Lyotard’s, fits into the ‘modernist’ side of Rancière’s schema, where art’s politics are ‘marked by the paradox of “artistic” resistance. Art promises a people in two contradictory ways: it does so insofar as it is art and insofar as it is not art’ (2010: 177). Art announces a ‘people to come’ through a sublime break, an art work acting as the transcendental emergence of a new political community, the inhuman and immanent excess directing a process of individuation in which the organism is overcome and a new world is born. Rancière argues that the problem here is that this both affirms art in the highest terms and implies its disappearance. This, Rancière claims, is the ‘ethical confusion’ by which art and politics vanish through their union, and what results is not liberation but ‘a humanity referred to the vanity of any fraternal dream’ (2010: 183). How can humans dream of fraternity when art is nothing less than the end of humanity and the rise of singularity as life’s condition? For Rancière the point is not to obliterate the difference between art and politics, ‘but to maintain the very tension by which a politics of art and a poetics of politics tend towards each other, but cannot meet up without suppressing themselves (2010: 183). To maintain art and politics in their difference is, of course, to maintain both. Returning to the question of ontology, for Rancière any affirmation of a supersensible ‘reality’ underpinning but also exceeding the hegemonic sensible regime must be reconciled with its opposite (the sensible everyday) to avoid becoming totalitarian. For Rancière the passivity demanded by a sensation separated from rational cognition (in Deleuze, quite literally ‘passive synthesis’) displaces the political possibility of emancipation onto an ecstatic experience overcoming the realm of the political itself. But perhaps Rancière overstates his case somewhat, inasmuch as Deleuze and Lyotard insist on the sublime sensation as the eruption of an inhuman art in and from the human, and rather than suggesting a passive experience should submit



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to a totalitarian Other, affirm a singular and real experience capable of expressing and constructing the real conditions of life. In this sense inasmuch as activity is human, it is overrated and part of the problem, and genetic difference emerges in and as a transcendental experience that obliterates any common sense or sensible ‘regime’. In other words, the people to come announced by art are never, for Deleuze, a sensus communis, they are the actualisation of a transcendental difference by which human being becomes (something else), actualising Nietzsche’s maxim (crucial for Deleuze) that being is becoming. Rancière is therefore not wrong to claim that for Deleuze the art work is ‘not simply the promise of a people but its reality’ (2010: 179), inasmuch as reality is becoming. For Deleuze art gives the sensation in which the future erupts in the present as an aesthetic event, a tear in the fabric of time sweeping aside all subjective givens and all human communities in an experience strictly co-extensive with what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘becomingUniverse’ (1994: 169). At this point it is meaningless to speak about ‘communities’ united by what they have in ‘common’, as here everything is taking place on the entirely material level of singular ‘multiplicities’ in which the particular and the universe have become indiscernible. Life has become a kind of cosmic reflective judgment! In this sense, then, Deleuze uses the sublime to achieve Kant’s original ambitions for the aesthetic as the bridge between the sensible and reason, between the empirical particular and the transcendental Idea, although this latter, as we have seen, is understood somewhat ­differently from Kant. Nevertheless, for Rancière Deleuze’s concept of art has to pay a steep price, namely ‘the reintroduction of a kind of transcendence in the thought of immanence’ (2010: 180). Rancière accurately locates this transcendence as being the sublime, ‘the excessive power of an aisthesis, which is to say, in essence, the power of an ontological difference between two orders of reality’ (2010: 180). Rancière also understands and points out how Deleuze’s account (similar here, at least according to Rancière, to Lyotard) differs from Kant’s because ‘the suprasensible element encountered in the experience of the sublime is not the intelligible; it is the pure sensible, the inhuman power of life. Immanence must be turned into a form of transcendence’ (2010: 181). While for Deleuze immanence is transcendence insofar as vital life is forever overcoming itself, Rancière is wrong to say this is a transcendence of thought per se, as it only applies to human rationality and in particular to the conditions of our possible experience. For Deleuze art remains an aspect of reason inasmuch as it actualises (i.e. ‘thinks’) a virtual Idea. As Rancière puts it, in Kant the sublime moves us from the aesthetic to the ‘freedom’ of the moral realm of Ideas, and Deleuze ‘reinvests’ this

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freedom in the practice of art and the aesthetic experience it produces. In this regard, Rancière, in a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of literature, claims Deleuze ‘tears’ the ‘logic of sensation’ from Romanticism and ‘establishes it in another territory’ closer to pragmatism or English empiricism (2004a: 157). Art in this sense produces a sensible supersensible, ‘an experience of the heteronomy of Life with respect to the human’ (2010: 181). Rancière is helpful at this point in distinguishing Deleuze from Lyotard, who, he says, ‘drew diametrically opposite consequences from the same premises’ (2010: 181). Lyotard is like Deleuze in making art a sublime discord between human cognition and an inhuman and excessive vital power, and in inverting Kant’s analysis by transforming the difference between the faculties of imagination and reason into an experience of the sensible’s transcendence of itself, and both make this experience the principle of artistic practice. But, Rancière argues, for Deleuze art is a deterritorialising force working against the law and calling for a people to come, while for Lyotard art separates the mind from itself and can only testify to this irremediable alienation. This is a useful description of the difference between Deleuze and Lyotard’s understanding of the sublime, which share a commitment to an inhuman reality but differ when it comes to how this difference is actualised. While for both the transcendental difference is genetic, in Lyotard it can only give rise to an acknowledgment of the impossibility of experiencing heterogeneity for real and to the presence of this impossibility in experience, while in Deleuze transcendental difference produces a real experience that is understood as an actual but nevertheless asubjective individuation directly expressing and constructing a virtual Idea. Rancière will finally say that Lyotard’s conclusions are assuredly less appealing [than Deleuze’s]. I fear, however, that they are more logical, that the transcendence instituted at the heart of Immanence, in fact, signifies the submission of art to a law of heteronomy which undermines every form of transmission of the vibration of colour and of the embrace of forms to the vibrations and to the embraces of a fraternal humanity. (2010: 182)

Considering Rancière’s earlier condemnation of Lyotard this conclusion is both surprising and definitive. For Rancière, Deleuze’s dubious achievement of fulfilling ‘the destiny of aesthetics by suspending the entire power of the work of art from the “pure” sensible’ is not only ‘anti-logical’ inasmuch as it affirms the ‘incoherent modern work’ (2004b: 13), but also rejects the discursive difference or ‘dissensus’ upon which Rancière’s own system is based. Rancière sees very clearly that in Deleuze’s (and in Lyotard’s) account of sublime art the sensation



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obliterates the ‘communication’ of disagreement and the ‘community’ it produces. This is why the inhumanity of Deleuze’s aesthetics offends him, because it removes the beautiful­– ­and precisely the beautiful as the undetermined difference constitutive of a democratic discursive regime­– ­from the realm of art. As Rancière puts it: ‘Nothing else is formed except the identity of the infinite power of difference and the indifference of the Infinite. And the question remains: how can one make a difference in the political community with this indifference?’ (2004a: 163). The argument is very similar to that Rancière aims at Lyotard: when the difference between aesthetics and politics disappears in the ethical necessity or ‘justice’ of a sublime disruption of the human, aesthetics can get no further than a continual re-enactment of the art work’s hysterical de-figuration of the human and ‘the interminable postponement or deferral of the promised fraternity’ (2004b: 5 and 2004a: 162). Rancière finds such pointless absolutism distasteful, preferring the constant discursive negotiations of contemporary art over the ‘beautiful’ sensus communis to the violent absolutism of the modernist sublime. Rancière’s wider target here is the long modernist tradition extolling the incommensurability of art and discourse that culminates in Lyotard’s advocacy of a ‘sublime’ art that demolishes any stable relationship between empirical presentation and the Idea, and bears witness against the catastrophes of the holocaust (i.e. totalitarianism) and commodified existence (2007: 41). Against this Rancière posits the necessary tension of presence and its signification within the aesthetic regime of art, a tension that also orients art against postmodernism’s ‘anything goes’ approach of ‘a great chaotic juxtaposition, a great indifferent mélange of significations and materialities’ that he calls the ‘great parataxis’ (2007: 43). Interestingly, Rancière associates the great parataxis with a new organising force, not the incommensurable but rhythm, the vital element of each material that finds its source in chaos. This strategy risks­– a­ nd while Rancière doesn’t mention Deleuze here he is clearly referring to him­– ­‘getting lost in the great schizophrenic explosion, where the sentence sinks into the scream and meaning into the rhythm of bodily states’ (2007: 45). This is not only the risk of simple incoherence, but also of acquiescence, because such screams and rhythms can easily become indiscernible from the manipulated intensities and instrumentalised desires of commodity circulation. What Rancière really seems to be objecting to here is less the conflation of schizophrenic desire with capitalism (which are anyway intextricable in Deleuze and Guattari’s account), and more the erasure of the ­sentence in the rhythms and materiality of the body and its sensations. The

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scream that Deleuze loved in Bacon’s paintings is precisely what denies the political artculation of dissensus in Rancière, and so makes any real resistance to capitalism impossible. In such cases, Rancière seems to suggest, we merely return to the animal, but this is the oppressed and inarticulate Aristotelian animal rather than the herioc ‘becominganimal’ of Deleuze and Guattari. Rancière suggests that a new image emerges in contemporary art to address this risk, the ‘sentence image’, which seeks to avoid incoherence and acquiescence by separating itself from the chaos of contemporary life, but without simply repeating the banalities confirming the existing partitions of our sensible world. The sentence image is composed of, on the one side, a flesh or substance belonging to ‘the great passivity of things’ and capable of inducing a ‘leap’ or ‘rupture’ within the given sensory regime, and on the other organises this rupture into a ‘phrasal power’ or ‘paratactic syntax’, one capable of organising the inherent equality of its flesh against both its schizophrenic incoherence and its evaporation into consensus (2007: 46). The sentence image is therefore capable of giving measure to the immeasurable through either dialectical or symbolic strategies. The first would be an art of confrontation, continually confronting the police with the power of community through a process of heterogenesis (i.e. disagreement), the second an art of analogy that connects objects to another, common world. Rancière is not, however, convinced by such strategies, arguing that they draw on a tradition of ‘critical doxa’ that on the one hand merely inventories traces of community in a quasi-anthropological manner, or on the other utilises a symbolism based upon archetypal gestures and myths. Both are examples, Rancière claims, of the ‘neo-humanist tendency of contemporary art’ (2007: 67). The sentence image therefore fails because it is not historically specific enough, not contemporary enough, inasmuch as art is in, and must be in, the constant process of reconstituting and restating its constitutive tensions in contemporary terms. Rancière argues, drawing here on Deleuze, that contemporary art within the aesthetic regime is a constant process of de-figuration/­ de-nomination, but unlike Deleuze this process cannot involve an ontological ‘reality’ lying beneath the surface of its representations. As we have already seen the aesthetic regime rests on the co-determination of the discursive and the sensible, whose difference is, in the widest (that is, in Derrida’s) sense, discursive. As a result, Rancière will deconstruct Deleuze in a way similar to that we have seen employed in a different context by Paul de Man: ‘This transformation of visible into the tactile and of the figurative into the figural’, Rancière writes, ‘is only possible through the highly specific labour of the writer’s words’ (2007: 81).9



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Deleuze’s ‘whirlwind of adjectives and metaphors’ transforms representation into matter, at once blurring the presence of objects as it tries to turn concepts into things. In this sense Deleuze’s ‘pictorial diagram’ is paradoxical, according to Rancière, because it turns painting into a metaphor for a non-discursive power through the power of words. In Deleuze, Rancière argues, painting is only able to overcome the discursive and deliver us into the realm of the real through what it transcends. In this way, Rancière proves Deleuze’s hyprocrisy by ­ positing the genetic priority of his own aesthetic regime. But Rancière will go even further, as indeed he has to, because to this point his argument still depends upon his assertion of the priority of his own position. We could imagine Deleuze and Guattari’s rebuttal to be curt and to the point: ‘Representations are bodies too!’ (1987: 95). Rancière must therefore locate the discursive within the process of painting itself, which he does by arguing that the de-figuration of painting draws upon the painting of the past only by constituting a ‘discursive space’ that guarantees the coherence of the temporal disjunction it employs and so acts as the condition of its visibility. Here Rancière cheekily quotes Hegel to this effect, a gesture no doubt deliberately offensive to any Deleuzean! But there is more going on here than mere insult. Rancière’s figuration (défiguratif)­– a­ term Deleuze doesn’t use in his book on Francis Bacon­– n ­ egates figuration and thereby draws it into the orbit of a Hegelian dialectic, one Deleuze famously rejects in Difference and Repetition.10 Furthermore, it seems to imply that ‘defiguration’ operates within a discursive space constituted by differences without positive terms. This Derridean claim implies that the sublime de-figuration of Bacon’s figures and their expression/construction of the real are in fact linguistic in nature. Deleuze is deconstructed, and Rancière has shown that no sensible presence can emerge without its discursive support. Rancière will argue something similar about Deleuze’s cinema books. Deleuze (following Jean Epstein, as Rancière is quick to point out) extracts the material essence of cinema from the plot, detaching its sensible material from the ‘old art of telling stories’ (2006: 6). This is not, Rancière tells us, an action Deleuze makes specifically in relation to cinema but a ‘dramaturgy of art in general’ (2006: 6). This is, Rancière claims, Deleuze’s ‘fable’ of film that extracts it from its story, a fable of ‘de-figuration’ (2006: 7) that ignores the co-constitution of thought and sensibility making up the aesthetic regime. Rancière’s reading of Cinema 1 and 2 therefore concentrates on their distinction, on one side the classical cinema determined by the separation of matter from itself by the brain/screen, and on the other modern cinema with

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its a­ utonomous temporalities where images are separated from others and open toward their own virtual infinity (2006: 108). But this foundational distinction is, according to Rancière, ‘quite confusing’ (2006: 108), not least in Deleuze’s attempt to locate it historically in the harsh conditions immediately following the war. Additionally, directors such as Vertov and Bresson appear on both sides of this divide, clouding things further, as does the similarity of affection-images (found in Cinema 1) and time-images (Cinema 2). These are, however, mere symptoms of a wider problem, which is that Deleuze’s division of cinema ‘doesn’t escape the general circularity of modernist theory’ (2006: 108). This is the circularity of an ontological substrate and its expression in signs, a circularity that completely obscures, Rancière argues, history itself: ‘We might then conclude that Deleuze is not really speaking about the art of cinema, and that his two volumes on images are some sort of philosophy of nature which treat cinematographic images as the events and assemblages of luminous matter’ (2006: 109). But of course this is not the case, Rancière complains, because Deleuze requires the actions of the artist in order for cinema to achieve its plane of immanence, and to redeem it after the devastations wrought by the brain. Human thought placed itself at the centre of the world, and now must be removed in order for the ‘cinematic universe’ to be cleansed and perception to be restituted to things. But this ‘removal’ is ambiguous according to Rancière, inasmuch as it restitutes the interval of the brain to the infinite living cosmos, but doing so also restitutes thought to the chaos that created it and so cinema moves us from ‘images as elements in a philosophy of nature to images as elements in a philosophy of spirit’ (2006: 113). In this sense, Rancière writes, the distinction between the movement- and time-images is transcendental rather than actual and so historically unlocatable. The ambiguity of this break can be found in Deleuze’s account of the films of Alfred Hitchcock which occupy a liminal state and so become ‘allegories’ exemplifying a break that is otherwise purely ideal. The filmmaker takes perception to images by snatching them from bodily states and placing them on a plane of pure events; in so doing, the filmmaker gives images an arrangement-in-thought. But this arrangement-in-thought is always also the re-imposition of the logic of the opaque screen, of the central image that arrests the movement in every direction of other images to reorder them from itself. The gesture of restitution is also a new gesture of capture. (2006: 116)

Finally, on Rancière’s account, Deleuze himself illustrates Rancière’s thesis of the aesthetic regime by simply embodying its defining oppositions: active/passive, thought/non-thought, intelligible/sensible,



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providing we understand ‘thought’ here as Rancière does, not ‘as the faculty of impressing its will upon its objects, but as the faculty of becoming one with its contrary’ (2006: 117). Once more, this is the importance of ‘de-figuration’ for Rancière’s fable of Deleuze­– ­it is nothing less than the dialectical movement of thought at the heart of the aesthetic regime: ‘The gesture that frees the potentialities remains, as always, the gesture that chains them up again. The rupture is always still to come, like a supplement of intervention that is simultaneously a supplement of disappropriation’ (2006: 118). As a result, the division of the movement- and time-images is a ‘fictive rupture’, and their relation is not an opposition but­– a­ nd here Rancière once more evokes the Hegelian dialectic­– ­‘an infinite spiral’ (2006: 119). This spiral then encompasses the two aspects of the aesthetic regime: on one side the modernist urge towards dissolving thought in its genetic unthought, and on the other a postmodern art that would overturn this (false) identity and replace the human brain at the centre of the world. Under these circumstances, Rancière concludes, satisfied: ‘This dialectic jeopardises from the outset any attempt to distinguish two images by means of special traits, and so to fix a point separating a classical from a modern cinema’ (2006: 122). But what is really going on here? Rancière’s criticism of Deleuze seems to rest upon his own assumptions, which is of course fair enough, but they are assumptions Deleuze certainly refuses. From this perspective, Rancière’s argument is circular, inasmuch as it departs from his diagnosis of the aesthetic regime and its co-implication of material objects and discursive description. From this point any claim to a presence lying beyond the grasp of representation is necessarily impossible, inasmuch as even when painting ‘itself’ de-figures representation it can only do so through a discursive operation. Deleuze, as we have seen, directly refuses this point, seeking a mode of expression that only passes through words to the extent that they are bodies too. Rancière and Deleuze line up against each other, and we can chose which we like­– ­a philosophical, political and aesthetic matter of taste. But this is a banal observation, so let us try, once more, to distinguish Rancière and Deleuze. To do so we must return to the central figure of Kant and his Third Critique, and Rancière and Deleuze’s very different readings of it. Rancière’s approach is one that is broadly epistemological, inasmuch as it accepts Kant’s basic distinction between intuition and understanding, and sees in their free play within the aesthetic judgment of beauty the political emergence of equality and freedom. Deleuze, on the other hand, seeks in Kant­– ­and indeed against Kant­ – ­an ontological status for the aesthetic judgment of the sublime that

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would o ­ vercome the existing (epistemological) conditions of experience in favour of the ‘real’. In this sense, Rancière’s version of Kant is certainly closer to actual contemporary artistic practices, to their ‘post-conceptual’ discursivity and to their desire for direct political engagement, even if he is­– a­ nd justifiably so­– c­ ritical of many of them. Rancière’s method of disagreement begins with a description of a given regime of the sensible, and then moves to an analysis of its exceptions, which historically tend to predate the modern/postmodern split. As a result, contemporary art becomes a series of bad or redundant examples of existing modernist strategies in Rancière’s narrative, and it is often difficult to see how contemporary artistic practices might offer true disagreement in Rancière’s terms. This is not a problem for Deleuze’s account of sublime art however, because the ground of its ‘politics’ is ontological rather than historical, even if it is usually played out in examples we no longer consider truly contemporary. Does this open the door to the possibility that Rancière’s own approach risks consensus, inasmuch as the radical break introduced by disagreement must always be articulated in a language it shares with what it seeks to overcome? Deleuze will make precisely this point in relation to both the figure of dialectical negation (which confirms its opposite in negating it), and while Rancière also condemns a postmodern tendency in contemporary artistic practice to ironise its critical gestures, he also remains committed to the discursive ‘spacing’ of consensus and its disagreement. In this sense, Deleuze falls out of Kant on the side of the noumena, while Rancière remains committed to phenomena as the very condition of politics­– ­on one side an ontological aesthetics and politics, on the other an entirely epistemological one. CONCLUSION Rancière’s aesthetics are enthusiastically paradoxical. They are unapologetically grounded in experience, and so are undetermined conceptually or, more importantly, by the existing partition of the sensible, but at the same time this singular aesthetic judgment must be articulated within the realm of the existing in order to universalise the equality it embodies and produce a new sensus communis. Similarly, while the aesthetic judgment concerns an experience, its articulation is political before it is ‘artistic’. Indeed, the aesthetic revolution is precisely one in which democratic politics qua the expression of equality through disagreement is the primary achievement. In the aesthetic revolution the image became adequate to its political function and art became able to ‘do’ politics. This is an unusual resolution to the problem of ‘political art’,



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inasmuch as most discourse on ‘political’ art prioritises the rejection of an ‘aesthetic’ art in favour of an anti-art ‘aesthetic’ or, worse, reads this as a requirement of ‘political art’. Rancière is quite right to pour scorn on such simple-minded negations. Also rowing against the general tendency of the last fifty or so years, Rancière insists on the priority of the sensible for both art and politics, because the creation of new political possibilities is first of all an aesthetic problem and only then articulated in language. As a result, perhaps, Rancière has said: ‘I don’t really believe in any great historical break between the modern and the postmodern. There arn’t many solid identifying features of an art that would be postmodern’ (2004: 206). And in fact, we could radicalise this position by pointing out that most of Rancière’s privileged examples are modernist (see in this regard Rancière 2013). Nevertheless, some prominent contemporary artists have found Rancière’s work liberating for exactly this reason. Liam Gillick, for example, writes: ‘Rancière has offered artists a means of bypassing the continual requirement to ironize their way out of postmodern paradoxes [. . . because] the use of an ironic base allowed a critical position to slide easily into a reinforcing role’ (2007: 265). Perhaps, then, Rancière’s work is primarily of interest as a voice of disagreement within the great consensual pillars of contemporary art, against the necessity of political ‘critique’, against the rejection of modernist practices and against the hegemony of irony as a signifier for artistic ‘intelligence’. Rancière also rejects those forms of contemporary practice that assume the viewer’s stupidity and aim to ‘enlighten’ or ‘mobilise’ them within the context of specific causes. Exhibitions that try to reveal the illusions of the ‘society of the spectacle’ or ‘consumer society’ merely reveal what everyone already knows, and achieve nothing except a ‘militant’ ­spectacle or production of commodities. As Rancière puts it: If there is a circulation that should be stopped at this point, it’s the circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our infantilization, media images that denounce the media, spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle, etc. There is a whole series of forms of critical or activist art that are caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of denunciation. The work of dissensus is to always reexamine the boundaries between what is supposed to be active, and therefore political, and what is supposed to be passive or distant, and therefore apolitical. (2007a: 266)

The currently popular practices of ‘discourse production’ through audience participation also assume a natural passivity on behalf of the spectator, and so place an emphasis on articulation that does not address its underlying structural conditions as discourse. This leads us

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to the paradoxical conclusion that art is political precisely when it stops having a specific agenda, as Rancière puts it: ‘An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us’ (2007a: 258). As a result, for Rancière true art is necessarily political, and certainly no movement (whether political or artistic) is required to take us from the realm of one to that of the other. As a result, any non-art strategies that purport to clear a space for art to operate ‘politically’ are also counterproductive. Instead, what is required is for art to invent a new mode of sensible experience, and for this mode to be articulated and connected with other modifications of the sensible in order for them to have a wider ‘political’ effect. For art does not articulate anything other than the inherent ability of all to have and create new experiences that work against our existing conditions of life and the political consensus that keeps them in place. Finally, then, and in a statement perhaps addressing Deleuze’s call for new weapons: My role is not to supply weapons but to help invent other criteria for reflecting on the works of art, methods, and types of diagnostics that constitute art’s present. I never say what should be done or how to do it. I try to redraw the map of the thinkable in order to bring out the impossible and prohibitions that are often lodged at the very heart of thought that imagines itself to be subversive. (2007a: 269)

N OT E S  1. Perhaps the clearest example here is Rancière’s recent book Aisthesis: Scenes From the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), which rather than trying to construct a ‘theory’ of either aisthesis or the aesthetic regime, instead ‘deals with the same topic in fourteen scenes’ (2013: ix), offering a series of detailed readings of specific works of art or moments in the history of art that changed the very paradigm of art, and were ‘even’, Rancière ventures, ‘a means for art to find a way out of itself’ (2013: xi).   2. As Simon Wortham has put it: ‘Rancière opposes the democratic practice of dissensus to what he describes as the Derridean aporia of democracy’ (2015: 67).   3. Elsewhere, Rancière is explicit: In reference to the Marxist conceptualization, class war is the actual reality of politics, not its hidden cause. [. . .]. [Class war is] not the conflict between groups which have opposite economic interests, but the conflict about what an ‘interest’ is, the struggle between those who set themselves as able to manage social interests and those who are supposed to be only able to reproduce their life. (2011a: 1)



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Alberto Toscano, in a typically cogent essay, argues the opposite, that Rancière’s concept of ‘proletariat’ in fact wrests the concept away from the real political processes that form­– ­and also might dissolve­– ­the politicoeconomic category of the ‘working class’ (2011: 224).   4. Speaking in more detail about his relationship to Foucault, Rancière says his approach is a bit similar to Foucault’s. It retains the principle of the Kantian transcendental that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility. At the same time, these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression. I differ from Foucault insofar as his archeology seems to me to follow a schema of historical necessity according to which beyond a certain chasm, something is no longer thinkable, can no longer be formulated. The visibility of a form of expression as an artistic form depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility. This does not mean that it becomes invisible with the emergence of a new regime. I thus try at one and the same time to historicize the transcendental and to de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility. [. . .] in this way, the aesthetic regime of art, for example, is a system of possibility that is historically constituted but that does not abolish the representative regime, which was previously dominant. At a given point in time, several regimes coexist and intermingle in the works themselves. (2004: 50; see also 2003: 209)

  5. Again, we find a very similar idea in Schiller: ‘We must continue to regard every attempt at reform inopportune, and every hope based upon it as chimerical, until the division of the inner Man has been done away with, and his nature has developed with sufficient completeness to be itself the artificer, and to guarantee political reality to the political creation of Reason’ (2004: 46).   6. This description applies as much to the imageless paintings of Suprematism as to the socially engaged work of Constructivism. As Rancière points out, these are usually seen as diametrically opposed types of art, one proclaiming its aesthetic purity, the other seeking to dissolve this purity into life. In fact, he argues, they both aimed to abolish mediation and so realise the immediate identity of their form and a new mode of life (2007: 21).   7. Simon Wortham does a good job of tracking these attacks, arguing they mostly boil down to Rancière’s reading of Lyotard’s 1993 lecture for Amnesty International ‘The Other’s Rights’, a reading Wortham claims shows a ‘lack of rigour and sophistication’ (2015: 66).   8. Déotte argues that for this reason Lyotard is better than Rancière in thinking through cultural otherness, to which Rancière is insensitive (2004: 87).   9. For an interesting confrontation between Rancière and de Man, see McQuillen (2011).

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10. In Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation we find that Bacon ‘breaks with figuration [le figuratif]’ (2003: xiv), that he has ‘a different relation to figuration’ (2003: 8), that his photos are ‘not a figuration’ (2003: 11), that there ‘are two ways of going beyond figuration’ (2003: 34), that the Figure is ‘torn away from figuration’ (2003: 67), that the Figure emerges from the diagram as ‘a new figuration’ (2003: 110) and finally that a ‘transfiguration’ appears in Bacon’s work (2003: 128).

Postscript: ‘Art after experience’­ – ­Speculative Realism and the Sublime1

It seems undeniable that in the last ten years or so continental philosophy has undergone a shift that could turn out to be epochal and that takes the name ‘Speculative Realism’. It would therefore seem negligent not to include some sort of account of it in a book that claims to pertain to contemporary art. Nevertheless, while the sublime is arguably a factor in the development of Speculative Realism, it is certainly tangential to its major concerns, which in large part rest upon a rejection of Kant. As a result, my discussion of Speculative Realism is brief and by no means sophisticated, but is offered here as an attempt to indicate what the sublime’s future might hold, both philosophically and in the realm of art. The introduction to the collection Speculative Aesthetics begins by outlining the natural attraction of, but also the uncomfortable aspects to the combination of Speculative Realism and contemporary art: Given contemporary art’s cultural privileging as a site of negotiation between the conceptual and the sensory, it is understandable that it should have played host to the convergence of SR [speculative realism] and aesthetics. Yet such an alliance is puzzling when one considers what SR might bring to this negotiation, in so far as its primary selling point (according to the popularly diffused credo) is its dismissal of the mediating role of human experience. Indeed, if this ‘movement’ is concerned with wresting attention away from the primacy of intuition and interpretation, it could be (and has been) construed as an anti-aesthetic tendency. (Mackay et al. 2014: 1)

The rejection of what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’ (‘by “correlation” we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (2008: 5)2) unites, to a certain extent, the disparate group of philosophers (Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman) first 241

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gathered under and substantially defining the moniker ‘Speculative Realism’. The group, however, quickly diverges along various lines, the most important for us being whether they reject or privilege aesthetics in the task of thinking ‘the object in itself’ (Meillassoux 2008: 3). On one side, both Meillassoux and Brassier reject aesthetics as being necessarily correlationist, while on the other Harman and Grant affirm aesthetics as giving a non-subjective experience of the ‘real’.3 Consistent with these assumptions, then, there seem two very different ways of understanding what ‘speculative aesthetics’ might mean, and what kind of art might exemplify it. On the one hand, aesthetic experience is either discounted or only considered for its scientific and/ or conceptual ‘objectivity’, while on the other aesthetic experience goes beyond the correlation of being and subjective thought.4 As we shall see, the account of sublime art offered by Lyotard and Deleuze is­– ­very broadly speaking­– c­ ompatible with the second but not the first of these ‘speculative aesthetics’. Both Derrida and Rancière’s positions would seem to be irredeemably correlationist. S P E C U L AT I V E A N T I - A E S T H E T I C S Meillassoux’s argument begins from Descartes’ distinction between primary and secondary qualities, claiming that all qualities of objects gained through experience are secondary, while primary qualities pertain to reality ‘itself’ and can be grasped through an ‘intellectual intuition’. Although secondary qualities are connected to the primary, they provide no information concerning ‘real’ existence. Meillassoux’s dismissal of the ontological significance of aesthetics and art is therefore categorical: The luminous colour of a painting is not seen by the coloured pigment of the canvas. In short, nothing sensible, whether it be an affective or perceptual quality­– ­can exist in the way it is given to me in the thing by itself, when it is not related to me or to any other living creature. [. . .] Remove the observer, and the world becomes devoid of these sonorous, visual, olfactory, etc. qualities. (2008: 1)5

On his account, the aesthetic qualities of objects are irremediably ‘correlated’ to human cognition and therefore irrelevant to their ‘real’ existence, whereas an object’s primary qualities can be formulated (and so known) ‘in mathematical terms’ (2008: 3).6 This is possible because we can logically deduce what Meillassoux calls the ‘necessity of Contingency’ or the ‘principle of factiality’, the maxim that ‘only the contingency of what is, is not itself contingent’ (2008: 80). Beginning from this single ‘fact’ (and indeed it alone is true) it is possible, accord-



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ing to Meillassoux, to derive the truth of mathematics and so ground the ‘realism’ of science and its speculative credentials (2008: 82). As Ray Brassier explains it: ‘The claim is that mathematical thought enjoys direct access to noumena precisely insofar as the latter possess certain mathematically intuitable characteristics, to which all rational knowledge must conform’ (2007: 69). As a result, Meillassoux concludes ‘what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought’ (2008: 117). Ray Brassier has also championed the necessary detachment of primary and secondary qualities, and along with it the detachment of a ‘conceptual function’ from its socio-historical context (2014a: 75). This ‘metaphysical circumscription of the domain of sense’, he writes, allows us to ‘avoid the phenomenological equivocation between meaning and being’ (2011: 48) and to thereby undertake a ‘conceptual revision’ of the process of cognitive abstraction (i.e. representation) that removes its correlationist bias and allows rationalism to finally achieve its enlightenment ideal of autonomous self-governance. Brassier assumes, along with science (and unlike Kant), that the normative conditions of conceptual representation have a ‘natural’ relation to the real that allows us to describe it.7 Concepts do not condition objects and so become indiscernible from them, rather­– ­as in scientific ‘realism’­– ­objects condition their conceptual representation, even if this may not be entirely true or adequate (2011: 56). In these terms, art is ambiguously placed: on the one hand its aesthetic qualities are irremediably secondary and compromised in correlation, but on the other these secondary qualities represent primary reality in ways potentially able to produce unique conceptual insight. Indeed, Brassier suggests, ‘perhaps what distinguishes the thinking peculiar to art consists in constructing nonpropositional functions by making materials − linguistic, sonic, plastic, etc. − do things we don’t expect in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. Art is the construction of function, as opposed to the relaying of preestablished function’ (2014a: 81–2). This means, once again, that art’s ‘subversive epistemic function’ can play an ‘emancipatory’ role through its conceptual creativity, challenging ‘bourgeois epistemic norms’ (Brassier 2014a: 82) and revising the conceptual conditions of representation so that it might better grasp the primary qualities of the real. Aesthetic experience is involved in this process, but only insofar as it functions conceptually and epistemologically to bring thought closer to its autonomous objects. Brassier has elaborated his idea of art as ‘nonpropositional function’ in relation to certain noise musicians/artists whose ‘lucid antiaestheticism’ establishes noise as the genre of what has no genre. As a

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result its irreducible experiential obduracy cannot even be classified as ‘aesthetic experience’, giving us a critical reflection of our conceptual conditions and the opportunity to expand them in response. Noise in its best instances cannot be captured by existing concepts nor by cliché, something that has, Brassier claims, remarkable results: ‘There can be no “aesthetics of noise”, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation’ (2009: 5).8 Noise therefore offers us a non-aesthetic experience of contingency, and invites us to form a concept of it. As Brassier puts it, noise is an ‘objectification of experience [that] forces us to make sense of ourselves in a quite unfamiliar and even fundamentally foreign conceptual register’ (2009: 3). The aim or end result of this process would be the reconfiguration of our conditions of possible experience along rational (i.e. mathematical and scientific) lines. In many ways then, Brassier approaches a sublime art (noise is an experience of chaos that goes beyond our conditions of possible experience) from the opposite direction to that of Lyotard or Deleuze. Instead of utilising the rift between sensibility and cognition that appears in the sublime to move toward the transcendental empiricism of feeling-thought, Brassier uses it to jettison sensibility in favour of a rigorous revision of our conceptual conditions now detached from any subjective frame of reference (i.e. correlation). This is a project with clear political objectives closely aligned with what has come to be known as ‘Accelerationism’. For Brassier, noise’s genreless evasion of ‘aesthetics’ is an example of how art can allow us to intervene in the sociological determination of neurobiology as well as in the neurobiological determination of culture. Here, the cognitive and cultural import of art cannot be separated from its formal and structural resources: the radicality of the latter must be concomitant with the radicality of the former. (2015: 70)

In other words, the ‘generic anomaly’ of noise forces us to abandon ‘experience’ as a descriptive categorisation and to re-examine our scientific and cognitive frameworks of ‘reality’ detached from their ‘correlational complicity with particular forms of representation’ (Mackay et. al. 2014: 4). Free of the correlation a revisionary rationalism could technologise cognitive processes in order to accelerate changes in brain plasticity, a development that would directly impact on the social processes constituting our current political reality. Despite the rejection of experience and aesthetics we might nevertheless think that from the perspective of contemporary art this sounds



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suspiciously like business as usual. speculative anti-aesthetics offers a theory of ‘art’ (qua noise) as a creative exception, liberating us from the ‘norms’ and doxa controlling our lives, and first of all from ‘human’ life itself. As such, the affirmation of art’s ‘subversive epistemic function’ would appear as merely the latest instantiation of modern art’s undying ambition to be a social avant-garde. But there is an important qualification to this alignment, which hinges on the term ‘epistemic’. Although Brassier unproblematically locates himself within the modernist tradition and its ‘idea that by challenging clichéd ways of perceiving, you can encourage people to think about the ways they see things’, he immediately emphasises that this is a ‘cognitive subversion and emancipation’ (2014a: 82) rather than an emancipation from cognition and in particular representation, as it was for much of modernism. This is an important point, because it illuminates and to some extent explains the anger speculative anti-aesthetics directs at contemporary art’s own avant-garde understanding of its political ‘affect’. Contemporary art imagines its political efficacy to operate through its ‘provocation of moments of alienation or evanescent sentiments of liberation’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 6), whether these are understood aesthetically or conceptually­– ­and its claim of producing indeterminacy applies equally well to a sensation or a concept. In this sense, modernist abstract painting introduces a visual indeterminacy into the image, and postmodernism introduces a conceptual indeterminacy or ‘play’ into any ‘text’, but both claim that art’s openness is a political achievement.9 Quite opposite to this the genreless experience of noise is understood by Brassier to be the means by which it can produce a better conceptual determination of reality. As a result, when Brassier champions noise as a ‘non-aesthetic’ and conceptual revision of our cognitive conditions he aligns himself with the mode of Conceptual art formulated by Joseph Kosuth. For Kosuth art was the conceptual process of critiqueing its own conceptual conditions in order to produce a new definition of itself. In this process, as we saw in the Introduction, our experience of the art work only provides ‘secondary information’ of its conceptual content or ‘primary information’, and the function of art is to bring these two types of information as close together as ­possible (Kosuth favoured the tautology to achieve this).10 In this, speculative anti-aesthetics is quite classically avant-garde in its rejection of art’s aesthetic autonomy, and more particularly, its rejection of ‘the phantasm of an aesthetic realm that is radically immediate, indeterminate, free of conceptual constraints, or outside all extant power structures’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 6). Amanda Beech calls this ‘phantasm’ art’s ‘ideal functionalism’, which ‘defines the

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normativity of critique (2012: 87), and is precisely what a speculative anti-aesthetics arranges itself against. Speculative anti-aesthetics’ avant-gardism therefore proposes a non-aesthetic ‘non-art’ that directly challenges our cognitive limits with the aim of changing them. In this way, as the introduction to Speculative Aesthetics once more tells us, speculative anti-aesthetics’ fulfils ‘that old dream of levelling the art work with a non-art universe’ (2014: 1). Speculative anti-aesthetics’ understanding of art is therefore critical in precisely the sense in which modernist art was critical­– i­t constitutes itself through an immanent critique searching as it does so for its a priori or ‘real’ conditions. But whereas art history has often argued that this made Kosuth the logical extension of Greenberg’s modernism into the dematerialised realm of concepts, in the terms of speculative anti-aesthetics Kosuth would mark the end of aesthetics and the beginning of the conceptual as the condition of art.11 Amanda Beech discusses her own work in a direct paraphrase of Kosuth that is apt: ‘When I make my work, it’s equally important that my work destroys all other art, and sets itself up as the art that should be called art’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 39). It cannot be simply a matter of aligning speculative anti-aesthetics with conceptual and post-conceptual practices, because, as Beech points out, large parts of the conceptual tradition also enact the fundamental ‘myth that we can recognise our finitude by staring into the depths of the infinite and in fact structuring a relationship with it’ (2012: 93). The frequent anger of speculative anti-aesthetics’ outbursts against the aesthetic in no ways detracts from the accuracy of their critical observations. Contemporary art does generally operate (with all the attendant hubris and arrogance) through a ‘logic’ of escape that produces, as Suhail Malik puts it, an ‘anarcho-realist maxim’ (2014). This would be the maxim that the ‘real’ was ‘undetermined’ and was incarnated in the experience of art (or as John Dewey famously had it ‘art as experience’) in a directly political manner (Rancière would be the epitome of this argument). What makes this maxim so disappointing, Malik argues, is not only its dubious philosophical claims for a transcendental aesthetic dependent on its ‘subjectalism’, but as well the way it has become dogma to the extent that it is welcomed by the very institutions it supposedly escapes. As a result, contemporary art’s investment in these fantasies of freedom have been utterly instrumentalised by market forces and the institutions that serve them, leaving us with no alternative, Malik claims, other than to ‘exit’ contemporary art­– ­to exit the exit from capitalism, we might say, inasmuch as Speculative Realism accepts there is no outside to capitalism. Arguing in a similar vein, Mark Fisher claims that (regrettably) art has lost the



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aesthetic (and by extension political) traction it had during modernism, and is now ‘radically denuded of aesthetic texture’ (2014: 93). Indeed, Fisher precisely captures the double disappointment of a contemporary art in which ‘the aesthetic and conceptual are inextricably intertwined’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 6) when he claims: A fear of content seems to have a tyrannical hold, motivating ‘works’ which consist of banal discursive pre- (and post-) texts attached to super-banal objects which, at worst, trigger neither thought nor sensation [. . .] and, at best, indirectly invoke some mildly diverting process which led to their construction. The justification for this construction seems to be a worst-ofall-worlds mixture of post-conceptual cognitism without concepts (which makes aesthetic texture passé) and the post-Deleuzian celebration of infinite creativity (which outlaws any negativity by imposing a mandatory ­affirmatory imperative­– ­don’t complain!). (2014: 93)

On the one hand art’s conceptual content has been reduced to ‘mildly diverting’ anecdotes or, worse, a purely formalist ‘cognitism’ (i.e. information for its own sake), while on the other aesthetic production has been reduced to the banalities of an unreflected and ecstatic celebration of ‘sensation’. Fisher’s complaint echoes that of Malik, that art­– ­and indeed the wider forms of aesthetic expression found in popular culture­– ­tend to confirm rather than challenge our current conditions of possible experience. While this could be seen as a concern that the sublime also addresses, in fact Fisher and others such as Brassier advocate a contemporary art (i.e. noise) that provides ‘an experience which confronts one with the conditions of experience’ (Brassier 2014: 92, italics added) in order to change them so they might more accurately represent the real.12 In this sense, art no longer attempts to escape from its own mediation, whether in its institutions or more generally as representation­– ­a move that inevitably confirms its powerlessness (see Beech 2012: 88)­– ­but seeks to assert real influence on the structures of power that condition it. This means abandoning an avant-garde that is exhausted in the pointless task of detaching ‘art’ from itself through aesthetic invention, in order to accelerate cognitive processes that can directly intervene in the mechanisms of mediation conditioning our lives. In other words, this ‘rationalist’ mode of speculative anti-aesthetics entails a practice that no longer invests its faith in the essential promise of the aesthetic as such, but instead acknowledges the real force and traction of images, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously ‘engineer new domains of experience’ and map them through a ‘reconfigured aesthetics’ that is transdisciplinary and indissociable from sociotechnical conditions. (Mackay et al. 2014: 6)

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S P E C U L AT I V E A E S T H E T I C S If there is a ‘rationalist’ mode of Speculative Realism (led by Meillessoux and Brassier)13 advocating a speculative anti-aesthetics, then Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy is part of an ‘aesthetic’ faction of Speculative Realism that also includes Ian Hamilton Grant’s reading of Schelling and Steven Shaviro’s version of Deleuze-Whitehead as a Speculative Realist avant la lettre.14 Rather than rejecting aesthetic relations as impediments to a materialist ‘realism’, these authors tend towards a transcendental empiricism where sensation is the distributed expression of a pan psychic ‘living’ force. For Harman ‘things’ include two levels: a real ‘object’ that is inaccessible and mysterious and ‘by definition cannot enter perception’ (2005: 169), and the aesthetic relations this ‘object’ forms with other things. On one side is what Harman calls ‘the vacuum-sealed nature of objects’ (2005: 2) separating them from their relations, and on the other, these relations orient their objects while nevertheless operating on a separate level as a ‘vicarious cause’ (2005: 2). These aesthetic relations therefore form, Harman writes, ‘a global ether’ (2005: 3) or ‘elemental sphere’ (2005: 170) that surrounds objects, but does not reveal them: ‘Vicarious causation is not a special burden of human consciousness, but the very music of the world’ (2005: 169). In this very specific sense the aesthetic relations orienting experience towards objects is non-correlated, and although Harman draws inspiration from phenomenology he claims its insights ‘are still far too humanized, like most of the philosophies that have emerged in the long shadow of Kant’ (2005: 170). Harman attributes the discovery of the dual dimensions of objects and their aesthetic relations to Edmund Husserl (although clearly its ultimate roots lie in Kant’s Copernican revolution), although for Husserl this ‘unified object of experience’ is ‘exhausted’ by its presence to the mind that experiences it. Heidegger’s great corrective to his teacher was therefore to insist that these objects are in fact withdrawn into a ‘silent background’ or ‘earth’, and only emerge in their relationship to something else in the world of Dasein. Harman therefore bases his ontology on Heidegger’s understanding of the dual ‘being’ of the hammer in Being and Time,15 but Heidegger’s corrective also needs correcting inasmuch as Heidegger sees this hidden earth as unified and always the same, and objects of perception merely ‘hint monotonously at the same earthy background’ (2014: 3). Harman directly connects this problem to Clement Greenberg’s modernist theory of painting, in which ‘the flat background is the



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same no matter what content is deployed to hint in its direction’ (2014: 3). The problem, as Harman sees it, is to understand how this ontological ‘reality’ is the specific ‘essence’ of an object or work, while nevertheless maintaining that its actual appearance is determined by the relations it maintains with others and that they maintain with it. ‘At issue’, Harman writes, ‘is the independence of artworks not only from their social and political surroundings, their physical settings or their commercial exchange value, but from any other object whatsoever’ (2014: 2). We can see a problem emerging for ‘art’ at this point because, while the hidden aspect of its object remains inaccessible to experience, its visible relations are autonomous from human perception, giving the object a fundamentally aesthetic aspect but removing anything that might specifically be called ‘art’. This is the problem of vicarious relations that do not operate through the correlation: like the conceptual contributions of art in speculative anti-aesthetics, non-correlated relations tend to evade their description as ‘art’, unless ‘art’ is now understood (as it arguably is in Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari) as a privileged means of allowing us to move beyond the correlation and experience the ­diffused sensuality of a pan psychic world.16 Indeed, there has been a fierce criticism of Harman’s work by the ‘rationalist’ wing of speculative realism on precisely this point, because they see it as affirming the tendency of contemporary art towards ‘theory’, towards the understanding of art as philosophy, and towards the idea that art provides access to a special hidden realm:17 Object-orientedness enlivens a retrenchment from expanded practice back to the autonomous object with the thrill of philosophical profundity: in a cosmic reinvigoration of the readymade, any object whatsoever, when supplemented with a faith in the subversive power of objectality as such, becomes not only art but also practical philosophy [. . .]. ‘SR’ makes possible a new ‘art after philosophy’ in which a vacuously general concept (object, thing, or material) can mysteriously transform any stuff whatsoever into an aesthetically and philosophically significant experience. [. . .] [This] gigantic objectal matrix converges happily with the flat eclecticism of the New Aesthetic and the Post-Internet generation­– ­an endlessly multifarious universe that comes prequantified into discrete and isomorphic tumblr thumbnails. The concepts at work here are loose at best; the aesthetic effects as desultory as the curatorial apologia are extravagant. (Mackay et al. 2014: 2)

This passage is interesting for a couple of points. First, it defends speculative anti-aesthetics’ adoption of Kosuth’s conceptual practice by ridiculing object-oriented philosophy’s transformation of art into philosophy through the proposal of an always-already interesting

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object (rather than a concept). Second, it associates this object with Duchamp’s readymade, correctly pointing out that now anything can be art, but only according to the ‘vacuous’ and minimal condition of it being this mysterious ‘thing’ that everything, it turns out, already is. The reference to tumblr thumbnails is not misplaced, as Harman’s prose is punctuated by seemingly random lists of things, their poetic juxtapositions imposing an aesthetic experience on anything’s appearance (and, indeed, appearance itself is always a metaphor for its object): ‘object-oriented philosophy’, Harman tells us on the first page of Guerilla Metaphysics, ‘holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other’ (2005: 1). So while object-oriented philosophy propels us into a world constituted by aesthetic relation, it does so seemingly at the expense of ‘art’ as such, and certainly at the expense of Duchamp’s conceptual revolution­– H ­ arman reduces the readymade to the meagreness of ‘any thing’. As Peter Wolfendale puts it, Harman’s privileging of aesthetics ‘suggests that artists can do philosophy simply by doing art’ (2014: 384), instead of suggesting that art was in fact conceptual work as Duchamp established. On the other hand, Harman’s own poetic listing of things suggests that through the ontological necessity of metaphor any philosopher can make art by simply being a phenomenologist. Object-oriented art therefore affirms the Duchampian readymade in its most banal aspect, that of the ordinarily strange, and so simply works­– ­once more this is Wolfendale­– ­‘to highlight the object’s own allusiveness’ (2014: 388). This, he continues, reduces the art work to an indiscriminate ‘stuff’, and leaves the spectator to find their own affective resonance with it.18 As Robert Jackson points out, this makes Harman’s work a ‘limited descriptive gesture’ (2014: 333) in relation to art, because on the one hand ‘art’ remains in the eye of the beholder and so requires the ‘literalism’ of the correlation that Harman rejects, while on the other aesthetics as he understands it involves the necessary withdrawal of the object ‘as such’, leaving us with only the general concept of an aesthetic relation (or ‘allure’ as Harman calls it) that applies equally and in all cases and describes nothing specific to ‘art’. It is precisely these aspects of object-oriented philosophy that the rationalist wing of Speculative Realism rigorously critique. As the editorial introduction to a recent volume on Speculative Realism has it: The demotion of anthropic determinations by object-oriented approaches leads to the abjuring of judgment and semantically-organized social practice­ – ­including politics­– ­as necessary premises for the purposive transformation of the conditions of which it speaks. Equality of objects and the concomitant



Postscript: Speculative Realism and the Sublime 251 subordination or elimination of subjecthood as a condition of praxis risks undermining the very possibility of constructing an active, directed and transformative demand, and might even mitigate against it for fear of reinstating an anthropocentric reach. (Avanessian and Malik 2016: 5)

Brassier, in a typically succinct manner, contrasts his position with Harman’s as follows: ‘Some recent philosophers have evinced an interest in subjectless experiences; I am rather more interested in experienceless subjects’ (2009: 5). The question, in other words, and from the side of speculative anti-aesthetics, is not to get rid of consciousness, but to free it from the correlation so that it might begin to truly ‘think’ and so become capable of changing our current political predicament. Harman’s insistence on aesthetic relation seems to risk throwing out a critical or even creative consciousness along with the subject. While speculative anti-aesthetics’ condemnation of an object-oriented uptake of Duchamp may apply to recent developments in contemporary art, it is harder to pin on Harman himself, who actually rejects Duchamp in a way that both questions the pure conceptualism of speculative anti-aesthetics and pushes back against the rather too easy connection of object-oriented philosophy with the readymade. Harman follows Greenberg’s criticism of Duchamp as being an ‘academic’ artist who took his medium for granted, and simply used it to represent a conscious idea or ‘concept’. In this sense, Duchamp’s rejection of aesthetics in favour of ‘grey matter’ simply correlates the ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ of the work with consciousness at the expense of an experience of the materiality­– ­and hence reality­– ­of the object (Harman 2014a: 258). Harman finds the corrective to the problems raised by Greenberg and Duchamp in Michael Fried’s famous theory of theatricality. Fried condemns Minimalism (and in particular its ties to both modernist reductionism and the readymade) for being ‘literalist’, or in other words for claiming that it is context that gives an art work its particularity, a context entirely reliant on the human who perceives it. This kind of art is therefore ‘correlationist’ according to Harman, because it anticipates the viewer in its own structure, making perceptual relations rather than its ‘cryptic inner reality’ (2014: 5) constitutive of its being.19 Theatricality, on the other hand, which Harman argues Fried incorrectly identified with literality, does not make the art work equivalent to its perception but instead suggests that it ‘enacts’ its object through a process of mimesis and identification. As a result, Harman argues: ‘The problem with modernist theory was not that it decontextualised art and made it too autonomous, but that it rooted autonomy in the features of the medium rather than the internal fascinations of content itself’ (2014: 5). Such fascinations are types of ‘passionate a­ ttachment’

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that co-constitute the art work through the necessary (rather than simply perceptual) relations it forms with its ‘objective’ essence. This marks a return to what Fried calls ‘presentness’, which is as close as human perception can get to the hidden essence of things. Here the art work refuses to acknowledge the viewer, but the viewer experiences the work as ‘a perpetual creation of itself as something intense, essential and inexhaustible, and not as a thing of literal presence in duration’ (Jackson 2014: 347). This is the empathic projection that the work has produced in its viewer, and that produces their ‘absorption’ (as Fried called it) into the work as its intense and present instance. In this way, then, things withdraw from contact with us, but the relations they form with other objects ‘theatricalises’ their withdrawal and expresses the ‘sincerity’ (2005: 220) of their vicarious causation. While Harman seems to privilege perception and even consciousness in this account, he is quick to reject any description of it as ‘panpsychism’. This would be to privilege if not the human subject then a more diffuse ‘psychism’ that enforces the same problems of correlation (2005: 220), Harman argues, and so ‘reviving pansyschism would not solve our current problem, since this refreshingly freewheeling theory actually preserves the central problem of human-centered philosophy: namely it still assumes that cognition is something so poignantly special that ontology cannot live without it’ (2005: 242). Nevertheless Harman’s theory of allure does seem to suggest a theory of animism (a term he uses to describe Alphonso Lingis’ work, without repudiating it (2005: 59)), inasmuch as it infuses all things whether organic or inorganic and even including the imaginary. While I do not want to discuss this in detail here, it is an aspect of speculative aesthetics that goes beyond its purely objectoriented approaches. It is also an aspect of speculative aesthetics qua transcendental aesthetics that broadens its catchment to include our sublime account of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. On the Urbanomic website (the press run by Robin Mackay that is perhaps most responsible for the rise of Speculative Realism) there is a transcript of a discussion in the Tate Britain that seems to confirm this view. One of the participants claims: ‘Speculative Realist philosophy asks how thought can access a reality that endures before, after, and without the human, a reality which the “sublime” encounter with powers that exceed the capacity of the imagination also gesture towards.’ This is the way in which Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism begins to become both ‘speculative’ and ‘realist’, inasmuch as the sublime is an experience of a reality that reveals to human consciousness the contingency of its own limits, an eruption of ‘reality’ qua anonymous matter-force. Art is the example, and more



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specifically Turner’s Shipwreck (oil on canvas, 1805), where representation gives way to ‘a distribution of forces that retains or repeats something of the traumatic experience’, the experience, in other words, of destruction, dying and death. In this sense, the painting does not actually ‘represent’ what it shows, it instead embodies those forces, ‘its dynamic relationship to the eye belongs to the same anonymous, turbulent nature it depicts.’ Here, nature becomes the productive principle that encompasses everything within it, a pure expressive immanence that we have already seen in Deleuze, but that is also the privileged mechanism of the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and of Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading of it. These naturalisations on the one hand support Speculative Realism’s realism in that they do not propose a rational cognitive subject as the basis for how the real is to be apprehended, but on the other they suggest an animism or panpsychism that risks merely atomising consciousness into all aspects of nature and thus returning it as a ‘subjectalism’. As Suhail Malik puts it, ‘life and matter and their organizational modes take the place of the subject that is traditionally at the base of how the real is dealt with’ (2016: 2). Steven Shaviro is another who advocates an aesthetic path beyond the correlation that flirts with panpsychism (primarily drawn from Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead). Rather than following the path of this book towards the sublime, however, he has argued for the beautiful as a form of disinterested pleasure that escapes our subjective conditions of possible experience by emerging as an intense affect (2009: 5). The beautiful, in other words, is a non-subjective feeling expressing the ‘world’ (i.e. nature, or the real) without any correlation with ‘knowledge’; in it Shaviro claims: ‘Intuition is decoupled from thought’ (2009: 10). This is a reversal of Kant, then­– ­instead of the world being produced by the subject, the subject (or ‘superject’ as Whitehead has it) is produced by the world. As Shaviro puts it in his long essay on Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, the disinterested and indeed depressed affects of the main character Justine are a de-subjectified experience of ‘the great Outdoors, the absolute outside’ (2012: 39). Justine’s disinterested emotional life plays out against the background of the impending end of the world as it collides with another planet, and so is the affect of the necessity of contingency and the omnipotence of chaos (2012: 39). In this sense, the film offers an ‘anti-sublime’ Romanticism because it figures immense, end-of-the-world-scale cosmic events without the redemption of an experience of the absolute within ourselves (i.e. Ideas). The film instead figures this event as ‘beautiful’, which, Shaviro claims, ‘offers us a kind of release, a suspension of the will, a radical disinterest that offers a way out of ourselves. And this is why

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von Trier presents the end of the world as a seductively beautiful semblance’ (2012: 48). In this way aesthetic experience or feeling expresses something that encompasses us (nature) in terms of experimental ‘emprico-ideal’ categories that emerge from events, while providing their real conditions, like Deleuze’s problematic Ideas. These Ideas organise experience around an ‘objective structure’ of indeterminacy (in beauty both imagination and the understanding is undetermined­– ­although this does seem rather thin grounds for Shaviro to take them away from their proper realm of reason and their expression in the sublime) that forces actual experience to go beyond its ideal limits (Shaviro 2009: 31–2) and means, Whitehead claims, that ‘the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty’ (quoted in Shaviro 2009: 67). This is to universalise the aesthetic, and make, as Shaviro puts it, feelings (or ‘prehensions’ as Whitehead has it) the ‘common generative matrix’ of space and time (2009: 59). In this way, experience and thought is a result of being affected, and resides within all entities, not just humans (2009: 64). As a result, Shaviro claims ‘Whitehead rejects correlationism and anthropocentrism precisely by extending Kant’s analysis of conditions of possibility, and of the generative role of time, to all entities in the universe, rather than confining them to the privileged realm of human beings, or of rational minds’ (2009: 79). While Shaviro’s account does a good job of aligning Deleuze and Whitehead around a ‘beautiful’ vitalism, like Harman’s work it seems to dissolve any specific description of ‘art’ into its much broader ontology. While this position can perhaps be alleviated by Deleuze or Lyotard’s advocacy of art as a special mechanism operating within a transcendental aestheticism, it remains vulnerable to speculative anti-aesthetics’ accusations that it retains the correlation and its idealism in its animist or panpsychic ‘subjectalism’. BRASSIER VS DELEUZE Ray Brassier has offered a brilliant reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that clearly articulates how the transcendental ambitions of speculative aesthetics, along with Shaviro’s Whiteheadian interpretation of beauty, remain correlationist. Deleuze rewrites Kant’s First Critique from a Bergsonian perspective, Brassier argues, whereby it undergoes an involution which folds the Transcendental Dialectic directly into the Transcendental aesthetic. The mediating role of the Transcendental Analytic is supplanted by an account of spatio-temporal individuation which provides the sufficient reason for a non-conceptual synthesis of reason and sensibility. With the unifying function of the understanding suspended, the



Postscript: Speculative Realism and the Sublime 255 aesthetic manifold need no longer be subjected to conceptual subsumption; it now incarnates the dialectical structures of ideal multiplicity. (2007: 163)

In this way what we have seen Deleuze call ‘problematic Ideas’ become ‘things-in-themselves’, and thought escapes the confines of human being to become the individuation of being itself. In doing so cognition becomes ‘feeling-thought’, it becomes the intensity of sensibility corresponding to the problematic ideality of being, which catalyses the discordant exercise of the faculties and makes the aesthetic (whether as beauty as in Shaviro or as the sublime as I prefer) the only mode of ‘thought’. This is made possible, as we have seen, by the caesura of the third synthesis of time, which shifts thought from a function of contemplative representation to one of ontological production (Brassier 2007: 171). As production, thought involves the reciprocal presupposition of the ‘thinking of individuation’ (i.e. the ‘contemplation’ of passive synthesis) and the individuation of thinking (i.e. the problematic Idea), or, as Brassier puts it, the articulation of ‘univocal immanence’ and ‘ontological transcendence’ (2007: 171). It is the eternal return or repetition of this difference that constitutes, Brassier writes, the non-human form of thought that defines Deleuze’s ‘panpsychism’ (2007: 195): Thus the difference between thought and thing, thinking and being, is not a transcendent condition of access to things, as it is for the philosophy of representation, but is rather internal to things themselves. In actualization, each thing is at once the expression of an Idea and the thought through which that Idea is expressed. (2007: 173)

This, Brassier says­– a­ nd it will not be the last time he uses the term­– i­s a ‘correlation’ between the expressing thought and the Idea that is expressed (2007: 174). Thus­– ­and it is a nice phrase­– t­ he larval subject of passive synthesis ‘dreams matter into being’ by expressing an Idea (2007: 178). This is an important point, because while Deleuze’s sublime reading of Kant certainly breaks thought out of its cognitive frame (the understanding) and materialises its process, Brassier will argue that this process nevertheless remains in the final instance ideal. Being comes to be in being thought, but because the third synthesis of time removes the I and the self as thought’s conditions, ‘it produces the future as the “unconditioned”; the instance of absolute novelty which Deleuze explicitly associates with the work of art’ (Brassier 2007: 184). This is the sublime art that we are by now familiar with, and Brassier gives a significant philosophical account of modernism’s recent adoption of the undetermined as its political accomplishment. Brassier argues that despite Deleuze’s best efforts the third synthesis of time seems to privilege ‘complex psychic systems’, and so

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implies that only consciousness can become equal to its intensive individuation qua ‘feeling-thought’ (2007: 185). In other words, only the death of the ‘I’ is adequate to the emergence and experience of pre-individual ‘thought’. This experience is of the chaos of nature, a sublime experience of ‘death’ as the necessary condition for nature’s emergence in inhuman sensations (i.e. spatio-temporal dynamisms), in feeling-thoughts of problematic Ideas, its emergence in other words (Brassier’s) as ‘a transcendental aestheticism’ (2007: 188) in which ‘the intensive noumenon as sentendium gives rise to the cogitandum in the transcendental exercise of the faculties’ (2007: 189). This means that Deleuze’s ‘superior empiricism’ has nothing to do with an empirical realism, inasmuch as the extensive world has been utterly detached from any empirical laws of appearance (i.e. representation). As a result, Brassier argues, Deleuze’s empiricism is a form of ‘absolute idealism’ (2007: 190) that goes further than simply separating feeling-thought from representation, and in fact claims that ‘the caesura of thinking fuses intensive thought with noumenal nature’ (2007: 191), guaranteeing the ‘correlation’ of the intensity of being and its individuation in and as thought. ‘In this regard,’ Brassier concludes, ‘the determining role allotted to thinking in absolutizing the correlation between ideality and sensibility is characteristic of absolute idealism’ (2007: 191). Finally: ‘For Deleuze then, being is nothing apart from its expression in thought, indeed, it simply is this expression’ (2007: 203). Although Brassier does not make it explicit here, it is precisely the ‘death’ of the ‘I’ in this sublime and absolute idealism that provides the philosophical model for the reification of indetermination in contemporary art. As Brassier points out, Deleuze’s ‘absolute correlation’ (2007: 191) of intensive thought and noumenal nature installs an ‘a priori other’ within the subject as the expression of a ‘possible world’ (2007: 194, quoting Deleuze 1994: 261). This possible world is the ‘sheer virtuality’ (Brassier 2007: 194) that carries the political ambitions of Deleuze’s ontology, and is actualised when the virtual and the actual come together in an artistic sign that is absolutely undetermined and can only be thought. This ‘absolute idealism’ also seems to have an organicist bias, Brassier claims, inasmuch as Deleuze defines a ‘vitalist’ life whose examples fall within a fairly narrow biological band, and substantially ignores both subatomic and astronomic physics (although he rejects entropy in Difference and Repetition and sides with Bergson on his rejection of Einstein’s theory of relativity in Bergsonism). This is a result of Deleuze’s empiricism, which privileges experience (qua sensation) and the organic processes that support it (even if they are understood in their widest sense as ‘contemplation’), incarnating



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thought while nevertheless retaining its absolute ideality in the virtual. In any case, central to Brassier’s argument is that Deleuze remains a correlationist even while announcing the death of the subject­– ­he simply shifts the correlation from the mediation of the representational understanding in Kant to the aesthetic sensation of the Idea in a genetic feeling-thought: ‘The speculative audacity with which Deleuze upholds the rights of virtual ideality’, Brassier argues, ‘should not blind us to the curiously conservative nature of his empiricist premise [. . .] ­biocentrism leads infallibly to noocentrism’ (2007: 200). Obviously Brassier’s argument concerning the ‘conservative’ nature of Deleuze’s work rests upon his own assumption that correlationism is an epochal limit on the possibilities of thought. This claim is somewhat limited by Brassier’s reading only considering Difference and Repetition, and we have already seen how Alliez and Toscano make convincing cases that Deleuze’s position moves away from its idealism once he starts work with Guattari (see Toscano 2006: chapter 6, section 5). Indeed, Toscano’s reading of Deleuze’s theory of individuation could be read as a direct rebuttal of Brassier that seeks to ‘materialise’ Deleuze’s ‘idealism’ (i.e. problematic Ideas and their ‘thought’ as the real conditions of experience) in a play of forces understood geologically as the emergence of inorganic life (what Toscano calls ‘transcendental materialism’). Nevertheless, despite the interest of these arguments I would instead like to focus on the implications Brassier’s speculative anti-aesthetics have for contemporary art. We have already seen how Brassier’s affirmation of noise and Beech’s return to the Conceptualism of Kosuth call for a non-aesthetic artistic practice that seeks to revise our cognitive assumptions about ‘reality’, but behind this, and this is something that Brassier’s reading of Deleuze makes explicit, is that this means subordinating art to science. As I have mentioned, Brassier’s critique of Deleuze’s idealism clearly associates his thought with the excesses of contemporary art’s claims of indetermination. Deleuze’s thought offers us, Brassier argues, a choice between ‘actuality as an entropic junkyard yoked in the iron collar of representation, and an actuality transformed into an inexhaustible reservoir of ontological novelty’. This choice is based upon the assumption ‘that the experience of time is irreducible to the objectifying representation of space’ (2007: 201) or, in other words, on the suppression of scientific objectivity in favour of aesthetic experience. This is the result of correlationism, which ontologises (in Deleuze’s case) temporal difference (i.e. thought) while denying the possibility of a truly autonomous time (i.e. ‘the real as being-nothing’ (Brassier 2007: 203)). This finally lies at the base of speculative anti-aesthetics’ ambitions for art­– ­that it

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actualises this ‘real as being-­nothing’ as something beyond experience but not beyond thought (e.g. a genre-less noise), which would address ‘reality’ as science understands it and in doing so act as a tool or assistance to scientific research (e.g. data visualisation, design, etc.) or as a cognitive ‘accelerant’ that might enable a political shift. On the other hand, however, the transcendental aesthetics (i.e. speculative aesthetics) ‘grasps’ chaos (or ‘reality’) in an empirical sensation that is onto-genetic (i.e. vitalist) whereas speculative anti-aesthetics moves in the opposite direction, thinking chaos as a logical necessity that makes it possible to ‘understand’ reality beyond the current conditions of experience (i.e. in a way freed from empirical commitments understood as correlationist). This would be a ‘hard’ anti-correlationism that would seek to grasp phenomena in a rational thought completely detached from the human, a thought that would therefore be necessarily ‘inhuman’ (and as such the Promethean ‘intelligence’ of the human­– ­see Negarestani 2014). In this way, Brassier insists on a ‘pre-critical’ realism where ‘the noumena is the reality of the phenomenon. It’s something that is embedded in the structure of the phenomenon. [. . .] [As a result,] to understand how phenomenal experiences are dimensional projections of a higher-dimensional reality is a cognitive task’ (2014: 117–18). Aesthetics and art can help us in this task, but only given that aesthetics as such is subordinated to the rational and conceptual task of grasping ‘reality’ qua noumena. While this certainly means to go beyond our given conceptual conditions, this is not in the direction of a ‘real experience’ beyond any conceptual conditions, but towards new conceptual conditions that are less human, perhaps, but more ‘realistic’ and in this sense more able to grasp and effect those forces that are detrimentally controlling our lives. A C C E L E R AT I O N I S M Speculative anti-aesthetics seeks to turn art into a mode of philosophy by insisting on its conceptual qualities, or envisages it as a support for scientific analysis, as for example ‘data-imaging’,20 ‘design’,21 or ‘mapping’.22 In both cases art would contribute to a process of ‘cognitive acceleration’ that could directly intervene in the political sphere. Rather than attempting to turn art into a rational tool able to make or support cognitive interventions, speculative aesthetics argues that ‘thought’ is an aesthetic practice, common to all things, and as such abandons the correlation. In this speculative aesthetics recalls the role of the sublime in Lyotard’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, who can in this sense be included in a genealogy of transcendental



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aesthetics qua non-correlated philosophy. As we have seen, from the perspective of speculative anti-aesthetics, however, this would clearly not be the case, and as Amanda Beech has argued of Lyotard: ‘The sublime struggles to manifest beyond the fiction of abstract perception and the tradition of an intact subjectivity, held in contradiction. This contradiction preserves politics at the level of private experience and fails to transcend the subject of self-consciousness that ‘finds itself’ in this experience’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 36). This objection hinges on the claim that abstract perception is a ‘fiction’, or in other words that sensible intuition is impossible without conceptual conditions. To claim that there is a non-human (and so by implication non-correlated) form of experience, Beech argues, is to binarise the absolute qua immanence and its mediation in human representational systems so as to reject the possibility of intervening within those systems, in favour of a utopian desire to escape them altogether. In this sense, one that echoes Rancière’s objections to his work we considered in Chapter 5: ‘Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime establishes the perception of incomprehensibility before interpretation’ (Simanowski 2014: 365). Nevertheless, Lyotard could be seen to offer an aesthetic rather than cognitive form of Accelerationism, one that would have directly political implications that we have already touched upon in the discussion of Nick Land’s work in Chapter 3. Lyotard was, we remember, crucial to Land’s work, while Land was the teacher or mentor of Ray Brassier, Robin Mackay, Mark Fisher, Iain Hamilton Grant and Reza Negarestani, and as such the source of much of what is now known as Accelerationism. Lyotard’s accelerationist phase is generally understood to pre-date his interest in the sublime, and to bridge his earlier work on the primary processes and his later interest in the emerging new technologies of cybernetic machines. Lyotard saw this connection of libido and technology to be integral to the new forms of capitalism emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where aesthetic experience circulates through ‘synthesisers’ (both human and inhuman) that derive monetary and libidinal ‘profit’ from it. In this sense, Lyotard offers a prescient and politically relevant analysis of non-correlated aesthetic relation as always already technologically mediated. Robin Mackay has offered a compelling reading of Les Immatériaux in precisely these terms, arguing that the exhibition’s purpose was to show how ‘the human mind becomes only one of a series of “transformers” that fleetingly generate immaterials as they extract and contract flows of energyinformation. [. . .] we are synthesizers among synthesizers’ (2015: 219). This inhuman aesthetics marks a radical ‘deanthropocentricisation of

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culture’ (Mackay 2015: 220) where the complexification of matter and the ­circulation of energy is no longer for human benefit and indeed is contrary to it. While Nick Land embraced this outcome, and indeed pursued it, his lauding of neoliberalism and its immanence with primary processes can be uncomfortable reading. More recent versions of Accelerationism have therefore attempted to pull back from Land’s delirious nihilism (although a more restrained version is still evident in Brassier’s work) in favour of a more considered revisionist Leftism that affirms the acceleration of cognitive processes and scientific objectivity in order to influence rather than overthrow our capitalist reality.23 As Steven Shaviro concisely puts it, this is the argument ‘that the only way out is the way through’ (2015: 1). The risk in this is precisely that which Mackay perceptively sees in Les Immatériaux, that by attempting to counter-instrumentalise the transformative potentials of capitalism one merely delivers resistance over to it: ‘Les Immatériaux’, Mackay writes, ‘can be understood as a kind of hinge point: it seems to be poised on a knife-edge between satisfying the Beaubourg cultural megamachine’s call for polyvalent cultural communication, on the one hand, and entirely sabotaging these demands with disorientation, indetermination, and greyness on the other’ (2015: 233).24 In this sense, Lyotard’s position poised between sabotage and collusion summarises the dilemma of Accelerationism. Either it must affirm our potential for conceptual mastery and attempt the Promethean task of a neo-Enlightenment, or it must seek something more radical that evades the oppressive mechanisms of the capitalist systems defining our world and attempts their total destruction. This could be seen as a very schematic rendering of the two sides of Speculative Realism in relation to art, on one side an anti-aesthetics that affirms the concept and science as methods of real political engagement, and on the other a transcendental aesthetics that at least in its historical variants of a sublime art as advocated by Lyotard and Deleuze carries experience all the way to the undetermined expressions of the becoming of being. Whichever side we find more sympathetic (my own preference should be obvious!) Speculative Realism has certainly made a remarkable contribution in making the stakes of this decision very clear. CONCLUSION Leaving aside these differences for the moment, both the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic theories of art share a desire to move beyond ‘art’ as a specific category, expanding it to include conceptual production on one side and all aesthetic relations (i.e. feeling-thought) on the other. Good.



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In a sense it is business as usual as philosophy expresses the highest ambitions possible for art, that it stop being art and become everything else, that it construct reality itself! Despite the grandiosity of such a claim and the inevitable disappointment we might feel when looking at art that cannot possibly live up to it, the desire for art to stop being art is already enshrined as one of the underlying logics of art itself. In this sense, the split between speculative anti-aesthetics and speculative aesthetics simply repeats a split that has been evident in artistic practice since the emergence of Conceptual art. Speculative anti-aesthetics assumes, in classic avant-garde style, that the aesthetic aspect of art ‘doesn’t have a long-term relation to behavioural feedback loops or to collectivity which would enable it to make its abstractions real’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 84). In this sense, the suggestion that art could be more politically effective by abandoning the ontological politics of its recent past and instead enact its own dissolution into broader scientific and political projects seems typical of the various moves towards discourse-production, research-based practices and transdisciplinary collaborations in recent contemporary art. Speculative aesthetics, on the other hand, seems to follow the ontological emphasis given to aesthetic relations in recent poststructuralist philosophy (e.g. Lyotard, Deleuze and Rancière) while stepping away from the Nietzschean privilege given to ‘art’ as a mechanism of ontological politics. ‘Art’ seems to dissolve in Harman’s work for metaphysical reasons rather than political, although his dislike of the contemporary art world seems similar to, although perhaps not as vehement as, that of his opponents. Harman’s return to Greenberg and Fried, although surely a deliberate provocation of the post-conceptual art world, also returns to the affirmation of aesthetic abstraction found in high modernism. His championing of the work of M. C. Escher (2014: 5), on the other hand, can only be intended as giving the finger to contemporary art’s ubiquitous self-importance. Both sides carry their advantages and their risks, but all have been inherited from artistic practices that seem to have already set the agendas for speculative aesthetics and speculative anti-aesthetics. Contemporary artistic practices have been negotiating the relation between concept and sensation for many decades (and arguably centuries) and the most interesting contemporary art does not seek to simply overcome the one with the other as our two speculative streams seem to want. It seems that only philosophy seeks an art that is either dissolved into a transcendental aesthetics or has already failed as a result of this, and must be replaced with a pure concept. The only possible result of such ideas, and thus of a book like this, is to force us to return to art

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once more in order to look more carefully for what philosophy always manages to miss. A beginning. N OT E S   1. The quotation in the title comes from Peter Wolfendale (Mackay et al. 2014: 116).   2. In a recent article Meillassoux extends the definition of correlationism to encompass what he now calls ‘subjectalism’, which would be any philosophy that makes subjectivity, or ‘certain remarkable traits of thought’ (2016: 121), ‘an intrinsic characteristic of the absolute’ (2016: 120). This would ‘encompass at once all forms of idealism and all forms of vitalism’ (2016: 122), which share, according to Meillassoux, an antimaterialist metaphysics.   3. Harman has gone so far as to claim that aesthetics is ‘first philosophy’ (2007: 205). Grant hasn’t written explicitly on aesthetics, but ‘given his Deleuzo-Schellingian dynamic process philosophy, it is safe to say that aesthetics plays a crucial role in his metaphysical project’ (Askin et al. 2014: 28). For Friedrich Schelling aesthetic intuition is transcendental intuition become objective, making art the only ‘true and eternal organ’ of philosophy.   4. The editors of Speculations V, Aesthetics in the 21st Century call this divide ‘a new struggle between rationalism and empiricism within contemporary speculative philosophy’ (Askin et al. 2014: 29). Robert Jackson, writing in the same volume, calls it a distinction between ‘Eliminativism’ (of aesthetic experience) and ‘Panpsychism’. In the first thought can deduce knowledge of itself, and so demonstrate the reality of its own contingent finitude, while in the second thought cannot deduce any in-itself and so cannot be distinguished from the aesthetic experience constitutive of all other forms of relation (Jackson 2014: 321). Miellassoux draws a distinction between his own position of ‘speculative materialism’ and ‘object oriented’ positions that he calls ‘speculative realism’ (see Meillassoux 2016).   5. As Tom Trevatt has put it: ‘Art exists in correlation to the human [. . .] by being shown, exhibited, put on display or presented for the purposes of interpretation’ (in Mackay et al. 2014: 28).   6. As a result, Meillassoux continues, in relation to the ‘arche-fossil’ (the traces of what existed before humanity) secondary qualities ‘represent the modes of relation between a living creature and its environment and cannot be relevant when it comes to describing an event that is not only anterior to every recognized form of life but incompatible with the existence of living creatures’ (2008: 12).



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  7. As Brassier puts it: ‘The correlationist conceit is to suppose that formal conditions of ‘experience’ (however broadly construed) suffice to determine material conditions of reality. But that the latter cannot be uncovered independently of the former does not mean that they can be circumscribed by them’ (2011: 63).   8. This would also be a useful way of understanding one of the eminent works of speculative aesthetics, Amanda Beech’s Sanity Assassin.   9. As Amanda Beech has rather more forcefully put it: The non-instrumentalised art work has often been discussed as configuring a non-relational self-producing space, unbound from the constraints of a regime of causality. In this sense, it has come to symbolise an image of freedom from law; a pre-political state of infinite and dynamic uncertainty, openness and flux. This is how we characterise critical art as we understand it today. (2012: 87) 10. As Kosuth writes: The validity of artistic propositions is not dependent on any empirical, much less aesthetic, presupposition about the nature of things. For the artist, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth. In other words, the propositions of art are not factual, but linguistic in character­– t­ hat is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art. Accordingly, we can say that art operates on a logic. For we shall see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical inquiry is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definition (of art) and not with questions of empirical fact. (1999: 166) 11. So while this might seem similar to Osbourne’s claim that contemporary art is post-conceptual, he in fact advocates a far looser definition of ‘postconceptual’ based on Lawrence Weiner and Sol le Witt’s definitions of conceptual art, where aesthetics still played an important role. 12. So while Speculative Realism also seeks to unite the two realms of aesthetics as Kant understood them, the philosophy of art and the science of sensuous cognition, it does so within the realm of cognitive process rather than that of aesthetic feeling. 13. But also including the work of Reza Negarestani, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, along with the various others I have already mentioned. 14. This ‘aesthetic’ version of speculative realism also includes major works from Timothy Morton and Ian Bogost, amongst others. 15. The hammer ‘present-to-hand’ is in a functional relation to its user, while the broken hammer being ‘ready-at-hand’ means it ‘withdraws into subterranean depths that other objects rely on despite never fully probing or

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sounding them. When objects fail us, we experience a negation of their accessible contours and become aware that the object exceeds all that we grasp of it’ (Harman 2007: 177). 16. This, Harman claims, is ‘a form of realism far more enticing than the tedious kind repeatedly denounced or evaded by human-centered philosophy’ (2005: 171). 17. As Peter Wolfendale notes (and it is not a compliment) in Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumena’s New Clothes, his epic take-down of Harman’s work: ‘The greatest influence that OOP has had lies, no doubt, in its appropriation by artists, architects, curators and the discourses that cater to their theoretical needs’ (2014: 383–4). 18. Claire Colebrook has argued that in this sense Harman simply repeats the modernist tradition of subjective formalism, where the art work is autonomous from its various readings (2014: 145). 19. As Robert Jackson puts it: ‘The structure of the work, together with the situation it generates, utterly exhausts itself in its effect on the beholder’ (2014: 343). Minimalism would in this sense be Husserlian, and indeed it is well-documented that minimalist artists, and in particular Robert Morris, were avid readers of Merleau-Ponty. 20. Robert Simanowski suggests, ‘The only way to document reality bypassing the human relationship to it is the automatic documentation of human action’ (2014: 377). In this way, he continues, both minor and grand narratives are dissolved into ‘numerical narratives’ (2014: 380). 21. As Nick Srnicek describes it, ‘design as a means of manipulation, rather than about beauty’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 52). Benedict Singleton has also been a prominent advocate of what he calls ‘speculative design’ (see Mackay et al. 2014: 21–5). 22. As Ray Brassier puts it: ‘A Promethean constructivism will engineer new domains of experience, and it is these new domains that will need to be mapped by a reconfigured aesthetic’ (Mackay et al. 2014: 77). 23. As Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s ‘Accelerationist Manifesto’ has it, ‘the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed, it needs to be repurposed towards common ends’ (2014: 355). 24. This same ambiguity could be seen as being already enshrined in the discursive strategies of politically motivated conceptual artists. As Benjamin Buchloh (1999) famously pointed out, conceptual art’s ‘aesthetics of administration’ used statistics and other practices of ‘cognitive mapping’ (e.g. Hans Haacke’s Shapolski et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971)) to critique and even intervene in political ‘reality’, but also succeeded in making such practices a significant part of the ‘culture industry’.

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Index

abstract art, 65–6, 70, 88–96, 98, 100, 127, 225, 245 abstract expressionism, 7, 107n, 140; see also Francis; Fried; Greenberg; Minimalism; modernism; Newman; Rosenberg abstraction, 13, 76–7, 88–97, 113, 140 cognitive abstraction, 243 Accelerationism, 52, 135, 244, 258–60 active synthesis, 115–19, 125, 128, 137, 139, 143, 145, 146, 148, 155; see also passive synthesis actual, 122, 126, 128–30, 132, 154–6, 256 actualisation, 124, 126, 128, 131, 152, 255 see also virtual Adorno, Theodor, 46n, 47n, 94, 99, 108n, 215 aesthetic autonomy, 4, 7, 23, 88, 174, 190, 208–11, 215, 245 aesthetic idea, 12, 38–45, 47n, 159n, 142, 212 aesthetic judgment, 9, 11–12, 15, 17–21, 23–45, 47n, 56–9, 67, 112, 167, 169–72, 175, 178–9, 187, 199, 210–11, 214, 223, 235–6 aesthetic regime, 207–9, 213–15, 219, 224, 231, 232–3, 234–5 affect, 51–2, 55, 61, 74, 93, 167, 180, 183–6, 253 affect phrase, 50, 87–8 problematic affect, 145 see also feeling; sensation aisthesis, 57, 63, 69, 89, 90, 205–6, 229, 230n aistheton, 90, 110, 221–2, 235 allegory, 188–9, 194–7, 206, 234; see also Owens Alliez, Eric, 127–8, 129, 147, 163n, 257 Allison, Henry, 40–1, 44–5 Alloway, Laurence, 95, 107n

analogies of experience, 32 analogy, 170–2, 174–7, 232 analogical presentation, 38, 42 anarchy, 207, 213 anthropocentrism, 85, 251, 254 anthropomorphism, 186 anti-art, 6, 83, 219, 237 anticipations of perception, 32 apperception, 62–3, 90, 114–17, 158n apprehension, 33, 60, 92, 129, 130, 158n, 180–1, 184; see also comprehension appropriation, 191–2, 194, 201n, 217; see also postmodernism arche-fossil, 262n; see also Meillassoux Aristotle, 205, 207, 232 Politics, 205 Aroni, Maria, 105n art theory, 190–1 Artaud, Antonin, 138–40, 154; see also body without organs Artforum, 70, 103n auto-immunity, 204 avant-garde, 2, 7, 10, 11, 38, 46n, 65–6, 83, 84, 89, 90–2, 95, 96–7, 100, 108n, 169, 221, 222, 224, 225, 245–6 neo-avant-garde, 103n Bacon, Francis, 126, 136–40, 144, 157n, 232 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 145–6 Bamford, Kiff, 52, 64, 86, 103n Bataille, Georges, 74 Baudelaire, Charles, 106n, 194 beautiful, 12, 21–9, 59, 60, 67,71, 73, 78, 81, 97–9, 113, 124, 169, 173, 175, 177, 179, 182, 194, 209–10, 211–12, 219, 225, 230, 231, 235, 253–4, 255; see also free play of the faculties; harmony of the faculties Beech, Amanda, 245–6, 257, 259, 263n Benjamin, Walter, 97, 108n, 194

279

280

Sublime Art

Bergson, Henri, 90, 146, 148, 157n, 163n, 254, 256 Matter and Memory, 146 Bernstein, Jay, 181–2 biopolitics, 128–9 body without organs, 136–9 brain, 148, 152, 153, 155, 234, 235, 244 brain-screen, 152, 153 Brassier, Ray, 158n, 241–3, 244–5, 247, 251, 254–8, 259, 260; see also genre; noise; speculative anti-aesthetics Brauntuch, Troy, 195 Buchloh, Benjamin, 6, 264n Buren, Daniel, 47, 70, 93, 105n Burke, Edmund, 29, 34, 106n, 225 capitalism, 43, 50–2, 54, 56, 62, 70, 71–83, 87–8, 94–5, 96–100, 108n, 132–5, 222–3, 231–2, 246, 259–60 castration, 110 categorical imperative, 20, 30–1, 47n, 87 categories, 17, 32, 58, 102n, 146 Cézanne, Paul, 135, 138, 186 chaos, 32, 131, 135, 138–40, 144–6, 151, 154, 161n, 228, 231, 234, 244, 253, 256 chaos-germ, 138 chaosmosis, 144–7 Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 162n cinema, 126, 148–56, 218–19, 233–5; see also brain-screen; Costa; duration; Eisenstein; Epstein; French impressionist cinema; German expressionism; Godard; Griffith; modernism: modern cinema; montage; Murnau; Ozu; realism: neo-realism Clarke, T. J., 107n class war, 207, 238n cliché, 137, 146, 154, 156, 227, 144, 145 Cogito, 114, 117, 118, 123; see also Descartes colour, 92, 106n, 136, 147, 230, 242 common sense, 26, 98, 111–12, 118, 124, 179, 224 communicability of the sublime, 64, 68–9, 93 comprehension, 33, 35, 129, 130–1, 137, 140, 158n, 180–1, 184; see also apprehension concept, 15, 17, 18, 20–4, 26, 32, 38–45, 45n, 54, 57, 59, 60, 100, 102n, 103n, 141–2, 179, 189, 225, 243–5, 251, 260, 261 Conceptual art, 4–5, 8, 140–7, 169, 188, 196, 245, 257, 260–1; see also Duchamp; Kosuth; readymade; Wiener; le Witt

post-conceptual art, 7–9, 70, 140–7, 169, 197, 236, 247, 261 conditions of possible experience, 15, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36–7, 45, 48, 59, 65, 73, 87, 94, 105n, 116, 118, 126, 134, 137, 143, 153, 167, 170, 182, 244, 247, 253, 254 contemporary art, 3, 4, 6–9, 12, 15, 23–4, 30, 62, 70, 85, 91, 100, 105n, 145–7, 190, 194, 196–7, 211, 213–19, 231, 232, 236–7, 241, 249, 251, 257, 261; see also appropriation; Conceptual art: post-conceptual art; research-based practice contingency, 242, 244, 253 correlationism, 241, 243, 244, 249, 251, 254, 255, 256–7, 262n subjectalism, 246, 253, 254, 262n see also anthropocentrism; archefossil; contingency; eliminativism; factiality; Meillassoux; Speculative Realism Costa, Pedro, 218–19 Crimp, Douglas, 192, 194, 201n; see also October critical philosophy, 57, 113, 136 as politics, 63 see also Kant Crowther, Paul, 41, 43–5 culture industry, 7, 84, 94, 108n, 264n cybernetics, 87–9, 98, 132–5, 259 dark precursor, 127, 160n de Duve, Thierry, 10–13, 47n, 84 de Man, Paul, 4, 170, 183–7, 194, 232, 239n The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 187 see also Derrida; ideology; metaphor; metaphysics death, 31, 76, 132, 134, 149, 151, 183, 256 death drive, 72, 74, 82–3, 104n, 132 Deleuze, Gilles, 30, 109–63, 164, 165, 167, 180, 197, 202, 204, 211, 218, 219, 223, 224, 226, 227–36, 238, 244, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254–8, 260–1 Anti-Oedipus, 109–10, 128, 132, 139, 145, 161n Bergsonism, 256 Cinema 1, 148–56, 233 Cinema 2, 148–56, 233 Difference and Repetition, 109, 119, 127, 128, 129, 159n, 131–2, 137, 140, 142, 148, 153, 154, 161n, 163n, 233, 254, 256, 257 Foucault, 128, 159n; see also Foucault



Index 281

Francis Bacon, the logic of sensation, 136–40, 240n; see also Bacon Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 113 Proust and Signs, 109 see also active synthesis; actual; body without organs; cinema; dark precursor; desire; doctrine of the faculties; dramatisation; duration; eternal return; event; Guattari; modernism; passive synthesis; readymade; refrain; rhythm; superior empiricism; time; virtual democracy, 82, 203–4, 206–7, 209, 221, 225, 236, 238n Déotte, Jean-Louis, 219, 239n Derrida, Jacques, 2, 3, 6, 13n, 14, 17, 22, 23, 164–200, 202–8, 216, 221, 222, 232, 242 ‘Economimesis’, 174–8, 200n Margins of Philosophy, 199n Memories of the Blind, 168 Of Grammatology, 178, 182 Positions, 178 The Truth in Painting, 178, 182 Writing and Difference, 189 see also allegory; analogy; autoimmunity; de Man; différance; economimesis; painting; trace; ultratranscendental; vomit Descartes, René, 114, 242; see also Cogito design, 22–3, 258, 264n speculative design, 264n desire, 109–10 determinative judgment, 17, 23, 69, 98, 112, 167, 171; see also reflective judgment diagram, 136–7, 160n dialectic, 54–5, 66, 84, 101n, 235, 236; see also Hegel différance, 164–9, 171, 174–8, 181–4, 189–90, 195, 199n, 204, 222 differend, 49–50, 53, 54–6, 58, 61, 66, 68, 87, 98, 227 differential, 120–3, 136, 150 disagreement, 202–7, 209, 219–20, 226, 231, 232, 236 dissensus, 64, 67, 98, 125, 204, 210, 212, 214, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230, 232, 237, 238n doctrine of the faculties, 110–13 dramatisation, 142 drift, 54, 144 Duchamp, Marcel, 5, 7, 10–12, 37, 47n, 70, 81–4, 86, 90, 93, 104n, 140–7, 163n, 201n, 226, 227 The Bottle Rack (1913), 145 delay, 83

Given (1966), 82 The Green Box (1935), 141 The Large Glass (1923), 82, 105n Porte, 11 Rue Larrey (1927), 104n see also readymade duration, 90–1, 146, 148; see also Bergson; Deleuze economimesis, 174–8, 193 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 103n Eisenstein, Sergei, 148, 149, 155 eliminativism, 262n empiricism, 158n, 164, 165, 170–1, 175, 183, 230, 256, 262n empirical experience, 32 superior empiricism, 152, 164, 256; see also transcendental empiricism Epstein, Jean, 149, 155, 163n, 233 Escher, M. C., 261 eternal return, 118–19, 127, 128, 132, 150, 155, 158n, 255; see also Nietzsche; will to power ethics, 12, 19, 50, 53, 57, 61, 67, 69, 110, 183, 193, 197, 204, 208, 221–3, 224–8, 231 event, 9, 30, 48, 56, 61, 62–4, 66, 77, 87, 90, 93–4, 99, 102n, 117, 122, 124, 137, 145, 153–4, 202, 218, 225, 229 factiality, 242; see also Meillassoux fear, 34 feeling, 10–13, 21, 56, 77, 179–86; see also affect; intellectual feeling: feeling-thought; sensation figural, 51–2, 156–7n, 232 Figure, 136–40 Fisher, Mark, 246–7, 259 Flaxman, Gregory, 152 form, 21–2, 62, 168; see also formalism formalism, 23 formless, 28, 30, 32–4, 46n, 60, 66, 92–3, 95, 100, 126, 170 Foucault, Michel, 158n, 159–60n, 136, 209, 239n Francis, Sam, 92–3 free play of the faculties, 11, 12, 20–3, 27, 32, 47n, 60, 78, 178, 209, 211, 212 freedom, 16, 18–19, 27, 28, 31–2, 35–40, 46n, 49, 59, 61–3, 69, 95, 99, 167, 171, 175–7, 179, 183, 209, 212, 229–30, 235 moral freedom, 31 French Impressionist cinema, 149–50 Freud, Sigmund, 161–2n Fried, Michael, 251–2, 261; see also abstract art; Harman; modernism

282

Sublime Art

future, 9, 48, 93, 119, 126, 132, 135, 139, 144, 148, 154–5, 165, 183, 198n, 203–5, 219, 226, 229 as emancipation, 93 Gance, Abel, 148, 149 Garnett, Robert, 30 genius, 38, 112, 159n, 174, 175–7 genre, 243–5 German expressionism, 150 gift, 74, 132, 174 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 30 God, 39, 151, 176–7, 205 Godard, Jean-Luc, 155 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 51–2, 241–2, 248, 259, 262n; see also pansychism; Speculative Realism Greenberg, Clement, 2, 11, 23, 94, 103n, 188, 212, 215, 246, 248–9, 251, 261 Griffith, D. W., 149, 150 Guattari, Félix, 109–63, 165, 167, 197, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 249, 257, 258; see also affect: problematic; body without organs; Deleuze; desire; event habit, 115–17 hallucination, 91, 152 Harman, Graham, 241–2, 248–52, 254, 261, 262n, 264n Guerrilla Metaphysics, 250 see also Escher; Fried; Greenberg; Heidegger; Speculative Realism harmony of the faculties, 23–8, 39–40, 45, 57, 59, 111–12, 121, 124, 169, 211; see also doctrine of the faculties; free play of the faculties; imagination; Kant; reason; understanding Heaney, Seamus, 1–2 Hegel, G. W. F., 233, 235; see also dialectic Heidegger, Martin, 166, 175, 183, 199n, 248 Being and Time, 248 holocaust, 222, 223, 226, 231 humanism, 43–4; see also anthropomorphism; inhuman Hume, David, 115, 116, 161n humour, 30, 227 Husserl, Edmund, 248, 263n hylozoism, 19–20, 200n; see also materialism: vital materialism hyperrealism, 73, 74, 104n; see also Monory; painting: figurative painting hysteria, 75, 139

Idea, 9, 11–12, 30–45, 56–69, 76, 79–80, 95, 111, 113, 119–25, 126–40, 142, 148–9, 151, 153, 154, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 184–6, 221, 225, 229, 230, 231, 255, 257 Idea of totality, 35, 122 problematic Ideas, 119–25, 126, 127, 139, 152, 254, 255, 256, 257; see also Brassier; Deleuze; virtual idealism, 68, 158n, 254, 256–7, 262n ideology, 6, 43, 186, 190 imagination, 20–45, 57, 59, 60–2, 64–5, 78, 92, 95, 97, 111, 112, 115–17, 123–5, 131–5, 139, 142, 149, 150, 155, 169, 170, 175, 179, 184, 210, 211, 219, 221, 225, 230, 254 headings of the imagination, 57–8, 60–4 productive imagination, 57, 66, 174 incommensurability, 53, 59, 65, 68, 75–7, 80–1, 84, 85, 104n infinite, 29, 34–5, 49, 76–9, 92, 99, 104n, 113, 125, 131, 139, 180–1, 231 information, 96, 141, 143, 259 information technology, 97 inhuman, 1, 31, 44–5, 51, 75–7, 81–2, 101n, 111, 226, 228, 230, 256, 259 inhuman politics, 51, 66 institutional critique, 84, 105n, 147, 190 intellectual feeling, 28, 35, 36, 61, 104, 109, 120, 125–7, 134, 139, 142, 154, 155 feeling-thought, 49–50, 59, 61–2, 93, 244, 255, 256, 257, 260 intellectual intuition, 242; see also Meillassoux; Speculative Realism intuition, 32, 60, 62, 111, 114, 115, 120, 122, 125, 130, 140, 148n, 149, 167, 235, 253; see also transcendental intuition irony, 30, 83–4, 183, 193, 217, 236–7 Jackson, Mark, 198n Jackson, Robert, 250, 262n, 263n Jameson, Frederic, 43; see also postmodern sublime Jones, Caroline, 94–5, 107n jouissance, 72, 74–5, 82, 94 judgment of taste, 20–3, 31, 60, 66–7, 78 four moments of the judgment of taste, 23–7, 32, 60–1: modality, 27, 32; quality, 24–5, 32, 60; quantity, 25–6, 32, 60; relation, 27, 32, 61 Juno Ludovisi, 224 Kant, Immanuel, 2–52, 56–69, 85, 89, 90, 92–3, 95, 98, 110–27, 141–2,



Index 283

149–53, 164–87, 229, 235–6, 241, 243, 248, 254, 255 Critique of Judgment, 4, 9, 15–45, 48, 53, 56–66, 93, 111–27, 166, 453 Critique of Practical Reason, 16–17 Critique of Pure Reason, 16–17, 23, 32, 46n, 102n, 124, 125, 139, 158n, 186 Opus Postumum, 19 see also aesthetic idea; aesthetic judgment; analogies of experience; anticipations of perception; apperception; apprehension; beautiful; categories; comprehension; concept; conditions of possible experience; critical philosophy; determinative judgment; doctrine of the faculties; free play of the faculties; genius; harmony of the faculties; imagination; intuition; judgment of taste; noumenon; phenomenon; reason; reflective judgment; schema; schematism; sensus communis; subreption; supersensible; understanding kebab, 24 Kerslake, Christian, 157n, 158n Kirwen, James, 36, 42, 102n Kosuth, Joseph, 5–6, 141, 143, 245–6, 257, 263n Art After Philosophy, 5 see also Conceptual art Krell, David, 171, 190 Kruger, Barbara, 192, 193 Land, Nick, 132–5, 159n, 259, 260 language, 6, 39, 40–50, 54–5, 87, 164, 172, 176–8, 183–7, 194, 206–7, 236–7; see also sign; signification; signified; signifier Les Immatériax, 70, 84–8, 259–60 Lyotard, Jean-François, 44–100, 109–10, 133, 161n, 168, 197, 202, 204, 211, 218, 219–27, 230, 244, 249, 258, 259, 260, 261 ‘The Aesthetics of the Serial Killer’, 75–81 communism, 53–6 The Differend, 51, 53, 86, 101n, 107n, 219 Discourse/Figure, 53, 101n, 109, 110, 156n Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, 81–4 Enthusiasm, 102n Lessons on the Sublime, 48, 56–69 Libidinal Economy, 51–2, 59, 82, 101n, 102n

‘The Libidinal Economy of the Dandy’, 71–5 The Postmodern Condition, 96 Soundproof Room, 96 see also Adorno; communicability of the sublime; death: death drive; differend; drift; Duchamp; Francis; hyperrealism; incommensurability; inhuman; judgment of taste: four moments of the judgment of taste; Les Immatériax; Lyotard: communism; Monory; Newman; Pouvoir Ouvier machine, 81–5, 149, 161n desiring machine, 139, 161n; see also desire Mackay, Robin, 85, 87–8, 252, 259–60 Maïmon, Solomon, 120 Malik, Suhail, 246–7, 253 Malraux, André, 89, 96 Marxism, 53–5, 66, 96, 101n, 161–2n, 238n mass-media, 6, 43, 84, 97, 110–13, 216 materialism, 184, 227 vital materialism, 19, 200n; see also hylozoism; vitalism mathematics, 242–3 244 Meillassoux, Quintin, 241, 242–3, 262n; see also arche-fossil; contingency; correlationism: subjectalism; eliminativism; factiality; speculative anti-aesthetics memory, 90, 116–17, 149 metaphor, 185–6, 250 metaphorical image, 216 metaphysics, 164, 165, 170–1, 177, 182, 183, 190, 207 Minimalism, 251, 264n; see also Fried modernism, 2, 7, 23, 30, 38, 65, 70, 83, 88, 85, 92, 93, 99, 106n, 108n, 109, 126–7, 133, 146, 156, 174, 188, 190–1, 195, 196–7, 212, 213–15, 219, 222, 228, 231, 235, 237, 245–6, 248–9, 251, 255, 261 modern cinema, 152–6 sublime modernism, 3 see also abstract art; abstract expressionism; Francis; Fried; Greenberg; Minimalism; Newman; Rosenberg money, 72, 77, 175 Monory, Jacques, 70–81, 103–4n; see also hyperrealism montage, 155–6 moral law, 31, 46n, 61, 67–8 mourning, 80–1, 85, 90, 165, 200n, 224, 225

284

Sublime Art

movement-image, 148–50, 153, 155; see also cinema; time-image Murnau, F. W., 151, 155 music, 100, 126, 151, 177 mysticism, 93, 106n, 133–4, 139, 149 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 46n nature, 16, 17, 18–19, 22, 29–31, 45n, 57, 96, 144, 150, 169, 175–7, 182, 185, 256; see also Grant negation, 83, 92, 99, 108n, 139, 236 negative presentation, 37, 50, 52, 59, 62, 63–9, 71, 77, 89, 90, 92–3, 108n, 125–7, 147, 149, 156, 180, 182, 225 new, 9, 48, 52, 57, 89, 97, 108n, 126, 148, 154, 169; see also future Newman, Barnett, 88–92, 94, 106n Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue (1969), 91 see also abstract art; modernism; painting Nietzsche, Frederick, 118–19, 125, 132, 154–5, 183, 226, 229, 261; see also eternal return; overman; will to power nihilism, 51, 52, 69, 75, 76–7, 81, 89, 101n, 109, 133–5, 260 postmodern nihilism, 217 noise, 243–5, 257, 258 nonsense, 81–2, 126 noumenon, 16, 35, 61, 100, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120, 122–3, 130, 168, 171, 173, 175, 180, 236, 256, 258; see also phenomenon now, 90, 96, 106n October, 103n, 188, 196; see also Crimp; Owens; postmodern art Osbourne, Peter, 6–9, 13n, 141, 163n, 263n outside, 30, 50, 55, 89, 137, 144, 155, 159n, 164, 221, 235, 236 over-identification, 218 overman, 118 Owens, Craig, 188–9, 191, 194–7, 202n; see also allegory; postmodern art Ozu, Yasujiroˉ, 153, 154 pain, 2, 29–37, 46n, 50, 57, 59, 61, 79, 82, 86, 92, 125, 134, 152, 179, 184 painting, 71–81, 88–97, 126, 136–40, 147, 165–7, 173, 177, 188, 199n, 215, 233, 235, 242, 248–9, 253 figurative painting, 72 see Bacon; Buren; Francis; Newman panpsychism, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 255, 262n; see also Grant; Harman; Shaviro; Whitehead

parergon, 169–74, 178, 179, 182, 189 partition of the sensible, 206–7, 209–11, 236; see also aesthetic regime; disagreement; police; Rancière passive synthesis, 115–17, 126, 128, 131–2, 138–9, 142, 143, 145, 146–7, 151, 153–5, 228, 255; see also active synthesis; sensation people to come, 228–9, 230 performance, 87, 92; see also performativity performativity, 92, 96–7, 185–7; see also performance perspective, 81–3 phenomenon, 16, 69, 112, 116, 122, 171, 175, 236, 258; see also noumenon photography, 71–81, 97, 173–4, 191, 195 pleasure, 2, 21–2, 24, 26–7, 29–37, 50, 57, 61, 79, 86, 92, 98, 125, 134, 169–74, 179, 182, 184, 218 disinterested pleasure, 21, 24, 60, 78, 98, 253 negative pleasure, 29, 33, 134, 170 poetics, 183–7, 206, 228 poetry, 126–7, 176, 177–8, 185, 187 police, 172, 206, 211, 217, 219–20, 232, 237; see also partition of the sensible; Rancière political art, 52–3, 55, 188–97, 211, 213, 217, 219, 237 politics of deconstruction, 177, 175; see also Derrida; postmodern art Pop art, 72, 103n, 142 positivism, 79, 188–97, 212, 221, 222 postmodern sublime, 42–3 postmodernism, 8, 30, 42, 79, 86, 95–8, 100, 169, 174, 187–9, 200n, 213–14, 216, 219, 221, 225, 231, 245 Pouvoir Ouvier, 53 primary process, 54, 72, 81, 259–60 Prince, Richard, 191–2, 193, 194, 201n; see also postmodern art problem, 117, 119–24, 126, 132, 138 proletariat, 55, 82, 132, 207, 222, 228, 239n; see also Marxism; revolution purposiveness, 21–2, 27, 28, 30, 36, 45n, 47n, 57, 60, 213 Rajchman, John, 51, 81, 86, 108n, 227 Rancière, Jacques, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 26, 40, 163n, 197, 202–38, 246, 259, 261 Aisthesis, 238n Disagreement, 203 see also aesthetic regime; beautiful; cinema; democracy; disagreement; free play of the faculties; Juno



Index 285

Ludovisi; modernism; partition of the sensible; police; postmodernism; proletariat; Schiller; sensus communis rationalism, 19, 154, 243–4, 247, 262n readymade, 5, 11, 12, 47n, 97, 103n, 140–7, 249–51; see also appropriation; Conceptual art; contemporary art; Duchamp real experience, 50, 59, 118, 120, 126, 129, 132, 139, 153, 159n, 165, 168, 229–30, 258; see also passive synthesis; superior empiricism; transcendental empiricism realism, 78, 80, 98, 107n, 193 neo-realism, 156 see also transcendental realism reason, 17, 18, 20–1, 24, 27, 28–45, 59, 61, 62–9, 110, 112–13, 122, 125, 133–4, 142, 151, 170, 179–81, 184–5, 227, 230, 245, 255 reflective judgment, 4, 11, 12, 13n, 17–20, 48, 56–61, 69, 102n, 147, 167, 171–3, 179, 180, 181–2, 209, 219, 225 refrain, 143, 145, 146, 151, 165n; see also nature; rhythm; spatio-temporal dynamism representation, 10, 32–3, 41, 50, 58, 59, 66–7, 73, 81, 89, 100, 103n, 116–18, 120, 122, 125, 132, 138, 141, 143, 146, 149, 152, 166, 225, 233, 235, 243, 256, 257; see also language; sign; understanding research-based practice, 191, 262; see also contemporary art; Conceptual art: post-conceptual art resistance, 55, 69, 96, 190, 210, 223, 225 respect, 30–1, 46n, 61, 68–9 revolution, 55, 63–4, 96, 103n, 124, 135, 207, 210, 212, 213, 217, 136 Copernican revolution, 118–19, 158–9n, 248 rhythm, 130–2, 135–40, 145–7, 231; see also music; refrain Rimbaud, Arthur, 115, 121 Rodowick, David, 175, 178 Romanticism, 29–30, 65, 76, 90, 106n, 187, 196, 200n, 223, 230, 253; see also hylozoism; nature; Schelling; Schiller Rosenberg, Harold, 94, 107n Schelling, Friedrich, 253, 262n schema, 57, 59, 62, 131–2, 137, 142, 149; see also schematism schematism, 15, 20, 31, 59, 111, 124,

125, 132, 133, 162n, 173, 210; see also imagination; schema; understanding Schiller, Friedrich, 40, 208, 212–13, 216, 219, 222, 224, 239n On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 208 see also Rancière; Romanticism schizophrenia, 118, 132, 135, 139–40, 145, 162n, 231 Schreel, Louis, 129, 159n science, 78–9, 96–8, 107n, 175–6, 242–3, 244, 252, 258, 260 sensation, 3, 15, 21, 24, 27, 35, 45, 50–3, 57–8, 62, 65–6, 69, 97, 109, 115, 119–23, 125–6, 129–40, 143, 151, 153–4, 167, 179, 185, 188, 247, 256–7, 261 sensory-motor-schema, 151–5; see also modernism: modern cinema sensus communis, 11, 12, 27, 31, 52, 67, 68, 76, 179, 208, 219, 228, 231, 136; see also beautiful; free play of the faculties; harmony of the faculties Shaviro, Steven, 155, 159n, 200n, 223, 248, 253–4, 260 Sherman, Cindy, 193, 194; see also postmodern art sign, 50, 62–5, 67–9, 87, 95, 141, 150, 160n, 165–70, 173, 177–9, 188, 195, 199n, 234, 256 op-sign, 153 see also language; signification; signified; signifier signification, 30, 50, 165–7, 198n, 216, 218, 231 signified, 5, 100, 156n, 183; see also language; representation; sign; signification; signifier signifier, 5, 30, 91, 110, 156n, 183, 237; see also language; representation; sign; signification; signified singularity, 82–3, 93 Smith, Daniel, 157n Socialisme ou Barbarie, 53, 101; see also Pouvoir Ouvier soul, 37, 113, 149, 150; see also spirit sound, 92, 100; see also music; noise Souyri, Pierre, 53–5 space and time, 114–15, 120, 130, 136, 140, 163n, 184, 199n, 254 spatio-temporal dynamism, 131–6, 139, 142, 153, 256; see also refrain speculative aesthetics, 242, 248–54, 258, 261, 263n speculative anti-aesthetics, 242–7, 254, 257–9, 261

286

Sublime Art

Speculative Realism, 3–4, 9, 10, 142, 194, 241–64; see also Beech; Brassier; Harman; Land; Meillassoux spirit, 38, 41, 61, 138, 150–4, 156, 162n, 178, 190, 209 spiritual automaton, 154–5 see also soul Stiegler, Bernhard, 51, 101n structuralism, 127–30, 156n, 161n stupidity, 83, 90, 138 sublime dynamical sublime, 32–7, 148, 150–1, 180, 185–6 mathematical sublime, 32–4, 78, 148–50, 180, 184–6 see also Idea; imagination; intuition; Kant; postmodern sublime; reason; Romanticism; supersensible; technology: technological sublime subreption, 42, 225 superior empiricism, 152, 164, 256; see also empiricism; transcendental empiricism supersensible, 3, 14, 16–19, 25, 28–45, 62, 64, 66, 69–70, 109, 113, 118, 151–6, 164, 176, 179–81, 200n, 213, 220–1, 228, 230 symbol, 39, 42, 113, 142, 196, 232 technology, 43, 52, 71–81, 84–9, 96, 98, 100, 244, 259 immaterial technology, 85 new technology, 85–8, 99, 259 technological sublime, 78, 81 techno-science, 78–81, 85–8, 97–9; see also science time, 62, 77, 81, 89, 90–1, 93, 114–20, 129–32, 139, 148–56, 254, 257 three syntheses of time, 115–19, 158n, 244–6 time-image, 148, 152–6; see also modernism: modern cinema; spirit: spiritual automaton Toscano, Alberto, 19–20, 111, 128–9, 239n, 257 trace, 166–8, 170, 199n transavantgarde, 97–8 transcendental aesthetics, 209, 246, 252, 256, 258, 260, 261 transcendental blindness, 168, 171 transcendental ejaculation, 182

transcendental empiricism, 116–17, 121, 140, 164, 244, 248, 252; see also superior empiricism transcendental idealism, 182; see also idealism; Schelling transcendental illusion (antinomy), 122 transcendental infidelity, 171, 173 transcendental intuition, 262n; see also intuition transcendental materialism, 19–20, 23–4, 30–1, 44–5, 66, 70, 257 transcendental realism, 156, 215, 243, 248, 253, 256, 258, 264n; see also realism transcendental signified, 167 transcendental subjectivity, 26, 111, 115, 123, 153, 165 ultra-transcendental, 168, 174, 181–2, 189; see also Derrida understanding, 17, 20–45, 59, 62, 78, 94, 97, 102n, 107n, 110–13, 115–17, 120, 123, 136, 142, 149, 162n, 175, 179, 211, 219, 225, 235, 254, 257; see also categories; concept; harmony of the faculties; imagination; reason; representation Vanhanen, Janne, 159n virtual, 122, 124, 126, 128–30, 132, 145–6, 152, 154–6, 229, 230, 256–7; see also actual vitalism, 133, 254, 256, 262n; see also hylozoism; materialism: vital materialism vomit, 176–8, 182, 196 Whitehead, Alfred North, 248, 253–4 Wiener, Laurence, 141, 162n, 263; see also Conceptual art will to power, 118; see also eternal return; Nietzsche; overman Williams, James, 51–2, 101n, 128 Witt, Sol le, 141, 263n; see also Conceptual art Wolfendale, Peter, 249, 250, 262n Woodward, Ashley, 67, 101n, 108n work, 175–6 Wortham, Simon, 227, 238n, 239n Zammito, John, 41–2