Post-Experimentation Art & Culture

• The theme is a moment of relaxation in art and culture where experimentation is being abandoned.
• There is pressure to give up experimentation in the arts and other fields
• New subjectivity and realism are being preached by an art historian
• There is an art critic broadcasting and selling "Transavantgardism" in the art market
• Architects are discarding experimentation and the Bauhaus project
• Postmodern architects are ridding themselves of the Bauhaus project while throwing out experimentation
• A philosopher is inventing Judeo-Christianism to end current impiety
• People are unhappy with Mille Plateaux as it is difficult to comprehend
• Avant-garde writers and thinkers of the sixties and seventies introduced a reign of terror into language
• The imposition of a common mode of speech on intellectuals by historians is needed to reestablish conditions for fruitful debate
• Continental thought avoided talking machines and replaced referentiality with adlinguisticity
• Language needs to recover a firm anchorage in the referent
• Postmodernism's tricks and caprices count for little next to authority, especially amidst anxiety and the threat of nuclear war
• Modernity is being defended against neoconservatives who want to abandon the project of Enlightenment
• Jürgen Habermas believes modernity foundered because life fragmented into independent specialties
• This led to narrow competence of experts and ignored concrete individual experiences

Baudelaire's Ennui & Wellmer's Philosophy

• Baudelaire described immense ennui
• Albrecht Wellmer believes that the remedy for culture's parcelling and separation from life will come from a change in the status of aesthetic experience, rather than judgments of taste
• Aesthetic experience should illuminate a life-historical situation and relate to the problems of existence
• This experience should enter a language game that is no longer just that of the aesthetic critic, but intervenes in cognitive procedures and normative expectations
• Habermas demands that the arts should form a bridge over the gap separating the discourses of knowledge, ethics, and politics

Habermas' Unity & Modernity's Project

• Contemplation is made as to what sort of unity Habermas has in mind
• Modernity - Envisaged as the constitution of a sociocultural unity at the heart of which all elements of daily life and thought would have a place
• The path could be cut between heterogeneous language games of knowledge, ethics, and politics
• Two hypotheses - Hegelian inspiration does not call into question the notion of a dialectically totalising experience.
• The second is closer in spirit to the Critique of Judgment but must be submitted to the severe re-examination modernity addresses to the thought of the Enlightenment

Realism

• The demands cited at the beginning of the text are not all equivalent and may be contradictory
• Some demands are made in the name of postmodernism, some in opposition to it.
• Demanding a referent, meaning, addressee, addressor, or communicative consensus
• Various invitations to suspend artistic experimentation share a call to order and a desire for unity, identity, security, and popularity.
• Artists and writers must return to the community, or heal it if it is ailing

Avant-Garde Liquidation & Bourgeoisie/Capitalism Realism

• It is important to liquidate the legacy of the avant-gardes.
• “Trans-avantgardism” impatience is a case in point.
• Mixing avant-gardes allows artists and critics to suppress them, passing off eclecticism as progress.
• The bourgeoisie established the Salons and Academies with a purgative function that awards prizes for good conduct in the plastic and literary arts under the guise of realism.
• Capitalism has such a capacity to derealise familiar objects, social roles and institutions that realist representations can no longer evoke reality except through nostalgia or derision.

Reality Destabilization & Industrial Effects

• Classicism is out of the question with reality destabilized
• Photography did not pose so much an external challenge to painting but refined certain aspects of the program of ordering the visible.
• Industrial cinema perfected the containment of diachronies within organic totalities
• Substituting mechanical and industrial production for manual and craft production was not a catastrophe in itself
• Photographic and cinematic processes could accomplish the task that academicism had assigned to realism, protecting consciousness from doubt

Effects of Reality & Therapeutic Occupations

• Industrial photography and cinema stabilize the referent, order it from a point of view that would give it recognizable meaning, and repeat a syntax and lexicon that would allow addressees to decode images and sequences rapidly.
• The structures in these images and sequences form a code of communication between them all
• Painters and novelists should not be apologists of what exists; instead, they should question the rules of painting and narration as taught by their predecessors
• The rules are methods of deception, seduction, and re-assurance which make it impossible to be "truthful"

Mass Conformism & Avant-Garde Challenge

• An unprecedented split occurs in painting and literature.
• Those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art make careers in mass conformism, satisfying the endemic desire for reality
• Pornography uses photographs and film to bring the desire for reality into communication
• Artists and writers that question the rules of the plastic and narrative arts lack credibility and a guaranteed audience.
• The Duchampian readymade points to the dispossession of the painter's craft.
• Modern aesthetics emphasizes "What is art to be (and what is literature to be)?"

Realism & Authority

• Realism always finds itself between academicism and kitsch.
• When authority takes the name of the party, realism triumphs.
• "Correct" images must procure a public which will desire them as the medicine for depression and anxiety it feels.
• Attacking artistic experimentation via political authority is reactionary.
• Political academicism understands and imposes criteria of the "beautiful", selecting works and their public

Aesthetic Judgment and Contemporary Culture

• An expression is first "well formed" in the understanding, then only those "cases" will be subsumed within this expression.
• Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture.
• Knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows and it is easy to find an audience for eclectic works. - - - When art makes itself kitsch, it panders to disorder which reigns in the "taste" of the patron.
• "Anything Goes" is the realism of money because in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still effective to measure the value of works of art by their profits

Artistic/Literary Threat & Science/Industry

• Artistic and literary investigation is doubly threatened by "cultural politics" and the art and book market.
• Works should relate to subjects already existing in the eyes of the public to which they are addressed
• Works should be well formed so public can recognize, understand, & grant/withhold approval
• Science and industry are just as open to suspicion with regard to reality as art and writing.
• Scientific knowledge and the capitalist economy bring the rule that there is no reality unless consensus confirms it

Modernity & Kant

• Modernity does not occur without a shattering of belief and a discovery of the lack of reality in reality.
• The phrase "lack of reality" is related to Nietzsche's nihilism and the Kantian theme of the sublime.
• Modern art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of the avant-garde finds its axioms.
• The sublime feeling is a powerful and equivocal emotion, bringing both pleasure and pain
• The contradiction develops as a conflict between all of the faculties of the subject, between the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to “present” something

Aesthetics & Unpresentable

• Modern aesthetic is defined through taste and accords to what is conceivable
• The sublime occurs when the imagination in fact fails to present any object which could accord with a concept
• I call modern the art which devotes its “trivial technique”, as Diderot called it, to presenting the existence of something unpresentable
• Modern art has to show we can conceive of which we can neither see nor show
• Modern painting cannot be seen, and is a negative presentation and cites to avoid any presentation

The Avant Garde & Modernism - The Postmodern

• Avant Garde dedicate themselves to allusions to the unpresentable through visible presentations.
• The avant-gardes have, as it were, humiliated and disqualified reality by their scrutiny of the pictorial techniques used to instill a belief in it
• This includes tone, drawing, blending, linear perspective, the nature of support and tools, "execution", hanging.
• A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.
• Modernity unfolds in the retreat of the real and according to the sublime relationship of the presentable with the conceivable

Proust, Joyce & Allusion

• Proust and Joyce create works that allude to something that does not let itself be made present.
• Allusion is an indispensable mode of expression for works which belong to the aesthetic of the sublime.
• In Proust the thing that is eluded as the price of this allusion is the identity of consciousness as the victim to time.
• Joyce makes the reader discern the unpresentable in the writing itself, in the signifier

Modern vs Postmodern Aesthetics

• MODERN - an aesthetic of the sublime, but it is nostalgic It allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content,
• WHILE form, thanks to its recognisable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator material for consolation and pleasure
• But such feelings do not amount to the true sublime feeling, which is intrinsically a combination of pleasure and pain: pleasure in reason exceeding all presentation, pain in the imagination or sensibility proving inadequate to the concept.

Postmodernism - Not About Reality

• Postmodern - invokes the unpresentable IN presentation itself
• Postmodern also does not accept consensus of taste
• As philosophy, not governed by rules, investigates the rules for what will be made
• Therefore they should not try to provide reality but to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable
• Rejects reconciliation between 'language games”"
• Finally - let us activate the differends and save the honour of the name.