On the Sublime or Opening to the Diversity of Form

Here's my latest research into postmodern arts. You will enjoy it because it explains all the latest thinking in philosophy of aesthetics since Kant and also explains why my music sounds the way it does and why Modern art looks the way it does.

On the Sublime or Opening to the Diversity of Form

Fixation with absolutes is the hallmark of the idea of the sublime and is similar to capitalist ideas of infinite wealth and power. Loss of meaning is one trait which defines post-modern society. The concept of the sublime tries to address this.

According to Kant, in the western philosophical tradition there are five forms which the philosophy of art and music needs to be cognizant of; the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly and the comic. According to Kant there are two kinds of sublime, what he calls mathematical and dynamic.

The sublime supposedly points to an impassable doubt in human reason and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the post-modern world. The idea of the sublime is supposed to describe art whose size, complexity or destructive character tries to capture all of space, all of time, the unknown territory of death or the essence of the divine.

The mathematical sublime deals with quantity, magnitude, boundlessness, and infinitudes while the dynamic sublime deals with the physiological shock and terror caused by nature. The idea of the sublime is actually an Enlightenment concept applied to Romanticism. As space, time and the divine are boundless,the boundlessness of culture, consumption and for some technologies also are related to it.

The idea of the sublime is a symptom of Capitalism. Discourses on the sublime seem to surface more forcefully during crisis and Capitalism's understanding of itself. The idea of the sublime arose at the same time as the idea of a "specialist calling' that came out of the Protestant work ethic.

Capitalism can only be concerned with the future and with the new, which it collapses into a continual present of innovation. The past is irrelevant. Capitalism shares a similar phenomenon with Modernism. The cultural present 9in the arts for example) is discontinuous with the past. This idea lies at the origin of Modernism.

One of the problems with the idea of the sublime is that its motivation has been market lead not spiritual. Artists make art in order to sell it. The construction of mystery around the historic image as in the visual arts, permits the ruling class to justify its privileged position. The new of capitalism and the now of the sublime are not identical however. The sublime asks, Will anything further happen?

Capitalism assumes a continuation to infinite wealth so discounts the challenge to temporality which for Capitalism would mean the death of everything it stands for and of itself. The bourgeoisie respect the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation but it resists actual questions.

It eventually exploits creations which openly criticize the industrialization of culture for example but takes care to compartmentalize them into utilitarian disciplines such as rebellious music played at the end of a film during the final credits dismissing all comprehensive critique.

They divert the tast for the new, which has become dangerous for it, toward degraded forms of nevelty that are, harmless and confused such as rebellious Indie bands.

One author offers an alternative concerning the sublime;

Aesthetic reason is a third way of knowing truth which is neither objectively provable nor an arbitrary opinion. Possessing subjective validity, a statement coming from knowledge of an aesthetic response to a sublime feeling acknowledges a universal truth in aesthetic judgment.

It offers a rational grounding for the quest for meaning so central to post-modernity. The judgment on the sublime offers help out of the seeming impasse deplored as the post-modern condition. Discourses on religion, rapture and divinity lie outside the temporal and functional constraints of capitalism and offer a revising of the Romantic conception of the sublime.

One of the issues arising after Kant is that only art can be beautiful in the sense of harmony for the sake of harmony. Nature cannot partake of beauty in this sense of the meaning.

The Modernist agenda of art for art's sake has traditionally required a meticulously controlled environment on the canvas or in the musical score. Perhaps a working definition of the sublime as it's currently understood is the interplay between the intellect which is limited to one sensation at a time, of sight, sound and feeling and cannot fathom all of space, all of time etc.., and between a sensuous totality.

However, what to exalt as partaking in intellectual beauty or sensual beauty is a question of aesthetic or it would just be tribal or Imperial. This question can not immediately exist with the sublime. This kind of beauty would merely be glamorous or frivolous. As with a skull covered in diamonds selling for millions of dollars.

A second perspective has been put forward; After culture became culture/industry, the assumption arose that industry can commodify the past. The past began to be conceived as something you could manufacture as with furniture, perform (a folk dance), collect ( in museums), restore (at heritage sites), and consume. People also began to invent traditions.

Modernity had sought to avoid the genteel, the bourgeois, and the predictable but they did not repudiate the past though discontinuous with it. The sublime deals with presence and a non-verbal immediacy that has NO past. This has become a sticking point. The description of art as being sublime is an impoverished formalist aesthetic notion that goes against post-structuralist thinking which deals with mediation, translation, deferral of meaning, miscommunication, and social conditions of understanding.

The idea of the sublime takes people away from real culture and real value. It has no actual meaning. It pretends that historical images and musical compositions contain a mystery they don't actually contain so the rich and powerful can inflate their own importance. It chokes off narrative (communication with content such as criticism of the capitalist culture of the production line at the root. It has absolutely nothing to say about gender, race, class, identity, sexual orientation or politics.

Its better to use words to describe art which are fresh and exact instead of the word sublime. The idea of beauty had been exhausted unable to be applied first to nature since nature can't be harmony for harmony's sake and second to art when tied with the sublime since beauty could only be glamorous or frivolous in that case.

The sublime seemed to be all that was left after beauty was exhausted. If art can be separated from gender inequality, racial discrimination and maltreatment, classism, corporate control of employees public identities, or political struggles then art can be safely integrated into the official culture and public discourse where they can add new flavors to old dominant ideas and just become a cog in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle.

Poetic form is the main asset of social criticism. The autonomous subject is based on form and conceived as negating the existing order. But according to Dan Hillerman there's a danger using poetic particles of sound, light and sensation little rhymes, ditties, dances and stage productions, that make artists, musicians and their art appear divine.

Poetic form is the laziest way to get consent with life. The revolutionary poets in Europe notably France and Germany among others, Russia and China were only interested in destruction because being able to destroy those in power or those who wanted power would ameliorate their own accurate feelings of inferiority.

After making sublimely beautiful poetry about nature they were capable of denouncing the real philosophers and artists as degenerate enemies of the state who often went on to be imprisoned or killed. They only created poetry, song or art for Marxist or Communist propaganda in order to be in harmony with and spur on the unconscious mob bent on destroying everything.

These poets had no interest in philosophy or the truth. They embodied the exact opposite of the long struggle to become more conscious of what we mean when we say beautiful or sublime. They were interested in staying as unconscious as is possible while still awake and to create the ugliest, most horrible life of ignorance and stupidity ever for everyone. The opposite of what Marx wanted for them.

This is one reason why post modernity abandoned not only the concept of the autonomous subject but the concept of the subject altogether.

The value of art is not how much it costs but how conscious the artist is regardless of the price tag.

To review momentarily the history of the sublime. It dealt with absolutes of space, time, death and the divine. modernists wanted to express it, create it (as with technologies or the invention of traditions), or anticipate it (as with Futurism). Post-modernists began to feel that the arts' proper role was social criticism not the absolute world of ultimate questions of, "was the universe created or has it always existed," "is there a God or should we be agnostic," and "what happens after death if anything?" With post-modernism any position anyone might take was deconstructed to show that all assertions negate themselves.

There was no absolute moral truth either, how to act in society seems to only be base on what the other people in that society feel is acceptable to a large extent. So on what basis do you criticize others? The post-modernists were concerned that not only does each person die but also the whole race might some day perish in a fiery atomic bomb explosion that destroys the earth, or pandemic plague outbreak etc...contributing to a feeling of meaninglessness.

They were no longer able to apply the concept of beauty to nature or art since nature can't be a harmony for harmony's sake and beauty attached to the concept of the sublime ultimately can only be glamorous or frivolous as with a skull covered in diamonds. These along with the ability to show all assertions negate themselves contributed to a seemingly final loss of meaning.

People tried to find ways around the impasse with ideas such as Aesthetic Reason which proponents believe has found a universal truth in aesthetic judgment.

Others inverted the idea of the sublime (not previously discussed above) in a digging up of the archaeological remnants in the arts since only fragments remain. We can only be as objective as we can within our own subjectivity. It is irony and sincerity combined like a Steampunk laptop partaking in harmony for harmony's sake but it is an inversion of the sublime.

The inversion is paradoxical, quirky, unsettling, inspiring and/or hilarious. But the humor is completely honest. They believe there is no movement beyond the post-modern without this opacity.

They feel the inversion bridges beauty and the sublime. They offer; it is not beauty or sublime but creates awe. Though beauty can be framed and the sublime cannot, the awesome constructs it's own frame.

Refreshingly, the meta-modern, tired of only being able to criticize society with art the socially devalued (such as the poor, minorities, women, children, homosexuality, the physically and mentally handicapped, the construction of public identities through consumption/consumerism or workplace uniform, and the environment) began to look at what is privately highly valued such as pleasure, play, leisure, hobbies, sex, conversation, learning, napping, sports, entertainment, reading, hanging or out.

The meta-modern also began to look again at art's relationship to capitalism. A work of art can be as valuable as money but it is not money. A $20 bill can be exchanged for any other $20 bill without any loss of value in most cases. It's value is deferred into the future.

A work by Michelangelo cannot be exchanged for a work by Picasso of equal monetary value without losses and/or gains of a different order. Their value is not deferred. It exists in the present. The meta-modernists feel that making art is not like making money. It's more like making love.

The meta-modern also is dealing with the idea that we can paradoxically establish a holistic, coherent identity that cannot conceptually exist. The loss of identity since the beginning of modernity has been central to contemporary psychology. The meta-modern position on this comes from the idea that fiction is as able to express the truth as facts. Photos which are supposed to be a snapshot of reality actually lie by what is left out or having the objects composed by the photographer. A mask paradoxically hides the actor but is able to reveal his essence.

The meta-modern also acknowledges a yearning for universal truths as well as the importance of the two "relative" positions of social value and private value. The meta-modern is characterized by an oscillating between the Modern and the Post-modern. They feel we can't and shouldn't unify them.

The Japanese philosopher Karatani, operating in the Western philosophical tradition, looks to the technique in art called Paralaxity where opposite ends of a street are presented on the same canvas to overcome the impasse and stop the oscillation. You can't just super impose the West end onto the East end because you'd lose everything in between which is the bulk of our experience of it. For him Karatani paralaxity is the way out of all the post-modern paradoxes and returns meaning to human life.