postmodern aesthetics

Now it is time to address more clearly the postmodern political response to this world. I've touched upon it throughout the discussion but now it's time to spend more time with it, to ask why exactly do they denounce rationality, narrative, structure. But, if one is going to get a good understanding of postmodern "politics" then it is important, if not essential, to understand postmodern aesthetics first. For as will become evident postmodern aesthetics carries over into, and shapes, postmodern politics. So what are postmodern aesthetics?

Postmodern aesthetics is marked by an emphasis of the figural over the discursive. What this means is that postmodernism values the impact of art over the meaning of art, and the sensation of art over the interpretation of it. Such an emphasis on the impact of art relates well to Heidegger's wish to hear words as if for the first time, to "let their elementary forces" rise through. Such postmodern preferences, however, were first notably articulated by art critic Susan Sontag in the mid 1960's. Sontag claimed that modernism's favoring of the "intellect" in art, came "at the expense of energy and sensual capability" (quoted in Lash, 176). Again, this relates well to our discussion of Heidegger, who saw philosophy not as a means to learn anything more about being, but just to experience it, time and time again. Sontag believed that interpretation was "the revenge of the intellect upon art," and that a work of art should not be a "text," but rather another "sensory" product in the world (176). This focus of art as a "sensory" experience over and above an intellectual experience, led the way for postmodernism to favor the image over the narrative and the figural over the discursive (i.e. don't tell me about how happy you were, show me! don't tell me how brutal it was, show me!)

The terms figurative and discursive as used by Lyotard help to theoretically support the distinction Sontag makes between a postmodern art of impact, surface, and sensation versus a modernist art of meaning, depth, and interpretation. Lyotard describes the figural as the primary processes of the unconscious, similar to what Freud called the id, versus the discursive which he describes as the secondary process, or similar to what Freud called the ego. Thus, what Lyotard and other postmodernists want in art is the "decodification" and subsequent "decolonization" of the libidinal energies which language, text, and the intellect codify, censor and repress. To do so, postmodern art switches from modernism's emphasis on signifiers to an emphasis on the signified and thus the preference of image over narrative. With this collapse and de-differentation of signifiers into the signified comes a loss of meaning, of depth, and interpretation, because no longer is there an interplay between representations of reality (signifiers) and reality itself (signified). This de-differentation increases the impact of the art, because no longer are there signifiers which mediate, distance, and disinvest the viewers desire. Art becomes then a participatory experience, one in which the audience recieves, and handles as they may, the flows of libidinal energies which the artist set free.

Art criticism, in this context, thus becomes something of an oxymoron, and is replaced instead by art supplement, in which the reviewer creates something in his/her review which carries forth the energies of the piece, giving a feel in his/her review of the impacts the piece creates. Thus to the postmodernist, it's no longer about what art means, but what it does. And thus the sense of control language has over art is gone, and the primary processes of the unconscious is freed and decodified from the socially constructed secondary processes of the ego.

A last point to make here, is that postmodernism no longer equates aesthetic value with beauty. What Lyotard sugggests instead, is an aesthetic of the sublime. Lyotard views the sublime as being a mixture of pleasure and pain, of pathos and grit, of sweetness and sin, of the cute and of the dirt. It's aim, Lyotard claims, is to "present the unpresentable" to find religion in the streets not in the Church (as quoted in Lash, 110). This aesthetic of the sublime, which transcends moral categories like "that feeling is good, that feeling is bad, that smells good, that smells bad, that looks nice, that looks bad," epitomizes the de-differentation which marks postmodernism, which in the words of John Cage, "aims to wake up to the very life we're living" and which in the words of Leslie Fiedler, "attempts to cross the border, close the gap." This means, explains Marshall Berman, breaking down the barriers between art and other human activities, such as commercial entertainment, industrial technology, fashion and design, and politics" (Berman, 32).

The Revolution of Desire: The Politics of Aesthetics

Time Space Compression

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