Page 201 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

DICK HEBDIGE 189

the course of his protracted debate with Habermas over the nature of
rationality and modernity, Lyotard (1984) has sought to clip the angel’s
wings by recommending that we abandon all those ‘modern’ sciences which
legitimate themselves by reference to a meta-discourse which makes an
explicit appeal to ‘some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the spirit,
the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working
subject, or the creation of wealth’ (xxiii).
In what becomes in effect an explicit renunciation of marxism (Lyotard
was a founder member of the Socialism or Barbarism group in the
1950s), Lyotard returns to Kant—especially to the critique of judgement—
to reflect upon the origins of modern social thought, aesthetics and the
relationship between the two. He sets out to examine the philosohical
underpinnings of the Enlightenment project which is defined as a twofold
impetus towards universalization (reason) and social engineering
(revolution), both of which find support and legitimacy in the related
doctrines of progress, social plannning and historical ‘necessity’. Much of
Lyotard’s (1986b) argument turns on an involved discussion of the
distinction in Kant (following Burke) between the two orders of aesthetic
experience: the beautiful and the sublime. Whereas the beautiful in Kant
consists in all those views, objects, sounds from which we derive aesthetic
pleasure but which can be framed, contained, harmoniously assimilated,
the sublime is reserved for all those phenomena which exceed logical
containment and which elicit a mixture of both pleasure and terror in the
viewer (Burke mentions, for instance, the spectacle of a stormy sea or a
volcano).
Lyotard argues that in so far as the various modernist literary and
artistic avant gardes attempt to ‘present the unpresentable’ (through
abstraction, alienation, defamiliarization, etc.) they remain firmly
committed to an aesthetics of the sublime rather than the beautiful. For
Lyotard, a properly avant garde poem or canvas takes us to this sublime
point where consciousness and being bang up against their own limitations
in the prospect of absolute otherness—God or infinity—in the prospect,
that is, of their disappearance in death and silence. That encounter compels
the spectator’s, the reader’s and the artist’s subjectivities to be predicated
for as long as it lasts in an unliveable tense: the post modern tense.
Postmodernity is here defined as a condition that is also a contradiction in
terms. Lyotard calls this timeless tense the future anterior: ‘post’ meaning
‘after’, ‘modo’ meaning ‘now’. (What Lyotard calls ‘post modernity’ is
similar to Paul de Man’s (1983) a(nti)historical definition of ‘modernity’ as
the perpetual present tense within which human beings have always lived
at all times and in all places pinioned forever between a disintegrating,
irrecoverable, half remembered past and an always uncertain future.)
Lyotard insists on the validity and the viability of this avant garde project
of the sublime and seeks to promote those artistic practices which pose the