Page 202 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

190 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

issue of the unpresentable in a gesture which has to be incessantly forgotten
and repeated. Using a term from psychoanalytic theory, Lyotard calls this
process ‘anamnesis’: the reencounter with a trauma or former experience of
intensity through a process of recollection, utterance and invocation which
involves not so much a recovery of the original experience as a
recapitulation of it.
What might at first seem a quite arbitrary, unnecessarily abstruse and
idiosyncratic detour through eighteenth-century German idealist aesthetics
actually provides Lyotard with an opportunity to flesh out his central
objections to Habermas’s attempts to defend and build on the Enlight-
enment inheritance, to revive what Habermas regards as the prematurely
arrested project of modernity.
For Lyotard uses the notion of the sublime as a kind of metaphor for the
absolute nature of those limitations placed on what can be said, seen, shown,
presented, demonstrated, put into play, put into practice, and Lyotard
implies that each encounter with the sublime in art provides us with the
single salutary lesson that complexity, difficulty, opacity are always there in
the same place: beyond our grasp. The inference here in the insistence on
the palpability of human limitation is politically nuanced at those points
when Lyotard talks about the disastrous consequences which have flowed
from all attempts to implement the ‘perfect (rational) system’ or to create
the ‘perfect society’ during what he calls the ‘last two sanguinary centuries’
(1986a:6).
Habermas, publicly aligned with the Frankfurt tradition which he is
concerned both to revise and to revive, has emphasized the emancipatory
and utopian dimensions of art favouring an aesthetics of the beautiful.
From this position, the fact that the harmonious integration of formal
elements in an artwork gives us pleasure indicates that we are all drawn
ineluctably by some internal logos (reason reflexively unfolding/folding
back upon itself through the dispassionate contemplation of form), that we
are, in other words, drawn towards the ideal resolution of conflict in the
perfection of good form. Here our capacity both to produce and to
appreciate the beautiful stands as a kind of ‘promissory note’ for the
eventual emancipation of humanity. Lyotard, on the other hand, in a move
which mirrors the deconstructive strategies exemplified by Derrida, takes
the relatively subordinate, residual term, the ‘sublime’ in the binary
coupling upon which ‘modern’ (that is, Enlightenment) aesthetics is based
(the beautiful—[the sublime] where the sublime functions as that-which-is-
aesthetic-but-not-beautiful) and privileges it to such an extent that the
whole edifice of Enlightenment thought and achievement is (supposedly)
threatened. For whereas the idea of the beautiful contains within it the
promise of an ideal, as yet unrealized community (to say ‘this is beautiful’
is to assert the generalizability of aesthetic judgements and hence the
possibility/ideal of consensus), the sublime in contrast, atomizes the