Mechanical Reproduction and Techno-Science: Walter Benjamin and Jean François Lyotard
Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ and ‘The Sublime and the Avant Garde’ each investigate modes of mechanical reproduction, the nature of the resultant image and the consequence of this relationship beyond the art object or photographic depiction. The domain of motorised representation is explored in its influence on general aesthetic and political discourse. They examine the communicability of technologically rendered images and their effects beyond archival states in terms of political and social ethics as well as their influence on art practice and tradition. Benjamin discusses the politicizing of art, the nature of ‘aura’ in the image of an artwork where Lyotard seeks to appraise the ‘differend’ – disruptive sublime ‘events’ which are ultimately political. He documents the impact of photography on Postmodern sensibilities which in the new techno-scientific culture redefines realism and the photograph ultimately as paralogical vehicles by which the destabilisation of society will begin.
Written in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ seeks to address the effects of modern technology on the art work. He outlines the transformative effect of various reproductive techniques, from the ancient Greeks with their founding and stamping, the engraving and etching processes of the middle ages, lithography in the C19th to photography of the modern era. He writes:
‘For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth developed only upon the eye looking into a lens.[1]’
He considers Paul Valéry’s ‘Pièces sur L’Art’ which likens the new visual productive technique to essential household elements – water, gas and electricity. That which provides necessities for comfortable living now stands on a par with ‘visual/auditory’ images satisfying our needs. The ability of technology to reproduce has a profound effect upon the public and establishes itself firmly in modes of artistic process, beyond the realm of mere archivist. However, Benjamin states that the effect of technological reproduction is far reaching to the point that it also changes our perception of the established art piece, what he calls ‘art in its traditional form.[2]’
Benjamin writes that reproductions, even in their most perfect state, lack a presence in space or time. This presence belongs exclusively to the original which, in its inhabitation, demonstrates its history, its authenticity and its originality/authority. Reproduction of the original piece dilutes these elements – firstly, it moves the piece from its original location. Secondly, it allows it to become vulnerable to manipulation – its captured state enables enlargement or microscopy – ‘unconscious optics.’ There is a depreciation of presence and its essence, what Benjamin terms its authenticity, is compromised. These ‘eliminated elements’ diminish the Aura of the piece; a fact which Benjamin claims has consequences beyond the province of art. He writes:
‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence ... In permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tenuous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.[3]’
Benjamin touts the viral aspect of modern technological reproduction as insidious – the invasive quality which infiltrates and envelops mass culture is inherently destructive. He writes that it is the ‘liquidation of the traditional value of...cultural heritage.[4]’ Changes in social structure and perception are underpinned by this dilution of the artwork – a false, empty process which attempts to reproduce authenticity.
The mechanical element of the reproduced image threatens its historical testimony. Tradition succumbs to transitive impositions devaluing the techniques by which the artworks were made. Ultimately, this allows for the objects consideration in the viewers owns critical arena rather than the designated space in which they were designed to be appraised. Mechanical reproduction re-places the nucleus of the piece, putting it at the centre of human sensibility – for Benjamin, it is as if the sun now revolves around the earth. This type of unnatural consideration – the distancing effect of mechanism and its effect on the transmission-ability of the work lead it to become ‘common property’ resulting in the aforementioned ‘liquidation ... of cultural heritage.’ Cazeaux writes:
‘A pre-modern work of art, Benjamin suggests, invites critical contemplation because it is “authentic”: it is rooted in a tradition and, therefore, requires knowledge of the tradition in order to be appreciated. However, mechanical reproduction threatens authenticity, since works can be reproduced out of context and ad infinitum, reduced to one unit among many in a homogeneous flow of moving images[5].’
Finally, the manner by which we consider the work of art changes due to the effect of mechanical reproduction. It allows collective reaction and we see a shift in the considerative process. Benjamin addresses notions of entitlement – what it is that we should ask from a work of art. The mass reproduction of the image leads to reactionary attitude which in turn leads to progressive reaction. He states ‘the greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.’ This mode leads to an experiential consideration of the artwork. The public receives rather than perceives the piece, uncritically and en masse. The ‘simultaneous contemplation’ Benjamin writes is a symptom of the ‘crisis of painting’ as we address works in a mode by which they was never intended to be seen. Rather than consider the artwork in its sensuous presence (that which demonstrates its authenticity and history) we have a reactionary experience to a reproduced form. Mechanical production has allowed spectatorial assimilation whereby we react to the artwork as a quantitative thing rather than a qualitative object. It moves it from the realm of artistic vision transmuting its aura and becoming ‘common property.’ The consequences of this loss signified by the appropriation of the image and mass desire to possess the ‘experience’ of the artwork, leads to a reversal of the function of art. Benjamin claims that artistic production will now be based in another practice – in politics rather than ritual or ceremony. He writes ‘when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever’ and states ‘all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.’ Cazeaux explains:
‘The epilogue to ‘The Work of Art’ relates perception in modernity to the prospect of war. The final paragraph offers sombre reflection: mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree”, Benjamin writes, “that it can experience its own self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”. War, he suggests is a Fascist response to the unemployment and the inequalities which result when “the tremendous means of production” are not properly integrated in society. It is an analogous lack of integration that Benjamin finds in the experience of film ... Just as war is regarded as the provider of solutions, so it becomes a source of artistic gratification for a medium in which any objective, referential value is suspended.[6]’
Jean Francois Lyotard’s ‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ and ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ focus on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He places the experience of the artwork in a political and consumer-driven society, redefining notions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. He proposes a theory of the ‘differend’ – analysing phrase and language in their inability to represent conflict and terror. The sublime becomes a demonstration of ‘lack’ and is explained: ‘For Lyotard, the sublime is conceived as a disruptive event, forcing thought to a crisis...the resistance of the sublime is ultimately political.[7]’
‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ was originally published as a ‘collection of lessons[8]’ rather than a book in its own right. It is a compilation of thoughts written as preparation for an oral lecture on Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ Lyotard explains that it has not been written as merely instruction or accompaniment to Kant’s philosophy but rather requires that one reads his Critique in order to understand the text. He acknowledges that it has been written as a series of lecture notes and surmises that:
‘One could say that these lessons try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.[9]’
First published in 1991, the book is made up of a series of chapters analysing and discussing Kantian philosophy – from aesthetic reflection and subjectivity to comparisons between the sublime and notions of taste. It considers the idea of aesthetic and ethics in the realm of sublimity and concludes that the communication of sublime feeling lies with violent interactions between the idea of the absolute and the differend. By ‘differend’ he means ‘a difference which exists in a blatant manner but which is structured such that the victim cannot find a means by which to address it.[10]’ Rather than existing in a litigious sense, he categorises it under the terms of language -
‘A phrase that comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend, since the success (or validation) proper to one genre is not the one proper to others.[11]’
He concludes his Lessons with the theory that:
‘The Idea of the finality without concept of a form of pure pleasure cannot be suggested by the violent contra-finality of the object. The sublime feeling in neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of the differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated by all thought.[12]’
He wishes us to consider a ‘parology’ or false reasoning with regards to works of art. He feels that by creating the unrecognisable or ‘presenting the unpresentable’ we can destabilise the rules governing the materialistic and thence culturally vapid society in which we live. Where Kant strives for a comprehension of totality, Lyotard says that the postmodern should instead ‘wage a war against it.[13]’ Shaw writes: ‘(Lyotard) regards the artistic avant-garde as a vital tool in exposing the logic of late capitalism ... driven by a desire to disrupt the means by which capitalist economies determine realism.[14]’ The idea of the aesthetic therefore becomes a loaded political concept – beauty is the method by which a materialistic society is enslaved and controlled. Lyotard sees the sublime as an experience of ‘the happening’ and ‘the not happening.’ The paradoxical nature of eventhood means that the experience testifies only to the event itself and therefore cannot be appropriated by an aesthetical political regime. In terms of art, a ‘beautiful’ painting is something that can be ‘grasped by sensibility[15]’ and is ‘intelligible to understanding.[16]’ He writes:
‘The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the ‘it happens’ is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this that it has to witness... Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime... It’s still the sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described and yet it isn’t their sublime any more.[17]’
In terms of artistic practice therefore, we see that Lyotard’s theory is best applied to Modernist works which are formless/abstract. These works appear in a Postmodern state which is defined as an era/movement that is constant and flowing rather than definable by its demise or the demise of a predecessor. Rather than signifying the end of the modern, it should instead signify a type of symbiotic discourse. He writes ‘Postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.[18]’ We are reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy who wrote: ‘not so much what we’re going back to as where we’re coming from.[19]’
It is through his definition of realism in these postmodern terms that Lyotard makes his most defining claims, particularly in relation to Kant and the avant-garde. Since photography now exists to document and categorise imagery we move away from a dependence on paint or the artist to accurately render a scene in order to make it recognisable or familiar to us. Instead, what he calls the ‘ready-made techno sciences[20]’ undertake the role of documenter of our age and the capacity for ‘infinite production’ allows for a new set of rules governing aesthetics and culture. Crowther writes:
‘It is with the impact of photography and techno scientific culture, then, that we find the historical beginnings of a postmodern sensibility – wherein our conceptions of art and the aesthetic are transformed.[21]’
He can now define art in two separate and distinct categories – that of fine art and mechanical art which, due to the nature of its production lies outside the traditional parameters of ‘taste’ and aesthetic appreciation. The application of forms and imagery in painting likewise adopt a new role. ‘Realism’ becomes something that is instantly understandable and recognisable. Photography lies within this category, representing as it does the infinite production of a communication based media and culture. Painting in the Postmodern era defined by Lyotard must therefore undertake a new function. Crowther explains: ‘Lyotard’s reasoning here is based on the fact that because Modernist works can be “formless” or “abstract” (in comparison with conventional representation), this enables them to allude to the “unpresentable” or “invisible.”[22]’ On the notion of photography Lyotard writes:
‘It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.[23]’
Rather than defining realism in the traditional realm of art-historical style or period, he says instead that it is ‘the mainstream art of any culture.[24]’ It is something instantly understandable and recognisable. Our understanding of the term realism thus far has been to categorise historical treatments of form or colour in painting and the subsequent rise of photographic depictions and documentation. Lyotard takes a very different view with Malpas explaining:
‘Lyotard claims that realism “makes” the world appear to be real. What he is getting at here is that reality is not something that we know naturally, but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of a particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[25]’
If it is that we use signs and signifiers to draw upon a reservoir of meaning/understanding to make a judgment, and if it is that judgments such as these form the basis of our cultural reality then Lyotard places the action of the renderment back into the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. The capacity for the evolution of process lies here with Nicholas Mirzoeff writing:
‘Because the sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world – for example, peace, equality, or freedom – “the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture.” (Lyotard) Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of culture and is therefore central to visual culture.[26]’
Jean-François Lyotard’s formula places painted and mechanical imagery in a contemporary setting with its role lying in ‘presenting the unpresentable.[27]’ To understand Lyotard’s ideology we must first examine his foundation for this theory, based in his definitions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. In his book, ‘The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge,’ Lyotard proposes that capitalism has become the driving force behind human progress. He feels that this dynamic has destroyed what is known as the speculative grand narrative and the grand narrative of emancipation. As truth and freedom, rather than efficiency and profit, are the basis for these narratives, Lyotard says that their destruction will not allow for a ‘unifying identity for the subject or society.[28]’ Simon Malpas explains this position saying ‘the main threat facing postmodern society is the reduction of knowledge to a single system whose only criteria is efficiency.[29]’ In order to combat our invalidation in society, Lyotard argues for a paralogy to destabilize the ’capacity for explanation.[30]’ He sees this paralogy – a type of ‘false reasoning,’ as critical to having ‘the potential to break the rules of an existing game in such a way that a new game needs to be developed.[31]’
We live in a world of transitory cultural immediacy. Lyotard’s realism is the reality of dealing with a culture where capitalism invests in and controls this paradigm. Although Lyotard sees the instantaneous nature of modern artistic production as flighty, he also sees the capacity for our evolution in its technology saying ‘the ready-made in the techno-sciences presents itself as a potential for infinite production, and so does the photograph.[32]’ This is the first instance of Lyotard’s sublime. He places its action in the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. By defining realism in this way, he also proposes new theories for the terms ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Malpas declares that these alternatives will ‘set out to disrupt realism by “questioning the rules that govern images and narratives.”[33]’
As with the term ‘realism,’ Lyotard makes distinctions from those commonly referred to when considering the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern.’ Where the former would generally be thought a periodic precursor to the latter, and with the postmodern always pronounced as signifying the end of the modern, Lyotard claims that this is not so. He says that they should not be expressions used solely to categorise periods of artistic development but rather should be considered as a symbiotic discourse necessary to heterogenic contemporary expression. Bill Readings writes that:
‘If classicism offers a description of the concept that would itself not be an event, whereas modernism offers to represent the concept of the event, postmodernism seeks to testify to the event without recourse to the concept that would reduce its eventhood to unity and fixity.[34]’
The postmodern’s testification to the event finds its vehicle in abstract expressionism and the avant-garde. The presentation of the unrepresentable allows artistic conception to become the sublime object, rather than the object itself. Lyotard said ‘it will be white, like one of Malevich’s squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain.[35]’ Lyotard puts pain in the category of melancholia (nostalgia) and the ‘novatio.’ These are two modes by which he defines our faculties of comprehension. Steurman explains:
‘One, which Lyotard calls “melancholic,” stresses the impotency of our faculty of presentation and dwells in the nostalgia of presence. The other mode, which Lyotard calls “novatio,” stresses the potency of the faculty of conceiving which is not the faculty of understanding. This mode stresses the invention of new rules, of new forms in a pictorial, artistic, or philosophical game.[36]’
In 1982 Lyotard writes at length on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He says that photography has made the profession of painting impossible as the industrial and scientific world have greater need for this new techno-science rather than the ‘optical geometry[37]’ of painting:
‘Photography achieves this programme of metopolitical visual and social ordering. It realises it in both senses of the world: it realises it, and it concludes it. The know-how and knowledge that were given substance and were transmitted in the school and the studio are now programmed inside the photographic machine. In a single click, an ordinary citizen, whether amateur or tourist, can organise his or her identifying spaces and make a picture that enriches the cultural memory-bank.’
He goes on to say that while painters have always sought to document, the laboriousness of the process meant that the time sacrificed was too great and the advent of photography allows for a new process by which to do this. Our new relationship with photography is therefore, akin to the modern idea of the death of the author – living as we do in a world desirous of journalism rather than literature.
Lyotard, writing in 1984 and 1991, and Benjamin writing in 1936, each recognize crucial, previously unconsidered aspects of the photographic image and the consequences of mechanical produce. They place its evolution firmly in the industrial man-made technological realm and appreciate that it is an escalating, continually evolving phenomenon. Both writers proffer that imagery represents something in the Postmodern sensibility heretofore indemonstrable within the traditional canon of art. Each of the men recognizes something insidious in the nature of the reproducible image – or in its capacities at least. For Benjamin, it testifies to man’s capacity for war – mechanical reproduction’s ability to give us ‘everything, here and now’ demonstrates a change in the perceptive will of man. Rather than concentrating on the wondrous, technological advance that photography and film offer, he instead categorises it thusly, recognizing something inherently unsettling about the nature of mechanical reproductions:
‘Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities, and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.[38]’
Lyotard focuses on the notion of the ready-made technological sciences which, in their capacity for disruption disorientate and break standard rules of image convention. Like Benjamin, he recognises the shattering of traditional forms of representation and the mechanical image, as Malpas explains, show that ‘conception runs ahead of presentation, as the collapsing structure of the realism challenged by the work of art indicates the possibility of a new, different “inhuman” way of experiencing and thinking about the world.[39]’ Each writer absorbs and negotiates the massive impact of the reproductive, mechanically engineered image on society, art theory, philosophy, political ethics and indeed, history.
However, the two theorists differ greatly on the social impact of photography. Where Benjamin sees in it the parameters for destruction, Lyotard proposes that it will contribute to social ordering. Each acknowledges the notion of substance – for Benjamin the reproduction of the art image dilutes its substantive quality – its presence becomes depreciated and the essence or thingliness of the piece is compromised leading to the jeopardy of the ‘historical testimony’ of the piece. Lyotard on the other hand, utilises the term to recognise photography’s capacity to record and renew this substance essence – an archive of tradition and artistic endeavour rather than the destruction of said traditions. Mechanism and image serve to demonstrate knowledge, stored within a ‘photographic machine’ that serves to illustrate process rather than compromise it.
Benjamin’s refusal to acknowledge photography/mechanical reproduction in any true positive light could be said to weaken his argument. It has been proposed that his thinking was, perhaps, too ahead of its time with writers like Cazeaux realising:
‘What has emerged is that perception evolves in such a way as to generate the possibility of critical distance and scope for new forms of production ... This possibility was either something Benjamin failed to anticipate or something he judged to be too optimistic for the time in which he was writing.[40]’
The reproduction of works of art and the art of film have for Benjamin irrefutable influence on ‘art in its traditional form.’ However, it is important to keep at the centre of any image-based argument that, in fact, some body or person has taken the picture in question. Mechanism is merely the tool by which they record and distribute that material. At the heart of mechanical reproduction there lies the hand of one person – the resulting image serves not just as imitation or archival material of the subject but also as a visual record of the experience of that piece. It could be said that Benjamin overlooks this experiential negotiation of substance and critically, is evaluating mechanical reproduction exclusively from a re-spectatorial point of view. Where, as Cazeaux points out, Benjamin understands ‘what matters is not the existence of a work but the fact that it is on view,[41]’ he fails to consider the hand that holds the camera in anything other than a manipulative or calculating sense. Lyotard, in his appreciation of the ‘happening’ and the ‘not happening’, the differend, the sublime and eventhood relegates photography to an undertaken activity. It serves a purpose in both the destabilisation and enrichment of culture but only in terms of active service. Benjamin’s affirmation of the artwork on view mirrors Lyotard’s negotiation of the ‘presentation of the unpresentable’ - abstract concepts concerning the substantial/substantive qualities of the pieces in question but ignoring mechanically reproduced images as anything other than artefacts or illustrations of conceptual, paralogical or cultural demise.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000
Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, May 2014
Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993
Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010
Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984
Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge
Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986
Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991
Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006
Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989
[1] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.432
[2][2] Op.Cit
[3][3] Ibid. p.433
[4] Op.Cit
[5] Ibid. p.429
[6] Ibid. p.430
[7] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, pp.129-130
[8] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994, p.ix
[9] Ibid. p.x
[10] Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986, p.82-86
[11] Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, May 2014
[12] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.239
[13] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.49
[14] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.125
[15] Ibid. p.124
[16] Op.Cit
[17] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.455
[18] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p.79
[19] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.1
[20] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[21] Ibid. p.155
[22] Ibid. p.156
[23] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p.79
[24] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.44
[25] Op.Cit
[26] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[27] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.47
[28] Ibid.,p.29
[29] Ibid.,p.30
[30] Op.Cit
[31] Ibid.p.31
[32] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.154
[33] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.45
[34] Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991, p.74
[35] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.116
[36] Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989, p.51-66
[37] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.131
[38] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, p.444
[39] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.41
[40] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, p.430
[41] Op.Cit
Written in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ seeks to address the effects of modern technology on the art work. He outlines the transformative effect of various reproductive techniques, from the ancient Greeks with their founding and stamping, the engraving and etching processes of the middle ages, lithography in the C19th to photography of the modern era. He writes:
‘For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth developed only upon the eye looking into a lens.[1]’
He considers Paul Valéry’s ‘Pièces sur L’Art’ which likens the new visual productive technique to essential household elements – water, gas and electricity. That which provides necessities for comfortable living now stands on a par with ‘visual/auditory’ images satisfying our needs. The ability of technology to reproduce has a profound effect upon the public and establishes itself firmly in modes of artistic process, beyond the realm of mere archivist. However, Benjamin states that the effect of technological reproduction is far reaching to the point that it also changes our perception of the established art piece, what he calls ‘art in its traditional form.[2]’
Benjamin writes that reproductions, even in their most perfect state, lack a presence in space or time. This presence belongs exclusively to the original which, in its inhabitation, demonstrates its history, its authenticity and its originality/authority. Reproduction of the original piece dilutes these elements – firstly, it moves the piece from its original location. Secondly, it allows it to become vulnerable to manipulation – its captured state enables enlargement or microscopy – ‘unconscious optics.’ There is a depreciation of presence and its essence, what Benjamin terms its authenticity, is compromised. These ‘eliminated elements’ diminish the Aura of the piece; a fact which Benjamin claims has consequences beyond the province of art. He writes:
‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence ... In permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tenuous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.[3]’
Benjamin touts the viral aspect of modern technological reproduction as insidious – the invasive quality which infiltrates and envelops mass culture is inherently destructive. He writes that it is the ‘liquidation of the traditional value of...cultural heritage.[4]’ Changes in social structure and perception are underpinned by this dilution of the artwork – a false, empty process which attempts to reproduce authenticity.
The mechanical element of the reproduced image threatens its historical testimony. Tradition succumbs to transitive impositions devaluing the techniques by which the artworks were made. Ultimately, this allows for the objects consideration in the viewers owns critical arena rather than the designated space in which they were designed to be appraised. Mechanical reproduction re-places the nucleus of the piece, putting it at the centre of human sensibility – for Benjamin, it is as if the sun now revolves around the earth. This type of unnatural consideration – the distancing effect of mechanism and its effect on the transmission-ability of the work lead it to become ‘common property’ resulting in the aforementioned ‘liquidation ... of cultural heritage.’ Cazeaux writes:
‘A pre-modern work of art, Benjamin suggests, invites critical contemplation because it is “authentic”: it is rooted in a tradition and, therefore, requires knowledge of the tradition in order to be appreciated. However, mechanical reproduction threatens authenticity, since works can be reproduced out of context and ad infinitum, reduced to one unit among many in a homogeneous flow of moving images[5].’
Finally, the manner by which we consider the work of art changes due to the effect of mechanical reproduction. It allows collective reaction and we see a shift in the considerative process. Benjamin addresses notions of entitlement – what it is that we should ask from a work of art. The mass reproduction of the image leads to reactionary attitude which in turn leads to progressive reaction. He states ‘the greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.’ This mode leads to an experiential consideration of the artwork. The public receives rather than perceives the piece, uncritically and en masse. The ‘simultaneous contemplation’ Benjamin writes is a symptom of the ‘crisis of painting’ as we address works in a mode by which they was never intended to be seen. Rather than consider the artwork in its sensuous presence (that which demonstrates its authenticity and history) we have a reactionary experience to a reproduced form. Mechanical production has allowed spectatorial assimilation whereby we react to the artwork as a quantitative thing rather than a qualitative object. It moves it from the realm of artistic vision transmuting its aura and becoming ‘common property.’ The consequences of this loss signified by the appropriation of the image and mass desire to possess the ‘experience’ of the artwork, leads to a reversal of the function of art. Benjamin claims that artistic production will now be based in another practice – in politics rather than ritual or ceremony. He writes ‘when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever’ and states ‘all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.’ Cazeaux explains:
‘The epilogue to ‘The Work of Art’ relates perception in modernity to the prospect of war. The final paragraph offers sombre reflection: mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree”, Benjamin writes, “that it can experience its own self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”. War, he suggests is a Fascist response to the unemployment and the inequalities which result when “the tremendous means of production” are not properly integrated in society. It is an analogous lack of integration that Benjamin finds in the experience of film ... Just as war is regarded as the provider of solutions, so it becomes a source of artistic gratification for a medium in which any objective, referential value is suspended.[6]’
Jean Francois Lyotard’s ‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ and ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ focus on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He places the experience of the artwork in a political and consumer-driven society, redefining notions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. He proposes a theory of the ‘differend’ – analysing phrase and language in their inability to represent conflict and terror. The sublime becomes a demonstration of ‘lack’ and is explained: ‘For Lyotard, the sublime is conceived as a disruptive event, forcing thought to a crisis...the resistance of the sublime is ultimately political.[7]’
‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ was originally published as a ‘collection of lessons[8]’ rather than a book in its own right. It is a compilation of thoughts written as preparation for an oral lecture on Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ Lyotard explains that it has not been written as merely instruction or accompaniment to Kant’s philosophy but rather requires that one reads his Critique in order to understand the text. He acknowledges that it has been written as a series of lecture notes and surmises that:
‘One could say that these lessons try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.[9]’
First published in 1991, the book is made up of a series of chapters analysing and discussing Kantian philosophy – from aesthetic reflection and subjectivity to comparisons between the sublime and notions of taste. It considers the idea of aesthetic and ethics in the realm of sublimity and concludes that the communication of sublime feeling lies with violent interactions between the idea of the absolute and the differend. By ‘differend’ he means ‘a difference which exists in a blatant manner but which is structured such that the victim cannot find a means by which to address it.[10]’ Rather than existing in a litigious sense, he categorises it under the terms of language -
‘A phrase that comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend, since the success (or validation) proper to one genre is not the one proper to others.[11]’
He concludes his Lessons with the theory that:
‘The Idea of the finality without concept of a form of pure pleasure cannot be suggested by the violent contra-finality of the object. The sublime feeling in neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of the differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated by all thought.[12]’
He wishes us to consider a ‘parology’ or false reasoning with regards to works of art. He feels that by creating the unrecognisable or ‘presenting the unpresentable’ we can destabilise the rules governing the materialistic and thence culturally vapid society in which we live. Where Kant strives for a comprehension of totality, Lyotard says that the postmodern should instead ‘wage a war against it.[13]’ Shaw writes: ‘(Lyotard) regards the artistic avant-garde as a vital tool in exposing the logic of late capitalism ... driven by a desire to disrupt the means by which capitalist economies determine realism.[14]’ The idea of the aesthetic therefore becomes a loaded political concept – beauty is the method by which a materialistic society is enslaved and controlled. Lyotard sees the sublime as an experience of ‘the happening’ and ‘the not happening.’ The paradoxical nature of eventhood means that the experience testifies only to the event itself and therefore cannot be appropriated by an aesthetical political regime. In terms of art, a ‘beautiful’ painting is something that can be ‘grasped by sensibility[15]’ and is ‘intelligible to understanding.[16]’ He writes:
‘The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the ‘it happens’ is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this that it has to witness... Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime... It’s still the sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described and yet it isn’t their sublime any more.[17]’
In terms of artistic practice therefore, we see that Lyotard’s theory is best applied to Modernist works which are formless/abstract. These works appear in a Postmodern state which is defined as an era/movement that is constant and flowing rather than definable by its demise or the demise of a predecessor. Rather than signifying the end of the modern, it should instead signify a type of symbiotic discourse. He writes ‘Postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.[18]’ We are reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy who wrote: ‘not so much what we’re going back to as where we’re coming from.[19]’
It is through his definition of realism in these postmodern terms that Lyotard makes his most defining claims, particularly in relation to Kant and the avant-garde. Since photography now exists to document and categorise imagery we move away from a dependence on paint or the artist to accurately render a scene in order to make it recognisable or familiar to us. Instead, what he calls the ‘ready-made techno sciences[20]’ undertake the role of documenter of our age and the capacity for ‘infinite production’ allows for a new set of rules governing aesthetics and culture. Crowther writes:
‘It is with the impact of photography and techno scientific culture, then, that we find the historical beginnings of a postmodern sensibility – wherein our conceptions of art and the aesthetic are transformed.[21]’
He can now define art in two separate and distinct categories – that of fine art and mechanical art which, due to the nature of its production lies outside the traditional parameters of ‘taste’ and aesthetic appreciation. The application of forms and imagery in painting likewise adopt a new role. ‘Realism’ becomes something that is instantly understandable and recognisable. Photography lies within this category, representing as it does the infinite production of a communication based media and culture. Painting in the Postmodern era defined by Lyotard must therefore undertake a new function. Crowther explains: ‘Lyotard’s reasoning here is based on the fact that because Modernist works can be “formless” or “abstract” (in comparison with conventional representation), this enables them to allude to the “unpresentable” or “invisible.”[22]’ On the notion of photography Lyotard writes:
‘It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.[23]’
Rather than defining realism in the traditional realm of art-historical style or period, he says instead that it is ‘the mainstream art of any culture.[24]’ It is something instantly understandable and recognisable. Our understanding of the term realism thus far has been to categorise historical treatments of form or colour in painting and the subsequent rise of photographic depictions and documentation. Lyotard takes a very different view with Malpas explaining:
‘Lyotard claims that realism “makes” the world appear to be real. What he is getting at here is that reality is not something that we know naturally, but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of a particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[25]’
If it is that we use signs and signifiers to draw upon a reservoir of meaning/understanding to make a judgment, and if it is that judgments such as these form the basis of our cultural reality then Lyotard places the action of the renderment back into the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. The capacity for the evolution of process lies here with Nicholas Mirzoeff writing:
‘Because the sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world – for example, peace, equality, or freedom – “the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture.” (Lyotard) Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of culture and is therefore central to visual culture.[26]’
Jean-François Lyotard’s formula places painted and mechanical imagery in a contemporary setting with its role lying in ‘presenting the unpresentable.[27]’ To understand Lyotard’s ideology we must first examine his foundation for this theory, based in his definitions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. In his book, ‘The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge,’ Lyotard proposes that capitalism has become the driving force behind human progress. He feels that this dynamic has destroyed what is known as the speculative grand narrative and the grand narrative of emancipation. As truth and freedom, rather than efficiency and profit, are the basis for these narratives, Lyotard says that their destruction will not allow for a ‘unifying identity for the subject or society.[28]’ Simon Malpas explains this position saying ‘the main threat facing postmodern society is the reduction of knowledge to a single system whose only criteria is efficiency.[29]’ In order to combat our invalidation in society, Lyotard argues for a paralogy to destabilize the ’capacity for explanation.[30]’ He sees this paralogy – a type of ‘false reasoning,’ as critical to having ‘the potential to break the rules of an existing game in such a way that a new game needs to be developed.[31]’
We live in a world of transitory cultural immediacy. Lyotard’s realism is the reality of dealing with a culture where capitalism invests in and controls this paradigm. Although Lyotard sees the instantaneous nature of modern artistic production as flighty, he also sees the capacity for our evolution in its technology saying ‘the ready-made in the techno-sciences presents itself as a potential for infinite production, and so does the photograph.[32]’ This is the first instance of Lyotard’s sublime. He places its action in the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. By defining realism in this way, he also proposes new theories for the terms ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Malpas declares that these alternatives will ‘set out to disrupt realism by “questioning the rules that govern images and narratives.”[33]’
As with the term ‘realism,’ Lyotard makes distinctions from those commonly referred to when considering the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern.’ Where the former would generally be thought a periodic precursor to the latter, and with the postmodern always pronounced as signifying the end of the modern, Lyotard claims that this is not so. He says that they should not be expressions used solely to categorise periods of artistic development but rather should be considered as a symbiotic discourse necessary to heterogenic contemporary expression. Bill Readings writes that:
‘If classicism offers a description of the concept that would itself not be an event, whereas modernism offers to represent the concept of the event, postmodernism seeks to testify to the event without recourse to the concept that would reduce its eventhood to unity and fixity.[34]’
The postmodern’s testification to the event finds its vehicle in abstract expressionism and the avant-garde. The presentation of the unrepresentable allows artistic conception to become the sublime object, rather than the object itself. Lyotard said ‘it will be white, like one of Malevich’s squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain.[35]’ Lyotard puts pain in the category of melancholia (nostalgia) and the ‘novatio.’ These are two modes by which he defines our faculties of comprehension. Steurman explains:
‘One, which Lyotard calls “melancholic,” stresses the impotency of our faculty of presentation and dwells in the nostalgia of presence. The other mode, which Lyotard calls “novatio,” stresses the potency of the faculty of conceiving which is not the faculty of understanding. This mode stresses the invention of new rules, of new forms in a pictorial, artistic, or philosophical game.[36]’
In 1982 Lyotard writes at length on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He says that photography has made the profession of painting impossible as the industrial and scientific world have greater need for this new techno-science rather than the ‘optical geometry[37]’ of painting:
‘Photography achieves this programme of metopolitical visual and social ordering. It realises it in both senses of the world: it realises it, and it concludes it. The know-how and knowledge that were given substance and were transmitted in the school and the studio are now programmed inside the photographic machine. In a single click, an ordinary citizen, whether amateur or tourist, can organise his or her identifying spaces and make a picture that enriches the cultural memory-bank.’
He goes on to say that while painters have always sought to document, the laboriousness of the process meant that the time sacrificed was too great and the advent of photography allows for a new process by which to do this. Our new relationship with photography is therefore, akin to the modern idea of the death of the author – living as we do in a world desirous of journalism rather than literature.
Lyotard, writing in 1984 and 1991, and Benjamin writing in 1936, each recognize crucial, previously unconsidered aspects of the photographic image and the consequences of mechanical produce. They place its evolution firmly in the industrial man-made technological realm and appreciate that it is an escalating, continually evolving phenomenon. Both writers proffer that imagery represents something in the Postmodern sensibility heretofore indemonstrable within the traditional canon of art. Each of the men recognizes something insidious in the nature of the reproducible image – or in its capacities at least. For Benjamin, it testifies to man’s capacity for war – mechanical reproduction’s ability to give us ‘everything, here and now’ demonstrates a change in the perceptive will of man. Rather than concentrating on the wondrous, technological advance that photography and film offer, he instead categorises it thusly, recognizing something inherently unsettling about the nature of mechanical reproductions:
‘Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities, and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.[38]’
Lyotard focuses on the notion of the ready-made technological sciences which, in their capacity for disruption disorientate and break standard rules of image convention. Like Benjamin, he recognises the shattering of traditional forms of representation and the mechanical image, as Malpas explains, show that ‘conception runs ahead of presentation, as the collapsing structure of the realism challenged by the work of art indicates the possibility of a new, different “inhuman” way of experiencing and thinking about the world.[39]’ Each writer absorbs and negotiates the massive impact of the reproductive, mechanically engineered image on society, art theory, philosophy, political ethics and indeed, history.
However, the two theorists differ greatly on the social impact of photography. Where Benjamin sees in it the parameters for destruction, Lyotard proposes that it will contribute to social ordering. Each acknowledges the notion of substance – for Benjamin the reproduction of the art image dilutes its substantive quality – its presence becomes depreciated and the essence or thingliness of the piece is compromised leading to the jeopardy of the ‘historical testimony’ of the piece. Lyotard on the other hand, utilises the term to recognise photography’s capacity to record and renew this substance essence – an archive of tradition and artistic endeavour rather than the destruction of said traditions. Mechanism and image serve to demonstrate knowledge, stored within a ‘photographic machine’ that serves to illustrate process rather than compromise it.
Benjamin’s refusal to acknowledge photography/mechanical reproduction in any true positive light could be said to weaken his argument. It has been proposed that his thinking was, perhaps, too ahead of its time with writers like Cazeaux realising:
‘What has emerged is that perception evolves in such a way as to generate the possibility of critical distance and scope for new forms of production ... This possibility was either something Benjamin failed to anticipate or something he judged to be too optimistic for the time in which he was writing.[40]’
The reproduction of works of art and the art of film have for Benjamin irrefutable influence on ‘art in its traditional form.’ However, it is important to keep at the centre of any image-based argument that, in fact, some body or person has taken the picture in question. Mechanism is merely the tool by which they record and distribute that material. At the heart of mechanical reproduction there lies the hand of one person – the resulting image serves not just as imitation or archival material of the subject but also as a visual record of the experience of that piece. It could be said that Benjamin overlooks this experiential negotiation of substance and critically, is evaluating mechanical reproduction exclusively from a re-spectatorial point of view. Where, as Cazeaux points out, Benjamin understands ‘what matters is not the existence of a work but the fact that it is on view,[41]’ he fails to consider the hand that holds the camera in anything other than a manipulative or calculating sense. Lyotard, in his appreciation of the ‘happening’ and the ‘not happening’, the differend, the sublime and eventhood relegates photography to an undertaken activity. It serves a purpose in both the destabilisation and enrichment of culture but only in terms of active service. Benjamin’s affirmation of the artwork on view mirrors Lyotard’s negotiation of the ‘presentation of the unpresentable’ - abstract concepts concerning the substantial/substantive qualities of the pieces in question but ignoring mechanically reproduced images as anything other than artefacts or illustrations of conceptual, paralogical or cultural demise.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000
Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, May 2014
Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993
Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010
Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984
Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge
Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986
Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991
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Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989
[1] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.432
[2][2] Op.Cit
[3][3] Ibid. p.433
[4] Op.Cit
[5] Ibid. p.429
[6] Ibid. p.430
[7] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, pp.129-130
[8] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994, p.ix
[9] Ibid. p.x
[10] Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986, p.82-86
[11] Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, May 2014
[12] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.239
[13] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.49
[14] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.125
[15] Ibid. p.124
[16] Op.Cit
[17] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.455
[18] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p.79
[19] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.1
[20] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[21] Ibid. p.155
[22] Ibid. p.156
[23] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p.79
[24] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.44
[25] Op.Cit
[26] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[27] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.47
[28] Ibid.,p.29
[29] Ibid.,p.30
[30] Op.Cit
[31] Ibid.p.31
[32] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.154
[33] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.45
[34] Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991, p.74
[35] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.116
[36] Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989, p.51-66
[37] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.131
[38] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, p.444
[39] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.41
[40] Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, p.430
[41] Op.Cit