FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE BEAUTIFUL ON RANCIRES

FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE BEAUTIFUL: ON RANCIÈRE’S CRITICISM OF LYOTARD 1 Wataru Suzuki The University of Tokyo

2 Introduction In reading the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière (1940 -), one of the most points is his sharp criticism of Jean-François Lyotard (19241998). Lyotard: an example of the ethical turn of aesthetics However, we can find an obvious resemblance between these two thinkers: both see the essential purpose of the aesthetic experience in suspending the spectators’ powers of mind and regard this experience as having the potential to radically reconstruct communities. Then what significance or novelty could Rancière’s arguments have?

3 Introduction 1. Articulating Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime 2. Examining Rancière’s criticism of Lyotard 3. Pointing the resemblance between Rancière and Lyotard 4. Accentuating the novelty of Rancière

4 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime

5 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime In The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard criticizes the movements in painting such as Transavanguardia or Neo-expressionism: for Lyotard, by providing the public with easily presentable subjects and facile pleasures, these movements “avoi[d] the question of reality implied in the question of art” (Lyotard, 1992, 17) Against this situation, he affirms that “presenting the existence of something unpresentable” is the duty of art: not representing only the presentable but “showing that there is something we can conceive of which we can neither see nor show” (11). It is through arousing “the sublime feeling” (10) that the modern avant-garde art executes this duty.

6 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime Lyotard elaborates his concept of sublime through the reading of Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime in Critique of Judgment. Kant states that the sublime surpasses our imagination’s ability for presentation (Darstellung) and hence it causes us “the feeling of the inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment” of the Idea of Reason (Kant 2000, 140). This feeling, however, at the same time gives our imagination the “vocation for adequately realizing that Idea” (ibid. ).

7 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime In Lyotard’s terminology, the imagination faced with the sublime suffers “the disaster”: =the faculty of presentation (as “the ‘forming’ of the matter of the data”) can no longer make the sublime presentable. And it is through this very unpresentable sublime that “an Idea of Reason is revealed”. In this way, the sublime is for Lyotard “none other than the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field” (Lyotard 1991, 136 f).

8 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime In what way does the modern avant-garde art assume the sublimeness and execute its duty? According to Lyotard, avant-garde artists aim at “approaching matter”, which means “approaching presence without recourse to the means of presentation” by means of the sublime arts (139). This matter is not such traditional one as naturally fits form, but rather the “scarcely perceptible differenc[e]” such as “nuance” or “timbre”, which “the faculties or capacities of the mind” cannot construct (140).

9 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime In this sense, Lyotard paradoxically describes this matter as “immaterial” and states its effect on the human mind as below: “They[Immaterial matters] all designate the event of a passion, a passibility for which the mind will not have been prepared, which will have unsettled it, and of which it conserves only the feeling – anguish and jubilation – of an obscure debt”. (141) Lyotard inherits the framework of Kant’s thought but somewhat modifies it. While Kant sees the sublime as a generator of the feeling of respect, Lyotard gives it the role of causing for the spectator the feeling of “an obscure debt”.

10 1. Lyotard’s Concept of Sublime And what is noteworthy for our argument is Lyotard’s determination of this immaterial matter as below: “the matter I’m talking about is ‘immaterial’, an-objectable, because it can only ‘take place’ or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind” (140). To sum up, in Lyotard, the sublimeness of an art consists in suspending the human faculties of the mind.

11 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE

12 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE In Aesthetics and its Discontents, Rancière criticizes Lyotard’s modification of Kant’s argument: “With Kant, the imagination’s failure brings forth the autonomous law of the legislative mind. With Lyotard, the logic is strictly inverted: subordination to the aistheton signifies subordination to the law of alterity. Sensory passion is the experience of a ‘debt’. Ethical experience is that of a subordination without appeal to the law of an Other. It manifests thought’s servitude with regard to a power internal and anterior to the mind that it strives in vain to master”. (Rancière 2009, 93 f) Whereas the Kantian sublime leads us to “the autonomous law of the legislative mind”, Lyotardian one brings about the “subordination to the law of alterity”, i. e. the heteronomous enslavement to “an Other”. Rancière’s emphasis is this pessimistic inversion of the logic.

13 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE This reading of Kant by Lyotard closes the possibility of freedom and equality which was opened by “a first reading of Kant” (97): = Schiller’s interpretation of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful in the Aesthetic Education: “The core argument of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man resides in the same double negation that characterizes Kantian aesthetic negation. It states that the latter is subject neither to the law of understanding, which requires conceptual determination, nor to the law of sensation, which demands an object of desire” (ibid. ).

14 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE What Rancière refers to here is Schiller’s “aesthetic state” (ibid. ) or “free play” (99) in the human mind. In Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, this state is expressed as neutralization of conflict or imbalance between two human drives (Schiller 1982, 79 -81): “the sensuous drive” (sinnlicher Trieb) : which stems from our passive sensibility “the form drive” (Formtrieb) : which proceeds out of our active reason

15 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE And this neutralization is regarded as what artworks should above all bring about for human beings, since “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. This proposition [. . . ] will, I promise you, prove capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful, and of the more difficult art of living” (107 -109). In other words, Schiller dreamed of the reformation of the whole human community through the aesthetic experience, starting from changing individual mental modes.

16 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE For Schiller, the exemplary artwork of this argument is an ancient statue, the Juno Ludovisi, which he describes its beauty in the 15 th letters: it is not Grace, nor is it yet Dignity, which speaks to us from the superb countenance of a Juno Ludovisi ; it is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. While the woman-god demands our veneration, the god-like woman kindles our love; but even as we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly grace, her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror. The whole figure reposes and dwells in itself, a creation completely self-contained, and, as if existing beyond space, neither yielding nor resisting; here is no force to contend with force, no frailty where temporality might break in. Irresistibly moved and drawn by those former qualities, kept at a distance by these latter, we find ourselves at one and the same time in a state of utter repose and supreme agitation, and there results that wondrous stirring of the heart for which mind has no concept nor speech any name” (Schiller 1982, 109)

17 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE Rancière, taking up this description, explains the aesthetic experience the statue causes as below (note his use of terms ‘suspend’ and ‘suspension’): Aesthetic experience suspends both laws at the same time. It therefore suspends the power relations which usually structure the experience of the knowing, acting and desiring subject. (Rancière 2009 a, 97) The suspension of power, the neither. . . nor. . . specific to the aesthetic state [. . . ] announces a wholly new revolution [. . . ]. Aesthetic free play – or neutralization – defines a novel mode of experience that bears within it a new form of ‘sensible’ universality and equality. (99)

18 2. CRITICISM OF LYOTARD BY RANCIÈRE Based on this, we would be able to grasp the gist of Rancière’s criticism of Lyotard: “what it [Lyotard’s reading of Kant] strives to do is efface the original link between aesthetic suspension and the promise of emancipation” (104). = Lyotard is blameful because he denies the possibility of freedom and equality manifested by Schiller and, conversely, forces human beings to be submitted to the feeling of debt.

19 3. RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN RANCIÈRE AND LYOTARD

20 3. RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN RANCIÈRE AND LYOTARD Both see the essential aspect of the aesthetic experience as the suspension of the human mind. Rancière sees the suspension (=neutralization) of faculties of the human mind as the essential point of Schiller’s aesthetic education. Lyotard also states that sublime arts ‘suspend (…) active powers of the mind”. (In this sense, it is reasonable to say that Rancière does “not only adopt the vocabulary but also part of the ideology of postmodernism” (Rieusset-Lemarié 2017, 465). ) So we have to figure out his novelty in other respects.

21 4. THE NOVELTY OF RANCIÈRE

22 4. THE NOVELTY OF RANCIÈRE Rancière is emphasizing the importance of the beautiful instead of the sublime. Lyotard regards the sublime as the raison d’être of contemporary arts, and on the contrary, declares “the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful” in exchange for the sublime (Lyotard 1991, 137). Moreover, in the field of French aesthetics in the late 20 th century as a whole, it is not the beauty but the sublime that has been at issue (for example, Deguy et al. , Du sublime, 1988). From this point of view, we can find the novelty of Rancière in that he ventures to focus on Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful (and not of the sublime) through Schiller’s interpretation.

23 4. THE NOVELTY OF RANCIÈRE However, it is hasty to reduce Rancière’s argument to a traditional simple opposition between beauty and sublime. Regarding the Kantian and Schillerian aesthetics, Rancière says that: The experience of beauty, which is apprehended by Kantian aesthetic judgement in terms of a neither. . . nor. . . , is already characterized by the double bind of attraction and repulsion. [. . . ] There is, then, no rupture between an aesthetics of the beautiful and an aesthetics of the sublime. Dissensus, i. e. the rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible, already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and repose. (Rancière 2009, 97 f) The point is that the suspension of our faculties of mind, which weighs in the aesthetics of the sublime, is “already” anticipated by the Kantian and Schillerian aesthetics of the beauty.

24 4. THE NOVELTY OF RANCIÈRE The concept of beauty which Rancière proposes through reading Kant and Schiller is more fundamental one, that can subsume even the concept of the sublime.

25 4. THE NOVELTY OF RANCIÈRE Finally, we encapsulate the novelty of Rancière as follows: Lyotard’s thought of the sublime leads to the subordination of the Other and ends up annulling the promise of emancipation. Rancière, rather tracing back to Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetics of the beautiful, reboots the possibility of the freedom and equality by suspending the faculties of the mind. Rancière’s significance consists in his re-interpretation of the beautiful as the factor of such suspension.

26 REFERENCE l Deguy, Michel et al. , 1988. Du sublime (Paris: Éditions Belin). l Kant, Immanuel, 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). l Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1988. “La vérité sublime”, in Du Sublime, Michel Deguy et al (Paris: Éditions Belin). l Lyotard, Jean-François, 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press). l —, 1992. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982 -1985, trans. Barry Don, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). l Rancière, Jacques, 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press). l Rieusset-Lemarié, Isabelle, 2017. “Aesthetics as Politics: Kant’s Heuristic Insights Beyond Rancière’s Ambivalences”, Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 9, the European Society for Aesthetics, 453 -478. l Schiller, Friedlich, 1982. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press).