Pre-Class, Lyotard

In Lyotard’s examination of providing a helpful understanding of postmodernism in “Answering the Question: What is Postmodern,” he offers a comparison between the aesthetics of modernism versus the aesthetics of postmodernism as a means of emphasizing difference, and by pointing out what exactly postmodern is not, can better comprehend what postmodern is. One of the main themes seems to be the notion of the “unpresentable”. According to Lyotard, “modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one…[allowing] to put forward only as the missing contents,” (46) while on the other hand, “the postmodern…puts forward the presentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations” (46). In modernity, it is expressed that there exist certain grand concepts that can be imagined and conceived mentally yet are unable from being articulated and materialized in tangible form, an idea that Kant coins the “sublime” and what Lyotard seems to equivocate with the “unpresentable”. Modern art attempts to present the fact that the “unpresentable” does in fact exists, yet does so with “little technical expertise” (43). Kant provides a helpful suggestion that this abstract idea of the “sublime” can best be conceptualized by the principle of “absence of form” or “empty abstraction,” both of which exemplify a withdrawal from reality. Lyotard recognizes this fact in his assertion that “modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality” (43). On the other hand, Lyotard argues that postmodern art attempts to make the unpresentable perceivable, but does so not by working off of precedent and pre-established rules; rather, the postmodern artists’ art is looking for… those rules and categories” (46). Likewise, postmodernism is not in search of reaching a sense of “totality” that is already in existence but is instead in search of the “what if’s” or the “what might be’s’,” with its final destination being completely unknown.