1. Lyotard’s account, as adaptation of Kant’s mathematical sublime

As Lyotard acknowledges, his view of contemporary art borrows from Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment, particularly §§25–6 on the ‘mathematical-sublime’.Footnote ⁷ There Kant proposes that the experience of the sublime comprises a deeply meaningful failure: when confronted by a very large, formless natural object, the viewer’s imagination fails to ‘comprehend’ it – she cannot perceptually take it all in at once, as a whole (CPJ, 5: 252). This failure calls attention, however, to a higher human capability: the ability of reason to form the idea of infinity or, more generally, of the absolutely great, beyond imaginative exhibition, beyond nature and sensibility altogether (CPJ, 5: 250, 254–5). Thus, Kant contends, the experience (paradigmatically of mountains, towering crags, volcanoes, storms, and the like) is one of fear and dizzying displeasure, but also of uplifting pleasure, a pleasure in the transcendence of reason over sensibility, a beyondness and superiority made ‘as it were … intuitable’ (CPJ, 5: 257, the phrase Lyotard adapts in his slogan) precisely by the striving, and inadequacy, of the imagination.

As noted, Lyotard adapts this structure – a relation between sensible and supersensible – to characterize the aesthetics of (some) modernist art: a failure, absence or break in the sensible somehow ‘presents’ a super-sensible something, or, in Lyotard’s terms, the ‘un-presentable’. He modifies Kant’s view, however, by identifying different relata and by understanding the relation itself somewhat differently. I discuss now these modifications to each relatum and the relation, in turn.

First, and most obviously: the sensibly encountered object on which Lyotard focuses is not a natural object, but an artwork. (For concision, I refer henceforth to the sublime in contemporary art, as theorized by Lyotard, as the ‘art-sublime’.) Barnett Newman is Lyotard’s primary example (particularly the zip paintings, but also perhaps the inverted pyramid sculptures), in part because of Newman’s manifesto, ‘The Sublime is Now’.Footnote ⁸ He also mentions Malevitch, Delaunay and Mondrian (as well as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, John Cage and Pierre Boulez).Footnote ⁹ More generally, Lyotard seems to have in mind a class of artworks that confront one with a challenge, refusal or difficulty. Thus he identifies art of the high middle ages, the baroque and romanticism as previous art movements that have to some degree instantiated the impulse of the Kantian sublime: aiming not at pleasure, beauty or form, but at challenging experiences of the relatively formless (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Rottenberg and Palo Alto1994: 153). As his named examples suggest, however, Lyotard associates the art-sublime most emphatically with the avant-garde, or twentieth-century modernism, specifically mentioning abstraction and minimalism (1994: 157). (Lyotard explicitly acknowledges that his account will not characterize the aims of all modern art movements,Footnote ¹⁰ and with some disdain excludes postmodernist eclecticism from the category of the art-sublime (1984: 73, 1991d: 127).)

Second, as suggested by his language of ‘presentation’ and ‘unpresentable’ (rather than imagination and ideas of reason), Lyotard’s approach to the sublime, and thus his understanding of the central relation in the sublime, is less psychological and more semiotic than is Kant’s. That is, unlike Kant, he does not aim to describe or explain affective responses (of pleasure or displeasure), nor does he dwell on the viewer’s psychological activities in engaging with the object.Footnote ¹¹ He focuses, rather, on the object’s (i.e. artwork’s) sensible (spatiotemporally located and manifest) characteristics – what it presents, and especially its failure to present something discernible. This failure then in turn constitutes a sign of something else, namely the unpresentable.Footnote ¹² Thus, describing Kant’s account, Lyotard writes:

And of course – to return to the previous point – construing the sublime as a signifying relation makes sense when the sublime is transposed from nature to artworks, that is, objects made by intentional agents, to have or convey meaning. (I will qualify this claim below, however, in discussing Lyotard’s occasional, surprising denial, at least with respect to Newman, that this is a signifying relation (1991a: 82–3, 87).)

Finally, third: the non-sensible relatum in the sublime for Lyotard – that which is art-sublimely signified, or the unpresentable – is broader and more indeterminate than Kant’s ideas of reason. In an essay originally titled ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, Lyotard glosses that which is unpresentable (yet somehow ‘presented’) in Kantian terms, as the ‘unconditioned’ or ‘absolute’, or the object of an idea of reason. He also provides Kantian examples – the universe (seemingly equivalent to Kant’s ‘world-whole’), the good and humanity – as well as the end of history, the instant and space. Such absolutes cannot be presented as such, sensibly, because, Lyotard writes, ‘to present is to relativize, to place into contexts and conditions of presentation, in this case plastic contexts and conditions’ (1991d: 126).

Kant would of course agree that the objects of ideas of reason cannot be ‘placed’ in certain ‘presentational contexts’ (i.e. they cannot be represented spatiotemporally). But Lyotard’s suggestion that the unpresentable cannot be ‘relativized’ or placed into a context signals his significant expansion of the scope and meaning of his term (the unpresentable) beyond the objects of the Kantian ideas of reason, an expansion that also renders it, or its referents, significantly more indeterminate.Footnote ¹⁴ Lyotard often suggests that what is revealed is that there is something unpresentable (e.g. 1991d: 121). At other points, this unpresentable something is specified (slightly) as the fact that ‘something happens at all’, that there is something rather than nothing, or the ‘that’ (rather than the ‘what’) of being, and so also as the ‘indeterminate’ (that which is not specifically determined as a ‘what’).Footnote ¹⁵ Here Lyotard seems to have in mind the most abstract or general fact of being as such, or (when the emphasis is on ‘something happening’) on the unassured continuity of such being over time, from moment to moment.

Lyotard has, correspondingly, a different view concerning why the unpresentable is unpresentable than does Kant, a difference at which he gestures in characterizing his sublime as ‘immanent’ (implying a contrast to Kant’s ‘transcendent’ ideas of objects beyond sensible nature). Kant of course takes it that reason conceives of unconditioned entities (such as God, monads or the world-whole) that could not be instantiated within sensible nature (since all spatiotemporal, experienced, natural items are conditioned by others) (CPR, A327/B383–4). By contrast, Lyotard seems to hold that it is the vagueness or indeterminacy, or globality, of the unpresentable that renders it so: it is not localizable at some particular spatiotemporal moment, in some particular spatiotemporal form or context; all such determination is falsifying. Thus, though he does not mention it in the context of discussing contemporary art, Lyotard elsewhere characterizes the Holocaust as unpresentable,Footnote ¹⁶ for similar reasons (I suggest): any determinate presentation of it, any exemplification, will falsify it by reducing it, making it too delineated, too comprehensible. In the passage in which he refers to his sublime as ‘immanent’, Lyotard also identifies as unpresentable the ‘infinite’ expansion of research and production in late technological capitalism, again not an object outside of or beyond sensible nature, but one that is too indeterminate, global or all-encompassing to present in a single image.Footnote ¹⁷ In light of these potential instances of the unpresentable, one might also note that for Lyotard viewers may in some way profit from the contact with the unpresentable offered by the art-sublime – a benefit perhaps best understood as access to a kind of truthFootnote ¹⁸ – but they would seem to experience little of the elevation, specifically not the elevated sense of themselves as rational beings, characteristic of the sublime on Kant’s account.

In sum: the basic components of Lyotard’s Kantian, but semiotically reoriented art-sublime are (a) a sensible artwork that (b) signifies (c) an unpresentable (or that there is something unpresentable). I turn now to discuss directly and in more detail the paradox or difficulty that Lyotard thereby places at the centre of the art-sublime: that, as his slogan has it, such art aims to ‘present’ the unpresentable – a phrase that suggests the impossibility or, given Lyotard’s scare-quotation marks around ‘present’, a near-impossibility, of instituting this signifying relationship.

2. Specifying the task: heterogeneity as pragmatic difficulty

Lyotard takes over from Kant (or elaborates by means of interpreting Kant) his understanding both of the difficulty of this task, and the way to address it: respectively, heterogeneity and negative presentation. I treat the first of these concepts here and turn to the second in section 3. As noted above, Lyotard emphasizes in his interpretation of Kant that the idea (or its object) is so heterogeneous from sensible items that it cannot be presented or exemplified sensibly; it is unpresentable. Thus, Lyotard argues, the Kantian sublime comprises a relationship between (or a synthesis of) two dramatically heterogeneous items: sensible presentation of large objects (as challenging) and ideas of reason.

Lyotard himself treats this heterogeneity simply as a fact about the sublime – or, better, its constitutive condition: the Kantian sublime just is the combination of sensible presentation and radically heterogeneous idea (only so can it be the painful-pleasurable experience that it is).Footnote ¹⁹ But I propose that it can also be seen as a theoretical difficulty concerning the Kantian sublime, brought out by Lyotard. The appreciating subject, on Kant’s view, is overwhelmed by experiencing a large or powerful natural object, finding it difficult to take in or potentially threatening to her action and life. Why should this experience be conjoined with – why should she combine or enrich it with – an entirely different thought, an idea of reason? Is this merely a random, arbitrary and so ultimately insignificant association of ideas – or is there some reason to have this sort of experience, to make that connection?Footnote ²⁰

This question can be recast, in turn, for Lyotard’s semiotic art-sublime: how can the sensible sign ‘present’ something utterly heterogeneous from it? Or, as Lyotard puts the problem: ‘is it possible, and how would it be possible, to testify to the absolute by means of artistic and literary presentations, which are always dependent on forms?’Footnote ²¹ As Lyotard’s language suggests, in the art-sublime a theoretical question is transformed into a pragmatic one. That is, concerning Kant’s account, one may ask why the subject should combine representations so, or how the theorist can explain that combination. For Lyotard’s art-sublime, the question rather becomes: how can artists do this, find a sensible presentation for something non-sensible, for something that is falsified by every image? Thus Lyotard also inverts the ‘direction’ of such heterogeneous conjunction – not (as for the Kantian subject) a movement from perception of a mountain or waterfall to an idea of infinity or morality, something beyond and other, but rather from idea to sensibility, from unpresentable subject matter to (somehow, nonetheless) a sensible ‘presentation’ of it.Footnote ²²

Here one sees another reason, perhaps insufficiently acknowledged by Lyotard, for the centrality of Newman as an example: many Newman paintings (including some cited by Lyotard) are furnished with religious titles that explicitly indicate the artistic drive to present an idea that lies beyond the visual, and that give interpretive directives to viewers to endow the work with such meaning as well. (Rothko would be another apt example.) But this self-set artistic project is also described well – and with forceful expression of its difficulty – by Ad Reinhardt, a less overtly spiritually motivated painter. The artist aims, he writes, to create ‘a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art’.Footnote ²³ Here we can clearly discern the paradox of the art-sublime: of course the painting will not be spaceless, relationless and so forth – even though it somehow, impossibly, aims to convey that or present itself as such.

I pause now, however, to specify this artistic task, in order to make clear and precise the difficulty. For of course it is commonplace to use a sensible sign to signify something heterogeneous to it: this is the way words (mostly) signify. Lyotard himself uses the (sensibly instantiated, linguistic) phrase ‘that something is unpresentable’ to refer to the unpresentable, and, as he mentions briefly, one might also symbolize the absolute allegorically, as in a lengthy history of European painting.Footnote ²⁴

By ‘presentation’, then, Lyotard must mean something more specific than signification generally. And something more demanding: linguistic and allegorical signs signify their heterogeneous objects by convention or established practice; such conventional signification, I suggest, is not sufficient for presentation on Lyotard’s view. In his brief mention of allegory, Lyotard claims that it is no longer available for historical reasons: those systems of signs no longer have those meanings for us (1991d: 125). But his position appears to be stronger: such conventional signification would reduce the indeterminate, the unpresentable, to simply one element among many, matched to its sign, part of a scheme of symbols. Conventional signification would, then, place the unpresentable in a ‘context’ (1991d: 126). This is a reason, I propose, why Lyotard sometimes bristles at calling the art-sublime a form of signification: he does not wish to characterize it as a relation between two determinate, settled, identifiable items, sign and signified. Allegorical signification also clearly does not make the unpresentable (itself) ‘present’ but rather refers to it, or indicates it, according to a set code.

To put this point in positive terms, Lyotard appears to conceive of presentation much in line with Kant’s view of sensibility: as providing immediate, sensibly perceivable representations of things, here and now. Presentation for Lyotard is closer still to Kant’s ‘exhibition’ (Darstellung): a sensibly perceivable image of something (else) such that the something (or an instance of its kind) is manifest in the sensibly perceived image.Footnote ²⁵ When applied to paintings, then, presentation (for Lyotard) is similar to depiction, perhaps even mimetic depiction, in which it is ‘as if’ one perceives its subject – or, perhaps, is invited to imagine perceiving it sensibly.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, again, neither ordinary linguistic description nor visual allegorical representation – references to a signified as distinct from the sign and not sensibly manifest within it, by means of sensible signs (even in the second case, depictive signs, though depicting something else) – will amount to presentation.

It is in this specific sense, I would argue, that one should understand the paradoxical project of the art-sublime: how can one present, sensibly, that which cannot be presented? Lyotard’s answer to this question is, as noted, inspired by Kant: the absence or failure of sensible presentation –what he calls (following Kant) ‘negative presentation’ – shows, precisely in its failure, that something cannot be presented, is unpresentable. Here a new question arises, however: what is a failed (‘negative’) presentation – a presentation that shows its failure? How does the artist achieve this – achieve a failure, make a mark that somehow doesn’t count, quite, as a mark? (We may discern here a new, and again newly pragmatic version of a question facing Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime: how can one experience the natural object as formless, as purportedly required for occasioning the experience of the sublime, when, according to Kant, all objects of experience have form?Footnote ²⁷)

3. Performing the task: negative presentation in contemporary art

Lyotard’s most explicit treatment of ‘negative presentation’ occurs in his Kant interpretation, and is frustratingly metaphorical: in producing (or encountering) such presentation, the imagination ‘retreats’, ‘suffers’, sacrifices itself, even ‘lights the beautiful on fire’.Footnote ²⁸ But, I will suggest, one may gather Lyotard’s remarks concerning style and the sublime to glean a sense of the ways in which imagination (sensible presentation) could retreat or suffer, particularly if one augments the remarks by considering contemporary artworks that have in fact developed and deployed such strategies.

First, drawing on the tradition of discussing the sublime, from Longinus and Boileau on to Kant’s invocation of the ‘sublime’ Jewish prohibition on graven images,Footnote ²⁹ Lyotard mentions simplicity, taken to an extreme degree: the ‘absence of figure’, or ‘silence’ in the case of rhetoric (Boileau’s and Longinus’ central artistic case). Here imagination – or sensible presentation – ‘retreats’ in the sense of being (nearly) absent: there is something there, but it is minimal, slender, anti- or non-figurative (non-depictive). There is nothing much sensible there to pay attention to, linger on, etc. The object is, rather, blank. This style is arguably the dominant style of the art-sublime. Particularly in the case of the mystically intentioned painters Rothko and Newman, the blankness of the paintings conveys the way in which something – being, divinity, true reality – cannot or should not be constrained, made small and specific by determinate figuration. The blankness points attention away from the painting itself, and thereby suggests, as Lyotard puts it, that ‘the absolute is never there, never given in a presentation’; rather, ‘it is … “present” as a call to think beyond the “there”’ (1994: 150).

Second, Lyotard suggests that the sensible presentation may undo or destroy itself. (This is Lyotard’s version of Kant’s claim that the imagination does ‘violence’ to itself in the mathematical sublime (CPJ, 5: 259).) To get a sense of what this might be, one might think – a literal rendering of the metaphor – of the self-destruction enacted in de Kooning’s erased paintings and drawings: the work manifestly records the act of presenting something only to take it away.Footnote ³⁰ Or of Anselm Kiefer’s scratched out paintings – where an image is made and then destroyed, where one is offered figures yet also prevented from making them out.Footnote ³¹ Or again, one might think of Cy Twombly’s scratchings, marks on paper that seem to declare that they amount to nothing, that they are mere scratchings, not purposeful, mimetic or aesthetically valuable marks. In short, these painters strive precisely to make ‘negative presentations’, depictions that show themselves as insufficient or inaccurate, non-depictive depictions.

The determined ugliness of these paintings – or, if one prefers, their marked anti-structure or de-formedness – may also exemplify another of Lyotard’s subcategories of negative presentation: ‘resistance’. For this is an ugliness, arguably, that is not expressive or meaningful – not the ugliness, say, of the comic character or the villain, nor that which expresses grief or anger. Rather, it is anti-structure or un-form: an ugliness of not being able to be put together, of not making sense, of resisting one’s attempt to add it up to a composition, a picture.Footnote ³²

Twombly may count too as an instance of a fourth and final sort of negative presentational project, described slightly more extensively by Lyotard: an emphasis on the materiality of the work. Here Lyotard attempts to incorporate a well-recognized direction in modernist painting into his account. The emphasis on materiality is, he suggests, an emphasis precisely on the non-meaningful aspect of the work: its matter, rather than its form, its platform rather than the meaning, image or information that might thereby be conveyed. Matter here, Lyotard writes,

As Arthur Danto has argued, somewhat to the contrary of this suggestion by Lyotard, such paintings do not lack meaning altogether (or, in Danto’s terms, ‘aboutness’). Rather, their meaning is reflexive: the painting’s meaning is that it does not have meaning, or its insistence on its non-relatedness to any (other) meaning, anything beyond itself.Footnote ³³ For Lyotard, I suggest, such insistent self-referentiality is to be understood as negative presentation: a presentation of a foreclosed possibility, the absence of a (further, interesting, as it were significant) meaning that could have been presented, an insistence on the limits of the medium, its unsuitability, at least here and now, as a vehicle for meaning.

Lyotard’s conception of negative presentation seems, then, to capture and to unify various strands of painterly practice in contemporary art – what one might call, in line with the pragmatic cast of the problem of heterogeneity for Lyotard, various strategies for undermining depiction or figuration. Indeed, Lyotard suggests that the project of the art-sublime could give rise to an ‘infinity of plastic essays’ (1991d: 127). In other words, there is such a thing as negative presentation or manifested failures of presentation. For this fact is established by artists who have made them, whether Newman’s and Rothko’s blank presentations (perhaps one could say: presentations of the negative); Kiefer’s self-undermining, self-erasing anti-presentations (perhaps: presentations of negation), or Twombly’s insistently non-signifying, merely material scratchings (perhaps: presentations refusing the act of presenting something).

4. Achievement: presenting the unpresentable?

But we may still ask: do such negative presentations thereby present (or ‘present’) the unpresentable? Perhaps. In the preceding section, I suggested some ways in which negative-presentational or anti-depictive strategies in contemporary art might gesture towards, or make ‘an allusion to’ (Lyotard Reference Lyotard and Durand1984: 78, 81), the fact that something is not presented, and thus perhaps to the fact that something is unpresentable (or even gesture at some unpresentable entity). Such works perhaps point away from themselves or call attention to the fact that something might have been portrayed there, but is not.

Moreover, though Lyotard does not quite claim so explicitly, he seems to propose two further ways in which such gesturing might (nearly, per his scare quotation marks) amount to or bring about presentation of the (fact that something is) unpresentable.Footnote ³⁴ First, he proposes what I shall call ‘experiential exemplification’: some sort of contact with or instantiation of the unpresentable. In writing about Barnett Newman, he suggests that, when faced by a frustrating, negative-presentational work, one has an experience of lack of determinacy, of there being something here but one cannot tell what it is. Thus one has an immediate sense of the ‘that’-ness of this work’s being, perhaps as an instance of a global ‘that-ness’ of being, behind or before the what-ness of any particular being (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Bennington and Bowlby1991a: 81, 85–6). Or again, Lyotard suggests (quoting Newman), perhaps one becomes so aware by being cast back upon oneself, becoming aware of one’s own indeterminate being, one’s own simple, immediate presence, here and now (1991a: 86). Thus is the unpresentable presented – vividly, directly experienced, perhaps instantiated, by the viewer.Footnote ³⁵

Second, in his Kant interpretation, Lyotard seems implicitly to propose that there is a symbolic relation between the negative presentation and the signified unpresentable; one might take that symbolic relation also to hold for the art-sublime.Footnote ³⁶ For, in discussing Kant’s mathematical sublime, he suggests that, in attempting to comprehend the large object, the imagination presents an ‘absolute’ of sensation – the very limit, the very maximum, of what sensibility can do (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Rottenberg and Palo Alto1994: 123–4). In accord with Kant’s characterization of symbolism – that one judges a sensibly given object (the symbol) by the same reflective ‘rule’ in accord with which one judges a non-sensible object that is thereby symbolized (CPJ, 5: 352) – one might then take the large natural object (represented as a sensible ‘absolute’) as symbolic of the ‘absolutely great’ conceived by reason. Both might be reflectively judged to fit a rule of maximizing, of limit or of absoluteness (holding its measure within itself). Correspondingly, an artistic negative presentation – as a limit-phenomenon, a depiction that nearly escapes depiction – might be taken to symbolize the unpresentable, that which is at the limit of conceivability. The negative presentation would thus ‘present’ the unpresentable in the sense of providing it with a borrowed (symbolic or analogical), sensible instantiation.

Yet one must acknowledge the lingering force of the heterogeneity question concerning such instantiation, such meaningfulness – the gap that remains between negative or failed presentation (a work fails to show something and does so in a discernible way) and its positive meaning (there is something unpresentable). Negative presentation does present something (ugliness, blankness, erasure and so forth), but that something is not itself yet, quite, the unpresentable. Even the above-described exemplification and symbolization need substantial and non-obvious interpretation to get the viewer from the one to the other, from the experience of an indeterminate something to the supposed (or so-interpreted) experience of The Indeterminate as such. Are Newman’s zips or Twombly’s scratchings presenting Being, or gesturing at the infinite progression of capitalist production? How can one ‘find’ those meanings in the works, convince someone of the aptness of such interpretation or even come to such an interpretation of one’s own (frustrated, blank, uncomprehending) experience of them? These questions are, I am suggesting, in principle unanswerable for Lyotard, at least on the basis of the paintings (the negative presentations) themselves.Footnote ³⁷ For given that both the negative presentation and the signified unpresentable are in principle indeterminate or lack articulation, in principle are at the limits of recognition or comprehension, neither provides articulable constraints that would guide or institute experiential instantiation or symbolism. Certainly, within the terms of Lyotard’s account, it would seem impossible to distinguish among presentations of different potential signifieds as such – between a negative presentation that, say, symbolized the unpresentable enormity of Holocaust, and one that presented Being – or to determine which of these signifieds is the appropriate one, correlating to a particular negative presentation.

In other words, one might discern a certain mysticism in the art-sublime, both in the character of the experience of it, as described by Lyotard, and in his theoretical apparatus itself.Footnote ³⁸ For, as we have seen, Lyotard’s unpresentable signified is not only sensibly imperceptible and unpresentable, but also vague and apparently imperfectly conceivable rationally, at the limits of thinkability. And, just as mystics claim to come into contact, in a puzzling, blank experience, with a fundamental metaphysical truth, or even fundamental metaphysical entity, so Lyotard suggests that that signified limit-concept or, even, limit-reality is ‘present’ to one in indeterminate, puzzling, even explicitly meaningless experiences of the puzzling, art-sublime negative presentation. Perhaps it is, or perhaps not – there is in principle no discernible, articulable criterion by which one could grasp, much less establish the truthfulness or aptness of the experience to that purported meaning.Footnote ³⁹

One may also transpose this hesitation into the more grounded, pragmatic terms of the art-sublime as artistic project. Lyotard himself notes, in passing, that there are ‘empty abstractions’, that is, abstract paintings that do not have such exemplifying or symbolic meaning (do not present the unpresentable) (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Bennington and Bowlby1991a: 81). They are, as it were, mere negative presentations. So, one may ask: what distinguishes such empty abstractions from those that ‘present’ the unpresentable? Of course some painters of empty abstractions simply may not aim at that further meaningfulness – unlike, for example, Newman and Rothko, who announce that they do have such aims. Yet artistic intent alone seems insufficient to render paintings not empty, not merely negative: surely it is possible for artists to fail to realize their aspirations to experiential instantiation or symbolization. Again Lyotard hints at this possibility when discussing the difficulty of understanding (or achieving) simplicity as a style of the art-sublime: how, he asks, can one recognize absence of figure as a sign, as itself a figure, perhaps ‘for the erasure of figures’? ‘How do we distinguish between a hidden figure and what is not a figure? And what is it, if it isn’t a figure?’ (1991b: 95). This style is and signifies through absence, but how can one render or recognize such an absence as itself a sign, which signifies absence? Perhaps it is just an absence. Making a negative presentation as such (challenging as this task is, as discussed above), in short, does not seem to guarantee achievement of the art-sublime.

This is not to say that Lyotard’s art-sublime never happens, that Barnett Newman’s or Agnes Martin’s paintings are not sublime. It is to say, rather, that their achievement is precarious, fragile, unassured – contingent. So indeed Lyotard concludes about the Kantian sublime, emphasizing a phrase in Kant’s unpublished introduction: reason’s ‘contingent use’ of natural objects for its own purposes in the sublime (FI, 20: 250). Lyotard insists that in the Kantian sublime ‘thought arbitrarily actualizes its destination in a “contingent” way with regard to the object’; it imposes ‘finality on what remains of nature when natural form is no longer “given”’ (1994: 184). As I have suggested, Lyotard’s art-sublime does not involve a ‘destination’ (Bestimmung) or higher purpose to which the perception of the natural object is taken or made to point the subject (as on Kant’s account, described here by Lyotard). But in the art-sublime, a further, and deeply significant meaning is nonetheless assigned to that perception. And this connection to a further meaning, I am suggesting, is likewise contingent and unassured, guaranteed neither by that meaning nor its purported sensible (negative) presentation (the perception to which the meaning is attached).Footnote ⁴⁰ Specifically, in the following, brief remarks, I shall propose that the art-sublime is historically contingent – historically facilitated (rather than conceptually or intentionally guaranteed, as I have just argued it is not). As Lyotard might say: it happens.

5. Sublimity and history

Lyotard of course does situate the art-sublime historically, taking it to be prompted by the advent of photography and its accomplishment of other traditional functions of painting (1991d: 119–24; 1984: 74, 78–9), or more generally as part of the focus in modern aesthetics on viewers’ affective response rather than rules of composition (1991b). I mean to suggest, however, that historical conditions are not just locations (as it were) in which the art-sublime arises, but are crucial for the very mechanism or structure of the art-sublime: they make negative presentation as such possible, and facilitate its connection to some unpresentable meaning; themselves contingent conditions, they are also the source of the ‘contingent’ meaningfulness of negative presentations. And this despite the appearance or felt experience, in the sublime, of gaining access to supra-historical meanings, to a transcendent reality.Footnote ⁴¹

That is, first: blankness, ugliness, resistance and so forth will show up as negative presentation – as undermining or refusing their own depictive potential, rather than simply as absent, ugly or meaningless marks – only as a late part of an historical tradition of depictive representation that is noticeably, even shockingly, rejected by them. Silence – the absence of speech – is meaningful within conversational practices; so too blankness within a tradition of representation, ugliness within a tradition of beautification and so forth.Footnote ⁴²

That refusal will in turn gesture at (some) unpresentable – or the fact of unpresentability – only within socio-historical conditions in which ideas of unpresentables (whether Being as such, undigestibly horrible historical events such as the Holocaust or the idea of infinite production governing capitalism) play a significant cultural role, in which such ideas stand ready to be supplied as the signifieds for negative presentations, or in which there is a pressing need for contact with the ‘unpresentable’ (whether as expressive of one’s social situation, or as compensatory for secularization, etc.). For, again, negative presentation can be an ‘occasion’ for the sublime, but it precisely does not carry indications of its sublime meaning, or indeed any discernible meaning, within it. That meaning must be ‘imposed’ (Lyotard Reference Lyotard, Rottenberg and Palo Alto1994: 184).

Later, when abstraction becomes its own tradition, or when art is entirely eclectic, negative presentation may no longer be possible; it will just be more of the same.Footnote ⁴³ Or, later, when climate or identity, rather than secularization or the iron cage of capitalism, become more pressing cultural problems, not only will the task of presenting the unpresentable be less compelling for artists, but the unpresentable as meaning will be less available: ideas thereof will be less ready to be filled in as the meaning of a symbolism, viewers less likely to interpret an experience of puzzlement as metonymic of a broader social or metaphysical phenomenon. In other words, to use Kant’s terms, as an aesthetic phenomenon, the sublime ‘requires culture’ (CPJ, 5: 265).Footnote ⁴⁴

And so I end with a brief remark about Kant and contemporary art. By way of discussing Lyotard’s view, I hope to have suggested that some core structural aspects of Kant’s view of the sublime aptly characterize some contemporary art. Kant’s own denial that art may be sublime apparently rests on presuppositions that art must aim to be beautiful, and that visual art will and ought to be largely representational, even depictive, both of which one may reject – as it turns out, as we have learned over the course of art history. Artists can come up with strategies of negative presentation and thus confront viewers with (almost, experienced-as) ‘formless’ objects, just as nature does – and thus provide viewers an occasion for a confrontation with the unpresentable. I have just suggested, however, that Kant is right that this latter confrontation (in the art-sublime, as in the sublime) requires ‘culture’ – both to supply the heterogeneous, unpresentable but as if presented ‘ideas’ (signifieds) and to allow one to recognize a negative presentation as such (as, mutatis mutandis, one may need a certain socio-historical position to approach dangerous natural objects with disinterested contemplation). More broadly, Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime could be understood as part of a cultural secularization: a movement to reinterpret purported religious revelation or experiences of contact with the divine, as human and humanly comprehensible, even psychological phenomena. Correlatively, the art-sublime may be seen as part of another, almost opposite widely shared cultural situation or need: a reaction against secularization, an objection to its reduction or rejection of the beyond, or (more indirectly) to the social and historical bad infinites with which it has been historically contemporary.Footnote ⁴⁵