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61 2 u Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry Burke’s contribution to theories of artistic representation has often been overshadowed by the sensualism and physiologism of the Enquiry, and underestimated because of the treatise’s lack of abstract speculation. Nevertheless, a number of critics have noticed the originality of his reflection on language, on terror, on the complexity of the aesthetic experience or on the irrational, and consequently emphasised the relevance of the Enquiry for later aesthetic theories, especially those which
The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
motion by artists before him as a conscious response to a clearly perceived 269 270 Relocating the sublime challenge. This contention requires examining the various channels through which eighteenth-century theories of the sublime reached Turner, before assessing his exploration of pictorial processes which attempt to overcome the mimetic limitations of visual representation and articulate the presentation of the unpresentable. Poetic endeavours In Chapters 6 and 7, I have already included Turner’s work among contemporary examples of experiments with unlimitation
the link with an external – physical or visionary –reality. Just as Kant described the workings of the imagination as the presentation of an unpresentable which ultimately encountered its sensible limits, these artists’ conception of the sublime made evident a representational gap between visual presentation and its object. Although this inadequacy signalled a significant departure from classical aesthetics and its definition of a stable perfect form, it was not yet a conscious rejection of the principle of representation itself. For such a rupture to be taken
paradigms, and even though by the time it reached artists like Turner it had undergone a number of theoretical and poetic inflections, I contend that he provided a notable impetus. To begin with, his Enquiry initiated the antipictorialism which, I argue, stirred the ambitions of visual artists and incited them to compete with the productions of poetry. More significantly perhaps, his conception of the sublime as beyond the reach of certain forms of representations may be seen as the source of a compelling urge to ‘present the unpresentable’, which I consider to be
Madchester may have been born at the Haçienda in the summer of 1988, but the city had been in creative ferment for almost a decade prior to the rise of Acid House. The End-of-the-Century Party is the definitive account of a generational shift in popular music and youth culture, what it meant and what it led to. First published right after the Second Summer of Love, it tells the story of the transition from New Pop to the Political Pop of the mid-1980s and its deviant offspring, Post-Political Pop. Resisting contemporary proclamations about the end of youth culture and the rise of a new, right-leaning conformism, the book draws on interviews with DJs, record company bosses, musicians, producers and fans to outline a clear transition in pop thinking, a move from an obsession with style, packaging and synthetic sounds to content, socially conscious lyrics and a new authenticity.
This edition is framed by a prologue by Tara Brabazon, which asks how we can reclaim the spirit, energy and authenticity of Madchester for a post-youth, post-pop generation. It is illustrated with iconic photographs by Kevin Cummins.
Jean-François Lyotard the litmus test is not self-reflexivity or a combination of formal characteristics, but how the text positions itself vis-à-vis the sublime, ‘the unpresentable’ in his terms. The hallmark of ‘modern aesthetics’, which for Lyotard is an aesthetics of the sublime, is nostalgia. Modernism ‘allows the unpresentable’ – of which it is fully aware – ‘to be put forward as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter
), 81. What Cixous calls ‘break[ing] with our thought habits’ has clear affinities with what Lyotard talks about, in the same essay, as ‘put[ting] forward the unpresentable in presentation itself ’ and a commitment ‘to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’ (81). 19 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Cinders , trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1991), 53; Aporias: Dying – awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’ , trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 49, 69; ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own
posits art as a disclosure of truth as ‘the secret of that which comprises nothing other than the multiple, discreet, discontinuous, heterogeneous, and singular touch of being itself ’.39 This is not therefore the presentation of or that there is an unpresentable, but rather the presentation that presentation is itself singular plural, that there are multiple origins of the world, that the world is constituted in and by our Being-in-common, which itself is finite and fragmented. For Nancy, what remains of the Romantic fragment is the sense of incompletion and the lack
, non-religious theorising of death. Melmoth is a restless, damned spirit; his Faustian pact is such that he needs someone to take his place. But Maturin keeps writing Melmoth’s story, embedding each tale into another as if the act of writing itself is a deferral of death because the latter is ‘unpresentable’ to consciousness. The Gothic, as a