. . . the intuition of duration, when it is exposed to the rays of the understanding, in like manner quickly turns into fixed, distinct and immobile concepts. In the living mobility of things the understanding is bent on marking real or virtual stations, it notes departures and arrivals; for this is all that concerns the thought of man in so far as it is simply human. It is more than human to grasp what is happening in the interval. But philosophy can only be an effort to transcend the human condition.129
It is the subverting of the conventional signifying systems of verbal discourse that Julia Kristeva, in her Revolution of Poetic Language, assigns to poetry, ascribing it to the category of the “semiotic,” a sort of fluid, pleasurable excess over precise, univocal meaning, which takes delight in destroying or negating the rigid signifying systems of the social-symbolic order.130 It is this “pleasurable excess” St. John describes. Apophatic, like poetic, discourse is propositionally unstable and dynamic, effecting a kind of ecstatic instability, liberated from logic, with effect on our perception. Rupture in language (the term is Kristeva’s) occurs in the poetic text by pushing linguistic signification to its extreme limit—through, for instance, rhythm, intonation, sound-play, repetition—subverting stability, precision, and clarity in meaning, rendering it mobile, plural, and open to potentially new forms and disrupting fixed hearer/reader-subject positions.
Indifferent to language . . . this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation . . . What is more, when poetic language . . . transgresses grammatical rules, the positing of the symbolic finds itself subverted . . . as a possessor of meaning . . .131
If, then, Bergson’s “duration” is a notion of time radically independent of space (and language), it is inaccessible to reflective consciousness, as cognitive thinking represents things in space—a form of symbolic representation. Duration can only be lived or experienced. There is much more at stake than the supposed “instant” of visual perception, if perception/experience is understood to be an extended—and lived—activity, one of continuous adjusting, shifting attention, forgetting, calling back into memory. And it is this sense of extendedness to perception that matters in Bergson’s “durée.”
There is a similar redefinition of time conveyed by our mystics’ reversion to a pre-modern idea of non-linear, non-measurable time—an idea, according to Viola, captured by its artists as welclass="underline" “artists in the early fifteenth century were not burdened by the idea of optical representation as being locked into a single moment of time, so they were able to show the same person in multiple places within the same landscape in a single picture.”132 He is drawing attention here to a very real distinction of orders of realty—that of ritual and that of narrative—that correspond to two opposing conceptions of time: ritual time (eternal recurrence) and narrative time (perpetual present). And this redefinition of the temporal is registered in his own art of duration and absorption—in slow motion, time lapse, accelerations and decelerations of time—that extend the moment of viewing into a time of attentiveness and receptivity, wherein what is captured is, in a sense, the invisible. “The invisible,” Viola says, “is always much more present than the visible.”133 Linear and sequential (narrative) time is disrupted in the form of large, slow-moving, mesmerizing images that, the artist contends, “extend the self into time with the capacity to anticipate and recall.” Thinking in time, for Bergson, through its very iterative structure, “crushes duration.”134 As such, we are invited, by implication, to imagine a process “before” signification or coding, a “pre-linguistic” experience, and thus a shift from the (modernist) certainties of mechanism to the (postmodern) potentialities/anxieties of indeterminacy. These manipulations of temporal experience are suited to the technologies of time-based media, which therefore allow for a new consideration of the sublime in contemporary art.
Lyotard and the Apophatic Postmodern Sublime
For French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime (in art) is essential in our postmodern age, an age in which all legitimizing and stabilizing narratives have been shattered, as the sublime keeps relevant metaphysical thinking.135
That which is not demonstrable is that which stems from Ideas . . . The universe is not demonstrable; neither is humanity, the end of history, the moment, the species, the good, the just, etc.—or, according to Kant, absolutes in general.136
Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991) is in many respects a renewal of Kant’s critical project. Philosopher David Johnson explains:
Following Kant very closely, Lyotard identifies the experience of sublimity as the simultaneous feeling of pleasure and pain that accompanies the imagination’s inevitably failed attempt to present to thought an intuition that would adequately correspond to an idea of the absolute generated by the faculty of reason. Through this failure, thought is made to feel the unintuitable presence of this idea of the absolute, as well as the superiority of the faculty of reason over both the imagination and the phenomena of nature the latter presents. For Lyotard, the essential mechanism of this experience can thus be summarized in one short formula: the presentation of the unpresentable . . . It is this humbling failure of the imagination before reason, in spite of the former’s greatest efforts, that gives rise to the painful component of the feeling engendered in the sublime.137
According to Lyotard, contemporary art—abstract art, in particular, which for Lyotard representes a new apophaticism—can give new form to Kant’s “negative presentation” of the unpresentable; it can make “ungraspable allusions to the invisible within the visible.”138 The incapacity of the imagination produces a negative presentation of what exceeds presentation, “a sign of the presence of the absolute.” And Lyotard brings this to bear on modern art which will, he argues, “‘present’ something though negatively; it will therefore avoid figuration or representation.”139 Once again we find a denial of and collapse of the Logos, wherein “language enters into a generalized crisis and the currency of the word goes bust. The . . . collapse of verbal assurance fosters cultures that can be characterized as ‘apophatic,’ that is, as veering into widespread worries about the reliability of words and even into wholesale refusal of rational discourse.”140 “The aesthetic of the sublime,” Lyotard argues elsewhere, “is where modern art . . . finds its impetus . . . showing that there is something we can conceive of which we can neither see nor show.”141 The “presence” he identifies as “a kind of transcendental pre-logic in which thought and sensation are complicit” is prior to an orientation by the categories of the understanding that enable feeling to be thought. This “presence” does not correspond to the ontological order of things in themselves, the immediate apprehension of which was for Lyotard, as for Kant, impossible. The presentation of the sublime, then, is negative; it is, Lyotard argues, “compatible with the formless,” it exceeds the Kantian faculties of imagination—understanding and reason—and is thus freighted with negativity in words like “abyss,” “unboundedness,” “incommensurate, “unconditioned”; it is an awakening of the idea of the supersensible in the subjectivity of contemplation on the sublime. For Lyotard it acknowledges the “desire for the unknown” in the postmodern: