The Aesthetics of Inadequacy, Still

Despite an increasingly complex understanding of their relationship, modern and postmodern art may still be said to share in an ­exploration of the limits of representation. Although each is motivated by a wide and ever-changing range of aesthetic, social, political and cultural ­concerns, both embrace negative presentations—images of failure, rupture, ­fragility, transience, and decay—in a way that bridges many of their ­differences. French post-structural philosopher Jean-François Lyotard once referred to this as an aesthetics of “the missing contents,”1 1  - Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. ­famously distinguishing between the modern and postmodern ­according to the manner in which each approached the idea of the ­unpresentable, rather than on the basis of a binary opposition or linear timeline. For Lyotard, as for many post-structuralists, the postmodern was not only an inextricable part of the modern, it was its “nascent state,”2 2  - Lyotard, 79. and ­images of inadequacy were common to both. 

Perhaps no other philosophical category is better suited to ­theorizing aesthetic inadequacy than the sublime. Not surprisingly, the advent of postmodernism proper is concatenate with a renewed ­interest in this concept, and particularly as it was articulated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgement (1790). Unlike previous works on the ­subject, Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime contended that the sublime did not occur in nature or in “any sensuous form,” but instead “concerned the ideas of reason.”³ 3 - Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 92.  It was therefore an elusive event, a feeling that occurred only within the spectator. In contrast to the beautiful, which produces a pleasing and harmonious balance of faculties, the Kantian sublime results from a mental rift, a cleaving of the mind in which reason thinks the almost unthinkable—infinity, death, limitlessness, disaster—and imagination fails to provide it with a commensurate image.