The Sublime & The Vulgar
6-19-06 Introductory Words: My Own Thought Experiment
Is there an art that is not sublime? What is sublimation? It is the use of mental & sexual energy for the production of works of the imagination that we call art. Sublimation is constituted by the refining of physical urges into mental fantasies & esthetic projects. On the larger level all of the world of man-made objects are products of sublimation. Brooms and clocks and pitch forks or silver ware and items of clothing. But also cities are objects of sublimation. They are imagined quantities. Sublimation consists in the conversion of what was formerly sexual desire or the instincts of the body into higher forms of creation and invention that benefit society as for instance the complete matrix of the urban world.
It has been said that the movement in arts & letters known as Modernism is constituted nost especially and singularly by the phenomenon of Sublimation. This is its crowning aspect. This distinguishes Modernism from what came before it Romanticism and what comes after Postmodernism. What occurred in Postmodernism is a running together of Modernism (sublimation) and the popular culture. No longer does the pure form of Sublimation hold sway over English departments for example as it once did. Now other lower vulgar forms of esthetic expression have broken into the stream of the formerly pure waters of Modernism that is evident in such masters as Wallace Stevens & T.S. Eliot & James Joyce. And the two forms of expression---the Sublime & the vulgar---bleed into eachother in the works of literature that have gained importance in the last 25 to fifty years. However, Modernism is also kept alive in works that retain this character of essential sublimation. The whole anti-realist school of literature which is a mixed bag of writers unable for me to summarize here seems to me at first glance to be part of the school of the sublime in literature. Whereas popular culture of the day has always been on the front burner of American letters and the novel & has thousands of practitioners in every major field of art. Let me get back to you to clarify these very hazy & perfunctory remarks.
RLG Copyright 2006
Is there an art that is not sublime? What is sublimation? It is the use of mental & sexual energy for the production of works of the imagination that we call art. Sublimation is constituted by the refining of physical urges into mental fantasies & esthetic projects. On the larger level all of the world of man-made objects are products of sublimation. Brooms and clocks and pitch forks or silver ware and items of clothing. But also cities are objects of sublimation. They are imagined quantities. Sublimation consists in the conversion of what was formerly sexual desire or the instincts of the body into higher forms of creation and invention that benefit society as for instance the complete matrix of the urban world.
It has been said that the movement in arts & letters known as Modernism is constituted nost especially and singularly by the phenomenon of Sublimation. This is its crowning aspect. This distinguishes Modernism from what came before it Romanticism and what comes after Postmodernism. What occurred in Postmodernism is a running together of Modernism (sublimation) and the popular culture. No longer does the pure form of Sublimation hold sway over English departments for example as it once did. Now other lower vulgar forms of esthetic expression have broken into the stream of the formerly pure waters of Modernism that is evident in such masters as Wallace Stevens & T.S. Eliot & James Joyce. And the two forms of expression---the Sublime & the vulgar---bleed into eachother in the works of literature that have gained importance in the last 25 to fifty years. However, Modernism is also kept alive in works that retain this character of essential sublimation. The whole anti-realist school of literature which is a mixed bag of writers unable for me to summarize here seems to me at first glance to be part of the school of the sublime in literature. Whereas popular culture of the day has always been on the front burner of American letters and the novel & has thousands of practitioners in every major field of art. Let me get back to you to clarify these very hazy & perfunctory remarks.
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 5:24 PM
1 Comments:
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