Ace Ventura, Lyotard

While reading Lyotard, I first wished that I had chosen to do my pre-class post on Benjamin whose concepts were much easier to grasp. Lyotard often refers to Kant while discussing the meanings of art and literature in this concept of "reality". Lyotard asks the question, "But how to make visible that there is something that cannot be seen?" and Kant answers this with the idea of "formlessness" (3). Art and literature are in reality, but the concepts in them are our own interpretations, so how can we make these interpretations real? How can we convey the meaning that we find in a peice of art or in a literary work to someone else viewing the same peice. And if we can not convey this message to another, does that call into question its validity or does that make it less real? Kant says, "the empty 'abstraction' which the imagination experiences when in search for a presentation of the infinite: this abstraction itself is like a presentation of the infinite, its 'negative presentation'" (4). Through attempting to convey your personal interpretation to another, you make it real. Even if they do not grasp the same concept, you had validated its existence in having it either accepted or rejected by the others. In the philosophy course that I took my sophomore year of college, we studied many of Kant's theories and, in summary, his beliefs are that reality is an abstract concept only until you take it in, interpret it, and then project it out into the world again. When applied to Lyotard's position on art forms and literature, this is to say that a meaning has yet to exist for a painting or a novel until you make one.