Thread: What is art?

Originally Posted by seanayb

Isn't the aforementioned invocation of the sublime itself the essence then? Or if not that, then the "family resemblance" to other pieces of art? The essence of X is that which is necessary to X, so to define art in any certain (necessary) terms is to name its essence.

Well, I would argue in this case, that's avoided, and I'll explicate in order to demonstrate why. In the Zizekian corpus, the Real refers to that which avoids being conceptualised, made meaningful or represented in the Symbolic and Imaginary orders (i.e. words or conceptual schemes in the case of the Symbolic, images in the case of the Imaginary.). The Real, then, is the thing experienced by the pre-lingual subject, it is what a toothbrush is before you can name it toothbrush, explain what it is used for, link it to other toothbrushes etc. The Real is experienced in adult life when you cannot explain or systematise an experience, and, to Zizek, in it's inverted form when you use a word which has no meaning, refers to nothing, or has an infinite, transcendent, or surplus meaning (which is actually the same thing in this theory) (for Zizek, words like "God", "My Country", "The Soul" and so on, called "signifiers without signifieds"). For Zizek, then, Religious, aesthetic, patriotic feelings exploit the Human experience of the Real, and so, ironically, they actually do point "beyond" all human comprehension and experience (Whether this is inherently atheist is another debate). Art is an experience of the Real in that it defies all meaning by having a surplus of it, cannot in fact actually refer to anything ("What is she smiling at?"), and so is ultimately a "signifier without signified". I would argue that since the Real is not limited to Art but rather Art is simply one socially prescribed channel of the Real, the Real cannot be called the "essence" of art; and since Zizek uses the word "sublime" simply to identify the Kantian sublime with this particular channel of the Real, he is not using the word "sublime" essentially but only definitionally. Hence I can ascribe to it a culturally contingent existence using family resemblance theory and Structuralism without logical contradiction (because the Real is an ontological category, Art merely a contingent channel of this).

EDIT: I realised that "essentially but only definitionally" is far from lucid. What I should say is that when Kant uses the word sublime, insofar as it has a definite meaning, it is merely tautological. "Art is the Sublime" means only that art is art. Insofar as it says anything more, as it does, I think that we would agree that the sublime means "beyond, transcendent". Naturally, in this view, when Sublime means that it is a textbook example of a signifier without signified. "Sublime" therefore does not define what art does, but explicates it by performing the same function as art i.e. Pointing out and attempting to accommodate into the symbolic and imaginary orders the existence of the Real.

As far as the "family resemblance as essence" thing goes, I think that's stretching the definition of essence. Surely "essence" must be "that which is shared by all members of the group and not with things outside the group"; if this is the case, then family resemblance theory is precisely anti-essentialist because it denies that all members of the group share the same thing. To say that the family resemblance is itself the essence fails because family resemblance is a phenomenon in other systems like games; to say that "family resemblance to other pieces of art" is the essence doesn't work either because it utilises the concept of "art" in the definition of "art", hence already admitting that art pre-exists any formulation of it's essence and therefore is contingent rather than essential.