When reading Karl Marx’ and Frederick Engels’ The Communist Manifesto the same argument is used, they argue that capitalism is an evolution of the feudal economy and call for a proletarian revolution promising a utopia of ‘stateless communism’ once the condition of class consciousness is reached. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” (Marx and Engels 1848) They also illuminate in this statement the ‘reappropriation’ of foundations (invoking Vattimo again) that modernist paradigms rely upon. One can even listen to a politician like President Trump
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Postmodernism is not a goal, nor is it a promise of a future condition of liberty, nor is it ‘a carrot on a stick.’ It is the condition that all modern constructions of reality are fashioned out of. Language falls short but Lyotard attempted to define postmodernity through the concept of the ‘sublime.’ Following his metaphor for art, he explains that “a work [of art] can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.” This nascent state, the chaotic ‘depthlessness’ (as Jameson described above), is the ‘sublime.’ The sublime is an unpresentable condition that all presentable forms are built out of. The metaphor of the sublime being inherent in works of art is what this essay has been exploring in all of modernity and it’s artifacts. “[T]he modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator material for consolation and pleasure.” (Lyotard 1993) In relation to modernity as a paradigm, these constructions of reality within societies (whether that be the nation-state, a religion, an economic theory, a scientific elite, and/or any other social structure), hold within itself the chaotic postmodernity, the sublime, that
Postmodernism is not a goal, nor is it a promise of a future condition of liberty, nor is it ‘a carrot on a stick.’ It is the condition that all modern constructions of reality are fashioned out of. Language falls short but Lyotard attempted to define postmodernity through the concept of the ‘sublime.’ Following his metaphor for art, he explains that “a work [of art] can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.” This nascent state, the chaotic ‘depthlessness’ (as Jameson described above), is the ‘sublime.’ The sublime is an unpresentable condition that all presentable forms are built out of. The metaphor of the sublime being inherent in works of art is what this essay has been exploring in all of modernity and it’s artifacts. “[T]he modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator material for consolation and pleasure.” (Lyotard 1993) In relation to modernity as a paradigm, these constructions of reality within societies (whether that be the nation-state, a religion, an economic theory, a scientific elite, and/or any other social structure), hold within itself the chaotic postmodernity, the sublime, that