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. Sounds Like Now: Form-Contrariness, Romanticism, and the Postmodern Sublime In The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard invents a string of associations with the German gehorsam sein: to be obedient, or, literally translated, to be able or tending to hear. ‘‘To obey,’’ Lyotard suggests, ‘‘is gehorchen. Gehören is not far, to pertain to, to depend on an agency, to fall into a domain, under an authority, a dominus. And zuhören, to lend one’s ear.’’ There is, Lyotard continues , ‘‘an inexhaustible network linking listening to belonging, to the sense of obligation, a passivity I would like to translate as passibility’’ (TI ). As a concept, passibility nicely merges ‘‘possibility’’ with the idea of something coming to pass or being allowed to pass through. In Lyotard’s book, being in a state of passibility means being in a mental state that hinges between activity and passivity, neither and both, a state of being open (mentally , bodily, creatively) so that something unexpected may arise. It is a ‘‘soliciting of emptiness,’’ an ‘‘evacuation’’ of preconceptions and intentions, in short a state of indeterminacy in which one’s mind is suspended so as to allow something un-thought (a word, phrase, color, sound that ‘‘doesn’t yet exist’’ ) to come to pass (TI ). And then, ‘‘it’’ happens, gracefully—or not. Passibility could well be the key term for the postmodern sublime feeling : this feeling no longer exclusively turns on a mind suspended by shock but on a mind willingly suspending its own intentions to welcome the unknown . If and when an alien, un-thought event happens is contingent, yet it is this very contingency that makes up its sublimity as an occurrence: something that appears all of a sudden out of nowhere. This is the wonder of the postmodern sublime: a philosophical wonder celebrating that there is something rather than nothing, but also a creative wonder ‘‘belonging’’ to the painter, thinker, or composer who has suddenly hit on a new turn.1 It is significant that Lyotard should embed this concept of passibility in an aural network and in turn signify this network ethically in terms of dependability , obedience, and obligation: what is at stake here is not just the ability but also the demand to hear, to be receptive. Indeed, being receptive  Form-Contrariness, Romanticism, and the Postmodern Sublime  to an otherness that the mind cannot (yet) quite ‘‘place’’ or contain is what the postmodern sensitivity revolves around here: the sublime is invasive as it makes the soul or anima, as Lyotard calls it, aware of its own dependability on an ‘‘outside.’’ It is not itself, as a core already available, but an other that propels its animation and apparition. Thus, the soul is not, ‘‘does not affect itself, it is only affected by the other. . . . Existing is to be awoken from the nothingness of disaffection by something sensible over there’’ (PF ). The soul is called upon, in the very ancient sense of being implored or invoked, and in this calling senses its precariousness. It senses its vulnerability in the absence of an absolute foundation or autonomous ‘‘existence’’: it is contingent , relying, so to speak, on an intrusive violence that poses as external (an ‘‘over there’’) but is at the same time internal (an ‘‘already there’’) in its constitutive force. Responsiveness thus plays a crucial role in the postmodern sublime. This urgency of responsiveness is reinforced in Lyotard’s essays on Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist rerenderings of the pictorial sublime (TI –, –). Consistently, Lyotard here describes looking at the fourteen Stations of the Cross (–) in terms of the waiting and suspension he associates with hearing: ‘‘I (the viewer) am no more than an ear open to the sound which comes to it from out of the silence; the painting is that sound, an accord’’ (TI ). Newman’s paintings become aural events insofar as they embody happenings that occur suddenly, unforeseen. They do not ‘‘depict’’ the sublime but make it happen in their material occurring: if there is any ‘‘subject matter’’ in these paintings, Lyotard suggests, ‘‘it is immediacy. It happens here and now’’ (TI ). These paintings do not show things; they present the act of becoming apparent: they offer the sublime performatively. Self-pronouncements: the very possibility of self-presentation or selfperformance is here intimately tied to a refusal to figure in the sense of realistic pictorial figuration creating the illusion of a three-dimensional space. That is to say, for Lyotard it is their apparent barrenness that allows these paintings...

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