Infinity Pools;
The Sublime, Bound Beauty, Absolutes
“One of the distinctions often made between beauty and the sublime is between boundlessness and boundedness. For Kant, Beauty and Sublimity are opposed along the semantic axes quality-quantity, shaped-shapeless, bounded-boundless. And many a champion of the sublime have used the boundedness of beauty as a critique to ground advocacies of the sublime.
Beauty is a quality bound to form, but rather than following a metaphysical position on form – we deal with what we have gained from Meillassoux - "an absolute without an absolute entity”, form as the radical contingency of all things, bound in a virtual outside all infinities, in the end of order, in the certainty that we could at any moment fall off the edge of the world.
Beauty since the Sublime
If we consider beauty since postmodernism, it has seemed as though it has become far less of interest to our aesthetic discussions than that of the sublime. The sublime, as Kant proposes it in his critique of judgement, is abundant in contemporary aesthetic cultures as Shaviro mentions in his re-investigation of the Beautiful - “The sublime seems more appropriate to contemporary taste because it is an aesthetic of immensity, excess and disproportion, whereas the Beautiful is one of harmony and proportion. It is as if Beauty were somehow old-fashioned, whereas the sublime is considered more radical.” (Shaviro 1997)
The sublime revels in the openness of the unpresentable, in the anxiety between the immense power of large-scale and impotence of understanding. It yields excellent open reason - that in the 80s and 90s vanquished all sorts of societal injustices and is, no doubt, still doing so. The sublime takes place in a site is away from its form, like that shift the site of artwork made by Duchamp etc. Since modernisms such as Duchamp’s the sublime has just seemed more appropriate to art and the avant-gardes tastes and as we have already mentioned has become something of a posterboy for much of post-modern aesthetics.
Yet the sublime is limited despite its ability to seize “upon what is received, it seeks to reflect and overcome. It seeks to determine what has already been thought, written, painted, or socialised in order to determine what hasn’t already been.” (Lyotard, 1984). Sadly it is exactly the limits of its open site in an order that allows it to think this way, to grasp the expansive becoming of within the correlation. Yet as Kant describes it faced with the immensity of such an endeavour the imagination involved in the sublime pales as “its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself’ (Kant, 1987, p.252). The sublime is an appearance of boundlessness without being free.
Beauty
What of any kind of bound aesthetic experience, it is certainly the boundedness of beauty which has led to co-options by many an aesthetic politic of high taste and the meta-narratives all the sublime was doing away with. What of a bounded concept that were not to fall victim to any of these ails. What of a beauty that were bound and were more interesting than some tool of social exclusion?
Kant himself offers some tools to think beauty outside of criticisms such as Lyotards. Lyotard even quotes Kant saying that the “consensus as to what is beautiful must remain free; in other words, that it is not regulated a priori by laws (Lyotard, 1982, p.4). Here we find a clear springboard into Meillassoux’s project. We have learnt that for Meillassoux that we can only understand the absolute as the radical contingency of all things, the annihilation of any claims to a truthful founding of any statement about an a priori.
Beauty appears in the entity of the thing or event not in the here-and-now of the sublime but in an-any-moment-whatever of a node of subjectification that lets us past order and through to the absolute.
Bound Infinity
"'Cantor's theorem', as it is known, can be intuitively glossed as follows: take
any set, count its elements, then compare this number to the number of possible groupings of these elements (by two, by three - but there are also groupings 'by one', or 'by all', which is identical with the whole set). You will always obtain the same result: the set B of possible groupings (or parts) of a set A is always bigger than A - even if A is infinite." (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.157)
This is the transfinite, a devise that Meillassoux uses to create a distinction between chance and contingency. This distinction is the removal of Kant's probabilistic reasoning. For example, chance - when considering the role of a dice, chance is a totally fixed schema that deals in stakes of what is likely to happen between certain parameters (degreees of predictability), Like – randomness. In Meillassoux's hyper-chaotic contingency randomness can only exist as a quotation, just as the infinite ends up being quoted within the transfinite. “Hyperchaos simply denotes that everything either could or could not change without reason; it could remain in perpetual flux or could remain in the same state for an indefinite duration.” (Meillassoux, 2008a) It is totally conceivable that in Hyperchaos a world could end up completely made up of fixed objects, without any becoming whatsoever. From the vantage of hyperchaos, everything is contingent – even disorder and becoming themselves. And it is in this extension beyond necessity that we find beauty in any entity.
Lyotard's texts on the sublime deal with an infinity that he associates with the vanishing point of perspective and traditional pictorial aesthetics, as well as the reach of science, technology and economics “making concrete the infinity of ideas”. He sees perspective of this kind registering "well-ordered universe” that extends “all the way to the vanishing point” (Lyotard, 1982). His critique is formulated on the politic that classic aesthetic sensibilities of beauty are reproduced in the mechanical image production that came with the invention of the camera its mass production, and he sees this as part of the an ‘infinite’ extension of the technoscientific and economic reason of capitalism which makes pictures of order unproductive.
In an infinity pool the key mechanism one discovers is not Infinity, but several infinities. They function not just in the doubled horizon of the image but also precisely in its role as a commodity. Each horizon, be it the lip of the pool, the frame of an image, edge of your material desires, each is a limit of the infinity of order, and what lays beyond is exactly the hyperchaos of Meillassoux’s radical contingency.
It is here in beauties long reach to the end of order where we find its access to Meillassoux’s Absolute. All one need do is follow the perspective of Lyotard’s critique to its limit and one finds this radical contingency.
This beyond seems to be similar to that which Lyotard is concerned with while he is discussing presenting the unpresentable. For Lyotard though the unpresentable one gets access to the unmediated temporality of the ‘Here-and-Now’ that exists as an ‘openness’ it is in an order already constructed through some a priori logic, be it one of becoming, fixity or probability. It is a gap in infinity, (or capitalism) that resists the prescribed order that surrounds it. This gap can be considered to be the site of much of the differentiation of post-structuralism or the deterritorialisation of Deleuze’s project. The Sublime with an expansion of imagination when it is not bound by understanding however it reaches a limit it cannot go beyond. As Deleuze says, “In the sublime, Imagination surrenders itself to an activity quite distinct from that of formal reflection.” It is concerned with the formless gap made for imagination in the correlation, but it is unable to go beyond, for the Sublime hovers with the becoming of reason and all its assumed limits, in the openness in creates in a supposed infinite.
Given our concern with Meillassoux’s project this quality of the Sublime leaves it unable to have any access to anything other than the schema that it is formulated within. It is similar to the openness of artworks concerned with chance.
Within this conception of beauty really we would have to consider all correlationist conceptions of beauty to actually be examples of the sublime. Perhaps even further the whole philosophical project hovering in the openness of the sublime caught in a never ending productive loop which may as well be the correlationist circle.
This beauty we have described can go beyond novelty, and beyond taste. It is a material point through which we may have access to outdoors of it.
