Hollywood Utopia

190 Hollywood Utopia
notion of a pristine wilderness’ or the idea of a ‘limitless fully immersive
cyberspace’ (Robins 1996: 93). Such spatial analysis falls into the trap of
positioning all abstract notions of space into the same dimension of ‘cognitive
mapping’ mentioned previously, thereby demeaning the more concrete ecological
appreciation of space as a constituent of interactive organisms, including human.
Criticism becomes trapped in an ethereal cyberspace where ‘man can play God’
but without having to cope with the ethics of responsibility or the chaotic fluidity
of our ‘natural’ spatial eco-system.
The importance of spatial analysis can perhaps best be understood with reference
to Kant’s concept of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘pleasure’ achieved through human
communion with the environment. Kant cogently affirms a conventional romantic
sensibility when he asserts that while ‘beauty’ can be regarded as mere ‘restful
contemplation’, the ‘sublime’ in contrast creates an ‘intellectual feeling’ and makes
us ‘feel moved’. Lyotard nevertheless appears to turn Kant’s theory upside down,
exposing ‘its strange non-connectivity to nature’. The sublime, on the whole, gives
‘no indication of anything final in nature itself, but only the possible employment
of our intuitions of it. It is ignorant of nature . . .’ (Lyotard cited in Haber 1994:
139).
Lyotard goes on to associate the sublime with the ‘unrepresentable’ which is
beyond the mastery of naming and which prompts artistic (and by implication
intellectual and social) experiment. Lyotard regards the Kantian sublime as being
closely bound up with the essence of modernity. The modernist sublime, which has
been explored in earlier chapters, following this line of argument, is essentially
nostalgic and its form ‘continues to offer to the reader or viewer, matter for solace
or pleasure’ (Lyotard 1984: 340).
Whereas for Lyotard the postmodern (avant-gardist), sublime
puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the
solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share
collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations,
not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable
(ibid.)
Lyotard specifically focuses on what he sees as the postmodernist inability to
represent, which, according to Broderick, now ‘surpasses our power to represent
and pitches us into a sort of Gothic rapture’ (Broderick 1995: 104). Bertens
usefully suggests, however, that both modern and postmodernist aesthetics remain
preoccupied with notions of the sublime and are equally concerned with the