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public they address, and second, works so made that the public will recognise what they are about, will understand what is signified, will be able to give or refuse approval knowingly, and if possible, even to derive from such work a certain amount of comfort". Given the inadequacy of these two positions, as neither provides the possibility for growth, change and development, and in fact both provoke a tacit but insidious repression of post modern exploration, what is one to use for a substitute? What are possible criteria for assessment of experimental work? Lyotard writes "I see a much earlier modulation of Nietzschean perspectivism in the Kantian theme of the sublime. I think that, in particular, it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms". He goes on to write that the sublime sentiment carries with it a contradiction, a pleasure derived from pain. This contradiction develops as a conflict between the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to present something. The sublime experience is evoked when the imagination fails to present an object that matches the concept. He concludes that ideas of which no presentation is possible impart no knowledge about reality and "prevent the free union of the faculties which give rise to the sentiment of the beautiful; and they prevent the formation and the stabilisation of taste. They can be said to be un-representable". So the task of the post modernists is "to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible". The definition of the post modern continues: ..."that which, in the modern, puts forward the un-representable 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 searched for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the un-presentable. The post-modern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work produced is not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artists and writer then are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what 'will have been done'. Hence the fact that the word and text have the quality of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, this realisation always begins too soon". This is not a case for deliberately obfuscating the issue. As Perry Meisel points out in his article 'Imitation Modernism.' The aesthetic of difficulty as expressed by Joyce, for example, reached its hiatus in Joyce's work, in that time. The search for the post-modern must not succumb to the position of such alienation that it becomes entrenched in the obscure for its own sake. Such entrenchment merely leads to further institutionalisation and a failure to discover the "unreality of reality". The invention of genuinely new languages which are in themselves un-presentable, not because they seek obscurity, but because they are new, because they refer to redefinition of what can be said to be art - this is the task of post-modern work and the challenge for critics and funding bodies.
