I see that Steven Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory argues for the relevance of the beautiful rather than the sublime (and Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. He reverses the postmodern preference for sublime over the beautiful by privileging beauty over the sublime. So what is meant by beauty? A feeling without a concept?

Shaviro says:

Most aesthetics of the past century has been focused on the sublime, and has disparaged the beautiful. This is because the sublime involves a moment of rupture or disproportion, whereas the beautiful seems to involve accommodation, comfort, and proportion. Thus, for instance, Roland Barthes is clearly on the side of jouissance (which is sublime) as opposed to mere plaisir (which corresponds to the beautiful).I argue, however, that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful remains important, because it is really a nascent version of what Deleuze calls singularity. A judgment of beauty is non-cognitive and non-conceptual; beauty is that which cannot be subject to rules, or derived from rules. It is always a singularity or an exception. It cannot be reduced to norms.

On the one hand, 21st century marketing and commodity production seem increasingly to be concerned with questions of “aesthetics”...This is so, both in the manner of Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense”, and in the way that the aesthetic attributes of our existence have themselves become commodified and marketed, so that today we are incited to purchase, not just tangible commodity objects, but also such things as events, experiences, moods, memories, hopes, and desires.

In contrast, Shavior argues for immanent conception of beauty --a conceptual engagement with 'feelings without concepts'. In his Beauty Lies in The Eye beauty refers to the loss of aura without the shock or trauma; more to Andy Warhols "It's great." The Kantian bit reres to beauty disconnected from morality or utilty and to a kind of passivity or indifference that is still very much of this world. The judgement is entirely singular as there is no concept to determine it, and yet the judgement is universal and we demand assent from others regarding it.