If the beautiful relates to notions of unity and harmony, then the sublime refers to fragmentation and disharmony, to the moment when thought trembles on the edge of extinction. Thus, the Enlightenment faith in reason meets its suspension in the Romantic fascination with the numinous.

In The Sublime William Shaw says that postmodern culture, which for him, roughly spans the period from the 1940s to the present day (takes a lively interest in the sublime:

Whilst postmodernism retains the Romantic feeling for the vast and the unlimited, it no longer seeks to temper this feeling through reference to a higher faculty. The postmodern condition therefore lays stress on the inability of art or reason to bring the vast and the unlimited to account. In what amounts to a retreat from the promise of enlightenment, its dream of freedom and transcendence, the postmodern affirms nothing beyond its own failure, and it does so without regret and without longing.

Shaw adds that the differences between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can be highlighted in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable.

He says that:

Where Romantic art tends, on the whole, to link the unpresentable with ideas of the divine or, in its humanist manifestation, with the concept of mind, postmodern culture endeavours to retain a sense of the unpresentable as absolutely other....Unlike modernism... which ‘allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents’, Lyotard claims that the postmodern ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’