Jean-François Lyotard's Underground AestheticsAuthor(s): John RajchmanSource: October, Vol. 86 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-18Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779104Accessed: 10/09/2010 00:12

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Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

JOHN RAJCHMAN

Jean-Francois Lyotard leaves us a large and complex oeuvre we are perhaps yet to understand; Discours, Figure, an important work still fresh today, is yet to

appear in English; and even in French one awaits several posthumous publications. What sort of oeuvre is it? Perhaps since Adorno no philosopher has worked as

directly with "aesthetics"; and unlike some of his more "textualist" contemporaries, Lyotard was peculiarly concerned with the visual arts, one might even say with "the visual" in art. Painting retained its privilege for him, no matter all the computer consoles of the postmodern condition.

Lyotard invented a peculiar style, an original way of doing aesthetics. His aes- thetic writings trace a powerful line that runs through all the more philosophical works for which he is better known-a line of fragility and mobility that accompanies his thought. In his hands aesthetics was thus not a high-minded "appreciation" of

works; it was not a methodological aid to historical research or critical appraisal; it was not even a "theory," unless by that one means an attempt to think-and to see-

just where one doesn't or can't know. It was more a tool to expose often unseen

tensions, shifts, and complications in philosophical thinking and its relations with

society-a way of helping it depart from doxa without the assurances of higher knowl-

edge or even a sensus communis. That is why in the philosophical works that name and work out these tensions, we find not one philosophy but many talking to one

another, held together without being unified, the notion of aesthetics itself assuming different guises with the rhythm of their unresolved tensions. For Lyotard's philoso- phy was by design without doctrine or method, but rather embraced a "weakness" he took to be its force and with which he would navigate across and in between all the

geographic and conceptual boundaries dividing up philosophy since World War II. In Hegel aesthetics is absorbed in a higher philosophical "synthesis"-that is

what makes it a "melancholy science," tied up with the end or dying of art; and even Heidegger, taking up this idea, would imagine art agonizing for several centuries under the aegis of "aesthesis."' For Lyotard, by contrast, aesthetics

1. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 79ff.: "Experience is the element in which art dies. The dying occurs so slowly that

OCTOBER 86, Fall 1998, pp. 3-18. ? 1998 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OCTOBER

became more a "gay science," concerned with a time to come rather than a compendious "philosophy of history," a restless activity that starts in those "incommensurabilities" in our practices or agreements which ensure that the language one ends up with in thinking is never the same as the one from which one starts, since it translates something as yet unspoken and never completely understood. With this "weakness" (this "impouvoir," as he called it) there then goes a whole art-one might say an ethic-of breaking with those with whom one nevertheless identifies, while exposing oneself to the singularities of those one nevertheless tries to understand.

Take, for example, Lyotard's concept of "presenting the unrepresentable." In one way it offers a way of reading the beautiful-sublime distinction in Kant, which, in turn, concerns the whole idea of the "aesthetic" in his philosophy. But in itself it is not exactly part of a doctrine or method. It is rather a way of talking about a sort of accomplice and stimulant to the attempt to make thinkable some-

thing as yet unthought. It is a way of pointing to that strange zone where art and

thinking discover secret and unpredictable relations with one another prior to the institutions or practices that serve to circumscribe or prescribe them. In this sense, "presenting the unrepresentable" is one name for a complex problem formulated in different ways within Lyotard's work as well as without.

What, for example, does it have to do with the invisibility of the "flesh of the world" in the late Merleau-Ponty, or with the absolute "alterity" of the face in Levinas, or with the "plane of immanence" in Deleuze, with the question of judg- ment and judgment day in Kant, the themes of transgression and sovereignty in Bataille, or the notion of language game in Wittgenstein? What does it suppose about "sense," and what does it mean to inhabit or be-together in the world, or for those possibilities of action (and "agency") that arise in relation to what he called the event or the time "to come"? But also and at the same time, how did it figure in the work of Klee or Cezanne, or in the way Duchamp would then "transform the field" of the visual in turn? What does it mean for the very idea of an avant- garde and the types of historicity associated with it, or for the kind of conception under which the art work falls in Malraux's "imaginary museum"?

There is a pleasure in reading or rereading Lyotard that comes from seeing his concepts in this manner as points around which complex themes grow up and then go off in many directions at once, which belongs, I think, to the "paidea" of his work with its languid humor. In particular, the concepts of the "figural," the

it takes a few centuries." For Heidegger, aesthetics, supplanting an earlier poetics, would in fact be a slow death to all that links "great art" to disclosing truth in the history of being, its "showing" (herstellen) reduced to mere "exhibition value" (austellen). We might see Lyotard as pursuing another tack: to rethink aisthesis in terms of a "sensation" (of the unseen in seeing, the unheard in hearing, and so on) which, in contrast to Hegel, would be understood not in terms of its absorption into Spirit or History, but rather in its relation with "events." Thus, instead of "disclosing truth," it would fall to the art work to "experiment" with what is happening to us and to do violence to the "stupidity" of com- mon assumptions, appealing to another sense of "public" and "world," and hence of "aesthetics" itself.

4

Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

"unrepresentable," and the "postmodern" may be read in this way, not as postulates of grand theory or principles of a great method, but rather as three tension points in the unfolding of Lyotard's underground aesthetics, each with complicated and still unresolved relations with the others, throwing off questions or problems still with us today.

The Figural

We are accustomed to thinking of the postwar French philosophical atmosphere from which Lyotard was to emerge in terms of a dramatic passage from phenomenology to structuralism, surrounding a cluster of themes (for example, the phenomenological subject replaced by an "experience of structure" and the related "death of the author"). That is roughly how Foucault preferred to tell the story, even as he came to see structuralism itself as one variant of the many kinds of "formalism" that run throughout the century, tied up with different politics or political movements (in the case of the passage from phenomenology to structuralism, there would be the maneuvers through which Marxism, presenting itself as "fiance" to various philosophies, would shift its attractions from one to the other).2

Lyotard would, however, pursue a complicated path, which remained in some ways closer to phenomenology and in particular to the changes introduced in it by Emmanuel Levinas in the 1960s. There is a long "prehistory" in the formation of Lyotard's thought-a gap of seventeen years separating his first book, Phenomenology (1953), from his second, Discours, Figure (1971). It was a period of militant activity, starting in Algeria (where Lyotard went to teach), and continued later at Nanterre (to which he returned), the campus of the University of Paris tied up with the events of '68. It was a time of political writings for Socialisme et

2. Michel Foucault, "Structuralism and Post-structuralism," trans. Jeremy Harding, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James P. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998). Today we might see Foucault's own "aesthetic" writings from the '60s (on Bataille, Blanchot, Magritte, Roussel, etc.) as complicating this story, inasmuch as they belong to the very idea of "archive," which Foucault was developing at the time in his own "archaeological" research. In the '60s, Foucault was working on an original approach to the "art-archive" relation-how, for example, the frame of the "imaginary" museum, library, or encyclopedia came to be introduced into the very idea of arts and letters, and how arts and letters find ways to depart from them. It is in this context that we may read a theme he shared with Deleuze-the problem of "stupidity" (la betise) as distinct from error or knowledge as the element arts must fight against and from which they arise. Thus Warhol, in introducing small differences into series, would continue Flaubert's assault on stupidity within a new image-culture; and Deleuze, drawn to this "diagnostic" activity linking art and archive, would go on to ask how it might be extended to the new "debilities" of our television and information environments and related ideas of "communication." In Foucault's writings from the '60s, "art" or "aesthetics" thus mattered for the ways they depart from "regularities" of a given archive (e.g., from rules linking les mots and les choses); beyond "form" or "structure," they would belong to that zone of experimentation which keeps our relation to "archival regularities" from the attitudes of historicism, nostalgia, or melancholy or else progressivism, futurism, or teleology, introducing another sense-another time-of seeing, saying, and doing.

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Jean-Franfois Lyotard 's Underground Aesthetics

Barbarie, and later Pouvoir Ouvrier, but also of a questioning of that activity which would take him on what, using a term dear to the Situationists, he would call a derive ("swirl" or "drift"). And it is perhaps precisely through aesthetics that this drive would assume a distinctive form, tied up with a first concept and a first problem-that of the figural.

With this concept and problem, we see not only Lyotard's "way out of" phenomenology, but also at the same time a departure from a kind of linguistic bias in structuralism-its tendency, precisely, to subordinate "figure" to "discours," as, for example, in Lacan's formula that "the unconscious is structured like a language." To rescue "figure" from its subordination to "discourse" was thus, in fact, a long and complicated task with many ramifications; and one way of seeing it is in contrast to the "formalism" that grew up in New York also in relation to

painting and its vicissitudes. For we all know that in Clement Greenberg's at-first Trotskyite view of "modernism," the visual or the "optical" is to be obtained by removing all "literary content" in an act of purifying reduction or abstraction that would first be carried on in painting, then in all the other "mediums" of art. By contrast, for Lyotard the form-content distinction on which such a conception of "modernism" rests in fact stays within precisely the assumptions of "representation" from which he was trying to extract the "figural"-it remains tributary to a tradi- tional notion of "good form" that ties it to "discourse" after all (in particular that of the critic), and so remains in fact quite "classical." With the figural, by contrast, we find another notion of the "visual" in the arts, its relations with literature, and the paths taken by abstraction in modern painting; and if (as Lyotard would later say) Duchamp transforms the field in turn, it is not by rejecting pure "opticality" in favor of purely "conceptual" contents, but rather by exposing "incommensura- bilities" to shake up the notion of seeing supposed by the very idea of "opticality" and its ties to good form, introducing into it a time of delay.

The figural is thus not to be confused with the "figurative," the reduction that Greenberg (among others) made central to his account of abstraction. It belongs to another logic of pictorial space-or pictorial sensation. Thus, to take another example, in his study of the "logic of sensation" in Francis Bacon, Deleuze takes up Lyotard's distinction between the figural and the figurative to describe how Bacon recasts the history of painting and the role of abstraction in it. In Bacon we should not see a "return to figurations" but rather a reinvention of the figural that helps us see abstraction-first in Kandinsky and Mondrian, later in Pollock-from another point of view, which Deleuze develops in his own terms by distinguishing "diagram" from "code."3 In fact, Deleuze shared Lyotard's attempt to depart from the notion of an unconscious structured like a language, as if in

3. Gilles Deleuze, Logique de la sensation (Paris: Difference, 1981), pp. 63ff. I discuss Deleuze's views on abstraction and diagram in my Constructions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). In Lyotard's late writings, there is a return to themes of "sensation" and to what, in the last pages of his study of Bacon, Deleuze calls "lefait pictural."

7

OCTOBER

libidinal processes figurality would always come in nice codable or discursive forms, rather than giving rise to "bad forms" or "un-forms," irreducible to any code or discourse. Thus, against Christian Metz and the whole category of the "imaginary," Deleuze would say that starting with Neo-Realism, we in fact find in cinema something that challenges the whole idea of a film code-a "shock" that knocks seeing out of the movements of its usual habits linking it to a time or

"virtuality," irreducible to the movements of veridical narration.4 With his concept of the figural, in short, Lyotard wanted to rethink seeing

and its role in aesthetics. His problem was not that of purifying "the optical" of

literary content, or shifting attention from representation to its means or medium. It was rather freeing the visible and, more generally, the sensible, or the aisthesis, from "representation" and the kind of "discourse" traditionally associated with it. Seeing, and more generally sensation, then becomes "experimental" just when it thus encounters or presents something "unrepresentable," even "inhuman," prior to code or discourse; only then does it depart from the functions of commu- nication and conciliation, preserved in more classical forms and formalisms. In Discours, Figure Lyotard then develops this new problem in and of aesthetics along two general lines.

For the problem of the figural is a problem of "spatialization," concerning the body and the "world" of its movements, gestures, postures, attitudes. As such, in pictorial (and architectural) terms it may be formulated in contrast to ideas that go back to Alberti. For associated with the discovery of perspective would arise the space of "figuration" from which a space of the "figural" in Klee or Cezanne would later have to free itself. What happens in such cases is not a move to eliminate figuration and narration so much as the discovery of another logic of

pictorial space and time, which puts the discursive-figural relation before the

figurative-abstract one. In particular we see a departure from figure-ground relations and a corresponding discovery of interstitial spaces. The space of the body is no

longer held together by a nice compositional gestalt, but rather by a kind of "informal matrix"; there is a departure from horizontal-vertical "orientation" or "coordination," and with it from the gestaltist side of phenomenology and already from the geometric forms for which Husserl already sought the genesis. In this

space the body is submitted to forces that seem to "disfigure" or "disorganicize" it; thus it departs from the nice "flesh of the world" in which phenomenology enclosed it at the same time as it brings out something already at work within the classical world of figuration and narration-rather along the lines Deleuze suggests when he says, "God exists, therefore everything is permitted."5

For the "libidinal body" is not in the world (or space and time) in the same

4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). On the departure of cinematic seeing from the idea of the imaginary, see also "Doubts on the Imaginary," in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 5. Logique de la sensation, p. 14.

8

Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

way as is the phenomenological one. It encounters a certain "violence of sensation," which Deleuze contrasts with the cliches of "sensationalized violence"-Bacon's "meat" contrasting with the more pious "flesh" Merleau-Ponty had found in Cezanne, closer to the "inhuman."6 Lyotard's way out of phenomenology was thus through such a libidinal body given in a figural space or through an infor- mal matrix rather than through a space of gestaltist or perspectival composition. As such, it is inseparable from a second problem-that of the function of "the

figural." For the problem of the figural is at the same time a problem as to what art

does or is. It allows us to see in art, and especially painting, a potential that prob- lematizes the supremacy accorded to representation and discourse in Western

thought; it points to a heterogeneous "figural" element within discourse itself, brought out in writing or literature, which cannot be reduced to an object given to a subject (or intersubjectivity) of representation. Cezanne and Klee help show this, and indeed they may be read as exposing the limits of a view of "fantasy" one still finds in Freud, in which identification and "good form" are linked to one another. There is a sort of a "radical connivance of desire and figure" through which art departs from the functions of conciliation and communication society depends on from it-for example, in its great "museum without walls"; and with the figural, art acquires another function or potential: to prevent the satisfaction of desire in "good form" and the sense of propriety, taste, and beauty that goes with it. It exposes something "indigestible" a public can't easily "consume," appealing to another public or another view of what is public.

But what exactly is this other function that the figural introduces into art and its relation to discourse? Is it a matter of "transgression"? Is it seen more in Levinas's notion of the "face" of the absolute other, or in the problem of "faciality" raised by Deleuze and shown, for example, in the facelessness of Bacon's figures? In Discours, Figure there is some vacillation on this point, which serves to introduce a second concept and problem in Lyotard's thought, in turn related to tensions or differences among philosophies through which he navigates and tries to find a way out. In this case the divide is not between formal "structure" and phenomenological "lifeworld," but rather between transcendence and imma- nence in this figurality we can't represent or code, which art would nevertheless have the power to let us see and sense.

6. Logique de la sensation, pp. 27ff. Deleuze's contrast between "the being of sensation" in Cezanne and Bacon should be read together with his reservations concerning phenomenology in What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 178ff. These reservations concern the pieties of phenomenology, and the ways in which, already with Mikel Dufrenne, if not Husserl himself, phenomenology needed art in order to "disclose" the "flesh of the world." David Lapoujade has developed Deleuze's suggestion with Bacon that "the being of sensation" frees itself from the formation of the "confessions of the flesh" which Foucault was trying to analyze (unpublished manuscript); and, in his forthcoming book Thresholds of Perception, Jonathan Crary examines how, starting from another view of sensation closer to Bergson and changes in neurological discourse, we might derive a new and non-phenomenological view of the world of "sensation" in Cezanne himself.

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The Unrepresentable

What does it mean to speak of the unrepresentable, or to think of art as showing it? Is it like the "silence" Wittgenstein arrives at after throwing away the ladder of his logic of pictures of states-of-affair, or the "void" or "nudity" Loos obtains by reducing unnecessary ornamentation? Is it a matter of the great aesthetic negative theology of the "blank page" or the "empty canvas"-or rather of the violent humor of the endlessly deferred Law in Kafka? Does it suffice to substitute for a mysticism of silence, void, or deferred law, a mysticism of "the event," and, through a piety of thought, learn to be thankful when "it gives" and patient when it does not? Or should one move in a more experimental (Lyotard might say "pagan") direction and see it as a "pragmatic" part of seeing and acting-as, for

example, with the art exposing something unseen and intolerable, which Deleuze sees at once in Foucault and postwar cinema?

These sorts of questions seem to have a peculiar importance in French

philosophy after the war, as if the philosophy were in search of a piety found in several religions at once. Thus Dominique Janicaud worries about a "theological turn" in French phenomenology after Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, for which one

might count as its starting point the publication of Levinas's Totality and Infinity in 1961, though it goes back to problems Derrida had already detected in Husserl.7 But the situation is perhaps more complex than Janicaud's call for a return to

"things themselves" would suppose; and more recently Giorgio Agamben has drawn a line running through French philosophy, between transcendence and immanence, with Levinas and Derrida on one side, Foucault and Deleuze on the other.8 In any case, all of these different lines or tendencies are to be found at once in Lyotard, sometimes in tension, sometimes in uneasy alliance, associated not so much with the question of life, as in Agamben himself, as with the issue of oeuvre-of the "work" in a work of art and the place of that in what Foucault had called "the absence of oeuvre." Should we think of that work, for example, as a

dispositif, a montage or assemblage of heterogeneous elements working together with the disjunctive logic of a "libidinal economy," or should we see it as "incarnating" an invisible "flesh" or else some absolute or radical "transcendence"?

In this regard, we may count Economie libidinale (1974) as Lyotard's fullest embrace of immanence, the "plane" of which is imagined as a "great ephemeral pellicule," amorphous, shifting according to "tensors" or with the emergence of

singularities and vital differences. But Lyotard would later recoil from this joyful embrace, and even come to see Economies libidinales as a melancholy work. For, starting from such vitalist "intensities," he declared, one can never pose questions of judgment and injustice, with which philosophy is nevertheless always bound up.

7. DominiqueJanicaud, Le 7burnant theologique de la phenomenologiefrancaise (Paris: Eclat, 1991). 8. Giogio Agamben, "L'Immanence absolue," in Gilles Deleuze: Un Vie philosophique, ed. Eric Alliez (Paris: Institute Synthelabo [PUF], 1998), pp. 186ff.

10

Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

For such questions, we should rather turn to the radical transcendence one finds in Levinas, or at least the sort of "arch-obligation" toward the "other" associated with it; and in The Differend, Lyotard would go on to try to formulate the problem of injustice in terms of heterogeneous genres of sentences or phrases, distinguishing differends from litigations. And yet in taking this "linguistic turn" he rather loses the whole side of "the figural" concerned with body, affect, experimentation-in a word, "sensation"-and it is not clear that identifying the unrepresentable with the sublime in Kant resolves the problem.9

There arises a new tension in Lyotard's thought between the philosopher as a 'judge" and an "experimenter," or between philosophy itself as "tribunal" and as

"investigation," "essay," "experimentation"-a tension that is then refracted and elaborated through aesthetics. It is as if, following the enthusiasms of '68, he wanted a "gay science" of art, which would yet have a moral face, capable ofjudging in the case of those "wrongs" or "injustices" for which the rules of judgment are not already given. A number of concepts then grow up from this point.

Let's take the problem of "incommensurability" and its relation to the idea of "event" as Lyotard formulates it in his study of Duchamp. We may see Duchamp as introducing into the "common sense" of pictorial practice a series of "incom- mensurabilities" which serve to introduce another sense of time than the

progressivism that accompanies the avant-garde, especially in Paris, opening that

practice (and painting itself) to other possibilities, even another sense of possibility. With such a problematizing "expansion of the field" we seem at some distance from a theology or mysticism of the unrepresentable, a Levinas-like responsibility of otherness, or an embrace of "messianicity"; we have something more like a "pictorial nominalism" given through a gay "an-artistic" humor.10 For the sort of

"delay" such incommensurabilities introduce into pictorial practice seems to need no mystical authorization or to involve the sort of "verticality" that Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, is happy to find hovering over the various "incommensurable" sentence

types in The Differend;il an immanent materialism might just as well suffice, appealing to experimentation rather than judgment.

But this sort of question, perhaps the most intense zone in Lyotard's thinking in the '80s, lay in politics, where it formed part of a further derive, leading to the

9. The problem of the sublime in Kant had already been discussed by Deleuze, for example in Difference and Repetition, where he declares: "in the case of the sublime, the recognition model and the form of common sense are found wanting in favor of a quite different conception of thought" (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 321). But Deleuze develops this other "conception of thought" in a somewhat different manner; he sees Kant in his late years as undoing the "rules" governing the various faculties (which Lyotard would seem to preserve as "phrase genres"), introducing into them a kind of indeterminate dereglement that would also belong to the "other conception of thought" to which the sublime points. 10. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). In my introduction to this book, I try to indicate the element of humor (not to be confused with irony) in this operation. 11. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in La Faculte dejuger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 178 ff.

11

OCTOBER

question of the postmodern. For, of course, the immanence-transcendence division also applies to the notion of "event" (utopia or conjuncture) in Marx; and along with the notion of a "libidinal economy" as irreducible feature of oeuvre or work, Lyotard proposed to draw a division within Marx or Marxism. On the one hand, there would be a Christian-Hegelian Marx who still puts his hopes in a "theology of alienation"; on the other, a Marx who instead sees capital as a force that undoes any such faith or belief, inducing the "impiety" that translates a loss of credibility in all transcendent or teleological values. For this second Marx, capitalism is too unstable, too devouring, too "immanent" a thing to find its "outside" in a dis- alienated humanity; and the problem then becomes how to rethink the critical Marxist promise of what is "to come" without recourse to a religion of some "essential community" or the "great narratives" through which this community would take consciousness of itself. In other words, how might we construct a "critical theory" no longer based in the theology of an alienation and reification overcome as the international proletariat becomes self-conscious; and how to adjust the

analysis of capitalism accordingly, paying closer attention to the world of financial

capital and consumerist consumption. For in the absence of nineteenth-century "alienation-theology" there arises an indifference, cynicism, "nihilism" toward the

poverty, degradation, violence, and xenophobia that capitalism continues to carry with it; such "injustice" then seems intractable, no longer capable of being turned into the object of an emancipation or a politicization. In his attempts to deal with such "impiety" of indifference or "nihilism" in modern Christianized capitalism, Lyotard would turn not only to the transcendence of Levinas's 'Judaism" but also to a certain "paganism" presented in Economies libidinales in relation to Augustine's City of God as a new figure of immanence.12

But the same questions of Christianity and impiety recur in relation to aesthetics, where they are linked to the sort of "messianism" Scholem helped introduce into the aesthetics of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, or the "hopes" of their critical theory. In effect Lyotard thought that they still experienced problems of capitalism in too "religious" a manner, tied up with a sense and practice of mourning; in their critical sense of what is to come, they lacked the "pagan instruction" of an affirmation of multiplicity no longer relying on high-minded negation-something for which Cage seems to give us a better sense than Schoenberg, or at least in the way he mattered to Adorno.13 It was, in other words, a question of practicing aesthetics not as a melancholy but as a gay sci- ence, lighter, closer to events, more attentive to their multiplicities and

12. Of course, one can introduce the immanence-transcendence divide within the traditions of Judaism itself. For example, one might read Spinoza as attempting to overturn the Augustinian system of original sin and judgment-and, more generally, the whole "politicotheological" notion of a City of God-in favor of an "immanence" of the forces of life and their expression at once in the city and in free thought. Bergson's notion of a "fabulation" of gods in 7wo Sources might also be read in this way, and even Kafka's fable of deferred law might be read as a piece of violent humor with similar effect. 13. Lyotard, "Adorno como Diavolo," in Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Bourgois, 1980).

12

Jean-FranCois Lyotard 's Underground Aesthetics

incommensurabilities, offering an "enlightenment" closer to Diderot than to

Kant, who had turned Rousseau into the austerities of the "moral law"-an aes- thetics no longer in need of a theology of "reason" or, therefore, of its "dialectics." In short, it was the problem of a "postmodern" critical and aesthetic

sensibility.

The Postmodern

Today it is hard to remember that "postmodern" once named a problem or

question in thinking and aesthetics. The category has long since gone the way of

journalistic "common sense," for which already for some time it has been supplanted by talk of "globalization." Nevertheless, that is what it was for Lyotard-the name of a new "condition" that thinking and, in particular, aesthetics, needed to confront in order to reinvent; in vain he tried to dissociate the problem from the sort of

"theory and the miserable slackening that goes with it (new this, new that, post this, post that, etc.)."14 We might thus see it as naming a third "point of tension"

through which Lyotard's thinking would pass, associated with a fresh sort of

philosophical division. For Lyotard become concerned with a new set of philosophical differences

which took on an international cast, even if played out in different ways in different

places. In it, the problem was no longer the lifeworld versus structure or immanence versus transcendence, but rather French, German, and American philosophical attitudes toward the Enlightenment or modernity. It was as if the old postwar divisions and alliances between a phenomenologically minded Continent and an

analytically minded "Anglo-America" were undergoing a geophilosophical shock, giving rise to new stories and alliances. For Lyotard the "postmodern" supplied a

way to understand the shock or the shift. He not only encouraged the discussion, but invented a particular "grand story" of it consistent with his earlier notions of

"figurality" and the "unrepresentable"-he envisaged a scenario in which, as it were, the French take over from the bad Germans, while the Germans find a way to become good Americans. For, in his view, what characterized the French position in the postmodern condition was in fact not relativism or nihilism, but rather the

place given to the "event" and the "incommensurable" in thinking-whether in the form of a responsibility for the "absolutely other" or of a pragmatism of exper- imentation with the new forces that are acting on us. In a manner at odds with

14. Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xiii. Lyotard's question of "event" retrospectively seems to point in other directions than the "utopian allegories" Fredric Jameson sought to hang onto in his once influential theory of the postmodern as a new total stage in "late capitalism." For example, we might contrast Jameson's view that all Third World art or literature must assume the form of "national allegory" with the altered geographies and borders in the "global" situation which poses instead the problem of the "transnational" and its links with a new conception of the cosmopolitan, its politics, and its time. Lyotard's philosophical attempt to connect "heterogeneity" and "event" seems to offer a better starting point to get at the questions posed by this "condition."

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Habermas, this "French" attitude would then find new affinities with Benjamin and Adorno, as well as with Heidegger, which in turn would trace another legacy and bring out another side of Kant. Thus, for example, we might read Lyotard's discussion of Kant's "enthusiasm" for the French Revolution together with Foucault's attempt, around the same time, to isolate a new kind of question in Kant's essay on Enlightenment, one concerned with what is happening to us now, or in our "actuality," which would then have different destinies in French, German, and Anglo-Saxon traditions. 15

In both cases we see an attempt to find a point in Kant from which a new connection between philosophy and "event" would derive, one which would later be taken up and elaborated in an original way in contemporary French philosophy. But for Lyotard, this other lineage was especially a matter of aesthetics, and, already in Kant, of judgment. With the "French" attitude to modernity as "event" there would go another sense of community or of public. In contrast to Habermas's "communications community" or Rorty's "conversational liberal solidarity," there would remain an appeal to a "we" yet to come, never fully given, born of "hetero-

geneous" sources, with another role in the city. Adumbrated in Romanticism, it would accompany the avant-garde in all the guises it would assume in different countries-for example, in relation to the new "enthusiasms" released by the Russian Revolution. Lyotard's "French" attitude to modernity thus turned out to be quite a complicated thing, which was to receive rather mixed reactions in France itself.

But Lyotard also had a diagnosis for the "condition" that had brought on such shifts and differences and the altered geophilosophical landscape to which

they testified. The key, he thought, was to be found in the "new technologies" and the sort of "information culture" they bring with them-in "technoscience" and the ways it alters our image of the relations of thought to knowledge and belief; and in this respect, at least, it is perhaps no accident that Lyotard found the term

"postmodern" in America. How, under such conditions, might one carry on the traditions of the "event" or "modernity," and the heterogeneous "we" or "community to come" that goes with it, which had been so important in postwar French

philosophy? That was the question in effect; and one way Lyotard found to tackle it was not through a book but rather by curating a show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in which computers would intrude into the traditional space of the museum and its tie-in with books, disturbing the great framework of the library, the museum, and the encyclopedia which had haunted nineteenth-century literature and philosophy and whose "stupidity" and related "hysteria" Flaubert was to

15. That is more or less the view I tried to work out in my Philosophical Events (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), a book that owes much to Lyotard. In Foucault the question of modernity as "event" is posed not so much in terms of aesthetic judgment as in relation to the new urban "manners of being" of whose artifice and "eternity" Baudelaire wrote in talking about the modern-in other words, in terms of what Foucault called a "style" or an "aesthetics" of existence.

14

Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

diagnose.16 We should thus count Les Immateriaux of 1985 as an important part of Lyotard's oeuvre, along with his many books; it would prove prescient in many ways.

At the time, the show was the largest and most expensive undertaken by the Pompidou Center. But such "bigness" was not monumental; rather it assumed the form of a labyrinthine sprawl as the "condition" of mixtures and heterogeneities. There was too much "information" to absorb or digest, even when armed with the compendious accompanying catalogues, which, if anything, served to complicate things further. Moreover, all the "data" didn't cohere, but rather fell together in strange, even surreal, juxtapositions or unforeseen patterns. In this respect one was at some distance from the notion, often associated with the theme of "mechanical reproduction," that capitalism "equalizes" everything; the exhibition was rather a mad jumble into which we were plunged. And, while there was lots of "theory" in the show, it was part of the jumble. It occurred alongside or among the objects shown rather than "above" them, as if no longer able to oversee their spread or supply an Ariadne's thread to get out from it. Theory, too, had become part of the "condition."

The larger problem was then how to move about in, how to "inhabit," this condition, this mad "datascape"; and in this manner the show helped initiate a theme that Lyotard would later develop in his essays on "domus" and "zone"-the theme of the "urban" or urban "condition."17 His aim, he declared, with this "post- modern" space in Paris (near the old Halles), was to give some sense of what it is like to travel in a California "conurbation" with only the car radio to mark the passage from one place to the next. The global curator thus started to join hands with the new "conditions" of the zonal city and the type of "culture" that goes with it.18

One might thus look back on the "sites" in the show which featured architec- ture. In them we don't find the replacement of abstract functional purity with the historicist eclecticism or pastiche often associated with the term "postmodern" in architecture. Instead, there were contributions by Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Peter Eisenman; and the problem is one of drawing in architecture, its relations with constructivism, and its role in an image-obsessed culture-it was still a moment in architecture before computer-assisted design.19 The nineteenth-

16. On this point see Lyotard. Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 208ff., where Lyotard raises the question of a Bouvard and Pecuchet of the tele-information age; one might ask how, in exposing such "stupidity," such aesthetic figures might alter the design or nature of books or invent more "underground aesthetic" uses of the new media. 17. Lyotard, "Domus et la megapole," Poe&sie 44 (1988); and "Zone," in Postmodern Fables, pp. 17ff. In both cases, with the theme of "inhabiting the inhabitable," we find an implicit move away from the problematic of "abstract space" and the alienation of "everyday life" earlier advanced by Henri Lefebvre. 18. Documenta X, among other things, may be seen, if not quite as consummation, then as a new "engagement" of the global curator with "the urban" outside as well as within the museum. The nature of the "culture" that goes with the diffuse "zonal city" and the sort of communicational debility it involves is a recurrent theme in Lyotard's Postmodern Fables. 19. Along such lines, Beatrice Colomina looks at the architecture of Loos and Le Corbusier in terms of its relation to an emerging "media culture." See her Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

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century metropolis, industrial and colonial, would celebrate its progress in great "universal exhibitions." But the "zonal" condition of the megalopolis, closer to the

postwar invention of television than to the great industrial art of cinema, confronts us rather with a heteroclite landscape of objects and "informations," gradually finding its way in older metropolitan centers or contexts, in which the great metropolitan practices of fldnerie or derive no longer make much sense. The old "bad form" or "un-form" strategies once directed against the "museum without walls" seem peculiarly inadapted to this condition; and in Les Immateriaux aesthetic, "antiaesthetic," and simply nonaesthetic objects coexisted effortlessly alongside one another, on display or in disarray, as if in some airport. How then, in the midst of all this, might one again find something of the "modernity" Baudelaire had sought a century earlier in the Parisian metropolis?

The problem of "immateriality," itself divided up into the many "sites" of

Lyotard's show, is perhaps best understood in the light of this problem. Of course,

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Jean-Franfois Lyotard 's Underground Aesthetics

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the problem of immateriality more or less coincides with the "take-off" in the early '80s of the mix of integrated markets, financial capital, and fast electronic transac- tion that economists now call "globalization"; but Lyotard wanted to understand how it was manifested in physical landscapes and altered ways of thinking and being. His problem was thus not the "dematerialization of the art object," and indeed he contin- ued to talk of "sensation," physicality, hapticality; nor was it the Pop problem of the great wired "irrealities" of the "digital revolution." Lyotard in fact seemed to have something else in mind, shown in one way by the cosmeticosurgical body-what he came to call "the artificialization of life." The postmodern condition is one of an "artifice" for which there is no longer any original "nature" to oppose, or in which the artifice-nature distinction itself tends to be blurred. The problem is thus no longer how to get back to a warm rich lifeworld from our alienation in "abstract space"; rather it is to find new ways to move about in the diffuse space of the post- modern condition-how to "singularize" it, how to "complicate" our relations with it.

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OCTOBER

But with this problem goes another. We find a new division between "zonites" and "victims"; and the question of injustice comes to be distributed along new geographies and in relation to new borders. For if it is within the "zone" that the philosophies of communicational consensus or liberal solidarity find their appeal, those outside it, sometimes in extreme distress, no longer seem

part of any hope of emancipation (like the "proletariat" in the last century); they become victims, seen on the news, to whom at best we might try to parachute some aid. If then in relation to the "artificialization of life" we need to invent new

strategies of singularization, in relation to this new division of zonites and victims we need to reinvent politics, extending it into the problematic borders of and in our very view of justice. For Lyotard these were the areas into which we should move, carrying on the work of "incommensurability" and "bad form," which had

supplied the strange force of art and thinking in our pitiless century.

Lyotard's death has deprived us of a singular presence. The force of his

thought-the peculiar generosity and mobility that went with what he called its "weakness"-is such that it is hard to imagine doing aesthetics or philosophy today without confronting the questions he exposed and the points of tension he traversed. As we read or reread him now, we might thus also ask another question, apart from the problems he helped formulate: how to continue his "underground aesthetics," how to carry on the strange critical alliance between thinking and the arts which, under the name of "aesthetics" (or in opposition to it), has helped art and thinking alike for the past two hundred years to free themselves from the "common sense" of the habitual circuits of classification, appraisal, and sale, as well as from the control of states, and to breathe the fresh air of other possibilities.

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