87

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 4 Number 1
2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.87_1
POP 4 (1) pp. 87102 Intellect Limited 2013
Nigel Mapp
University of Westminster
lyotard, art, seeing
abstract
This araticle examines elements of Jean-Franois Lyotards paradoxical negotiations with aesthetic experiences
in order to characterize his critical involvement with discursivized forms of knowing and explanation. These
elements are offered as salient and salutary correctives to the symmetrical dogmas of disenchanting naturalisms
and culturalisms currently programming typical misprisions of the aesthetic. Lyotards 1971 Discourse, Figure,
as well as some of his later writings on visual art and artists, are not interpretatively integrated here but
instead explored in terms of an anti-discursive logic that actually animates what appear to be their own anti-
aesthetic commitments and conclusions. The article tracks the ambivalent, but persistent, role that perception,
art-medium and sensate experience play in Lyotards efforts to see beyond them. This result impacts not only on
the kinds of demystification his work should be seen to espouse, but on that pervasive pseudo-category itself.
Rei Terada has noted how the kind of seeing that theory involves is no mere etymological matter.
It is a paradoxical resource in theorys tracing of the conditions of perception, a tracing that cannot
mean some iconoclastic purging of seeing from reading, perception from cognition:
The word seeing, in all its ambiguity, encompasses both perceptual and cognitive, literal and
figurative, meanings, and only our own interpretive decision to collapse its inner difference can
Keywords
Lyotard
discourse
seeing
reading
representation
aesthetics
Butor
Adorno
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unify, and hence aestheticize, it. In itself [] it represents what we know and dont know
of perception and cognition more accurately than the terms perception and cognition do.
(Terada 2007: 16364)
The claim wants to suspend all the contemporary efforts to naturalize or discursivize knowing and
perception, at least as standardizing, general ways of separating one from the other. Their difference
is instead here taken to be internal to seeing, an experience or activity that inhabits or opens a zone
in which both knowing and perception are ambiguously, perhaps resistantly, involved. Aestheticizing
the difference would be the stabilizing of their relation into a knowing, not necessarily into a unity
(as an inert separation or clarifying autonomization of domains would achieve a cognate obscurity).
Seeing is a name that captures or evidences the unseen, scarcely known, role of perception in
cognition, and vice versa. It intensifies the critical questions of what is known, and how, in
such cognition-perception, as well as of how it can be opposed to, or different from, any factitiously
coherent seeing. The questions concern how knowledge may be threatened or promised in each
condition, and how aesthetic illusion is both liability and clue.
These are among the problems that give critical aesthetics its equivocal authority its broaching
of a space of contestation rather than rendering that authority constitutively suspect. Aesthetics
attends to those experiences, with their normative pull, that do not painlessly or convincingly trans-
late into conceptual knowing, ideological investment, or subjective predilection. These experiences
refuse to their objects or the senses in which they are given the position of exemplary data, the
externality to meanings and interests that would make of them indifferent raw materials. It is art,
after Kant, that becomes the site of the problematic, especially as artworks are taken to manifest a
compelling material specificity, which is to say an authority of the medium, as of the phenomeno-
logical or somatic nuances and intensities that such works may occasion. Such experiences demand
explication but elude it, along with any reproduction in discursive terms. Thus, aesthetics meets or
remarks modern deficits in the authority of experience, its passions and motives, as of its objects. It
thinks the penalties of rationalization, abstract equivalences of exchange and concept, and of the
disembodied subject as it is stripped down to, then enthroned as, the principle of articulation of
indeterminate external givenness.
Space, representation
Jean-Franois Lyotards philosophy has many centres and interests, but it has much to say, in other
terms, about the cognitive claim of art in relation to its medium, and about sensate experience as
engaging, or critical. More than twenty years ago, Bill Readings commented on the belated introduction
of Lyotard to the Anglo-American academy, and hoped that the by-then depleting animus over
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theory might allow for Lyotards thought to be put to work effectively, beyond the slogans (Readings
1991: xii). With the publishing of more English translations of Lyotard in the last decades (see the
effective reader edited by Crome and Williams [2006]), the hope has slowly been realizing, with this
author now more fully challenging some important current debates. A complete English translation
of Discours, Figure published in French in 1971 has at last arrived (Lyotard 2011). Hudeks and
Lydons translation makes available a major text, which, decades ago, was very effectively expounded
in English, notably by Geoffrey Bennington (1988) and Readings (1991). It is a major work not only
in terms of the theoretical ferment of structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism and
deconstruction that characterized its creative hour, but also in its elaboration of issues central to
aesthetics and its contemporary re-functioning and critique. We also have Leuvens six, copious
French-English volumes, under the editorship of Herman Parret, which are devoted to Lyotards
Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists mainly painters, although music is discussed along
with a range of visual and graphic artworks.
1
All these works testify to the seriousness of Lyotards
engagements with art and to his sustaining relationships with many artists. And they encourage an
entanglement with a corpus of comprehensive heterogeneity and still some provisionality of
organization.
The following is not concerned to rescue, ramify or re-emphasize this thinker, as such or in the
main, or even really to elaborate on the deeper engagements that have recently appeared (see
Bamford 2012). The aim is to configure a very selective set of Lyotardian reflections in order to
dramatize an apparently anti-aesthetic practice in terms of its treatment, perhaps its fixing or empty-
ing, of the heterogeneity and singularity that captivate its attention, and then to suggest the valua-
ble, if ambivalently recruited, aesthetics of experience on which this practice appears to rest.
Discourse, Figure first represents a critical encounter with the structuralist tendencies of its
time, in which diacritical systems are the transcendental fabric of all experience. Against significa-
tion is posed the depth and inexplicitness of perception, an argument informed by Merleau-
Pontys chiasmic intrication of world and flesh, seeing and seen. Saussure is the principal target,
and in the early sections of Discourse, Figure his systematicity is confronted with the indicative and
referential functions of language, with deixis and expression, with the situated acts of speech and
writing, with the shape or weight of the so-called signifier confronted, that is, with differences
that no diacritical system of oppositions can signify or clarify, or free itself from. The analysis of
language seeks what figure names, in an early definition, a spatial manifestation that linguistic
space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification
(Lyotard 2011: 7 original emphasis). Indication, for example, implies a motivated, graduated envi-
ronment, not an oppositional space. Figure expresses, too, the insistences of desire, and the book
moves from a phenomenology to a psychoanalysis, and to a breakdown of perception into a figural
form that instances libidinal processes. So the inter-irreducibility of domains, of seeing and
1. For instance, the fourth
volume of this latter
series (in two parts)
and the fth are men-
tioned in what follows:
Lyotard (2012a, 2012b,
2012c).
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reading, mooted at first, changes to an understanding of each domain as a compaction of hetero-
geneous spaces.
Although this is not how Lyotard develops his account, Saussureanism might be termed, follow-
ing Paul Ricoeur, a Kantian transcendentalism without a subject, and we might add, taking it as a
general type of cognitive machine, that it is one without a transcendental deduction, too: rather than
systemic demands guaranteeing objectivity, the (merely) indispensable conceptual or constructive
forces organize an undifferentiated given that has no powers of constraint over what gets imposed
on it. The given will always and infinitely be, in itself, that which falls outside the cognitive or repre-
sentational apparatus. Instead of questioning the model or exploring its aporias, any appeals to what
lies outside such reason are actually capitulations to its embrace, in principle, of all possible salient
contents. For resistance to count for anything, it must appear as and to something. The more radi-
cal appeal is so only because it is empty moralism. Lyotards evident hostility to Hegel, and occa-
sional invocation of Levinas, is part of the impression his work makes of some such rigidification of
reason and radicalizing of its others allowing a servile ethics of alterity to be sometimes detected
(Jay 1993; Rancire 2009).
But this book is not entitled Discourse versus Perception, and the model elaborated above is not
left undisturbed by it. Distance seems to be taken from Levinas in the early pages, underlining an
interest in the passionate thickness of the half-lit visual environment, not some abrupt opening to
and abasement before the infinite Word. Yet an odd fate characterizes the book that appears to wish
to establish the claims of seeing: a decline throughout its pages of the importance granted percep-
tion (Lyotard 2011: 14). The decline owes not, in intention, to any concession to the discursive, but
to the figure and the siting (Lyotard 2011: 5) of the eye, including the necessary libidinal investment
of a sensed topography. The opposition of seeing to reading is to be undermined, gone behind. This
is what the word figure wants to capture and indicate; it is a kind of reinscribed term (cf. Derrida
1976: 11).
Discourse, Figure supplies a fragmentary genealogy of the representational regime in pictorial art
in a long italicized sequence. It is an analogue for the significative realm, and also solidary with it. A
distinct theatrical space of representation is denounced as restrictedly discursivized a frozen amal-
gam of systematic cognizing. The theory and geometry of vision, perfected by Descartes, fixes the eye,
from whose experience (the mobile spherical zone and its peripheral qualities, for instance) it abstracts,
while the domain of objects is standardized and de-authorized as the projective image on a grid. We
are thus on the way to writing, for Lyotard, and to a system that self-sufficiently and without mimesis
or analogy signifies its objects (2011: 183). Objects are made legible, obvious, seen to exhaustion.
While the mediating forms of sense and sign are local and flexible in medieval manuscript illumina-
tion, in representation the mediating form is totalizing and exclusive. What interrupts or confuses a
discourses self-conformity is what blocks this obviousness, then; thus, art receives its modern task.
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But Lyotard also finds moments in the birth of representation where the passion and phantasy that
opened it up, as another kind of space or mobile expanse, can be identified:
A scene devoid of backdrop is an open space for desire and anxiety to represent their progeny
endlessly and lawlessly. [] For Masaccio, it is [] the discovery of the absence of a world,
of a space where the phantasmatic, hitherto harnessed and sublimated in the Christian tale
of Redemption, asserts itself in it, promising to shatter it: the discovery, in other words, of a
space no longer sacred (textual) and not yet geometrical (textual), but imaginary.
(2011: 190)
In the Carmine Frescoes, painting frees itself from coded signification; colour is released from linear
subordination and becomes plastic, while the work incites reverie, not reading. Lyotard thinks this
space destructive of a world and such a rejection of Martin Heidegger, if this is what this unworld-
ing implies, seems to echo in many of these analyses perhaps in the name of the sensory specificity
that occupies its own space that will not disappear into another. But an equivocality of representa-
tion persists or insists in the pictorial function of showing the figural as unsignified:
The window Massacio traces on the wall does not open onto the discovery of the world, but
onto its loss, or, rather, its discovery as lost. The window is not open, there is the pane of
representation that separates by making visible, that makes that space over there oscillate,
neither here (like that of a trompe loeil), nor elsewhere (like Duccios). [] The world, from
the Renaissance onward, withdraws into the silence of the foreclosed. Yet great artworks still
manage to show this silence, which is that of the figural itself, through the same reversal
the Greek tragic authors taught us: the payment of the debt depicted on the walls of the
Brancacci Chapel is steeped in a somber light, demonstrating negatively that this settle-
ment is nothing more than a fulfillment of desire[.]
(2011: 194)
This squashes a lot together, quite impressively, and seems to regard proto-representation as an
invention without rule that expresses a lawless desire, the betrayal of God no less. This is not
quite a secular thought, but it is a release of the plastic signifier, one aligned with a sort of icono-
clasm. Lyotard reads Massacios equivocal spaces of desire as a kind of genealogy for Czannes
experiments in a seeing prior to any looking-at (cf. 2011: 197), in which the opening-up of
space, or its heterogeneity, occurs. But a compromise between textual and figural spaces estab-
lishes the representational position in its universality and, even if all representation can testify to
what is absent, the compromise is one in which Masaccios negation or instability is neutralized.
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The screen must be transparent and opaque, both a window on the object and the reading of an
object that must be elsewhere; but the elsewhere is now fully coded by perspectival laws (Lyotard
2011: 19596). Such closing-down establishes an enduring ethic of art for Lyotard: to expand
experience to register, or make patent, the invisible, to fight the image that captures the gaze
(Lyotard 2011: 12).
Thus, the seen, more generally now, is no screen of appearances, some provisional projective
medium for a meaning from elsewhere (Lyotard 2011: 67). For Lyotard, that is Hegels view: he
hears the silence of the seen by which seems to be meant that Hegel just translates into philoso-
phy what he can and discards the exhausted medium as a husk, as exhausted (the end of art
hypothesis, for hearing silence is to eliminate it). It does not look quite metaphoric to think of
cognizing as hearing; it is important to the effort to reflect on the seen as a silence appealed to,
rather than ignored as mere phenomenon of hearing, a meaning-nothing that is both harvested and
disowned. Lyotard continually tangles with the problem of establishing the pertinence of silences
and blanks, the intricated deafness of the faculties and senses to one another. This can give the
impression of an artificial restriction of artistic purpose or experience (as Art & Language have
recently argued [2012]). Sometimes Lyotard will consider this problem in terms of artistic materials,
which take on a Janus-face: both meaning-potential and utterly disenchanted exteriority. His
stretching of sensibility (cf. Lyotard 2012c: 375) can thus appear to refuse the expansion of cogni-
tion it promises. It is not clear that Lyotard could ever say this in contemplation of a Barnett Newman:
I know things differently when in this state; indeed, I recognize that I know things that in other
states are not accessible to me as knowledge (de Bolla 2001: 53).
Seeing and abstraction
Language is explored in order to adumbrate the figure that is inside and outside it:
[Figure] holds the secret of connaturality [of discourse and object-world], but at the same
time reveals this connaturality to be an illusion. Language is not a homogeneous environ-
ment: it is divisive because it exteriorizes the sensory into a vis--vis, into an object, and
divided because it interiorizes the figural in the articulated.
(Lyotard 2011: 78)
To signify is to kill, as Hegel knew, but such a death, Lyotard maintains, is expressed in the reversal
by which objects become signs, discourse a thing what he refrains from calling a second nature.
Signification rips apart, and expression is engendered as the work of deforming energy that folds
and crumples the text and makes an artwork out of it. It at least manages this insofar as unreadability
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prods us to an acknowledgement of, a visibility for, seeing itself (cf. 2011: 9). Compare Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno:
With the clean separation of science and poetry, the division of labor it had already helped
to effect was extended to language. For science the word is a sign: as sound, image, and
word proper it is distributed among the different arts, and is not permitted to reconstitute
itself []. As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to
know nature, and must discard the claim to be like her. As image, it is required to resign itself
to copying in order to be nature entire, and must discard the claim to know her. With the
progress of enlightenment, only authentic works of art were able to avoid the mere imitation
of that which already is.
(2002: 1718)
Here knowing is split from imaging; knowing is discursive, the conventionality of signification.
Image is the given or its inert reflection. Horkheimer and Adorno are talking about split functions of
language, but the split also falls between language and imaging, concept and intuition. The split is a
disaster, and the passage names a predicament, a history of damage, albeit one not yet complete,
indeed uncompletable while there is still language or knowing at all. Thus, language promises a
reconciliation, which means, first, an acknowledgement of the brokenness and falsity of these parts.
The expression of the deathly counterparts, meaningless nature and meaningless meaning, is a
mimesis that holds them together, negatively, as suffering, and allows language and images to be
thought in resistance to this historical carve-up to assess or miss the knowing that occurs in the
imaging and sensory potentials of language (e.g.) and in the language-like potential of image and
medium.
Grald Sfez rightly points out, in an expert epilogue, that Lyotards emphatic concern with
modes of presence and withholding opposes the techno-scientific destruction of intimate existence
by the despotism of communication (in Lyotard 2012c: 478). Several later pieces of Lyotard address
the problem in terms of Adorno himself (cf. 1991: 634; 2012a: 170ff.). A lecture from 1988, On Two
Kinds of Abstraction, notes, and updates the Adornian characterization of, the sort of technological
abstraction to be skewered. This abstraction is the domination of form, defining and determining
the most subtle parameters (menus) of the matter itself (of the material in the signifier) of the work.
This is already the case in photography, even more in video film, and more in the image of synthesis
(Lyotard 2012a: 197). Total restorability of elementary data of visual sensibility reinforces a false
immediacy through technique. This abstraction pretends to offer the formal and immediate condi-
tions of sensation. Lyotards sublime alternative, however, offers something equally conditioning, as
he says the feeling of a presence that is not sensible (visible) in the sensible (the visual). It is a way
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for receptivity to be touched by what it cannot receive (2011: 199). The very forms of sensibility are
felt as impossible, torn apart by this abstraction, the indeterminable material presence hidden in
the presentation of data. So this sublime is the trace, it appears, of expression, a mimesis of evacu-
ation itself. But what can be said of this indeterminacy? Is its abstraction the problem, or some
betrayal of this material?
Sfez suggests that Lyotard seeks something outside language in Discourse, Figure, whereas later,
in the writings of the 1980s, it is a kind of opening in language that presents the successful secession
of art (in Lyotard 2012c: 45051). This secession is from discursivized perception, too, if we wish to
talk that way. Compare Lyotard: But Newman is not representing a non-representational annun-
ciation; he allows it to present itself (2012b: 427). Again, this success concerns difference, albeit
one occurring in terms of a division that threatens to fix and empty the terms of the divided (the
invisible). Representation is gone around, as presencing is somehow presented. The issue or phenom-
enon demands and refuses commentary (Lyotard 2012c: 185). In some pages on Daniel Buren,
however, the characterization of presentation is very interestingly nuanced. Linguistic and plastic,
phonemic and graphic units, are again distinguished in terms of the distinct operations of seeing
and reading (Lyotard 2012c: 328ff.). Burens installations-plus-text could be given a (Danto-
Duchampian) meaning, taken as untethered from their sensory environment and materials in order
to make a point about the rules of paintings exposure, an institutional regime, for instance (cf.
Lyotard 2012c: 375). But this is not how Lyotard arrives at that reflection on the rules. There is again
a conflict of spaces, for while the experience of these works never leaves the plane of the sensory in
which the body is involved and seduced, the visual in some manner outstrips or displaces the visible
precisely by making this process of exposure one that can be seen (cf. Lyotard 2012c: 325, 331, 375).
There is a sort of noticeable unnoticeableness thematized here. Burens cloth or paper stripes, unex-
pectedly seen, elude and help indicate two other types of vision, one instrumental, the undetected
quick detection that cues up practical behaviour, the other contemplative or immersive (because,
despite the context-specificity of these installations, one could think about [these works] without
one being there [Lyotard 2012c: 40911]). They come stealthily in and out of sight and mind, which
do not notice them:
Hence the stake of DB work [sic] is [] a non-subjective and non-objective experience where
the places and moments are on [] anonymous operators locating the seen and the seer as
complementary points of reference.
By fighting against the limits imposed on vision by the art institution, DB work targets
the presumption, constitutive of this institution, that a gaze could remain un-seen, that an
organisation of the visible and the seer could be achieved from an invisible point of reference,
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in short, that there could be a non-site and a non-moment. [] DB work is the situation of
the piece or sentence in space-time. This situated sentence marks the institutional space-
time (that of the museum-gallery, for example) as resulting from restrictive exclusive choices.
It does this by resorting to the (ontological) visual sensory space-time in its infinite specular
power.
(Lyotard 2012c: 33227)
All that seems to be a function of the local, site- and movement-specific experience of the appear-
ance, the event of the presence, of these works, rather than their signification they are easy to
overlook and forget, enjoying only a minimal beauty, a minimal but critical irreducibility of aesthetic
presence their colour indexes presence, as it is an infinitely variable quality, not a diacritical signi-
fier (Lyotard 2012c: 173). Thus, the works temporariness, minimal motivation of material means
and non-portability can provoke or sustain a strange perdurance in involuntary recall, just as quietly
as they slip from the instrumental gaze. The space-time of the work connects to that of its context
and of its seer, but disturbs it, indicating the pre-suppositions of arts exposure, the operators of
art-vision (Lyotard 2012c:321, 345) in which this kind of porosity is shut down. It is an experience of
sharing space, when one thinks one is free of that space. This reflexivity is what commentary eluci-
dates: how the work refers to or shows this condition in or by its simple manner of appearing and
disappearing (Lyotard 2012c:341). The analysis seems to refuse the schematic sundering of appear-
ance and appearances, presence and perception.
Demystification as figure
An in-folded microcosm of some of Discourse, Figures subtle developments of such a paradoxical
aesthetics can be extracted from the analyses of two of Michel Butors texts: a commentary on four
photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, titled Lappel des Rocheuses, first published in
Ralits magazine in 1962; and Les Montagnes Rocheuses, in Butors first book of Illustrations of
two years later, which eliminates the photographs but re-deploys some of the text as a kind of
fabric or arrangement (Lyotard 2011: 36177). There seems to be a relation of demystification set
down between the works, the idea of making patent conditions of representation, as opposed to
occluding them. First, Lyotard attends to layouts in the Ralits piece as units of sight and reading
(2011: 362). The units include, with the photographs, different types of text:
[Text] A [] connot[es] a standard tourist document, printed in small roman type, laid out
according to standard conventions of reading [] B [has] lyrical connotations, printed in ital-
ics, laid out vertically on the side of the image, with a margin of its own []. The image in
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question plays the role of reference (Bedeutung) for text A, and of representation (Vorstellung,
reinforcing a figure that is already in the text) for text B.
(2011: 362)
The effect seems to be, for Lyotard, a sense of quoting (of types of discourse). The discourses are
seen as overlooking the image, as the analysis also seems to do, with A interested in what the
photograph is of, and the poetic B recruiting it to programme a response. Butors construction is
ambivalently iconoclastic, we could say, as it allows for the seeing-through of the image itself to be
seen in the array of positionings it is subjected to, all of which just respond to what the photograph
is of, or seem to (cf. Lyotard 2011:369). One spread, the first, has a different layout and includes a
further different type of text, C, in heavier roman type than text A:
At the level of the signified, we observe the use of figures heavily connoted by two features:
the signifiers repetitive scansion [anaphora?] and the diegetic connotation alluding to a
narrative unfolding in the temporality of the national legend. [] C [is] a kind of epic tale,
whose relation to the image is no longer that of representation nor reference, but under
which the images of the Rockies play the part of scenery [].
(Lyotard 2011: 362, 368)
Text A takes the figure-image as reality; B, as phantasy; and C, as mythical backdrop, comments
Lyotard. In the subsequent development represented by Butors Illustrations piece, the figure or
figural potentials that are here smoothed over find presentation. We see that the texts of the
earlier piece do not lay bare the positioning of the image, but borrow its stabilization or naturali-
zation of an environment, the mountains themselves grounding any derangement of reading or
figuration presented by the texts graphic obtrusion. The distinctions of the merely plural texts, it
is implied, may be related to properties or qualities of the image, even help bring these out, but
they are subordinated to their centring principle, the photographic index. That is what the
discourses have in common, or is what coordinates them despite their plastic-perceptual differ-
ences. And yet the discourses, according to Lyotard, can and do bring out, as a prize, something
enmeshed or rooted in the image, its own positioning and framing of its subject. So they do seem
to connect with or illuminate, rather than simply project, what is already scenic, referential and
phantasmal in the photograph and its subject. And that seemed to have something to do, we
recall, with the connotations of size and font. But this is not yet, or ever, Lyotards emphasis.
Anyway, all this was involved in this work being relatively easy to read. But Lyotard will want to
stress that the work hides its operations, or does not stage its own operations in setting out the
image-figure.
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The later text will repeat the earlier one, only now as if it were illustrating its own illustrative
operation. This time, something is acknowledged rather than concealed. When his analysis of the
second text is done, we will see that the critical-disintegrative, dream-desire processes of
Illustrations
were already at work in the figure images provided in the Adams and Weston photographs:
the condensation on a single image of perfectly focused close-ups and extreme long-dis-
tance shots; the lowering of the point of view to ground level, distorting the objects silhou-
ettes ([Freuds] Entstellung); the use of filters, as well as the films over- or underexposure
(displacement of values or colors). But in these photographs, such processes occurred as if
in a phantasmatic scene, overlooked in favour of what they make visible, of the subject.
They themselves were not staged, rather they helped stage and represent the Rockies. They
belonged to the scenes underground, occupying the forbidden space between the latent and
the manifest. Their role was to be forgotten.
(Lyotard 2011: 376)
Of course, these things could be divined without the second text. Photographs are always
menaced by questions of objectivity, as Lyotard notes elsewhere in discussing Corinne Fillipi
(Reason has the right to know what objects the photographs represent and what distortions they
undergo [Lyotard 2012b: 623]). The natural scene, or the optical experience it apparently struc-
tures, is cognitively downgraded in this analysis, which suspects its idolatrous coherency. That is
just why the pictures were chosen: to supplant their presenting apparatus or processes one
possible libidinal set up for photography (cf. Lyotard 2012a: 91). The idea, I think, is neverthe-
less that the processes cannot be attended to without a turn to the textual. The second text shows
what is assumed or at stake in such demystification. The following quotation serves as the acme
or distillation of theoreticist anti-aesthetic discourse, as well as the sensing or presentation of its
limits:
taken back from the space of the imaginary and transposed in that of the book, which is
linguistic, these operations can no longer go unnoticed, shaking the textual expanse that
in turn begins to vibrate and creak. The expanse testifies. Butors book does not signify
these operations [] rather it allows one to sense the traces they leave on the position of
the constituents of discourse and on the intervals between them. It is, therefore, no longer a
case of desire finding fulfillment in a phantasmatics played out on the photographic stage, as
in Ralits. In Illustrations, desire can only unfulfill itself, having been deprived of its aims of
reverie: in the end, all it has at its disposal are the means by which it dreams, the operations.
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That is what accounts for the books strictness. The eye seeking temptation, enamored only
with its own rapture, must here give up, or become strong and cold enough to desire seeing
desire at work, or at least traces of its work. Polar opposites of the photographic window, the
aquatic expanses upholding written passages here and there can only refer desire back
to itself. For not only can desire no longer lose itself in plastic images, but the effects of the
mobility of the lettering and blanks on the signifier further prevent it from phantasizing from
the signified, as was at least particularly the case in the Ralits layouts.
(Lyotard 2011: 377)
This sounds like remorseless disenchantment of the image, of a vision in narcissistic love. There
seems a decisive asymmetry between phantasy and mechanics, a mechanics revealed in the textual.
The question that fixates this article arises again: how can any such conclusion relate to the experi-
ences of the artworks that the analyses live off? I have placed this quotation before reporting on the
analysis it extrapolates from, not to repeat lamely the kind of cut-and-paste work it discusses, but
specifically to make its disenchanting cast reveal what it depends on, and thus to become equivocal.
Already, it can be read that the ascetic (unfulfilling) presentation in and of Butors second text,
which is indeed critical or a critical poem (Lyotard 2011: 367), is not one that can be reported in
some realized signification. For the discursive elements still float in another element; it is again the
difference between two spaces, neither opposed nor continuous (which are modes of aesthetic phan-
tasy), projected into one space, that secure this critical status (cf. Lyotard 2011: 367). The criticism is
not so asymmetrical after all. But the seductions of the visual remain emphatically circumscribed,
and the plasticity of the signifier is now the enemy, rather than the token (perhaps Lyotard means
synecdoche?), of the invested signified, from which it is unchained. The vision is some sort of
reversal of desire, precisely because it reveals formal processes, and any seeing apart from the seeing
of seeing sounds like illusion. That is why we are oriented to a species of text. But how is it
analysed?
The text of Illuminations is organized according to plastic requirements such as drastic altera-
tions and cut-ups of the texts B and C (A being dropped, like the photographs, perhaps because of
its referential dependence or exhaustion) (2011: 368). Texts B and C inter-involve and interfere, with
B being transcribed or reproduced in a variety of blocks and styles and C unfurling in horizontal
bands. Lyotard even offers schematic figures, eliminating the text and just re-presenting the sheets
in terms of diagrammatic shaded blocks of varying density, responding to heaviness and size of
type, and the intervals and spaces in which they are organized. What follows, if this is one of read-
ing-cum-seeings broken components? A certain derangement of reading, obviously, although it is
not mysterious or incoherent, notes Lyotard, despite its linguistic malformation, and indeed offers,
as text, possibilities for new meanings and concepts (Lyotard 2011: 36970).
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I think Lyotard is attempting to expand on two aspects of experience, and he is clearly relating
them to the dream-work, the mechanisms by which the unrepresentable movements of desire find
and distort expression. First, he offers a rapid remark about just how signification persists in subter-
ranean manner in the cut-ups of Illustrations: the sense of a journey west, and through history,
remains partly intact (text C), produc[ing] an effect of vague recognition, a suspicion of dj vu
grounded in the experience of the books sensory space-time (2011: 371). This reports on an effect
internal to the impact of the second work, yet one apparently activated by relation to the former
one. Not quite an actual dj vu, the suspicion is wrought by the plastic disposition of the vestig-
ial narrative. An element of this effect is the role of blanks in the work, which are not (only)
systemic intervals, oppositional absence, but plastic regions. So, and this is the second aspect of
the experience being explored, we enter the discourse of Illustrations as the mime or the diver
would enter a volume to be activated through gesture (Lyotard 2011: 373). Lyotard thinks, then,
that the processes working in the text are to be integrally entered into by the reader, who is quasi-
physically challenged to invent and re-invent, acknowledging the character of that invention. These
experiences must be borne in mind when we encounter those comments that make this later text
sound merely, or mainly, a kind of textualist demystification of the former. The critical relationship
depends on an inextricability of sensing and understanding, or a deformation of each, which
presents, as this deformation or intrication, the staging protocols or operations that are usually
overlooked.
That thought-gesture runs throughout the examples addressed in this article. It deflects from
the aesthetic claim of embodiment or material specificity in paradoxical manner, refusing it
sensory specification or authority, yet drawing on it. The experience issues in general insights, at
least in the commentary, about types of space: the transformation of a mutually exclusive rela-
tion between two heterogeneous spaces into a relation where they commingle to form an unsta-
ble volume, hesitating between the two original spaces [] forc[es] the eye to interact with the
page in a new way (Lyotard 2011: 37475). The later Butor work brings the spaces, previously
held apart, together. The blanks, which leave the groups of letters relatively undisturbed
Lyotard figures these disparately as floating logs, echo-chambers or amplifiers manifest censor-
ship processes in this apartness. This is how we move, not from a unit of sight to a unit of
reading, reconstituting the malformed text, but to the latent text the seen revealingly conceals
(Lyotard 2011: 370).
Lyotard is claiming, it seems, that the plastic disposition of the text asks for decoding in terms of
a unity that is not discursive but a kind of image acting as mythical frame to the epic character of
some of the texts (C) and as echo and plastic harmonics to the lyricism of others (B). Are such
images the photographs that have been omitted? Not only, and not quite. If, as Lyotard says, this
figure is hidden as much as lost, we must try to fathom how the figural disposition of the text feels
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out what is hidden, missing, and also what was missing, or concealed, in the prior text (2011: 374).
We are to
dare to discover (or invent) in the form that is, in the figure-form of the units of sight
of Illustrations an equivalent to the figure-image of Ralits. A rough equivalent, a lawless
analogue.
(Lyotard 2011: 370)
The lawlessness echoes Lyotards (impeccably modernist) stress on the Kantian notion of genius, the
faculty of finding a new law (see Costello 2000), as well as adverting to the force of desire. So the
passage does not just say: This image is a congeries of significations that can be read. Return and demys-
tify the prior image. The dependency, the dj vu, remains. We are, desiringly, to make the rebus, not
resolve an existing one into its nuts and bolts. The second artwork is just the machinery of the first,
presented. But commentary connects them on its basis, and involves concrete, imaginative construc-
tion, which is something like the philosophers mimesis of the artist.
Experience and invariance
There is, then, a strong tendency in Lyotard to abstract down to conditions of presentation. But his
encounters with art indicate the sensate contribution, often despite themselves (a paradox he routinely
lays out, and thus formalizes), of the modern, historically specific, melancholia of expression.
Shafts (Lyotard 2012c: 40817) is Lyotards text on Burens Les deux Plateaux, an installation in
the forecourt at the Palais-Royal in 19851986. It reflects on the truncated columns, which connote
ruin, in a manner that brings out the thought of a persistent invisibility that emerges as the event of
appearance. The work looks a chronic spasm, or a putting of one space-time in another, that is, the
ruin of the palais into the here and now (2012c: 415). The columns own ageing and ruin is also built
in. A message, then:
Appearances, if nothing more than themselves, reduced to being seen, are destined to the
night, and bemoan this fate. But when appearances will have been ruined, appearance will
still remain. Appearance arises as the ruin of appearances. It ruins at once the visible and the
time that ruins it.
(2012c: 41517)
A whole mournful mimesis seems to be laid out. Envisaged ruination of appearances exposes the eter-
nal event of appearance. The relation is structured by the paradoxical involvement of times, of the
imagined and perceived. Lyotard is insisting that seeing does not see that it does not see [the shafts].
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The columns are not where they are (Lyotard 2012c: 417). They escape the present in two specific ways,
he claims. They have an aura of memory (even the memory of aura, we could think, although this is as
much the endless ruin of Heideggers famous temple [Heidegger 2002: 2021]). They are, second,
missed as the utopia of these memories, to which no objects yet correspond (Lyotard 2012c: 417). Why
yet? If Lyotards work is to irrigate contemporary aesthetic concerns and the very possibility of philos-
ophizing sense without liquidating it that writers as diverse as Derrida, Nancy and Deleuze explore
then these moments must be what matters.
2
Does Lyotard here simply report the congealed
temporality of the appearances, and lock the work into a permanent self-displacement? Would that
be the obliteration of an object by an idea? Yet the experience, which he may actually be reporting care-
fully, misses the columns by misperceiving them, he says, in this auras utopia. But what can the columns
be, outside this? It is perhaps asked. We could bear in mind a clarification elsewhere, via Freud, of
utopia as the site of truths happening, always out of place, yet indexed to hope (Lyotard 2011: 12).
References
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2. For the re-
confrontation of these
thinkers differences
over haptics, and in
terms cognate to some
of my exposition here,
see Claire Colebrook
(2009).
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(2011), Discourse, Figure (trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon), Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
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(2012c), Que Peindre?/What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren (ed. Herman Parret, trans. Antony
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Suggested citation
Mapp, N. (2013), Lyotard, art, seeing, Philosophy of Photography 4: 1, pp. 87102, doi: 10.1386/
pop.4.1.87_1
Contributor details
Nigel Mapp teaches English literature at the University of Westminster. His interests are in early
modern English literature and continental philosophy, particularly German idealism and contempo-
rary aesthetics. He is completing a book on the topic of early modern disenchantments. He is an
editor of William Empson: the Critical Achievement (Cambridge UP, 1993), Adorno and Literature
(Continuum, 2006), and the author of Paul de Man: A Critical Introduction (Polity, forthcoming).
E-mail: n.mapp@westminster.ac.uk
Nigel Mapp has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi-
fied as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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