23rd July 2010 Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Explained

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oPjxy9iJ1nI/TEj_UTzewRI/AAAAAAAACLU/v8CkWKLpvCQ/s160

0/9780816622115.gif] The Postmodern Explained collects a series of letters that do

indeed offer a relatively straightforward explanation of various aspects of Lyotards

theory of the postmodern. Though drawing from the ideas of his later work such as
The Differend, Lyotard returns to and clearly discusses many of the points of The
Postmodern Condition, including the modern/postmodern distinction, the collapse
of the Wests grand narratives, and the problem the multiplicity of language games
causes for the act of legitimation. One of the first letters notes the widespread
contemporary interest in liquidating the legacy of the avant-gardes. But in a
society where authority takes the name of capital, avant-gardes no longer have to
be replaced by mediocre realism. What Lyotard calls transavantgardism
dominates not by rejecting the avant-garde but by neutralizing it through eclecticism: Eclecticism is the
degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you east
McDonalds at mid-day and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in
Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows. But, Lyotard argues, this realism of Anything
Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible and useful to measure
the value of works of art by the profits they realize. This realism accommodates every tendency just as
capitalism accommodates every need so long as these tendencies and needs have buying power. In
contrast to this realism of money, Lyotard offers his well known theory of art and the sublime. Drawing
quite heavily on Kant, specifically The Critique of Judgment, Lyotard argues that the mind is capable of
having an Idea of something that can never be concretely experienced. That is, it is possible to have an
Idea of the unpresentable. The sublime occurs when the imagination in fact fails to present any object
that could accord with a concept. Modern art, according to Lyotard, devoted itself to presenting the
existence of something unpresentable, and accomplished this task largely through the use of
formlessness, the absence of form, [as] a possible index to the unpresentable, and through empty
abstraction that is itself like a presentation of the infinite, its negative presentation. What distinguished
modern from postmodern art is the modality of the approach to the sublime relationship of the
presentable with the conceivable. Modern art exhibits a nostalgia for presence whereas postmodern
art places emphasis on the power of the faculty to conceive. So this is the differend [the irresolvable
difference of opinion]: the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the
unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency,
continues to offer the reader or spectator materials for consolation and pleasure. But the sublime
involves pleasure and pain. So The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the
unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the
consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into
new presentations not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is
something unpresentable. The postmodern therefore must be understood in the future anterior, since
the artist will work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made. Many
of the letters in the middle of the volume take up the collapse of the Wests grand narratives. Lyotard
almost salvages this over-used and over-extended argument by using Kant to identify a specific set of
important grand narratives of modernity, which include, The progressive emancipation of reason and
freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism),
the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience. These grand narratives
stand above others because they look for legitimacy . . . in a future to be accomplished, that is, in an
Idea [in the Kantian sense] to be realized. This Idea (of freedom, enlightenment, socialism, etc.) has
legitimating value because it is universal. It guides every human reality. It gives modernity its
characteristic mode: the project. Needless to say, although technoscience still keeps rushing forward

and further destabilizing humanity, for Lyotard the project of modernity has been liquidated. The
French title of Lyotards book translates as postmodernism explained to children, and the letters are
addressed to the children of his friends and colleagues. But it is hard to imagine many children fully
comprehending Lyotards references to Adornos negative dialectics, Habermas appraisal of the project
of modernity, and Kants transcendental philosophy. Some of the later letters in the volume reveal how
the title might be disingenuous. Lyotard explicitly turns to the topic of childhood when he brings up
Adornos idea of micrologies, such as the tales of childhood in Benjamins One Way Street, which
register an event that is an initiation, that cut[s] open a wound in the sensibility, a wound that has since
reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality.
And later, when speaking of the difficulty of teaching philosophy, which requires a kind of
autodidacticism, to a young generation already indoctrinated into a world of exchange, narcissism, and
competition, Lyotard singles out for praise Vincennes (University of Paris-VIII) and its non-traditional
students: Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more
outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood
anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood.
Posted 23rd July 2010 by Brian Rajski
Labels: theory

Enter your comment...

Comment as:
Publish

Select profile...
Preview

Add a comment