Inhuman educations: Jean-Francois Lyotard, pedagogy, thought 9789004458789

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B R I L L

G U I D E S T O

S C H O L A R S H I P

I N

B R I L L

E D U C A T I O N

Jean-François Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought Derek R. Ford In the fijirst monograph on Lyotard and education, the author approaches Lyotard’s thought as pedagogical in itself. The result is a novel, soft, and accessible study of Lyotard organized around two inhuman educations: that of “the system” and that of “the human.” The former enforces an interminable process of development, dialogue and exchange, while the latter fijinds its force in the mute, secret, opaque, and inarticulable.

Inhuman Educations

Inhuman Educations

G U I D E S T O

S C H O L A R S H I P

I N

Inhuman Educations Jean-François Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought

Threading together a range of Lyotard’s work through four pedagogical processes—reading, writing, voicing, and listening—the author insists on the distinct educational logics that can uphold or interrupt diffferent ways of being-together in the world, touching on a range of topics from literacy and aesthetics to time and political-economy. While Inhuman Educations can serve as an introduction to Lyotard’s philosophy, it also constitutes a singular, provocative, and fresh take on his thought. “Inhuman Educations takes us through the difffijiculties, challenges, and excitement of thinking Lyotard in relation to pedagogy and the inhuman. As our guide, Derek R. Ford carefully leads the reader through diffferent practices—reading, writing, voicing, and listening—in order to challenge today’s dominant pedagogical assumptions.” – Kifff Bamford, Reader in Contemporary Art, Leeds Beckett University “Deftly but subtly connecting Lyotard’s postmodern peregrinations with his investments in revolutionary politics, Derek R. Ford’s erudite study brings to the fore pedagogical practices that—in errant and disparate ways—contest the grip that the extant system has on how we think, speak and act.” – Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University “In this mind-expanding book, Derek R. Ford engages with Lyotard to question and challenge the developmental model of modernity, the inhuman system bound up with progress, capitalism, and white supremacy.” – Noni Brynjolson, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Indianapolis

ISBN 978-90-04-45878-9

Derek R. Ford

Cover illustration: Artwork by Sarah Pfohl

ISSN 2590-1958 BGSE 7

Spine

E D U C A T I O N

Derek R. Ford

Inhuman Educations

Brill Guides to Scholarship in Education Series Editors William M. Reynolds (Georgia Southern University, USA) Brad Porfilio (Seattle University, USA)

Editorial Board Donna Alvermann (University of Georgia, USA) Antonia Darder (Loyola Marymount University, USA) Petar Jandrić (Tehničko veleučilište u Zagrebu, Croatia) Lagarrett J. King (University of Missouri, USA) Sherell McArthur (University of Georgia, USA) William F. Pinar (University of British Columbia, Canada) Pauline Sameshima (Lakehead University, Canada) Christine Sleeter (California State University Monterey Bay, USA)

VOLUME 7

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bgse

Inhuman Educations Jean-François Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought

By

Derek R. Ford

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Artwork by Sarah Pfohl All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2590-1958 isbn 978-90-04-45878-9 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-45879-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-45881-9 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Derek R. Ford. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Advance Praise for Inhuman Educations “Inhuman Educations takes us through the difficulties, challenges, and excitement of thinking Lyotard in relation to pedagogy and the inhuman. As our guide, Derek R. Ford carefully leads the reader through different practices— reading, writing, voicing, and listening—in order to challenge today’s dominant pedagogical assumptions. In addition, this well composed volume does an important job in drawing educational philosophy and theory away from its focus on The Postmodern Condition to new questions prompted by infancy and the inhuman.” – Kiff Bamford, Reader in Contemporary Art, Leeds Beckett University “Deftly but subtly connecting Lyotard’s postmodern peregrinations with his investments in revolutionary politics, Derek R. Ford’s erudite study brings to the fore pedagogical practices that—in errant and disparate ways—contest the grip that the extant system has on how we think, speak and act.” – Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University “In this mind-expanding book, Derek R. Ford engages with Lyotard to question and challenge the developmental model of modernity, the inhuman system bound up with progress, capitalism, and white supremacy. Education is the key theme here, but the wide-ranging discussions will also resonate for those interested in art, literature, music and politics, and beyond that, for anyone seeking to nurture their secret inner lives instead of continuing to build the system.” – Noni Brynjolson, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Indianapolis

To my parents, Janet and Bob, who relentlessly believed in and supported my childhood

∵

Perhaps words themselves, in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e. what it cannot manage to think. Words ‘say’, sound, touch, always ‘before’ thought. J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman (1988 /1991)

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Contents Acknowledgements xi About the Author xii Introduction: Lyotard’s Thought as Pedagogy 1 1 Why Lyotard? 2 2 The Inhuman System 5 3 Inhuman Infancy 9 4 Pedagogical Forces 11 1 Reading 14 1 The Text and the Line 16 2 Developmental Reading and Childish Reading 18 3 Secret Reading and Public Reading 20 4 Racist Reading and Quiet Reading 21 5 Re-Reading: An Invitation 24 2 Writing 25 1 Writing and the System 28 2 The Idiocy of Writing 30 3 Re-Writing: As If! 31 4 The List… 33 Intermezzo: From the Beautiful to the Sublime 37 1 Sublime Thinking 40 2 A Sublime Re-Writing 43 3 Voicing 44 1 Sonorous Voices 45 2 Voicing Words 48 3 Voicing Matter 51 4 Voicing the Mute 53 4 Listening 55 1 Musicking Matter 56 2 Listening to Listening 58 3 Elliptical Listening 61 4 Elliptical Listening and Timbre 63

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5 Sectarian Initiation 66 Afterword: Towards a Post-Human Approach to (In)humanity: Reflections on Derek Ford’s Inhuman Educations 69 Joris Vlieghe 1 A Phenomenological, Practice-Oriented and Educational Take on Lyotard 70 2 Infantia and (In)humanism 71 3 Humanistic Education as Profoundly (In)human: Perfectibility and Taking Childhood Literally 73 4 (In)humanist Education as Non-Humanist: Writing as Initiation 75 5 Making (In)humanism Post-Human: Technologies of Trans-Individual Attention 78 References 83 Index 86

Acknowledgements This might be a good place to tell you that I’m not a specialist on Lyotard. The only time I studied his work in a formal setting was in Margret Grebowicz’s undergraduate seminar on his work. After that course, I didn’t read Lyotard consistently or vociferously, but I never put him down. I found myself going back to his work again and again, both in and out of school. Much of my study—and the thinking in this book—is due to the fortunate connections I’ve made with those who study his work, especially Kiff Bamford, who generously read an early draft and provided really helpful comments and queries and, of course, Margret. It was also the other students in Margret’s seminar—especially Kate Levitt and Andrew Burt—who helped me orient and disorient myself in that time and thus helped me feel the force of his thought. Reading and studying Lyotard with my students over the years has significantly shaped my thinking and writing in unforeseen and inhuman ways. I’m indebted to my students in “Pedagogy in the ‘post-truth’ era” seminars over the past few years for this, especially Summer Pappachen, Jonah Jones-Stevens, Yutaka Phyo, Masaya Sasaki, and Brayden White. My friend Tyson Lewis over the years has given me an aesthetic education without which I couldn’t have accessed many of the writings I engage here. And if it wasn’t for Sarah Pfohl sharing her expansive knowledge and relentless thinking about art, aesthetics, and education with me, my thinking about and with Lyotard would be much more limited. I’m also grateful to Joris Vlieghe for writing the book’s afterword and opening up a new space of initiation. Evelien van der Veer, my editor at Brill, was uniquely helpful in guiding the manuscript through the submission, revision, and publication process. The anonymous reviewers each provided not only corrective but, more importantly, interesting comments and critiques. Thanks also to David Backer for reading the first draft of the manuscript and to Bethany Cintron for help making final edits. As always, I appreciate series editors Brad Porfilio and Bill Reynolds for encouraging me to write the book and providing an outlet for it. In order to assemble and finalize this book, I had to excuse myself from some of my normal obligations, including those related to organizing. This book wouldn’t have been possible with the support of my comrades in the Indianapolis branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. I want to thank Timi Aderinwale, Connie Thompson, and Sam James in particular for giving me this opportunity and for stepping up during this time in the summer of 2020.

About the Author Derek R. Ford received his PhD in cultural foundations of education from Syracuse University in 2015. He is currently assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, USA, where he also serves on the steering committee of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. His teaching and research take place at the nexus between educational theory and political movements and are generally concerned with ways that pedagogy can help us re-imagine and re-enact our ways of being-together. Within this trajectory, he’s published and taught about a range of topics from air, aesthetics, and sound to space, affect, and anti-imperialism. Ford has published four monographs—the latest of which are Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era: Insurgent Politics and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (Routledge, 2017)—and edited or co-edited five books, including Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Brill | Sense, 2019) and Educational Commons in Theory and Practice: Global Pedagogy and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). His work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Cultural Politics, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Critical Education, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Ford currently serves as an associate editor of Postdigital Science and Education and as an assistant editor of the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. He co-edits three book series, including “Radical Politics and Education” (Bloomsbury) and “Marxist, Socialist, and Communist Studies in Education” (IAP). He is chair of the education department at The Hampton Institute (a working-class think tank) and editor of LiberationSchool.org.

INTRODUCTION

Lyotard’s Thought as Pedagogy While Lyotard took up various topics and approaches throughout his life, and while he spent most of his life teaching, he didn’t often write explicitly about education, and he never wrote about it in a sustained manner. While he did use terms like “education” and “pedagogy,” their use doesn’t coalesce into any coherency, and in due course we’ll see that this isn’t a bug, but a necessary feature, of his work. One place where he explicitly considers education is in the introduction to The Inhuman, a series of lectures published in 1988, although here education serves as an object through which to consider the question of the human. “If humans were born human, as cats are born cats (within a few hours), it would not be… I don’t even say desirable, which is another question, but simply possible, to educate them” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 3). The reason that education is even of concern to humans—let alone a fundamental concern— is that we aren’t born human. We’re born as in-fants. The Latin words that give us infant are in, which means “not” or “non,” and fans, which means “speak” or “say.” The infant is thus non-speaking, or speechless. Unable to speak, the infant requires education to become human, to participate in the human community. This is, Lyotard tells us, a “banal” observation around which there’s a general consensus. We can confirm this by the absence of infants, as well as those with non-normative language abilities, from any decision making, debates, or discussions. Infants have to be trained to participate in the human community. Those who can’t speak, or who speak in unrecognizable ways, are excluded from participating in society. Only once we’ve acquired language—and more specifically a particular kind of language that we communicate in a particular manner—can we understand and know, debate and communicate, reflect and differentiate. To put a finer point on it, only once we’re adults can we be human. Education generally views the child as a deficient adult, and takes correcting this deficiency as its main task. Even the name we give to children—infants— rests on this belief: the child is defined by its lack of language. Unlike other living beings, the infant has to be developed into a human. The children are not our present; they are our future! So many practices and theories, from the most conservative to the most radical, are predicated on this fundamental idea. Different educational practices, for example, are distinguished by the means and goals of this development. They are united in their belief that the child must be developed. © Derek R. Ford, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004458819_001

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INTRODUCTION

Lyotard is troubled by this question of development in general and in the particular historical contexts of his writing. In The Inhuman, he writes that what he calls “the system” is undergoing a “profound” transformation in which the goal of development isn’t attached to any one particular idea, but only to itself. This system represents a different kind of inhuman, one that’s radically opposed to the inhuman of humanity. The inhumanity of infancy is something that’s proper to humanity, what distinguishes us from cats. The system is inhuman for at least two related reasons. First, the system views humans as mere agents of its continual development. It’s not concerned with bettering humanity (whatever that may mean), but with optimizing itself. Second, the system is inhuman because it attacks the inhumanity of the human, because it only sees children as potential adults. The talks compiled in The Inhuman, and indeed much of Lyotard’s work, can be seen as an attempt to resist the inhumanity of the system by means of the inhumanity of the infant. What this means is not that we use physical, fleshy children to fight it. For Lyotard, infancy isn’t only a particular biological stage of humanity that we grow up from and leave behind. Instead, inhuman infancy persists throughout the human’s entire life, as something timeless. “It is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 7).

1

Why Lyotard?

If this doesn’t quite make sense, if it seems opaque, then I can assure you that you’re not alone. You at least have me in your company. I can’t promise you that you’ll really “get it” by the end of the book. My intention isn’t to provide an authoritative accounting of Lyotard, or to declare what his educational philosophy or praxis really is. Instead, I want to present some of Lyotard’s thought, to show how Lyotard’s thought has helped me think, and to help you think with Lyotard’s thought. In a series of lectures delivered to first-year students at Sorbonne University in the fall of 1964, Lyotard asks, why philosophize? To me, this gesture signals much of what animates Lyotard’s thought and his pedagogy: he asks why philosophize, and not what is philosophy or how to philosophize. Philosophy isn’t a thing, an object of study or a discipline, and it doesn’t entail particular methods. To ask what philosophy is would pin philosophy down and make it static, whereas to ask how to philosophize would lock philosophy in a protocol. To ask why philosophize, on the other hand, makes philosophy an action, a movement. More specifically, philosophy is the movement of desire, which is derived from the Latin word siderare and the prefix de. Siderare translates into English as “stars” or “constellations,” and de, which indicates a removal

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or separation. Taken together, desiderare “means first and foremost to note with regret that the constellations, the sidera, do not form a sign, that the gods are not sending any messages in the stars. Desire is the disappointment of the augur” (Lyotard, 2012/2013, p. 70). An augur is one who predicts, promises, or forecasts the future. The world is unpredictable and unintelligible, and those who want to look to the sky for reasons and to decipher meaning and destiny are disenchanted. This separation also propels a movement towards meaning and connection. To desire something is thus to be inhabited and moved by a lack. I desire to know what Lyotard means, and so I read Lyotard. It if happens that, through studying Lyotard, I come to know what Lyotard means, I no longer desire to know. Desire has to remain unfulfilled or else it disappears. Philosophy asks questions and can never be satisfied with any answers. The best philosophical question is perhaps one that can’t be answered (“what is education?”). As an incessant movement of desire, philosophy isn’t the development of knowledge, but a recurring exposure to thinking. The challenges of teaching philosophy, Lyotard writes at one point, “are essentially bound up with the demand for patience. The idea that we could put up with not making progress (in a calculable and visible way), that we could put up with always doing no more than making a start” (Lyotard, 1988/1992, p. 102). Philosophy is like infancy: it requires patience. So too does Lyotard, and so too does this book. By the end of the book, while you won’t exactly know what Lyotard means in the introduction to The Inhuman, you will be able to ask more questions about it. More importantly, it’s my hope that you will desire to continue starting over again, and not only with Lyotard. This doesn’t mean that explanation isn’t important, that we shouldn’t even bother trying to understand or trying to construct new and different educational practices or knowledges. Lyotard never says that the way to resist the inhuman of the system is to refuse to teach infants to speak. Desire isn’t just an absence or a lack; it’s a present absence, an activating gap. Forever unfulfilled, desire propels us forward as it pushes us back. The woman who first taught me Lyotard, Margret Grebowicz, said in class one time that philosophy for her was not an interest or vocation, but an “affliction.” It was something she couldn’t shake, a loss that she pursued. Consider the gap between language and reality. We can never bridge the divide between an experience and the way we speak about it. In fact, the more we talk about something, there more we simultaneously shorten and widen the gap, getting closer to and further away from it. This is my experience writing this book. There’s something in Lyotard I desire and I’m writing to communicate this desire. I’ll never be satisfied with it because I’ll never close the gap between my experience with Lyotard’s thought and the words that can communicate that experience. The reason I’m writing

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the book is to think about Lyotard’s thought. Through the process of writing I come to know Lyotard differently, have new experiences with his thought, ask new questions and ask old questions again. One of the interesting things about Lyotard is that, as a writer, he performs this movement of desire. His writing never comes off as closed or stagnant. It’s always open and indeterminate. In bearing witness to infancy, he helps us become childlike. He rarely, if ever, tells us exactly what he means, and when it seems like he is, we have to question if he really is. There’s no conclusion to Lyotard, and there’s no real introduction either. We are always starting over, but the starting point isn’t a pure state of zero and there isn’t any linear development. In this way, Lyotard’s writing is deeply pedagogical in that, if we accept the challenge of reading him, we practice becoming childlike through an exposure to the infancy to which he seeks to bear witness. Reading Lyotard can also be deeply frustrating, at least if, like me, you’ve grown up in the system, and are always in a rush, on the lookout for shortcuts, trying to figure out how to save time or game the system, and seeking to produce something new with the work. It can be frustrating because it requires patience, because it remains opaque, thick, and intractable. Lyotard performs his philosophy as often as he articulates it, and throughout the book, I highlight some of these performances. Here I want to point out his use of concepts. When you read Lyotard, you’ll repeatedly encounter certain concepts—like infancy or childhood, development or the system—and they’ll have different inflections or nuances, and sometimes they won’t be reconcilable with each other. His writing isn’t a systematic plan, procedure, or path, nor is it a maze you could find your way out of. In 1986, Lyotard was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the University of California, Irvine. The organizers, he tells the audience, “asked me to define my ‘position’ in the field of criticism and the path which led me to this position” (Lyotard, 1988, p. 4). Lyotard early on says that he is “unable to take a position,” and that “this is not due to a bent toward confusion… but to the lightness of thoughts.” Thoughts aren’t hard or secure, they don’t provide a stable foundation upon which we walk. Instead, they’re “clouds,” with immeasurable peripheries, that “are pushed and pulled at variable speeds” and “never stop changing their location one with the other,” as “one cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached” (p. 5). Lyotard’s concepts are ways not of knowing these clouds; they’re ways of touching them. We can and will trace these clouds through the different ways and places Lyotard’s concepts appear and take form, relating them to each other and to other concepts, and in the process, we’ll be getting closer to and further away from them.

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5

The Inhuman System

One of the more consistent ideas Lyotard writes about is that of the system, which is less of a concept or even idea and more of a logic. As a logic, the system isn’t just a way of thinking, it’s a way of organizing—or trying to organize—the entirety of the world. The system takes on particular names and forms throughout history and according to different political tendencies. Some might call it imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, capitalism, or state capitalism, while others (maybe most) call it democracy or liberal democracy. Yet for Lyotard (1993/1997) especially after the end of the Cold War, “it is quite simply called the system” (p. 199). Some historical and biographical context can help us understand why. Lyotard was born in 1924 in Vincennes, France. The First World War, the deadliest war up until that time, was fought between competing European imperialist powers, but the battlefield extended far beyond Europe, into Asia and Africa. Lyotard’s father, Jean-Pierre, fought in the war, while his mother, Madeleine, lost her first husband to it. While European powers framed the war as a “war for democracy” and “the war to end all wars,” it was but a prelude to the even more devastating Second World War and was ultimately a struggle between various empires over European colonies. As with all wars, the specific events that caused tensions to erupt into all-out battle couldn’t be predicted, but it was possible to identify that the tensions were likely to erupt at some point. These were the tensions of imperialism, which is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Capitalism is a necessarily expansive system. It’s based on the production of profits.1 Profits are literally a kind of expansion: it’s an accumulation over and above the initial investment. This is why Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1978), in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, wrote that the bourgeoisie will follow profits “over the whole surface of the globe,” and that capitalism “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere” (p. 476). Colonialism is inherent in capitalism, as the borders of the capitalist nation are limits that capitalist expansion has to overcome if it is to survive. Yet at some point the world was more or less already divided up between the major capitalist powers such that there can only be a struggle to re-divide the colonies. This is, from my perspective, what World War I was about; it’s why Madeleine’s husband died and why Jean-Pierre was injured. This is also the essence of World War II, which came when Lyotard was 15-years old. There was an important difference here, which is the existence of the Soviet Union. In the middle of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Russian Czar and instituted a rule of workers and oppressed peoples in the Soviet Union. One of their very first acts was to expose the secret treaties

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the Czar signed with foreign powers, which concerned who would get the spoils of the war. The Bolsheviks also relinquished any ambitions for territorial expansion. The Bolsheviks, still trying to develop their country’s industry and infrastructure and repair the damage of the First World War, tried to stay out of the fighting but were forced into the war in 1941. All told, the Soviets lost 27 million people in the conflict. They also were the primary force that defeated the Nazis and liberated their death camps. As such, they emerged from the war with an incredibly strong prestige, with many workers and colonized people throughout the world looking to their leadership. The imperialist powers now had to unite in order to defeat the new enemy, and the Cold War began. Lyotard lived in the French colony of Algeria between 1950–1952, where he took up a post teaching philosophy. Although he didn’t fight as part of the Algerian National Liberation Front, he had contacts with them as a participant in the workers’ movement. Witnessing, living, and participating—as a French national—in the reality of French colonialism had a profound impact on him, to which he felt a debt, a true debt beyond calculation and one unable to be paid. What Lyotard lived wasn’t a homogenous and tidy bi-polar structure of colonialism, in which there were the colonized indigenous people on one side and the colonizers on the other. As Kiff Bamford (2017) writes in his biography of Lyotard, a simplistic division would occlude “both the complexities of Berber and Arab communities and the racial hierarchies within the collective nomenclature ‘pieds noirs’ [colonizers],” the latter of which was highlighted “when the right to French citizenship was withdrawn for Jewish families living in Algeria in 1940” (p. 36). It was in Algeria that Lyotard met Pierre Souyri, who more or less recruited Lyotard to the Marxist movement. Souyri was initially a member of the Communist Party before leaving for a Trotskyist splinter group. In that group, he was part of a sect that would again split to form Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), which Lyotard joined in 1954. The National Liberation Front was a Marxist-Leninist organization, and the Soviet Union provided them with key military, intelligence, and funding resources (as it did with so many national liberation struggles). Under Souyri’s influence, Lyotard was introduced to Marxism through a critique of Marxism as it played out in the real world under the guidance of the Soviet Union. Of particular importance were critiques of “bureaucracy” and the domination of the Party over work, life, and the revolutionary process. This is perhaps one reason that Lyotard (and many other academics) never joined the French Communist Party and even agitated against its dominance. Even though the French CP had many different tendencies within it, it overall followed the line of the Soviet Union. Lyotard was more committed to Socialisme ou Barbarie, where internal debates flourished

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openly. When Lyotard returned to France, he continued his involvement with the Algerian independence movement. He was critical of the National Liberation Front—even publicly—but provided practical support and assistance— necessarily in secret. The fact that Lyotard was introduced to Marxism in this way partly explains his later use of “the system.” The Marxist that Lyotard became was one that was hostile to the Soviet Union and critical of the actually existing struggles of working and oppressed people. They believed the Soviet Union had betrayed the workers’ cause, and that it had instituted a form of “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic state capitalism.” Lyotard officially left the Marxist movement in 1966, at which point he was part of another splinter group, Pouvoir Ouvrier (or Worker Power). He deepened his critique of Marxism but never rejected Marx’s work itself. Instead, his “break was with the exclusivity of Marxist thought as the only framework through which to consider social and political problems” (p. 64). It was a “drift” from Marxism, not a complete rejection. We can see the drift as the culmination of tensions within the Marxist circles in which Lyotard was initiated. The break also has to do with the philosophical and political reliance on and faith in critique. In an incredibly reductive way, some Marxist movements, especially but not only those around academia, can be viewed and approached as a religion of critique: capitalism mystifies or hides the social realities of exploitation and oppression, and through critique we can unmask them and galvanize the masses into action. By the time Lyotard left the movement, there was increasing evidence that critique wasn’t antagonistic to capitalism, but was actually one of its fundamental motors. Sometimes we get the impression that the system is something timeless, or something that transcends different historical periods, but that it really comes into its own at the end of the Cold War and the supposed victory of liberal capitalist imperialism. Lyotard’s conceptualization of the system isn’t a historical or empirical argument, however, and Lyotard never makes any of these claims. With the term “system,” he’s trying to identify the dominating impulses organizing the world in the second half of the twentieth century, and this is really what the system refers to. The system is based purely on development without any external goal. Development, that is, isn’t subordinated to any idea of emancipation, justice, enlightenment, and so on, and is totally coincidental with itself: development for the sake of development. Under the demands of development, performativity is the basis of legitimation. Performativity is the idea that efficient cause-effect or input-output ratios are most desirable. If one technology does something faster and with less energy, then it’s superior to another that does the same thing but slower and with more energy. Performativity is maximum optimization.

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INTRODUCTION

Optimization and efficiency, in turn, demand control over the inputs and outputs. Control doesn’t imply repression or any special mechanism of control, and the system will deploy whatever mechanism is the most efficient. This is one explanation for why democracy and capitalism won out over socialism: “After a time, it happened that the systems labeled liberal democratic showed themselves to be the most appropriate at exercising these regulations. They in effect left the control programs open to debate, they in principle allowed each unity to accede to decision functions, they thereby maximized the quantity of human energy useful to the systems” (Lyotard, 1933/1997, pp. 89–90). The system tends to work best when it’s open to modification and contestation, rather than when it’s strict, rigid, or closed. Flexibility is, generally speaking, more efficient than constraint. The system’s main enemy is entropy, or the absence of energy, which would imply a lack of inputs. The most efficient way to fight entropy, it seems, is to encourage dialogue, debate, and deliberation, because each of these processes generates energy. The system is a shifting, evolving, and flexible network whose internal functioning “is not subject to radical upheaval, only to revision” (p. 199). The system actively solicits and demands such revisions. As a postmodern system, its “politics are managerial strategies, its wars, police actions. The latter do not have the aim of delegitimizing the adversary but of constraining it, according to the rules, to negotiate its integration into the system” (p. 200). The system needs critiques and it needs uncertainty to continue growing. Excess and surplus aren’t obstacles for it, but engines for its expansion: the system can continually decompose and recompose, and it must remain open to difference and opposition, and can even encourage them. The intellectual, then, not only can write all manner of critiques of the system; they’re compelled to, rewarded for it—so long as they remain within the uncertainty granted by the system: “whatever our intervention, we know before speaking or acting that it will be taken into account by the system as a possible contribution to its perfection” (p. 204). Note that, at least here, Lyotard doesn’t say that it will contribute. He instead says the system will take it “into account… as a possible contribution.” This is an important distinction, because without marking this difference we might think that we can only contribute to the system. I think it’s clear that, for Lyotard, the system is incredibly dynamic. But it doesn’t follow that the system is impenetrable, unassailable, or permanent. The system doesn’t only operate by soliciting its critiques, however. It also has terror in its arsenal. Terror for Lyotard takes place when a difference is silenced or someone or some force is compelled to acquiesce. If the system were truly impenetrable, it’s hard to imagine it would require terror. Yet whether or not

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we can enact a different system is a different question, one on which Lyotard himself seems to remain agnostic. He is often wrongly accused of nihilism on these grounds, and we’ll get a sense of the reasons for his agnosticism later on. What is clear, however, is that Lyotard is resolutely and consistently partisan when it comes to the system. As he writes in The Inhuman, it must be resisted.

3

Inhuman Infancy

Lyotard’s commitment to resistance is evidenced by the plethora of concepts he works on to defend the inhuman of infancy against the inhuman of the system. Lyotard returns to infancy and childhood again and again (for 30 years, according to his daughter, Corinne Enaudeau) to expose himself to the clouds of thought (Enaudeau, 2012/2013, pp. 6–7). With infancy, however, there’s a danger that stems in part from the translation of the French word enfance into the English word childhood.2 Infancy and childhood, as I said earlier, are not discrete stages of development. Sometimes, however, when Lyotard writes enfance he seems to signal biological childhood, while other times he signals something more general: something unbounded by developmental stages and that remains in-fans because it cannot be spoken within the constraints of the system precisely because it remains inhuman. It is not as if they are radically separate usages, as if there is “real” childhood and a metaphorical childhood. They’re related to each other. We know we’re not born humans, and that the term infancy designates being without speech or the means of communication. It follows that there is something fundamentally human about speech, language, and communication, about the ability to hear and speak, represent and signify, listen and comprehend. We also know that infants aren’t singularly defined by this lack. Just because infants aren’t capable of speech doesn’t mean they aren’t capable. On the contrary, there is one capacity that is greater in infants than in adults: the capacity to be affected. Affect is often used synonymously with feeling, but there is an important difference. Feelings are articulated, they can be represented, while affects are inarticulable and immediate. Affects can sometimes give rise to feelings, can be translated into words, but when this happens the affect is transformed or, more accurately, reduced to a feeling. While feelings are states of being that we name and identify and come from being affected, affects themselves are prior to and escape from understanding and cognition. They don’t register in the same way and they’re completely out of our control. In “Voices of a Voice,” Lyotard (1992) tells us that affects are charges or forces we receive, sense, and emit; that an affect is “wholly what it is, with one fell

10

INTRODUCTION

swoop” (p. 130). We might say that affects are transmitted, while feelings are communicated. Lyotard links the capacity to be affected with animals, including the human animal. Cats and humans are both capable of being affected, but only humans can represent and articulate affects through feelings, and education is what facilitates this ability to represent. Infants have a greater capacity to be affected because they’re uneducated. They can’t speak about feelings, but they can and do, importantly, voice affects. “In-fans, it has a voice, but doesn’t articulate. Non-referential and unaddressed, the infantile sentence is an affectual signal, pleasure, pain” (p. 132). Infants cry and laugh, scream and moan, sigh and whimper. Their voice isn’t addressed to anyone in particular, and it isn’t a response to the content of any speech. It’s comes from an exposure to something that is unknown. The child’s capacity to be affected entails their debt to the affects that animate them, that move them to voice. An infant’s cry might express the pain of hunger at one time, and something else another time. Adults caring for infants often speak the words, “What do you want?” There isn’t any agreement or resolution. Even if a child stops crying upon being fed or changed, the cry didn’t represent a request or even a demand for these actions. And because the linguistic address is always temporal (in that “I” respond to “you,” after “you” speak to “me,” and so on), the infant “does not belong to the inflected time of genealogies” (p. 133). We can’t even say that the cry belongs to the infant, because there is no conception of subjectivity, no idea of the “I” or the “you” that structure linguistic address. “It is not ‘I’ who am born, who is given birth to. ‘I’ will be born afterwards, with language, precisely upon leaving infancy,” as Lyotard (1991/1993b, p. 179) puts it in “Prescription.” Even though the infant child can’t speak, they’re already within the adult world of language. Before being born, the child is given a name, is placed into lineages and institutions, all of which it is oblivious to. Lyotard will call this being held hostage. The price for release is paid through education, through which the infant child becomes a human subject. In turn, however, the child will continue to hold the adult hostage, and here we can transition to the infancy that transcends infant childhood. Because infant childhood is before cognition, because it’s outside of the procession of time and a state without subjectivity, we can’t recall it or represent it. Our infant childhood doesn’t really “belong” to us because the “I” that I am now is not the infancy from which the “I” developed. Without our infant childhood, however, we wouldn’t be an “I.” We’re indebted to this infancy that persists at the heart of being human. This is the sense in which Lyotard described his debt to Algeria: it was uncalculable and unpayable.

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Just like the infant child’s debt to the unknown can’t be repaid, neither can the adult’s debt to the infancy. But repayment isn’t necessary for Lyotard (1988/1991): “it is enough not to forget it” (p. 7). By not forgetting what we can’t remember, by, in other words, bearing witness to infancy, we can resist the inhuman of the system. Because infant childhood is unintelligible, it can’t enter as an input into the system without being educated. Once educated, the system has no need for a recurrent infancy, and works to repress it through different mechanisms. But if the inhumanity of infancy were eradicated, according to Lyotard, so too would the human. At that point, the human would merely be an input and output of the system, which is why it’s so important to highlight how infancy persists. “Birth,” as Lyotard puts it at one point, “is not merely the biological fact of parturition, but, under cover and on discovery of this fact, the event of a possible radical alteration in the course compelling things to repeat the same. Childhood is the name of this faculty, in that it brings to the world of being the astonishment of what, for a moment, is nothing yet—of what is already without yet being something” (Lyotard, 1988/1993b, p. 151). The primary question will be how we relate to this debt, how we bear witness to and try to enact infancy to resist the system, to interrupt development, to remain inhuman and, therefore, to stay human. If we can, with great hesitation, name anything like a trajectory or project in Lyotard’s work, it’s the various means this can happen, the places infancy shows up, and the work it does and undoes. The chapters that follow pivot around different educational processes through which we might continue to encounter this infancy. Each chapter presents different pedagogical appearances and forces at work in Lyotard, although none are firmly delineable from the others.

4

Pedagogical Forces

There are a number of possible ways to “guide” one through Lyotard and education. One way would be to focus on the places Lyotard explicitly mentions education, pedagogy, teaching, and the like, in order to thread together a “Lyotardian pedagogy.” Another way would be to put Lyotard in conversation with educational literature, to present Lyotard and education. I’ve chosen to take a different route, and have organized the book around different practices (reading, writing, voicing, and listening) that Lyotard considers and that are also common to education. Composing Lyotard in this way has its dangers. It risks systematizing Lyotard and forcing his thought into conceptual confines, which would reduce

12

INTRODUCTION

Lyotard’s thought to knowledge and, in the process, miss the subtleties and nuances of his expansive endeavors. It hazards the pretense that I’m authorized (or authorizing myself) to present some authentic version of Lyotard. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I’m okay with these risks and the attacks they invite or compel. In this book, I move across the decades of Lyotard’s thinking, the debates he was responding to, and the concerns he had without always clarifying the differences. The straightforward explanations I do this are to balance depth and breadth and because it’s how I encounter Lyotard. A short guide to Lyotard can’t cover it all, and I could narrow my study down to a few texts or discrete periods of his writing, but my wager is that a broader scope will increase the opportunities for readers to encounter their own infancy, although I don’t take up Lyotard’s thinking before his dissertation in 1971. Of course, this might be an excuse for my lack of “training” in Lyotard. Besides one undergraduate course, I’ve never formally studied Lyotard “under” anyone. I consider myself a student of many scholars on Lyotard and have benefited from their collaboration and insights in the past. My job as an academic, writing books for the system, affords me a certain kind of space and time to sit with his work in different ways. But there’s so much I don’t know (and not only because I don’t read French), and so much uncertainty about what I think I know. The reason I’m committed to his work is precisely because it interrupts the speed, equivalency, transparency, and knowledge in which I’ve been trained and to which my profession—teaching—commits me. I’ve never been able to shake Lyotard, and I find myself drawn to his work in fits and starts. The drive behind these encounters are varied and random, and they’ve led me to re-read certain texts again and again while neglecting others. This will show in the following pages, in terms of the texts and trends I engage and those I purposefully omit or unintentionally ignore. It will also show in the lack of historicization of Lyotard’s thinking, and the historical contexts over the decades he thought and published obviously changed quite a bit. I could claim that my approach here follows from Lyotard’s own. Lyotard often doesn’t reference the particulars of the scholars he’s responding to (or provoking). The vast majority of his writing doesn’t follow the traditional academic set-up. In my own reading, this disables the pretense of knowing all that Lyotard knows and forces me to remain a student of Lyotard, to try again and again to access the infancy of his thought. Granted all of this, I stick close to Lyotard’s writing in the pages that follow and don’t engage in secondary debates about his work (of which there are plenty, maybe even enough). I’m not trying to prove my reading of Lyotard against that of other scholars. The fragments I write on and those I recall frequently aren’t intended as an assertion that these are the most important for

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reading him or thinking about education with him. Relatedly, I also do my best to suspend judgement on his thought by, for example, verifying or contesting his work, demonstrating that he reads political, artistic, philosophical, or literary works and movements correctly or incorrectly, or arguing about what is or isn’t “useful” for certain kinds of educational or political praxis. However, while I principally reference Lyotard, there are a few places where I bring in other scholars (but not “Lyotardian” ones). I do this because—and I do this when—they help me think more about what might be present in Lyotard’s writing. While I didn’t write the book for a particular audience in mind, I hope it’s useful to students and scholars of childhood, art and aesthetics, literacy and composition, music and sound, and yes, even politics. My hope is that those with and without the theoretical background that can help situate Lyotard’s thinking can find an accessible entry point into his thought, take it up for themselves, let it work on them. By grouping the text under the headings of reading, writing, voicing, and listening, which are different (but not necessarily distinct) modes of encountering, my attention is drawn to the divergent educational logics and ontologies of the two inhumans, which are not confined to schooling or formal education but organize and guide our most basic ways of engaging with ourselves, each other, and the world. There are pedagogies organized around, predicated upon, and dedicated to development, transparency, optimization, and exchange, and others that drift from and to infancy, opacity, desubjectification, and the sublime. The point is not so much to eliminate some pedagogical logics in favor of others, as this is actually the current educational ethos of the inhuman system. The aspiration is rather to recover that which the system represses in order to expand and deepen its grip. By way of errant pedagogical processes that open and hide in Lyotard’s work, we might be able to make a little more room for the opaque, to strive for idiocy, to listen for the mute, to attend to and endure the debt of infancy. This is one of my own struggles as a thinker, a teacher, and an organizer. It’s why you’ll see the tension between the two inhumans, between articulation and opacity, between knowledge and thought, crop up again and again in the text. This is the tension, or tensor, that makes Lyotard continually relevant, that makes his very mode of thinking pedagogical, and that makes education educational.

Notes 1 Profits are a sub-category of surplus-value, but this point isn’t essential here. 2 Thanks to Kiff Bamford for pointing this out. See Lyotard, Readings in Infancy (forthcoming).

CHAPTER 1

Reading One primarily encounters Lyotard today by reading his words. Even though Lyotard worked outside of the written word—he made films, collaborated with artists, and co-curated a major exhibition—words are the primary data he left for us. He also left us ways of thinking about and practicing reading, childish ways that resist the inhuman reading of the system, beginning especially with his 1971 dissertation, Discourse, Figure, his second book. Written over several years, including during the tumultuous student and worker uprisings of 1968, in which Lyotard played an active role, the book is concerned with practices of reading and the relationship between language and its shadow. Lyotard’s dissertation project coincided with the rise of “structuralism,” an academic and political tendency present in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and elsewhere, that focused on the relationship between signs and the systems in which they occur. Lyotard was after something more than meaning and representation (practices of understanding and cognition), which is evident from the opening pages when he references Plato’s allegory of the cave, a foundational educational scenario articulated in The Republic. In the allegory, prisoners sit inside of a cave staring at a blank wall. On the wall, they see shadows from the fire outside. Knowing nothing else, the shadows aren’t seen as shadows, but as reality itself. Plato supposes that one day a prisoner breaks their chains and leaves the cave only to discover what they thought was reality was only its shadow. The enlightened prisoner represents the philosopher for Plato. Discourse, Figure takes a different tact, draws a different lesson from the allegory, and enacts a different pedagogy that’s not oriented toward bringing people from the dark to the light. “This book,” he begins, “takes the side of the eye, of its siting; shadow is its prey. The half-light that, after Plato, the world threw like a gray pall over the sensory, that it consistently thematized as a lesser being, whose side has been very rarely really taken in truth… this half-light is precisely what interests this book” (Lyotard, 1971/2011, p. 5). In taking the side of the shadow, Lyotard takes up what structuralists either leave out or repress: that which can’t be translated into language. Shadows are like silences in that they’re not devoid of meaning but instead outside, underneath, and beyond it, all while being in relation to it. They’re not a false reality that opposes the real reality outside the cave.

© Derek R. Ford, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004458819_002

Reading

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Lyotard begins with one of the “fathers” of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, who viewed signification relative to the discursive space it occupied. The textual space is a structure and system of signs (words). Each sign is composed of a signifier (a spoken or written word) and a signified (the thing that the signifier signals). The signifier represents the signified. When I write about this book, the word (signifier) book refers to the book (signified) you’re holding. There isn’t an intrinsic or motivated connection between any signifier and signified, and the former represents the latter through negative differentiation. When I write the signifier “Lyotard,” it represents the signified “Lyotard” by distinguishing itself from every other sign in the linguistic system. It’s place in the system also matters. On the first day of my Lyotard seminar, when we were going around the room and introducing ourselves, a student said that she was a dance major. The professor jokingly responded, “you know this is a different Lyotard, right?” We laughed at the juxtaposition and congruence between the two signifiers signified when voiced. If you only knew leotard/Lyotard as dance attire, you’d have to learn a new signifier-signified relationship, after which you could differentiate one from the other negatively, through their opposition and difference. There is nothing inherent in “Lyotard” that creates its relationship with either a person or an outfit. The linguistic system can unquestionably expand, but the signifier-signified relationship is seen as entirely locked within the overall linguistic structure. There’s clearly something to this, but what about the shadows of the words cast outside of the system? This is where Lyotard drifts to phenomenology (the topic of his first book), and in particular Merleau-Ponty. This isn’t so much a developmental process as it is a movement away from something and toward something else. For Merleau-Ponty, there is something deeper and thicker than a closed system of difference. We can “start (again) by stating that language is not made of signs” (p. 72). We can do this because we always encounter language with our bodies, with our ears, eyes, hands. Our bodies orient us to language, they structure the way we’re posed toward it, and therefore our bodies actively participate in the linguistic system. Because our bodies participate, signs aren’t completely unmotivated and aren’t (exhaustively) defined by their differential opposition to other signs. This isn’t to say that our bodies determine language, but it is to say that there is “a connatural relation between discourse and its object” (p. 76). There is something inhuman at work when we omit, disregard, or repress the body and the indeterminacy of shadows. There’s always something else to language than signs and meaning. The shadows of words are like their infancy, which inhabits them as they shift relative to our bodies and the world.

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chapter 1

The Text and the Line

It’s Merleau-Ponty who brings forward bodily orientation, placing it “under the authority of the body, demonstrating that there is structure before signification, that the former supports the latter” (p. 55). Signs don’t exist for themselves and they don’t only represent or reference. Take any letter as an example: E is composed of one horizontal line and three vertical lines, and to recognize—to read—an E one has to occupy a particular position relative to the surface upon which the lines are inscribed. If the relationship were changed, the E could appear as an M. “Does this mode of opposition,” Lyotard asks, “not call for relationships of textual displacement in the reader’s optical field, and therefore for figural properties” (p. 206)? Out of the various ways we could see these four lines, why must we always read them as an E? An E is a sign, but it’s much more than that. The letter operates in graphic space, where its “function consists exclusively in distinguishing, and hence in rendering recognizable, units that obtain their signification from their relationships in a system entirely independent from bodily synergy” (p. 206). The system (which Lyotard doesn’t reference in this book) works against the plasticity of the line, the line’s ability to function as part of a letter and as itself, its life as the letter’s shadows. The line’s plasticity points to a thick and opaque shadow of discourse that can spring from a figural space. The line can be transformed into a letter, but the line can also free itself from the graphic. This is often the case with street graffiti, in which the lines don’t always immediately appear as letters, but they aren’t quite completely freed from textual space. It forces an interruption in the smooth operations of reading the world, where we’re always searching for meaning and signified representations. The pure line is that which is liberated from the hooks of text. “The line is therefore figural when, by her or his artifice, the painter or drawer places it in a configuration in which its value cannot yield to an activity of recognition—for to recognize is to know well” (p. 213). Lyotard here places emphasis on the drawing or writing of lines, but it just as much depends on the viewer’s encounter, the way we engage the line, or are presented with it. The system’s pedagogy forecloses these alternative encounters. They’re not efficient. Importantly, there isn’t a hard and fast opposition between discourse and figure, between structure and body. The line’s plasticity derives from its ability to occupy and lead us to either mode and the spaces in between, to lead us from one into the other, and to see one in the other. There are three types of figures in the book. First, there’s the “figure-image,” which “applies to the image of an object with its outline.” The figure-image is the letter E as a coherent, self-enclosed inscription in graphic space. Second,

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there’s the “figure-form,” the “form (Gestalt) of the visible, which can be brought into relief through analysis even if it was not seen at the outset.” The figure-form consists of plastic lines composing E. Here, our attention moves beyond reading and signification, and towards a viewing that can appreciate the aesthetics of their composition. Third, there’s the “figure-matrix,” which is “a still deeper configuration to which analysis could possibly come near, but that can never become the object either of vision or signification” (p. 279). The figure-matrix is like the infancy of the line, the affective charge that animates it. That analysis can only potentially approach the figure-matrix means it can’t be rendered transparent or visible, it can’t be captured. It’s something that phenomenology can’t grasp either because it’s before sensation. The figure-matrix “is the most remote from communicability, the most withdrawn. It harbors the incommunicable” (p. 327). It’s not a figure that one could see or that could ever take on a stable form. Dreaming is an exposure to the figural as it “works over” discourse and image. It’s not purely figural, because we still hear and speak words, see and read letters and lines. But with dreams, the figural and discursive are blocked together without temporal distinctions. Different heterogeneous and conflicting levels play out together. When dreaming, we’re not beholden to the dictates of reading and reason. Things that shouldn’t make sense seem like they’re natural. Different time periods, spaces, logics, experiences, and more merge together in the same place. If you’ve ever come out of a particularly lucid dream and wished to communicate it in some way (write it down or share it with the people around you), you can sense the figural disappearing. It’s impossible to bring them to representation. Even if you could perfectly remember what happened, attempts to articulate events become unintelligible. This is why, for Lyotard, we can’t definitively interpret dreams or accurately bring them to representation. In 24/7, Jonathan Crary (2013) writes about how there is currently “a broad remodeling of the dream into something like media software or a kind of ‘content’ to which, in principle, there could be instrumental access” (p. 97). This is the dream of the inhuman system: even our dreaming life would contribute inputs to the optimum functioning of the system. While this is evident in science fiction literature and film, it’s also propelled in research institutes, which use “data from brain scans of visual cortex activity in dreaming subjects to generate digital images that allegedly represent what the subjects are dreaming of” (p. 97). It isn’t a mere question of how accurate these practices would or could be, and a far more fundamental question of the very drive to bring the dreamworld under the hegemony of the system. It’s the impulse to reduce the figural to the discursive, to eliminate the subject’s infancy and discourse’s figural properties in the name of the inhuman system.

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Another way to get at the figure-matrix is through desire. The figural’s desire is present in discourse, but it “does not manipulate the intelligible text in order to disguise it; it does not let the text get in, forestalls it, inhabits it, and we never have anything but a worked-over text, a mixture of the readable and the visible” (Lyotard, 1971/2011, p. 267). If you’ll recall from the introduction, desire is a present absence or an animating gap. Within discourse, it’s evidenced within the unbridgeable abyss between signification and reality. There’s something that we feel or experience, and we want to capture it through language. Every linguistic communication arises from someplace else besides language itself. But as we try to articulate it, we’re both closer and further away from it. In this book, for instance, it’s because as each reference from reality enters a system of signification, it’s flattened and altered, but its shadow persists. “A compulsion of opacity exists that requires that what one speaks of be declared lost” (p. 102). This, in turn, can spawn the impulse for more and different significations. Consider the metaphor. Let’s say I turn to the metaphor in an effort to describe my love for my wife. I say (and don’t worry, I would never say this) “My love for you is a perpetual sunrise.” I’m attempting to represent something figural through discourse, but at the same time, my use of discourse takes me away from my love. It’s not my love, but a sunrise. It’s the same with similes. If I say that school is like a factory, I’m saying something precise and potentially meaningful, but in order to do it, I’m moving away from the school. Even as I make the school clearer in one respect, at the same time I obscure it and render it opaquer in other respects. This is why discourse “finds itself endowed with an enigmatic thickness. The signifiers come forward and seem to be hiding something, something that is not their ‘signified’” (p. 284). What is particularly telling is that Lyotard doesn’t paint or draw any of this (although he does include and analyze art in the book). He remains within textual space. This is the paradox of figural discourse. Keeping in mind what Lyotard finds missing in linguistic systems, the absence of motivation in language, Lyotard motions that all language—not only the poetic—operates with and in an irreducible opacity. It is the object—the thought, the thing, the dream—that is opaque. It is also, at the same time, the designating language that removes “its immediate meaning and deepens its mystery” (p. 83). For example, if I tell my wife that my love for her is beyond words, I’m uttering words but articulating something figural, something beyond their literal meaning.

2

Developmental Reading and Childish Reading

In The Inhuman introduction, Lyotard (1988/1991) writes that development is about saving time. “To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information

Reading

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that is useful afterwards, as in ‘rapid reading.’ But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing ‘within’ are slow” (p. 3). I see the inhuman as the main hinge on which different orientations of reading brought forward in Discourse, Figure swing. Practices of reading can swing toward the inhuman of the system—let’s call it developmental reading—or the inhuman of infancy, let’s call it childish reading. Around these different directions circulate orientations of subjectivity, time, knowledge, and thought. The one place Lyotard (1971/2011) mentions education in Discourse, Figure, he gets at this hinge (without using infancy or the system). “It is precisely of this skill that discursive education and teaching deprive us: to remain permeable to the floating presence of the line (of value, of color)” (p. 212). Discursive education teaches developmental reading. It seeks to minimize the time between when one encounters something and when sense is made of that thing. Developmental reading entails encountering things as if they had already entered into signification and discourse, ignoring their shadows and brushing aside their alterity. The figural is sacrificed at the threshold of textual space, lines are reduced to parts of signs, and reality is reduced to the sign. The clouds of thought are captured. The system, with its demands for recognition, representation, and signified difference, is predicated upon the logic of developmental reading. We encounter the lines of language and recognize them in flat, textual space as signs. Thus, there are “assumptions, interpretations, and habits of reading that we contract with the predominant use of discourse” (p. 212). We developmentally read more than text: we do the same to paintings, actions, animals, ourselves, others, our encounters, and everything. We read the world developmentally. It has to be rendered intelligible as quickly as possible. If it doesn’t make sense, we move on. Sometimes, we don’t even continue reading past the abstract or the introduction. If we do, we understand ourselves as the “you” the author is addressing. This is the “course compelling things to repeat the same” that infancy interrupts (Lyotard, 1988/1993b, p. 151). The system is open to differences, but these differences have to be intelligible, they must be articulated. Schooled by the system, we tend to read in this way. If we do so, we contribute to the repetition of the same. Meaning is represented, pre-existing, and stable. Of course, the system would suffer entropy if nothing new was added to it. There is, as such, nothing contradictory about the need to read things for yourself or to make the text your own. This represents a higher functionality for the system. So too does critical reading: when we read for what the author didn’t say but should or could have said. This is how the system gets its new inputs. It’s how the system develops.

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chapter 1

Secret Reading and Public Reading

But the clouds of thought can’t be captured, and infancy persists. In an essay on teaching philosophy, the one where Lyotard says philosophy demands patience, he gives us a hint as to what childish reading entails: “it is an exercise in discomposure in relation to the text, an exercise in patience… it is learning that reading is never finished, that you can only commence, and that you have not read what you have read” (Lyotard, 1988/1992, p. 101). Infancy never starts from a point of zero; it emerges in the course of things and throws them off course. If we view the infant child as only a future potential adult, we foreclose their infancy. If we view the text as only a future potential meaning, we foreclose our infancy and the infancy of the text. This is an important distinction, one that turns on the difference between initiation and innovation. In an essay (that in one place took the form of a letter to his son David), Lyotard marks this divergence: “What makes an encounter with a word, odor, place, book, or face into an event is not its newness when compared to other ‘events.’ It is its very value as initiation.” It’s crucial to defend initiation “from innovation, that other mode of the already said. Innovation is for selling” (91). If we relate to the text as an innovation, as something new that can be developed, we eliminate the moment of initiation, or pure exposure and birth. If we read words strictly as signs, as raw materials we mine for meaning and innovate with, we do the same. To read childishly, we have to move from reading text to encountering it, to obey the “irreversible thickness” that “stands in the way of the mind’s rush toward signification” (Lyotard, 1971/2011, p. 172). This thickness testifies to the presence of the figural from which discourse arises, the affective capacity that moves us to language in the first place. At one point, Lyotard reads The Revolt, a short novel by Nina Berberova, to behold this opaque space and the dangers of developmental reading. In The Revolt, the narrator, Olga, tells of her separation from and eventual reunion with her lover, Einar. She accompanies Einer as he leaves Paris for Stockholm in the middle of World War II, the day after the Nazis invaded Poland and a few months before they would invade France. They said their goodbyes as they planned their future life together. While the lovers met in Paris, Olga tells us that they really met in “no man’s land,” which Lyotard names “the secret life,” and we could consider a land of infancy. Lyotard doesn’t dwell on this, but Olga first discovered this land in her “earliest years.” While she discovered it in her childhood, she says she didn’t recognize its importance until she had grown up. It wasn’t until she was developed that she appreciated the significance of infancy. It’s a place of “quiet and solitude” where “a thought might occur that changes a man’s life, ruins or saves him” (Berberova, 1990, p. 28). Olga tells us that she met Einer here and that it was an important place in their relationship

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(they called it their Tuesday Sabbath) Their life there “flourished and came to block out the first” (p. 29). The privacy and secrecy of no man’s land can be shared, it isn’t the property of an individual subject. This existence is different from “the life everyone sees,” the life lived in public, perhaps in the system (p. 27). The no man’s land is where “a man lives in freedom and private,” where “strange things can happen”: “Perhaps in this no man’s land people cry, or drink, or think about something no one else knows, or they examine their bare feet, or they try to find a new place for a parting on their balding head… I don’t know, and I don’t want to know” (p. 28). Olga doesn’t want to know what others do in this realm, because that knowledge—and the very aspiration for that knowledge—would betray their rights to it. When Olga finally meets up with Einar, he’s living with another woman, Emma, who Olga comes to find is his wife. As Olga spends time with Einer in Stockholm, Emma always accompanies them. Emma kept Olga “in her custody… here I had no more no man’s land” (p. 40). Olga eventually decides to leave and break off her relationship with Einer rather than let Emma deprive her of the secret life. There has to be a “sort of ‘general line’” between the regions (p. 28). Discursive education chips away at the general line and developmental reading is a means of doing so. The no man’s land’s elusiveness and unintelligibility, discourse’s figurality and opacity, are a threat to the system. It can’t be developed or predicted. It’s a place for thinking rather than knowledge. “The secret authorizes,” Lyotard (1993/1997) writes, “that at the moment one [does] not say what one knows. But ‘the secret existence’ is ‘free,’ because you don’t know what should be said. You grant your hours of solitude to that existence because you have a need not to know more” (p. 116). Perhaps Olga realized the secret life’s gravity as a consequence of the constant drive to know. In the secret life, we’re free from the inhumanity of the system and its requirements for development, speed, efficiency, and discursive articulation. By dwelling there you “can encounter what you are unaware of.” You have to wait for the encounter, even though “you can try to make it come… But these means to provoke the encounter are also part of this mysterious region. They keep the secret and nothing assures that they will work” (p. 117). One of the means Lyotard notes here is reading. There are no guarantees that reading will lead to thinking, you can’t force it. As he writes in another essay in Postmodern Fables, secret reading entails “a squint-eyed look at the visible, divergent enough to glimpse what is not visible there” (p. 39).

4

Racist Reading and Quiet Reading

It’s easy to see why this requires patience and the recognition that you haven’t actually read what you’ve read. It’s also easy to sense why Lyotard can frustrate

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the need for political action. In the face of exploitation and oppression, what effect can waiting have except for allowing injustice and violence to continue? The claim, of course, isn’t that we should only ever wait for encounters or that we must refrain from discourse. The call is rather that we have to defend the secret life by maintaining a general line between it and the public life of expression and communication. In fact, it’s by neglecting this responsibility, by only reading developmentally, that we deepen and reinforce oppression. Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet can provide a compelling example of the dynamic between infant and developmental reading and their respective roles relative to anti-racist struggle. Without citing Lyotard or explicitly demarcating different kinds of reading, he defends the general line and the secret life from the terror of the system. Quashie reproaches the prevailing modes of reading and representation, in which “black subjectivity exists for its social and political meaningfulness,” insofar as “the determination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist” (Quashie, 2012, p. 6). The inclination to focus on Black subjectivity as public is reasonable because racism is a public system enacted in public places. He’s not denying that there needs to be a struggle on this terrain or that we need to resist racism publicly. But that can’t be all there is. The problem is that Black culture is structured totally by the public, that there’s no general line. One weapon that attacks the general line is the domination of signification, which entails “what is said, what is unsaid, and the relationship between the two.” The relationship is important because it’s what allows for interpretation. However, we tend to only pay attention to the unsaid in relation to the said, and not on its own terms. As a result, “the general discussion of signifying as verbal exchange tends to focus on its demonstrative quality rather than its capacity to reflect what is unsure and interior” (p. 18). The quiet life is this uncertain interiority of the subject. He calls it an expansive place of immeasurable wildness. “The interior is expansive, voluptuous, creative; impulsive and dangerous, it is not subject to one’s control but instead has to be taken on its own terms. It is not to be confused with intentionality or consciousness, since it is something more chaotic than that” (p. 21). We’re not in control of our quiet interior. We can only access it by surrendering to it and waiting for it. We can’t know what goes on there. It’s beyond and greater than language. Quashie uses the word ineffable. To encounter it, to read it, we have to move beyond resistance. If resistance is our only framework, we’ll read the inner life in terms of the public life such that the inner life will be there to resist the public life.

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Quashie gives an example of what we might call quiet reading when he reads an iconic photograph that captures a 1960 lunch counter protest against racist apartheid. Two Black men sit at the counter across from two white waitresses who remain seated, one of them smoking a cigarette, refusing to serve them. We can read this as “a stand-off with the two white waitresses who watchfully ignore them; these boys have no plates of food in front of them and no one seems to be moving to offer them service. In another moment, they might be assaulted with condiment bottles or verbal epithets.” Quashie doesn’t dispute such a reading, which produces absolutely crucial knowledge of “the pervasiveness of both racism and black resilience.” Yet to limit ourselves to this reading would be racist because it would remain within the confines and dictates of the system’s demand for publicity, denying the subjects their secret life. If we read it quietly, we can see “something that suggests an inner life: they are not (only) in a stand-off but they are also reading; their minds are likely wandering over many things, including the words on the page. There is something self-focused about their act of reading, a process that stirs the imagination and strengthens the self—a consummate kind of agency, perhaps” (p. 77). What stands out in Quashie’s quiet reading of the image is the way he refrains from asserting any particular knowledge about the Black men. We read that the image “suggests” that “their minds are likely wandering,” and finally we read the word “perhaps.” Quiet reading refrains from producing determinate knowledge, although it doesn’t remain in pure indeterminacy. Its discourse is one of an interrupting hesitation, an indecision that demands “suspending the framework of cause and effect that is so essential to the logic of thinking about racism, sexism, and poverty” (p. 54). Through such a demanding hesitation we can wait for the infancy of the encounter, we can increase our capacity to be affected. Quashie remains within initiation, defending it from innovation, and letting us bear witness to infancy. We’re discomposed by virtue of quiet reading’s refusal to develop settled knowledge about the text that could be entered into the circuits of the system to increase its efficiency. In other words, while we grant the other their inhuman infancy, their wild and quiet interior, we can encounter our own. This is “a kind of radical freedom, as if one’s existence is no longer defined by membership in a community or group” (p. 120). Without this quiet, childish reading, we hold the other hostage, depriving them of their no man’s land, their inhuman infancy, and accordingly contribute to the system’s attack on infancy. This surely doesn’t imply a permanent refusal to read developmentally or to produce new knowledge. What it does imply is the institution of a general line between the two readings, a “squint-eyed look” so that the lines composing the

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E can be freed from their system, and the inhuman comprising the human can be freed from theirs.

5

Re-Reading: An Invitation

It’s hard to read Discourse, Figure developmentally. A recent work by Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (2019) says that the book “eschews synthesis and rather approaches something like the event of thinking” (p. 17). The book is more like an exhibition in which objects are arranged such that text, image, and the invisible are arranged and presented “as if they were somehow already thoughts, already thinking in themselves,” insofar as “language is shown through with visual forms just as much as the visual is broken up by linguistic elements” (p. 17). The above reading didn’t draw this out, and at first presented the book as a linear progression through different thinkers and philosophies, to later be undermined by the book’s arguments before taking leave for elsewhere. This comes from the necessity to read childishly and developmentally. If there were no development, there would be no inhuman infancy. On a different register, there’s an interesting moment where Lyotard concedes to the rushed efficiency of developmental reading. In The Differend, he acknowledges the nexus of the system in which the writing and reading take place. He begins with a preface titled, “Reading Dossier,” which claims to provide a succinct summary of the book, clearly articulating its genre style, problem, thesis, and context. We’re not entirely sure to what degree it’s genuine or sardonic. It’s clear that the idea one could assemble a case file on a philosophical exploration is absurd. On the other hand, Lyotard might provide the dossier for the reader who doesn’t truly want to read the text, who doesn’t want to practice the patience of re-reading, for the developmental reader concerned only with speed, performance, progress, and conclusions. “I know you’re in a rush, so here’s the gist of it.” Yet it also signals what is to come, and invites us into a childish reading, as a kind of warning: “You will not have read this book. You can only read it over again.”

CHAPTER 2

Writing Lyotard could be approached as a writer who writes in order to think about writing. In his 1986 lecture series, he references how Claude Simon answered the question posed by someone from the Union of Soviet Writers about what Simon thought writing is, to which Simon replied, according to Lyotard (1988): “It consists in trying to start a sentence, to continue it, and to finish it” (p. 4). Writing, in other words, is an attempt to go someplace through and with the writing, to try and begin, to try and continue, and to try and end. This attempt “constitutes thinking or writing in its ‘entirety’” (p. 7). Writing is not synonymous with thinking, but a practice through which one can touch the clouds of thought. To emphasize that one can only try to write intimates that writing is not an instrument to be wielded, a technique to be learned, a mechanism to be mastered, or a procedure to be developed. It’s not a process of transcribing existing knowledge from the ear onto paper or screen or of formulating representations to reality competently. Nor does the attempt to write emanate from the will, as if there is an “I” who has a thought or sensation and is compelled to organize it linguistically to communicate it to others. That one can only try to write sentences means that the sentence is always incomplete. Thus, it’s not a matter of trying harder or writing better, but of surrendering to the impossibility of writing. This is not due to—or not only due to—the permanent disjuncture or difference between reality and language, the real and the symbolic, the unconscious and the conscious, or, in proper Lyotardian speak, discourse and figure, but instead to the very insufficiency of thinking. Thinking is most sharply distinct from knowing or understanding, the latter of which come under the property of cognition and are the result of the subject’s grasping of data, and the former of which is an exposure to what is beyond the mind’s capacities. Thinking always fails to capture the clouds, a failure that sustains thinking’s movement. To approach the matter from the heading with which he is most commonly associated, we can go to Lyotard’s paper on “Re-writing Modernity.” The heading was given to Lyotard by the organizers of a conference in Milwaukee, and for him, it’s better than postmodernity because it changes the “post” to a “re” and “modernity” to “writing.” Lyotard prefers the first change because it eschews any pretense to periodization, to declaring another end and another beginning, which is a definitively modern (and impossible) gesture. Indeed, in a later work, he will define modernity as the endless piling up of new willed © Derek R. Ford, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004458819_003

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pronouncements of new inaugurating periods. The modern revolutions—in politics, science, society—each declared: the old era is over and the new era has begun. We are turning back the clock and beginning again. The “re” indicates a return that is simultaneously present, past, and future. To understand his preference for writing, we have to appreciate his distinction between two kinds of re-writing. The first is re-writing as remembering. This is a modern re-writing through which the writer returns to the beginning of the text or the top of the document and begins again. One draft is finished and the next draft is begun. The text’s shadows have been trimmed or eliminated. The point of modern re-writing, and the gesture of modernity, is to mark a new zero hour in which the mistakes, misinterpretations, and mystifications of the past can be corrected. By marking a new zero hour, we can get closer to the zero point of the truth, justice, equality, and freedom. Modern re-writing produces progressively more comprehensive knowledge. It helps the system develop. As opposed to modern re-writing, re-writing modernity is re-writing as working through. This re-writing is “without end and therefore without will: without end in the sense in which it is not guided by the concept of an end— but not without finality” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 30). One tries to finish or complete the writing, but can only ever succeed in trying to end it. The writing is initiated without resulting in an innovation. Without the will to guide it, the writer operates under Freud’s rule of free-floating attention, which “states: do not prejudge, suspend judgement, give the same attention to everything that happens as it happens” (p. 30). Re-writing as working through, in other words, is propelled not by the will but by “listening to a sentiment. A fragment of a sentence, a scrap of information, a word, come along” (p. 31). The objective is not to know or understand, but to think. The point is not to gather more data to write a more accurate representation but to experience the forces that limit and mobilize the subject’s capacity to synthesize and even, perhaps, to remain as a subject. Re-writing is like Freud’s technique of free association (which we’ll discuss in chapter three). Modern re-writing remains within the system at the level of discourse. It works to force the figural into expression, to bring the secret life into the public life. It approaches the silences of the text always and only in relation to what is explicit in the text, structuring the text’s secret life as a resource for the public life’s expansion. With modern re-writing “one still wants too much. One wants to get hold of the past, grasp what has gone away, master, exhibit the initial crime” (p. 29). There is no initial crime because we’re always beginning in the middle. Because infancy persists, because the secret life necessarily eludes capture, because discourse’s intractable thickness can’t be annihilated,

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modernity remains to be re-written again and again, driven by the will to know. The dividing line between the two writings, then, doesn’t hinge on their openness to repetition, but on their openness to opacity and indeterminacy, to thinking. Re-writing modernity, as such, “provides no knowledge of the past.” The past isn’t in the past, but is “itself the actor or agent that gives to the mind the elements with which the scene will be constructed” (p. 31). Modern re-writing is based on the progression from opacity to transparency, from an unknown known to a known known, while re-writing modernity is a non-developmental way to encounter opacity as such, to write as a partisan of the text’s shadow. In his essay on teaching philosophy, Lyotard writes about “philosophical writing” as an infantile composition. For a course of study to be philosophical, it has to strive to remain within initiation. Lyotard (1988/1992) reflects on his time teaching philosophy in school and recalls a perpetual reality of beginning again. In the first trimester of the course, “we, the students and I, were ‘at sea,’” and “the course began, or rather, began to begin, with the survivors in January. One had to—one has to—endure the childhood of thought” (p. 102). He’s trying to grapple with the antagonism between teaching philosophy and teaching philosophically. Teaching philosophy necessarily entails teaching certain ideas, thinkers, periods, debates, and so on. To teach these, we have to locate them, name them, signify them. Teaching philosophically, on the contrary, unsettles these locations, names, and significations, trying to encounter them not as past, present, or future innovations, but as pure initiations. It’s the same antagonism at work in writing: “We write before knowing what to say and how to say it, and in order to find out, if possible. Philosophical writing is ahead of where it is supposed to be. Like a child, it is premature and insubstantial” (p. 103). The infant child comes into the world held hostage by something it can’t know or respond to, is initiated in a world of language before it has the means of language. The writer, too, comes to the page without the means of saying what they’re thinking. We have to re-write: “We recommence, but we cannot rely on it getting to the thought itself, there, at the end. For the thought is here, muddled up in the unthought, trying to make sense of the impertinent chatter of childhood” (p. 103). Thinking is irreducible to knowledge, is impossible to codify. The clouds are always moving, casting different shadows, speeding up, slowing down, rising, falling, disappearing. We trace them, always beginning in the middle of a thought and never capturing the thought with our lines. This, by the way, is why childish reading is so important: only with squinted eyes can we sense the thinking that’s “muddled up in the unthought.”

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Writing and the System

Writing about Claude Lefort’s analysis of George Orwell’s 1984, Lyotard inquires into what we could term the general line of language and writing as it plays out in the secret, wild, quiet interior life. What’s at first significant about the book is that it isn’t a work of criticism but of literature. Criticism is all too readily absorbable within the system with its clear judgments, condemnations, and proposals. What Lyotard (1988/1992) in this essay refers to as “literary writing,” which I think is synonymous with philosophical writing or re-writing, is one that “demands privation” and thus “cannot cooperate with a project of domination or total transparency, even involuntarily” (p. 88). Orwell’s hero, Winston, writes the novel not as a manifesto or theoretical excurses, but as a private diary, an act that begins as a resistance through which Winston encounters his “secret universe” (p. 88). Yet as he writes his innermost thoughts—driven by an attempt to escape the system—he articulates the secret, therefore obliterating it and facilitating its swift and efficient capture by the system. “In the very process of revealing itself to the author of the diary, this secret universe is trapped by the bureaucratic order” (p. 88). Like Olga in Stockholm, Winston discovers his secret life is being taken over, structured, by the public system. He realizes that his quiet is a means of resistance rather than a wild, expansive, and sovereign no-man’s land. The public life seeks to take hold of the secret life, to obliterate the general line, not only through overt means of repression. It can also happen subtly, through democratic means. For Lyotard (1993/1997), this is particularly dangerous precisely because it’s “more imperceptible” (p. 118). Democracy compels our articulations and expressions. It’s a kind of terror that “does not at all have the air of a terror.” Under democracy, we’re told: Express yourselves freely, have the courage of your ideas, of your opinions, communicate them, enrich the community, enrich yourselves, set yourselves to it, converse, there is nothing but good in making use of your rights since it takes place in respecting the rights of others, circulate, everything is possible within the limits fixed by laws or rules. And besides, these rules can themselves be revised. (p. 118) Without the secret life, without the right to infancy, there’s only the inhuman of the system. This might be uncomfortable to those of us who have been indoctrinated in democracy, but without this general line, we can’t resist the inhumanness of the system, including, as Quashie showed us in the last chapter, white supremacy.

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More than that, there’s a strange way in which totalitarianism has an appreciation for the power of infancy and the secret life. Under totalitarianism, “the leader wants to forget and make others forget the terrible nakedness constituting childhood,” and its repression is organized to produce this forgetting. It can’t do this, however, without acknowledging the force of childhood: “for such a powerful instrument of foreclosure, of forgetting, as totalitarianism to be fabricated, the Thing must appear extremely threatening, the relation of desire to the real must be one of extreme defenselessness” (Lyotard, 1988/1993, p. 159). Lyotard writes this in an essay on Hannah Arendt, where he makes the pointed observation that in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she never identifies these origins. For Lyotard, it originates as a response to the threat of infancy. The nakedness of infancy is repressed by the nakedness of power, by its brute force and blatant propaganda. Democracy is a more efficient and complex inhuman system because, instead of raw public violence, it absorbs infancy by compelling it to grow up through development. There’s no ideology to protect through mystification; only development. The enemy of totalitarianism is a particular group of humans. The enemy of democracy is entropy, so instead of repressing segments of the population under the cover of destiny, “in democratic forms and in the constant adaptation of laws to attain greater well-being, the ‘law’ of development finds both a means and a mask even more powerful… than totalitarian organization” (p. 159). Biological childhood isn’t forgotten but mobilized through development. “Childhood has to immediately take its place in the communicational networks” (p. 160). Infancy is attacked through a rear-guard action: child-rearing. Lyotard isn’t against the right to expression, of course. He recognizes that it’s easier to write without the threat of the police busting down your door (not that this doesn’t happen in democracies, of course).1 He’s calling our attention to the potential terror that’s intrinsic to democracy, in which we’re “absorbed in defending the proper use of general life, enticed away from one’s guard upon the ‘general line’ that belongs to one” (Lyotard 1993/1997, p. 119). The danger is that we’re too busy communicating and making ourselves transparent, too active engaging in critique and deliberation, that we “neglect the duty we have to listen to that other and to annul the second existence it requires of us.” We then “become ourselves perfectly interchangeable,” nothing more than inputs and outputs of the system (p. 121). Without our inhuman infancy, without our wild quiet interior, we’re overwhelmingly public, and not human. In “The General Line,” Lyotard mentions the academic dictate to publish or perish. Your thoughts are only good if they’re communicated as knowledge. “If you are not public, you disappear; if not

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exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist. Your no-man’s-land is interesting only if expressed and communicated. Heavy pressures are put on silence, to give birth to expression” (p. 120). This is developmental writing, the flipside of developmental reading.

2

The Idiocy of Writing

How to write from and to the secret life, or along the general line? Along with reading, writing is a means of touching the clouds of thought, of encountering the secret life. The capture and defense of the figural hinges on the relation between language and writing, which are simultaneously allied and opposed to each other. “One writes against language, but necessarily with it. To say what it already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say, but what one imagines it should be able to say” (Lyotard, 1988/1992, p. 89). We can only write with language, but we don’t write from language, and we write with language to move beyond or outside of it. Language can never represent thinking; it can only ever leave traces of thought. True totalitarianism can’t get rid of writing, because it would have to do so by writing, through which it “would have to concede that with writing there is at least one region where restlessness, lack, and ‘idiocy’ come out into the open” (p. 90). Discourse can never obliterate the figural, and it’s more practical and effective for the former to take hold of the latter. Infancy can’t be eradicated, but children can grow up faster. The idiocy of writing is the unthought, that which always indicates there is something that language can’t capture, that can’t be reduced to information or knowledge. That said, there are some forms of writing that might be more open to infancy than others. One example is Walter Benjamin’s writings on childhood, which don’t describe childhood but indicate “the childhood of the event and inscribe what is uncapturable about it” (p. 90). In describing childhood, I might seek to articulate something new about childhood, to show how it’s unique. But this would remain tied to the logic of development, in which an event is transformed into innovation, something new that can be sold or circulated throughout the infinite exchange routes of the system. Each innovation is a child that has grown up. Instead, re-writing is about an initiation into childhood; an unknown that remains unknown and only appears through traces. Rather than the diary, then, the more appropriate act of resistance in 1984 is the production of the idiom, singular words, or phrases that can’t be translated or transferred and that never succeed at naming what they name. Because the idiom always fails, it’s the experience of initiation without development. The idiom is singular

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but also shared, a common point of contact in which we share in the secret. In love, there is “the never-ending search for a different idiom of sensibility, this vertigo where my idiom and yours falter, where they look for exchange, where they resist and discover each other” (p. 92). The idiom is never complete, can never capture what it wants, and hence cannot grow up into an innovation, destined always and only to the experience of initiation. There is an unremarked irony in Lyotard’s writing about Orwell that I have to note. While the target of Orwell’s 1984, and his other books, are “totalitarianism,” and in particular the Soviet Union, Orwell himself was an enthusiastic collaborator with the totalitarian repression of the state. He was part of the British government’s Information Research Department, which he provided with names of communists and “fellow travelers.” “Orwell’s List,” as it’s known—which wasn’t made public until 2002, after Lyotard had died— named a disparate range of people, including Paul Robeson, who Orwell noted was “very anti-white” (Cockburn, 2012). None of this discredits or challenges Lyotard’s analysis, and on the contrary, I think it coincides with his conceptualization of the system and its extreme dynamism. Violence and repression, as Lyotard knew, and as we all know, isn’t off the table in democracy. It’s just that the more naked forms of power are less preferable.

3

Re-Writing: As If!

Lyotard knew that nothing was immune from the system, not even his own life, work, or thought. In one fable, “Marie Goes to Japan,” he writes about his own general line between writing and language, between thinking and producing. The narrator, Marie, could be Lyotard. An academic who’s just landed in Tokyo to give a lecture, Marie identifies with the circulating baggage and the conveyor belt it’s on at the airport. The stream of baggage is just like the stream of cultural capital, of knowledge and information. “They buy culture from me. Capital too. I’m not the owner, thank God, nor the manager. Just a little cultural labor force they can exploit” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 3). Marie has to keep innovating new ideas, which has to not only be different but display her difference (so her ideas get picked up on the conveyor belt), and produce faster. “The good stream is one that gets there the quickest. An excellent one gets there almost right after its left… But the best thing is to anticipate its arrival, its ‘realization’ before it gets there” (p. 5). Ideally, we know where the infancy of thought is headed before it gets there. Then we can write faster. Marie wonders what happens to writing under these demands. “You have to buy a word processor. Unbelievable, the time you can gain with it.—But what about the act of writing?” But Marie doesn’t use one, she still uses a typewriter.

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Her conveyor belt of thought moves slowly. “Thought takes time” and it “doesn’t resemble streams. Ponds, rather. You flounder in them. It goes nowhere, it’s not happy, not communicative” (p. 5). There are a few places where Lyotard links language and thinking to ponds or water. “Language is like water,” he writes in an essay on Ulysses, “a kind of great profligate carnal sea that offers itself to everything, infiltrates everywhere, redoubles and represents everything” (Lyotard, 1988/1993a, p. 203). You have to “give in” to the sea when writing, without somehow giving into it. The trust we put in language while writing “must remain suspended.” The speech that Marie’s about to give, scribbled and slow, brings her satisfaction, as “they won’t understand a thing. It’s too laconic. And in too written a form.” Her audience expects a transparent argument, the typical academic format: give an overview of the argument, explain your point, position it relative to the literature, and most importantly, show off your difference, your otherness. “Ah! others! That’s all they have on their lips… What cultural capitalism has found is the marketplace of singularities” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, pp. 6–7). The difference has to speak to them. Her secret life, her wild interior, is there for public consumption. She’s defending it by making her speech opaque, hard to digest. It’s not what they’re after. But she doesn’t take solace in this. “My stuff is not on target, that’s for sure. A little worry for Marie, and a laugh: what is not on target might well be what is most on target” (p. 9). There’s no surefire tactic for resisting it, no assurance that even the most unintelligible or opaque piece of writing won’t find an exchange-value in the marketplace of ideas. The absence of guarantees doesn’t imply nihilism. Quite the opposite. It’s all too easy to read an apathetic politics in Lyotard’s work, especially after he left the workers’ movement, but we can find the force of his political engagements precisely in the absence of direct political critiques. “The task of criticism,” he says, “is precisely to pinpoint and denounce every failure of the system with regard to emancipation. But what is remarkable is that the presupposition behind this task is that emancipation is from now on the charge of the system itself, and critiques of whatever nature they may be are demanded by the system in order to carry out this charge more efficiently” (p. 70). Critical writing remains within the spiraling confines of modern rewriting. This is what accounts for Lyotard’s drift from Marx and Freud, which for Lyotard represent the endless task of critique and exposure. “Any critique, far from transcending” capitalism or the system, “reinforces it. What destroys it is the drift of desire” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 14). Re-writing modernity doesn’t transcend capitalism or the system but holds it at bay, or at least attempts to open discourse to the figural. As Claude Simon said, writing is trying. Trying, as a verb, is different from doing—as doing implies success and completion—and is nothing more or less

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than making an attempt, an effort, to do something. As an adjective, trying denotes that something is frustrating or taxing, fatiguing or annoying. Perhaps the reason we relate these qualities or states with the action of trying is a result of trying’s attempts to do in the face of its own potential inadequacy. Perhaps the reason we find the action of trying annoying or tiring is because we’re products of the system. Trying certainly isn’t efficient, and it definitely isn’t subject to control. It demands patience. As a state of being or an action that entails its own uncertainty and failure, as a simultaneous capacity and incapacity, Lyotard links trying to infancy. Infancy is an occasion of debt that can’t be repaid, but the infant child isn’t rendered passive as a result. As he writes in “The Survivor,” the capacity to be affected animates the infant child. As a result, “childhood consists in the fact of being and acting as if one could nonetheless pay off the enigma of being there, as if one could draw interest on the inheritance of birth, of the complex, of the event, not in order to enjoy it, but to transmit it, so that it might be put off, passed on [remis]” (Lyotard, 1988/1993b, p. 149). The infancy that persists pasts biological childhood can never wipe out the debt to which the human owes its life. Totalitarianism tries to erase this debt by force, while democracy tries to forget the debt through non-stop activation, through keeping us so busy that we neglect our infancy, our secret life. The system supplements this debt through constant and ever faster development, including that of the human through education. This might explain the expansion of formal schooling and its various rituals like testing into earlier years (it is not uncommon for preschool children aged 2 or 3 to be tested in schools) and later years (the qualifications it takes to acquire a professional job has now proceeded past the Ph.D. and into a “postdoctoral” engagement in some fields). As we can’t guarantee our resistance to the system’s encroachment on infancy, we have to act as if we can. We have to try to write as if we can move beyond discourse and transmit that beyond to others, as if we can access our secret life without making it public; as if, in other words, we can maintain the general line. Throughout his work, Lyotard both identifies these uncertain endeavors at work in other writings and he makes his own uncertain attempts.

4

The List…

One attempt to write along the general line is the list, which Lyotard finds in the work of Michel Butor, a French writer who served on Lyotard’s dissertation panel (and whose work Lyotard examined in his dissertation). In an essay written for a conference on Butor, published as “False Flights in Literature,” Lyotard reads Butor’s work as a discursive mode that both produces and undermines

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knowledge, a writing that suspends its trust in language and stays in discourse’s shadows, and through which we can sense the unthought that remains within the thought. One mode through which this happens is the process of listing. At first blush, it might seem like the system has a monopoly on listing, as a list is an attempt to capture something through writing. The list can always grow and expand to new territories, to conquer and grasp new unknowns. The list is a means by which “the empire has become luminous,” by which it renders opacity into transparency. Simultaneously, the list is revealed as “nearly monstrous,” as “the luminous imperial system’s edging: an impossible place (an edge is unthinkable: it is that by means of which one thinks) where what the empire will compose and what the confessor will cause to speak are held in reserve” (Lyotard, 1974/1993, p. 129). As a limit, the list both encloses what it lists and marks the borders of what it hasn’t or can’t enclose. Further, as a compilation of words, signs, and lines, what the list identifies isn’t really enclosed. The list is still a means of capture and development for the system, but at the same time, it’s a means for thinking and potentially an opening to infancy. The list is duplicitous, as is all writing. We try to write with language and against it. We try to write from within to beyond the limits of the list. But not all list writing is equal. Some lists, like lists of grievances, are more readily absorbable into the system. Butor’s writing maintains a general line not because it stands from outside the system, but because the writing, “the decoupage, collage, and montage of fragments taken from the world-book act immediately as critique upon received arrangements (book and world are received) and as exhibition of the work of writing itself” (p. 136). When Butor engages his data, he places himself outside of it but within it. He doesn’t represent it as much as he presents it differently. He doesn’t articulate what he’s thinking so much as show us the process of thinking, of re-writing modernity, of working through. It’s a “false flight,” as the title indicates, because it takes off without arriving, preserving the instant of initiation without developing into innovation. Another attempt to write along the general line is the ellipsis, which Lyotard finds in the writing (and life) of André Malraux. The ellipsis is also a limit, and Lyotard (1993/2011) at one point says in Soundproof Room that Malraux’s writing is “a writing at the limit of writing” (p. 10). The ellipsis is an anacoluthon, a word that comes from the Greek akólouthos, which means “following” with the an, which means “not.” As an anacoluthon, the ellipsis enacts a discontinuity that interrupts a sentence or series of words communicating a thought. The ellipsis doesn’t merely represent its failure but performs it. The performance, Lyotard, writes, “imposes silence on the verbiage of intrigues and allows to murmur the mutism that it covers” (p. 62). In a sense, the ellipsis is

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the enactment of the as if, as it’s the limit of the list that points to what can’t be articulated while casting doubt and uncertainty on the contents of the list. I don’t think this means that the ellipsis always and only has this effect. Reading developmentally, we might completely gloss over it. Writing developmentally, we might deploy it to save time and to prevent the attempt to write. There are no guarantees, only risks. If we write and read childishly, however, we can encounter the force of the ellipsis. One of my friends was once totally consumed with the ellipsis that appears at the end of so many mentions of oppression and identity: “race, gender, class, sexuality, etc…” Their particular interest was in the exclusions, what the ellipsis covered over. It forces us to ask what was left out and why, what else might be included in it? At the same time, as an anacoluthon, as something that doesn’t follow, it can compel us to ask if the preceding items follow from one another. It throws the whole list into doubt. What, after all, is the relationship between these terms? Are they interchangeable? Do they signal the same process under different forms? There’s no way of confirming even the most standard and routine linkages in any list, but this is heightened with the ellipsis. “The poetics of the ellipsis forces the real world to confess that it is an illusion: the screen of the familiar has obsessed the nil” (p. 62). The writing confesses its own inadequacy in its exposure to the clouds of thought. It can move us to think and to write, maybe even allowing us to encounter the wild interior life… I’ve emphasized a few times how dialogue contributes to the system’s performance and optimization. Yet this isn’t always and only the case. The system, too, is without guarantees. In Lyotard’s writing, he undercuts the performativity of dialogue by staging conversations between subjects (almost always between a “he” and a “she”). By doing so, he writes a general line that defends his secret life from the clutches of determinate knowledge. The reader, and the writer, don’t discern any particular position or fix any determinate knowledge. Sometimes, as is the case in the essay, “Interesting?,” even the “he” and “she,” through whom Lyotard is writing, acknowledge that there is something other within them that is speaking, to which they have to listen: “There is something or someone in me,” “she” says to “he,” “who is not speaking ‘me,’ my language. How can this clandestine host be ignored” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 62). The multiple distancing moves us beyond language into an indeterminate and wild realm of potentiality. The writing doesn’t home in on any truth, but circles around opacity. When I write about Lyotard here, I can’t attribute any of these words to him. Things get even more ambiguous when there are no words attached to the speakers, only lines. In “Paradox on the Graphic Artist” from Postmodern Fables, what appears to be a conversation takes place but each contribution of the

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dialogue is marked only by a “—.” The figures remain completely anonymous. Even as they articulate ideas through Lyotard’s writing, they do so without any public identity attached. We’re not even sure—and Lyotard might not have even known—exactly how many participants there were. The ambiguously written conversations serve to set thought apart from knowledge, to testify that writing can only ever try to think.

Note 1 Lyotard says we must recognize that “we write and think in a state of relative peace, without having to listen for the doorbell at 6 A.M., without the immediate, constant threat of the most abject annihilations” (Lyotard 1988/1993, p. 155).

INTERMEZZO

From the Beautiful to the Sublime In his essay on re-writing modernity, Lyotard (1988/1991) suggests in passing that such re-writing happens “under a problematic of the sublime as much as, and today more than, more obviously than, the problematic of the beautiful” (pp. 33–34). Writing is an aesthetic practice, and thinking is too. In fact, Lyotard often links writing and thinking with drawing, painting, and musicking. His interest in and engagement with artistic thinking and practices, with literature on and works of art (and literature as art), was long standing, sprawling, and eclectic. We’ve encountered the aesthetic dimensions of Lyotard’s work already, but at this point I’d like to consider them more explicitly so we can better experience their force in the chapters that follow, and so we can realize we haven’t quite read or written the chapters we have thus far. Lyotard was particularly taken by the distinctions and relationships between the beautiful and the sublime, and here he was especially interested in Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s thinking on the aesthetic categories. While the sublime has a long history in philosophy and art, it was Burke who moved the categories from the objective to the subjective, in other words, from a phenomenon of an artwork to one of the subject, and it was Kant who considered them in a framework of knowledge and thinking, which is why I’ll focus on Kant here. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant asks about the nature of aesthetic judgments and how they differ or coincide with objective knowledge claims. We often take our aesthetic judgements (our tastes) as purely subjective: to each their own. Yet it’s often the case that are we absolutely confounded when others, especially those closest to us, do not share our tastes or find our tastes repulsive. We are bewildered, even concerned, how someone we love and respect can have such bad taste. It seems that when we judge something to be beautiful, we’re making both a particular and universal claim, a subjective and an objective claim. Lyotard wrote a book on Kant titled Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. The “analytic of the sublime” is in the “third critique,” the Critique of Judgement, which came after his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. Lyotard’s (1991/1994) book challenges the prevailing idea that the third critique was supposed to “restore unity to philosophy in the wake of the severe ‘division’ inflicted upon it by the first two Critiques” (p. 1). The division concerns the relationship between the subjective and objective, the particular and © Derek R. Ford, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004458819_004

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universal, which is why we could read aesthetic judgements as bridging this divide. The judgement of the beautiful is disinterested or impartial. Saying that something is beautiful is thus different from saying it is just or efficient because the judgement isn’t tied to any particular end. Judging a particular mode of reading, for example, as oppressive, subordinates the judgement to another commitment (justice). Relatedly, the judgement of the beautiful is free in that it doesn’t correspond to a particular need or law. Because they are disinterested and free, the judgements don’t come from any particular kind of understanding or knowledge. There is no reason they shouldn’t be universal. Taste doesn’t emerge from a subject and instead signals the possibility of the formation of the subject. Taste is “the subject in a state of infancy” (p. 20). The reason for this has to do with the fact that, in the face of the beautiful, the subject’s faculties are not united. The pleasure of the beautiful arises from different faculties playing with each other in a free and disinterested manner, without being “guided by the concept of an end that would be the aim of their play” (p. 64). Our faculty of understanding (through which we group or categorize data into conceptual rules) plays with our faulty of imagination (through which we represent data in different forms). We can consider thinking as this state of play, where “thought must ‘linger,’ must suspend its adherence to what it thinks it knows” and “must remain open to what will orientate its critical examination: a feeling” (p. 7). In this state of lingering play, the faculties are separate and open. Understanding can’t give the imagination a rule and imagination can’t give understanding a form. With the beautiful, we can only think how the object or sensual data received through the body could be given a category or a form, how it could result in knowledge. For the experience to be aesthetic (rather than teleological), it can’t succeed in producing knowledge. Because understanding is involved, it is nonetheless still felt as the possibility of “determining the given” data (p. 58). If the determination succeeded, there would be no more play and no more pleasure, and thus no more infancy because the faculties would be united. This infancy, however, is based on a shared potentiality or a sensus communis, as Kant calls it. Taste is disinterested and free and is therefore subjective as there is no rule or external end guiding it. Owing to this, taste asks for universal assent and communication. This is why we are dumbfounded when others don’t share our taste, and why we feel compelled to tell them why they should. In the absence of knowledge, of concepts or rules, one can’t draw up logical proofs proving or disproving taste. The sensus communis, or common sense, is the “‘ideal norm’ that everyone in turn ‘should’ observe when judging the form judged to be beautiful” (p. 204). It’s not a law because it’s not demanded, and

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therefore can only be endlessly debated. The sensus communis is the shared potential of the beautiful that facilitates the discussion. The sublime also doesn’t emerge from a subject, but its infancy is of a different order. Whereas the beautiful is the pleasurable feeling of the faculties at play, the sublime is the feeling of both pleasure and displeasure that arises from an excessive and immeasurable presence. The thinking provoked “by the sublime feeling is faced, ‘in’ nature, with quantities capable only of suggesting a magnitude or a force that exceeds its power of presentation” (p. 75). The sublime is absolute, which means it is not relative to anything else, and is therefore immeasurable and ineffable. The sublime is something so large and powerful, or so small and weak, that it deprives imagination of the ability to present it through form and understanding the ability to place it in a category. For this reason, “there are no sublime objects but only sublime feelings” (p. 181). With the beautiful, we’re faced with something immeasurable and unintelligible, which is what activates the play of faculties as they wrestle with ways of measuring it (through imagination’s form) and knowing it (through understanding’s rules). There is, however, the possibility of both giving it measurement and knowing it. With the sublime, there is no such possibility. Yet we are still moved to nonetheless try to think about it, but this is motivated precisely by our inability to grasp it. The sublime is an intellectual feeling because it is thought pushing itself to the absolute through a negative presentation (the presentation is negative because it is without form or limit). “Thinking defies its own finitude, as if fascinated by its own excessiveness. It is this desire for limitlessness that it feels in the sublime ‘state’: happiness and unhappiness” (p. 55). With the sublime, however, the faculty of understanding is replaced by that of the reason. Whereas understanding deals in categorical rules, reason deals with speculative ideas. A speculative idea is an idea without any grounding or a priori rules. With understanding, we seek to find a rule to apply something, or to adjust a rule to accommodate it in order to know it. With reason, however, we there are no rules. Ideas here “are inapplicable a priori to any presentation, because the objects of these Ideas are absolute or limitless” (p. 100). Ideas are different from concepts in that the latter are forms (which have limits or boundaries) and the former are beyond form. The feeling of the sublime is the heterogeneous sensations of pleasure and pain, or exaltation and terror. The pain comes from the inability of the faculties to reason or represent. We’re in the presence of something beyond our power to even imagine it. The pleasure comes from the experience of thought thinking itself. We’re in the presence of this thing, and we can’t imagine or know it but we can still think about it. If we couldn’t think about it, it wouldn’t even

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register in any faculty. Importantly, this attempt isn’t driven by the will but is imposed on the subject by the immeasurable ineffability of the sublime. The faculties of reason and imagination aren’t at play but are brought to the breaking point. Revisiting Lyotard’s challenge to the typical reading of Kant’s Critiques, in which the third bridges the first two, we see that Kant’s introduction of the beautiful and the sublime shows that all thinking and knowledge, every category and rule, is unstable and without a common basis. The third critique is a kind of ellipses that approaches the outside of the list and throws the first two critiques into doubt by gesturing that the faculties at play there are also subject to this radical disorganization.

1

Sublime Thinking

Taste appeals to understanding to actualize itself even as it defies it. It’s understanding trying to accord or produce knowledges or categories, imagination trying to give it a representation. The play between our faculties brings forth a pleasurable feeling. With the sublime, “the perspectives of knowledge that the beautiful leaves accessible, albeit aporetically… are at once barred” (p. 186). The sublime is uninterested in understanding and is interested in thought. It’s even more intense: this uninterestedness is how thought finds its true destination: the absolute, which it can never reach. Sublime thought “seems to have a great interest in the disorganization of the given and the defeat of the understanding and the imagination” (p. 186). To put it differently, sublime thinking is absolute in that it’s thinking thought freed from the domination of knowledge and understanding. Because the understanding is barred, there’s no possibility of producing categories or rules or principles to the feeling. Infancy here must remain infant without the promise of growing up. It might be that the beautiful infant is the infant child who can grow up, while the sublime infant is the infancy that endures. Beautiful thinking is communicable thinking that entails the ability to be disclosed and debated, while sublime thinking is incommunicable as it proceeds as if it could reach the absolute while feeling it cannot. Beautiful thinking is pushed onward by the possibility of grasping data as knowledge, while sublime thinking is pushed onward by the inability to do so. Beautiful thinking can grow up, while sublime thinking remains insubstantial and premature. At one point, Lyotard likens the sublime to thinking itself, noting that “the sublime is a thought that is felt on the occasion of an absence of the object’s form” (p. 231). Given all of this, what might Lyotard intimate when he briefly suggests that today re-writing happens under the sublime rather than the beautiful?

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Lyotard gives us some clues in “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics,” an essay based on a talk he delivered at a conference on theory in 1987. Here he approaches the beautiful and the sublime along the question of matter. In a way, he begins where he ended his essay on re-writing modernity, for over “the last century, the arts have not had the beautiful as their main concern, but something which has to do with the sublime” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 135). Artists ask what it means to make art through their art, which is like thought thinking itself through thinking. “What can an art be that must operate not only without a determinant concept… but also without a spontaneous form, without a free form, as is the case in taste” (p. 137). The answer turns on imagination and cognition, the ability to freely present experience—to present and create data—and the ability to accord experiences and data to concepts. The sublime is beyond both powers, and thus prevents the imagination from giving form to matter. Under these circumstances, how can the artist present matter? To answer this, we have to move past the notion that art is giving matter a form. Form, he writes here, is “the simplest and perhaps most fundamental case, of what Kant constitutes the property common to every mind: its capacity (power, faculty) to synthesize data, gather up in the manifold,” and matter is “diverse, unstable and evanescent” data (p. 138). Under this regime, art entails producing beautiful knowledge. Sublime art, then, can only be “that of approaching matter. Which means approaching presence without recourse to the means of presentation” (p. 183, emphasis added). All art entails form, which means it has its boundaries and limits. Yet sublime art isn’t moved to shape matter into form, but to allow matter to work on its own. It’s impossible to present the formless, so matter has to come through in relation to some form. This happens by an increasing attention to subtlety and nuance. We can identify notes in a song or colors in a painting, but there is always something that resists this determination. Thinking about this relationship is thinking the question of composition. Lyotard encounters the sublime in the paintings of Barnett Newman, an abstract expressionist and aesthetic theorist working in New York City. His first exhibit stupefied critics and audiences through a series a rectangular canvases that didn’t seek to represent anything. “The message is the presentation, but it presents nothing; it is, that is, presence” (p. 81). What’s notable here is that the sublime is inaugurated by a minimal formlessness. It’s not an overwhelming, awe-inspiring painting that prevents our imagination from considering forms, but a barely present gesture that maintains the presence of the painting in the here and now. Newman barred the faculty of understanding by denying any references to any artistic movements, works of art, historical events, social problems, or cultural questions. There is no sensus communis, no “‘common sense’ of a shared pleasure” in Newman or the avant-gardes painters

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and artists, no possible “shared pleasure” (p. 125). Instead, they “appear to the public of taste to be ‘monsters’, ‘formless’ objects, purely ‘negative’ entities” (p. 125). As monstrous, they block the speed of the system, they can’t enter into the system’s circuits of exchange because they can’t find any equivalent. One way to consider this, as Lyotard does, is by contrasting Newman’s paintings with Marcel Duchamp’s. The latter invites endless commentary, examination, and questioning. The “consumption” or viewing of the work is limitless because there’s something else there that isn’t represented. Duchamp represents the non-representable. Newman, on the other hand, gives nothing more than what is there. “There is almost nothing to ‘consume’, or if there is, I do not know what it is,” Lyotard remarks (p. 80). It’s not difficult to access the use of materials, the cadence, or the colors. Without any technological artistic cleverness or complexity, “we feel not only that we are being held back from giving any interpretation, but that we are being held back from deciphering the painting itself” (p. 83). Thinking aesthetics after the sublime, he draws out the paradox that the matter presented here is immaterial. More precisely, it’s immaterial “under the regime of receptivity or intelligence. For forms and concepts are constitutive of objects, they pro-duce data that can be grasped by sensibility and that are intelligible to the understanding” (p. 140). The matter in sublime art can’t find its place within the power of the faculties and instead “can only ‘take place’ or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind” (p. 140). Sublime art, which works not by presenting the unpresentable but rather by presenting “that there is something that is not presentable” invites us to surrender our will, subjectivity, and adulthood and take up the position of infancy (p. 125). The immaterial matter presented, after all, is not concerned with us and therefore disables our ability to respond to it. There is no disinterestedness because there is no subject to be interested or disinterested. As I mentioned at the outset of the intermezzo, however, Lyotard considers writing alongside art, as an art. At the end of this essay, he asks if there’s something similar that happens with writing. “Perhaps words,” he says, “in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e. what it cannot manage to think” (p. 142). As matter, words are totally uninterested in us. They’re excessive, always saying more and less than they say. We could also re-read Lyotard’s writing on writing to sense the sublime operations of the text. The ellipsis is the immediate presentation of that which can’t be presented: infinity. Butor’s lists are fragments of composition taken from their context and deprived of the sources with which understanding could work. By presenting fragments, Butor gives form that highlights the nuances of the words and their lines. By depriving the reader of his own positions, Lyotard’s dialogues block understanding from its attempts to find rules.

From the Beautiful to the Sublime

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A Sublime Re-Writing

Re-writing modernity under the order of the beautiful is a pleasurable experience of imagination and understanding encountering an unknown. We experience some excess in the narrative, which propels us to consider the endless ways it could be given a form or accorded a rule. Because understanding is operative here, there’s the possibility of growing up into knowledge. Modernity is an unrecognizable data that could potentially be given a form, although never a final one. It’s a growing up that begins again and again, as it is “unable to be resolved,” and so “the debate about the beautiful lives on” (Lyotard, 1991/1994, p. 209). The beautiful develops continuously and without end, and is therefore more acceptable to the system’s demands for infinite discourses and limitless articulations. The beautiful is the aesthetic of the system because neither “require any shared great ideologies,” and instead occurs “through the mediation of the whole set of goods and services exchanged at a prodigious speed, of the general equivalent of the exchanges, i.e. money, and the absolute presupposed of this equivalent, i.e. language” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 124). Re-writing modernity under the order of the sublime takes modernity itself as an excessive and immeasurable process or moment that bars understanding from any attempts and, in its monstrosity, links us with a pure infancy that persists. Re-writing with and against language is a sublime experience because the writer uses words to articulate a thought but fails, and this effort and failure results in the experience of thought qua thought—thought beyond representation, knowledge, and language. While, as he puts it in his book on Kant, the infancy of “the beautiful allows one to hope for the advent of a subject,” the sublime “seems to put an end to these hopes” (Lyotard 1991/1994, pp. 159–160). The artwork can birth a child, but “the child can be subsumed under the rule of knowledge” (Lyotard, 1991/1993a, p. 173). The writer (or the artist) waits as if in infancy for the sublime encounter to dash hopes for this subsumption so it can withdraw into the secret life to think. Re-writing modernity sublimely is the experience of a radical passibility to the phonè of words, where their matter works over the writer (or reader, speaker, or listener). The writer no longer tries to grasp phonè, and instead the words’ timbres grasp the subject. Instead of a recursive state between childhood and subjectivity, then, re-writing modernity is the interruption of subjectivity by the force of infancy, the charge that suspends subjectivity.

CHAPTER 3

Voicing Lyotard’s opaque dialogues are nothing more than a potent enactment of a more common practice in writing, and a standard one in academic writing: quotations. Every writing that quotes from another text is staging a dialogue. Even if the dialogue is clear, there’s still an elliptical operation undergirding it. Quotations interrupt the writing and the writer. They’re fragments that splice the text and bring a scrap of the past into the present, reanimating both. We try to stall this animation by debating over their correct use, by showing how another’s quotations are taken out of context, betraying the previous writer’s intentions, or contradicting their project. Alternatively, and without necessarily contradicting discussion about their propriety, we can feel their force. But we can only do this if we clear out common predispositions about speech that Lyotard addresses in the third lecture in Why Philosophize? He names three, all of which bear on the relation of speaking to thinking. The first is that “we think first and then express what we think and that this is what ‘speaking’ means: expressing” (Lyotard, 2012/2013, p. 72). Speech here is reduced to the communication of a pre-existing thought, which is the objectification of thinking. The second is that the subject produces speech, that this speech here comes from me, that the objectified thoughts are mine. The third is that speech is out there waiting for us to speak it, so that “we simply need to listen to the world, and to man, to hear speech saying what it has to say” (p. 75). Each of these distortions eliminates infancy from thinking and being: in the first and third, speech is already grown-up when it’s spoken, and in the second, speech comes from the grown up as their property. Such a mechanistic model, as he wrote a few years earlier, prohibits speech from being “the activity that lets what demands to be said be spoken,” and rather becomes “an operation performed on what are now called ‘listeners’ in order to make them do and say whatever conforms to the plans of the apparatus that regulates their activity” (Lyotard, 1962/1993, p. 39). The voice is in perfect sync with meaning and separated from thought, deprived of infancy. As such, these predispositions bolster the system’s efficacy by trying to eliminate the opacity of speaking. To cite a text not only introduces others’ speaking into writing, but it is also when others’ voices infiltrate it. Whatever the writer’s intention, whether it’s to affirm or negate, augment or detract from any writing, it reveals that the voice is no simple matter, that it’s not a matter of a voice but voices. Speech is a © Derek R. Ford, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004458819_005

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voiced sign, but one that emanates from different voices, even silent and inaudible voices, undercutting any attempt to eradicate the figurality of language and the infancy of thought.

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Sonorous Voices

Born without and before speech, but in a world of language, the education of the infant child entails the teaching of speech. As we noted earlier, all infants have voices that emerge from affectations. Without vocal articulations, the child’s voice is sonorous, it’s about sounds instead of words. The infant child’s voice amounts to “a sonorous machine” that “manufactures sighs, hiccups, burps, cries, hisses,” and so on, that are unmediated; they’re “plugged directly into desire’s hazardous current” (Lyotard & Avron, 1971/1993, p. 48). Learning to speak, acquiring the capacity for verbal language necessarily means repressing the infant’s voice and divorcing it from the “sonorous machine” through mediations of meaning. “A child learns to speak his mother tongue,” that is, “by repressing irrelevant phonetic possibilities” (p. 48). The sonorous voice persists through figural eruptions within the voice’s discursive utterances. To think through this, we can consider artistic attempts to repress learned phonetic possibilities. Lyotard considers this in an essay co-written with Dominique Avron on the Italian composer and electronic musician Luciano Berio. Lyotard and Avron are interested in what happens when the voice isn’t speaking but singing, when its background isn’t nonspeech but musical sounds. Music and language don’t have the same way of approaching the referent, but music is still organized according to time, and consists of discrete notes within an overall system. In music, the figural is evident in the different orders of time (“rhythm and development”), differences within the system (“the scale” and “existence of notes”), and the overall “composition of elements out of other elements, sonorous material of so-called musical objects” (p. 42). Music’s transgressions leave traces of the primary process in the secondary process, and by transgressing the rules of music, we can sense them. Berio’s music is this kind of transgression, but he does so by reversing the typical relation between music and voice, in which the voice is more articulated than the music. Berio’s compositions present more clearly articulated musical notes and muddled or worked over voices. In Visage, a 1961 composition that Berio said was “essentially a radio programme: almost a sound track for a play that has never been written,” Berio cut up fragments of mezzo-soprano vocalist (and his wife at the time) Cathy Berberian’s vocal utterances and composed them to render their meaning

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unintelligible as they play over electronic sounds.. According to Berio (1961), the piece is “a transformation of real examples of vocal behaviour that go from unarticulated sound to syllable, from laughing to weeping and singing, from aphasia to types of inflections derived from specific languages.” It sounds like speech but isn’t speech, and there’s only one word enunciated in the piece: the Italian word for words, parole. The words spoken are cut up such that they revert from the discursive to the figural, from their meaning to their immediate affective force. The distinct units are divorced from any system within which they would find meaning, and Lyotard and Avron (1971/1993) contend that they “are no longer interpreted as parts of a system, but according to their immediate sonorous value” (p. 49). Text and voice are the primary components of Visage and they’re elevated above the musical sounds, but they’re worked over to such an extent that we can’t infer or produce any meaning from their content. The body voices plastic lines rather than text, the latter of which has been shredded and fragmented, and thereby freed of potential semantic meaning. Berio’s Sequenza is a series of 14 movements he composed for solo instruments between 1958 and 2002. Sequenza III was written in 1965 for a woman’s voice, and Berberian’s in particular. Berio writes three levels of notations for the voice: explicit directives like snapping the tongue, cries, or laughter, those with general ranges for the voice, and a melodic level with exact durations and frequencies. The words, which are recognizable, are of a poem that Markus Kutter wrote for the piece, from which Lyotard and Avron take their essay’s title, “A Few Words to Sing.” Each Sequenza explores the range of capacities of an instrument, and to do this vocally Berio (1965) says he “had to break up the text in an apparently devastating way, so as to be able to recuperate fragments from it on different expressive planes, and to reshape them into units that were not discursive but musical.” As the singer explores her own voice, this exploration becomes a dramatic scene of the relationship between the two. The voice is revealed as something that one doesn’t quite recognize. Exploring the range of the voice’s capacity, words are used but not singly important. Lyotard and Avron (1971/1993) take particular note of the role of laughter in the score, which “gives no less than sixty-one types of directives for the vocal performance,” including “tense laughter,” “urgent,” and “relieved” (p. 53). There are 21 cues between 30 seconds, a frequency and intensity that prevents the singer from engaging in any mediation that could express or represent any meaning. The score’s cues “determine spontaneously the color, the expression, and the intonation of the voice” in response to affective receptions and charges (p. 53). They present the matter of the voice paradoxically by hyper-prescribing the form it takes. Sonorous matter is allowed to appear in its infancy, as the voice is plugged back into the currents of the body.

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They end their essay by telling us that we should, “without warning, plug Sequenza III into the loudspeakers” of a university, and that “by doing so, you will do a service to everyone: to work, to music, to Berio, and to us” (p. 59). They’re asking us to help present and experience the voice beyond the system, and while Berio’s compositions and Berberian’s singing are more intentional and, as a result, more overt, the voice of infancy is never fully annihilated. Lyotard is troubled by the dominating position the system accords to identifiable utterances, including critical or radical articulations. While radical articulations are still necessary, the defense of inhuman infancy needs to find other weapons, lest the public life takes hold of the secret one. While Lyotard and Avron move us from the theatre to the university to transgress both, in an essay titled “Futility in Revolution,” Lyotard moves us to the streets and political institutions to draw out the political nature of the elliptical voice. Here he also focuses on laughter, but the laughter of a pagan order. The essay’s title refers not to the impossibility of revolution itself—he doesn’t dispute that they have, can, do, and will happen—but as an attempt to wrest revolution from being synonymous with the founding of new constitutions and orders. Revolution is imagined here as a force that opens the field of possibility by disordering the social field, in the same way that Visage’s reassembled fragments open the field of vocal sound. Revolution, that is, as an elliptical force. But here he calls it a pagan force. Paganism isn’t an adherence to multiple gods or a radical openness to belief, but a kind of suspension within the present: “the seemingly incoherent activity of playing out scenes” and “the derisive honor of parody,” as he puts it (Lyotard, 1975/1993, p. 92). One pagan force in the French Revolution were the sans-culottes, poor peasants and proletarians who weren’t unified by any particular program, and whose politics, therefore, didn’t coincide with any coordinates within the social field. Without emanating from any coherent program, their actions were entirely incalculable. Without concrete articulated demands, their actions weren’t stepping stones from one constitution to another. The sans-culottes forced ellipses in society and within the revolutionary process itself. The pagan revolution began with parodic marches or processions on the formal political assemblies taking place. They’d dress up like Catholic priests or royalty not to critique or denounce them per se, but to laugh. They inaugurated “a time-space of meetings, laughter, and anxieties in which the edifice of institutions, weighty issues, and guarantees began tottering” (pp. 99–100). Their laughter didn’t stem from “an anger still subordinated to the religion whose object it is” (because this would structure the secret in response to the public) (p. 104). What we hear is a monstrous laughter that destabilizes meaning, and that therefore remains within initiation. To read anger in pagan laughter would be to hold the secret life hostage to the public life.

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The pagan laughter continually displaces the field of politics. The processions end up in the political assemblies, transgressing the boundaries of political action and the respective roles of the people and politicians. After the delegates leave, the people take up their seats and “speak in their place,” thereby breaking “the barriers between exterior and interior, between spectators and actors, between representatives and represented” (105). The revolutionary festivals in the streets also worked in an elliptical fashion. They weren’t performances but monstrous appearances that were motivated by political choices (which are always binary, always for something and against something). Crucially, however, the sans-culottes “do not answer it unanimously, or fail to answer it at all.” The laughter was humorous and not critical or ironic. Irony is essentially nihilistic in that it only negates what is present. Humor is affirmative. As he wrote in “Retortion in Theopolitics,” humor is a weapon of the weak that doesn’t assert strength but “confesses to a sort of ‘passivity’” (Lyotard, 1976/1993, p. 120). Pagan laughter is indifferent rather than assertive, or, better, it asserts its indeterminacy. It doesn’t so much actively resist the system’s demand for inputs but remains unconcerned with them. It doesn’t say what should be or what shouldn’t be; it merely laughs. As such, it “manifests its indifference to capitalization and also to the composition of energies that tends to expend itself” (p. 120). As one of the founding revolutions inaugurating something like a liberal, democratic imperialism, the pagan laughter’s force during the French Revolution resisted by remaining ambiguous and refusing to constitute a new order, by trying to keep the revolutionary process in infancy.

2

Voicing Words

The voice that unravels language and, as Lyotard and Avron (1971/1993) find in the cries of Sequenza III, poses “a challenge to communication, to information,” works to block “the codes and the networks that guarantee translatability and communicability” (p. 58). The initiative and infant properties of crying or laughing are not unique to the singing or political voice and apply to voices in general. To make the immediacy of the voice and the presentation of its matter unique properties of aesthetics or politics would set apart unique and delineated functions of the voice, separating the figural from the discursive. Even when and as speech articulates meaning, the infant voice, the voice before, without, and beyond articulation, persists. In “Voices of a Voice,” Lyotard listens to the affective and articulated voices as they show up in Freud’s writing and the analytic scene, where there’s three voices: the published record (the

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report), the notes taken during the sessions, and the voice of the patient. In order to really distinguish these, we would need an objective third witness who could confirm or identify what voice is which. We would also need a host of assumptions: that the voice is singular, that it is attached to a subject who uses it to express its life (and can verify if the voice succeeded or not), and that the voice speaks from the subject to another. These assumptions revolve around the notion of “a zero degree or ‘simple and proper’ state of the voice,” which would effectively communicate information and knowledge (Lyotard, 1992, p. 127). If there is a zero degree of the voice, then there will be inflections of the voice or the degree or character of the voice’s divergence from this zero state. This is the schema of lexis or articulated speech on which the closed textual theory we addressed in Chapter 1 rests. With lexis, “the voice is formed by articuli, by little members deprived of signification in themselves, which can refer to the objects they designate because they are their arbitrary representatives.” The articuli’s meaning “is agreed upon by the speakers who exchange these words… the articulated voice, which I call lexis… goes from an addressor to an addressee that transmits to the latter a meaning on the subject of what it is referring to” (p. 128). Under these conditions, the analyst is tasked with analyzing inflections in the lexis to determine the actual truth. The task of analysis is to determine the zero degrees of the voice: “you said x, but did you really mean y?” The schema of lexis—a word Lyotard approximates to “enunciation”—is one through which a fixed meaning and subjectivity are both assumed and hidden, and are revealed according to a back-and-forth exchange of articulations. The zero degree voice is one without any tone or pitch; not just a monotone voice but an atonal voice. The inflections modify the zero degree voice to reveal something else (like a doubt or hesitation, a repressed memory, or an unacknowledged feeling) that we analyze to locate the truth. Lyotard hears another voice in Freud’s writing, one that itself is a tone, and which therefore can’t have inflections or a zero case. Instead of inflecting, it jumps or leaps. Following Aristotle, he calls this voice phonè. It’s an unarticulated voice that doesn’t transmit a message, doesn’t emanate from a sender to a receiver, and doesn’t refer to anything outside of itself. This is the infant voice that is plugged directly into the body, the voice that cries and cracks, laughs and screams. Without meaning or intention, prior to the subject, it is the affective voice that signals only itself. It’s like a breath that communicates nothing except life itself. Insofar as it is outside of or prior to articulated speech, the phonè belongs to all animals; all animals can cry or scream. If the human is both an animal and something unique, then we can call this voice an inhuman voice, whereas the human voice will be lexis: “With the phonè, they show; with the lexis, they communicate, reply, debate, conclude, decide” (p. 130). The

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system is thus inhuman because it insists solely on lexis; the phonè is an inefficient input. By virtue of being inarticulate, phonè is hard to articulate. This might be obvious, but it’s not trivial, especially in the system in which articulated information and knowledge dominate, in which we’re coerced at every turn to enunciate our positions and beliefs. How, then, can we hear this voice’s presence? This inhuman voice, through speaking, withdraws into silence. The phonè is deaf, even dumb (silence is a voice). It can sound with all the tones that connote, in Indo-European, the root mu (mut), which indicates the sound obtained by closed lips: to moan, to mutter, murmeln, murmerer, mugir (in French, even the word for word, mot, comes from this root, muttum). (p. 130) This voice is mute because it stifles or hushes the lexis. If we think of lexis as the form of the voice, the phonè is that which interrupts and escapes the form. It’s hard or impossible to voice or hear outside of any form. This voice isn’t heard because there is no “one” who speaks it or understands it. There’s no circulation of information or exchange of meaning, as phonè isn’t addressed to anyone, doesn’t refer to anything. As the infancy of voice, it’s timeless (and therefore sublime). Articulated speech operates according to a certain temporality: I speak to you, and you respond to me, and so on. But my initial speech is a response to something that’s happened before, as there’s no zero moment from which speech begins. Phonè isn’t part of this temporal succession and has as little awareness of it as the dream. The voice is immediately present in the now as a sentiment, or what Lyotard later calls the “phrase-affect.” It’s necessarily unarticulated and incapable of articulation and, as such, can’t be linked together within any kind of discourse. Instead, “it appears on the contrary only to be able to suspend or interrupt the linkages, whatever they are” (Lyotard, 2001, p. 235). It’s a phrase but without any senders, recipients, or referents, and thus without any rules or performed relations between them. In his essay (a “supplement” to his book The Differend), Lyotard says the phrase-affect is mute. It not only mutes the lexis, however; it mutes the subjects involved. The mute voice doesn’t come from a subject to another subject. It can’t be identified with anything because it signals only itself. As a phrase of absence, it doesn’t take a place within the unfolding of time and “appears and disappears as a whole instant… it is ageless” (p. 237). One can’t respond to it or request or demand it of another, as this would be a demand for an articulation. It is only present through its interruptions.

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Voicing Matter

To flesh this out, Lyotard turns to Freud’s encounter with Ernst, or the Rat Man. Ernst tells Freud of a thought he had that his parents knew without him speaking it. According to lexis, this is impossible and is an inflection in need of analysis. Freud tries to discover the truth, and he does this by taking the place of the addressee who is in the position of knowing, or who is capable of producing knowledge about what really happened. Ernst and Freud exchange articulations to figure it out, and it fails. This leads Freud to change the structure of the sessions and prompts him to initiate the technique of free association. Lyotard proffers that it’s also what motivates Freud to assign his patients animal monikers, noms de phonè. With free association, Freud is no longer in command or in the place of authorized knowledge. There’s no more dialogue, no back-and-forth exchange of meaning, no assumption of a zero degree. This is the technique Lyotard linked with re-writing, where he describes it like this: “Basically, the rule states: do not prejudge, suspend judgement, give the same attention to everything that happens as it happens. On his or her side the patient must respect the symmetrical rule: let speech run, give free rein to all the ‘ideas’, figures, scenes, names, sentences, as they come onto the tongue and the body, in their ‘disorder,’ without selection or repression” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 30). The analyst and patient suspend their own will and control, with neither judging or understanding the articulated meanings. “This neutralization,” Lyotard (2001)remarks, “has the effect of giving to the affectual voice, scarcely or not at all addressed, a wider field in the strongly articulated voice of the discourse” (p. 137). The distinction between modern re-writing and re-writing modernity thus concerns their differential positions relative to the two voices. In the first, the writer corrects the past inflections (errors, sins, mistakes) to discover modernity’s zero point. In the second, the writer tries to let the tone of modernity present itself. The narrative voice is one example of phonè muffling lexis. The narrative voice doesn’t provide commentary or analysis (while the narrative itself does) but merely narrates what is happening as it happens. Listening and re-writing according to free association, everything comes to the same ear as it happens, which “allows the affectual voice to make itself heard, within the narrative voice, and to make itself heard by he, the narrator, who wasn’t hearing it” (p. 142). It’s not a matter of saying what truly happened but letting what is happening happen. There’s the modern voice, which “marks the zero hour beginning with which succession will henceforth be counted and the story recounted.” It initiates the narrative. “From this willful act,” however, as he

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writes in Soundproof Room, “an unexpected effect: the story resists” (Lyotard, 1993/2001, p. 4). As a presence that exceeds form, sonorous matter is part of and outside the work of art or writing. To think through this, Lyotard writes about it as a “gesture” in an essay titled “Music, Mutic.” The gesture is the attempt by the writer or artist “to let the sound make a gesture that seems to surpass the audible and to consign its trace in the space-time-sound that determines the field of audibility” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 227). There are a few paradoxes here. For one, sonorous matter is both a sound and something that surpasses what we can identify as sound. For two, the “gesture” that lets the inaudible vibration sound is the result of the artist’s attempt but the artist isn’t the agent that produces it. Sonorous matter is sublime as its presence is beyond our abilities to sense, understand, imagine, and reason. Just like with phonè, however, it rarely if ever appears to us outside of some kind of form. Sonorous matter inhabits and exceeds even the written form. Lyotard reads Pascal Quignard’s writings on languages (from his multivolume work Petits Traités, or Little Features) through the audible instead of the visible. What lets him engage the work sonically is by now familiar: language is sonorous. Quignard writes about “a language beneath languages,” a mutism beneath words: breath. Lyotard takes three points from Quignard. The first is that this language “is available only to the hallucinated ear” (p. 224). Only an ear disoriented from meaning can encounter it. The second is that even though it’s inaudible, this mute breath nonetheless produces a sound. It’s the breath that signals not only life but the terror of impending death. The third is that “the distress exhaled in this breath is common to the animal kingdom, “is mutic, henceforth, inasmuch as it is not addressed and remains unaware of the other and the self” (p. 225). Breath is common in its generality and expansiveness. “The breath,” Lyotard writes, “is affect. Not an affect among others, or a modality of affection… but affection” (p. 227). While the articuli might, at least in part, have a sender, addressee, and referent, the breath remains anonymous. In its anonymity and opacity, breath is shared and common among all animals. We’re not as unique as we might like to think. Or as alive as we might like to think. Lyotard suggests the breath “is the sound death makes in the living body” (p. 231). As a minimal infancy, the breath is the emptying out of the air from the body. But it’s also the possibility for more sound to come. Lyotard “hijacks” the breath “in the name of a mutic beneath music” (p. 226). To speak or to make music is to present the inaudible through the audible. There’s no way out of this paradox of presenting the inaudible. Music can’t force this, and so all it can do is “phrase pathos, to nuance it, to cut it up into pitches, measures, loudness” (p. 228). Berio does this in Visage by fracturing the

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recording and in Sequenza III by overdetermining notations. In both instances: an elliptical praxis. In his biography of the author, Lyotard (1996/1999) quotes Malraux’s remark that “all art is grounded on a system of ellipses” (p. 87). This system operates by cleaving matter (words or sentences, tones or colors) apart and reassembling them. “Disjointed, then reassembled, ‘life’ allows a breeze to pass through clefts left by successive disjunctions and reassemblages” (p. 87). The breeze of life is the mute breath of simultaneous life and death, an ellipsis within modern narratives.

4

Voicing the Mute

“This is art,” we say to ourselves or another, refusing or, more accurately, unable to name what we’re referring to exactly. For Lyotard, this makes the sentence cognitively inconsistent. Consistency in a sentence means that what the sentences says corresponds to something else. We know something is consistent when the object of the sentence belongs to the category to which it is accorded. In “this is art,” “this” belongs to “art.” The “this” is taking place now, in the instant, and not something determined by another or a measurement. The sentence is inconsistent because it’s incomplete. This inconsistency is a block on our cognition because “this” is not something that can be assigned a category or property. “‘this’ is directed to the cognition of things because ‘this’ is neither a known nor a knowable nor even a recognizable thing to the mind that ‘produced’ ‘this’” (Lyotard, 1991/1993a, p. 169). Cognitively, the sentence is inconsistent and unverifiable, as “this” remains indeterminate and opaque. The artwork can be determined in a manner of ways: dated, attributed to an artist, assigned a school, or trend. But the “this” can’t be. This is art is inconsistent cognitively and, because the art in the artwork can produce something now that exceeds the given space-time-sound continuum, entirely consistent. To give this a determinate name would make the sentence cognitively inconsistent, as it would reduce the art in the artwork to an identity, in which case, the this would no longer refer to art. To say “this is art” is an articulated sentence muffled by phonè, which makes the speech work by rendering it inoperative according to understanding and knowledge. When Marie was speaking in Japan she was trying to speak mutely, too. She didn’t give the audience the typical academic set up, depriving them of the temporal context for her words. She didn’t even look at the audience, depriving them of the status of addressee. She tried to let her paper speak for itself. “She absents herself. It will find its own tone. As for me, this is the time when I can think about other things, that’s much better” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 10). Or we

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might say she acted as if she wasn’t there, as if the audience wasn’t there, as if the text could speak for itself. All the same, the void “between the voice for the ear and the stridulation that rises through the throat” is one that “proves impassable” (Lyotard, 1993/2001, p. 88). The breath opens an ellipsis within our own speaking, one that makes us unrecognizable to ourselves. The mute breath thus seems to introduce another voice, a “voiceless voice” that’s “born of some ‘core’ where things don’t get voiced” (p. 80). As pure affection (and not a particular affect), the mute breath is below both lexis and phonè, both of which are audible if not meaningful, temporal, or human. It works over both such that, when we hear ourselves recorded, we sound totally unfamiliar and alien. “When I speak, when I believe I am speaking, the clamor that rises from my throat is not the voice heard by others” (p. 84). In speaking or singing, in voicing, we’re defamiliarized with ourselves. Aesthetics is the practice of trying to present this disorientation, to prick our hallucinated ear. This prick is an education in our own inhumanity that disassembles our knowledge and will, suspends our being, exposing us to the matter of the world without innovating, and allowing us to inhabit the secret life.

CHAPTER 4

Listening The prick of mute breath inaugurates an initiation, a beginning that doesn’t grow up but, in sublime fashion, thwarts our hopes for development. The prick does so unpredictably and uncontrollably. The gesture of writing, or painting, or music, or politics, is of trying to make the inaudible and immaterial matter appear. The matter of words is muted and scarcely perceptible. Lyotard says we can’t hear the inaudible. To be accessible to the prick, we have to try to listen for it. Hearing entails sensing and processing sounds, while listening is a more general attention to sounds. Because sounds are vibrations passing through the air, hearing and listening aren’t restricted to the ear or to those with particular auditory ranges. Both are processes that we learn, things we practice. In the system, we tend to listen like we read: developmentally. Our ears are attuned to that which can be heard. We listen for lexis not only from those we recognize as speaking beings, but everything that sounds. It’s easier to recognize a sound—to give it a form and accord it a rule—when we have some prior knowledge of it. Once we hear a sound, we might hear it more often because we’re listening to it more regularly. There’s a circularity here that affirms our knowledge, certainty, and will, a circularity that draws boundaries around our audible surround and reinforces existing orders. Lyotard links it with nihilism: “what happens is listened to through the sound of what will happen—a future anterior nihilism” (Lyotard, 1975/1993, p. 104). But it’s not mere repetition. Like the system, it’s not a closed circle but a spiraling and shifting one. The spiral is guided by that which can be heard. Life in the system seems to be increasingly loud. In the urban centers, the dense and expansive chatter and clamor of gathering and circulating pedestrians, cars, buses, trucks, and bikes, of construction, repairs, and demolitions, of music from street performers and cell phones, are non-stop. Even in our homes, there’s the chattering of the TV or stereo, the advertisements that automatically play when you click on a news article online, and the endless barrage of posts and tweets. It’s loud everywhere, and sometimes we crave silence. But silence is sublime. Its radical privation and minimality are inaccessible to the living body that sounds. It bars our faculty of understanding and forces the imagination to play with reason before overpowering both. We can’t imagine what it would mean to exist without the presence of vibrations moving through air. With so much sonorous matter, it’s not efficient to listen for what © Derek R. Ford, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004458819_006

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you can’t hear. But this is the only way the inaudible can prick our ears. To listen for an event of infancy, we have to listen as if we were infants, as if we could hear silence, not to constitute a new aural order but to inhabit the ellipses.

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Musicking Matter

Lyotard (1996/2009) claims in “Music and Postmodernity,” that “it is difficult to ‘lend an ear’ to the event: it has already passed even before it is clear what it is” (p. 37). When something happens that ruptures the field of what we knew was possible, we can only ask what it was after it had already happened. We can only try to reconstruct it, to develop it after the fact. To hear infancy is to develop infancy into something recognizable. The mode of listening for what you can’t and won’t be able to hear is, like childish reading, a practice that requires patience and discomposure. It gets harder the more the system develops. In Lyotard’s words, “the postmodern condition is that of human beings when they are caught in this process, which simultaneously develops their powers and demands their enslavement” (p. 38). The system develops our capacities for hearing new and different things, but this development always takes place under the regime of recognition. To try to resist the inhuman of the system with the inhuman of the human, Lyotard listens to musicians and composers who explicitly try to make the inaudible gesture appear. To do this, the musicians try to “let the sound perform an act that seems to exceed the audible, and to record the trace of it in the space-time-sound that determines the field of the audible” (p. 40). Music is the attempt to liberate sonorous matter from form through forms. There is no such thing as “free form” music. The composer (or writer, painter, photographer) comes to the scene with “words, sounds, colors, not in a raw state, of course, but already organized by the rhetorics we have inherited” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 215). Just as the writer writes with, through, and against language, the composer writes with, through, and against the rules, techniques, traditions—or organizations of sound—available. The composer doesn’t free sonorous matter but tries to arrange sounds so it can escape the form, exceed it, and appear. “But by ‘exceed’, we refer to a secret immanent to the form that transcends it. There is in the work a remainder, which defies ordinary reception or perception and which will defy all commentary. This secret does not call for any mysticism. A secret is not a mystery” (Lyotard, 1996/2009, p. 41). The sublime can be felt through the artwork, but the artwork will always have some kind of form, and will always be the result of an arrangement. Two composers who were contemporaries of Lyotard and attempt this similar project but in quite different ways are John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Cage

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is probably better known, at least in the U.S., and his best recognized work is a three-part movement from 1952 titled 4’33.” Written for any and all instruments or combination thereof, the piece is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of continuous rest. It was performed first by David Tudor on the piano. Tudor walked up to the piano, sat down, and began the piece by closing the cover on the piano keys. At the end of each movement, he opened the cover again, and at the beginning of the next movement, he closed it. The piece isn’t silent but mute. The anticipated articuli of music are completely absent, and the ear is completely disoriented (maybe even hallucinated). We might strain to hear something, or we might attend to the other sounds in the performance space: feet rustling, breaths and sighs, fabric chaffing, wind blowing, and so on. Lyotard hears Cage’s compositions as an attempt to “escape from articulation (and from composition, which is the supreme form of it) by having recourse to ‘silence’, to contingency, to the event, to the unforeseeable encounter of a piece of piano music and a ‘noise’ from the subway street” (p. 42). Without explicit and identifiable notations, the event can take place. Boulez, a contemporary of Cage’s (and Lyotard’s), worked along a different order. He took up “aleatory music” and re-wrote it as “controlled chance.” In one iteration, the score presents musicians with different options for playing and the composer with different ways to bring the musicians into the piece. In another iteration, the musicians move about the concert hall and the sounds they produce are recorded and played back, and which the musicians then play in response to. In Boulez, Lyotard hears “the conclusion that we must over-articulate all the elements of musical language in order to extract from it its inaudible sound-matter” (p. 42). Whereas Cage tries to allow sound to take place, Boulez intervenes in the sonic field to produce a new inaudible sonic element. While Lyotard refrains from definitively favoring one or the other, Boulez’s approach sounds more resonant with Lyotard, as he acknowledges the paradox of trying to will what can’t be willed. But Lyotard can only hear what he does because he’s listening for it. In a piece in Driftworks, Lyotard (1984) writes that “the wisest thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately, and hear a sound suddenly be-fore one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract, or symbolical” (p. 108). He’s not trying to determine what he hears; he’s listening for what he can’t hear. And it’s not really he who is listening, because the he will only come afterwards as the one who recounts what is heard. For another case, we can return to Newman’s paintings introduced in the intermezzo. Because Newman doesn’t present a message from himself or the artwork to a sender, the presentation is a message without content. Instead of trying to look at it for meaning, the paintings say, first, “Look at me,” but later, after correcting himself, Lyotard (1988/1991) tells us they say, “to be more

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accurate, Listen to me” (p. 81). This is because they demand an obligation that is received not by the eye (which can be closed) but by the ear. The viewer is a listener forced to lend an ear to the silence of the painting, a silence of immediate and immaterial presence.

2

Listening to Listening

Through developmental listening, we listen in order to affirm what we have already heard, what we already know. This gives way to either a repetition of knowledge or the production of new knowledge from the existing reserve. In a paper delivered at a conference on the theme of music and repetition, published under the heading, “God and the Puppet,” Lyotard presents two different modes of listening and their relationship to knowledge. All sounds can theoretically be measured and quantified, given an identity. For this to happen, the sounds—which again are movements—have to be identical. The repetition has to be exact so we can lock “sonorous matter into distinctive properties for acoustic knowledge” (p. 154). The movement is halted and fixed as determinate knowledge. We listen to measure and identify so we can give a name to the properties we hear. As movements that are always coming and going, however, sounds don’t obey any rules outlined in a composition. A different mode of listening thus respects the errantry and opacity of sounds, where we approach sounds only through metaphors, through similarities and differences. We don’t listen to identify sounds but to imagine what they might actually be, without ever determining their coherence. These different kinds of listening correspond to two different kinds of repetition. The first is determined/determining repetition, the second is “‘free’ repetition (the term is Kantian) of the forms of the musical compositions of the sounds with each other” (p. 154). What distinguishes the two kinds of repetition and listening is our attention to the nuance or timbre of sounds (timbre, in case you’re reading this in your head for the first time, is pronounced “tamber”). Timbre is an incredibly elusive concept (it might even be a speculative Idea in the Kantian sense) in music, a catch-all that refers to everything about a sound except for its pitch (frequency) duration (time), and intensity (loudness). It is everything we can’t determine about a sound. If you have a vocalist, a guitarist, and a trumpet playing an A for the same amount of time and at the same volume, timbre is the difference between them. If you have two trumpeters playing the same note for the same duration and at the same volume on the same kind of trumpet, timbre is the difference between them. Timbre could also be the difference between one guitarist playing an “A” at one

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moment and playing an “A” at another moment. Here, Lyotard’s using timbre and nuance to name “the singularity which, at least in part, distinguishes the different performances of the same work” (p. 155). The nuance is unforeseeable and irrepressible. He plays with the French word for rehearsal, répétition, to highlight how even the most trained musicians can’t determine their own timbre, can neither plan nor predict exactly how they will sound when they perform. No matter how many times you rehearse, you repeat, the same thing, it will never be the same. Timbre mutes the articuli of the music. If we’re only listening for what we know in order to affirm what we know, we won’t be able to hear the timbre, the singularity of any given performance. If we listen for the timbre, for everything that can make sound appear singularly, for everything beyond our capacity for knowledge, “the ear is given over to something incomparable (and therefore something unrepeatable) in what is called the performance, i.e. to the here and now of the sound” (p. 155). Because we can’t know timbre, because it resists all repetition, it remains inaccessible to our cognition. The timbre happens now. While we can write about or discuss the nuance later, we’re too late: “the present nuance changes into a nuance reported, retained, deferred, so that it becomes a different nuance” (p. 156). We can compare tonight’s performance with last night’s, but we will ultimately be at a loss. It’s like when Lyotard (1988/1992) told us that “reading is never finished, that you can only commence, and that you have not read what you have read” (p. 101). We won’t have heard the timbre that we heard. Timbre is the negative presentation of sublime sonority: it is “what breaks the mind” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 156). It disorients and suspends the subject by taking hold of us, taking us hostage: I mean that if this matter, so tenuous that it is as though immaterial, is not repeatable, this is because by being subjected to its seizure by that matter, the mind is deprived, stripped of its faculty—both aesthetic and intelligent—to bind it, associate it. (p. 156) Lyotard goes further still, asserting that not only are we unable to know it, but we can’t even feel it with our senses because, during the now of timbre, the mind and subject are suspended or in a state of disseizure. “If there is no subject to refer to itself, i.e. to its power of synthesis, the sensory forms, and conceptual operators, so as to refer to this nuance, the reason is that sonorous matter which is this nuance is there only to the extent that, then and there, the subject is not there” (p. 157). Even sensibility is interrupted. The nuance passes through us, affecting us to the extent that we can’t recount or recall it. If

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we think about reading a text aloud in our heads, the timbre in the head will be different each time, and if we’re open to the timbre of the voice in the head or the word of the text, we can get a different sense of why childish reading is a realization that we haven’t actually read what we thought we did. To sense or understand the now of timbre, we would need to retain it and constitute it within some temporal order, and therefore move from initiation to innovation. Lyotard presents the desubjectified subject of timbre by way of an analogy with Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre.” The narrator encounters a friend he’s seen at the marionette show who is totally taken with the puppets. The narrator is taken aback because, although he himself acknowledges the grace of the puppets, his friend thinks the puppets are more graceful than humans. Lyotard agrees with the friend: “Deprived of all intention (I’d say, deprived of all capacity for temporal synthesis), the dolls merely place their limbs at the moment as they are ordered, following the laws of gravity alone” (p. 163). This is the grace that music strives to sound, and it’s the status of the subject held hostage by timbre. This presents a paradox for the subject, for how can the subject accept or prepare for its own dissolution, even if it’s only a momentary one? Is it possible to suspend the forms through which we experience the world? In “Obedience,” a paper presented at a conference on music and writing in the same year (and collected in The Inhuman), he describes “a destination of listening to listening, an ‘obedience’ that should perhaps be termed absolute, lending the ear an ear” (p. 167). The obedience demanding of listening to our listening is an “obligation, a passivity I should like to translate as passibility” (p. 178). Passivity is a state of inaction. One lets things happen. To be passable is to be actively passive: to try to listen for that which will pass through us without being heard. To try to be like marionette puppets. In his 1964 Sorbonne lectures, Lyotard (2012/2013) attributed something like passibility to Marx, who he wrote: “knew that doing also means allowing oneself to be done to, and this passivity requires the greatest energy” (p. 227). Passibility is the subject in the disseizure of the sublime. When we listen to listening, we’re not operating with the faculty of understanding because we’re not listening to hear. We’re under the imagination and reason, between which the conflict becomes so intense that we’re rendered infants without the hope of fully growing up, of ever reconstituting ourselves. It’s hard to lend an ear to the event, but if we lend an ear to the ear, we can listen to the inaudible and immaterial matter of sound; the mutic underneath music (which is a kind of language). “Passibility,” as he characterizes it in “Music, Mutic,” “is precariousness. One is not, one depends, one depends in order to be.” He describes its

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rhythm: “A master shakes your hand, and grabs you, lets you go, and holds you back. He reminds you that you are not. It puts you out of breath” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 227). In a short book on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy (2002/2007) linked hearing with understanding and listening with a “straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (p. 6). In other words, when we hear we arrange sonic matter according to categories, and when we listen to struggle for a potential message. But for Lyotard, to truly listen entails not listening, as listening still entails the subject’s coherence. Passibility isn’t then a state of being but a suspension of being that arrhythmically swings between being and non-being. It’s an obedience to a trial or a test of affection. In his essay on Valéry, Lyotard links passibility with the disordered mind, what Valéry calls the poetic mind. The disorder of the mind disorders the entire subject, as the senses too are in disarray. It’s not “a state, but a mode of temporality remarkable for its discontinuity and discreteness. It is a sort of spasm in which what has been done does not govern what is yet to be done” (Lyotard, 1991/1993, p. 170). He hears in the disordered subject “passibility; a disseizure” (p. 169). This is an infancy of the “art” in the work of art, one that waits for a slackening of life, “a death in order to give birth to the artwork” or the gesture of matter (p. 172).

3

Elliptical Listening

Lyotard occasionally prefers to write of anaesthetics instead of aesthetics for this reason. Aesthetics concerns the senses, but the sublime defeats our senses, overwhelming them through excess. If we limit our considerations to aesthetics we can’t really get at the passibility of nuance or timbre, because we’re only thinking of active sensing. “Aesthetics,” we read, “is phobic, it arises from anesthesia, belonging to it, recovering from it. You sing for not hearing, you paint for not seeing, you dance for being paralyzed” (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 232). Timbre is anesthetic because there’s no subject available to synthesize or comprehend it. The sublime is a “spasm,” a phrase-affect that “exceeds sensibility and ravishes it to the point of loss” (p. 240). When we listen to listening, we simultaneously increase and decrease our power to sense vibrations. We strain to hear what isn’t there, trying harder and harder to listen to the most minimal of sounds (in response to the anesthetic), thereby increasing our powers. But, by virtue of the inaudible’s formlessness, our audible comprehension falls back on itself. We listen to listening in order to hear what we can’t hear

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and to wait for the dissolution of listening (and accordingly, our hearing). We listen to become deaf. Our engagement with sonorous matter is, then, about more than hearing and listening; it’s also about not listening. After Lyotard (1988/1992) tells us that reading is an education in realizing “that you have not read what you have read,” he tells us that “reading is an exercise in listening,” and then that “forming in yourself this capacity for listening in reading is forming yourself in reverse; it is losing your proper form” (p. 101). This discomposure is the opening up to hostage-taking by the timbre, whether it’s that of a word or a color. Because there’s no subject there, or the subject is just barely one, it can’t be sensed. It’s rather the touch that inaugurates the sense, something coming from the pages only to escape and prick the ear. And as he puts it in “Directions to Servants,” the writer is always the first reader of the text, which means they’re the first listener, too. The sonic forms of writing he glosses over here have helped me think about what Lyotard is after with all of this. He begins by distinguishing between hearing yourself write and listening to yourself write. When you hear yourself write “you hear only something that has to be written,” and are confident in the writing, “ahead” of it (Lyotard, 1993/1997, p. 150). There’s a seamless communication between sound and the text, the words on the page and in the head, that’s based on immediate transparency and lucidity. Writing and language are allied together. The discourse comes easy, and knowledge is affirmed and produced. The sonorous matter forms under the command of understanding. As listening is a more generalized openness and exposure to sounds, when you listen to yourself write, the concurrence between matter and form loosens, the links between them are relaxed, maybe even unbound altogether. Language and writing, perhaps, are neither allied nor opposed to each other, but constantly shifting between the two positions. The writer can resolve the ambiguity by trying to close the gap: “You strap it down, make it severe, classical, academic,” arguing your points against another, taking control of the words. In the other direction, you can “neglect it in the sense that you get attached to what appears neglected, négligé” (p. 150). This isn’t so much a path or trajectory as it is a dwelling within the suspension. Neglected writing means “that you are not quite sure of the heading, that you are a little or very lost, that you are afraid, that you don’t feel you have enough force to think” (p. 150). Your will is still present, but it’s in retreat, anxious and insubstantial in the presence of the sonority of words. Finally, there’s not listening to the writing, when “you lend an ear only to what comes along” (150). When you don’t listen to writing, you’re listening to listening, awaiting the prick of the inaudible. Lyotard calls this a “grace,” the same word he used to describe the obedience of listening to timbre. It’s as if

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the matter of language appears without form and the mute breath beneath the words takes hold, disabling the senses. The movement from hearing to listening to not listening that unfolded isn’t a progression in which the sonic modes occupy subordinated or privileged positions. You’ll have to re-read and re-write yourself, which means you’ll have to hear, listen, or not listen again. If you don’t do this, grace turns into pride, and “you act as if you were destined only for the most noble works of thought.” There isn’t a rhythm to the ellipsis. We might think of the three sonic forms of writing as the scene of passibility described in the last chapter: the word grabs you (not listening), lets you go (hearing), and holds you back (not listening). Hearing establishes a correspondence or an established harmony between matter and form, thereby transforming the event of writing into a discourse. Listening interrupts this correspondence, opening matter and form up, desynchronizing the two as the ear goes astray. The relationship is suspended, ambiguous, and unsettled. When you don’t listen, the relationship is severed and you’re obedient and passible to the unformable clouds of thought. It might be that the three kinds of listening have to be held together in some way, that they can be both allies and enemies. The system’s demand for ceaseless development makes hearing dominant over the other two so that to the extent listening and not listening take place, they respectively end up with reasserting the will and pride and hardening the certainty of the audible surround, its borders, and its meaning.

4

Elliptical Listening and Timbre

At the end of Marie’s time in Japan, she gets overwhelmed. “It’s become too much for a single human life,” she says,” what there is to see, to hear, to understand” (p. 14). The system, then, not only orders our sonic modes of engagement, it structures what and how we can hear. After all, there’s a lot that we hear without even trying to listen. In Sonic Intimacy, Dominic Pettman (2017) cites the tagline for the 1979 film Aliens—“In space, no one can hear you scream”—and notes that it could apply to the earth, too, “depending on who, or what, is doing the screaming” (p. 93). With an overabundance of sounds and voices, we can’t possibly hear everything, and the filtering of sound isn’t natural or happenstance, but pedagogically and politically structured. We’re taught to hear certain things and recognize them in certain ways. Lyotard remains at a higher level of abstraction here with regards to the system: inputs and outputs. But Pettman can tune us into lower levels of abstraction through his notion of the vox mundi, or the “voice of the world,” the name he gives to everyone and everything that sounds.

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The vox mundi helps us “widen the circle of the voice to include not only other animals but other natural and environmental elements, including machines, as well” so that “we treat all sounds as potential ‘voices’” (p. 6). In turn, it casts doubt on our pretensions—whatever category “our” designates— to the special worthiness of our own voice. If we listen to and recognize the sounds (and screams) of other identities and species, we can truly think about what it means to be. Listening to the vox mundi, including the voices of other humans that the system currently tunes out, we can understand that the system isn’t (currently) as open in practice as it is in principle. Not everyone is even allowed a public life. To the extent that the system can accommodate this, it can aid its development, but this is the very contradiction Lyotard wants to attend to. The caution is that we don’t presume the limits of what the system can accommodate or the lengths it can go to reconfigure and revise itself in order to keep functioning. The prescription is that we maintain the general line between the public and secret regions, and we can only do so if we listen elliptically, if we hear, listen, and don’t listen. The disseizure of timbre is, I think, one of the most radical (if unguaranteed) resistances of inhuman infancy to the inhumanity of the system. Timbre can be discussed and debated, and the process and results of such discussions can enter into the system’s circuits as inputs, which in turn can produce new debates and new inputs. Yet any articulation of timbre always comes too late, and timbre can’t be recalled without being reduced. Timbre in itself escapes all capture: that of the musical form, the musician’s playing, the listener’s intentions, and the system’s development. Timbre is accessible only to the secret life. There’s no aesthetics of timbre, just an anaesthetic that signals a presence beyond that which could be presented. The sonic matter of timbre is a figure-matrix that remains incommunicable and accessible only to the disseized subject. I mentioned earlier that timbre is an elusive concept, an “everything but.” To honor timbre as such, we might want to refrain from trying to produce any knowledge about it. Yet an absence of knowledge doesn’t imply a strengthening of resistance. There’s no pure presentation of the unpresentable, and thus we have to always attend to the form through which the matter appears. Sometimes making the form explicit helps tune us in to the matter, helps us better approach the limits of our capacities, helps us become passible to timbre. I hear this at work in Nina Sun Eidhseim’s study on racism and vocal timbre, where she shows how the openness of timbre works to reinforce essentialized notions of timbre that tie it with a person’s essence and identity. When we listen for what we can hear in another’s voice, we begin with a preexisting notion of their identity and believe this is verified when we hear it. When and

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if we don’t hear it, we might question if their voice is really genuine or authentic. In informal and formal settings, we’re trained to voice in particular ways, which deepens sonorous matter’s identification with forms, and restricts the forms with which it’s identified. The sounds of voices are disciplined through the meaning is attached to sounds through a “cult of fidelity” by which we “continue to name the voices we hear and to believe that this is the way the world works” (Eidsheim, 2019, p. 181). Another kind of listening practice is when we pause to consider how what we hear is only one possible meaning “in a chain of potentialities” (p. 182). Eidsheim wants us to do both simultaneously by approaching timbre as “a collection of styles and techniques,” which, while being “distinguishable through one name,” also “may be distinguishable through another name, and another, and another, and yet another” (p. 193). We don’t deny that we’re trained to listen for what we hear but rather open listening up by listing every possible way we can hear sonorous matter. The obedience to listening here, faced with the sublime force of timbre’s infinite potentiality, can fall back on itself so we might be able to not listen and therefore be accessible to timbre’s force. Listening elliptically, we question inaudible and audible sounds and our own listening, destabilizing our identifications of sounds and ourselves with meanings or essences, or our reception of sounds with our cognition of them. The elliptical list aspires to transparency (hearing), but remains punctuated by gaps (listening) and necessarily fails or falls back on itself (not listening). Placed within the ellipsis, hearing itself is no longer engaged developmentally, and the audible surround is no longer a border to be moved or entrenched, but a general line that falls between the public life and the secret one. We will not have heard what we thought we heard. We can only continue to try and think it and, in so doing, are desubjectified to become passible to the sonic force of timbre itself.

CHAPTER 5

Sectarian Initiation The paradox of matter and form preoccupies Lyotard. It’s the fundamental question of thinking, politics, and art. Thinking proceeds by way of the known into the limits and beyond, where it falls back on itself, and at which point the clouds have moved. Politics proceeds by mobilizing energies in response to given conditions into indeterminate pagan humor that sustains the revolutionary movement without constituting a new order. The aesthetic proceeds by way of inherited organizations of sounds and colors into a disabling of our faculties. Each category enacts an infancy that can either grow up or that remains infantile, depending in part on the kinds of practices of reading, writing, voicing, and listening with and through which we engage ourselves, others, and the world. In each case, form becomes monstrous matter. I’ve noticed the topic of stupor or idiocy—which are not the absence of knowledge but the beyond of knowledge—cropping up through Lyotard’s works, although rarely as a proper heading, title, or object. In an essay on the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Lyotard (1976/1993) links stupor with humor and passivity (or what he’ll later term passibility). As we heard in his bit about pagan laughter, humor is indeterminate and disinterested in acquiring power. “The important thing,” he says as he reads Bloch, “is to be ein innerlicher Narr, an idiot inside, a sort of unbeliever, empty, weak, of spirit, inane: a body ready to perfectly lead the impromptu excess, should that time come” (pp. 120–121). If thinking isn’t destined for knowledge, it could be destined for stupor. Thinking necessarily fails in the sublime encounter, so that even if thinking does produce knowledge, we won’t ever understand it. When thinking is viewed merely as a means for producing knowledge, we remain within the inhumaness of the system and its demands for development. We also remain firmly in the public life. “The secret,” as Lyotard (1988/1991) puts it at one time, “because it consists only in the timbre of a sensitive, sentimental matter, is inaccessible except to stupor” (p. 201). Those of us in education, then, have a special duty to defend Stupor. Stupor, however, is different from ignorance. Ignorance is defined by the possibility of knowing. Education views the infant child not as stupid but as ignorant, as a being that needs to develop capacities for knowledge. Ignorance is temporal and can change over time. Stupor never has an answer and doesn’t even know it’s being called on to respond, let alone how to respond. Stupor is

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timeless and intractable. It’s that which remains in infancy without any hopes of growing up. If education is infant, if it’s to and from, in, and for stupor even as it teaches particular ideas and texts, protocols, and disciplines; it can teach along the general line. But it can never be on time. Stupor is the excess that thinking tries to touch, a chronically disobedient incapacity to actualize and articulate lexis in textual space, and a capacity to experience the common mute breath of the world. An education in and for stupor is one in which “the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended… It is thought itself resolving to be irresolute, deciding to be patient, wanting not to want, wanting, precisely, not to produce meaning in place of what must be signified” (p. 19). Because stupor is a resolution to be irresolute, it isn’t a passive state but one that requires exposure and experience, a training in passibility. This is even truer given the transformations of the system Lyotard highlights. Reading, writing, voicing, and listening elliptically disseizes the subject and punctuates innovation with interminable initiations that block or jam the system’s inputs. Just as Lyotard drifted from Marxism as a definitive account and explanation of thinking and action, we can’t ask Lyotard to provide this in Marx’s place. We too have to drift from Lyotard, although we can’t predetermine why, when, or how. But there’s good reason to insist that the name Lyotard is still important and that we should always try to be sectarians for infancy. What Lyotard found compelling in Bloch, and which echoes Lyotard’s own experience with the Marxist movement, was that Bloch was sectarian. He distinguished the sect from the Church or the Party. The latter “are merely made up of many Egos, which is why their beliefs are syncretic and unity is formed around the despotic deposit of the divine utterance.” Sects, contrast, are “trans-individual,” as they “only exist as a fleeting knot that will ties with itself. And if names mark them… these names are not those of their leaders” but “are collective proper names that sects take on themselves or that they are given” (Lyotard, 1976/1993, p. 122). The sect isn’t united around a fixed point, which is why sects always come from splits only to result in further splits. They’re temporary common bodies that exist in difference, contradiction, and even antagonism. In other words, they’re united around something precariously and contingently. The sect is an infancy that interrupts a trajectory in an elliptical fashion, by breaking away while still being part of it but throwing it off course at the same time. It works on the Party or Church—or any grouping centered on and adhering to a divine utterance (like an academic discipline)—by haunting it with the irrepressible possibility of splits, which fractures the authority of the zero hour or zero degree of speech. The sect is a shared arrhythmic disseizure, detaching,

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assembling, and dismantling itself incalculably and unpredictably. We can try to list out the different splits and regroupings in any trajectory, and perhaps by doing so we can feel their elliptical force as the list’s—and Lyotard’s—duplicity. Perhaps infancy itself is a permanent splintering that, in so doing, always opens up initiatory moments in pedagogical (and political) processes.

Afterword

Towards a Post-Human Approach to (In)humanity: Reflections on Derek Ford’s Inhuman Educations Joris Vlieghe

One particular merit of Derek Ford’s Inhuman Educations, at least speaking for myself, is that it succeeds in writing on Lyotard in a fashion that stands opposed to a clichéd opinion on the branch of 20th Century French philosophy to which he belongs. In my own education as a philosopher I got to know Lyotard as a thinker who—side by side with Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, and many others—represents a style of philosophizing that is primarily concerned with pointing out the impossibility of making any substantial or generally valid knowledge claim. This is because, seen from an ethical perspective, such claims always involve some kind of violence (intended or not). In terms of a well-known jargon coined by Lyotard, the ‘grand récits’ or metanarratives, on which we have apparently relied for a long time to shape our individual and collective lives, have lost all reliability today, chiefly because we have come to realize that their universalistic and systematizing pretense comes with sacrificing and liquidating heterogeneity, difference, and otherness. This implies that the main task left for philosophy is a critical one: a never-ending effort of unveiling forms of epistemic violence in the name of the call of paying absolute respect for Otherness. The only acceptable thing to do as a philosopher is to show to those who are not yet conscious of it, that the desire for insight always involves the suppression of singularities and that it inadvertently will lead to forms of exclusion and injustice. In the end this comes down to turning philosophy into an entirely (self)critical affair, the sole aim of which is to secure a stature of moral immaculateness: an untarnished position, but not a fecund one at all. This, however, is not the case in Ford’s rendering of Lyotard’s oeuvre: he takes the reader on an altogether different kind of journey. Without giving much justification, except his personal passion for the author, Ford just reads Lyotard through the lens of an educational philosopher, to show that, if we just look, we can find in this oeuvre many interesting and inspirational ideas that pertain to the practice of teaching and upbringing. Ford’s book is thus to be seen as an experiment in thinking, which seeks out how far one can go with some of Lyotard’s concepts and schemes, rather than, for example, as a © Joris Vlieghe, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004458819_008

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systematic introduction in Lyotard’s philosophy (of education), or as an investigation into what it means to take a “Lyotardian position” in this discipline. This combination of an experimental approach and a particular (viz. an educational) interest in Lyotard grants the possibility to present Lyotard’s provocative work as being of the highest relevance to education.

1

A Phenomenological, Practice-Oriented and Educational Take on Lyotard

Ford’s analysis is characterized by the following threefold approach. First, he stays clear of reading Lyotard’s work in view of the smothering moral call of non-violence which I described in the first paragraph. Instead, he makes Lyotard appear as a rigorous phenomenologist. With that I don’t refer to phenomenology in the sense of the later Husserl, but in the general sense of giving detailed and rich accounts of what we actually experience when engaging in particular educational practices. More specifically, a second reason why Ford’s approach is most refreshing relates to the emphasis he puts on pedagogical forms: reading, writing, voicing, and listening. As I mentioned, his main goal is not to come up with a general theory about education, in which Lyotard’s philosophy then would serve as a basis for developing such a theory. Rather, what is at stake is to take seriously what we do and experience as educators and students, and to come to a more precise account of these practices. This book is first and foremost practice-oriented and does not deal with education in a vague and abstract sense. Nevertheless, I believe that Ford’s endeavors do contribute to pedagogical reflections of a more comprehensive kind. A third characteristic of his take on Lyotard in this book is to show what is educationally worthwhile about these practices. What is at stake is to draw attention to particular aspects of reading, writing, voicing, and listening that have a particularly educational significance. There are dimensions to each of these four practices that, at least when we allow for them to come about, thwart any attempt of existing societal systems to render us part of them. Even though the societal arrangements we currently live under are such that they seem to allow for maximal freedom and human dignity, we are in fact subjugated to an alienating system, which Lyotard calls inhuman, as the system tends to become a goal in itself. Once we fully comply with its rules, any possibility to go and live outside of it is forever foreclosed. Hence, we might be well advised to take into account certain aspects of the aforementioned practices insofar they escape any final control: never ever can these be seized by the arrangements of such an inhuman societal system.

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One might think of the utterly unpredictable possibilities of signification that are always present in every piece that we write and that might even surprise the author, as well as the never fully expressible force present in writing that cannot be reduced to one’s intentions to communicate a fixed meaning. Or, consider the ‘timbre’ which is present in any sound we utter and which can only negatively be defined as that what escapes any attempt at determination (in terms of pitch, intensity, etc.), although it makes the sound into something unique and discrete. These and many other dimensions, such as the plain occurrence of laughter, cannot be assigned a fixed place, meaning, or function, and they are therefore genuine forces of resistance we’d better take into consideration: they are another, and more positively understood form of inhumanity. They regard, paradoxically, an inhuman part of ourselves that we must assume in order to be able to lead a human life in the first place. To be clear, there is nothing intrinsically liberating about these practices. These pedagogical processes. can very easily be turned into capital that feeds the system. In that sense they are pharmaka: just like drugs, one and the same practice can be a cure or a poison—depending on how it is deployed (Stiegler, 2010). Reading, for instance, can be a perfect tool for optimizing the system: we can learn how to read speedily and gain time, to relate as a reader to a book the way an entrepreneur does vis-à-vis natural resources, to read critically so as to develop new ideas and supply the system with new energy, etc.. Lyotard would call this way of reading ‘innovative.’ But whilst reading we might also resist any such orientation towards innovation, and stay with the text, lose ourselves in the text without any set goal, experience that we don’t understand the text, that there is something in the text that touches us and that changes us even though we cannot fully capture it. Then we experience something different: ‘initiation.’ Something radically unplanned becomes possible—a new beginning. Our reading then becomes an educational reading. The practice of reading, but also of writing, voicing, and listening, can give this other, more profound and fully positively understood inhumanity a chance to make something happen outside of the confines set by the system, and hence to challenge it. So, what appears to be educational valuable about these practices is that they may offer a strong experience of always being-able to start anew.

2

Infantia and (In)humanism

Saying this, we get to a notion which is at the very heart of education, and which is also central in Lyotard’s oeuvre: infantia—the incapacity to speak, the part in all of us that never can and never will grow up. Infancy points to

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a particular paradoxical structure that, as Klaus Mollenhauer (2013) argues, defines what education is about. This paradox can be formulated in many different ways, e.g., that education is a process that is good in and of itself: it is better to be educated than not, and hence the more education the better; but at the same time education also needs to come to a close, meaning that contrary to what has just been said, it is also a process that aims at its own annihilation. This is—to take once more the same example—akin to the experience of reading a book. On the one hand, reading is a practice valuable in and of itself; on the other hand the reading of the book is aimed at being able to summarize its main points and to use it, for instance, during one’s teaching about the book or when constructing new arguments based on the book (which I will do in the second part of my reflections, by the way). So, the best reading is the one that makes reading redundant. And yet, one also has to agree that there is an enormous difference between reading an excellent summary of a book and reading the book itself (writing this very piece, I have the strong experience of betraying both Ford’s magnificent book and my own enjoyment whilst studying it, as I am staring at the screen of my laptop and only write about it based on my recollection of my reading and the notes I took). Complicated as the issue is, reading is both aimed at keeping what one is doing and aimed at coming to a final close. But, this tension cannot and should not be overcome. The analogous tension we find in education is not so much a problem; it is exactly constitutive of the phenomenon of education itself. If one takes learning how to speak as a model for education, what happens here could be described as the closing of a gap: we all begin our lives as a purely ‘private’ beings, so to speak—a pure interiority, experience without language—so as to become part of a ‘public’ and intersubjective world of meanings. Once this step has been successfully taken, the very notion ‘pure interiority’ no longer makes sense, as everything we say and experience is structured by the realm of signification we now belong to. The starting position only remains a vague memory, and certainly something unsayable. And yet, it seems of the highest importance that we remain in touch with it. As the German philosopher of education Klaus Mollenhauer would argue, it is exactly this which makes us into educable beings. Mollenhauer sees this exemplified in the enigmatic figure of Kaspar Hauser, the boy who was deprived of any education and who only started to learn how to speak at an adult age. Kaspar never fully manages to speak fluently. But instead of rendering this well-known story in a pitiful way, it could also be seen as revealing what education is all about. The exceptional case of Kaspar only highlights something that applies to all of us: we never fully learn how to speak. There is

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the permanent and structural possibility that we start stuttering, that we are left without words: we are never fully educated. And never must be. We are all Kapser Hauser. That is, we never close the gap, as we are always in the situation of crossing the gap. We never fully leave the starting position. Even at an adult age we remain children. Or more adequately put: we keep carrying in ourselves a remainder of the unsayable original experience of what it means to be radically private and without language—infantia. Importantly, it is this which explains why the life of human beings can change in profound ways. There is no necessity in who we are and in the ways in which we give shape to our individual and shared lives. A new beginning is always imaginable. Bearing witness to the inhuman (not of the system, but the inhumanity of infancy) in us and caring for it: only then we can be educated. Only then there is the promise of genuine transformation. The question remains, however, how this infancy, this inhumanism relates to the traditional ideals or goals of humanism that has informed so much of existing educational theory and practice. After all, humanism also remains in the background of Ford’s analysis: the inhumanity of the system aimed at development and innovation is challenged because it is hostile towards a truly human existence. But, in order to stay human (or at least to lead not-inhuman lives), we need to remain ‘inhuman’ in the other, more profound and positive sense of infancy. I want to turn in the second half of my reflections to the complex issue of what I will call (in)humanism—i.e. embracing inhumanity so as to be able to live a truly human life. More exactly, I will do this in three steps, which all can be seen as working out Ford’s main point, making the idea of (in)humanism generative of new thoughts. This exercise comprises three different degrees of radicalness: (1) (in)humanism as a qualified, more downto-earth and hence tragic and perverse humanism; (2) (in)humanism as an uncompromising non-humanism; and (3) (in)humanism as post-humanism. Admitting that the third perspective is the least developed one in Ford’s text, I believe it to be the most crucial one.

3

Humanistic Education as Profoundly (In)human: Perfectibility and Taking Childhood Literally

First, we could take Ford’s account as residing within the (safe) borders of a plainly humanistic account of education. What is basically at stake in such an account is what makes us human, and what sets us apart from all the rest in the universe that is not human. Then, it could be said that Lyotard’s depiction

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of the (in)humanity of infancy remains one-sidedly optimistic: by fostering (in)humanity—through education—we can hope to obtain something uniquely human that should be appraised as quintessentially desirable. Without, for the time being, questioning this idea, I want to point out that Lyotard’s ideas could still be taken in a far more radical way, so as to flesh out another version of educational humanism that offers a more realistic account of our conditio (in)humana and that is sensitive to the calamitous side of existence. Although Ford shows that (in)humanity isn’t necessarily a matter of a positive experience—in the last chapters of the book we learn that it comes with a disappearance of our own subjectivity, that it concerns an experience of outright self-loss or even of anesthesia, and certainly that is not conducive to strengthening ourselves—it remains a redemptive quality. Humanity is saved—even in the face of complete desubjectivation. Ultimately, there does not really seem to be a ‘dark side’ to infancy. However, following Blaise Pascal (1995) on this point, (in)humanity can also be taken in a much stronger, and possibly more unsettling sense: l’homme est un milieu entre rien et tout. The place of humankind in the universe is somewhere in-between (mi-lieu) nothing and all, in-between darkness and light, inbetween perversion and sainthood, in-between the worst and best imaginable. Pascal’s view dovetails with Lyotard, as for him humankind is also singled out from the rest of reality in that there is nothing fixed about who we are: we can change in various directions (whereas other realities aren’t bothered by this lack of essence). Now, according to Pascal, it is this unique feature of humanity that makes our existence so tragic: it renders us capable both of composing ingenious symphonies and writing brilliant and revolutionary new poetry as well as committing the most sadistic cruelties animals are incapable of, such as taking pleasure in the misfortune of others or exterminating whole groups of people on a global scale. From an educational perspective, it seems important to take this into account, although then we risk again taking the position of ethical purity and absolute respect for otherness. So, let me formulate the same idea more affirmatively, showing that drawing attention to the potential dark side of (in)humanity also highlights something about the bright side. The upshot of this approach is that we are potentially both god-like and worse than beasts: it is not a priori given what humankind is able and is not able to do. In that sense, there is no point in premising a set goal of human perfection after which education should strive. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that anything goes: some paths are more desirable than others, but the criterium for deciding this is entirely immanent. It needs to be found at the level of an intensification of (shared) experience. A good example of such a yardstick is what Rousseau

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(1991) calls ‘perfectibility’ (perfectibilité): the perceived increase in proficiency. There is no external norm that is to decide what the content of our strive towards perfection need be. However, at an experiential level we can delight and find pride in getting better at something. Of course, this view runs counter to Lyotard’s critique of development and innovation in the name of staying faithful to infancy. This line of criticism must be granted, but one could also take the concept of infancy in a more straightforward and day-to-day meaning: let infants be infants, i.e. children and not adults. As Ford acknowledges, the very notion of infancy only speaks to us because of its ambiguity, because it also refers to a life stage, or what can be experienced in a particular life stage: childhood (enfance). He then draws from this connection between infancy at an ontological level (the constitutive inhumanity that makes us human) and infancy as a stage, to define a particular sensory quality that typifies (in)humanity: children, more than adults, have the capacity to be affected (a capacity that Lyotard also renders as ‘passibility’). I would fully agree with this analysis, but—in a Nietzschean vein—one could make the equally valid argument that children, more than adults, are likewise characterized by the capacity to find simple joy in just being good at something, or getting better in doing something. Again, this would point to the possibility of experiencing immanently, or without any reference to some ideal external to life that prescribes a goal for which to aim, advancement in human becoming. Childish enjoyment at increasing life’s possibilities sets a touchstone for this improvement. Using terminology coined by Tim Ingold (2017), I explicitly referred, in the last paragraph, to ‘human becoming,’ stressing the idea that our doings as humans can become more rich, complex, intense, etc., rather than to ‘becoming human,’ or becoming more human. The last expression would set out an a priori—a definite and unsurpassable—definition of the goal of humanization. This is not meant as a critique of Ford. Clearly, even though there is not a mistaken humanist orientation in the background of his account of education, he decidedly does not yield to any traditionalist version of humanism. Ford’s (in)humanism is also profoundly non-humanist in the strong sense of that word. And so, I want to move forward to a next and second elaboration of the possible interplay between (in)humanism and education.

4

(In)humanist Education as Non-Humanist: Writing as Initiation

Traditional humanism could be defined as an account of education that assumes a positive ideal of what it is that we educate for: a picture of fully attained

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humanity. An example of this can be found in the work of Jürgen Habermas, with whom Lyotard famously entered in a long and fierce controversy on this topic. So Habermas (1984) constitutes an apt ‘case’ to use in order to develop further, with Lyotard and Ford, the idea of an (in)humanist education beyond a humanist position. Although for Habermas there is seemingly no predefined conception of the good human life prior to rational dialogue, Lyotard points out that Habermas actually makes a lot of normative assumptions about being-human. For Habermas, the best human life is unquestionably one in which we behave as participants of a rational dialogue aimed at reaching consensus. When entering such a discussion we are willing to leave behind our own positionality, we listen to other discussants’ perspectives, learn why these perspectives matter to them, and in the end we must be willing to give up our own point of view if there are more compelling arguments put forward. Transparency rules: the only force to yield to is the stringency of the best (logical) argument. Differently put: what makes human life worth living is full rational self-determination. Democratic discussion, based solely on argumentation and aimed at unanimity, is what defines the most desirable life in common. This also comes with further assuming that entering the public sphere has an uplifting and emancipatory effect because we are no longer prisoners of our closed private worlds. Instead, thanks to the transparency of the dialogue, we will give shape to our lives based on reasons we can bring in the open and share with others. Even if partners of the dialogue momentarily disagree, they can in principle have access to each other’s points of view. As a result, the better argument will prevail and consensus will arise. This also entails that the only part of our existence that really counts is the part we can bring to expression, so that it can be unequivocally understood by others (i.e. by everyone endowed with reason). Such a view is at odds with an (in)humanistic account à la Lyotard, which favors the private over the public, and which regards more highly the inexpressible compared to what can be rendered in (already known) words. For Lyotard, the sphere of the ineffable and private should not be approached in terms of a lack of meaning and publicity. Rather, the very possibility of leading a worthwhile life seems to depend on bearing witness to and enacting an infancy that contradicts the demands of the system: a society that thrives thanks to fully transparent rational discussion. If we take infancy seriously, there is a more original dissensual non-expressivity that makes any attempt at consensual democracy suspicious. Surprisingly, Lyotard’s views are here on a par with Adorno, who also exposed the too easily taken for granted significance of public discussion as a form of bourgeois instrumentalism. Discussion, Adorno (2005) holds, is ‘an entirely bourgeois category.’ It is a method that

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has been completely ruined by tactics […] Discussion serves manipulation. […] The opponent in a discussion becomes a functional component of the current plan. […] If the opponent does not concede, then he will be disqualified and accused of lacking the qualities presupposed by the discussion. (p. 269)1 This is, of course, not a call for abandoning discussing matters among each other or giving up on the idea that mutual understanding is possible and desirable. But, what both Lyotard and Adorno warn against is that rational transparency shouldn’t be put forward as an ideal we should try to realize at all costs. For Adorno, discussion and argumentation can easily become mere tactical means for oppression by discrediting others for not being willing to play the game the way they should. Analogously, for Lyotard discussion may too easily become subservient to the logic of innovation: it appears then as an operation that makes the system operate smoother and that prevents it from becoming entropic, as it is fed by more diverse sources of information. Hence, genuine initiation is precluded. Furthermore, the primacy of discussion—when seen as the goal of a humanistic education—forestalls many aspects of what counts in our lives, but that cannot possibly be articulated in terms of rational arguments that everyone, when using their reasonable faculties, is able to understand. The unique and private located at the level of infancy is then overrun by an identitarian logic (Adorno) or a systematic logic (Lyotard). Interestingly, over and against the supremacy of rational dialogue and discussion, Adorno holds a high regard for the practice of thoughtful writing. Too often writing is regarded as a practice of secondary significance only: we form our ideas whilst thinking and speaking, whereas writing is considered as a mere support to deposit or to communicate these ideas. Adorno, on the contrary, argues that we can only think and speak well thanks to writing. Writing is, as we have seen, always a practice in which the words we generate speak back to us: we can be surprised, discover that an idea we hold dear is actually wrong or not precise enough, we might come and see utterly new connections between things, etc. The intentional consciousness of the writer is not the sole author of that what is written, so to speak. The writer has to go along with the experience of writing—passively—so that new ideas can be formed that do justice to the subject one writes about. The source of the ideas that we generate whilst writing is, in some measure at least, the part of ourselves that escapes transparency and control: the nonidentical, as Adorno would call it. Or, in a Lyotardian parlance: (in)human infancy. Moreover, Adorno believes that a particular form of writing routine offers this possibility of creative thought that stays true to our experience: the essay. It concerns an odd and difficult to categorize genre which does not obey

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particular formal requirements (e.g. in terms of length), that can literally be about anything, but that is fully driven by a particular thing or issue about which one needs to write. Interestingly, and conforming to what Ford says about Lyotard’s analysis of writing, the word essay itself refers, in its original French meaning, to the practice of ‘trying’ (essayer). As such the essay is both ‘trying,’ as in demanding, fatiguing, bothersome, and even frustrating (as the text doesn’t just give in to the intentions of the author), and a matter of ‘trying out’: checking out, experimenting, just seeing whatever happens. One doesn’t know beforehand what the outcome will be and success is no guarantee. It is a difficult genre that doesn’t easily come to a close, and that puts the writer in a position of remaining as it were permanently at the beginning. Writing essays is thus a practice of initiation in the sense that Lyotard means it.

5

Making (In)humanism Post-Human: Technologies of Trans-Individual Attention

Thus far I have been attempting to develop some of the educational implications of taking seriously (in)human infantia, benefiting from the oxymoron2 that we need to focus on inhumanity in order to support a veritably human education. One way to do so is to start from humanist assumptions and tweak such an account by also taking the tragic ‘dark side’ of infantia (as that what makes us uniquely human) into consideration. This led me to formulate an immanent criterium for education in terms of human becoming—with a stress on the last term. Another, and more radical, i.e. less traditionally humanist, path to follow, is to begin with the fully inhuman itself—the non-human— and to oppose it to humanist educational goals (such as democracy, publicity, and transparency), so as to rediscover the relevance of practices such as writing essays, which hinge on something that remains non-appropriable by its human author. But I want to finish my reflections on Ford’s book with a third possible way to deal with (in)humanism. More specifically, I want to come back to the practice of writing to argue that we can also view infancy along the lines of another modulation of (in)humanism: post-humanism. Taking the risk of aligning myself with the newest ‘grand récit’ and joining the academic fad that reigns today, I do believe that it is promising to read Lyotard through this lens. Very briefly put, post-humanism, as I take it, is a view on the interconnectedness between human affairs and the many non-human aspects of reality that support these. It comes, hence, with bidding farewell to human exceptionalism, but not with altogether giving up the idea that it makes a difference that we are human.

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As humans we can only make sense of the world and ourselves in it against the background of an understanding of reality in which humankind is but one category of beings that possesses a capacity to act. Agency is not a human privilege. This is, we are also dependent upon what non-human entities make us feel, think and do, and allow us to feel, think and do. In special, it is the technological means we rely on, which need to be taken into account to paint a convincing story about humans—and about their education. Writing is such a technology.3 In keeping with Adorno’s and Lyotard’s analysis, there is something to the very practice of writing and to the material infrastructure we rely on that conditions and directs what we write and how we write—and hence how (new) thoughts are generated whilst writing. For instance, as Vilém Flusser (2011) argues, the linearity of writing—the fact that we have to jot down letter after letter, and word after word—forces a particular order on our thinking. The technology which we use defines rationality. Writing is not a technology that was invented by clever creatures so as to extend their rational capacities. Instead, it was writing that invented us and made us rational in the first place. In that sense, humanity is fully sustained by its prosthetics. Such a view, obviously, also entails that with substantial evolutions of the technologies we rely on, e.g. that we write digitally today instead of with pen and paper (and that we can very easily erase what we have written, or just copy and paste what others have written), also comes with different experiences of what it means to be human—and in this case: what it means to think. I have no place to develop these thoughts further here (see Vlieghe, 2016). However, I would like to point to an important consequence of this posthumanist approach that risks remaining underexposed in Ford’s account of (in)humanism. As we saw above, when taking a critical distance from Habermas’ humanistic views, Lyotard’s position comes with an extreme anti-public gesture. That in us which makes our lives meaningful—infancy—is through and through private. This is a challenging, albeit most invigorating, way of thinking. After all, we are usually inclined to see things exactly the other way around: as if we would be on a deeper, ontological level always already ‘public’ beings: creatures that are implicitly connected to and/or willing to associate with others— as is clear from the origin of the word private, the Latin ‘privatus’ meaning that one is ‘robbed of’ some preciousness (see Visker, 1997). What Lyotard convincingly shows is that there exists a more original and totally positive privacy at the heart of our humanity. In view of this, I want to raise a double, related question: whether it is desirable for an educational account to stop at this point (and actually to surrender to solipsism), and whether a post-humanist perspective can take us further in the direction of an understanding of humanity that is trans-individual.

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With Lyotard it becomes possible to recognize an inconvenient truth about pedagogical initiatives that try to make more decent, social, and civic, and less violent, racist, and intolerant creatures out of us by asking to open ourselves up towards the other (and to demonstrate our humanity). Even if these initiatives are well-meant, either these are in fact in vain or they entrap us in another system: that of hypocrisy. With this I refer to the dominant view which I started to criticize in the first paragraph of this afterword: that the best life for humans is one based on renouncing ourselves in view of an unconditional respect for the Otherness of the Other. Too easily, this boils down to giving in to the illusion of moral correctness, more than that we actually change anything to the ways in which we live together. However, this inconvenient truth is not an excuse for defeatism. On the contrary, from a post-humanist perspective more affirmative argument can be made for the possibility of other form of collectivity— not one that we presuppose, but one that we need to build again and again.4 If we ultimately define infancy as the idea that our humanness hinges on the technologies we use, a case can be made for the following thesis: it is an educational endeavor of high pertinence to take care for the technologies that support our being and use them in such a way that they actually facilitate community. Let me give two concrete examples. First, consider collective educational practices, such as teaching face to face in a classroom or a lecture hall. Especially in this day and age, these practices sound obsolete and—in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—even dangerous. They are massively replaced by individualized on-screen learning activities. However, from an ‘infantile’ post-humanist perspective, as proposed here, a case can be made for this kind of communal ‘in the flesh’ gatherings. Lecturing in an auditorium, where bodies are arranged around a matter that is put in the center of interest, is itself a technology which fosters a form of attention that exceeds the level of a singular psyche. For instance, an individual attending a lecture can be distracted, but she can suddenly descry that everyone around her starts energetically writing down something the lecturer is explaining (see Marin, 2020). In this case her attention is shaped, not as the result of choice, a personal effort or putting at work an individual competence. Rather, it is the dependency on a milieu (the architecture of the auditorium which immediately allows for perceiving how the behaviour of her peers connect to the person’s doings and saying in the front, the PowerPoint slide that is being presented, etc., and hence for sensing something important is going on) that contributes to the possibility of an educationally relevant experience occurring. In this context, a second examples comes from the contemporary French philosopher Yves Citton (2017), who speaks about an attentional ecology. He, too, calls for taking care of the technologies that help us become attentive to

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things that matter. That is, as educators we have a responsibility for technologically supporting collective, i.e. trans-individual, forms of attention. An example he discusses at length and that fits in with the point I want to make here is that of the ‘The Order of the Third Bird,’ an artistic-political initiative that wants to restore practices of attentively visiting museums. In essence, one invites people just to stand in small groups in front of an artwork that is normally disregarded and to stare at it for a very long time. The result is that other visitors of the museum start to pay as much attention to the artwork in question as one would be inclined to do in front of the Mona Lisa. As such, attention is being generated thanks to a collective practice. In conclusion, cherishing the (in)human can also be understood as avowing our conditio posthumana. Acknowledging that our humanity depends much on the extra-humanly, and especially the technological-prosthetical milieu we thrive in, doesn’t necessarily have to come with a deterministic worldview. On the contrary, it opens interesting educational paths. We have to take care of these technologies while developing new technologies that may sustain forms of collectivity. Such an account, inspired by Lyotard, that circles around our (in)human infancy doesn’t necessarily have to end up in a celebration of privateness. This seems to me an important addition to make to the views defended in Ford’s book.

Notes 1 I gratefully draw my inspiration here from Itay Snir’s recent analysis of thinking in Adorno. 2 The Greek term ‘oxymoron’ literally means ‘pointedly foolish’ (moros referring to foolishness, as in ‘moron’). In a sense the very paradox of achieving humanity being predicated on inhumanity seems to be foolish, and hence—maybe—through and through infantile itself. 3 I am, again, following here Stiegler, who defines technology not merely in terms of material tools we rely on (pen and paper, keyboard and screen). It also comprises the routines we put in pracrice (viz. longhand writing and typing). 4 Cf. once more with the position Stiegler (2010) defends.

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Index adulthood 42 affect 9–10, 50, 52, 54, 61 Algeria 6, 10 art 2, 13, 18, 37, 41, 42, 52, 53, 61, 66 beautiful 37–41, 43 Berberova, Nina 20, 21, 28 Berio, Luciano 45–47, 52 Bloch, Ernst 66, 67 breath 49, 52–55, 57, 61, 63, 67 Butor, Michel 33, 34, 42 capitalism 5, 7, 8, 32 childhood 4, 9–11, 13, 20, 27, 29, 30, 33, 43, 73, 75 Crary, Jonathan 17 critique 6–8, 29, 32, 34, 37, 40, 47, 75 democracy 5, 8, 28, 29, 31, 33, 76 desubjectification 13 development 1–4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 21, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 45, 55, 56, 63,64, 66, 73, 75 dialogue 8, 35, 36, 42, 44, 51, 76, 77 disseizure 59–61, 64, 67 dreams 17 Duchamp, Michel 42 education 1, 3, 10, 11, 13, 19, 21, 33, 45, 54, 62, 66–67, 69–77 Eidsheim, Nina Sun 65 ellipses 40, 47, 53, 56 exchange 13, 22, 30–32, 42, 43, 49–51 form 3–7, 17, 20, 24, 29–32, 35, 38–43, 46, 50, 52, 55–60, 62–66, 69–71, 76, 77 free association 26, 51 Freud, Sigmund 26, 32, 48, 49, 51 general line 21–23, 28–31, 33–35, 64, 65, 67 idiocy 13, 30, 66 immaterial 42, 55, 58–60 infancy 2–4, 9–13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28–31, 33, 34, 38–40, 42–48, 50, 52, 56, 61, 64, 66–68, 71, 73–77

interiority 22, 72 Kant, Immanuel 37, 38, 40, 41, 43 knowledge 3, 12, 13, 19, 21, 23, 25–27, 29–31, 34–38, 40, 41, 43, 49–51, 53–55, 58, 59, 62, 64, 66, 69 lexis 49–51, 54, 55, 67 listing 34, 65 Marxism 6–7, 67 matter 15, 25, 41–44, 46, 48, 51–66, 74, 76–77 modernity 25–27, 32, 34, 37, 41, 43, 51 music 13, 45, 47, 52, 55–60 mute 13, 50, 52–55, 57, 59, 63, 67 Newman, Barnett 41, 42, 57 opacity 13, 18, 21, 27, 34, 35, 44, 52, 58 Orwell, George 28, 31 paganism 47 performativity 7, 35 phenomenology 15, 17, 70 philosophy 2–4, 6, 14, 20, 24, 27, 37, 69, 70 phonè, 43, 49–54 phrase-affect 50, 61 Plato 14 politics 8, 13, 26, 32, 47, 48, 55, 66 publicity 23, 76 Quashie, Kevin 22, 23, 28 Quignard, Pascal 52 racism 22, 23, 64 Robeson, Paul 31 secret life 20–23, 26, 28–30, 32, 33, 35, 43, 47, 54, 64 sensus communis 38, 39, 41 Simon, Claude 25, 32 Soviet Union 5–7, 31 structuralism 14, 15 stupor 66, 67

87

index sublime 13, 37, 39–43, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59–61, 65, 66 suspension 47, 61, 62

timbre 42–43, 58–66, 71 transparency 12–13, 27, 28, 34, 62, 65, 76–77

teaching 1, 3, 6, 11, 12, 19, 20, 27, 45, 69, 72 temporality 50, 61 terror 8, 22, 28, 29, 39, 52 thought 1–5, 7, 9, 11–14, 18–20, 24, 25, 27–32, 34–36, 38–45, 51, 60, 63, 65, 67, 73, 77

understanding 9, 14, 25, 38–43, 51, 53, 55, 60–62, 77 zero point 26, 51