Lyotard and the 'figural' in Performance, Art and Writing 9781441108753, 1441108750

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Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing

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Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Derrida: Profanations, Patrick O’Connor The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler Heidegger and Logic, Greg Shirley Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte Idealism and Existentialism, Jon Stewart Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman Žižek’s Dialectics, Fabio Vighi

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Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing

Kiff Bamford

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Kiff Bamford, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Author has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-0875-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bamford, Kiff. Lyotard and the figural in performance, art, and writing / Kiff Bamford. p. cm. – (Continuum studies in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-6707-1 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-0875-3 (ebook (pdf) 1. Lyotard, Jean-François, 1924–1998. 2. Arts–Philosophy. I. Title. B2430.L964B36 2012 700.1–dc23

2012000807

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1. The figural

15

2. The Libidinal

44

3. Les Immatériaux : What is Lyotard’s Attitude to the Body?

75

4. The Sublime

109

5. Temporality and the figural

137

In Conclusion

165

Notes

174

Bibliography

198

Index

211

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to: The Arts and Humanities Research Council for a doctoral award to carry out the PhD research from which this book has been developed. My supervisory team at The University of Manchester: supervisors David Lomas and Dee Reynolds, academic advisors Aris Sarafinos, Charlie Miller and in particular Amelia Jones for her support and critical encouragement. Discussions with postgraduate colleagues, especially Christine Stoddard, and members of related reading groups including Mark Hallihan, Rob Lapsley, Ana Miller and Jeremy Tambling. Scholars and artists who have willingly given their time to discuss and answer queries related to my research either by email or in person: Vito Acconci; Heidi Bickis; Keith Crome; David Cunningham; Sepp Gumbrecht; Antony Hudek; Luc Maillot; Gavin Parkinson and Alice Maude-Roxby. Readers for Continuum: Stuart Sim, Kent Still and James Williams. Additional thanks to James Williams who, together with Adrian Armstrong, formed a generous examination team. Conference organizers who have given me the opportunity to present work in progress: Lucy Prodgers (Lines of Flight , Manchester); Sophia Hao (Notes on a return , Newcastle); Sharon Kivland and Forbes Morlock (Reading to Attention, Glasgow), Sharon Kivland (Transmission: Hospitality, Sheffield), Heidi Bickis and Rob Shields (Rewriting Lyotard , Edmonton, Canada). Colleagues in the art school at Leeds Metropolitan University, particularly conversations with Liz Stirling and Andrew Wilson Lambeth. Artists and staff involved in Marina Abramović presents . . . at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, especially the artist Yingmei Duan. University of Minnesota Press to refer to Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure. Originally published in French in Discourse, Figure ; copyright 1971 by Klincksieck. English translation copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Mme Dolorès Lyotard for permission to refer to unpublished sources held in the Lyotard archive at the Doucet library in Paris. Some sections of this text first appeared in print elsewhere: part of Chapter 2 as ‘“Arrive-t-il?” “Is it happening?”: Questions of duration and the ephemeral in Acconci, Abramović and Lyotard’, NOTES on a return, ed.

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Acknowledgements

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Sophia Yadong Hao and Matthew Hearn (Sunderland: Arts Editions North, 2010). A version of part of Chapter 3 as ‘Acconci’s Pied-à-terre’, Performance Research, 17 (2), April 2012. Thanks to the editors of these publications for their comments and permission to include the material in this book. Finally, to the patience of my family, in particular the attention to reading given by G. B. Bamford and the chaotic normality of Jill, Izzy and Joseph to whom these pages are childishly dedicated.

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Introduction

Like everyone else, I have problems with the words performance, performer. On the other hand, a phrase like ‘Duchamp as a transformer’ seems to me comprehensible .1 The word performance is certainly not the appropriate term to describe the work of Daniel Buren. [. . .] Performance is the transformation of a situation. This performance is unique and brief. Installation is also a unique, but lasting, transformation of a situation .2 It might appear that these two comments by French philosopher JeanFrançois Lyotard, given at different conferences on performance in 1976 and 1980 respectively, do not bode well for a book which sets out to show the relevance of Lyotard’s thought to performance art.3 But it is this unwillingness to accept terms and practices as given which makes his thought both provocative and urgent in any attempt to consider aspects of performance today. This book is primarily concerned with the writings of Lyotard, specifically those on art and how his ideas are useful when thinking about performance art and its documentation – including writing and re-performance. It is prompted in part by the curious position of Lyotard’s work within the context of English-speaking art historical discourse and how his reception through translation has led to an emphasis on certain aspects of his work and the neglect of others. By shifting the focus to the ‘figural’, a key feature of that work which has been overlooked, the relevance of Lyotard’s later writings and their pertinence to writings on art and performance will become clear.

Art and Theory The relationship of contemporary art to its bedfellows in theory has a long and turbulent history, witness the scars born by the association of Lyotard with the postmodern debates of the 1980s. In the Anglophone art world the name Lyotard still connotes The Postmodern Condition or the sublime

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Lyotard and the figural

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and is firmly associated with the Eighties, a decade whose nostalgic reprise began with the fashion world’s ‘Back to the Eighties’ label and has been followed by museum blockbusters, such as Postmodernism at the V&A museum (2011).4 I do not want to go back to that debate but aim to reinvigorate other aspects of Lyotard’s thought and enter the debate which I hope will be prompted by the English translation of his 1971 book, Discours, figure [Discourse, Figure] and the significant five-volume project initiated by Leuven University Press: Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists.5 In the French context it is different: I attended a conference on postmodernism in Paris where the only mention of Lyotard came from a North American scholar, while the French organizers and speakers referred repeatedly to the US cultural theorists Frederic Jameson and Hal Foster.6 This difference of cultural reception is important to this study and I will pay attention to both the sequence and context in which Lyotard’s work was translated and the reciprocal relationship Lyotard himself had with contexts exterior to France, in particular North America. Another relationship that is central to this book is that of writing to art, though this is never without problems. The uneasy attitude of contemporary art to philosophy and other theoretical areas is described by Ilona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, as being ‘magpie-like’: For while the contemporary art world picks out – with magpie-like unconcern for academic propriety – the sparkly bits from the oeuvres of political philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, cultural theorists and even art historians, things can go wrong when those who have been temporarily lured into the ambit of contemporary art try to return the compliment.7 Blazwick is here writing of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s involvement in a conference at Tate Britain, Undoing the Aesthetic Image, and warns that a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the worlds of art and philosophy cannot be assumed, concluding that ‘ultimately, for these public intellectuals, the realm of contemporary art evaded their reach’.8 In contrast, my own research into Lyotard and his relationship to the art about which he wrote permits me to argue strongly for the case that Lyotard was not only personally drawn to a varied range of modern and contemporary art – evidenced in the 20-plus catalogue essays he wrote – but that his thinking on aesthetics was integral to much of his wider philosophical writing and thinking. Furthermore, there are many aspects of Lyotard’s thought

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Introduction

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which ask new questions about the experience of art, questions that this book will respond to through a specific consideration of performance art.

Why Performance Art? The role and status of performance within the context of fine art production and display has changed significantly since the latter part of the twentieth century. Many artists now employ strategies of performance, whether live or ‘live to camera’, as one of several media currently available. This broadens further the already problematic concept of performance as a category within fine art and necessitates its address by institutions, both in terms of its accommodation, preservation and documentation. These have been the focus of several significant exhibitions including: Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object , at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1998) and Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance at Tate Liverpool (2003). A different, though not unrelated phenomenon is that of the re-performance of ‘historical’ pieces from the era which is widely regarded as the crucible of performance in its contemporary sense: the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include re-performance projects initiated by curators with the participation of artists, such as A Little Bit of History Repeated (Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2001) and A Short History of Performance (Whitechapel, London, 2002–6) and artist-initiated projects, whether individual re-enactments by the first performers, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut piece (1964/2003), or younger artists presenting new interpretations, for example Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2005 version of Vito Acconci’s Walk-over. In addition, Marina Abramović ambitiously combined re-performance of her own work and the work of other key ‘historic’ pieces in her project Seven Easy Pieces for the Guggenheim in 2005. The most commonplace explanation for this phenomenon is anxiety, whether anxiety over the appropriateness of existing records or wider issues of preservation and posterity. However, the very attempt to address these issues results in further questions and uncertainty. It would be easy to interpret Abramović’s projects, including the durational re-performances of her ‘back catalogue’ by other artists in her 2010 Museum of Modern Art, New York retrospective, as motivated by egocentric concerns but equally this can be interpreted as a concern for performance art itself, particularly the durational brand for which she is best known. Certainly she is one of the most active and provocative advocates of the need to address the future of performance which, for her at least, has been kept away too long from the bastions of cultural power.9

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Performance and its historical legacy is an important topic of debate, the interest in which is demonstrated by the rise in the number of publications which refer to performance art and the alternative categorizations of body art and live art. RoseLee Goldberg’s histories are no longer the only versions readily available, the earlier account of La ‘Body art’ e storie simili by Lea Vergine, initially published bilingually in English and Italian, was republished in 2000 by Skira. Also, popular art history and contemporary art series include titles which either emphasize the broad nature of performance in contemporary art, such as Perform – published by Thames and Hudson in 2005 as part of their Art Works series – or adopt means of categorization which focus on the themes of identity and the body rather than the medium of performance, the explanation given by Amelia Jones for her choice of ‘body art’ in her academically important study Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998). This term refers back not only to its use by Lea Vergine but also to that of French art critic François Pluchart, whose 1974 exhibition was titled L’art Corporel , and it is subsequently mirrored in the compilation of texts and images Jones co-edited with Tracey Warr in 2000 for Phaidon, The Artist’s Body.10 This collaboration between an art historian and a curator and academic who taught for many years at Dartington College of Art, well known for its innovative work in theatre, also indicates the extent to which performance art has not only been increasingly embraced by fine art but has also bridged the artificial divide between disciplines, crossing over most notably into theatre but also aspects of experimental dance and music. Performance as an interdisciplinary field is best exemplified, in the United Kingdom at least, through the term Live Art and its specific manifestation in both the Live Art Development Agency, founded in 1999, and the National Review of Live Arts, a platform for events since 1979 whose annual festival, currently based in Glasgow, has become the focus for much live performance across Europe and North America. This event was recently described as the ‘trade show’ for performance art, a comment which reveals the extent to which some artists reject the ‘Live Art’ label and the fetishization of presence implied by the term.11 There is something missing in contemporary approaches to performance, whether in the manner in which it is brought into the category of sculpture and its expanded field or in its role as the experimental edge of theatre. The issues of documentation and re-performance, for example, have a different role in the work of performance studies when it is aligned more closely to theatre or anthropology.12 In this brief summary of the field of performance I have placed an emphasis on the difficulties which are particularly pertinent to

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the field of art history in order to outline some of the terrain to which I suggest Lyotard’s thought can be applied, not as a medicinal therapy or cure but as a provocation, sometimes irritating. The disruption of presumptions that Lyotard terms the figural is what is needed at this time, coupled with the particular nuance which Lyotard’s writings on affect, sublime and the event can bring to current understandings and considerations of performance. In this book the term affect refers to unfamiliar and contested feelings which, unlike emotion, escape definition; early Freudian uses of the term by Lyotard refer to an economy of affective discharge that accompanies repressed ideas and memories while in Lyotard’s later writings terms such as ‘affect-phrase’ relate to the unarticulated which cannot be communicated through language. It is a term with a particular resonance for this book and its desire to respond to performance. The following section will address the manner of the performance to which the title refers and ask the question: ‘Why Lyotard?’

Why Lyotard? ‘Why should we still be interested in Lyotard?’ asked Amelia Jones in response to my research proposal. It was a deliberately provocative remark, from an art historian whose 1994 publication Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp drew heavily, if not uncritically, on Lyotard’s own 1977 book on Duchamp: Les Transformateurs Duchamp.13 But Jones was right to question the need for new research into Lyotard, now. There is a lack of engagement with Lyotard’s work within art history, where his relevance is regarded with the same passé disdain as the works of postmodernism with which he is (unfairly) associated. When embarking on the research that has led to this book I found that Lyotard was all but forgotten: have we not ‘moved on’ to other thinkers the philosophy and art theory bookshelves seemed to groan, offering instead a diet of Deleuze and Rancière. But, once having been warmed again by the glowing embers which remain, I found that there is an interest among contemporary scholars and the steady flow of new publications of Lyotard’s work attest to the fact that we have, perhaps, ‘moved on’ too hastily.14 It is because Lyotard’s importance as a philosopher with a long-standing interest in aesthetics – in its least conventional sense, that which David Carroll calls ‘paraesthetic’ – has not been recognized by the English-speaking world that this book will deliberately pay attention to aspects of his work which have not been readily accessible through existing translated work.15

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It is necessary to reconsider now those writings by Lyotard which have been neglected and also to use them to reinvigorate our understanding of those unrepresentative texts, including those on the sublime, which have entered the canon of art theory only as examples of a past era and its debates. Necessary because Lyotard’s work is able to trouble the still waters of complacency which surround an academic field which seems able to suck the life blood from many philosophical interventions without reciprocating the dynamism of their challenge. Questioning through disruption remains the only constant throughout Lyotard’s writings on art, provoking an unsettling refusal to accept the stabilization of thought. This incessant questioning and refusal of predetermined formulae is taken as the approach to this study – together with the inherent paradoxical implications of such a claim – prompting the manner in which Lyotard’s own work is read and brought to bear on questions beyond those directly addressed in his writings. At a time when performance art is attempting to write its own history – while tempted by the demand for capitalist legitimation that Lyotard, ironically, calls performance – Lyotard’s demand to hesitate, to bear witness to the event is crucial. Within the English-speaking arenas of art history, interest in Lyotard has barely survived the surfeit of attention which dominated the late 1980s and early 1990s. Interest peaked in 1985–6 with the postmodern debates that followed the publication of the English translation of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984, and the publication of several articles by Lyotard in US art journals. The specific context and sequence of these publications will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4 in relation to Lyotard’s writings on the sublime; it is sufficient here to highlight the fact that Lyotard’s legacy in terms of Anglophone art history and theory is concentrated on a very few texts from this period, represented in anthologies such as the important collection Art in Theory 1900–2000 which includes the 1982 essay ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ or The Continental Aesthetics Reader which includes the 1984 Artforum essay ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’.16 In each case the attempt is to reproduce texts which are representative of a period and its theoretical debates rather than to proffer their content as ripe for reconsideration or as having pertinence to art history today. In contrast, Jacques Derrida has been well used by art historians and those analysing visual culture, but Lyotard’s interest is visual and sensory in comparison to Derrida’s which remains primarily textual. This can be demonstrated by their differing approaches to the Italian-born artist Valerio Adami. Derrida’s famous study was incorporated into The Truth in Painting (1978) and drew attention to the philosophical

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implications of the boundary between art and theory, philosophy and its object through the study of the framing devices which are central to its study yet infrequently considered. David Carroll summarizes Derrida’s book: ‘These essays are not, really, as much on art as on the difficulties the major philosophies of art and art itself have in fi xing the border between theory and art.’17 While Derrida looked at the boundaries of works, including the frames within Adami’s drawings, Lyotard’s response to the work of Adami focuses on the line itself, drawing out the complex comparison inherent in writing of that line – with what appeared to be the same line – but which simultaneously figured the irreconcilable difference between the artist and the writer. Lyotard meditates on the desire for unity where there can be none, a relationship which is also mirrored in the relationship of performer and viewer; an irreconcilable difference which, according to Philip Auslander, is ‘predicated on the distinction between performers and spectators. Indeed the effort to eliminate that distinction destroys the very possibility of performance’.18 Lyotard writes poetically of this inevitable separation with reference to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as the border between the conscious and the unconscious, responding to Adami’s works in a manner that Mary Lydon describes as ‘a figurative reflection or echo of them in literary form’.19 The tendency to focus only on Lyotard’s writings associated with the postmodern and the sublime is great, and the exceptions sufficiently few in number to permit a brief introduction here. In addition to Amelia Jones, others referring to Lyotard’s writings on Duchamp include Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious and David Joselit’s Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, both published by MIT Press. Krauss also makes extensive use of Lyotard’s writings on the figure-matrix from Discourse, Figure in her discussion of ‘a pulse or beat, that the modernist artist senses all too well as the enemy of his craft’ which is part of her analysis of Picasso’s objection to the Duchampian instability of form. 20 Krauss also refers to the same passage in her catalogue for the exhibition L’Informe : mode d’emploi co-organized with Yve-Alain Bois at the Pompidou in 1996. Through the wide dissemination of the English-language version, as Formless: A User’s Guide , Krauss’ usage is significant as an adoption of Lyotard’s figure to a particularly influential interpretation of art history. Joselit draws unusually on Lyotard’s visceral descriptions of the body in his 1974 book Economie Libidinale , and its ‘disintensification’ through the production of signs. This libidinal aspect of Lyotard’s writing is the focus for the 1998 publication The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory in which two essays by Lyotard on the painter Jacques

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Monory are published as parallel texts in French and English together with an introductory essay by Sarah Wilson which contextualizes the painter, largely unknown to Anglo-American audiences, and the writer in the cultural context of the two essays written in 1972 and 1981. This book is part of the ‘revisions’ series, edited by Wilson, which aims to restore the artistic contexts in which many key European thinkers have written but whose writings have become decontextualized in their transatlantic dissemination. Wilson succinctly summarizes the situation as follows: ‘. . . despite his extensive engagement with the arts, a Lyotard solely of the word, the discours , not a Lyotard engaging with the image, the figure , is the Lyotard discussed in philosophy and literature departments throughout the world’.21 It is this Lyotard – of the figure – that is the focus of this book.

Performing the figural Through focusing on the different means by which Lyotard performs and can be made to perform in the contemporary context, this book will not only consider aspects of performance and its attempts at historicization but draw attention also to Lyotard’s own struggle with the written medium, made manifest through the multiplicity of voices he adopted in order to avoid any sense of a static, complete ‘theory’. The intention of the title: Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing, is to draw attention to performance as a central, though not unproblematic, tenet of the study while also highlighting the ‘figural’ as exemplary of the neglected aspects of Lyotard’s thought. Lyotard’s doctoral thesis, published in 1971 as Discours, figure, is a complex, radical and largely undiscovered book; the diverse arenas in which translated sections have been published testify to the breadth of its concerns but have also minimized its impact.22 I have titled the first chapter ‘The figural’ partly to signify the importance of Discourse, Figure to this study but also in order to explain my extended use of the term as the characteristic disruptive questioning which is a feature of Lyotard’s work, even when the term itself is no longer used. For example, this chapter introduces an important question posed by Lyotard in The Differend (1983), the question of Arrive-t-il? [Is it happening?]. The Arrive-t-il? is a figural sense of time that can help us rethink the role of time and presence with regard to performance art, its reception and the role of documentation. Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, particularly her re-working of Acconci’s infamous Seedbed , is used as a point round which to debate the current attempts to engage

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with the history of contemporary performance. In the course of this book a variety of terms used by Lyotard to connote that which I am terming the ‘figural’ will be used to drag his ideas out from under the stifling weight of the postmodern; the resulting reconfiguration of the figural will be made to work on the problems that performance practice presents to art historical discourse. The figural shares with contemporary performance and body art the trace of the seismic events of 1968: it is a disruptive force which lends itself to questioning assumptions with regard to time and presentation – in some respects a philosophical equivalent of performance that aims to transform a situation. Initially there may well be echoes in the reader’s mind of other philosophers who have been termed post-structuralist; the nature of philosophical and artistic discourse means that the overlay and interplay of thought is always to some extent the result of the discussion rather than a singular clearly defined bell sounding sonorously above the collective noise. However, two other key figures from the same grouping of ‘French philosophers’, Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze, will be considered at various points in this book in order to highlight the specificity of Lyotard’s approach at times when Lyotard’s proximity to these figures may belie their differences. This approach is taken in Chapter 2: ‘The Libidinal’ where the many points of congruence between Lyotard’s writings of the early 1970s and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus contribute to an understanding of their significantly different approach to the role of absence, whether conceptualized as lack or negation, the implications of which are demonstrated through aspects of Lyotard’s later essay on Adami and Deleuze’s writings on Francis Bacon. In addition to the postmodern and sublime texts of the mid-1980s which have entered anthologies, there is another aspect of Lyotard’s oeuvre that has recently gained near-canonical status within museum and curatorial studies: the 1985 exhibition co-curated at the Pompidou under the title Les Immatériaux . This exhibition gives the title to Chapter 3 but my consideration of this exhibition as a dramatic performance is introduced by the subheading: ‘What is Lyotard’s Attitude to the Body?’. Lyotard referred to the exhibition as a dramaturgy and showed a particular interest in the ways in which the new materials – which he termed the immaterial – relate to the body of the viewer. The sensory experience of Les Immatériaux is certainly performative but it does not adhere to theatrical conventions – the only performers are the visitors, for example. For a comparison I turn to performance art and the example of another show in Paris, in 1972, where Vito Acconci was not physically present but his body is alluded to through

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alternative sensorial means. This emphasis on alternative modes of communication relates to Lyotard’s most philosophical work, The Differend , in particular the concern for that which cannot be phrased. This brings to light an aspect of Lyotard’s thought which is particularly pertinent to considerations of performance, where the impact on the body resonates in a manner that cannot be articulated. This ‘inarticulate affect’ opens up Lyotard’s unusual discussion of sexual difference for which the recent collection Gender after Lyotard has been a valuable resource.23 That Lyotard refers to aspects of this affective communication as ‘feminine’ ensures that gender remains highlighted at the opening of the next chapter, Chapter 4, which discusses Lyotard’s essays on the sublime for which, in terms of aesthetics, he is best known in the Anglophone world. This chapter gives particular attention to the context in which Lyotard’s essays were published in the United States, considering the history of the art journals October and Artforum and the context of postmodern art in the early 1980s. I emphasize the unusual reference made by Lyotard to the work of Edmund Burke, whose understanding of the sublime as an intensification resulting from privation has a particular relevance for a consideration of performance art which refuses theatrical transcendence. This distinction must be emphasized in order to counteract assumptions that Lyotard, in writing about the sublime, can be positioned with the modernist formalism of Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg. The intensification of which Lyotard writes – whether sublime event or affect – is not one of enlightenment or transcendence but destabilization. This reconsideration of Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime focuses on the aspects of uncertainty – described by Burke in relation to the elapsing of time – thereby opening a discussion of temporality which can be described as figural, following the staccato pulse of the figure-matrix from Discourse, Figure . The final chapter of the book, Chapter 5, returns to aspects of temporality, arguing for the immediate, affective potential of the performance art document as a feeling to which we are called to respond. This call is prompted by Lyotard’s discussion of Emmanuel Lévinas whose ethical obligation challenges fi xed notions of both communication and time, a call which prompts my reconsideration of Lyotard’s essay on Barnett Newman, ‘Newman: The Instant’. In exploring those aspects of communication that elude articulated discourse – the figure, the sublime, the affect-phrase and their temporal position with regard to the Arrive-t-il? – this chapter and the conclusion that follows will argue for that which art historical discourse struggles to recognize and the role that Lyotard’s work can play in prompting the necessary transformations.

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Introduction

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Secondary Literature While the paucity of reference to Lyotard’s oeuvre in recent art history has been indicated above, it is important to highlight the continuing importance of works on Lyotard written in the 1980s and 1990s and the extent to which debates have continued since. The secondary literature written by Anglo-American academics – mainly in departments of comparative literature and French studies – includes key works which have been important reference points for this study, while more recently there have been several publications relating to Lyotard, particularly from Departments of English and Philosophy in the United Kingdom. I will highlight first three publications which appeared in the wake of Lyotard’s success in the mid-1980s. Lyotard: Writing the Event was published in 1988 while its author, Geoffrey Bennington, was a Lecturer in French at the University of Sussex; he is also known as a Derrida scholar and moved from Sussex to Emory, Atlanta in 2001. As joint translator of The Postmodern Condition , Bennington was well placed to write the first major introduction to Lyotard’s work in English and although Bennington is particularly concerned with the implications of Lyotard’s thought for literature, as the title indicates, he shows a sensitivity to Lyotard’s philosophical approach and its paradoxes: Introductory books in general (and this one is no exception) rely on a host of well-meaning pedagogical assumptions (‘pedagogical, therefore very stupid’, as Lyotard says in an unpublished conversation with the painter René Guiffrey), which do not necessarily make them helpful to those for whom they are ostensibly written.24 Bennington works with the knowledge of these limitations and gives an insight into the wider range of Lyotard’s writings including those works which are not available in translation, except through extracts scattered through various journals. Bennington includes chapters titled ‘Libidinal Economy’, ‘Discourse, Figure’ and ‘Le Différend’ each corresponding to the books of those titles but also referring to the additional books and essays which surround these publications. In 1991 Bennington jointly translated the collection of essays The Inhuman: Reflections on Time which had been published in French in 1988 and published occasional essays and book chapters on Lyotard through the following decade, though, by his own admission, failing to keep up with all the new material that Lyotard wrote or which was translated by others in the 1990s, an oversight he comments on and goes some way to redressing in the 2005 collection Late Lyotard .

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Writing another introductory text on Lyotard in the wake of Bennington’s book prompted Bill Readings, then of Syracuse University, New York and subsequently the Université de Montréal until his early death in 1996, to structure his 1991 volume Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics according to a different approach: ‘. . . if Bennington offers an account of Lyotard, I try, at times impatiently, to pose the question “Why Lyotard?”’ and in so doing Readings introduces Lyotard’s thought to ‘the discourses of AngloAmerican cultural criticism’. It is still a largely literary approach, the art in its subtitle referring to literature and theatre rather than the visual arts, but Readings’ attempt to make Lyotard’s thought work is certainly closer to the approach that I desire for this book. Readings describes how his approach is different to Bennington’s: whereas the latter’s strategy is to ‘ape’ the work of Lyotard in an attempt at repetition, in the English sense of the word, Readings responds in the French sense of repetition as ‘. . . performance, as in the French répétition – which may refer to each singular rehearsal or staging of a drama’.25 This subtle distinction between French and English exemplifies the means through which Lyotard’s performance of singularity attunes one to the important differences within repetition and the pulsating rhythm of the body. My own approach, taken in this book, is one of tension: wanting neither to follow too closely the rigid delivery of information parcelled ready for digestion, which can constitute academic writing, nor wishing to destabilize the reader too much – losing them in a mire of Lyotardian parody – but rather to offer sufficient sustenance of ideas and language flavoured with the manner of Lyotard that a little indigestion will be tolerated. The third significant publication from the era of Anglo-American Lyotard fever does come from closer to the realm of visual art, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida (1987) by then French professor at California, Irvine, David Carroll. Carroll takes a different approach again through an examination of the critical strategies put forward by the three French philosophers – who best represented what the Anglo-American world termed ‘French Theory’ – within a largely Nietzschean context and with the focus clearly on art and literature. Carroll’s account of Discourse, Figure remains the most frequent overview referred to by writers in English. The gulf between the French artistic context from which Lyotard and other ‘French theorists’ were writing and the sites of their reception in Anglophone contexts is expertly recounted by François Cusset in French Theory: How Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States : ‘This great French-American story deals with the joy of becomings, the power of effects, the surprises of unexpected uses’.26 Cusset does not

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attempt to correct any misappropriation but rather revels in the unexpected phenomenon, an approach which is in keeping with Lyotard’s own sensibility; the lack of control an artist or author is able to exercise over their work is continually recognized, and at times celebrated, by Lyotard. For example, The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew Benjamin in 1989, lacks any contextual information in order to allow the texts to ‘drift’ to their new contexts. The reproduction of a painting by Adami on the cover of this book reminds us once more of the seemingly disparate reach of Lyotard’s artistic interests, one which finally forces us to admit the specificity of our own cultural horizons. In addition to the lack of detail regarding the context of the various materials selected for The Lyotard Reader its obfuscating ‘Foreword’ by Lyotard is also indicative of the allure that Lyotard held for the English-speaking audience at the time. This is also demonstrated by the comparative speed with which Le Différend (1983) and L’inhumain (1988) were translated, appearing in 1988 and 1991 respectively, in contrast to the earlier work: Economie Libidinale (1974) was translated into English in 1993, after a delay of almost 20 years, while Discours, figure (1971), as we have already noted, was finally published in 2011. In contrast to the largely decontextualized Lyotard Reader of 1989, the 2006 collection The Lyotard Reader and Guide is published to an audience perhaps less willing to indulge in the ‘drift’, thankful instead for the clear exposition of Lyotard’s range of concerns; the introductory essay on ‘Art-events’, for example, highlights the breadth of his involvement: Lyotard is much more than an art theorist, philosopher of art or art critic. His philosophy is written in conjunction with art, in particular painting, to the point where it is more accurate to speak of a ‘co-creation’ rather than a ‘theorising-about’.27 Both the editors, Keith Crome and James Williams, are members of philosophy departments in the United Kingdom and their books on Lyotard are referred to in this book, as are the works of many other academics whose writings have contributed to the ongoing scholarly discussion in the light of new publications and translations, particularly since Lyotard’s death in 1998. In addition the works of scholars publishing in French are referred to when their writings give a particular insight into Lyotard’s writings on art, including essays by Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Jean-Louis Déotte, both academics at the University of Paris 8 where Lyotard taught. Lyotard’s writings on art have always been taken seriously in France, a 5th edition of Discours, figure was published in 2002 and his 1987 book Que peindre? [What

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to paint?] was re-issued in 2008. Que peindre? is itself part of a return to questions which were first addressed in Discours, figure under the rubric of the figural but are here worked through a varied vocabulary, elements of which will be introduced slowly through the course of this book. One late term that I will mention in advance, because of its pertinence to performance, art and writing, is ‘affect-phrase’: it is a term that Lyotard does not use until the last decade of his life but which reiterates a sensitivity to that which language is unable to present and therefore has a close proximity to the figural.

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Chapter 1

The figural

The body is being used as an art language by an ever greater number of contemporary painters and sculptors, and even though the phenomenon touches upon artists who represent different currents and tendencies, who use widely differing art techniques, and who come from a variety of cultural and intellectual backgrounds, certain characteristics of this way of making art are nonetheless to be found in all its manifestations.1 —Lea Vergine, 1974. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious.2 — Judith Butler, 2004.

Yingmei Duan A darkly painted space: dark, dark blue with dimmed, shaded spotlights from above. She is naked and enwrapped in her own world, sometimes close to the wall – touching, feeling her way along its surface as though clinging to the shadows – while humming slowly to herself a melancholic, but not mournful, tune and slowly caressing her body: her thighs, breasts, stomach. Slowly, ever-so-slowly rocking and moving in sliding steps as though caressing the floor – head down, eyes closed with an intense expression and furrowed brow – she moves towards a visitor, clad in a white coat. The medical overtones are accentuated by the contrast to her nakedness. Sensing the person’s presence she begins to tour the body at a close proximity; very close, with no sense of private space, moving rather into the space between which becomes her own through the strange movement and murmured humming. It is not a serenade in

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the romantic sense but a seduction of another type, a sensory beguiling of the space between bodies. This is it and this is its importance, its steadiness, her almost imperceptible progress round the space through the energy fields of the visitors. A newspaper review likened her pose to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the pose is very close, yet the comparison goes only so far – it is not a shamefilled, crime-ridden angst but a gently soporific pulling of the viewer . . . I grapple for parallels . . . Odysseus and the sirens. But it is too still and the suggestion of the female ensnaring the visitor does not gel; there is no subjugation here and it is the participants who will the artist to involve them. Her movements are gentle, a rhythmic swaying – back against the wall, arms by her side, head down and chin pressed to herself – turning one way then another while her feet begin moving slightly, slowly, shoulders angled. This shuffling forwards prompts the viewers to move away or steady themselves for the approach of slow, deliberate steps. Again, feet sliding or transferring weight very deliberately in a single movement – like the slow walk undertaken by visitors to Marina Abramović’s ‘drill’, the initiation to durational performance that prefaced this performance. Her face is peaceful, though the slight ‘cough, cough’ interrupts the music of her internalised hum and deepens her furrowed brow. One hand is on a breast, the other on her belly. She turns and feels one shoulder as though embracing herself in sorrow or peace, sadness or intimate meditation. I keep thinking of the title: Intimate distance, not knowing if the Blanchot reference is deliberate or helpful but the connotations of the unbridgeable divide between subjects is effective. There is desire here: desire on the part of the artist to be close to the other, the clothed figure who has come to observe and who has made the effort to stop. In turn the viewer is rewarded somehow by her attention – her slow circling absorbing the viewer’s aura; an energy transformation occurs and often the visitor responds, closing eyes to join in the intimacy and avoid the gaze of others left outside the experience: they are in the art work, in the performance, it is their body which has drawn the others into the space and caused them to linger. The first few evenings there were not many prepared to linger and the artist stayed near to the walls, but confidence has grown. The naked body slowly tours the proximity of the other’s white coat and breaks the barrier between observer and performer, between subject and object – it is an intertwining in action, the tension is palpable, and the willingness of visitors once approached to remain for the duration of the encounter is almost without exception. They are informed it is over by a gentle pushing of shoulders, leaving the naked artist alone and humming to herself once more: the recipient is left swaying and in shock, though often smiling. Lyotard articulates in his heuristic ‘Foreword’, written for the collection of his writings in English in 1989, the inability of the writer to occupy the same time as the reader: ‘Sometimes you do listen to yourself writing. That

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is not the same thing as hearing yourself writing’. Lyotard supports an overly cautious, self-conscious – more hesitant – approach to writing because it ‘indicates that you are not sure of your direction, unsure of where you are, or completely lost’. Whether through overwriting or a style that feigns nonchalance the result is that it ‘annoys the reader’.3 Such disdain is not for the reader per se but for their presumptions; it is to undo these presumptions that Lyotard took up a variety of writing styles and approaches, including the attempt at a ‘zero-degree style’ in The Differend and its prologue, a ‘Reader’s Dossier’, which allows ‘the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to “talk about the book” without having read it’.4 Lyotard’s acerbic disdain is for the ceaseless drive to ‘gain time’, a trend that he termed ‘performativity’ in The Postmodern Condition as the quantifiably efficient realization of a measured output, usually within a system. Here Lyotard shares something with Marina Abramović in her mission to teach the art of slowing down and shift perceptions away from systematized ocular-centric forms. Their methods are different but the connection is worth the wait. The intention here is not to annoy the reader but neither to force clarity where its avoidance is a deliberate attempt to acknowledge that which escapes systematization. Today I saw Yingmei crawl: carefully bending down to place both hands on the floor one after another and then, approaching a couple sitting at the edge of the space, she prowled round them like a big cat, moving arms and legs in synchronicity and nearly touching the couple before coming to rest beside them where she tucked up her knees to make a ball, coughing softly before continuing round the edge of the room in the same manner. I became aware that all the observers were also sitting – perhaps she had reduced herself to our level and altered the piece in doing so, taking on a feline presence. The strains of music from the other pieces, especially Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa, made the humming less audible today. But it was there. 5

Defining the figural Discourse, Figure opens with a disagreement: the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel suggests in Art Poétique (1941) that the visible is readable and that the assembling of elements, whether images or words, follows a logical pattern to form a ‘readable phrase’. Lyotard replies that: . . . the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference, and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into oblivion in the process of signification.6

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Lyotard questions the implication that one can comment on the visual only when a ‘point of view’ is found that allows one to regard it as a text. Therefore, when the visible is represented, what is not signified is the mobile element which reveals it – the mobility of the eye. Already, we have the adequacy of a representational system brought into question and the suggestion that translating one representational system to another results in a loss – thus when a visual artwork is discussed there is always something that is omitted from that discourse, not only because of this translation but also because of the existence in the visual of that untranslatable element which Lyotard will go on to designate the figural. The restriction of a text is its lack of physical depth: we cannot physically move in front of a text to seek alternative viewpoints – such movement is restricted to the metaphorical – and yet the sensible world remains the principal frame of reference for all analogies. The suggestion that through the creation of a scene the visual representation ‘flattens’ physical space and therefore draws it into the realm of the textual is refuted by Lyotard, emphasizing the lack of equivalence in the position of a surface: the textual is written on a flat, horizontal surface rather than the vertical screen of the visual. Here, sitting in front of a computer screen, the same screen which is the surface of many visual manifestations, it may seem that this comparison has less clarity, and indeed the world of the digital screen is the focus for David N. Rodowick’s discussion of the figural in relation to new media, but the contrast of horizontal to vertical is merely a visualization of a point of difference between the two modes of communication which are not actually reliant on the position of their surfaces.7 What is key is the means by which the eye reads the text or image, the physical proximity of the eye to the textual page does not allow for the meaning to be altered – once the characters are in focus their meaning usually flows independently of the visual whereas the physical visual surface of a drawing, painting or photograph asks to be regarded at different levels of proximity and with differing elements of experience offered by each (and here the screen of new media does not operate in the same way: there is little revelation or pleasure gained from increased pixilation or optical blindness of the digital screen). Given this distinction, Lyotard explains his objection to ‘reading’ the image: ‘One does not read or understand a picture. Sitting at the table one identifies and recognizes linguistic units; standing in representation one seeks out plastic events. Libidinal events.’8 This initial valorization of the plastic, the spatial and thus the bodily realm of gestures, movement and matter which are brought together in the realm of the figural is an important one for this study and contrasts

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with the idea of the body as a language implied in the quotation from Lea Vergine which prefaced this chapter. Vergine’s description could be misunderstood as the adoption of movement, gesture, performance as a language that can be readily decoded by an audience – but for many of the artists grouped by Vergine under the term ‘Body Art’ in 1974 it is the potential of the body as a site of resistance to such codifications which fired their exploration of the body as an ‘art language’. However, this attention to the body is only part of that which Lyotard designates the figural. Here I must attest to the paradox inherent in the aim of this section because the figural escapes definition. This can be witnessed in Lyotard’s own use of the term throughout Discours, figure, where there is no static explanation of the term as a fixed concept; rather it is posited in one section only to be modified and reconfigured elsewhere. In this sense, Lyotard activates aspects of the figural in the book itself, describing it as: . . . a dislocated body whereupon speech impresses fragments that in principle can be rearranged in various configurations, but which the constraints imposed by typographic composition – those belonging to signification and ratio – force to present in an immutable order.9 For 40 years the body of Discours, figure was not so much dislocated as ripped apart in its translation into English; prior to 2011 only five extracts had been translated which together amounted to a fi fth of the text. Mary Lydon, formerly of the University of Wisconsin, was involved in the translation of the whole and before her illness and premature death published two significant sections for literary journals in 1983; others have translated sections which appeared in the following publications: the 1984 Semiotext(e) collection Driftworks, the Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader in 1993 and the introductory section ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’ was published in the 2006 Lyotard Reader and Guide . The full English translation of Discours, figure, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011 as Discourse, Figure , was a long-overdue event and as it incorporates Mary Lydon’s translations together with the work of translator and Lyotard scholar Anthony Hudek it also indicates some of the troubled history of the books’ journey into English. This skilfully crafted translation helps the English reader to appreciate the deliberate dislocated arrangement of the whole: described by Lyotard as being a compromise between the author’s intentions and his pragmatic restrictions.10 Being a book of philosophy, not an artist’s book, the physical arrangement of the book does adhere to some norms; it is not a ‘good book’ in Lyotard’s terms and refrains from

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the further destabilization that Lyotard would desire in order to disrupt ‘the time of the reader’ and a sense of progression through the work. The clearest division of the book’s concerns, and the operation of the figural, is a preoccupation with phenomenology at the outset and a shift to the use of Freud as the main theoretical reference point in the later parts. Briefly, Lyotard initially uses phenomenology to justify the seemingly straightforward argument described above, that the visual cannot simply be read: the mobility – which is central to Merleau-Ponty – is employed to demonstrate the necessary depth or thickness [épaisseur] of the visual experience which is denied in an essentially two-dimensional reading. Initially it appears that Lyotard is himself setting up a binary opposition between the visible, aligned to the figure, and the textual, corresponding to discourse; yet this is a methodological move which is later unpicked and any such clear distinctions are removed. The initial critique of discourse is a specific reflection on the role of language in philosophy and politics where discourse follows premeditated patterns and structures, swallowing up anything different and reducing alterity to the same. In contrast, the figural is a realm of the unexpected, mediated not through communication but through intensities: systems and signification are disrupted to open up space for that which discourse disallows. Lyotard’s particular focus for attack is structural linguistic discourse – Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson in the first part and later Jacques Lacan – reminding us that Discourse, Figure is the result of Lyotard’s thinking in the late 1960s – a time when structuralism was still the method of choice for many French intellectuals – making Discourse, Figure one of the first in the turn away from, and questioning of, structuralist linguistics. The system of structural linguistics, based on the work of Saussure, and propagated by the posthumous publication of Cours de linguistique générale , approaches the study of language through an emphasis on underlying structures. Saussure explains the operation of language through a system of differentiation: the sign functioning only in relation to that which it is not, thereby creating a closed system which relies on the whole in order to function. Lyotard criticizes the semiological method – prevalent in France at the time – as a flat field of discourse which does not allow for ‘thickness’ and denies the presence of the figure In this context ‘figure’ is the trace that indicates the presence of something which escapes presentation, that is it does not fit the system of representation in use, which is outside representational space and therefore relies on the figure to indicate its presence. The example that Lyotard gives from Merleau-Ponty is the mobility of the

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eye that is rendered inexpressible in a discourse which assumes a fi xed position and a system of differentiation which is configured on a binary logic of signified / not signified, with the latter having no form in communication – if a sign is not understood by its recipient then communication is deemed to have been unsuccessful. This is the preoccupation which features again and again in Lyotard’s work; even after the term ‘figure’ is dispensed with, it is the same preoccupation which can be identified in his concern for the différends which remain unphrased, the role of the body in Les Immatériaux and also the role of negation which dogs the affirmative intensities of his libidinal philosophy. The figural is the transgression of signification which shows that alternatives to established forms of discourse – not only language and critical philosophy but also visual methods – are possible. It is not a romantic or nostalgic search for that which language is unable to say but rather draws attention to the need to find a mode of presentation for that which has been repressed – an inevitably unending search which confronts the paradox that the unsignifiable aspect of the figure is changed through attempts to make it ‘present’. The effect of this attempt, however, displaces the assumed preconditions of the view, disturbs notions of fixed address and resists assimilation to established orders, forms and means of signification. The ambivalence of Lyotard’s own position and manner of approach is one example of how the figural attempts (but fails) to present in discourse: the figure cannot be presented yet its presence must be pointed to. It is in response to this challenge that my own extended conceptualization of ‘figural’ is used in this book to highlight attempts to ‘point to’ that which exceeds signification and where the connection to the affect-phrase – from Lyotard’s late writings – is particularly helpful. It is important to remember that the first examples of the figure given by Lyotard in Discourse, Figure , which associate the figural with the visual and its resistance to what is signified, are part of a wider strategy to demonstrate the workings of figure in both art and discourse. The figure is not exclusive to art; critical philosophy, for example, can find the figural within its discourse by opening up to uncertainty. Lyotard gives an example of this in Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sur-réflexion’ (from The Visible and the Invisible), describing ‘painting and drawing with and in words’ in order to keep ambiguity and unforeseen connections open, drawing on metaphor and figure to expose lateral not manifest meanings.11 A close connection is drawn to both poetry and dreams, particularly the operations which Freud terms ‘dreamwork’ which make language bent and distorted, not to the extent that reference is removed altogether but to displace it through a disordering of

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language – ‘vibrating until it disjoins’.12 There can be no model to follow, however, that would be to replace one set of rules with the constraints of another; Lyotard’s references to ‘sur-réflexion’ and ‘deconstruction’ are used to highlight the existence of alternative approaches which show that figure exists in discourse as well as art. Later in Discourse, Figure Lyotard revises the figure once again through its tripartite division as figure-image, figure-form and figure-matrix, thereby further complicating the means by which the figural can present in discourse. The figure-matrix is invisible and troubles both the visual and discourse equally; it is the force of desire that is unbound, manifest everywhere and destroys established orders through its energetics. As such it cannot ‘present’ in discourse but its workings can be seen in the disregard for significations or temporal placing, as in Freud’s account of the unconscious given in Civilisation and its Discontents or his account of the analysis of the phantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, where the shift of subject, action and addressee ‘presents’ the work of the matrix as a ‘transformation’. It is a similar attention to displacement and transformation that preoccupies Lyotard’s interest in art, particularly evident in those writings that have been termed the ‘libidinal’ which will be dealt with in Chapter 2. As an epigraph to this chapter I included a quotation from Judith Butler whose phrase – ‘The body is that upon which language falters’– describes one aspect of Lyotard’s figural which will run throughout this book. Like Butler, we are by necessity drawn back to language when discussing art – we cannot paint our responses – and it is for this reason that Lyotard draws attention to the operation of the figural within language, as the element which threatens to destabilize established structures of meaning. It is by forcing language to hesitate, to draw attention to the thickness of the line in the letter, that a sensitivity to the figural elements of language might be made apparent and its graphic elements become something other than arbitrary signifiers in a closed system. Lyotard questions the function of the letter as a mere support to enable rapid, comprehensible signification and writes of the value that the same graphic mark can gain when it appeals to ‘the capacity of corporeal resonance’.13 When the line in the letter inscribes itself in a plastic space it is responding to the space of the figural and the plastic libidinal intensities which are otherwise rendered only as a trace, through the figure, in discourse. However, drawing attention to the visible element of graphic linguistic signifiers and the hidden resonance of their arrangement in space – as demonstrated in Discourse, Figure through extensive analyses of the visual arrangement of type in examples by Stéphane Mallarmé and Michel Butor – is but one part of Lyotard’s argument that

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discourse and figure are inseparably enmeshed yet radically different. It is my suggestion that a sensitivity to the figural – as that which is present to signification despite its absence as a signifiable element – necessitates an approach to art which responds to Donald Preziosi’s call with regard to art history: The task of the art historian today would entail a re-engagement with the discipline’s most fundamental dilemma: the uncanny power of artistry or artifice to both fabricate and problematize mooted social realities and institutions; to both empower and disempower; to delight and thwart, simultaneously entertain and contain.14 The largely unedited account of my time spent in the performance space of Yingmei Duan, which opened this chapter, is part of the same search for the figural that I identify in Lyotard’s writings on art. Contrary to my initial castigation of art history in my introduction, this is not a lone search: the same, potentially contradictory, desire for proximity and a self-conscious critical appraisal of the structures within which discourse operates is the subject of Preziosi’s reflections on the disciplinary aims of art history. In the 1998 edition of The Art of Art History Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors graces the cover, its famous example of anamorphosis acting also as the principal metaphor in Preziosi’s introduction to the revised 2008 collection which endeavours to reveal ‘otherwise hidden perspectives’ while also keen to keep the artifice of art history in focus. Replete with paradoxes, these aims might be termed incommensurable – according to Lyotard’s lexicon – like the two seemingly incompatible spaces of Holbein’s ambassadors and the skull which lurks, extended and incomprehensible, at their feet; and yet it is in the space of incommensurability that the figural is at work, refusing to be subsumed under a single system. Lyotard’s own reference to anamorphosis, including Holbein’s Ambassadors, emphasizes the implications for representation: In the case of the anamorphosis, the signifier itself is under siege, overturned under our own eyes. The threatening objects depicted in the representational artwork belong to a space one could call graphic, as opposed to that of representation. These objects are inscribed on the ‘sheet of glass,’ making it visible instead of crossing it on their way to the virtual scene. The eye thus ceases to be taken and is given over to the hesitation of the trajectory and site, while the artwork is given over to the difference of spaces, which is the dualism of the processes.15

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This is an example of the figural at work: it cannot be seen but by inducing hesitancy into the usual flow of representation, its construction is shown. Is my account of Yingmei Duan’s performance only description? Does the eye stop its automatic scanning of the lines which form the text – not in a material manner which might be the typographer’s answer – but in ‘the corporeal resonance’ of the figural trace, that space which Lyotard terms ‘plastic’ as opposed to ‘graphic’?16 It is a response which attempts at immediacy but fails to acknowledge the constructs of such experience and the staging of its effects. Am I so preoccupied with revealing a ‘hidden perspective’ – in my search for presence – that the staging of the view is left unquestioned? In Discourse, Figure the figural is discussed predominantly in spatial terms and consequently the temporal implications seem less explicitly considered. In the following section I want to draw attention to the importance of arresting the eye’s automatic scanning, of hijacking signification through hesitancy and destabilizing the forward thrust of time: these are aspects of the figural whose relation to time will be reiterated through reference to Lyotard’s later writings and his discussion of presence.

Presence This present introduction to the figural and my extended usage – to refer to Lyotard’s texts beyond the confines of his specific application of the term – will now jump forward chronologically in order to draw out aspects of the figural which are not as explicitly formulated in Discourse, Figure, beginning first with the term ‘presence’. As with many of the terms used by Lyotard in relation to art and aesthetics – sublime, event, affect, postmodern – presence is replete with connotations. Some of these associations, such as Heideggerian ideas of presence and event [Ereignis], are openly discussed by Lyotard, while others are not: the art-historical tradition of modernist formalism – Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg in particular – belongs to an Anglo-American tradition that was predominantly ignored by philosophers and art historians in France at this time.17 It is an uneasy task, therefore, to draw attention to Lyotard’s discussion of presence without acknowledging the art-historical discussion to which he does not directly refer. My intention here is first to outline Lyotard’s 1987 essay ‘Presence’ in the context of the figural as I am using it in this book, second to relate this discussion to Lyotard’s writings on the work of Daniel Buren – including Lyotard’s discussion of Buren’s work as ‘not performance’ – and finally to contextualize this discussion in relation to Fried’s famous essay ‘Art and Objecthood’.18

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‘La présence ’ opens Lyotard’s 1987 collection Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren; the book is, however, more than simply a collecting together of the pre-existing essays which Lyotard had written on the three artists, Valerio Adami, Shūsaku Arakawa and Daniel Buren, between 1978 and 1985. The book is a careful reconfiguration and editing of material into seven chapters, allowing Lyotard to reconsider both aspects of his earlier work in Discourse, Figure and the problematic interrelationship of art to commentary, the latter being visualized in part through the numerical references in the text’s margins which refer to an accompanying volume of plates.19 In his preface to the 2008 re-edition of Que peindre? Bruno Cany refers to the work as one of the ‘heights of Lyotard’s thought’, but one which remains ‘little known to many’.20 Perhaps its fate will be changed by the planned republication as a parallel French / English text by the University of Leuven Press. At present, English translations of some parts do exist, including the majority of La Présence and I will refer to this translation, ‘Presence’, in the following summary.21 In common with all parts of Que peindre? the essay ‘Presence’ adopts the form of a dialogue between fictional characters – in this case ‘You’ and ‘Him’ – that puts forward propositions regarding the role of presence in contemporary painting. ‘You’ begins by proposing that despite best efforts the painter can only apprehend sensible presence as deferred, that even in the moment of apprehension deferral has occurred – being by necessity a departure from the realm of presence. Reflection is similarly to be regarded as constitutive of a different temporal realm: ‘On reflection the least glance appears laden with presuppositions’.22 The resulting scepticism with regard to any idea of an ‘immediate presence’ is demonstrated by the work of the three painters – Adami, Arakawa and Buren – who variously show only the absence of presence, following what ‘you’ considers to be the legacy of Cézanne’s doubt. For example, what is important is not the presence of Buren’s work but rather its consequence on the ‘view’ of the mind whereby the staging of representation is revealed and henceforth the mind is destined to ‘show the falseness of presence’.23 Beginning in 1965 Daniel Buren’s working method consisted of predetermined elements: vertical stripes measuring 8.7 cm and alternating colour and white; the application of these elements to a variety of surfaces – billboards, banners, architectural features, even children’s sailing boats and the uniforms of museum guards – was the consistent feature of his practice for 30 years.24 The aim of Buren’s work – outlined in the accompanying texts, essays and interviews, published in three volumes in 1991 – is continually to draw attention to the means and structures of presentation. In contrast, the figurative work

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of Valerio Adami takes a comparatively traditional approach to painting yet similarly, according to Lyotard, effaces the time of the present: ‘The here and now drip everywhere with another time and another place.’ Not then the time of the event – the here and now – but of time displaced through anamnesis: ‘He plunges us in an anamnesis, rather than into an event.’25 Joined by Arakawa’s contemplation of blankness – which Lyotard likens to the better known work of Robert Ryman – the three painters are linked together through their call to reflexivity, a preoccupation which Lyotard’s voice describes as ‘putting the last touches to the aesthetics of Romanticism’.26 Part of this tradition of reflexivity is that of commentary as integrated into the work of the three artists, to differing extents: most explicitly in Buren’s extensive writings – though these predominantly come after the production of the visual elements – but also in the stories to which Adami’s work refers and the texts inscribed on Arakawa’s surfaces: ‘Having once been configurated. Being able to be configurated’ is written on the painting titled There is no space but the viewer (1986). All incite reflection rather than visual pleasure, and extend through narration to the spread of stories which exercises a control of time through desire: ‘Yet desire does not know presence.’27 The narration of ‘You’ in Lyotard’s essay is not without interjections: ‘Him’ attempts to assert that something did take place, that there was a break in space-time caused by an event, ‘The sensible event, if you like’, but he struggles to express ‘this timbre’ of which he speaks, and doubts himself: ‘I don’t know, an event, this blue, this morning’. But perhaps the first significant argument delivered by ‘Him’ comes in his reference to ‘the figure’, an unusual but significant return of the term from Discourse, Figure : What I provisionally call the figure escapes like a snapshot in this duration, whose course will infallibly bend back to its source, and which imparts its rhythm both to recitation and to diegesis. Figure opens out another space-time which isn’t yet, not already, caught up in the rhythmic rule of before and afterwards. It doesn’t matter if it is, as they say, figurative, or abstract, ‘good’, or bizarre. The figure is there now, and it blocks the course of the tale by putting a sort of sigh in its way, something between breathing in and breathing out. It is not the presence of the figure itself.28 This blockage, the bodily metaphor and the interruption of its rhythm – a sigh – is redolent of the multitude of different ways in which Lyotard expresses his concerns, about art and its commentary. It also contrasts

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greatly in terms of style with The Differend which, despite its measured, almost analytic use of language and explicitly philosophical concerns is a key component to Lyotard’s thinking and its applicability to considerations of performance. I am now going to block the progress of my own story and temporarily abandon the proposed three stages of this section on presence, moving instead to the hesitation which is named ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ in The Differend . This will permit a consideration of the time of event: the ‘now’ which, together with the spatializing designator ‘here’, featured in Lyotard’s attack on structuralist linguistics in Discourse, Figure . The ambiguous indicators of ‘here’ and ‘now’ cannot be fi xed or anticipated, they link to an unknown. This is the chink in the structuralist’s armour which is exploited by Lyotard to show the inadequacies of Saussurian linguistics and to demonstrate the limitations of a theory which takes communication at a level that ignores the depth that is clearly central to all but the most perfunctory of communication: expression.

‘Arrive-t-il? ’ ‘Is it happening?’ The book which Lyotard considered his major philosophical work is called Le Différend (1983). It is an analysis of language and communication in which he talks of ‘phrases’ – this would translate directly as ‘sentences’ but in the English translation by George Van Den Abbeele the word ‘phrase’ is kept in order to indicate the particular pragmatic usage by Lyotard where a phrase consists not only of words: gestures and even silence also constitute a phrase. Each phrase presents a ‘universe of phrases’ which consists of the instances by which it is defined and may include one or more of the following: addressor, addressee, referent and sense. But it is worth noting that ‘The universe presented by a phrase is not presented to something or to someone like a “subject”. [. . .] A “subject” is situated in a universe presented by a phrase.’29 According to Lyotard each phrase follows a previous phrase and is potentially open to be linked onto in different ways – through a phrase of reasoning, questioning, showing, describing, ordering etc. However, Lyotard argues that the previous phrase carries with it the rules of the type of discourse (the genre) to which it belongs, and therefore the linkages are not as open as might be thought – each type of discourse, each genre has certain goals for example to teach, to seduce, to justify, to evaluate: and to attain these goals a particular type of linkage is necessary. ‘Event’ is when the link

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to the next phrase has not yet been determined, when it remains contingent: it is ‘The suspense of the linking’, the question of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’.30 Event cannot be anticipated, otherwise its linkage is predetermined. Event takes place in the ‘Now’, before it is linked, before what it is has been established, before it is given a definite article. As soon as it is linked onto, it is subject to significant alteration: it is rendered the referent of a phrase and therefore it loses its singularity and stops being ‘event’ but becomes ‘the event’ – a referent in past time – or ‘an event’, thereby made similar to other events. Only in its event of questioning while it is still contingent can it be ‘event’ or occurrence with the potentiality and radical nature of the undecidable. For Lyotard, it is opening up this question of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ which is the objective for art. Before returning to Lyotard’s three painters and his essay on ‘presence’ I want to address questions of duration and the ephemeral in the work of Vito Acconci and Marina Abramović, in order to begin considering the implications of Lyotard’s question: ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ for performance art.

Marina Abramović’s Seven ‘Easy’ Pieces We are dealing here with an ephemeral state, one which may easily (perhaps too easily) be thought of in terms of wider art historical processes: as that which has yet to be categorized, explained, contextualized and therefore subjected to the processes which capture the ephemeral. Of course, that is a limited, stereotypical and regressive characterization of art history and the process of the museumification of thought which sometimes takes place. Yet it is exactly that which Marina Abramović, it would appear, is anxious to ensure for the future of performance art. Marina Abramović is one of the most significant figures in performance art. She started performing in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s and many of her performances have become canonical, in what is a very recently established canon. I want to consider an aspect of her project Seven Easy Pieces, which was performed at the Guggenheim, New York in 2005. Over a sevenday period she performed a different piece each evening: five pieces were re-performances of seminal works from the 1970s by other artists (Bruce Nauman; Vito Acconci; Valie Export; Gina Pane; Joseph Beuys); one was a re-performance of one of her own works from this period and the series ended with the performance of a new piece. As a project it is a fascinating engagement with the issues raised by the ephemeral nature of performance – it is, in itself, an exploration of the means by which performance

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can be both re-performed and documented – but I want to point out what may be a paradox, by highlighting that which is motivating her desire to re-enact the chosen works from the early 1970s. She speaks of regret – a regret that she had been unable to witness many early performances and a further regret that there was a tendency at the time to shun documentation, in order that the performance itself be the whole work. As she writes: I lived in Yugoslavia and it was very difficult to get information about performance events from abroad. All I could get at the time were Xeroxed images. Occasionally, there were also bad quality pirate video recordings. Most of the time, testimony was just word-of-mouth from witnesses who claimed they saw the performance or said that they knew somebody who had seen it.31 I remember a performance by Abramović, in a grand baroque palace in the centre of Madrid, not in the 1970s but in 1992. At least, I think I remember a performance – I remember the feeling of the performance, at least my reaction to what I was told happened. In retrospect I realize that what was described to me was her piece from 1973 Rhythm 10 which involved Abramović splaying her hand on a table top, taking a kitchen knife and rhythmically stabbing the spaces between her fingers, increasing the rhythm of the stabbing and the risks which were involved. But what I really remember is the anticipation, the atmosphere – I can find no record of which performance took place – certainly she performed the following week when the same festival had its second leg in London – but not in Madrid. I now think she didn’t perform, or if she did I arrived too late and missed it. And yet the memory is so powerful, mixed with what was presumably someone else’s account of Rhythm 10 and which they probably never saw either; and yet it wasn’t ephemeral for me: it is very much alive and present – just in the same way that those performances which Abramović never saw have carried the question of contingency – the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ – and driven her to this series of re-performances. Abramović reiterates the extent to which early 1970s performance worked on hearsay and whisper: If everybody who claimed to see the performances had actually been present, then thousands would have witnessed body art events. [. . .] Most of the time there were only about four or five friends there. The

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unreliability of the documents and the witnesses led to the total mystification and misrepresentation of the actual events. This created a huge space for projection and speculation.32 It is this very ‘space for projection and speculation’ which, I want to argue, is central to the power which performance can exert. Because its partial, inexact forms of documentation create a situation where a lack of certainty reigns, it is a realm that is conducive to the contingent. Therefore the destabilizing effect, which was the aim of many of these performances, can be continued – one which the drive to exhaustive documentation, which Abramović proposes, may stifle. The conditions which she suggests for re-performances are as follows: Ask the artist for permission. Pay the artist for copyright. Perform a new interpretation of the piece. Exhibit the original material: photographs, video, relics. Exhibit a new interpretation of the piece.33 These conditions, she suggests, will give performance ‘. . . a stable grounding in art history’ but in doing so won’t these prescriptive demands fetishize the original performance still further, stabilize it as a referent of any re-performance and minimize the contingency of linking? As part of Seven Easy Pieces Abramović re-performed her own interpretation of Vito Acconci’s 1972 piece Seedbed .

Seedbed Seedbed was part of an exhibition by Vito Acconci at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, which consisted of three performance situations, each of which needed the presence of the artist to be ‘activated’. In Acconci’s performance the gallery space was subtly altered to incorporate a sloping ramp under which the artist was secreted. As Acconci was hidden from view in the performance space there was some uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the artist – his voice was relayed to the visitor through the single speaker but even then, as Acconci himself acknowledged, some may have thought that the sound was a tape. In Abramović’s performance in the Guggenheim, a separate circular structure was built as a performance area under which the artist was clearly located and onto which the audience could ascend. This purpose-built structure removed the ambiguity of ‘presence’ that was part of the original set-up.

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Acconci’s Seedbed was specifically about exploiting the ‘space of projection and speculation’ of which Abramović talks. I am suggesting that at the heart of Abramović’s re-performance is the paradox that drew her to this history in the first place: the instability of the referent in these early pieces: the possibility of the question mark, of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ and the contingency of ‘event’ before it is linked onto as ‘the event’. This is something wholly supported by the inexact ways in which Seedbed has been documented. Starting with the edition of the magazine Avalanche dedicated to Acconci in 1972, the date of the performance is widely misreported as 1971, an error repeated by RoseLee Goldberg in 2001 and Melvin Carlson in 2004. The French art magazine Art Press , in an edition from 1972, misprinted the date as 1973 but the most wildly inaccurate is a French history of performance art by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, published in 1988, which gives Seedbed the date 1979. In the catalogue for Seven Easy Pieces , the dates are correctly recorded as 15–29 January 1972 but in the transcript of Abramović’s monologue – spoken while re-performing Seedbed and busy creating what she termed ‘heat and moisture’ – the date slips once more: ‘I’m doing Vito Acconci piece, the Seedbed , what he made in Sonnabend Gallery in 73, masturbating under the floor of the gallery.’ Similarly, the reports of the hours of ‘activation’ vary even in contemporary reviews, in 1972, from ‘two afternoons a week’ (Pincus-Witten) to ‘whole days’ (Schjeldahl) and the Acconci archive seems to positively promote the mystification – three confl icting press releases were exhibited together as part of the show of his work in Liverpool in 2005 and are variously reproduced in recent publications without necessarily acknowledging the confl icting information. 34 The 2001 monograph by Gloria Moure reports ‘9 days, 8 hours a day, a 3 week exhibition’ whereas Kate Linker’s monograph from 1994 opts for the more dramatic ‘for the duration of the exhibition’. Martha Buskirk (2005) shows a canny wariness when writing of Seedbed in The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art and states that ‘By his own description he was under the ramp two or three days per week for the duration of the exhibition.’35 There can be no more contingent object than the document of a performance piece, it would seem, particularly one which deals with such ‘intimate activities’. Without doubt the various manners in which the piece is reported, whether colourful or coy, adds to the tension which exists in the piece itself, as these quotes show: . . . in his work Seedbed, 1972, under a [floor] in a public space, a New York gallery, he performed a most intimate act of the body.36

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The most notorious involved a large, closed wooden ramp under which Acconci spent whole days in determined solitary sex while, as a wall label asserted, fantasizing about people present in the gallery.37 Within this wedge, Acconci passed 2 afternoons a week in a ‘private sexual activity’, stated bluntly, in masturbation.38 In room A (Seed Bed ) Acconci lay hidden beneath a room-sized, slanting plywood false-floor intoning words of love to the women walking over him, masturbating and moaning into a microphone.39 Acconci was playing his part while playing with his parts.40 Installed under a ramp in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery for six hours a day, five days a week, Acconci is said to have masturbated at intervals throughout.41 Seedbed (1971), performed at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, became the most notorious of these works. In it Acconci masturbated under a ramp built into the gallery over which the visitors walked.42 I am particularly drawn to the difference between the last two quotations from two different publications by RoseLee Goldberg which move from ‘Acconci is said to have masturbated’ to just accepting that he did. The duration, intensity and description vary to such an extent that the performance remains in flux and, contrary to my initial fears, Abramović’s re-performance adds similarly to this effect. The way in which Abramović documents the work acknowledges Acconci’s own regret that he never taped the audio – so in her performance she tapes everything meticulously and includes a transcription in the book – she also makes an attempt to record the reactions of the audience, and the transcripts of conversations from seven roving microphones are also included. This is particularly interesting in relation to the Acconci re-performance because the audience is making comparisons to a work about which there is already so much myth, speculation and ambiguity. There is a sense of uncertainty as to how they ought to react, a sense which is clearly in keeping with the idea I am working with in relation to Lyotard’s event, and my fear that contingency might be closed down is not borne out. I had feared that the preceding phrase would determine the type of linkage and limit contingency: that knowledge of the piece might lead to expectations being fulfilled not frustrated. Yet, rather than fulfilling expectations and linking in the expected manner, the members of the audience find themselves reacting against the mis-match with their expectations: the transfer of the work into the huge institution of the Guggenheim, for

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example, means that many struggle to find the intimacy or confrontation they expect and consequently they begin to reflect on what they know (or think they know) about the ‘original’ in order to locate their frustration. This example is certainly paradoxical: I am suggesting that those emotive aspects of presence, expression and affect – which are traditionally the central issues of performance – form the universe of phrases onto which an audience expects to link with their respective emotive responses. However, in fulfilling such an anticipated linkage there would be no event in the sense of creating a hesitation in the linkage – hence my fear with regard to the set-up of Seven Easy Pieces. But it is in the unfulfilment that the uncertainty might occur, a feeling that relates to Lyotard’s concern in The Differend regarding the presentation of a feeling as a phrase: ‘Feelings as a phrase for what cannot now be phrased.’43 Yet does this feeling of uncertainty not constitute one of the emotive responses expected from performance? Perhaps it is a question of intensity and temporality: if event produces a feeling that cannot be phrased it is not a consciously recognizable emotion and as it can exist only in the now it will always remain ephemeral and consequently, to return to Lyotard’s terminology in the essay ‘Presence’, deferred.

‘Something between breathing in and breathing out . . .’ If the ‘here and now’ of ‘event’ might be equated with what Lyotard refers to as ‘presence’, is it similarly only to be apprehended as deferred? Yes, and no. Both ‘event’ and ‘presence’ are experienced in the ‘here and now’ but their ephemeral nature escapes attempts to record and evaluate, except through the manner in which Lyotard describes the function of presence in the work of Daniel Buren – presence in this case being used only to show the falseness of presence. Does this suggest that presence can be manipulated in a manner that is anathema to the nature of event as we have just described it? Not necessarily: the manner in which Buren’s work operates, according to Lyotard, is to question ‘the situational conditions which affect the way art is seen, but he questions them situationally, and through an eye that is itself conditioned by situation’.44 This is not a manipulation of either presence or event but the disclosure of its absence through an unmasking of the illusion of presence. Although Lyotard’s first writings on Buren were not published until 1978, ten years after Buren’s first works in situ , the extent to which artist and philosopher were dealing with the same concerns contemporaneously, coming

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from the same revolutionary milieu, is made clear in Lyotard’s ‘Notes on the critical function of the work of art’, a text based on a discussion presented to students at the University of Paris, Nanterre in March 1970. Lyotard’s tone reveals much about the student body that invited Lyotard to speak and about the politically charged atmosphere of the times: The function of a revolutionary art is thus very precisely determined. What art does – what it ought to do – is always to unmask all attempts to reconstitute a pseudo-religion; in other words, every time the reconstitution of a kind of writing, a ‘graphy’ – a set of forms that produces a psychic resonance and reproduces itself – is undertaken, the function of anti-art is to unmask it as ideological; in the Marxist sense of the term, to unmask it as an endeavour to make us believe that there are in our societies ‘primary’ modes of communication of this type, which is not true.45 It is this unmasking of illusion that Lyotard later recognizes in the work of Buren – in this case the unmasking of the illusion of presence – and the assumption that event or presence can be either constructed or anticipated by the organizing structures which present ‘art events’. I want to clarify here two points relating to my use of the term ‘event’ in the previous section that referred to performance and re-performance. First I want to reiterate that the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ of the Lyotardian event does not necessarily equate to the time of the ‘art event’ – the happening or performance – but that ‘event’ could be as likely to occur in the gap opened by the non-representative aspects of its documentation or a double-take at a re-performance, and consequently it brings into question the privileging of ‘liveness’. Secondly, I introduced the ephemeral as being short lived and suggested that the event is analogous to the ephemeral, but it is important to stress that according to Lyotard, ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ does not belong to chronological time but to its own time of the now and therefore its duration can only be ascertained once it enters the network of linkages. This means that ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ may open up a duration which, rather than being short lived, does not find a linkage for some time – but only when it is linked can its ephemeral status be reflected upon. When Lyotard describes the effect of Buren’s work in the essay ‘Presence’ as being not in the viewing of the work but in ‘the view it is destined to become’, could it be that in this subsequent view the event occurs? Usefully, Lyotard’s ‘Him’ follows a similar line of thought, asking ‘You’ to admit that ‘something took place; I don’t say some one thing, an object, but an event which isn’t a thing, but at least a caesura in space-time and that that’s what must be “rendered”’.46

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The tentative means by which the counterarguments are put forward by ‘Him’ recall also the hesitant approach to writing that Lyotard describes in his foreword to the Lyotard Reader : a sense of feeling a way forward like that of a child, not the innocent pre-conceptual sensation that Merleau-Ponty describes but one which irrupts out of language, not prior to it.47 In the unravelling of their argument the two voices of ‘Presence’ begin to drop suggestive allusions to presence: touch, re-touch, colour, vowel, a vowel without a voice – the timbre, an immediate occasion – but not the religiosity of speaking with God’s timbre (that follows a set pattern of intent – the universe of phrases leading to religious persuasion) but, rather, that which ‘has gone missing in the prepared linking’.48 The challenge of mysticism is anticipated and that of formalism – following Kant – is contested, but there is no definitive answer: I cannot fast-forward to the end of the essay to tell you the ending, the punch line, the decisive definition, except to recall the frequency with which it echoes Discourse, Figure like a call across time, perhaps in the same way in which the talk of presence and deferral initiates an echo of Derrida in the ear of any self-respecting Anglophone scholar – particularly to his ‘way out’ West: the 1966 colloquium at Johns Hopkins University, generally regarded as the starting point of what became the phenomenon of deconstruction in American Literary Studies.49 In his critique of the metaphysics of presence, Derrida writes of the process of deferral – particularly evident in language – whereby every sign is obliged to defer to another for its meaning in a continual avoidance of an elusive origin and the ‘determination of Being as presence’ on which the history of metaphysics has been centred.50 In Lyotard’s account presence is not linked to metaphysical presence or the fulfilment of desire – ‘[it] isn’t the “presence of being”’ – but is rather what stops the continual process of deferral, challenging commentary by questioning presence.51 It is not a ‘way out’ in the manner that the West has looked for an exit in the philosophy of Buddhism, says Lyotard. Neither can it be a stopping like death, or a return to presence in an ontological sense, because there is no subject who is being addressed. It is, rather, a hesitating over the presumed linkages: ‘. . . it is, I think, all articulated thought which presence interrupts’.52

Buren Is Not Performing On 3 January 1967 Daniel Buren and three other painters working collaboratively as the group BMPT made four equally sized paintings carrying their signature format: Buren’s stripes, Oliver Mosset’s single circle, Michel

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Parmentier’s broad horizontal stripes created by folding and spraying the exposed pleats of a canvas, and Niele Toroni’s evenly spaced marks applied with a No. 50 brush. During the time of the paintings’ creation a loudspeaker advised the public visiting the Salon de la Jeune Peinture – held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris – ‘to become intelligent’. An accompanying pamphlet explained what they thought was wrong with painting and why, therefore, they did not consider themselves painters.53 At the end of the day the paintings were removed and replaced by a banner which read: ‘BUREN, MOSSET, PARMENTIER, TORONI, N’EXPOSENT PAS.’ In June 1967 BMPT organized a ‘manifestation’ at the lecture theatre of the Musée d’Art Decoratifs, Paris. A photograph of the event, reproduced in Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art, shows a surprisingly well-filled lecture theatre and the display of four equally sized paintings – similar to those exhibited for the day in January of the same year – forming a quadrant, hanging above the stage. After an hour, a text with a straightforward description of the four paintings was handed round, prompting the remark from audience member, Marcel Duchamp, ‘What a frustrating happening: one couldn’t have done it better!’.54 Catherine Millet’s book Contemporary Art in France opens with a full-page, close-up photograph of Duchamp in the audience at the same event, seemingly in the act of speaking her version of those words: ‘as frustrating happenings go, you can’t get better than that’.55 The slight variation in the translation of this spoken comment highlights both the transitory nature of the present and opens up the differing contexts in which each becomes placed. On the one hand Millet uses the figure of Duchamp to highlight a struggle within the Parisian contemporary art scene in the late 1960s, between those following the legacy of Dada: Yves Klein, Ben Vautrier, Daniel Spoerri and the more explicitly political approach of painters for whom Duchamp represented an outdated form of individualism, powerless to respond to the events in Vietnam. On the other hand Godfrey suggests that Duchamp would have been better to talk of ‘intervention’ rather than ‘happening’: ‘The word he should have used, rather than “happening”, was “intervention”. Stella’s dictum of “what you see is what you see” had been taken to its logical conclusion [. . .] For all their seeming dumbness they had a political significance.’56 This reference to the minimal approach of American painter Frank Stella refers us to an international (or Trans-Atlantic) context, within which the place of French art needs some further consideration. There is a tendency and temptation to assimilate artistic activities in France from this time to the art-historical discourses which have become the accepted modes of thinking about post-war developments in sculpture and painting – namely the dominance of formalist abstraction and the

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reaction against its hegemony through the rise of conceptual and performance work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One consequence of such an assumption is to render the varied artistic preoccupations of writers such as Lyotard seemingly arbitrary or incomprehensible: he writes on Daniel Buren and Valerio Adami, Joseph Kosuth and Jacques Monory. It is for this reason that the differing contexts of France and the United States will be highlighted here, using the figure of Marcel Duchamp as a means to articulate some of the differing positions.

Duchamp in France Though born in France, Duchamp had been resident in the United States since before the Second World War. He took up US citizenship in 1955 and his entry into the bosom of the art world was confirmed by the retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963. His position in France, however, was somewhat different. Duchamp was little known to the general French public in the 1950s and 1960s despite the fact that the legacy of Dada was clearly evident among many artists working in Paris, whether through the adoption of a Duchampian persona, as with Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni or Ben Vautrier, or the various adaptations of the strategy of the found object, as with Arman and Daniel Spoerri. There were some significant events during this period which furthered the dissemination of Duchamp’s ideas and work among artists in France: his collected writings Marchand du Sel and the first monograph Sur Marcel Duchamp by Robert Lebel were both published in Paris in 1959.57 The role of Robert Lebel as Duchamp’s biographer has an additional significance for developments in the Parisian art scene as it was his son, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who was to play a significant role in the development of happenings in France, a position that has been likened to that of Allan Kaprow in the United States. Jean-Jacques Lebel orchestrated the first performance of Carolee Schneemann’s seminal event Meat Joy in Paris in 1964 at the ‘Free Expression Festival’ and the connection to Duchamp via his father’s circle and his own often Dada-inspired performances links such developments to the legacy of Surrealism in Paris. 58 This connection is charted by Alyce Mahon in her study Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968, where she writes: ‘In short, Lebel’s ideas were suffused with Surrealist ideas, ambitions and terminology. Members of the Surrealist group recognised this and supported his new direction: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Max Ernst went to see Lebel’s Happenings and praised them.’59 This history

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of Surrealism’s legacy describes a preoccupation with sexuality and bodily excess which makes an interesting context within which to consider Lyotard’s libidinal politics and his writings on Duchamp, collected as Les Transformateurs Duchamp in 1977, the same year that Duchamp was the subject of the first major show at the Pompidou Centre.60 In contrast to this acceptance of a Duchampian tradition there was a tendency among some young painters in Paris to reject Duchamp’s political quietism, interpreting his refusal to speak out on political matters as indicative of a bourgeois conformism prevalent within the Parisian avant-garde tradition. This became increasingly manifest as an anti-American agenda by the mid-1960s when opposition to US involvement in the war in Vietnam was coupled with the bitter reaction to the dominance of American modern painting, realized for many by the success of Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale in 1964.61 A dead-pan, non-expressionistic approach to figurative painting was used by several younger artists as a means to articulate their concerns, an approach which was promoted by art critic Gérald Gaissot-Talabot under the name ‘Narrative Figuration’ at an exhibition in Paris in 1965.62 The focus of much attention at this exhibition was a collaborative series of eight paintings Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchmp [Live and Let Die, or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp] painted by Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati in 1965, which demonstrates both political disenchantment and also the extent to which Duchamp, as the famous émigré to the United States, represented a figure to kick against for a generation of painters. In the series Duchamp is shown being ‘stripped bare’, beaten up, thrown downstairs and finally buried in a coffin draped with the Stars and Stripes. The exhibition of the series provoked outrage, and the extent of the resulting defence of Duchamp marks not only his importance but also the role he now played as a signifier for a particular position within the debates in France at this time.63 Within this context of Duchamp’s presence in France, the position of Daniel Buren is a curious one as he was continuing aspects of the antiart tradition while also critiquing its limitations. Jill Carrick traces the associations between Buren and the Narrative Figuration artists through the involvement of BMPT in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the committee of which included Gilles Aillaud as President, Eduardo Arroyo as Secretary and Antonio Recalcati as a jury member, and Buren’s subsequent declarations that it was insufficient to replace the art object with an everyday object if the conditions for viewing the work remained unchallenged. In a text from 1969 he wrote that ‘A considerable number of works of art (the most exclusively idealist, e.g., Ready-mades of all kinds) “exist” only because the location

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in which they are seen is taken for granted as a matter of course’.64 The most striking example of Buren’s solo attempts to confront the frame of the institution also became an ‘intervention’ into the dominance of the United States as the cultural torch-bearer for the ‘free’ Capitalist world. Buren’s contribution to the sixth Guggenheim International exhibition became one of Buren’s most notorious interventions as a result of the institution’s response to the piece. Initially conceived in two parts: one large characteristically striped canvas was to be hung in the famous spiral atrium of Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark building and a second smaller version was to have been installed, perpendicular to the first, on a building outside the museum in an adjacent street. The first 20 by 10 metre, blue and white striped fabric, was hung for only one day and removed before the exhibition was opened to the public, the second was never installed. The debate is well documented and included objections by some of the other artists in the exhibition – most famously Donald Judd, who referred to Buren as a ‘Parisian wallpaper hanger’ – that the visual dominance of Buren’s piece obscured views of other works.65 Buren called the objections censorship and suggested that the true motivating factors were a desire to maintain the architectural dominance of the museum over the works it purported to preserve and display. As a result Buren’s intentions to reveal the museum as a container ‘which irremediably subjugates anything that gets caught / shown in it’ were unrealized in the intended format but the controversy which surrounded the event demonstrated the ideological issues with which Buren was playing.66 Guy Lelong suggests that the decision of the Guggenheim demonstrates the cultural power held by Judd, Michael Heizer and Dan Flavin – the small group of ‘censuring artists’ – within the New York Art scene at the time; Lelong also argues that Buren’s work highlighted the extent to which the work of these artists was radical only within the context of the formalist debate which had dominated the US art world in the late 1960s. The seemingly innocuous requirement of art to be ‘interesting’, given by Donald Judd, represented the literalness of the everyday that Duchamp’s readymades had ushered in. This was anathema to the position of modernist formalism, most famously represented by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who wished to save the sanctity of art from that which Fried famously termed ‘theatricality’.

Fried on Presence Michael Fried’s polemical essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, first appeared in an issue of Artforum devoted to American Sculpture in Summer 1967

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alongside essays and statements by artists associated with that which is now termed Minimalism: Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and Robert Smithson. The issue was an effective staging of the contemporary debate and the reaction against the dominance of formalist criticism, which Fried and Greenberg had espoused, and the Modernist sculpture and painting they had effectively promoted throughout the post-war period both in the United States and as representative of the US abroad. Fried’s essay is a clear attack on the new tendencies of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, but his detailed consideration of the work and interrogation of why its modi operandi opposed modernist values have been used as a key reference in the subsequent history of those movements in order to support their very difference from the formalist, modernist approach that Fried sought to defend.67 At the crux of the essay is Fried’s objection to that which he terms the ‘theatricality’ of the minimalist work and its staging of ‘presence’. Aspects of such staging include a conscious use of objects sized to relate to the ‘beholder’ and the deliberate controlling of the whole situation, including the beholder’s body: Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account, that he takes it seriously – and when the fulfilment of that demand consists simply in being aware of it and, so to speak, in acting accordingly.68 Fried does not dismiss the potential effect of the work but is concerned that its effect is not specific to art, and is not therefore attributable to an aesthetic effect and the criteria of judgement that are part of that tradition. Drawing on the example given by the sculptor Tony Smith in an interview published in Artforum the previous year – of driving at night on an unfinished road – Fried describes Smith’s account as ‘compelling’, referring to the clear emotional impact of the ‘experience’ and its ‘endless’, personal nature before turning to the threat that such a preoccupation with the duration of time presents to art. The fear that ‘authentic’ modern art was being ‘corrupted and perverted by theatre’ led Fried to adopt a tone of outrage which has made him an easy target – often reduced to representing an outdated, conservative approach – yet the subtle understanding of the apparent similarities between the differing approaches reveals a deep understanding of the impact that this turn away from the object represented for the traditions of art criticism and aesthetics.69 For example, Fried’s consideration of time in the final section, quoted below, might

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initially seem to correlate with that of Lyotard’s description of event – as having ‘no duration’: It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness : as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.70 However, neither Lyotard’s event nor his discussion of presence presumes that such insight is possible: it may result in emotional intensity but is closer to the endlessness that Tony Smith experienced in the dark of the unfinished New Jersey turnpike, than the transcendent grace of modernist ‘presentness’. In his opening epigraph, which talks of the presentness of God, Fried foregrounds the spiritual implications of his argument for the particularity of art. What Lyotard does share with Fried is a belief that art has a particular function, but unlike Fried Lyotard argues for an art which transforms, not transcends. Lyotard’s position is clearly closer to the anti-modernists who have reversed Fried’s narrow prognosis in order to embrace the theatricality and interdisciplinarity which Fried feared, but Lyotard does not simply reject the tradition of painting; rather, he acknowledges the different means by which artists strive in their task. How Lyotard defines the task of art in the most frequently referenced English texts of the mid-1980s has led to the frequent use of misrepresentative sound-bites that circle round the notion of the unpresentable. The publication history of these texts will be dealt with in detail in Chapter 4 but I will outline here those points which relate to the discussion of time and presence. In the widely circulated ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, included as an appendix to the English translation of The Postmodern Condition , Lyotard makes three important points which have a bearing on the task of art: I shall call modern the art which devotes its ‘little technical expertise’ (son ‘petit technique’ ), as Diderot used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists [. . .] The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself [. . .] Post Modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).71

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It is useful to highlight that Lyotard’s use of the term postmodern refuses the sense of a linear chronology implicit in the term itself and the specificity of Lyotard’s approach in this regard is generally acknowledged. What have been misunderstood in several contexts, however, are the subtleties surrounding the idea of the unpresentable, leading to a frequent use of the phrase ‘presenting the unpresentable’ which is not used by Lyotard. Among the most surprising is that of Hugh Silverman – Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University – whose use of the phrase affects the argument he puts forward regarding Lyotard’s sublime and the role of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’. I will briefly explain the consequences of this mistranslation with reference to Silverman’s essay and conclude with some initial remarks on the extent to which Lyotard’s use of terms such as presence connects with the figural. Silverman misquotes: ‘Lyotard states that the postmodern is “the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself”’ which concurs with neither of the published English translations nor the original French: ‘Le postmoderne serait ce qui dans le moderne allègue l’imprésentable dans la présentation elle-même ’.72 By rendering ‘allègue ’ as ‘the presentation’ rather than ‘puts forward’ or ‘invokes’ (used in an alternative translation), Silverman renders the phrase both tautological and paradoxical and in so doing fails to highlight the most significant aspect of that which Lyotard is describing as postmodern – the event that cannot be presented, which has no means of being presented and can therefore only be invoked.73 As there is no suitable idiom in which the unpresentable can be put forward it is the subject of that which Lyotard terms a différend – a conflict that cannot be resolved without exercising a wrong, owing to the absence of a rule of judgement which could be applied equally to both parties. When a suitable idiom is found then it can be considered as a presentation but, contrary to the implications of Silverman’s statement, it will no longer be event. It is not, therefore, merely a pedantic point but one which begins to expose the gap between Lyotard’s reception in the Anglophone world and the complexity of his thinking that this reception has often been unable to present. In 1982, Artforum published an essay by Lyotard under the title ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’ which connotes the same paradoxical propositions as highlighted above; Lyotard made it clear in a later interview that the title was not his – ‘It was not my title and I could never have written it,’ he said; the essay was re-titled as ‘Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable’ when it was collected in The Inhuman .74 To what extent does this notion of the unpresentable mesh with that of ‘presence’ and the term that initiated this chapter, the figural? First, we can reiterate Lyotard’s explicit refusal of any spiritual overtones in his

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approach to aesthetics – as made evident in his objection to Paul Claudel’s vision at the opening of Discourse, Figure – and therefore we should approach his writings on presence and the sublime as a figural working of existing aesthetic traditions, in order to undo ‘the presumption of the mind with respect to time’, operating in a manner closer to that of Buren’s in situ interventions, rather than the ‘instantaneousness’ of Fried’s writings.75 What is less clear, however, is the extent to which Lyotard’s preoccupation with questions of temporality – discussed here in relation to the Arrive-t-il? and his dialogue on presence – indicate a move from the largely spatial concerns of the figure in Discourse, Figure . In fact the figure-matrix, the instance of the figural briefly outlined above, is the figural of unconscious desire and its libidinal force that, following Freud, knows no time. It is not, then, that temporality does not concern the figural, but that the figure – like event – fissures chronological time under the force of desire; not the desire responsible for the delay in Duchamp’s Large Glass but the force of the figural that Lyotard describes as ‘difference itself’.76 It is significant that when Lyotard writes of Buren it is not in comparison to Duchamp – the libidinal transformer – but to Cézanne: ‘There is – there, in the work of Buren, a sort of paradox: to make seen the invisible of the visible which is inscribed in the Cézannian problematic.’77 This comparison links Buren back to the figural of Discourse, Figure where Cézanne’s struggle is one of desire: not to represent a scene but to shatter the search for signification, allowing the fluidity of the figural, the discord of event and its unpresentability. But desire is not fulfilled in the work: it is the error of psychoanalytic interpretation of art work, Freud’s included, to suggest this. Rather, Lyotard emphasizes at the end of Discourse, Figure , desire is unfulfilled in the work; this is the role of all art; it concerns unfulfilled signs – in the process of disruption and transformation.78

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Chapter 2

The Libidinal

Introduction In contrast to the carefully staged dialogues on ‘presence’ and the question mark of Arrive-t-il? Lyotard’s writings associated with psychoanalytic theory and termed ‘the libidinal’ are his most outrageous. Outrageous in both rhetorical style and political impiety, they were produced in the wake of 1968. Lyotard used the figure of the libidinal workings of desire to divest himself of his militant Marxist past and to attack the bodies of knowledge and beliefs round which he saw the skin of consensual acquiescence tighten, forming a sealed corpuscular world. The implication of this metaphor is a questioning of boundaries and an exploration of space, in particular the politics of representational space, a concern which is explored in this chapter with reference to other thinkers and artists who share similar concerns. The period of Lyotard’s writing which has been named the libidinal encompasses writings from the time of Discourse, Figure (1971) and Libidinal Economy (1974) including two important collections of essays, both published in 1973, whose titles illustrate the dominant themes – Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud and Des dispositifs pulsionnels – which involve both a coming to terms with Marx after the events of 1968 and, more personally for Lyotard, a break with 12 years of involvement in the radical, heretical, Marxist groups Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir Ouvrier.1 The titles of these two collections demonstrate the extent to which Lyotard is working out a different approach to Marx and Freud, a preoccupation that was felt to be necessary by several intellectuals in France post-1968, as the French philosopher Vincent Descombes notes: ‘in the seventies, an attempt was made to rehabilitate the referential political theory (Marxism) with an injection of desire and jouissance ’.2 Given Lyotard’s own avoidance of any systematization of thought we must tread carefully when borrowing such attempts at periodizing his

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work, lest we fall into the trap of suggesting that his oeuvre has a teleological aim. In his autobiographical reflections in Peregrinations Lyotard speaks of thoughts as ‘clouds’, suggesting that ‘we try to enter into them and to belong to them’.3 If we take that which is called the libidinal as a cloud it is one that must be allowed to drift into other territories and times. Therefore this chapter will also look forward to the continued implications of these libidinal writings through a consideration of later writings on art, in particular an essay on the Italian artist Valerio Adami, from 1983.4 The approach taken in this chapter is one which endeavours to open up this period of Lyotard’s thought. It has been closed off by writers taking a pragmatic approach, such as Bill Readings’ writing in New York in 1991: ‘To be blunt, fidelity to Freudian orthodoxy is not the argument most likely to influence Anglophone critics to take Lyotard’s work seriously’ or more critical, like Geoffrey Bennington in 1988: ‘the move into psychoanalysis [in Discourse, Figure] . . . ends up by compromising some of the rigour of the thought which led to it’.5 It is important, however, to draw attention to the context of these two comments as they were written at the height of Lyotard’s turn to Kant, which indicated a decided move away from the Freudian preoccupation of the libidinal period, and before the re-emergence of Freud as a key reference for his later writings of the 1990s. More recently writings by James Williams and several essays collected in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard reconsider the role of the libidinal period and contextualize the more scandalous aspects of Libidinal Economy, not only as an example of the excesses of the times, but as an engagement with those figures – Nietzsche, Bataille, Sade and Klossowski – which inform its writing, in addition to Marx and Freud.6 Such a context allows us to reinterpret Lyotard’s own, seemingly derisive, attitude to the work when he speaks of it in Peregrinations as ‘his evil book’. If judged within the terms of transgression this claim to ‘evil’ becomes a celebration of its success, and while Lyotard’s attitude is ironically dismissive, the full context of Lyotard’s remarks reveals an attitude which is not wholly contrite: I used to say that it was my evil book, the book of evilness that everyone writing and thinking is tempted to do [. . .] The readers of this book – thank God there were very few – generally accepted the product as a rhetorical exercise.7 Williams, for one, has recognized the importance of Lyotard’s theoretical propositions in this period, and I shall follow his lead in reconsidering the libidinal, not least the centrality of Freudian desire to the figural but also

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in a comparison with the other major libidinal text of the period: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). This comparison highlights the main theoretical focus of the chapter – the centrality of negation and absence to Lyotard’s discussion of representation – which, through reorienting a perception of the libidinal work, allows its implications to extend to the later writings on art, specifically Deleuze on Francis Bacon in 1981 and Lyotard on Valerio Adami in 1983.

Lyotard on Monory We begin in 1973 with a catalogue essay on the hyperrealist paintings of Jacques Monory that demonstrates the manner by which Lyotard evokes the rhythm and pulse of the body, its visceral internal workings and the unseen matrix of desire: There is no story in Monory. Breath is suspended, the diaphragm blocked, the libidinal apparatus charged to breaking point. When it does crack, then we will be ejected outside the blue, the smooth, and the closed, we will be thrown to the colours, to ‘reality’, to mobility, to sounds and language. We will enter into the time of history. Blue suspends history and so nothing happens in it. What do you hear in this silence? The pumps that make the internal liquors beat against the ducts, isochronous to the point of rupture.8 This is the rhetoric of Lyotard’s ‘mature’ libidinal work, where the mobility of libidinal investments is described and incorporated into the written style with more abandon than in Discourse, Figure . Freed from the constraints of academic requirement, the metaphor of the libidinal body is let loose, the body simultaneously as machine and a series of erogenous zones, laid out in a parody of polymorphic perversity. The psychic energy, which Freud describes as necessarily aiming to become bound through the establishment of boundaries and an identifiable ego, that which is based on the ‘primary repression’ of the first love object – the mother – is freed through Lyotard’s privileging of the mobile characteristics of energy in the primary processes. The ‘mature’ libidinal work is, therefore, essentially regressive and prefigures Lyotard’s later preoccupation with the paradoxical proposal of childhood and the infant as ‘inhuman’. In both Discourse, Figure (1971) and Libidinal Economy (1974) Lyotard points to the apparent contradiction in the

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child’s attitude to the mother as described by Freud in the ‘fort-da’ game, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle . In this famous passage Freud recounts his observation of an 18-month-old child – his grandson – who re-enacts the disappearance and reappearance of his mother through the throwing and recall of a stringed bobbin from his cot, accompanied by the German word ‘fort’ (gone) and its return ‘da’ (here). Freud relates to this as a process of objectification of the mother through identification and control: the object is presence (da) and absence (fort). Unlike the interpretation of this story by Jacques Lacan as relating to language acquisition and the role of absence, which also figures strongly in Derrida’s later account, Lyotard draws attention to the ambivalence of the child’s emotional attachment to the mother. He argues that in order to be missed the mother must already be constituted as a person for the child, and as separate from himself. How then, argues Lyotard, can the child still exist in the world of mobile cathexes which is the state of ‘polymorphous perversity’? And how can the pain and distress which the child experiences, according to Freud, derive only from this loss? For Lyotard it is the emotional oscillation between pleasure and pain engendered by the mother that is important, an ambivalence which relates to the earlier period of narcissism. Lyotard argues that the first forfeit, the withdrawal of the breast, is a long way from the establishment of a separation between the ego and reality and must rather institute the auto-eroticism of the ‘polymorphic body’ and the denial of a reality other than that which is immediately present to the ego.9 It is this preoedipalized stage which, as we shall see, is central to both Lyotard’s and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conception of desire. ‘What do you here in this silence?’ asks Lyotard of Monory’s paintings: it is the silence which Freud associates with the death drive. And the inevitable rupture of the ‘machine for collecting and draining energy’ which does not function efficiently, exemplified for Lyotard by the instability and ambiguity in Freud’s categorizations of desire.10 Lyotard suggests that Freud intermingles the two meanings of desire – as wish (Wunsch) and force (Nietzsche’s Wille) – which necessitates a reconfiguration of the drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to include the death drive. This demonstrates the incapacity of desire to operate as a well-regulated machine. The death drive manifests desire not as fulfilment but as intensity, which Lyotard regards as one of a disordering positivity. Therefore, when Lyotard analyses Freud’s accounts of phantasy in Discourse, Figure , in particular ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, he is emphasizing the workings of the figural, as desire powered by the non-signifying ‘unbound’ forces of the death drive, and rejecting Freud’s attempts to separate them from the aegis of Eros.11 At

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the end of Lyotard’s essay ‘Capitalisme énergumène ’, which first appeared in the journal Critique as a review of Anti-Oedipus in November 1972, Lyotard accepts Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘fight’ against Freud’s conception of the death drive, in Civilisation and its Discontents , as ‘guilt and hate turned against themselves’ but he reaffirms its importance as: . . . a necessary component of desire. Not at all another instinct, another energy, but within the libidinal economy, an inaccessible ‘principle’ of excess and disorder; not a second machinery, but a machine whose velocity can be displaced towards positive infinity, bringing it to a halt.12 This halt is the silence, the suspension, which Lyotard sees in Monory’s series of paintings Velvet Jungle No. 1/2 (1969). A series of four large canvases shows the creeping obliteration of one image (a woman in a synthetic jungle) by another (a tiled floor viewed from above with the squared grid running diagonally top left to bottom right). Both images are rendered in Monory’s signature blue monochrome in a manner that Lyotard refers to as ‘an art of catalogues’ playing on the allure of consumer images and the unfulfilment of the desire they elicit. I argued in the introduction that the stylistic variety of the artists to which Lyotard turns is significant. His role is not that of a critic who surveys the field, neither does he champion one approach; it is the simultaneous consideration of Monory and Duchamp, Buren and Adami which is unusual. In the first edition of Des dispositifs pulsionnels , for example, Lyotard included an essay on the minimal, abstract paintings of René Guiffrey and an essay on hyperrealist painting. Yet in many ways the concern is similar: a consideration of time and the role of desire in representation. Monory’s paintings deal with the excess of consumer images, but its screen of blue renders them inaccessible; to the critic Jean Clair the blue is a veil which invokes longing, waiting: ‘The blue is at the same time the object of my desire and that which separates me from my desire.’13 For Lyotard it is the sequence of the Velvet Jungle paintings that is his concern; they are not ‘readable’ as a diachronic sequence but ‘suggest the interchangeability of the two’ which, he claims, is contrary to the unfolding of fantasy in Pierre Klossowski’s novel La Monnaie Vivante , with its measured, seductive photographic accompaniments by Pierre Zucca. The time of Monory’s series is a ‘blue time’– a precursor, I suggest, to that which Lyotard will refer to in The Differend as ‘Is it happening?’ [Arrive-t-il? ] – but here it is likened to an erection without ejaculation: ‘There is no capitalisation of suspense.’14

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Lyotard claims that Monory’s paintings resist the pressure of capital to move forward; it is the grey of capitalist anonymity without the promise of capitalization in jouissance, denying the ‘turn’ which Cézanne sought and turning instead only to obsolescence.15 In the writings on Monory we can understand how Lyotard’s perception of desire differs from that of Deleuze and Guattari, as Anthony Elliot explains: it is simply mistaken to believe that desire does not flow freely enough in contemporary society – as Deleuze and Guattari contend. For the fact of the matter, according to Lyotard, is that desire circulates endlessly around objects, surfaces and bodies. In this connection, late capitalism for Lyotard is an immense desiring system.16

‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’ According to Lyotard, the flow of energies is organized and regulated by a dispositif, usually translated as either apparatus or set-up, which includes among others: language, discourse and painting. Painting is referred to by Lyotard in the widest sense of binding energy to a support, be it through the application of lipstick, production of photography, drawing or graffiti; however, as the translator of Libidinal Economy Iain Hamilton Grant explains, the French term dispositif also includes the suggestion of displacement and the impermanence of such a binding, hence the dispositif is a positive libidinal investment which remains subject to ‘movement with expenditure’.17 This mutable aspect of any set-up is important: energy is not only channelled to produce certain effects but can also work to disorder these set-ups, through their dilution as explored by Lyotard in the essay ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’ in Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973). Lyotard suggests that the process of ‘dissolution’ is already effected by modern painting itself through ‘. . . a multiplication of the places and modalities of this inscription’, evidenced through the diverse and various means by which painting has extended its materials and surfaces – collage, spray paint, metal, silk-screen are all mentioned. These ‘dilutions’ are transformations of energies, not meanings; transformations which Lyotard equates to the set-up of capitalism: Capitalism does not pose its problems in terms of meanings [. . . but . . .] poses its problems in terms of energy and the transformation of energy: transformation of matter, transformation of apparatus, production of

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apparatus, labour power, manual power, intellectual power, production, transformation of labour power, money . . . in terms of energy which circulates and which is exchanged, that is, which is metamorphosised.18 Painting as a libidinal economy must reject any investment in the ‘act’ of painting or the artist’s intentions; any theoretical set-up must be shattered and the way that painting is spoken about must change. Buren’s essays are referred to as close to the process of ‘liquefaction’ as are the steps initiated by two painters from the group Support/surface who list the different gestures, tools, media and processes by which painting as a set-up proceeds. But they do not go far enough according to Lyotard, who asks: ‘why is it that skin is not listed among the supports? Tattooing is painting’. Skin, he suggests, is not considered sufficiently ‘noble’ in the West and as such he recognizes the importance of Yves Klein’s prints of blue nudes on white canvases (Anthropométries, 1960) as an example of taking the skin seriously ‘. . . not as a support, but rather as a vehicle for making connections’.19 The reference to skin is significant and returns again at the end of the essay in the discussion of the ‘polymorphous perverse space’ of modern painting, a phrase that deliberately refers to Freud’s description of the child’s relation to the surface of the body ‘where all erotic inscriptions are possible’ and energetics are mobilized continually, invested and reinvested with impunity.20 At this point we can turn Lyotard’s attention to those artists whose actions did push the dissolution of established set-ups at the time he was writing and highlight the importance of L’art Corporel [Body Art] in Paris. The pivotal figure associated with L’art Corporel was François Pluchart who gave a platform to the ideas, discussions and performances of artists working with the body including Michel Journiac and Gina Pane in Paris and the New York-based artist Vito Acconci. In an action titled Applications (1970) Acconci seems to push the potential of skin as both support and vehicle, taking the ‘chromatic inscription’ of lipstick beyond its established set-up. Lipstick is applied to Acconci’s body by collaborator Kathy Dillon through thick lipstick kisses across his arms and chest, which Acconci then transfers by rubbing his chest onto the back of the third collaborator, Dennis Oppenheim, while the whole is simultaneously transferred to the skin of a 20-minute film. Yves Klein’s prints were a precedent for both Acconci’s Applications and another work which involved prints from the body, Trademarks (1970), in which Acconci bit different parts of his body, stretching as far as he could reach and biting deeply enough to create an impression from which he could take a print – rolling his skin with ink to act as

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a printing block. The documentation of such works was disseminated in France predominantly through magazines. Of particular importance was arTitudes, founded in 1971 by Pluchart who asserted that: ‘Body art is not an avant-garde. It is a permanent wound to the hollow of binary thought.’21 In an interview for arTitudes Acconci emphasizes the importance of change in his work, explaining that the aim of his activities was to arrive at a state where he is no longer in control, ‘where something else has taken control of me’; he also describes how he uses installations to create a private space, one which is deliberately different to the ‘opening up’ of a happening but is rather ‘like a spy who observes an action’.22 In November 1972 Acconci’s work was presented in a solo show, Anchors, at the Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, which prompted a further celebration of Acconci’s work in the newly re-launched, now partly bilingual arTitudes International . Acconci remained an important figure for Pluchart in his conception of L’art Corporel , which became manifest in an exhibition and catalogue of the same name in 1974 at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, where he declared that L’art Corporel ‘is not a new artistic recipe meant to be recorded tranquilly in a history of art which is bankrupt’.23 A more cautious response to Acconci was drawn by Philippe du Vignal, writing in the Paris-based art magazine Art Press in February 1973. Approaching the work from the context of theatre Vignal sees Acconci as rupturing traditional modes, introverting the theatrical act through his focus on intimate gestures and removing the spectator from the scene of the action. His consideration of Acconci emphasizes the role of recording and documentation, as typified by the Anchors show, rather than by live performance. Interestingly, however, Vignal links Acconci’s activities to the libidinal discourse with which we are concerned in this chapter and quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus : ‘There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other [. . .].’ The approach of Acconci cannot be detached from the society which produced it and must be perceived as a function of it: unlike all théâtre vivant [live theatre], with him there is no rebellion against the established order.24 Contrary to Pluchart’s assertion that ‘Body art is not an avant-garde’, Vignal assumes that it ought to operate according to those traditions of avantgardism, which Peter Bürger analysed in his 1974 book Theory of the AvantGarde as follows: ‘The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art

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by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life.’25 Vignal argues that, because all social systems are produced by desire, Acconci’s amplification of intimate acts, or the exploration of his body in line with symptoms of ‘pathological’ disorders, do not render his acts ‘truly subversive’. It would be another matter, however, continues Vignal, were Acconci to remove himself from the commercial art world and its circulation of commodified objects, and to ‘truly integrate himself into quotidian life’, following the example, he suggests, of Afro-American performance artist Adrian Piper. On the one hand, Vignal’s concern over the sociopolitical role of art is typical of many debates at this time, and his resistance to the circulation of Acconci’s performance documentation within the commercial art world accords with attempts to circumvent that system, but neither Deleuze nor Lyotard viewed such complicity as incompatible with their description of liberated libidinal forces and the argument that there is no separation between desiring-production and social production, counteracts any assumption that it is possible to work outside the dominant system of capitalist commodification. Lyotard similarly calls for the end to the fiction of art as autonomous and also advocates a need to move away from officially sanctioned sites for art, but this second move is not the same as ‘the integration into the praxis of life’ of which Bürger writes, or that which Vignal champions in Piper’s street performances. Moving art away from the security of the gallery is only one part of the process of liquidification of art’s processes. Lyotard does not permit a fi xed position to be taken, as can be seen in an interview from 1970 where the interviewer proffers Daniel Buren’s critique of Michael Heizer’s desert sculptures as lacking the criticality of work in the city, to which Lyotard replies: ‘Yes I believe he is completely right. But it is interesting all the same, from an experimental point of view, because an attempt is made to deconstruct the traditional space of sculpture and to invert it.’26 Lyotard accepts that the artist who investigates the dilution of materials and structures is important because of the interconnectedness between revolution in the arts and social and political revolution: If the proletariat does not grasp the fact that the question now is one of a deconstruction, here and now, of the economic and social forms within which it is caught [. . .], if it does not perceive that there is something absolutely analogous between what must be done today to social reality and what is done on a canvas or within a sonorous space, not only will it not encounter the problem of art, it will never come upon revolution.27

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What is important to recognize here is Lyotard’s openness to a variety of differing approaches to a revolutionary working in the arts; for example, he expressed welcome surprise at the successes of the 22 March Movement in 1968, which played a significant role in the lead-up to the May events, recognizing that everyday activities could become revolutionary because they were questioning the system and not following an organization, they were ‘starting to criticize the here and now’. At the outset of ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’ Lyotard clearly declares the interrelationship between a libidinal economy of painting and a political economy to be fundamental: ‘it is wholly impossible to articulate one without articulating its connection with the other’, but this relationship for Lyotard does not rely on the ‘autonomy’ which Vignal expounds, nor on a removal of the artist from the circuit of the art world.28 Lyotard’s consideration is, rather, the freeing up of libidinal desire, not through critique or necessarily through a break from traditions but through their extension. However, there is some ambiguity at the end of the essay: on the one hand Lyotard advocates the ‘problem of painting as a problem of non-painting’, calling for a dissolution of the limits to the regulated spaces where art takes place, but Lyotard then capitulates, anticipating the objection – the limit cannot be eliminated ‘because we cannot not be in representation’.29 Lyotard considers this question elsewhere in Des dispositifs pulsionnels with reference to the ‘theatrical-representative set-up’.

‘Theatrical-representative Set-up’ First we must recognize the difference between Lyotard’s analysis of representation and the tradition of ideological critique – the position of Vignal, for example. For Lyotard the representational set-up is a seduction, not an illusion, because the viewing subject is aware of the theatrical apparatus. Capitalism has reached a point where strategies to expose the internal workings of representation can be the source of profit, rather than critique: ‘Capitalism has caught up with Brecht, as it were,’ as Readings puts it.30 This is because the internal workings of the ‘theatre of representation’ can be exposed without drawing attention to the limit of the space of representation – whether the limits of the Greek Polis, the boundary between theatre and ‘reality’, or the walls of the museum. The ‘outside’, that which is beyond the limit of representation, can only be thought of in terms of an absence – which is still to think of it in the conceptual terms that belong to the inside of representation. Lyotard refers to this paradox as ‘mise en extériorité à l’intérieur ’

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which Readings translates as ‘a placing outside [that takes place] on the inside’.31 Consequently anything that is outside representation is rendered on the inside as the ‘Great Zero’, thereby reducing all affective intensities and the singularity of events to the diachronic sequencing of narration that is reducing it to the conceptual formulations of the inside. In opposition to this, according to Readings: ‘Lyotard demands a figural affirmation of the event as a singularity irreducible to the theatre of representation’, hence Lyotard’s interest in the question of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ as discussed in the previous chapter; the suspension of an automatic diachronic temporality in Monory; and as we will see later in this chapter: the heuristic approach to the function of the line in the work of Adami.32 In drawing attention to these examples of ‘figural affirmation’ Lyotard is questioning the privilege that is usually given to a ‘theatrical-representational type of thinking’ which is, as Geoffrey Bennington remarks, but ‘one dispositif among many’ yet whose dominance results in the assumption that desire is created by lack, rather than ‘a certain desire which produces a set-up dominated by lack’.33 This distinction highlights the particular role of lack, or its equivalent, in Lyotard’s thought and its importance in spite of the antagonistic response from figures who were seemingly close to his libidinal politics, particularly Deleuze and Guattari. It is the complexity of Lyotard’s relation to a conception of lack which will be the focus of the next section.

Desire and Lack In Michel Foucault’s introduction to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus he celebrates Deleuze and Guattari’s questioning, their asking how to proceed and how to put desire into discourse, part of which involves withdrawing ‘. . . allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality’.34 It is for retaining such aspects of the negative that Deleuze and Guattari criticize Lyotard within the pages of Anti-Oedipus : . . . despite his attempt at linking desire to a fundamental yes, Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire; maintains desire under the law of castration, at the risk of restoring the entire signifier along with the law; and discovers the matrix of the figure in fantasy, the simple fantasy that comes to veil desiring-production, the whole of desire as effective production. But at least for an instant the mortgage of the signifier was raised . . .35

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In the wider context of Lyotard’s other libidinal writings, apart from Discourse, Figure , it is easier to align Lyotard’s conception of desire to that of affirmation and Nietzschean force: for example Libidinal Economy ends with the repetition: ‘yes, yes, yes’.36 Several of the essays in Des dispositifs pulsionnels and Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud highlight the instability and ambiguity in Freud’s categorizations of desire, arguing that desire as force (as manifest in the primary process) is mistakenly assumed to operate in the same machinic, end-driven manner as desire-as-wish. As such, it might be forgiven if we were to assume that Lyotard turned to an increasingly affirmative libidinal philosophy, in response to this criticism, and that the equivalence of Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari in approach would therefore be justified. In Discourse, Figure however, Lyotard’s use of Freud is notably more reverential and it merits consideration in order that we can better understand the role which lack and absence play both in this book and his later writings on art, specifically the essays on Adami. Between Lyotard and Deleuze there is clearly a respect for each other’s work. Deleuze wrote a short but favourable review of Discourse, Figure in La Quinzaine Littéraire (May, 1972) parts of which are incorporated into AntiOedipus. There are three sections of Anti-Oedipus which discuss Discourse, Figure , praising Lyotard’s work as ‘. . . the first generalised critique of the signifier’.37 But, having praised his celebration of the figural element as desire, Deleuze and Guattari question the role he gives to transgression, arguing that it results in deformation rather than transformation: But what can explain the reader’s impression that Lyotard is continually arresting the process, and steering the schizzes toward shores he has so recently left behind: toward coded or overcoded territories, spaces, and structures, to which they bring only ‘transgressions’, disorders, and deformations that are secondary in spite of everything, instead of forming and transporting further the desiring-machines that are in opposition to the structures, and the intensities that are in opposition to the spaces?38 The role of disorder and transgression is key to the difference between Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari, a difference that can also be seen in the later writings on painting. As indicated in the quotation, transgression and deformation are central characteristics of the figural in Lyotard’s writing: the figural works within structured systems of representation and it is through deformation that the presence of desire is signalled. However, if we continue Lyotard’s argument from ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’ we are

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reminded that what appears as disorder only appears as such from within a regulative system. The effects of the death-drive (‘disordering, disorganized, deconstructing’) can only be described in a negative way ‘because we are in a place from which this regulation by the zero or by the infinite of the drive can only appear as deregulation’.39 Lyotard accepts that transgression cannot operate without a limit whereas in the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari there is no ‘beyond’ – as Williams notes – and therefore no limit.40 Deleuze and Guattari’s desire is not Freud’s desire as lack but desire as force , following a Nietzschean affirmation of desire as will. In Anti-Oedipus they rail against the Freudian conception of psychoanalysis as based on the repression of instinctual desire and attack the Oedipus complex as the symbol of repression under which desire is subjugated to a system founded on guilt and debt. According to Deleuze and Guattari it is the idea of repression we suffer from, not repression as an externally applied force. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is collective and not limited to ego-bound subjects; it exists as an endless flow of forces which rise up to actualize change through ‘desiring-production’: ‘In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as lack, rather than a process of production, of “industrial” production.’41 As such there can be no absence, lack or fantasy in their conception of desire, only immanent potentialities, possibilities of becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is a change of state without beginning or end, part of the ongoing process of becoming different that is posited as an alternative to the traditional ontological formation of a fi xed being. Their conception of becoming focuses on becoming ‘minor’, whether recognized in the minor literature of Kafka, where his use of language renders him in a minoritarian position, or through ‘becoming-woman’, which recognizes the position held by women in patriarchal culture.42 In both cases ‘minor’ is not a pejorative but a positive position that challenges the despotic status of ‘major’ forces which are built on myths of essence and originality. Given Deleuze and Guattari’s relentless parody of the ‘great Kastrator’ in Anti-Oedipus and their unequivocal response to the Oedipal set-up as the repressive system, it might seem fruitless to attempt a reconciliation of Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard on this point; but it does force a return to Lyotard’s own response to Freud – for that is the context of both these books – searching for an alternative response that does not succumb solely to the dominance of Lacan. Before proceeding we should note the important impact of Lacan’s seminars for many philosophers in Paris during the 1950s and 60s and while

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his passive response to the events of 1968 irritated many, his re-reading of Freud made the language of psychoanalysis a significant tool in the period that followed, aided perhaps by the multiplicity of cultural and philosophical contexts to which Lacan refers and the depiction of a fragmented ‘self’ which lent itself to structuralist and post-structuralist interpretations. In the Anglophone context Lacan’s work served as an alternative to the reductive use of Freud by ego-psychologists, particularly in North America, and the Lacanian models of subjectivity and the role of spectatorship in the formation of the (unstable) self, lent his work to investigations of fi lm and issues of gender, discussions which were particularly evident in the British journal Screen in the 1970s.43 However, in Discourse, Figure Lyotard directly confronted ideas which were central to Lacan’s approach to Freud, particularly the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language, in his eponymously titled argument ‘The dream-work does not think’. The relationship between the thought of Lyotard and Lacan with regard to desire is covered by Peter Dews’ review of Discourse, Figure as follows: . . . the dispute between Lyotard and Lacan has a significant political dimension. Since, for Lacan, desire is not a force, it cannot clash with any other force: desire may be the victim of a paradox, but not of a coercion. [. . .] By contrast . . . Discourse, Figure is a critique of discourse in the name of its distorted and distorting others.44 The perceived risks of Lacan’s increasing influence and his position as the dominating discourse in psychoanalysis in France are clearly evident in Deleuze and Lyotard’s jointly authored letter to Les Temps Modernes in 1975. They object to the influence of Lacan within the Psychoanalysis Department of Vincennes where Lacan had no official position yet under whose instruction changes were taking place that Deleuze and Lyotard describe as ‘a Stalinist operation’.45

Deleuze and Lyotard In November 1995, following news of the death of Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard wrote to Le Monde des livres : Meaning is an unexpected flower, a supplement of tension which grows out of an encounter imperceptible to hermeneutics and other semiotics.

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The flower opens without a sound, it is an accent, a tone, a strange mode of the voice, of a voice which is not mine nor that of things, a figural, as he said of Francis Bacon.46 The proliferation of interest in Deleuze, particularly since his death, is accompanied by new considerations of desire which echo Lyotard’s libidinal writings very strongly – Elizabeth Grosz’s 2008 Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth is one example. Because of the close proximity of Lyotard and Deleuze, it is rewarding to carefully consider the differences among their many apparent similarities, and here I am consciously making no distinction between those writings authored singly by Deleuze and those written collaboratively with Guattari.47 The manner in which both Lyotard and Deleuze write on art might be described as writing with art and artists rather than about them, insomuch as they give prominence to the ideas, statements and working methods described, and privilege the role of the artist as enacting a different type of thought, but one analogous to the philosopher’s. This peculiarly French fantasy regarding the special role of art has a legacy in the tradition of the writer’s or philosopher’s essay on art, whether Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire or Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Yve-Alain Bois, writing in 1990, attacked the tradition as ‘more often than not an efflorescence of condescending words uttered by a complacent man of letters’ I will argue that Lyotard’s critical self-reflexivity with regard to the task pervades his writings.48 The importance of maintaining the difference of the visual is central to both Deleuze and Lyotard and it is because of a sensitivity to the peculiarities of the visual that their writings strive to work with that difference, rather than to reduce it to a written form. Both Deleuze and Lyotard work knowingly with the paradox of writing about art – evoking rather than capturing its force – and it is in wrestling with this dilemma that their approaches can be particularly rewarding. I will discuss two pieces in particular: Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) which is his most extensive work on a single artist, and Lyotard’s ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ (1983) on the Italian artist Valerio Adami. I have chosen to focus on this essay because it highlights aspects of separation and questioning, which encapsulate the differing approaches of Lyotard and Deleuze already apparent in their earlier exchange at the time of the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in 1972 and which their shared use of the term ‘figural’ might belie.

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Let Us Start with the figural In Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon we find many terms familiar to both Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s lexicon – sensation, Bodies without Organs, deterritorialization – but Deleuze also introduces the term ‘figural’, with specific reference to Lyotard’s usage in Discourse, Figure : [Painting] has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the ‘figural’ to the figurative.49 Explicitly Deleuze uses the term ‘figural’ in order to differentiate Bacon’s use of the figure from a representational, figurative approach to painting, and his subsequent use of a capitalized ‘F’ for Figure, in reference to Bacon, brings with it that distinction. However, the figural is more than just a mark of formal distinction and encapsulates that which is central to Bacon’s work for Deleuze – his striving for a different figuration that avoids clichéd forms of figurative representation and which works instead with sensations. Deleuze writes of sensation, following Cézanne and Bacon, as impacting directly on the nervous system, bypassing the modes of communication which need cerebral decoding: the ‘violence of sensation’ is an affective sensation coming from matter itself.50 The approach of Bacon, according to Deleuze, is one which rejects a figuration that is too sensational, in the colloquial sense, and which relies on forms of narrative for its dramatic impact. Deleuze highlights Bacon’s own hesitation regarding the famous series of screaming popes, based on Velásquez’ portraits of Pope Innocent X, and his caution with regard to anything which might be construed as a scene of horror for fear that it could lapse into narrative. Bacon’s declaration of intent: ‘I want to paint the scream more than the horror’ is repeated twice by Deleuze and again in the preface to the English edition; thus in someway becoming a leitmotif of the book it emphasizes the importance, for Deleuze, of not representing mimetically but through sensation: ‘The violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the represented (the sensational, the cliché).’51 Deleuze suggests that Bacon questions presumptions with regard to the representation of horror and violence, through his rejection of established codes of representation and likens the process to that of Antonin Artaud – who forces a rethinking of what we understand to be cruelty – similarly, horror is rethought in Bacon’s

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paintings. Therefore, despite Bacon’s own misgivings about the overly sensational screaming popes, Deleuze maintains their centrality as part of the search for a violence which is invisible: ‘. . . it is rather the way in which the Pope himself sees nothing, and screams before the invisible .’52 In this search for the underlying, disruptive forces of sensation we can identify the importance of Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure to Deleuze, one which outweighs the book’s single reference to the term ‘figural’. The role of Discourse, Figure is highlighted by Ronald Bogue who gives an overview of Lyotard’s use of the figural and acknowledges that while Deleuze ‘does not embrace all aspects of Lyotard’s concept’ he relates the figural to sensation and affect but ‘without resorting to the theoretical presuppositions of Freudian psychoanalysis or conventional phenomenology’.53 It is to further question the extent of the confusion between Deleuze and Lyotard that we must consider their different responses to Freud. In Discourse, Figure the figural is initially equated with the visible of the ‘mobile eye’ which exposes the limitations of structuralist linguistics, but Lyotard is not merely wishing to re-inscribe a phenomenological sensibility onto language. Rather, Lyotard intends to draw attention to the figural as that which falls outside signification, and to figure the blocking together of the incommensurable, not through opposition but by highlighting difference. It is in a critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘One’ [On] as another system of totalization that Lyotard shifts the figural from the visible eye to the eye of desire. In this shift to the figural as desire, Freud’s conception of the unconscious and the workings of the primary process become central to Lyotard’s new conception of the figural. The process of using then rejecting phenomenology constitutes, for Lyotard, the most important enactment of the figural as an event in the book itself: One might ask: since you argue that the order of the perceptive One covers up that of the Id, why not simply discard the mask and erase the former? I would answer that this displacement is precisely what constitutes the event for me in this book.54 As already noted, Discourse, Figure is a detailed and complex work in which the shift to the language of psychoanalysis is a turn away from the dominant philosophical figures of both his own formation – his fi rst book was Phenomenology, written in 1954 – and the phenomenology of his supervisor for the Doctorat d’État Mikel Dufrenne. It is therefore an important ‘working through’ of diverse materials in a self-reflexive manner, which must not only resist any attempts to create an alternative system but also

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avoid merely duplicating the oppositional approach against which the figural is employed. Lyotard considers the figure operating within discourse not as opposed to it, but as given ‘thickness’ through the ‘energetics’ of the eye, a process he equates with the approach to painting by Paul Klee and Jackson Pollock. 55 Both Deleuze and Lyotard refer to Klee’s working methods as instances of the search for a figuration that attempts to free itself from the restrictive modes of perception and formulaic means of representation. They both quote Klee’s aim: ‘not to render the visible, but to render visible’. 56 In addition Lyotard’s discussion of Klee cites the different attempts by which Klee aims to free himself from the constraints of figurative representation, including Note 822 from Klee’s diaries: Genesis of a work 1) Draw strictly from nature, possibly using a telescope. 2) Turn No. 1 upside down and emphasize the main lines according to your feelings. 3) Return the drawing paper to its initial position and bring 1 = nature and 2 = picture into harmony. Munich 1908.57 For Lyotard, it is the combination and reconciliation of the first two steps, in the third, which controls the imagery released in the second, thereby creating not a merely personal, phantasmatic image but one which plays with the possibilities the working has opened up, controlled through ‘double reversal’.58 Through such processes Klee creates an inter-world, his zwischenwelt . Deleuze recognizes in the in-between point, that Klee termed the ‘grey point’, a process familiar to those modern artists who play with chaos, embracing it as a necessary stage and part of the process to ‘unlock dimensions of sensation’. 59 How an artist embraces this moment of chaos is described by Deleuze, however, as a specifically ‘pictorial’ not ‘psychological’ experience, which is in contrast to Lyotard’s psychoanalytic account. As David Rodowick notes: There is an important link here between Lyotard and Deleuze [. . .] in seeking alternatives to the reigning traditions of philosophies of representation. Concepts of Idea, image, and phantasm circulate in their philosophies, though in very different ways.’60 It is therefore useful to bear this distinction in mind as we discuss the approach of Deleuze and Lyotard to, respectively, Bacon and Adami, in

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order to highlight more clearly the extent to which Deleuze’s adoption of the figural is an extension of, or a removal from, that which Lyotard proffers.

Bacon and Adami Lyotard wrote two catalogue essays to accompany exhibitions of work by Valerio Adami, both of which are incorporated into the book Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren, published in 1987 by Éditions de la Différence as part of the same series as Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation . Both publications are double volume editions consisting of one volume of plates, and one of text. It is Lyotard’s essay ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ which I will use here to parallel Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon in order to highlight the role of distance and separation in Lyotard’s account which makes it markedly different to that of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. Lyotard’s essay was first published to accompany an exhibition of Adami’s work at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1983 in a lavishly illustrated edition of the in-house magazine repères: cahiers d’art contemporain . The Galerie Maeght had long been a significant presence in the Parisian art world and market, having represented many artists considered as central to the modernist canon – Jean Miró, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore – while also showing the work of younger artists from Europe in the post-war period and from the United States in the 1980s, for example Jim Dine and Ed Kienholz whose work was shown in 1982/3. Catalogue essays for the Maeght’s publications were commissions from leading art historians and philosophers and previous shows of Adami’s work had featured essays by Hubert Damisch and Jacques Derrida in 1975 and by Italo Calvino in 1980. Although Lyotard no longer uses the term ‘figural’ in this essays on Adami, he does refer to discussions which are central to Discourse, Figure , particularly the distinction between letter and line and the extent to which their functions overlap yet operate in significantly different ways. Lyotard is at pains to uphold this difference in order that the figural aspect of the line is not enclosed by the letter – that the visible aspect of the line is not written out when it is written about: this is the paradox that is at the heart of Lyotard’s writings on art. In the Adami issue of repères the reproductions of drawings, paintings and Lyotard’s lines construct a dialogue between demands, expectations and styles – the forcefulness of the line and the forms it suggests are questioned by the disrupted arrangement of space and the staged interlocutors

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(a frequent device used by Lyotard) which question our assumptions with regard to the function of the line. The stylistic strategy used by Lyotard gives presence to the lines themselves in the work of Adami, described as ‘inhabited by a desire’, they ‘. . . make a demand’.61 It is unsurprising that Lyotard moulds his essay around the line because Adami’s is an odd line – strong, bold, decisive and beautifully curved, it opens up the picture plane to allow space in, if only the intersecting of planes would conform to the rules of illusion which we have been taught to expect. Even when a clearly delineated form, such as a figure, is cut from the background and its smoothness allows the illusion of a powerful three-dimensionality to emerge in a classical, sculptured manner, it is not permitted to exist without being overrun: either by the background colour (which will claim some part of the body), or by an abandoned line (which leaves part of the form missing) or by a shift in chromatic tone which does not allow the hand and head to coexist on the same plane. The following quotation from Lyotard’s text indicates the approach he takes: quoting the artist, he uses these comments as prompts to his own discussion: Adami quotes Diderot: ‘To paint the way they talked in Sparta.’ On April 9, 1981, he drew a Promenade du sceptique [Walk of the Skeptic]: the man, barefoot, walks on his head, the woman holds a magnifying mirror. She is sliced down the middle from top to toe. It would require this laconism in order to comment on the drawing and recover its tenderness. Diderot said that pictures are like great mutes. They disavow beforehand everything we write about them.62 Quoting Adami, who is quoting Diderot, has the effect of distancing Lyotard’s own voice which is, consequently, rarely felt in a direct way but is replaced by an internal dialogue in which the drawings and the lines themselves play a significant role. The lines are described as belonging to an already existing continuum of possibilities, reminding us of their anteriority: they are there before Adami and his decision to select some, and silence others. So too, argues Lyotard, the picture is there before the critic, anticipating that which will be written: ‘the line anticipates commentary and eludes it.’63 In some respects the materiality of the line, and its independence from either artist or commentator, is similar to that described by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘Percept, Affect, and Concept’ (1991), perhaps their clearest statement about the role and functioning of the arts. Here the artistic

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gesture is described as existing independently of the artist and viewer: ‘The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.’64 Deleuze and Guattari argue that such a conceptualization of sensation is possible because humans are themselves only collections of forces, having arisen from the intense flows of forces, not the source of life in a vitalist sense but a changing, unstable chaos without fixed origin from which unanticipated folds can emerge, and are not privileged creators or receivers of sensation.65 The questions which have been levelled at Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of flows concern the creation of a privileged space – whether for desire, the flux of forces or indeed for art – are they positing an idealized ‘beyond’ which is a return to transcendence in another guise? Judith Butler asks such questions of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire as a flux of affirmative force in her 1987 publication Subjects of Desire. The main thrust of the book is an assessment of the role of desire in the Hegelian subject, as described both by Hegel in Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and as adopted by philosophers in France in the twentieth century. Butler’s thesis is that even in the work of those thinkers for whom Hegel became synonymous with totalization and teleology, the self-reflexive, unstable self can be traced to Hegel’s discussions of the divided self in the famous ‘Lordship and Bondage’ section of the Phenomenology. Butler gives serious consideration to Deleuze’s writings on Nietzsche, which predate Deleuze’s meeting with Guattari in 1969, praising the process by which he questions the assumption that desire must be conceptualized as lack, arguing that it is a socio-historic formation based on that which Nietzsche terms a ‘slave-morality’ characteristic of Judeo-Christian ideology.66 It is this ‘slave morality’ that Deleuze and Guattari recognized as inherent to both psychoanalysis and advanced capitalism and which, therefore, form the foci of their attack in Anti-Oedipus. Butler’s critique is twofold – first she argues that Deleuze’s portrayal of the Hegelian subject as life-denying and negative contrasts with the description given by Hegel in the preface to the Phenomenology which celebrates: ‘the achievement of the “labour of the negative”, the “lightness” at the end of Hegel’s admittedly arduous journey’.67 Secondly, Butler questions the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmative desire suggesting that in refusing to place it as historically or culturally conditioned it must be posited as ‘an ontological rather than a culturally conditioned historical experience’, and is therefore contrary to Deleuze’s initial project, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), to ‘historicize desire’; instead ‘his arcadian vision of precultural libidinal chaos poses as an ahistorical absolute’.68 The ironic conclusion is, for Butler, that Deleuze’s conception of desire as an affirmative, life-embracing plenitude relies on

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‘the dream of reconstituting that lost unity of Being’ which is at the heart of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Butler’s critique makes an important claim for the residual importance of Hegelian subjectivity within post-structuralist thought, albeit one that is significantly reformulated to emphasize the unstable nature of the subject and the non-teleological becomings of Geist , but her reading of Deleuze potentially misreads his position, and by implication that of Deleuze and Guattari. First, Butler repeatedly links Deleuze to a ‘life-affirming desire’ implying a vitalist position with a belief in an external source of creation and the preservation of individual life. Secondly, the framework within which Butler is thinking is in relation to a form of individualized subjectivity – the basis of which is attacked not only by Deleuze but also by those philosophical precursors, Nietzsche and Spinoza, to whom he turns as an alternative to the dominance of Hegelian thought. As a result, Butler sees Deleuze’s as an ‘emancipatory’ project oriented towards resurrecting an original desire which is ‘a version of absolute presence’. Deleuze responds to such accusations with a further explanation of desire, explaining that it is not a natural state that is returned to but something which exists when it is ‘assembled or machined . You cannot grasp or conceive of a desire outside a determinate assemblage, on a plane which is not preexistent but which must itself be constructed’.69 This quotation emphasizes the extent to which desire, being mobilized only through ‘construction’ is neither an idealized pre-world, nor a utopian metaphysical goal that exists in a ‘beyond’, but rather that desire is immanent: ‘There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.’70 This argument can also be applied to the way that ‘sensation’ is presented by Deleuze and Guattari; they argue that sensation comes from matter, not as something stable but as a constantly shifting potential that can open up the difference that normalization has closed. This is not a return to a prior state but an opening of that which is closed to human perception through the activation of a potential futurity contained within the ‘vibration’ of the sensation.71 In What is Philosophy? art is a privileged space, but not in the sense that it is usually conceived: for Deleuze and Guattari it is always potentially there – not a transcendent beyond, nor a space separate from the social, but one that has the force to think difference. Unsurprisingly, such claims have presented difficulties for both art historians and those working in aesthetics; as Stephen Zepke noted in a spoken seminar, it is Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts, particularly the Rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus, which have been taken up by the contemporary art world, rather than their writings on art in relation to affect, percept and sensation.72

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Having made the connection between desire and sensation we can bring this discussion back specifically to Francis Bacon and the phrase ‘to paint the scream more than the horror’. The sensation which is heightened in this phrase, and to which Deleuze draws our attention, is the temporal interlude before the unknown: to paint the scream prior to the horror not only in a chronological sense but also prior to our conception of what that sensation might be. Both Deleuze and Lyotard are taking an approach to painting which is unusual, as Mary Lydon, the English translator of ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, explains: ‘Lyotard strives, like Adami, for the inexpressible . . . Such a strategy is no doubt foreign to the Anglo-American critical perspective, generally speaking, and might easily be dismissed as a French extravagance. But this would be regrettable . . .’.73 A double page spread from Lyotard’s essay shows how it comprises several voices: ‘He’, ‘She’, ‘The other’, and finally, in the concluding section, ‘Me’. This collection of voices is another strategy to complicate the position of Lyotard as the writer and to allow the lines within the pictures to form themselves into words; consequently there emerges a polyphonic chorus. The voice labelled ‘the other’ appeals to the archaic time of classical mythology, prompted by the subject matter of Adami’s drawings, and to the passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: from man to woman (Tireseas), woman to sound (Echo) or woman to tree (Myrrha), noting that each passage relies on distance and separation. In contrast, the processes of becoming which Deleuze and Guattari describe, have neither beginning nor end. Writing of Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze recognizes the process of ‘becoming-animal’ which is not a passage from human to animal but a becoming through the ‘fact’ of a common zone between man and beast, where the body attempts to ‘escape from itself’ and dissipate into an assemblage of forces.74 Deleuze writes that Bacon’s paintings are not of faces but heads, not of flesh but meat, and what this ‘constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal’ where animal traits and animal spirit are actualized.75 According to Deleuze, Bacon sees meat not with horror but as a ‘fact’. If we take this as an instance of the immanent, affirmative and transformative desire which concerns Deleuze, we can identify a difference in approach when Lyotard writes of the process of passage in ‘It’s as if a line. . .’. Lyotard’s voice, ‘The other’, writes that separation is essential to representation and it is that which Narcissus cannot attain: ‘Without the work of this mourning there will be no representation. Narcissus is not an artist but a representation of impossible art.’76 Impossible because the thread between image and object, word and thing, can never be removed: ‘distanciation’ is a prerequisite of representation and language. It is this which preoccupied Lyotard in Discourse, Figure : ‘For one needn’t be immersed

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in language [langage] in order to be able to speak; the “absolute” object, the language-system [langue], does not speak.’77 This position echoes the double-bind of writing about art and performance, indicated in the introduction with reference to Philip Auslander’s warning that the separation between performer and viewer can never be removed, without the destruction of performance. Auslander goes on to quote Sean Cubitt: ‘The more you approach a performer, the more you inhabit the very performance you are there to see. No matter how much the performer gives, no matter how intensively you attend to her, the gap remains between.’78 Earlier in the Adami essay, ‘The other’ similarly meditates on the writer’s task, which is to represent the lines of Adami: ‘What is that capacity of drawing, to escape from the letter?’79 It is in this ability to escape that the figural resides, not to be recouped into the strictures of a system such as writing, but to signal that the task of art is unfulfilment: ‘If desire can be fulfilled in the work of art, then the work of art gives something to hope for. I believe that what is revolutionary is precisely to hope for nothing.’80 This clearly differentiates Lyotard’s position from those who use psychoanalytic theory, Freud included, to analyse art as if it were a symptom, an exteriorization of the artist’s phantasy. Lyotard explicitly rejects such reductive readings of art: it was clear in the citation of Paul Klee’s working method that Lyotard recognized Klee’s efforts to avoid the simple production of a phantasy and go beyond a consideration of the work of art as the fulfilment of desire. But how might we understand the role of desire and phantasy at work in the voice of ‘The other’ while restricting ourselves, for the moment at least, to the historical context of the doubleedged comments by Deleuze and Guattari on the role of desire in Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure : ‘. . . despite his attempt at linking desire to a fundamental yes, Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire . . .’?81 In chapter three of Anti-Oedipus two passages refer to Discourse, Figure , both in sections referring to representation and designation. Here the impact of Lyotard’s work is acknowledged in what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘territorial representation’: using the eye to see the word, not to read it, thereby disturbing attempts to overcome the heterogeneous representation of words and things, with the resulting effect that ‘the eye jumps’. In a footnote Deleuze and Guattari refer to the following passage from Lyotard: Words are not things, but as soon as there is a word, the object designated becomes a sign, which means precisely that it conceals a hidden content within its manifest identity, and that it reserves another face for another viewer focused on it, . . . which perhaps will never be seen.82

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What is not acknowledged by Deleuze and Guattari is the importance that Lyotard attaches to this process of negativity: the extent to which such a process of concealment equates to the source of figural force which will explode as libidinal desire, but which cannot be motivated in the way that Deleuze and Guattari infer, as Lyotard makes clear: ‘Desire is truly unacceptable, one cannot appear to accept it; to accept it is again to reject it, and it will become an event elsewhere.’83 The role of negation in Discourse, Figure has hidden its face from the Anti-Oedipal hunters but it is key to that which differentiates Lyotard’s approach to desire.

Negation in Discourse, Figure It is becoming increasingly clear as this book unfolds that absence and the role of negation in representation are issues central to writing about art and performance. Therefore, the final section of this chapter on the libidinal will focus on Lyotard’s discussion of negation in Discourse, Figure and in doing so prepare the ground for the following chapter which considers Lyotard’s attitude to the body in relation to that which he terms the immaterial. In addition to the syntactical negative of the grammarian or logician – x is not y – Lyotard draws attention to the role of reference as the absence which is hidden in all discourse but which gives it the ability to function. This referential aspect is introduced by Lyotard as a further critique of Saussure through a discussion of Emile Benveniste’s remarks on the characteristics of the personal pronoun ‘I’, as that which names and designates but does not signify. Signification occurs only when the personal pronoun is actualized in discourse, when the pronoun is adopted and thereby given a particular meaning and reference. However, as Benveniste explains, it is through the use of ‘I’ that the speaker positions himself in language and is simultaneously positioned by language, a process which is necessary to signify subjectivity. The use of ‘I’ governs all actualization of language: ‘The ego is that which speaks’; it opens up discourse to that which is positioned outside of signification but which is fundamental to the operation of discourse: The negation upholding the relation of designation is the split that, as it opens between discourse and its object, allows us to speak, since we can only say and have nothing else to say than what we are not, and since it is certain that, conversely, what we cannot say, we are.84

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It is in this latter negativity, ‘that which we cannot say’, that Freud identifies the work of desire, a negation that plays an important role for Lyotard’s discussion of the figural as desire. The section of Discourse, Figure titled ‘The No and the Position of the Object ’ gives an account of the role of spoken negation in analysis through a detailed reading of Freud’s short 1925 essay Die Verneinung [‘Negation’].85 Lyotard highlights the role of negation as signalling the unpresentable presence of desire in discourse – fuelled by the unconscious. Although, for Freud, the unconscious knows no negation, its presence can be indicated in the conscious realm when uttered as denial. Therefore, the persistence of denial in the discourse of the analysand signals the workings of desire, rendered through negation. As Freud argues, ‘Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed’.86 Lyotard pays particular attention to one example given by Freud: a patient recalling a person in a dream: ‘it’s not my mother’ they insist. Freud disregards the negation, as being the work of denial, and concludes ‘So it is his mother’. It is this transgression of the logic of language which constitutes the basis of Lyotard’s analysis as an example of the figural at work. In the statement ‘it’s not my mother’ the patient is able to differentiate between the person in the dream and his mother, following grammatical negation, and to use the structuralist system of opposition to distinguish the mother from all other objects; but it is with the analyst’s shift to ‘it is his mother’ that the negativity of denial is rendered as an affirmation, thereby introducing a different type of negation. Lyotard explains that desire is at work here, indicated through the transgression of conventional linguistic spacings: the mother must be placed outside designation and signification – because dreaming of her is forbidden by virtue of the incest taboo – and in denying that he has dreamed of his mother the patient reconstitutes her as a ‘lost object’ and renders the repressed desire as positive, through the repetition of denial. The mother is thereby simultaneously constituted on different planes in radically heterogeneous forms: reconstituted as a presence in discourse (as a ‘lost object’) the repressed is ‘intellectually’ accepted, while a destructive desire to negate the ‘mother’ remains ‘outside’: ‘it would not even be true to say that the interpreter replaces No with Yes. Rather, she or he goes from the No of syntax to the No of transcendence, the latter being a position “outside”, ekthesis.’87 The ‘no of transcendence’ refers back to Lyotard’s initial discussion of phenomenology and the constitution of objects through the negativity of distance, the process of ‘distanciation’ which, in this case, is necessary to bring

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the dream into articulated discourse. The acceptance of denial on the level of knowledge leads Freud to speculate on the process by which judgement in the formation of both pleasure-ego and reality-ego might be aligned to the ‘primary instinctual impulses’. While the pleasure-ego follows an impulse to introject that which is good and eject that which is bad, the reality-ego establishes an understanding of exteriority based not on an object’s quality but its accessibility and the ability to re-find perceptions externally. Both processes of judgement rely on interior and exterior thus prompting Freud to follow an implied correlation between acceptance by the ego and Eros and between expulsion and the destructive drive, as he writes: The polarity of judgement appears to correspond to the opposition of the two groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affirmation – as a substitute for uniting – belongs to Eros; negation – the successor to expulsion – belongs to the instinct of destruction.88 This correlation presents several problems for Lyotard who points out that the complex process of negation described in relation to repression is undermined by the reductive correlation of ‘No’ as a symbol of negation linked to the destructive drive, despite being accepted intellectually by the patient.89 There is an interesting parallel here with Julia Kristeva’s commentary on Die Verneinung in her 1974 book Revolution in Poetic Language where she also notes that despite the central position of this expulsion to the establishment of the ego for Freud, there is a lack of commentary on the drive which activates it or consideration of either ‘rejection’ or the pleasure that accompanies expulsion. Both Lyotard and Kristeva note the importance of the confusion concerning the establishment of an exterior through expulsion which, as Kristeva remarks, is always in the process of being established – that boundary is ‘never definitively separate’.90 Similarly, Lyotard questions the elision of the two forms of judgement without consideration of what drives the shift from pleasure-ego to reality-ego, also rejecting the implication that the former’s ‘spitting out’ is somehow involved with the constitution of reality. Lyotard explains: What is spat out is what is spat out, and no longer exists for the body of pleasure: it is obliterated. For what has been rejected to be something nonetheless, the drive to destroy must be supplemented by the opposite power to appresent [apprésenter] absence. Then loss may count as loss, the presence of a lack, and the object may count as reality, something that is even when it is not there. But what exactly is this power to render present,

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to ‘reproduce as representation’ an absent object? It is, says Freud, the power of linguistic negation.91 Here is the key to Lyotard’s argument, that while discourse is based on a necessary rupture and distanciation, affirmative desire for the lost object is at the heart of all discourse – ‘the mute support’.92 It is this figural desire, already operating within discourse, which must be released through a reaffirming of that which is ‘annihilated’ by the semiotic sign (of Pierce, Saussure, Husserl, Freud or Lacan) as described by the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy.93 In Kristeva’s terms that unarticulated absence is what she terms the semiotic, the instinctual drives that are at work in language, unsettling its structures, questioning beliefs and challenging the dominant discourses which she terms the symbolic. What is useful here to our consideration of Lyotard’s libidinal is Kristeva’s emphasis on the body as the source of the semiotic, particularly the feminine body. For Kristeva it is the feminine that the patriarchal order has labelled lack because of its power to disrupt, most famously articulated as ‘Powers of Horror’ in Kristeva’s writings on abjection which drew the attention of the art world in the early 1990s.94 Kristeva describes how the body, not exclusively in its feminine form, returns to disrupt the fragile boundaries which were erected at the moment of subjectification, the trace of which remains evident in the physical response to those substances which cross or disturb either the body’s limits – blood, shit, puss – or states of being: jouissance, mental disturbance, physical degeneration. Lyotard’s continuous, twisting, polymorphously perverse libidinal ‘body’ similarly fractures notions of the ‘organic body’ (of Descartes and Euclid) as a bounded constructed subject and rejects the continuous, endless search for meaning preferring the dance, the gesture, ‘becoming at every moment an emotional event, as in Cage’s Theatre Piece ’ or waiting – suspended – shaken by orgasm and the intensity of an earthquake’s tremors which sometimes cannot be heard – only felt.95 The figure of the mute reappears in the Adami essay, as quoted earlier, where Lyotard refers to Diderot’s claim that ‘. . . pictures are like great mutes. They disavow beforehand everything we write about them’.96 Lyotard’s description of the process of drawing contemplates Adami’s seduction: the possibilities presented by the line necessitates the rejection of many, which are reduced to a visual trace, a process evident in the drawings’ erased surfaces. The erasure of some, their ‘sacrifice’, gives an added power to those selected. In order to bring ‘strong configurations’ out of the ‘disorder’ Adami counters the potential proliferation of lines and their multiple possibilities: ‘The line is inhabited by a desire, it has a desire’s infinite power.’97

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The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, used frequently as a metaphor for the inaccessibility of the unconscious and also the subject of one of Adami’s pictures, is used to illustrate the task of the artist – caught between capturing emotion from the ‘watery underworld’ and rendering visible through line.98 We are left with the suspension of ‘affective power’ which is memorialized, rather than realized on the page, in the struggle between form and emotion. It is the same struggle which Freud briefly attends to in Die Verneinung when he remarks that an intellectual acknowledgement of repression does not constitute its removal: ‘We can see how in this the intellectual function is separated from the affective process’ and which was commented on tellingly by Jean Hyppolite in his ‘spoken contribution’ to Lacan’s seminar, as follows: This seems very profound to me. If the psychoanalysed person accepts this, he goes back on negation and yet the repression is still there! I conclude from this that one must give what happens here a philosophical name, a name Freud did not pronounce: negation of the negation. Literally, what transpires here is intellectual, but only intellectual, affirmation qua negation of the negation [. . .] At this point . . . Freud finds himself in a position to be able to show how the intellectual separates from the affective, and to give a formulation of a sort of genesis of judgement, that is, in short, a genesis of thought.99 It is this polarization of the intellectual and the affective which Lyotard repudiates. The ungraspable, personified by Eurydice, will not be brought to the surface through articulated presentation – be it Lyotard’s words or the lines on Adami’s page – but their trace is always felt: ‘If you want to lie with her, Orpheus is told, don’t eye her. He turns round to see her. That look puts her away.’100 ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ reaffirms that the problem which faces Lyotard, as a writer commenting on the visual, is not only a question of doing justice to another medium but is, rather, a problem which is shared by the artist, that of attending to ‘desire’s infinite power’ in the line. When Lyotard writes that ‘his line arouses the graphite in my ball-point’, it is both a nostalgic call to the writer’s own artistic ambitions and a call to that ‘childhood of thought’ which concerns him in The Inhuman: ‘This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off. [. . .] It is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it.’101 Although the rhetorical trope of ‘bearing witness’ is aligned to Lyotard’s writings on the sublime, the parallel with the ‘action’ of Orpheus – in turning round to look at the

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forbidden figure of Eurydice – makes the connections between the different periods of his writing sing, like the song which ‘. . . rose from the dismembered body of Orpheus’, as Lyotard described in 1969: Orpheus turns around. His desire to see the figure overcomes his desire to bring it to the light. Orpheus wants to see in the night, to see night. By trying to see Eurydice, he loses all hope of making her be seen: the figure is that which has no face; it kills the one that looks at it because it fills him with its own night. [. . .] We must stop looking at the problem of art in terms of creation. And as to the wish to look at the night, a work is never more than the proof of a failure to fulfill it.102 This description of Orpheus’ failure and his subsequent destruction at the hands of the Maenad women is an apposite metaphor precisely because his was not a failure but the accomplishment of the destructive desire to ‘look at the night’. For Lyotard, art should disturb, not console, it ought to be born not from the conventions of good form but from the rupture which is embedded in the process of representation. As we have seen, the importance of this rupture is reiterated in Discourse, Figure through a questioning of the premise of Freud’s metapsychological works of the 1920s, including Verneinung, where the simultaneous constitution of reality, subjectivity and desire are attributed to the original split (of identification) and the function of language in this split. Lyotard argues that it is not simply a process of establishing the ‘thread of referential distance’ necessary to language through the child’s establishment of the mother as lost object, but that the question of desire is more complex, as he explains: The scansion of eat-introject and spit-reject is not determined by a rapport with the breast; it marks the rhythm, not cumulative and not referential, of the pleasure-ego’s oscillation between relaxation and tension, governed by the principle of jouissance: ‘we never discover a “no” in the unconscious,’ writes Freud.103 This ‘scansion’ of desire does not fit into the idea of a simultaneous creation of ego and language. What the child proves with his bobbin is that there are two faces to reality, that based on the opposition of absence and presence, which incorporates both systems of signification and designation, but also that which remains hidden – the force which absence is not

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allowed to show. Discourse based on an opposition does not allow the missing to appear and proof of words and acts are required if they are to be accepted as evidence of a shared ‘reality’. For Lyotard the repetition of the patient’s denial ‘it’s not my mother’ brings with it the scansion of desire re-routed into the ‘negativity of transcendence and the play of language’ which, bringing us back to the essay on Adami, ensures that there will always be a separation, not only between the line of the artist and the line of the writer who forms his lines into letters, but between these lines and the objects they represent.104 This is not a melancholic reconciliation to an impossible situation, however, but the affirmation of that which is absent: which reminds us that there is always ‘something rather than nothing’ and that ‘all reconciliation (spiritualist or materialist) is a trap’.105 Deleuze and Guattari attacked Lyotard for clinging to the negation on which they consider the hegemony of desire as lack to be founded, where repression is ultimately figured as the inescapable debt of guilt in the Oedipus complex. Yet, for Lyotard, the process of separation does not necessarily indicate a utopian beyond – the religious space of Hegel’s spirit [Geist] or Merleau-Ponty’s ‘One’ [On] – but a necessary part of activating difference. The line that cannot become letter is what both Lyotard and Deleuze are struggling with in the hope that theirs might simultaneously activate a line of desire that is already there. But Lyotard emphasizes the role of ‘distanciation’ in the passage to representation, which does not merely exclude the object of representation but brings into play the force of its absence, which is released as desire in the line itself. What the line of Adami opens (not encloses) through desire is between form and emotion ‘at the limit of the visible’.106 The process is not that of ‘distanciation’ between subject and object, it does not seek to represent through a phantasmatic lost object, but to reveal an instance of desire. This opening of desire reveals, albeit momentarily, that representation is premised on the establishment of an enclosure, the ‘theatrical-representative set-up’ that removes the mobility of desire and harnesses the circulation of libidinal energies. Yet the fluidity and transformative potential of art objects is the investment which Lyotard makes in his writing, in spite of the ease with which they can be subordinated to the demands of other set-ups. For there is also the something we seek in a face in a Montparnasse night, in a voice on the telephone, something about to happen, a wavering or a direct tone of voice, a silence, a fi xedness, an eruption; but that doesn’t come. And this, far from evoking resentment or disgust, this reserve is loved with the most demanding impatience.107

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Chapter 3

Les Immatériaux : What is Lyotard’s Attitude to the Body?

This chapter continues to draw on Lyotard’s concern for that which representation renders negative, as absence without meaningful signification, but it does so through Lyotard’s own performance. The exhibition Les Immatériaux , co-curated by Lyotard at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, was an artistic performance – a ‘dramaturgy’, in his own words – one which provokes questions which are important to performance research: about communication, the role of the body and our attachment to its materiality.1 These questions parallel those asked by Vito Acconci a decade earlier in his exhibition Anchors, as does a desire to evade dominant ‘articulate’ discourse, or at least to put it into question. What links these two projects together seems close to that which Kristeva ascribes to the body – the semiotic – which was described in the previous chapter as destabilizing the symbolic, focused on the bodily expression which predates the use of symbolic language. When Lyotard later formulates the ‘inhuman’ to include the child as ‘in-fans’ (before speech) he is similarly evoking an affective realm of communication that comes from the body, one which indicates a differend between child and adult, a differend he also refers to as ‘sexual difference’.2 The child is inhuman because she is born too soon, as Freud described, but this affect remains in operation, according to both Lyotard and Kristeva, beyond the confines of a linear temporality: ‘Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen . . .’ mused Lyotard.3 Maurice Blanchot writes that Nietzsche came before Hegel; Lyotard writes that postmodernism is modernism in a nascent state.4 Such is the approach to temporality taken in this chapter which, despite attempts to maintain 1985 – the centenary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – at its centre, will follow Lyotard in his own retroactive investigations, back to phenomenology and forward to childhood. In the account of his riddle

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Zarathustra cries out to the man with the snake in his throat: ‘Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!’: the figure who rises after the ‘good bite’ is ‘No longer shepherd, no longer human – one changed, radiant, laughing !’5

Introduction to Les Immatériaux Reminiscent of the description of the ‘Great Ephemeral skin’ that opens Libidinal Economy – a body opened up and laid out as a single surface along which libidinal charges flow uninterrupted, from anus to the slit-open jejunum, investing energy across the surface of the opened trachea, made like ‘the skeleton of a boat under construction’ and creating an endless Moebian band of zones without beginning or end, front or back, inside or outside – Les Immatériaux transformed the Pompidou into a labyrinth of 30 zones but one without ordered connections, confused rather by its own complexity.6 In his review of the exhibition Pierre Restany, the art critic who promoted Nouveau Réalisme in the 1960s, draws attention to the sensory reach of the exhibition: ‘The visitor will not quickly forget the sound of blood in the entrance hall, Artaud’s cry to the equivalent derm, or the voice of Yves Klein talking about the architecture of the air.’7 I didn’t visit the exhibition, I was at high school in the north of England at the time of Les Immatériaux , though the Centre Georges Pompidou did have a presence: it graced the cover of my French textbook and I also remember a photograph from the ‘First year French trip’ which shows me sitting next to the sculptural fountains by Niki de Saint-Phalle and Yves Tinguely at the centre’s south side. Les Immatériaux seems to lack any equivalent photographic legacy: there is little in the way of a coherent visual trace of the exhibition, despite much archival documentation. Its chaotic floor plan is the closest equivalent or perhaps the rarely shown film by Paul Zajdermann and Daniel Soutif.8 It is the floor plan of Les Immatériaux which John Rajchman chose to reproduce in his overview of Lyotard’s ‘Underground Aesthetics’, an article published in October shortly after Lyotard’s death, in which Rajchman both marks the exhibition ‘as an important part of Lyotard’s oeuvre’ and recognizes its prescience with regard to the technological developments of globalization and the impact of these changes on both ‘physical landscapes and altered ways of thinking and being’9. The need to rethink the implications of these changes, which Lyotard famously termed postmodern, is better articulated by the image of the floor plan, which displays a frighteningly complex attempt to complicate rather than organize space, than by the official logo of the

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exhibition – the whirl of a fingerprint – reproduced on the catalogue and publicity. The fingerprint connotes individuality and the role of physical touch, and although it is edited into a spiral, by the designer Luc Maillot of Grafibus, there remains something misleadingly humanist about this as the exhibition’s central image, although in the context of a multi-media exhibition which emphasized the ‘articificialization of life’ its irony may have been clearer. In fact, it is the dominance of the monochrome reproduction in today’s archival documents that belies the more complex connotations of the colour image, used for the exhibition invitation, where a solar presence is intimated behind the fingerprint’s swirl. This is more in keeping with the dramatic display of interactive, electronic imagery which one of the exhibition team describes, echoing Lyotard’s intentions that the exhibition itself be a work of art, though not one with a coherent message: ‘I keep telling myself, in fact, that the entirety of the exhibition could be thought of as a sign that refers to a missing signified.’10 Could it be that this statement relates to the role of sensory, affective communication – that related to the body – which is evoked in the exhibition’s formulation? Certainly, the aim of the exhibition was not clarity but disorientation, an attempt to emulate the disintegrating boundaries experienced between the body and technology and the corresponding philosophical impact on relations to space and time. The recent resurgence of interest in the exhibition relates mainly to the display of new technologies and the rise of the curator’s importance, but my specific interest in the exhibition concerns the role of the body – both the reference to the body in the exhibition, the bodies of the visitors and the role of the body in sensory communication.11 Lyotard’s consideration of the body’s ‘immateriality’ suggests that there are far-reaching philosophical implications in the technological adaptations which have taken place under modern capitalism. Lyotard’s engagement with these issues dates back not only to his provocative writings in Libidinal Economy and Duchamp’s Transformers but also to his critical engagement with phenomenology, and it is this interrelationship which is explored in this chapter, starting with questions of communication.

‘A Body in Movement’ The textual, in its broadest sense as both written and spoken language, dominated Les Immatériaux , acting as an excess of information which obscured rather than aided attempts to understand the exhibition in a

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conventional sense. The excess is what Derrida and Lacan write about in relation to the inevitable failure of the signifier to match the signified (to sign its referent); it also resonates with Peggy Phelan’s transgressive notion of sexual difference, as that force which neither the conscious nor the symbolic systems of signification can cope.12 There was a deliberate attempt to overwhelm the senses in Les Immatériaux and it is in its extension beyond the visual that the parallel with performance art becomes pertinent. Lyotard positions this approach in contrast to the display of paintings in early modernity where ‘the visitor is an eye [. . .] he is offered views’ and sent on a journey with a purpose, likened to the voyage of discovery in a Bildungsroman , which is ‘the acquisition and assimilation of heterogeneous data in the unity of an experience which constitutes a subject’.13 In Les Immatériaux Lyotard sought to avoid such a didactic process, aiming rather to disrupt ocularcentrism as well as problematizing the assumed aims, direction and authority of normative modes of narration. Contrary to the traditions of an educative Bildungsroman , Lyotard’s model is closer to the ambiguous itinerary and ambivalent authorial voices of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. Reminiscent of the dialogues that Lyotard used in ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, Diderot’s multivocal format and slippery moral conscience play out the excesses of the character Lui: singing both high and low and simultaneously mixing musical styles. But, we are warned, there is no ambiguity regarding the function of the eye in Les Immatériaux : ‘The eye will be deprived of the exclusive privilege it enjoys in the modern gallery.’14 It was intended that the visitor to Les Immatériaux should be perplexed and displaced, no longer only a ‘body in movement’, but one immersed in ‘overexposition’.15 The aim of the complex, interactive and deliberately confusing movement of bodies in the exhibition was, I suggest, to enlist the visitor as a participant in the performance of the exhibition. This consideration of the visitor as performer echoes the desire to break down the ‘fourth wall’ in avant-garde theatre and involve the spectator, or Allan Kaprow’s desire to make the viewer become a participant in Happenings. But the non-didactic approach of Les Immatériaux is perhaps best anticipated by Vito Acconci’s consideration of the viewer as performer. Writing in Notes on 12 Pictures (1969), Acconci considers how photographs resulting from a performance can be approached in different ways: if displayed on the wall the ‘reader’ is a ‘moving performer’, whereas in a book the photographs place the ‘reader as performer in moving audience area’ and when the photographs are stacked in a pile the reader becomes a ‘reader as rereader; reader as former of the performance’.16 It is this latter format

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which Les Immatériaux adopts for the ‘Inventaire ’ [Inventory] part of the catalogue, an unbound ‘pile’ of separate sheets which describe the work, objects and installations included in each of the 61 sites. The form of the ‘Inventory’ asks the viewer to ‘reread’ the exhibition and thereby form the performance of the exhibition. The catalogue pages are not intended as a guide but something closer to an index-card belonging to a gargantuan system, ‘a reduced monograph of the Library of Babel’ suggested Lyotard, or ‘the universe of Borges’ as Rajchman describes the exhibition, quoting Jean Baudrillard, one of the contemporary French theorists whose voice is heard on the accompanying sound system.17 The visitor to Les Immatériaux , an uneasy ‘body in movement’, was given a headphone set, but, unlike the audio guides now familiar in museums, this set did not relate directly to individual works or zones for the visitor to access manually. Instead infra-red signals were embedded into the exhibition which triggered short-wave radio signals broadcasting different information dependent on the visitor’s location within the exhibition space. Lyotard likened the experience of the sound system to that of the multiple radio stations picked up by a car transistor on a drive down the East coast of the United States, retuning the radio as a marker of shifts in space. There is a significant conceptual difference between constructing the system of communication as a web into which the visitor enters, rather than one which the visitor has the appearance of controlling. It is in this regard that Lyotard’s philosophical investigations into communication, as explored in his 1983 book The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , were brought into practice in the conception of the exhibition.

Communication and The Differend The privileged role of the sender, central to modernist conceptions of the artist, had been questioned repeatedly by thinkers associated with poststructuralism, most notably Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The death of the author’ (1968), and this is continued by Lyotard in The Differend . He sought to expose the myth of an independent origin and de-legitimate claims made to universal authority, asserting that ‘no phrase is the first’.18 The term phrase is used by Lyotard to denote any form of communication, whether linguistic, gestural or even silence; its use constitutes a deliberate move away from the terminology of ‘language games’, borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein and used in previous publications including The Postmodern Condition , in order to avoid the suggestion that the ‘player’ of such games

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is in control of the language being used. In The Differend the destiny of the phrase is described as being dependent on the way in which it is linked onto; while a previous phrase may imply a particular mode of linkage, the direction (and consequence) of the phrase remains contingent, until it is linked onto by another phrase. The example given by Lyotard in §142 is the phrase ‘The meeting is called to order ’ that could be linked onto as ‘Okay, you chair the meeting ’ which accepts a particular context for the first phrase, or ‘No way’ or ‘By what right? ’ which rejects such a context and in so doing destabilizes any presumed context after the fact, revealing the notion of context to be ‘itself but the referent of cognitive phrases’. The performative enunciation, which had been so important to John Austin’s study of performativity, is further distanced from any sense of an individual’s action on language, emphasizing rather a position in language: ‘the illusion of the enunciation’ is not a result of the sender’s intention but rather a site of ‘tension’ exerted by genres (modes of discourse) upon addressee and addressor alike.19 It is the genres of the phrases, the code of the message, that exert pressure upon the referent, the sense, the addressee and addressor. To think otherwise is mere ‘anthropocentric’ vanity, writes Lyotard: ‘There is no reason to call these tensions intentions or wills, except for the vanity of ascribing to our account what is due to occurrence and to the differend it arouses between ways of linking onto it.’20 In Chapter 1 of this book the importance of the temporal sequence of linkages was discussed in relation to ‘Arrive-t-il? ’, highlighting the ways in which a predictable sequencing of communication can be disrupted. Lyotard neither accepts the autonomy of the subject in control of language nor leaves the enunciator helplessly trapped within existing systems of communication but presents us with a challenge: to pay attention to that which does not fit into established ‘articulate’ discourse, that which provokes hesitation and which signals the differend, as encapsulated in §22 of The Differend: The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is what one ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘One cannot find the words’, etc.21 In attempting to answer this question almost a decade later Lyotard opens his essay on the affect-phrase with the same quotation cited above but quickly adds the claim that ‘Feeling is a phrase. I call it the affect-phrase.

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It is distinct and it is unarticulated’.22 In this short essay, first presented as a lecture in 1990, Lyotard turns to the Aristotelian distinction between articulated human discourse (logos) and the wider phônè of all animals – including the human – in order to highlight that which the former loses without the latter. It is phônè (sunkékhuménè), the confused, inarticulate voice that signals the aesthèsis of pleasure and pain, not with the articulated phrases of logos but ‘with vocalisations (and I would add: with gestures) provoked by objects that are not objects of thought’ and which have no addressee.23 Lyotard also asserts that the body as a bound identifiable entity exists only as a referent of an articulate phrase whereas ‘the phônè does not have a body since it is not referential’.24 It is the potential mutability of the body that is highlighted in Les Immatériaux and its call to the inhuman through the sound of pumping blood which is there not to reassure us of our individual physical containers but to draw attention to that inhuman which persists despite the teachings of humanism, through the unarticulated phrases which, because they have no addressee, are reduced to mutism and banished from articulate argumentation – from logos. Central to Les Immatériaux was a questioning of both authorship and the limitations of existing discourse: the entrance vestibule showed an Egyptian bas-relief of anonymous authorship while similarly anonymous sounds of breathing filled the headset and the sound of blood pumped through the darkened corridor. The sound system was organized to cover several sites at once, not to explain but to disorientate and often to offer conflicting simultaneous experiences which elicited not meaning but affects. A brief note here on the use of the term ‘affect’, in order to clarify the extent to which affect differs from an emotional response that can be recognized and categorized. The recent rise of the term ‘affect’ in areas of cultural studies and social theory – which has led to the term ‘affect theory’ – has brought with it very different understandings of the term, the most explicit being the confusion between the use of affect as interchangeable with emotion (and therefore definable) and that closer to Lyotard’s use and which I am adopting in this text: an unfamiliar and contested affective feeling which differs from the category of emotion because of its inability to be defined; it is therefore related to the temporality of event as an affective intensity is felt but cannot be defined.25 Hence the emphasis I am giving to accounts of Les Immatériaux which suggest an ambivalence invoked by the excess of information and disorientating use of sound. This use of sound to destabilize the expectations of the visitor is also characteristic of the work of Vito Acconci, whether through the amplified voice of the hidden artist in Seedbed or the absent bodies presented through multiple sound recordings in Anchors (1972).

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Acconci’s Anchors I want to return to this Paris exhibition, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, in order to discuss the extent to which these recordings elicit the absent body – the ‘immaterial’ body – both through the sounds presented in the gallery and in the subsequent documentation through which the piece is now encountered. Today, Anchors is accessed through a sketch of the floor plan of the Sonnabend’s Paris gallery, several installation photographs, the text of the two main audio-dialogues and Acconci’s notes. Together these give sufficient information to re-read the installation and to allow me to imagine the sound-space created. Entering the main space, down four concrete steps, I see a low wooden box in the centre of the room and, in a separate area off to the side, a crude U shape of stones. There is an audio-tape playing underneath the shallow staircase: a man’s voice in French tells the visitor to be cautious, not to be fooled and to ‘walk on past him step right over him if he gets in your way’.26 As you approach the two ‘shelters’ other sounds can be heard: in the low wooden box Acconci’s voice is making a ‘low pitched “uunhh” sound’; you bend down to peer inside the box where there is a speaker covered by a woman’s garment – a beige nightgown. You move over to the stones: here a pair of beige stockings is strewn inside the line of stones; another sound starts up as the other ‘uunhh’ sound ends. It is much higher pitched ‘oooh’ and continues for a long minute. You move away. Everything is monochrome: the floor, the stones, the box and the nightgown all blend in a non-descript beige. Beige is also the colour of the blanket which marks the threshold into the second room; it is crumpled as though someone has slept there. Inside this smaller room is a third structure – a ‘lean-to tent’, a ramp-shaped timber frame with a piece of canvas tacked on top to make a roof. After a moment a third sound from underneath the ramp takes over from the high-pitched oooh: Acconci’s distinctive voice once more begins to make noises, this time ‘middle-range “ehhrrr” sounds’. The loop of sound played within each ‘shelter’ consists of 1 minute of sound, 2 minutes of silence – Acconci describes it as a ‘regular breathing rhythm’ each alternating so only one sound is emitted from each shelter in turn, calling the visitor’s attention to another space. In the corner of the second room, at the point furthest from the point of entry, is a foam bed and pillow and behind these a fi fth speaker relaying a continuous dialogue. The sound of these voices has been audible before, but only as you get close can you distinguish the dialogue. There are two voices: Acconci’s distinctive gravelly Italian-American accent and a

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woman’s voice translating Acconci’s words into French. But the tone is different: the woman’s voice asks questions, incessantly. The transcript makes it clear: each time that the woman’s voice repeats Acconci’s statements it is changed into a question, but it also begins to anticipate and precipitate Acconci’s statements. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue: Fr. Do you want to say that you can lie still, you can keep your voice steady, you can talk about your sister, you’ve never had a sister. . . . Eng. Yes, I can lie still, I can keep my voice steady, I can talk about my sister, you’re lying down, you’re alone, you’re in bed, on a different bed than this one . . .27 What I have not conveyed in this imaginative peregrination is the extent to which such a reconstruction relies on the succinct and carefully constructed written notes of Acconci. It is well known that Acconci’s artistic practice grew from his previous work as a poet, but the publication of documentation from his archive of this period highlights the important role of Acconci’s skill in turning an otherwise ephemeral event into an accessible text. Gregory Volk, writing an introduction to Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969–73, comments on the role of the writing in the archive: ‘Acconci’s descriptions and notes don’t define, but rather amplify, elucidate and function in tandem with the work; the more one pores through the archives, the more open-ended and evocative the works become.’28 This comment strikes a chord with Lyotard’s writings on Valerio Adami, as explored in the previous chapter, where writing plays the role of amplifying that which is presented through another medium, suggesting the opening up of a piece. The aim here is not to anchor meaning, and even though, for Acconci, it is necessarily descriptive, it is not only descriptive – it cannot be – there is a slippage between characters and personas in the installation and that slippage is maintained in the documentation. For example, the first audio tape is described by Acconci as follows: A tape loop with another man’s voice, in French: he tells the viewer to pass right over me – don’t be tricked into wanting to help me – I don’t want anyone real, I only want a sister I can’t have.29 In the previous chapter we noted Lyotard’s interest in deictics, including the personal pronoun ‘I’ which refuses fi xed signification, activated only through enunciation. In Anchors – both the recording in the gallery and its transcription as a document – the ‘I’ eludes even this enunciation because

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it is an absent voice: as there is no one to ‘pass over’, no one to help. The figure evoked by Acconci is a construct of fiction, yet it also works against such a set-up through the uncertainty created by the quality of the recorded voice. Acconci refers to the installation in spatial terms, which reminds us that the visitor might be unsure as to what could be lurking under the steps, or the box, or the ramp – after all it was 1972, the year of Acconci’s Seedbed when the artist had been there, underneath the ramp: was he here too? And what does he mean about a sister? How does he want her? To be ‘close to her clothes’, to call her his ‘silly goose’, to ‘smash her to pieces . . .’.30 The text is hard to read, it is perverse, disturbing. Hearing it in the gallery, I don’t want to stay to listen. Do you want to say that you don’t want to listen, but that you’re drawn back? Yes, I don’t want to listen but I’m drawn back. That voice, it keeps calling me back, I feel uneasy – what if someone else comes in and sees me listening? Do you want to say that you’re afraid that someone else may see you listening? Yes, I’m afraid that someone else might see me listening and I want to leave because this man is a pervert and he’s playing games and he talks about Antigone, I mean he talks about his sister, how he doesn’t have a sister . . . Do you want to say that you are thinking about Antigone and how she doesn’t want a sister, only a brother but that her brother is dead? Yes, I am thinking about Antigone and that her brothers were dead, but she had a sister . . . Do you want to say that she wanted a brother and not the sister she had . . .31 The ‘notion of mental space’ is how Acconci describes his concerns with regard to Anchors in a taped conversation from May 1977. Acconci hesitates over the piece, describing it as ‘an attempt to get into non-live pieces’, part of ‘various kinds of broken attempts’ and adds, more positively: ‘But the piece, I think, was trying to take further that notion of mental space.’32 The combination of the transcripts from the audio tapes of Anchors and Acconci’s documentary notes from the archive evoke a different ‘mental space’ which simultaneously allows for an imaginary recreation and disorientates the assumed direction of the phrases: their linkages are frequently unhinged. In contrast to Acconci’s Seedbed which encouraged a documentation based on gossip and speculation, the documentation for Anchors plays its own internal dialogue of propositions. There is little art historical commentary on Anchors compared to many other works by Acconci, perhaps because of Acconci’s own reticence in relation to the piece, or its close proximity to a live performance piece at Documenta 5, earlier in 1972, which received greater coverage. Anchors is briefly discussed, however, by Kate Linker in her 1996 monograph on Acconci, in terms of the ‘decentering of the subject by language’ in relation to Lacan’s formation of the subject

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in the ‘mirror stage’ – the reliance of the self on the other, as constituted only through (mis)recognition of the self in the other. Thus, Linker is able to highlight the Lacanian paradox with regard to the subject, positioned by its representation in language but simultaneously excluded from it.33 In Lacanian terms the subject always remains within the sphere of the symbolic and is unable to access that which drives their (unattainable) desire, leading to the criticisms we noted in the previous chapter and Lyotard’s ironic comment that Lacan ‘is the last great living French philosopher: that the Other would give rise to representation through discourse is the masterful utterance upon which philosophy continues to promote itself’.34 Lyotard suggests that because the subject for Lacan is alienated through language – forever positioned within the Platonic cave of representation while the imago, the idealized whole self, remains outside, unattainable yet desired – he continues the Platonic tradition of constructing a theatre of representation which constitutes ‘a retreat from presence’.35 What, then, does a Lyotardian understanding bring to Acconci’s Anchors? Through paralleling the use of sound to position the visitor as an uncertain ‘body in movement’ we have already highlighted the means by which both Les Immatériaux and Anchors destabilize traditional forms of narrative and question the assumed role of commentary as an aid to clarification. But there are further questions regarding communication which can be amplified by a consideration of Lyotard’s writings. First, we can turn to Lyotard’s adaptation of the traditional model of communication used as a conceptual basis for Les Immatériaux . The poles of sender / receiver / message / referent / code, used by Roman Jakobson, are accompanied by corresponding questions posed by communications theorist Harold Lasswell. Lasswell asks how and for whom the message is operating. Lyotard dispenses with the anthropocentric assumptions in the model, making it clear that the questions pertain to the dissolution of matter. For example, the pole of addressee asks – in whose name does it (the message) speak? What occurs, asks Lyotard, when the support, from which the message cannot be ‘dissociated’, is replaced by the ‘immatériaux’? The message relates no longer to matter and its point of origin is thrown into question. The assertion made by Linker is that the ‘message’ of Anchors is an expression of the ‘decentering of the subject by language’, not only that voiced by Acconci and his interlocutors, but also that experienced by the visitor.36 But from where does this ‘message’ issue? Does its theoretical assignment by Linker (to Lacanian theory) constitute a re-anchoring of those conditions that are already in a process of dissolution? This is the state that both Acconci and Lyotard are at pains to expose.

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The installation presents us with the conflicting assertions of different voices – some verbalized and others from the realm that Kristeva terms the semiotic – the physical ‘structures’ and the arrangement of both objects and sounds in a physical space. But we also have an absent body – that which we expect but do not find – and a present body, that of the visitor. In Linker’s book we are given an indexical reference to this physical arrangement only through a tightly cropped photograph of the stockings lying inside the stone shelter and the list of the materials used: ‘Installation Wood, stones, steel, canvas, underwear, blanket and audiotape 2' × 30' × 45'’. It is not clear what these dimensions refer to, neither is it made clear that the body of the performer was absent from the installation. Anchors is only referred to in passing by Linker, in a sentence which links it to Cross-Fronts, Acconci’s contribution to Documenta 5, which did include the performer’s body. Linker’s description of Anchors, prefaced by a discussion of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, constitutes, in fact, only one sentence followed by a theoretical reflection on the preceding theoretical set-up: This decentering of the subject by language is expressed in Cross-Fronts and Anchors, 1972, and other works in which the echoing of Acconci’s voice in translation shifts the utterance from first to third person, ‘I’ to ‘he’ (and in consequence, from narration to fiction). Moreover, it evokes the familiar experience of seeing oneself in windows or mirrors, transmuted by reflection into a person external to oneself, that is germane to the medium of video.37 There is no video in Anchors, nor a shift from first to third person, but rather a dialogue of three voices (and three additional vocal sounds) using first, second and third person – and it is the shift from the male, English ‘I’ to the female, French ‘vous’ [you] which is the prominent dialogue, set against the backdrop of the man’s voice, in French, commenting on ‘lui ’ [him]. It is also the struggle with the voice that is the ‘message’ of the piece: ‘I’ve shaken my voice off . . . Do you want to say that you are speaking in code, you’re speaking in tongues, you’re telling secrets you don’t know, you can’t remember what your voice sounds like . . .’.38 It is not the shift from first to third (or second) person which constitutes a shift ‘from narration to fiction’, but a particular narrative set-up that questions both the authority of each voice and the demand it makes of the visitor. Just as the line makes a demand in Lyotard’s essay on Adami: ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, so too do these voices and the set-up of the installation demand that the visitor act as the ‘body in movement’ and respond to the demand of the

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phrase. Linker’s response is to reflect on the wider issues of related works by Acconci and to connect these to theories of the self. It is a link that is not unexpected as Lacan’s model is frequently referred to in relation to art that deals with issues of identity. But there are other ways of responding and if we take Lyotard’s concerns from Les Immatériaux further there is a question of communication which is provocatively unfulfilled – the immateriality of the message. Whereas the Cartesian system of thought determined that the body, as substance, was simultaneously divorced from and complementary to the mind, the new materials – which Lyotard terms ‘immaterials’ – fail to adhere to such a stabilized set-up. It is not necessarily the materials themselves that are new but their effect on the longheld presumptions regarding what it is to be human. The interrelationship between the human – as the dominant player who ‘uses’ material and for whom material is, correspondingly, a compliant substance – and matter is destabilized by the immaterial which establishes the human in a network of associations. ‘The relationship between mind and matter is no longer one between an intelligent subject with a will of his own and an inert object. They are now cousins in the family of “immaterials”.’39 It is this associative relationship, like a ‘nebula’, which Lyotard sought to evoke in Les Immatériaux and which lends a sinister tone to the immaterial presence of Anchors where the body’s absence is already played out.

Communication in Les Immatériaux What Lyotard proposed in Les Immatériaux was a questioning of not only the author but also the receiver – the visitor positioned through sound as a ‘body in movement’ – caught in a ‘labyrinth of language’ which seems both ubiquitous and inadequate. Included in the essays which accompanied the exhibitions are two diagrams illustrating models of communication: the first follows the five poles of sender, receiver, message, referent, code, used by Roman Jakobson and the second is an adaptation of these five poles built round the Sanskrit root mât (to make by hand / to measure / to build) which formed part of the conceptual basis of the exhibition. It would be misleading to see Lyotard’s adaptation of the structuralist model of communication as an endorsement of these poles as fi xed positions; what Les Immatériaux seeks to question is the extent to which the new materials – which Lyotard termed ‘immaterials’ – fail to adhere to a stabilized set-up. While each of these points is dependent on and affected by the others, the idea of a ‘complete’ system of communication is undermined and its

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instability made apparent. The dissolution of the message into the support is cited by Lyotard as one example of this instability, described as when the code is inscribed into the support to such an extent that the ‘material disappears as an independent entity’, thus producing the ‘immaterial’. Even the now-unglamorous technology which enables the recording of sound onto tape enacts an aspect of immateriality, evident in both the sonorous experience of Les Immatériaux and the confusing world of Anchors. Such a collapsing is demonstrated by the technological revolution to which Lyotard wishes to pay attention, and which is even more evident today with the everyday use of computerized systems and nanotechnologies. Whereas it was once believed that the different poles within the communication system adhered to fi xed ‘identities’, complexification has loosened the anchors. The author is put into question and the pole of sender, named ‘maternité ’, is potentially replaced by ‘material that is no longer matter’; that which was once merely an aid to communication now presents the potential to give birth to thought. Such a gendering of the pole of sender might initially appear problematic and highly traditional: it can be aligned with Kristeva’s conception of the space from which the semiotic arises, the ‘chora’, and might similarly attract the suggestion that a bodily ‘semiotic is invariably subordinate to the Symbolic’, as Judith Butler has argued.40 However, the elision between Lyotard’s maternité and the maternal body that I have implied through reference to Kristeva needs adjustment. In the context of the exhibition maternité deals with questioning issues of authorship – for example ‘who is the author of a culinary message?’ – and an immateriality which involves aspects of sensory communication amplified by technological investigations.41 Therefore the label ‘maternité ’ acts as a wet nurse to a provocative recognition of that which traditional systems of communication reject as the ‘white noise’ of unwanted interference: shifting or destabilizing established perceptions. Scientific experiments, including those of particle physics, have shifted human understanding of matter. Exposing a matter that is potentially infinite may be a culmination of ‘the modern project of becoming master and possessor’ but it also ‘forces this project to reflect on itself; it disturbs and destabilises itself’.42 Such a destabilization is akin to the task of The Differend in which Lyotard’s analysis of the dominant genres of discourse continually reasserts the contingency of linking phrases in the face of assertions by economic or cognitive genres that their linkage should take precedence, regardless of the wrong that may ensue from the silencing of that which yet lacks the ability to be put into phrases. In one of the most significant sections of The Differend , Lyotard refers to how ‘This state is signalled by

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what one ordinarily calls a feeling’ and claims that language is called upon not to add further information but ‘to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase’.43 While the instances of a differend, and the feeling by which it is signalled, may vary widely, the implications of this testimony to that which cannot be phrased under the present systems of communications are hugely suggestive for an approach to thinking, one to which the immaterial is aligned, but not analogous. It is useful, perhaps, to consider that the immaterial has the potential to signal the disturbance of which Lyotard writes, but that the extent to which the human has already adapted to the effects of the change, often made manifest through the innovations of technoscience, neutralizes such an effect. The complicity of the visitors to accept, or at least engage with, the technological fairground is described by John Rajchman in a contemporary review as follows: What sort of drama was it? It was not narrative; it was not even disruptive in a Brechtian sense. It was electronic. The head-phoned masses milling through the maze were part of it. When they made music with the motion of their bodies or composed poetry on a computer, there was no effect of ‘distance’ or ‘alienation’. One could not ‘participate’ in this theatre because one was already part of it.44 This account suggests that the exhibition not only succeeded in positioning the visitor as a ‘body in movement’ but also incorporated the immaterial aspects of technology in a manner that perhaps highlighted the willingness of the human to integrate technology rather more than Lyotard may have anticipated. ‘We emerge from it a little more conscious of ourselves and of the imminent mutation of our kind’ reflects Pierre Restany.45 This ability to mutate had been highlighted already in one of Lyotard’s most notorious sections of Libidinal Economy, in which he remarked that the body of the worker was able to adapt to the extreme physical conditions demanded of it by industrialization. And not just adapt, but to gain a masochistic pleasure, a jouissance, from the prostitution of its body ‘in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell’, not to adapt and survive but to adapt and be destroyed; it was not a case of ‘that or die’ but ‘that and die’. Lyotard quotes an audiogram study which revealed that a worker was able to continue normal activities next to an alternator functioning at 20,000 Hz because the worker’s ear had neutralized that specific noise level: the audio test revealed that the frequency had been rendered mute for him.46 The example is repeated by Lyotard in his book on Marcel

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Duchamp, Les Transformateurs Duchamp (1977), where an invented interlocutor calls upon the philosopher to offer an apology for his previous publication; he refuses and instead clarifies the way in which a new body was created to meet the demands of capitalism, a transformation which cannot be recognized within the discourse of alienation. Lyotard argues that the transformation of the worker’s body was not passively accepted by the workers as victims of exploitation, as is the usual Marxist suggestion, but that it was a transformation of such intensity and affect that a history of reason could not take it into account: The metamorphosis of bodies and minds happens in excitement, violence, a kind of madness (I have called it hysteria, among other things). It includes outrageousness, immoderation, excessiveness, when there is no common measure between what you’re coming from (the old body) and where you’re going. Always incommensurability, here in the projection of the human figure, starting from a familiar space, on to another space, an unknown one. To accept that is to extend your power. This is the hardness of which Duchamp takes a reading, in his way, in his corner. End of my apology.47 Lyotard’s controversial proposition is not a defence of capitalism or a denial of the ‘hell’ that it produces, but rather a call to focus on the masochistic relationships at work within it, akin to Foucault’s refusal to lay the blame for the terror of the Second World War elsewhere, and his demand that we recognize ‘the fascism in us all’.48 Lyotard argues that the transformation of the human body is the subject of Duchamp’s work, from his mechanistic depiction of sexual desire in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or The Large Glass) (1915–23) to the meticulously planned laying out of the naked girl in the peep-show installation Étant donnés (1946–66), it is the transformation of the human body which is being chronicled; ‘let it exceed its givens; let it invent its possibilities’.49

The ‘Immaterial’ Body Duchamp is never far from Lyotard’s thought in relation to Les Immatériaux : the catalogue’s format acknowledges his Boîte en valise (1935–41), the site ‘infra-mince’ was named directly after the Duchampian concept, and the olfactory presence in the exhibition – whether the artificial smells of foodstuffs or the odour with which the catalogue was infused – is reminiscent of

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Duchamp’s room in the International Surrealist Exhibition.50 Held in Paris in 1938, the central exhibition room famously welcomed visitors with the smell of brewing Brazilian coffee and a brazier of burning coals that was positioned underneath a ceiling suspended with 1,200 coal sacks stuffed with newspaper. As Alyce Mahon notes in her book Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, the corporeal inspiration for this exhibition is conjured up in the essays of Tristan Tzara and Roberto Matta, writing for the surrealist revue Minotaure , in which the figure of the maternal and inter-uterine spaces are evoked to contrast with the rational, hygiene-obsessed, spaces of modern architecture. Certainly the disorienting effect, which was Lyotard’s ambition for Les Immatériaux , had a precedent in the surrealist exhibition – the visitors to which were handed torches in order to view the art works in the darkened spaces – but Lyotard’s aim was to draw attention to the body as a site of ‘tension’ rather than an uncanny sense of estrangement from its corporeality. When Rajchman describes the exhibition as a ‘phenomenologist’s nightmare’ he is responding to the overwhelming sense of the synthetic and the artificial, where the central concept of Maurice MerleauPonty’s ‘lived body’ is threatened by electronic replacement. 51 It was noted in the last chapter that phenomenology, and particularly the work of Merleau-Ponty, played a significant role in Lyotard’s thought even when he argued against some of its fundamental propositions, as he did in Discourse, Figure . It is possible, therefore, to understand the importance of the body in Les Immatériaux as a continuation, not a rejection, of the bodily implications of Merleau-Ponty’s late writings. Rather than the ‘phenomenologist’s nightmare’ which Rajchman describes, it reconfigures an understanding of what might constitute the ‘incarnated body’. 52 Les Immatériaux presented neither dystopia nor utopia, it remained ambiguous and not pedagogic in approach. The contradictory nature of the concepts being proposed can be appreciated in the section of the ‘matériau’ zone which was titled ‘nu vain’ [‘vain nakedness’]. The catalogue sheet representing the site presents the nude body as subject to measurement – through photographs of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 experiments Animal Locomotion – and subject to sexual alteration: describing a ‘forest’ of 12 asexual mannequins. Also described on the sheet is the projection shown in the interior of the site, which alternated between a clip from the 1976 film Monsieur Klein , set in occupied Paris, and a photograph of the deportations which took place during the Second World War. The woman in the Muybridge photographs is shown twice, the larger second image shows the development of movement in the sequence – her right leg is bent and lifted slightly as she walks towards the camera – but in both photographs

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she hangs her head: either in shame at her nudity, or cowed by the calibrating gaze of the new technology. Two corresponding photographs of a man show him facing left, hands on hips, with his face obscured in shadow; in the first image his left leg is bent at the knee, while in the second the figure stands erect, as though ready for military service. In contrast, the site next to ‘nu vain’ showed developments in new skin technology; titled ‘deuxième peau’ [‘second skin’], it included a photograph of two hands poised with tweezers holding a sample of cultured skin-equivalent being drawn from a petri dish; the marks and numbers of a ruler can be seen behind the shining skin sample, another reminder of calibration and the rational approach to scientific methodology. Throughout the matériau zone, of which these two sites are a part, the questions which confront the visitor are ethically unresolved; there as a provocation, not a resolution. The role of technology in Les Immatériaux is given prominence in a recent article, appropriately published in the on-line journal Appareil , by JeanLouis Déotte, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 8, where Lyotard also taught. Déotte notes that the contemporary art works which Lyotard chose for the exhibition – from light sculptures to holograms – rely on technological means; even Monory’s paintings, he reminds us, are the result of copying photographic images projected onto canvas. Déotte remarks that Lyotard is paradoxically forced to accept as artistic that which is produced by technoscience, and that ‘It is this passion for modern and contemporary art which caused him to depart from his phenomenological, neo-Cézannian habitus’.53 He suggests that the role given to technology in this exhibition, therefore, was a temporary departure from a more traditional aesthetic tendency, one that became evident again in Que peindre? which Déotte describes as ‘clearly melancholic and anti-technical [antitechnique]’.54 As regards Les Immatériaux , Déotte explains that, despite the emphasis on the immaterial, and Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of empty signifiers on the exhibition’s sound track, the exhibition did not display a nostalgia for the old body. Rather, the choice of art works and experimental installations demonstrates an enthusiasm for the possibilities of technology. This argument seems erroneous. In two ways, first the anti-technological stance – which is aligned with the position of a phenomenology – overlooks the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body is one that changes: ‘a set of possibilities to be continually realised’ as Butler puts it.55 Secondly, Déotte fails to consider the extent to which Les Immatériaux was a collaborative venture. Although Lyotard had been brought in to guide the philosophical overview of the project and was its principal, though not exclusive, spokesperson, it was far from being solely his conception.

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Les Immatériaux developed out of a project that had been initiated before Lyotard’s appointment as Commissaire ; it drew together a team of more than 50 participants with a corresponding diversity of approaches to technology and views regarding its impact. The initial idea for an exhibition – based on the notion of ‘technoscience ’ and the destabilization provoked by such developments – came from discussions in 1982 between a team of five researchers from the Centre de Création Industrielle , headed by Thierry Chaput. At the end of 1983 Lyotard was invited to become involved in taking the project forward, as an ‘expo’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou, because of the crossover with his ideas as discussed in The Postmodern Condition.56 Lyotard described the project as a collective undertaking and while he clearly steered the philosophical conceptualization of the exhibition – including his proposal that the working title, Matériaux nouveaux et creation , should be replaced by Les Immatériaux – one participant, JeanLouis Boisser, notes that existing plans for objects, examples and installations were largely incorporated.57 The collaborative nature necessitated significant interaction between the designers of the exhibition and the philosopher: a risk which Chaput was well aware of, describing the experience as ‘at once both unsettling, breathtaking [and] dangerous . . .’.58 Aspects of the collaborative nature of the planning can be seen in the facsimiles of sketches, notes, minutes from meetings and initial press releases which make up the ‘Album’ part of the catalogue. The multiple authorship of the project is further emphasized both by the diversity of views, theories and sounds on the exhibition sound-track, and also through the project Épreuves d’écriture. Initiated by Chaput, this element of Les Immatériaux exploited the potential of electronic communication as a form of discourse: 26 invited intellectuals responded to a series of 50 key words via computer terminals, loaned to the participants for the duration of the project. Participants were asked to give short definitions or responses to words selected by Lyotard as key to the exhibition, and encouraged to revise their entries in the light of (anonymous) entries by other participants. The results were accessible to visitors via a computer terminal within one of the exhibition sites – ‘The Labyrinth of language’ – and via the technological glory of the French communication system at the time, Minitel. The transcripts were also published as a second volume of the exhibition’s catalogue. Another publication that accompanied the exhibition – Modernes at après?: Les Immatériaux – puts Lyotard’s involvement in the project into perspective: of the 30 essays and interviews collected in the book only one involves Lyotard directly, an interview with the editor.59 The tenor of this book reinforces the importance of the exhibition as an

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exploration of new technologies and ranges in topic from cosmological to cosmetic research; including, for example, a discussion on the ‘immateriality of war’ by Paul Virilio and the possible hybridization of human and machine in an essay by the co-director of the exhibition and director of new media at the Pompidou, Thierry Chaput.60 The evidence of the collective nature of Les Immatériaux indicates that Déotte mistakenly ascribes to Lyotard an enthusiasm for ‘the new sensory and human reality, a part of which is technology’.61 This enthusiasm is better seen as a wider reflection of the project as a whole and its subsequent historicization as a key exploration of the exhibition of science, technology and new media. While not wishing to deny Lyotard’s clear interest in scientific developments and the significance of the exhibition for Lyotard’s oeuvre, the philosophical implications of Les Immatériaux need to be contextualized through a wider consideration of the role of the body for Lyotard, one which necessitates a re-evaluation of the premises of his critique of the ‘phenomenological’ body.

Lyotard and the ‘Phenomenological Body’ Les Immatériaux puts forward an ambiguous statement about Lyotard’s relationship to the body. On the one hand it documents the transformation and extension of the body by technology, while also questioning the sensations that result, asking to what extent they constitute a betrayal of those incarnate sensibilities which are given such importance by Merleau-Ponty. This relationship to Merleau-Ponty is addressed in the next section of this chapter through Lyotard’s initial critique in Discourse, Figure and its reappraisal in Que peindre? In the latter Lyotard describes a particular relation to recalling that which has been forgotten, through reference to the term anamnesis, whereby an initial forgetting is worked over or elaborated. The significance of this temporal reactivation is used by Gayle Ormiston to frame his discussion of Lyotard in his foreword to the English translation of Lyotard’s first book Phenomenology (1954), arguing that Lyotard’s approach to phenomenology, as a mode of thought ‘in process’ which cannot be considered a fixed historical entity, anticipates his later concern for dissent and ‘cases of differend’.62 In order to better understand the tradition of dissension within the work of those philosophers who are considered phenomenologists, the following section will give a brief account of the difference of opinion between its initial exponent, Edmund Husserl, and the phenomenologist whose work was most important for Lyotard, Merleau-Ponty.

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The method of ‘phenomenological reduction’, established by Husserl in Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913), brackets out, or suspends (epoché), that which is not immediately given to consciousness through perception. This process of investigating ‘phenomena’ as they appear and not as part of a transcendental world of (Platonic) ideas, accepts the ‘intentionality of consciousness’: that which appears to consciousness is the result of a ‘mental act’ and it is through such acts that the subject is constituted. The disembodied thinking subject implied by such a proposition is modified in Cartesian Meditations, where Husserl reframes Descartes’ cogito as the discovery of a transcendental subjectivity: The Objective world, the world that exists for me, that always has and always will exist for me, the only world that can ever exist for me – this world, with all its Objects, I said, derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with transcendental – phenomenological epoché.63 Despite the profound impact of Husserl’s later ideas on Merleau-Ponty, he did not accept Husserl’s assertions on the transcendental nature of subjectivity and rejects the idealism implied in such a notion of the ‘transcendental ego’. For Merleau-Ponty there is no pure ‘I’, only one which inhabits the world together with other people and things in the world, hence the importance of the Heideggerian term ‘being-in-the-world’. This experience relies first and foremost on perception – not an empiricist’s observation of things in the world, but one in which perception is always embodied. We cannot separate our experience of others and other objects from our experience of ourselves as ‘embodied subjects’, but neither can we reflect on our own bodies as objects, in a manner which Cartesian dualism would suggest. This can be clearly illustrated in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘intertwining’ from The Visible and the Invisible , published posthumously in 1964, in which the special role of the body – as neither subject nor object but simultaneously both in and of the world – is described: The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. A participation in and kinship with the visible, the vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively. The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my

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vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it. There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.64 It is these late writings which are a significant preoccupation for Lyotard in Discourse, Figure and he makes much use of them in his initial argument that language must be seen phenomenologically as much as to be read or decoded. Lyotard applauds the deranged arrangement of words in Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard that permits the ‘sensible . . . to express through its blanks, its body, the folds of its pages’.65 It is the same sensibility which attracts Lyotard to Klee’s description of his bodily response to painting as one of dancing; it is plasticity and rhythm which gives art its alterity.66 But what accompanies this celebration of the seamless ‘intertwining’ of the sensible and corporeal with the perceptual and cognate, for Lyotard, is disruption. For Discourse, Figure the disruption comes in the figure of the unconscious: the emotional which does not sit easily with the body but disturbs its seeming seamlessness and rips open the two parts which connive to deny the role of difference. It is the insistence on the seizure of thought which event brings and that phenomenology cannot account for, a limitation about which Lyotard was explicit in Discourse, Figure in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Cézanne: Cézanne desires nothing more than to have Mont Sainte-Victoire cease to be an object of sight to become an event in the visual field; this is what the phenomenologist hopes to understand, and which I believe he cannot.67 Lyotard applauds Merleau-Ponty’s questioning of the ‘givenness’ of vision, but then signals the limitations of phenomenology’s relationship to the Cartesian system of geometric space. For Lyotard it is irrevocably locked in relation to the ‘mental box’ which drives the belief that modern visualization presents clarity and depth. Despite Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the ‘mobile eye’ and his recognition of the multiplicity and disorder of vision, it is still, so to speak, locked inside the same theatre of representation.68 . . . it is not the search for the condition, whether anonymous or not, of the given that immobilizes Cézanne in front of his mountain, it is the search for the bestowal [la donation]. Phenomenology cannot possibly reach the bestowal since, faithful to the West’s philosophical tradition, it remains a reflection on knowledge, and the purpose of such a reflection is to absorb the event, to recuperate the Other into the Same.69

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Phenomenology may open up the limitations of the Cartesian framework of space and time – acknowledging the events of disrupted vision and temporality – but, argues Lyotard, the system of space and time within which the phenomenological self operates not only acknowledges events, it is also able to absorb them. The role of ‘passivity’ in the conception of the subject described in ‘Eye and Mind’ is significant, Lyotard argues, in its refusal to accept the structures of thought and vision that impose thought from outside the lived experience of the body – the presentation of meaning in traditional philosophical systems – but it operates only as the ‘underlying support’ of intentionality. It remains, therefore, a philosophy of intention and control even in its passive acceptance of phenomena, ‘a philosophy of knowing flesh, a joyful flesh untroubled by dispossession’.70 It is desire which opens up the space of the event and that cannot simply be located in the body, as the other to the Cartesian mind, nor can it be separated out to an all-seeing locus of idealist transcendence or the abyss of negativity, rather ‘the event as disturbance is always what defies knowledge’. It is not the body which troubles language; it is something else able to trouble both language and the body. To accept the body as the place of the event, is to adopt the defensive displacement, the vast rationalism, operated by the Platonic-Christian tradition with the aim of masking desire.71 In the light of such an assessment it seems incongruous that Déotte should describe phenomenology as Lyotard’s bedrock, especially given that his article, ‘Les Immatériaux de Lyotard (1985): un programme figural’, is situating Les Immatériaux within the wider context of Lyotard’s oeuvre, including specific consideration of Discourse, Figure as the title makes clear. This seeming incongruity needs further consideration; it is not simply that Déotte is making a wild assertion but he is, rather, reflecting on the context of Lyotard’s own writings from the same period as Les Immatériaux and the apparent return to phenomenology and psychoanalysis. It is a complex but important twist which brings us back to one of the most problematic parts of this study, Lyotard’s understanding and approach to the body, a preoccupation which has always been central to the practice and history of performance and, inevitably, body art. Why problematic? Mainly because the body for Lyotard is not indicative of the bound subject, alienated in modernity and fragmented in some accounts of postmodernity. It is certainly closer to the material entity whose physical embodiment, its

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movements and sensations, is the preoccupation of Merleau-Ponty’s late work yet, as we have just seen, Lyotard criticizes any recourse to a unifying source, whether in the intertwining of the chiasm or recourse to Being. The flow of subject–object fails to recognize the inevitable split between the two and its consequences. The importance of this split between subject and object, self and other, is not instituted in language as an inescapable psychoanalytic lack but is a break between the human and the inhuman. The inhuman is playfully given two definitions: the infans indicative of the state before education and other means of subjectification, and the inhuman of technoscience where the flesh is replaced, extended and amplified by development and the industrializing forces of capitalism. Neither is necessarily bound to a particular developmental stage, either of human life or the historical trajectory of capitalism, but the first inhuman is seen as the means by which to resist the second: And what else is left to resist with but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born? – which is to say, with the other inhuman?72 Hence the complexity that was presented in Les Immatériaux where the emulation of these two types of inhuman was performed on the bodies of the visitors in the constant push and pull of the unresolved issues of the inhuman. This tentative attempt to position Lyotard may well soon come undone, but it will act as a point from which to navigate the terrain ahead.

Critical Returns In the previous chapter we noted the limited attention given to the role of psychoanalysis in Lyotard’s philosophy by commentators such as Geoffrey Bennington in his 1988 book Lyotard: Writing the Event ; the same observation could also be made with regard to Lyotard’s supposed dismissal of phenomenology. Gayle Ormiston points out both Bennington’s ‘scant reference and discussion of Phenomenology’, and the way in which Lyotard’s apparent rejection of phenomenology, in Discourse, Figure , is used by Bennington to justify a lack of further consideration, despite the re-engagement which reappears later in his work. In fairness to Bennington, Writing the Event predates the shift of focus which is increasingly apparent in Lyotard’s work in

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the late 1980s and 1990s and subsequently, in a later essay, he does refer to Lyotard’s ‘mild complaints’ in regard to Writing the Event , presenting him ‘as always saying the same thing’; perhaps this was the result of missing the importance of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology to Lyotard’s philosophy?73 This short diversion into the history of critical work on Lyotard is important to contextualize the uncertainty that surrounds these aspects of Lyotard’s thought. As I have tried to indicate throughout the chapter this dispersal of thought is an identifiable factor regarding Les Immatériaux and it continues with regard to Lyotard’s discussion of the body and sexual difference. Perhaps it seemed as though all would be made clear when, in an interview published in 1994, Lyotard declared his intention to write a Differend II, to concern ‘the body, the sexual, space and time, the aesthetic’. Keith Crome suggests that some of the posthumous publications ‘testify to his intention to make such an elaboration’, but it might be better to accept that what Lyotard gives us are fragments that deliberately fail to make a whole, thus forcing us to do the work, while similarly chastising the reader for his or her desire to find any ‘originary’ conception.74 Husserlian description inaugurates the grasping of the ‘thing itself’ before all predication; this is why the latter never finishes correcting itself, erasing itself, since it is a battle of language against itself aimed at attaining the originary [. . .] In this battle the defeat of philosophy, of logos, is certain, since the originary, once described, is as described no longer originary.75 This quotation from Phenomenology is prescient with regard to Lyotard’s own return to the language of psychoanalysis in order to deal with aspects of memory and forgetting, making specific use of the terms Nachträglichkeit and anamnesis.

Nachträglichkeit and Anamnesis The Freudian term Nachträglichkeit refers to the temporal delay between the depositing of a significant psychic memory and its activation at a later moment. The traditional English translation, ‘deferred action’, does not incorporate the full implications brought to light by psychoanalysts in France, first by Lacan and perhaps even more importantly by Jean Laplanche and Jean. B. Pontalis whose explanations of the French term après-coup highlight a concept which, although not given huge prominence

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by Freud himself, has been central to much subsequent psychoanalytic theory. Anamnesis is described in Platonic philosophy as the process by which knowledge is not learnt but rather re-called: the soul, having lost an awareness of immortal knowledge through the shock of birth, comes to a re-awareness of that which was ‘forgotten’. This definition thus renders Socrates (as the character in Plato’s Meno) not a teacher, but a ‘midwife’. This has a particular resonance for our consideration of communication in Les Immatériaux : Boissier recalls that the concept of Maternité was added to the project by Lyotard and to which he aligned the question ‘in whose name does it speak?’ – the consequences of which will be explored later with reference to inarticulate affect, which has no fi xed addressee.76 First, I want to explain how the reactivation of phenomenological concerns, alluded to earlier, are worked in relation to Nachträglichkeit and anamnesis . In his 1987 publication Que peindre? Lyotard writes of the need to return to Discourse, Figure, stating: ‘I would not be able to work through an anamnesis of the visible without doing an anamnesis of Discours, Figure ’.77 This declaration appears as part of the essay L’anamnèse , the last of three essays on Adami which appear in Que peindre? The manner in which Lyotard arranges his writings always rewards careful consideration and highlights the extent to which essays, that might otherwise be regarded as secondary or supplementary to his philosophical work, can be fi rmly placed as integral to his ongoing concerns. L’anamnèse constitutes the second part of a catalogue essay written for the exhibition of Adami’s work held at the Pompidou Centre in December 1985; the fi rst part La Franchise also appears in Que peindre? as does the Maeght catalogue essay ‘On dirait qu’une ligne . . .’, here re-titled La Ligne . The Pompidou essay is not only split into two separate essays for Que peindre?, Lyotard also separates the texts into different voices – in the manner already discussed in relation to ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ – and four pages of new material are also added to the beginning of L’anamnèse . This new section is a reconsideration of Discourse, Figure , particularly the shift from phenomenology to psychoanalysis which forms an important point of transition for the book. Lyotard’s Vous reflects: ‘It was necessary, I concluded then, to reverse the movement of phenomenologisation of the unconscious.’78 Recalling this abandonment of phenomenology and the priority given to the primary processes in Discourse, Figure, Lyotard – via the voice Vous – gives a ‘(late) apology’ but one which is insufficient to remove ‘double-reversal’ from suspicion. ‘Double reversal’ is the process considered at the end of Discourse, Figure as the elaboration of a work which does not seek to

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interpret it but to work it over and draw out its figural differences. In Que peindre?, however, Lyotard is suspicious: This suspicion, it is simply that the visible, or rather the visual, is in no way attributable to a montage of desire, at least in its constitution, it has nothing at all to do with the intrigues coming from sexual difference, which only comes as an ‘après coup’ to impose its law, that of human language and its turns, on the enigmatic but frank presence of voici .79 Packed into this complex declaration is a disagreement with the structuralist conception of language in general and in particular the role ascribed to language in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as the means by which the subject comes to its formation through language and sexual difference. In contrast, the figural – which includes the non-visible element of the visual – has the potential to declare the immediacy of that which evades the representative structures of the sign by operating through affect. This is, therefore, no mere recollection of arguments presented in Discourse, Figure but rather a working through of the effect of this strategic dismissal of phenomenology and an acknowledgement that ideas from psychoanalytic theory, while overemphasized in the past, have a new role to play in his ‘philosophy of phrases’.

Affect-Phrase Lyotard terms an ‘affect-phrase’ that feeling which is ‘unarticulated’ yet cannot be wholly forgotten. It is an unconscious affect that drives the patient to the analyst, signalling an occurrence of Nachträglichkeit in which a pre-existing psychic event is given a new manifestation as the result of changing circumstances. Lyotard refers to Nachträglichkeit most often in connection to Freud’s story of Emma, in which the adult patient’s ‘hysterical’ symptoms are retraced to a childhood event in a shop – the sexual nature of which was unrecognized by the child at the time.80 As Claire Nouvet remarks: ‘The infantile affect has no meaning: it does not communicate a signification about a referent’, as such it dissolves our conception of communication understood from an adult point of view: ‘The infantile affect has no addressor’, neither addressee, nor referent, because affectivity does not happen to a constituted ‘I’, in Lyotard’s reformulation, but to the stage before the formation of an ego.81 As we discussed in the previous chapter, the Freudian phase to which Lyotard pays greatest attention is

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that of the pre-egoic polymorphous body – the model for the description of the opened out, continuous, auto-erotic body with which this chapter opened – it is in this phase that the affect ‘irrupts’ and it can no more be addressed by the adult, when the après-coup occurs, than it can by the child. In this regard childhood remains an inaccessible realm, or one which is rendered inarticulate by adult discourse – a fate shared by all those whose phrases are silenced by the dominant genre, who are not (yet) given voice. Hence the importance of ‘feeling’ for Lyotard in The Differend , which signals that which falls outside the control of the cognitive genre: ‘As always this imminent phrase, unable to be formulated in a description, is marked or announced as a partial silence, as a feeling, as respect.’82 In The Differend Lyotard also, albeit hesitantly, aligns this inability to present within existing idioms with ‘(femininity?)’.83

Sexual Difference The final section of this chapter will proceed with caution: we have felt the tremors of the minotaur’s footfall and smelt traces of its festering breath, but the inhuman figure of ‘sexual difference’ still lies around the next corner. Perhaps this encounter will allow us to follow the threads of thought (and unthought) to which Lyotard’s explorations in Les Immatériaux and his subsequent phenomenological reconsiderations have pertained, and lead us out of the labyrinth? Writing in the recent collection, Gender after Lyotard , Charmaine Coyle, cautiously suggests that a distinction needs to be made between Lyotard’s use of the term ‘sexual difference’ and that commonly understood by some feminists, drawing attention also to the equivalent terms used by Lyotard: ‘childhood’, ‘the sexual’ and ‘the body’ all of which act as figures of incommensurability.84 This clarification is useful in order to highlight the extent to which Lyotard is not writing within the feminist discourses most familiar to the English-speaking readers of Gender after Lyotard , but it is also important to situate Lyotard’s notion of sexual difference within the wider French philosophical context and the work of those writing across both contexts. In order to do this I will refer first to considerations of MerleauPonty’s philosophy from a feminist perspective, drawing on the work of Elisabeth Grosz and her reference to the work of Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young, and then consider Lyotard’s use of both specifically gendered terms and interlocutors within the wider concerns figured by his use of the terms ‘sexual difference’ and ‘the inhuman’.

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What troubled Lyotard in Discourse, Figure about Merleau-Ponty’s thought was the lack of attention given to rupture, specifically that which is fundamental to the formation of the subject in psychoanalytic theory – sexual difference. Writing in 1993, Elizabeth Grosz, the feminist scholar and interpreter of the work of several French theorists, including that of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray, reappraises aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work in her book, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism , and concludes with similar reservations. Like Lyotard and others, Grosz is drawn to that which Merleau-Ponty offers in overcoming the residue of Cartesian dualism, his commitment to the primacy of experience and consideration of potential reciprocity in the interlacing of subject and object in the world. However, she draws on the criticisms of phenomenology made by Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young: noting the inability of Merleau-Ponty to explain ‘those specific corporeal experiences undergone by women’ and also a general lack of awareness that the ‘lived-body’ about which he writes may be other than a male, white, Western, heterosexual subject, presented as a universal ‘norm’.85 Furthermore, in a criticism even closer to that of Lyotard, Grosz cites the reservations that Alphonso Lingis, one of Merleau-Ponty’s translators, voiced regarding Merleau-Ponty’s inability to deal with male sexuality, specifically those aspects of desire and orgasm which render the body dissolute.86 As part of a wider project to think subjectivism ‘in terms other than those implied by various dualisms’, Grosz aims to put the corporeal body back at the heart of the subject, or rather to understand bodies in the plural – not as biologically essentialist, but neither as products only of social construction.87 She argues for an ‘indeterminable position’, a recognition of the fluid and ‘ungraspable’ nature of sexual difference: ‘Identity is itself the solidification or coagulation of these potentially volatile and unstable differences. We can affirm this interval by which we are incessantly remade only if we acknowledge the unrecognisable difference of the other sex.’88 In the essay ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ published in The Inhuman , Lyotard stages sexual difference through two responses to the question: one titled Lui [He]; the other Elle [She]. It is one of Lyotard’s most provocative pieces of writing in relation to the potential immateriality of the body. The sole preoccupation for humanity, argues ‘He’, should be the survival of human thought beyond the solar explosion (estimated time of arrival: 4.5 billion years); however, in its race for the creation of Artificial Intelligence, technoscience is omitting the human and mistakenly overlooking the capacity for analogous thinking and error which is integral to corporeal thought. ‘She’ is sceptical – questioning the possibility that such

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a project could succeed: thought is inseparable from the body because it is activated by suffering – ‘Otherwise why would they ever start thinking?’.89 What activates thought, ‘She’ argues, is desire: without a gender and the sense of incompleteness which goes with sexual difference, thought cannot go on. Such then, is the power of the differend of sexual difference. ‘Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable differend of gender.’90 As with all the essays which use this device of multiple characters, particularly when gendered, there is the temptation to ask which one is Lyotard’s ‘real’ voice, what does Lyotard ‘really’ think. But the tone is deeply ironic and playful throughout, simultaneously addressing himself as the philosopher – mocked by ‘He’ for the limitations of philosophical thought – and giving voice to a familiar critique of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty is referred to explicitly at several points and is also gently mocked for his stabilization of order and his seduction by both ‘nature’ and ‘the chiasmus of the eye and the horizon’.91 What does this text tell us about Lyotard’s position on sexual difference? First, let us backtrack a little. I spoke of Lyotard as ‘staging’ sexual difference, as though this were somehow a theatrical performance. This analogy needs careful consideration in the light of Judith Butler’s discussion of gender performativity in order to establish the parameters within which Lyotard’s dialogue takes place and the extent to which the constructed nature of gender might be under examination. There are clues in the essay which suggest that Lyotard is not simply inventing two characters that represent gendered positions, but attempting to create a dialogue which constitutes different elements of his own thought, elements which are gendered according to socioculturally constructed labels but which derive from the same (male) author.92 ‘She’ writes: ‘Of course there’s masculinity in women as well as femininity in men. Otherwise how would one gender even have an idea of the other or have an emotion that comes from what’s lacking?’93 If we compare this to the following quotation from Butler it is possible to argue that Lyotard may indeed be separating gender from sex: When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.94 Despite the fact that Lyotard’s framing in ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ is still that of a dualism, it is neither that of a binary opposition nor a

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complementary relationship between two sexes. Such positions were clearly refuted by Lyotard in Discourse, Figure through an argument that forms an important backdrop to Lyotard’s use of the phrase ‘sexual difference’. In the section of Discourse, Figure subtitled ‘Opposition and Difference’ Lyotard discusses Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, in particular Marx’s refutation of Hegel’s claim that speculative logic is able to mediate between two opposites: ‘Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes.’ In contrast, argues Marx, the two magnetic poles of North and South or male and female sex are drawn to one another not because they are opposites but because they are differentials of the same essence [Wesen, être]. This leads Marx to declare that ‘the real extremes would be the pole and the non -Pole, human sex and non -human sex’ because, explains Lyotard, these would be ‘two beings [êtres] and not only two existences in the same being [êtres]’.95 The importance of this discussion for Lyotard is that it opens up the possibility of thinking a relation of difference not based on the simple opposition of complementaries – easily inscribed into a totality through the movement of a Hegelian dialectic – but prompted by unconscious desire. Lyotard writes that Freudian desire is desire not for the other sex but for that which cannot find its place in the conscious order, that real extreme of the ‘non-human sex’ [sexe non-humaine]. ‘Finally [Freud] admits that the question of the sexes is not at all that of the polarization between them, but on the contrary that of their non-attraction and of their unthinkable separation.’96 In a footnote Lyotard links this notion of the ‘unthinkable’ to that which provokes Freud’s après coup [Nachträglichkeit] in which the scene of seduction is not the result of the complementary presence and absence of a structuralist system, in which we are always situated in the gaps of representation [dans l’écart], but from outside the system, from the inhuman: ‘it is because human sex is non-human’.97 We return to the quotation by ‘She’ in ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ and the emotion arising from ‘what is lacking’, to ask: are we not still within the Freudian system of subjectivity that relies on castration as the model, one which reinscribes biologically determined gender norms? Certainly here is the affect which for Freud is most evident in anxiety, that suffering which ‘She’ regards as necessary to thought. But it does not come from the ‘the anatomo-physiological differences between women and men’, to quote from Heiddeger and ‘the jews’, ‘nor do I refer to the different roles attributed to them within a community and its cultural heritage’. Rather, it is from the inhuman that comes the suffering of which ‘She’ speaks and of which Lyotard writes with prescience in Discourse, Figure : ‘The No of

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non-human, inhuman (unmenschlich) sex indicates difference, another position (scene) that unseats that of consciousness – that of discourse and reality.’98 The necessary suffering that ‘She’ refers to does not come from maintaining a distinction between the sexes, neither does it preclude the dissolution of either the gender binary nor that which Butler terms the ‘heterosexual matrix’. It refers rather to the drive to exceed the ‘inhuman’ state of infancy through a multiplicity of events, as Lyotard elaborates in Heidegger and ‘the jews’ : This something is what Freud calls sexual difference. One can, one must (one cannot not) give it a thousand names: the sexual, castration of the mother, incest taboo, killing of the father, the father as name, debt, law, paralyzing stupor, seduction, and, perhaps the most beautiful: exogamy, if one redirects its meaning toward an unstoppable and uneven pairing between man and woman, but first between child and adult.99 This frames sexual difference as part of the drive to exceed the ‘inhuman’ state of infancy and the necessary role of others in this process. It is in this context that the labelling of the pole of sender as maternité in Les Immatériaux can be understood as part of the dissolution of the authorial subject – as the ‘masterful’ driver of modernity – and part of a complex attitude to sexual difference which does not posit the maternal body as ‘originary’ but shifts the differend of gender to that point of incommensurability which is indicated by the comma between Discourse, Figure and the temporal retroactivation of affect in Nachträglichkeit . In ‘Can thought go on without a body?’, ‘She’ highlights the stumbling manner in which writing, like thought, proceeds: . . . groping towards what it ‘means’ and never unaware, when it stops, that it’s only suspending its exploration for a moment (a moment that might last a lifetime) and that there remains, beyond the writing that has stopped, an infinity of words, phrases and meanings in a latent state, held in abeyance, with as many things ‘to be said’ as at the beginning.100 This description contains traces which may strike a familiar chord, recalling similar meditations on the function of writing in ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ quoted in the previous chapter. It also evokes ‘One of the things at stake in Women’s struggles’, an essay from 1976, which questions the status of writing as a ‘virile’ (i.e. masculine) activity and the extent to which philosophy

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relies on a ‘male way of thinking’ that is based on oppositions, a construction which renders the feminine silent or requires acquiescence to the ‘neutralized’ demands of capital in modern society: ‘This is how, for example, hysteria – the masculine name for feminine exteriority – enters into a recession.’101 Lyotard’s essay acknowledges that an alternative ‘feminine’ sphere of sexuality might resist assimilation, but notes that equally through its very oppositionality the feminine might be re-inscribed as that ‘irrational’ border by which the male imperium is able to define itself as rational and ‘true’, with the silent ‘natural’ symbol of motherhood at its heart. This argument reflects that expounded by Luce Irigaray in her 1974 book Speculum de l’autre femme and which Lyotard references at the end of the essay, part of a conclusion which refers to Irigaray’s fate at the hands of male (Lacanian) power: ‘women are discovering something that could cause the greatest revolution . . . there is no signifier’.102 No signifier, no rallying cry: Lyotard’s denunciation of metanarratives has drawn the most frequent criticism of his work, at least among AngloAmerican feminists, who resent the attack on those unifying elements which have been the driving force behind the women’s movement’s fight for equality.103 However there is also an acknowledgement that feminism can be postmodernist, a position put to Lyotard in an interview in Atlanta, United States, in 1995. In this interview Lyotard articulates further the connection between what he terms ‘femininity’ and writing and acknowledges his admiration for ‘certain books’ of Hélène Cixous, and her proximity to Gertrude Stein.104 When Lyotard locates the feminine in writing, and in the ‘bodily way of thinking’ that philosophy – based on a male, phallocratic way of thinking – has repressed, the significance of the immaterial body begins to emerge. It progresses in a manner which is woven into Lyotard’s own desire not to produce theory, but to stumble unknowingly as a philosopher who writes in response to the affects, emotions and bodily sensations which embarrass ‘male thought’. There is a sort of externalization of the body implied in philosophical discourse. But if you consider our real way of being, the body is here not as an organism but as an addresser of phrases, unarticulated phrases, but as an addresser. And it’s impossible not to listen to it; it’s sometimes oppressive. It seems to me that women are more sensitive to that. That’s their privilege.105 I would like to cut that last statement – it smacks of patronizing misogyny – yet it is important to include if only to demonstrate why feminists have

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approached Lyotard with caution, believing that the already dominant can afford to be destabilized. This scepticism is maintained in Gender after Lyotard in which Grebowicz notes the particular hesitancy with which Anglo-American feminists have approached his work while also suggesting that ‘One learns from Lyotard to listen’, not to be told the answers but to hear that destabilization which ‘a mobile gender’ demands.106 The problematic terrain of Lyotard’s gendered interlocutors is similar to that of Acconci’s self-conscious use of gendered voices in Anchors : both court the challenge that the masculine can afford to be destabilized only because it is already dominant. But they both expose themselves to that which Lyotard describes as the inarticulate affect-phrase of the body, in an instance when the question ‘in whose name does it speak?’ is asked of the viewer. It is not only the artist’s body which is undone, but also our own in the shaking of thought to which their ‘experiments’ are addressed. The masculine cannot dominate if it doesn’t (yet) know what is occurring.107 We can draw a parallel here between philosophy and the sophists, one which Keith Crome has insightfully made through his ‘sophisticated’ approach to Lyotard. Crome writes: ‘The sophist calls on whatever means she can in order to play her ruses. For example the body, Lyotard says, “can infiltrate the master discourse, laugh, and make one laugh”’.108 The skirmishes and destabilization continue from the pagus of philosophical thought in the following chapter, though the concept drew a cry of (ironic) derision from Meaghan Morris, in 1984: ‘A new sublime: what a terrible prospect’.109

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Chapter 4

The Sublime

A new sublime may have been ‘a terrible prospect’ to Meaghan Morris writing in 1988 but Lyotard’s writings on the sublime have become central to his aesthetic legacy, particularly in the Anglophone context. In the intervening two decades there have been different attempts to deal with the gendered implications of the concept, though never directly by Lyotard himself.1 Nevertheless, given the importance of the body as a source of inarticulate affect, as we began to explore in the previous chapter, it is possible to contextualize Lyotard’s own approach to the sublime within a wider discourse of the body and to argue for the specificity of his contribution. This chapter concerns Lyotard’s use of the sublime in his writings on art, considering both the essays which have become his best-known contribution to contemporary aesthetics and the role played by the sublime in his major philosophical work. The different contexts to which these writings contribute, in both France and the United States, will be highlighted as part of the broader aims of the book to investigate the extent to which Lyotard’s work has been caught between these two traditions. What is peculiar to his writings on art in relation to the sublime is the use of sources other than that of Kant’s Third Critique, particularly his reference to Edmund Burke’s Enquiry in three of the essays collected in The Inhuman . Burke’s sublime was an unusual source for thinkers in France at this time and it demonstrates one of the ways in which Lyotard was rethinking the sublime rather than merely adapting an existing concept. In his introduction to The Inhuman he castigates the uncritical acceptance of Kant’s humanism by many contemporary writers – a humanism based on reason which has led, he continually reminds us, to the horrors of modernity which, following Adorno, he unites under the name ‘Auschwitz’. Although Lyotard’s references to Burke’s sublime are considerably less detailed than his readings of Kant, the emphasis which he places on time, the physiological aspects of the body and the terror of death opens up a series of different possibilities in relation to the process of thought through art.

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Indeed, it is the idea of a sublime which is particular to Lyotard – referred to by others as a postmodern or Lyotardian sublime – that suggests the often noted ‘turn to Kant’ does not necessitate a complete break with the earlier libidinal work nor a rejection of the earlier approaches to art as having an essential critical capacity. In describing Lyotard’s work on the sublime I will emphasize the role of Burke in some detail before turning to the aspects of Kant’s thought which Lyotard also adapts to his own ends in the development of The Differend . This interface between Kant, the sublime and the differend connects with that outlined so far in this book in relation to the figural and is key to an understanding of Lyotard’s propositions for art which extend beyond a passive witnessing to an engagement that is still radical. Because it was The Postmodern Condition which first ignited widespread debate on Lyotard’s work outside of France the importance of Kant, and debates on judgement and justice, have tended to obscure or efface not only his earlier writings but also other significant voices within Lyotard’s thinking with regard to the sublime. A consideration of the contemporary French philosophical context shows that Lyotard’s interest in Kant was part of an ongoing wider debate and that discussions of aesthetics in France were free of the connotations of high modernism which Kant represented in the United States at this time.2 It is with an awareness of these two different contexts that this chapter will reconsider the implications of the sublime as ‘a terrible prospect’. How the sublime and its attending philosophical implications impact on Lyotard’s approach to art underlies both this section of the book and the next chapter, in which the temporal implications of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’, first outlined in Chapter 1, are further considered as that which informs the hesitancy of Lyotard’s approach to art. In contrast, the essays described in this chapter which announced Lyotard’s interest in the sublime to the United States, have a bold directness like a battle cry.

Presenting the Unpresentable Lyotard’s first essay on the sublime: ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’ was published in English in Artforum , April 1982, translated by Lisa Liebmann at the request of the editor, Ingrid Sischy. The title, however, was not Lyotard’s own and it was modified, along with other slight alterations, when the article was published in French in the 1988 collection L’inhumain .3 It is a short article, self-consciously a ‘critical sketch’ as

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indicated by the author in a footnote, printed over six pages in Artforum with thirteen illustrations consisting of twentieth-century, post-war abstract paintings from the United States (Mark Rothko, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin), nineteenth-century ‘proto-abstract’ paintings (Turner, Frederick E. Church) and earlier Classical representations of space attributed to the circle of Pierro della Francesca (An ideal townscape , 1470) and JacquesLouis David. The latter is mirrored by a photograph of a 1969 New York rally by Gary Winograd, while the facing page has an ensemble of images which demonstrate a range of photographic capabilities (daguerrotype, magnification, cloud chamber). These images set the tone for a seemingly conservative article which outlines how photography opens up the way for painting to indicate the sublime. By adopting the consensual framework of perspectival formatting, which had been largely the preserve of painting, photography accounts for the shift in painting, away from its role as the dominant means of representation. Following Kant, the sublime does not adhere to the common consensus of taste but to the ‘formless’ and ‘monstrous’ which challenges conventions. Lyotard describes how ‘Modern Painters’: ‘. . . set about to revolutionise the supposed visual givens in order to reveal that the field of vision simultaneously conceals and needs the invisible, that it relates therefore not to the eye, but to the spirit as well’.4 In so doing, Lyotard’s argument suggests, painting begins to act philosophically, to question itself: ‘What is painting?’ and draws attention to the existence of that which is not visible, a path taken when the centralized focus of costruzione legittima is rejected. While photography renders everything visible, beautiful, though only within the technological processes made available and with less and less craft control by the operator, the painter draws not on the sense of the beautiful, but of the sublime by alluding ‘to the existence of the invisible within the visual’.5 It is pointing to the move away from a conception of thought informed by reason, in favour of thought informed by feelings, which Lyotard identifies as a modernism, though initially coming from romanticism. The extent to which this shift is presented as a loss is what distinguishes between the principal tendencies within the ‘pictorial’ avant-garde: one touched with a ‘nostalgia’ and identified by Lyotard in Proust, Fuseli, Friedrich and Delacroix, but less evident in the ‘experimental vocation’ of Gertrude Stein, the Delaunays and Mondrian, whose work: ‘. . . tended toward the infinity of plastic experiment rather than toward the representation of any lost absolute’, an attitude which makes them part of the contemporary world of technoscience.6 Curiously there is no reference to the accompanying illustrations, though the section referring to the sublime

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is dominated by Rothko’s Number 8 (1952) which is clearly linked to the tradition of romantic landscape painting by being placed beneath the sunset of Frederic Church’s Labrador (1859). The sense of a historic shift from nostalgia to experimentation, which can be inferred from the artists mentioned in this section, is corrected by the corresponding passage in ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ where the two tendencies, here named ‘melancholia’ and ‘novatio’, clearly coexist in the same period: German Expressionism, Malevich and de Chirico belonging to the former, with Braque and Picasso, El Lissitsky and Duchamp belonging to the latter; at times these tendencies may be present in the same work, but signify a differend ‘between regret and assay’.7 Clearly the argument in Artforum is less nuanced but builds, nonetheless, to the object of his argument which is two-fold: a dismissal of those nostalgic aspects of contemporary painting taking place under the name of postmodernism, and a defence of the avant-garde which achieves that which is important to his postmodern: the sublime. The architectural postmodernism of Charles Jencks and Achille Bonito Oliva’s Italian ‘trans-avantgarde’ painters are singled out for attack in both essays, in Lyotard’s attempt to disassociate himself from those which encourage an eclectic postmodernism. Lyotard sees eclecticism as pandering to the tastes of consumerism, and here his tone is close to that of both Adorno and Greenberg’s belief in the higher value of painting, writing of its ‘honour’ and heroism in spite of the ravages of the market and consumer society. Because of the central place of these essays in Lyotard’s artistic reception in the United States it is important to note the alterations that are made when they are reprinted. For example, in the Artforum version the term ‘heroic’ is used to describe painting in the Twentieth Century: . . . it is that very tension [between the act and essence of painting] which stimulated one of the most heroic centuries of Western painting. This menace implies the corruption of painting’s honor – which thus far has remained intact in spite of the worst temptation of the state and of the market.8 In the French version printed in L’inhumain it is modified to ‘admirable ’ which is maintained in the subsequent English translation in The Inhuman: ‘. . . whereas this tension has persistently motivated one of the most admirable centuries of Western painting. It brings with it the corruption of the honour of painting . . .’9

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‘The Honour of Painting’ Lyotard’s rhetoric is extravagant and may strike the reader today as excessively dramatic, but ironically it fits in with the revival of painting at the time which was driven by bombast – the huge spaces of the Berlin MartinGropius-Bau filled with the likes of Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer for the 1982 exhibition Zeitgeist – but which in many ways came to represent the dilution of the real vocation which Lyotard was desperate to maintain for the avant-garde. The artist which Lyotard defends is not one who seeks to restore a conception of a ‘supposed “reality”’, or to stabilize taste, but rather the painter should respond to the question ‘What is painting?’ and ‘to show that there is invisibility in the visual’, a question of the sublime.10 Lyotard’s belief in the function of the avant-garde is clearly aligned to a modernist notion of the artist. Caspar David Friedrich may have been relegated by Lyotard to the realm of nostalgic longing, yet it is his figure of the wanderer which is called to mind: armed with the experimental weapons of the avant-garde to face the territories of the unknown. A more self-consciously critical version of this artistic myth can be seen in the work of Anselm Kiefer, one of the artists associated with the postmodern tendencies rejected by Lyotard. Paul Crowther suggests that Kiefer is one of the artists from this period who succeeds in questioning: ‘convenient categories such as “realist”, “expressionist”, “landscape”, even the notion of “good painting” itself, are questioned and made strange’.11 As such he criticizes Lyotard’s exclusion of such Neo-Expressionist work from the exhibition Les Immatériaux . What this observation raises is the need to make a distinction between the different approaches of the artists who were grouped together in the major painting exhibitions of the early 1980s; there was a tendency to either promote them as part of an eclectic ‘return to painting’ by curators and dealers, or dismiss them as a whole, as did Lyotard.12 Such seemingly indiscriminate groupings fail to acknowledge, for example, the Germanic tradition of the artist as healer and transformer: a Beuysian tradition which would oppose Kiefer to the ironic eclecticism of Schnabel. What Lyotard defends, at least in these essays, is the serious task of the artist as intellectual which should not be compromised by demands to ease communication, the task of accessibility which is now central to arts policy: ‘The task of “cultivating” the public comes later’, he writes.13 The final sentence of ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ can be seen as Lyotard staking out his own position

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with regard to painting, where both artist and philosopher interrelate on equal terms, both as intellectuals, who must seek to communicate to nonartists but without confusing this with their central task of questioning: ‘What is it to paint?’ and ‘What is thinking?’. The responsibility of communicating the meaning of thoughts and paintings belongs to the intellectual. In fact, the question ‘What is thought?’ places the philosopher in an avant-garde position. That is why he dares speak of painters, his brothers and sisters in experimentation.14 Given Lyotard’s own tendency to work with artists who also engage in writing, and the fact that his only previous publication in Artforum concerned ‘The works and writings of Daniel Buren’ this position would be understandable but not necessarily in keeping with the more populist, or at least eclectic, editorial position of Artforum .15 The context of his opposition to painting in the Neo-Expressionist vein championed by Achille Bonito Oliva and exhibitions such as Zeitgeist, mentioned above, and A New Spirit in Painting (London, 1981) may explain this position. These popular ‘blockbuster’ shows whose dominant aesthetic recycled aspects of earlier avant-garde style into a form more readily acceptable, emphasizing their size and bravura through both exhibition and marketing, would explain Lyotard’s desire to remove the task of easy communication with the public from the painter’s task. Returning to the role of photography in Lyotard’s essay, we might also remind ourselves that easy communication is no longer the role for painting but that photography, having taken on the mantle of perspectival representation, has become the dominant mode of visual pleasure and therefore painting need not concern itself with this populist function. Of the collection of photographs presented on the fourth page of the article both the Winograd photograph of tourists (Dallas, 1964) and the Daguerreotype portrait (Untitled , 1850) show their subjects holding other photographic images which, as illustrations, correlate to the argument of the circularity of photographic images and their role as the common-place means of visual representation. The two other photographs, however, illustrate a less certain role – a scientific photograph from a cloud chamber (showing the trace of particles, otherwise invisible to the naked human eye) and the magnification of a honeybee’s eye x500 (David Scharf, 1977). Are these included to reinforce the connection of photography with the development of technoscience (and thus the rapidity of development which Lyotard critiques) or as examples of the alternative means of presentation open to

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photography hinted at in the text? The magnification of the bee’s eye creates an other-worldly image – is that sublime? Certainly Burke writes that smallness, as well as magnitude, can provoke the sublime feeling because of the potential: . . . infinite divisibility of matter [. . .] and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.16 However, the scale rendered in the honeybee’s eye is not emphasizing its minuteness but rather the ability of technology to render that which is not visible to the unaided human eye, thereby illustrating a sense of inverse infinity – that minuteness continues beyond previously experienced limits – while also asserting the capabilities of technology to make visible that which would otherwise remain unseen. Lyotard describes the role of science, technology and capital as ‘making concrete the infinity of ideas’ and it is this incessant searching and seizing that is the aspect of capitalism which, for Lyotard, renders capitalism itself sublime: ‘There is something of the sublime in capitalist economy.’17 It is not only that photography has taken up painting’s mantle as the bearer of representation but that this role has expanded to include the development of the structures of language which are codified by the ceaseless search for data. Photography is allowed the opportunity to question itself: what is at stake, however, is the realization of such questions – either by rendering the previously invisible visual (following technoscience) or attesting to the presence of the unpresentable. This is the differend to which we will return later in this chapter. The ambiguous position of photography in this essay anticipates that of Les Immatériaux , where the selection of exhibits in the site nu vain – which included both Muybridge and documentation of deportations from occupied Paris – positions the role of photography as the recorder and interrogator of modernity. The conclusion is not explicit, but it is certainly not an endorsement of photography as the alternative to the return of expressionism in painting, which was one increasingly vocal position in the United States at the time with some artists who used photography being heralded as the proponents of the critical aspect of that which was labelled postmodern – Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo were celebrated by writers in both Artforum and October.

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From October to Artforum It is worthwhile contextualizing here the respective position of the two journals at this time. Artforum was a leading voice for the contemporary art world of the United States: under the editorship of Philip Leider it had carried some of the most influential pieces of writing on modernist painting and sculpture in the 1960s. Its function as a commercial magazine meant that it carried a significant number of gallery adverts, and the accompanying reviews which oil the wheels of the art market, allowed for the cost of colour reproduction and comparatively wide monthly distribution. The famous acrimonious break-up of Artforum took place in 1975 with Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson leaving to set up the journal October, partly in response to the entrenched position of the Artforum board, and coinciding with Krauss’ move away from the critical method of Greenberg and Fried. Published quarterly, with its distinctive subheading of: Art / Theory / Criticism / Politics, October positioned itself as a response to ‘overspecialized reviews’ such as Artforum , ‘which are unable to provide forums for intensive critical discourse’.18 In contrast to Artforum , the ‘return to painting’ of the early 1980s was met with scepticism within the pages of October, which saw it as enmeshed in an uncritical market: Yet now we hear proclamations of renewed faith in the permanence and transcendent powers of the aesthetic impulse. The credo of the faithful echoes throughout the pages of Artforum , the very journal in which the radical events of the sixties and early seventies were chronicled. We are offered a demonstration of the cleansing properties of linseed and turpentine, for American artists of the eighties will, we are told, again emerge paint-spattered from their studios.19 In October, the debate tended towards a celebration of the critical: for example examining the potential of photography to work against its usual employment as the bearer of the dominant visual field, and to return to the avant-garde conception of the camera as the ‘cine-eye’ of Dziga Vertov, Alexander Rodchenko and Sergei Eisenstein, whose revolutionary and political stance had inspired the title of the journal. October championed the use of French theory in art-historical discourse and Krauss was an important interlocutor in this process, commissioning translations of essays from French for publication in October, and being published herself in French.20 It was Krauss’ desire to publish a translation of Foucault’s essay on Magritte which, in part, provoked the split from Artforum, and its presence in the first issue of October

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declares this commitment.21 The tenth issue of October, in 1979, included an article by Lyotard on Daniel Buren – whose use of painting as a tool of institutional critique typified the October position. Lyotard’s article was preceded in the same issue by one of Buren’s theoretical essays and Douglas Crimp’s ‘End of Painting’, published the following year, also cited Buren extensively while a further essay by Lyotard on Buren appears in Artforum in February 1981. What Lyotard shares with the approach of October in general terms is his revulsion to the seemingly uncritical postmodern painters of this period, a similar intellectualist stance with regard to writings on art and broadly similar theoretical reference points. A return to the sublime, however, would have seemed an unlikely theoretical reference for October, given the implicit link to Kant and therefore the high modernist tradition of Greenberg away from whose aegis Krauss had only recently torn herself. The publication of Lyotard’s two essays on the sublime in Artforum demonstrates, therefore, the slippery nature of Lyotard’s position in the United States. By April 1982, when the first of Lyotard’s essay on the sublime appears in Artforum , the magazine’s remit has changed. The appointment of Ingrid Sischy as editor in 1979 resulted in an opening up of the magazine to artistic activity beyond North America, especially from Europe, and a diversity of writers that extended beyond the traditional remit: issues from 1980 include contributions from Benjamin Buchloh, Thierry de Duve and Bernard Tschumi. Artforum was certainly covering both the commercially successful names in the new painting movements and celebrating an approach which went beyond the traditional categories of Fine Art, including regular columns on Television, Dance and Fashion. This move to embrace wider aspects of visual culture is clearly articulated in a special edition of the magazine published in February 1982 under the joint editorship of Sischy and the curator, critic and contributing editor Germano Celant. The editorial speaks of a breakthrough into other areas of the arts, the importance of Pop and the interaction between the popular and Fine Art; they point to Dali as a pioneer, more than Picasso. Perception that stops at the surface has forgotten the labyrinth of the visible – it fails to see the abstract in Chuck Close faces, the harmony in John Cage noise, the non-negotiability of Warhol’s super-negotiability. The invisible seems more persuasive – naked emperors are flattered on the cut of their robes.22 This gives an indication of the context into which Lyotard’s article would be published two months later; already Habermas’ Modernity – An Incomplete

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Project had provoked the ‘postmodern debate’ when delivered first in Germany in 1980 and then at New York University in 1981; Achille Bonito Oliva had expanded his ‘transavanguardia’ to include painters from the United States (Modena, March 1982) and in April 1982 Italian Art Now: An American Perspective opened at the Guggenheim, New York. Given that during this period Artforum represents the unfolding of that eclectic aspect of postmodernism, against which Lyotard would expend much effort, it is a significant placing for these two articles on the sublime. Against this backdrop, the role given to photography in Lyotard’s first article on the sublime, is prescient. The development of photography is placed within a longer history of the technologization of the visible that dates back to the origins of perspective in the Italian Renaissance. He argues that increased access to the camera has further inscribed the dominant mode of vision and accordingly limited the frame of cultural understanding. As such, it continues the theme of perspective as a mode of (restricted) thought which is considered in detail in the ‘veduta’ section of Discourse, Figure. Contrary to arguments supporting photography as the democratizer of the visual, Lyotard argues that the shift from professional producer to amateur consumer has increased the control of visual framing. The body of amateur photography has almost nothing to do with experience and owes almost everything to the experiments of industrial research laboratories. As a result, it is not just beautiful, but too beautiful. Something is inherent in this ‘too’: an infinity; not the indeterminacy of a feeling, but the infinite ability of science, of technology, of capitalism, to realise.23 You are given the tools to create images, with little craft or skill necessary, you ‘point and shoot’, enjoy the results, keep records of family events: the good times, the funny moments, memories are created through the viewfinder; yet the scope for thinking outside the increasingly pre-prescribed formats and boundaries is reduced further and further. The aura is lost, but the liberation of the image from the hands of the few has not been the break which Benjamin suggested: for Lyotard the Costruzione Legittima has been commodified through the process of democratization. But it is not a simple teleological development – the theatrical format has always alluded to a space of democracy: the urban centres of ancient Greece and Rome allow the citizen the spectacle of the ordered sociopolitical body hence, with embodiment we can have (and see) it all. The political aspect to Lyotard’s argument is more apparent in the 1991 version, translated by Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey

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Bennington and published as ‘Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable’ in The Inhuman. In this version the terminology becomes more consistent with his other writings, notably in reference to the principle of ‘performativity’ inherent in the capitalist system and through the use of Marxist terminology which does not feature in the Artforum version – ‘capitalist demand’ for example, becomes ‘capitalist surplus-value’.24 There is no end to this ‘capitalist surplus-value’ yet even the infinite is captured by capitalism to make it appear achievable, driven by the demand to know all and to have all. The sublime, therefore, is introduced as a means of resistance to the beautiful: it is that which does not conform to the encoded systems of vision and thought but which realizes that ‘anguish’ is necessary. ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ did not appear in French until its modified version was included in L’inhumain in 1988, but the essay has much in common with ‘Réponse à la question: qu’est-ce que le postmoderne? ’, published in April 1982 in the journal Critique. This essay has already been referred to at several points in this book by its English title ‘Answering the question: What is postmodernism?’ because it had a significant impact on the reception of Lyotard’s thoughts on art in the anglophone world when published as an appendix to The Postmodern Condition in 1984. The situation in France was significantly different, however, where La Condition Postmoderne never carried an appendix on art, Lyotard’s earlier writings on art (including Discours, figure) were much better known and the revival of interest in the sublime was not peculiar to Lyotard. In 1986 Jean-Luc Nancy wrote that the sublime is ‘à la mode’. This comment is included in the anthology, Du Sublime, edited by Jean-François Courtine, which brought together essays by nine writers including Lyotard, Nancy, Louis Marin and Philippe LacoueLabarthe.25 Nonetheless, Lyotard’s approach is different in several respects: his reinterpretation of Kant’s Third Critique and his refusal to accept the proposed bridging of the realms of Pure and Practical reason is important to his philosophy and underpins the concept of the différend. Lyotard also considers Burke’s writings on the sublime which were different to the usual Longinus and Kant texts which formed the principal foci in French studies at the time. The interrelationship between Kant, Burke and Lyotard is complex and it will be useful initially to consider Burke’s Enquiry on its own.

Edmund Burke’s Sublime Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) was a dramatic contribution to the

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eighteenth-century interest in the sublime. As James T. Boulton notes Burke was able to assume that his audience possessed a familiarity with the work of Longinus, whose first-century Greek text Peri Hupsus had been made popular in both England and France through the translation of Despréaux Boileau (1674) and several later English translations; the translated title ‘On the Sublime’ first gave the term ‘sublime’ its particular literary significance during this period.26 Burke’s Enquiry was well received, though not without criticism, and soon translated into French (1765) and German (1773) with an earlier summary by Mendelssohn (1758) prompting, in part, Kant’s initial foray into the territory in Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764) and more famously in the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement (1790). For a reader today there are two main ethical problems implicit in the text: the overt gendering of the beautiful as female and the sublime as male; and the colonialist correlation of darkness and terror – neither of which concerned Kant. What did concern Kant, at least in his writings of the Third Critique, was the scientific basis of Burke’s explanation of the causes of the sublime, based as they are on physiological assertions that had lost credence even by 1790. Bearing these points in mind, together with the knowledge of Burke’s later critical attitude to the French Revolution, one can understand why Burke was less favoured by twentieth-century French intellectuals, or just less well known by them. What is more curious is why Lyotard chose to consider his writings: why, as he was asked by Terry Eagleton at the 1985 ICA conference, did he use the work of such a ‘reactionary thinker’? Lyotard notes the paradoxical position of Burke, ‘he both opened up the new romantic aesthetics, and he is also one of the most important reactionary philosophers of his time’.27 As mentioned above, Burke’s writings were well received and while not wholly accepted it was agreed that his Enquiry had opened up a different attitude to criticism, which radically altered the stagnating contemporary debate. The radical aspect of Burke’s writing includes a relentless critique of reason as a faculty by which judgements can be made, whether in reference to beauty or the sublime. I am afraid it is a practice much too common in inquiries of this nature, to attribute the cause of feelings which merely arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects presented to us; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.28

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Burke emphasizes that frequent agreements in matters of taste stem from the physical senses which humans share and which allow the ‘passions’ (love, grief, fear, anger, joy) to directly affect the imagination. The extent of their effect can be moderated by degrees of knowledge, gained from experience, and the attention given to the objects of taste. Burke also dismisses the belief that proportion can be applied as a determining factor in beauty, taking issue with the anthropocentric humanist notions embodied in the Vitruvian man and Alberti’s schema for architecture as based on divine proportions of geometry. In this rejection of Euclidian geometry as the guiding principle of art, architecture and aesthetic judgement, we can see not only the opening up of that which will become the aesthetic of romanticism, but a questioning of fi xed modes of presentation which relate to both words, images and, by implication, thought, which had been dominant since the Renaissance. The correlation between proportion and beauty cannot be upheld, argues Burke, as one can be both well-proportioned and ugly. But the ugly does not automatically reside with the sublime sentiment – it is not a simple dialectical argument: for the sublime to be present in ugliness it must also be accompanied by a sense of terror. The attributes of pleasure and pain are clearly defined by Burke in order to demonstrate that their condition is positive in both cases. One does not pass automatically from one to the other, but a state of normality or indifference exists between the two. Burke argues, in contrast to Locke, that pain is not a negative feeling induced by an absence of pleasure – which does not operate in the same fashion as pain – but is a separate feeling. In order to differentiate pleasure from the emotion experienced on the release from pain, Burke introduces the term ‘delight’. ‘Delight’ is the emotional response which accompanies terror in the sublime feeling and which accounts for its peculiarity as a set of aesthetic experience, separate from pleasure. Burke identifies the impact of the sublime on the body which experiences it and is therefore distinct from the intellectual response which Kant emphasizes. For Burke it is this threat to the body itself and the desire for self-preservation, which rouses the most powerful passions of pain and danger – emotions which provoke the sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime ; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.29

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This connection to the body accounts for the extremity of the sublime emotion for Burke and it is this intensity which Lyotard continually refers to. The intensity of the sublime is greater than the beautiful because the stakes are higher, argues Burke, because pain is more powerful than pleasure in its effect on mind and body – the terror which pain invokes is a physiological experience, exceeded only by death. When pain is removed it does not automatically induce pleasure, but rather that emotion which Burke considers specific to the sublime: ‘delight’. ‘Delight’ is achieved only when pain is held at a distance: too close and the sublime is eclipsed by real danger. It is this holding off which evokes the sublime and will be of primary concern to Lyotard, together with Burke’s emphasis on the terror of privations. The experience of the spectator is considered by Burke in his description of sympathy (Pt 1. §13) where it is suggested that viewers are affected by ‘a sort of substitution’, as though their own bodies were endangered in the manner afflicting the person observed. It is noted that the ‘affecting arts’ draw on this in order to communicate passions, in the manner of Aristotelian tragedy, but in the following section he returns to moments of ‘real distress’ and the significant extent to which the actual suffering of others can produce ‘delight’: ‘for terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close’. This delight in the suffering of others is accounted for as a means to ensure that humans will not simply turn their backs on those in need, but will be drawn to them because of this emotional investment experienced through sympathy. As a result, theatrical tragedy cannot compete with the draw of real spectacles such as public execution; it is this linking of terror to the sublime that was to lead to Burke’s later capitulation in the face of the French Revolution, as Christine Battersby surmises: ‘It is as if Burke has registered the political consequences of tying the delight in the sublime to feelings of terror and, in order to block the kind of aestheticised response . . . backs away in silence.’30

The Sublime and the Avant-Garde In the discussion of Lyotard’s essay: ‘Representing the Unpresentable’, we noted the modifications made to the essay for publication in The Inhuman . This also included a lessening of bombast in the use of terms which directly evoke the masculine heritage of the sublime as a gendered concept – ‘one of the most heroic centuries of western painting’ is softened to

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‘one of the most admirable centuries of western painting’.31 Nevertheless, the heroic returns at the very outset in Lyotard’s second sublime – related article for Artforum , published in 1984. Under the evening sky of Caspar David Friedrich’s Abend (1824) Lyotard opens with a discussion of Barnett Newman’s essay on the sublime: ‘The Sublime is Now’ (1948) which prefigured the 1950–1 canvas Vir Heroicus Sublimus. It is in this essay, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, that Lyotard introduces Burke by way of Barnett Newman, noting that Newman had read Burke and thought his description of the sublime overly ‘surrealistic’ and consequently too reliant on a pre-romantic or romantic way of dealing with the ‘indeterminate’.32 Instead, Newman ‘sought sublimity in the here and now’, locating the ‘inexpressible’ in this world – here – not in another time, but now. We can therefore ascertain through Lyotard’s description of Newman that he is not aligned with the melancholic mode of modernism, which seeks the missing as lost, but in the ‘indeterminate, the “it’s happening”’, which is the side of questioning, the ‘novatio’ spoken of in the earlier essay ‘Answering the Question’. Here Lyotard describes this as ‘an openness to the Is it happening? ’. Bound up in this question is an attitude which does not anticipate a predetermined response but has to confront the possibility of nothing further happening. However, this important connection between the sublime of Burke and the Arrive-t-il? is potentially lost in the Artforum version; it is in the revised version included in The Inhuman that Lyotard clearly highlights the temporal aspect, the suspense, as that which Kant fails to take from Burke in his own writings: ‘. . . he [Kant] strips Burke’s aesthetic of what I consider to be its major stake – to show that the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening.’33 From this statement I wish to take forward two areas of questioning: the importance of the threat as an example of the indeterminate and the temporal aspect of suspense. The importance of the latter is heightened when the essay is reprinted as a central chapter (7 of 16) of The Inhuman: Reflections on Time and preceded by the essay ‘Newman: The Instant’ as part of wider questions regarding time and ontology, both of which will be discussed in the following chapter. Here, however, the importance of the ‘threat of nothing further happening’ will concern us as a means of approaching what Lyotard takes from Burke and which can subsequently be identified in his writings on Kant’s sublime and his own philosophy of the differend. First, let us contextualize ‘the threat of nothing further happening’ in relation to ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, as an example of the role which Burke gives to privations. In Part 2 of the Enquiry Burke builds on the importance given to self-preservation as a motivating factor for the sublime,

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whether a physical or psychological threat. It is also in this section that we are given the connection to reason which will become so important for Kant – the great and sublime in nature provoke an ‘astonishment’ which suspends the soul in horror, filling the mind so much that it is unable to ‘reason on that object which employs it’.34 What robs the mind of reason is fear, and fear is provoked by various types of privation. These provocations of terror, invoked through privations, are emphasized by Lyotard in his synopsis: the removal of light, of society, of sounds, of language and the culmination of all these is the terror that nothing is happening, or is going to happen. The connection of these privations to pain and the effects on the body are also included in Lyotard’s summary, as is the necessity that pain be mixed with its suspension, its holding off, in order to provoke ‘delight’. But delight is accounted for in a way which presents it slightly differently to that of Burke, in a manner which emphasizes the role of privation in creating intensification. At the outset of the Enquiry, as we have already noted, the term ‘delight’ is coined in order to present the retreat from pain as a positive feeling, different from pleasure because it is caused by a privation. Lyotard writes of ‘delight’: This suspense, this lessening of a threat or danger, provokes a kind of pleasure that is certainly not that of a positive satisfaction, but is, rather, that of relief. This is still a privation, but it is privation at one remove; the soul is deprived of the threat of being deprived of light, language, life.35 The particular usage of ‘delight’ introduced by Burke is given a paradoxical twist when Lyotard accentuates the potential to deprive the ‘soul’ of privation. This double privation would operate in a manner similar to Freud’s ‘dénégation’ which concerned Lyotard in Discourse, Figure and formed the hub of a discussion in Chapter 2 of this book. As Lyotard argued for the positive ‘presence of a lack’ – which is not the direct correlate of that which is denied – so the affect of the sublime is constituted differently to pleasure through the positive ‘delight’ in the removal of pain (the threat of privation). Here then is an account of the sublime feeling: a very big, very powerful object threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it happens’, strikes it with ‘astonishment’ (at lower intensities, the soul is at this point seized with admiration, veneration, respect). The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of delight. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its life.36

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Lyotard’s reading echoes the pulsations of the death-drive as described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the sadistic phantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, as analysed by Lyotard in Discourse, Figure . The latter reminds us that ‘Whatever the drives produce lasts forever; an investment made by the unconscious is never liquidated’.37 In the case of Burke, the emotional response which he terms ‘delight’ retains the intensity of pain; even though that pain is held off or removed its psychological characteristic is the experience of pain and cannot be linked to positive pleasure. In ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ Lyotard acknowledges the scope for a psychoanalytic interpretation of the sublime, citing the work of Pierre Kaufman and Baldine Saint-Girons, but chooses not to elaborate on them in this essay, returning instead to his account of the avant-garde as a history concerned with ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘intensification’. There is an underlying concern, however, for the intensification provoked by ‘the threat of nothing happening’ that recalls Lyotard’s account of the workings of the psychic apparatus in Discourse, Figure . The section ‘Fiscourse, Digure: The Utopia behind the scene of the Phantasy’ incorporates a detailed reading of Freud’s analysis of the phantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ in order to show that the figure-matrix, the least accessible of the three figural orders, is in no way a linguistic structure but that it ‘harbours the incommunicable’.38 At the end of the section Lyotard notes that the pleasure opened up by the ‘beat’ which is at the heart of the erotic fantasy is not bound within a simple rhythm of absence / presence, but enacts its libidinal charge (and discharge) through tension on the brink of ‘absolute difference’: Jouissance is not death, but like death, at the same time that it discharges tension, it brings obscurity: the annihilation of representation, and the annihilation of words: silence. And absolute difference would be death, insofar as it is irreversible: the (+ –) that the resurgence of desire in its (– +) form, or ‘letter’, if you like, cannot annul. That is how (+ – +) the dialectic thinks it can put death into language, ‘pocketing’ it and mastering it. But the truth is that there is no process but rather a cycle (+ – + – + –) without end. Absolute difference would be (+ 0).39 Although this passage from Discourse, Figure , comes from a seemingly different context and period of Lyotard’s writing it does, nevertheless, provide a basis for an interpretation of Lyotard’s use of Burke in ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’. The sublime feeling relies on the moment of suspense and the realization that the threat is held at bay – the privation is still a privation, but at one remove – thereby inducing an oscillation

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between life and the possibility of death, showing the soul the limits of its existence. What these examples have in common is the production of an emotional response that is positive but complex in its origins, arriving not from rational thought, but through experiences deemed too volatile for definition by Burke. In Lyotard’s words: ‘In pain the body affects the soul. But the soul can also affect the body as though it were experiencing some externally induced pain, by the sole means of representations that are unconsciously associated with painful situations.’40 The physiological emphasis here is significant for several reasons. It links Lyotard’s account of the sublime to his concerns in planning Les Immatériaux and the broader concerns with the role of the body as discussed in the previous chapter. It also highlights an aspect of Burke’s writing that is inflected in Lyotard’s reading of Kant, whose description of the mind’s experience in ‘agitation’ embodies a struggle that escapes reason and which is referred to in ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ as a ‘remainder’ which provokes the question mark of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’.41

The ‘Swelling’ of the Anxious Mind Unfulfilled expectation is central to Lyotard’s wider argument in ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’. In a historical overview of the sublime Lyotard highlights the extent to which the text ascribed to Longinus finds itself challenged by the uncertain characteristics of its own subject, unsettled by the sublime discourse that it aims to teach. Boileau notes that the sublime cannot be taught and can be recognized ‘only by its effects on the addressee’. Because it cannot be delivered according to pre-existing rules, the role of techne and the rules beloved of institutions are put into question. Similarly, the shared purpose of art ‘which was to illustrate the glory of a name, divine or human’ is put into ‘disarray’ by the sublime. Lyotard is giving us a history of modern art based on a shift away from consensus: the mass audience is not bound by shared pleasures but by an experience of the unpredictable, a sensation which comes from the sublime as it involves a privation of the known and the anticipated: ‘What is terrifying is that the It happens that does not happen, that it stops happening.’42 This is the moment of insecurity from which the sublime feeling draws its power, but does this emphasis on the indeterminate not owe as much to Lyotard’s own thought as to that of Burke? In Part 1, section 17, Burke talks of the drive of ambition which provokes humans to exceed their usual capacities and realm of experience, and the rewards that occur in the form of: a sort of

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swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects’. For Lyotard, that encounter with the terrible is experienced when one is faced with an incapacity to estimate the next step – but one which should be sought by the modern painter in order not to shirk from the ‘anguish’ it causes, and to seek the intensification which Lyotard says is key to Burke’s sublime. Burke dismisses the capacity of painting to produce sublime feeling, due to its servitude to imitation, exhorting instead the power of poetry to represent those terrible events which seldom occur in reality, or to put forward Ideas which are beyond conception: ‘God, angels, devil, heaven and hell, all of which have however a great influence over the passions’.43 Burke also illustrates how poetry can raise objects to the sublime through a combination of words, as in Milton’s description of ‘Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens and shades – of Death’, thereby indicating the power of that which cannot be represented except by words. This challenge for painting to follow poetry away from mere imitation is a turning point in the history of painting and the development of the avant-garde in Lyotard’s account, with ‘Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetic of the sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s’ opening the way for experimentation and a change in the experience of the ‘art-lover’ who expects, instead of simple pleasure ‘an intensification of his conceptual and emotional capacity, an ambivalent enjoyment’.44 The version of the essay revised for The Inhuman adds the following to this passage: Intensity is associated with an ontological dislocation. The art-object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable; it no longer imitates nature, but is, in Burke, the actualisation of a figure potentially there in language.45 It is this potential to actualize a figure ‘potentially there in language’ which can be identified in Lyotard’s ‘Sublime and the Avant-garde’ to a greater extent than either ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ or ‘Answering the Question’, a feature which makes the essay connect to the performance of the figure hidden in language that preoccupies Lyotard in both Discourse, Figure , Libidinal Economy and the later writings on art. Perhaps it is significant that ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’ was first delivered as a lecture, given that the treatise attributed to Longinus concerns rhetoric and ‘the effect of language upon an audience not by persuasion but transport’.46 For Lyotard to have watched the delivery of his own text by

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a German translator before taking the podium himself must have highlighted the self-aware nature not only of his own project but that of the discourse of the sublime itself.47 Art’s object is not mimesis but intensification: the aim to demonstrate the presence of that which Burke identifies in poetry, where the emotive powers are free. Poetic language opens up a gap to which there is no clearly designated referent. This is considered at some length by Burke in Part 5 of the Enquiry where his discussion of the role of words in calling images to mind suggests that most listeners do not keep up with poetic description in a visual manner. Mind images are not evoked with a speed sufficient to accompany their words, neither do they correlate in this manner: ‘words undoubtedly have no sort of resemblance to the ideas for which they stand’ and are therefore more flexible in their invocation, allowing ‘many things of a very affecting nature’ to take root, which may have otherwise been transitory.48 The porous nature of language is its strength and also its danger, as was to be experienced by Burke in his struggle to respond to the French Revolution, whose excesses appeared close to the sublime of which he had written 30 years previously. His response, published in 1790 as Reflections on the Revolution in France, is visceral and replete with impassioned denouncements of the spectacles of October 1789, using the rhetoric he himself had warned of in the Enquiry to attack the revolutionary events as unbounded and un-English. He did so without consideration for historical cause or accuracy in a style which Thomas Paine dubbed ‘Mr Burke’s horrid paintings’. William J. T. Mitchell asks whether this style was self-consciously adopted in order to play out ‘the corrupting influence of the revolution itself’ and concludes that the Reflections succeeded in influencing subsequent writings on the Revolution and becoming a historical event in and of itself.49 I want to make a connection here between the excesses of both Burke’s ‘textual performance’ in the Reflections and the rhetorical style adopted by Lyotard in the Libidinal Economy. Both texts behave differently from that which is expected in that they do not conform to their anticipated modes of presentation but acknowledge the ‘surfeit of artifices’ possible in writing.50 Reflecting on Libidinal Economy in 1988 Lyotard recalls: It induced a manner of acting out, the relationalization for which (now it was my turn to rationalize) was the pretension to make writing so bent and flexible that no longer would the representation of errant feelings but their very presentation be performed in the flesh and blood of words. My only law therefore, was to try and be as receptive as possible to emerging impulses, be they of anger, hate, love, loathing, or envy.51

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This description is redolent both of the section of Discourse, Figure mentioned above – where the ‘beat’ of the fantasy is given ‘the name “letter” to that imprint of desire on the body, that wound and its lips, and to aspire to read the erotic body like a book’ – and the passions that Burke describes as producing the ‘strongest emotions that the mind is capable of feeling’. 52 The idea that Libidinal Economy aimed directly at an affective evocation of immediate sensation also correlates with the way Lyotard defines performance in La Performance et la phrase chez Daniel Buren where the role of written commentary is described as continuing the performance with an immediacy that contrasts with the reflexive response provoked by the work of Buren.53 The contrast Lyotard makes between performance and the work of Buren turns largely on the divergence of temporal and situational features and his argument for the reflective provocation of Buren’s questioning marks the growing importance of Kant’s reflective judgement in Lyotard’s thinking in the decade following the publication of Libidinal Economy.

The Sublime and the Differend The consideration of Lyotard’s writings on the sublime in this chapter has been deliberately tailored to emphasize the role of Burke in Lyotard’s thinking and to highlight the dissemination of the two texts published in Artforum . In comparison, the role of the essay ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ has been somewhat sidelined in this account except to note its relative obscurity in France compared to the dramatic role it has played in the reception of Lyotard’s thought on art in the Anglophone context. In a popular introductory guide The Sublime by Philip Shaw, ‘Answering the Question’ is referred to as ‘this classic essay’, which gives an indication of its importance with regard to Lyotard’s reception and the dramatic effect a publishing decision can have on the dissemination of ideas.54 By adding ‘Answering the Question’ as an appendix to the English translation of The Postmodern Condition the focus of the book is shifted dramatically: without it there is no reference to art nor to the sublime. In addition the foreword by Frederic Jameson gives an overview of the wider cultural context to which Lyotard’s main text does not directly refer and gives an overview of postmodern debates in architecture, thus setting the scene for Lyotard’s polemical opening to ‘Answering the Question’: ‘I have read that under the name of postmodernism, architects are getting rid of the Bauhaus project, throwing out the baby of experimentation with the

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bathwater of functionalism’.55 What is significant for this present account is that ‘Answering the Question’ introduces Lyotard’s ideas of the sublime without reference to Burke but through an emphasis on the conflict of the faculties in Kant’s Third Critique. Lyotard describes this conflict as ‘a strong and equivocal emotion [. . .] which some would call neurosis or masochism’, reinforced in his call for the ‘real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept’.56 Lyotard identifies in Kant’s sublime an example of the differend: the French word ‘différend ’ refers to a disagreement or conflict between two parties, or in this case the two faculties of imagination and reason. 57 The sublime experience, as described in the Critique of Judgement (1790), is one which overwhelms our senses and renders the faculty of imagination unable to find a presentation, thus causing pain. However this pain is accompanied by pleasure, brought by the realization that our faculty of reason is able to conceive of the sublime and thereby exceed both the faculty of imagination and nature. In contrast to Burke’s sublime which concerns the prospect of physical terror and in which reason has no place, Kant shifts the experience to the mind. The momentary violence done to thought is overcome through recourse to reason, as the gate to those areas which are beyond understanding which Kant calls the supersensible. This moment of reason transcending nature is the sublime for Kant. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be aroused and called to mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation.58 Lyotard rejects this moment of transcendence, however, emphasizing instead the pain as a demonstration of the absolute difference between the two faculties, an incommensurability which is the differend. It is Kant’s intention to bridge the two faculties, expressed as the intention of the Third Critique in its introduction, which provokes Lyotard’s strongest objection. Kant’s aim to provide a faculty of judgement that will mediate between the realms of Pure and Practical reason is not achieved, according to Lyotard, because it necessitates a false unification and represents an attempt at totalization which is indicative of the terror which has dogged modern history. Because Lyotard identifies a differend between these two

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faculties, he cannot agree with Kant’s attempt to bridge the two faculties and rejects the suggestion that aesthetics can mediate between knowledge (epistemology) and morality (ethics). The sublime feeling is neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalisation, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of their differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought. 59 Lyotard is not alone in this rejection of the metaphoric bridging – Derrida and Paul de Man similarly dismiss the claims of which Kant himself was never wholly convinced – but the problematic ‘gulf’ is emblematic of the argument that persists throughout The Differend .60 Aspects of this book have already been important to this study in establishing in Chapter 1 the temporal stasis of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ and in Chapter 3 exploring the rethinking of communication in the exhibition Les Immatériaux ; the book’s basic premise will be briefly revised here in order to highlight the importance of the Kantian sublime for Lyotard. The subtitle to the English translation – Phrases in dispute – highlights the importance of how phrases are linked. They must be linked, but in doing so the ‘phrase regimen’ within which they operate is established. According to the terminology of The Differend , all forms of communication operate within ‘phrase regimens’ which determine how phrases are linked and establish the sense of the referent in use. Lyotard aims to demonstrate that in all forms of phrase regimens there are inherent presuppositions – rules which link the phrases within an agreed ‘genre of discourse’ such as reasoning, knowing, describing – which supply rules for attaining certain goals. The Differend aims to show the existence of incommensurable phrase regimens and to explain that a dispute between two such regimens results in a differend. If a dispute between two or more parties occurs, but they agree to share the codes set out in an agreed form of judging, this is litigation. When no such agreed code or idiom exists and the voice of one of the parties would be silenced through their inability to phrase, it is not a litigation but a differend, as Lyotard explains: ‘In general, the plaintiff becomes a victim when no presentation is possible of the wrong he or she says he or she has suffered.’61 We can better understand the vehemence of Lyotard’s rejection of Kant’s attempts to bridge the different faculties if we equate them to the untranslatable phrase regimens analysed in The Differend . Each phrase regimen has its own set of intentions, embedded in the syntax and lexicon, and there cannot be any translation between such regimens; such attempts are dismissed

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by Lyotard as signifying only the impossibility of translation and incur an injustice to one of the regimens. Rather than attempting to resolve the gulf between the two, Lyotard demands that the absolute difference is upheld. It is the conflict of the faculties, as present in the sublime, which holds a fascination for Lyotard and is the reason that the Third Critique remains so central to his thinking despite the rejection of Kant’s main ambition of resolution. The inability of the mind to judge in the face of the sublime throws thought back on itself, the ‘disarray’ that Lyotard credits to Burke. It is the investigation of this process by Kant which preoccupies Lyotard and is particularly evident in his detailed reading: Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991). In Lessons Lyotard urges the reader to go beyond the thematic reading, in which Kant’s introduction to the Third Critique is soaked, and to pay attention to ‘the “manner” (rather than the method) in which critical thought proceeds in general’.62 This ‘manner’ is that which Kant attributes to Fine Art, working against the method of definite principles, and it is this manner which Lyotard believes should constitute critical thought, as being purely reflective. The key is not to learn philosophy but to learn how to philosophize: ‘I would argue that an importance of an entirely different order may be accorded the “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement”, that of being a propaedeutic to philosophy, a propaedeutic that is itself, perhaps, all of philosophy.’63 Similarly the task of The Differend is to recognize the presuppositions inherent in ‘phrase regimens’ and the task of the avant-gardes – in the essays already studied – is to rid the visual and perceptual fields of prejudices. Likewise both painter and philosopher are called to question: what is it to paint, what is it to think? Lyotard sees Kant asking similar questions in the Third Critique – what is judgement when there can be no recourse to fixed systems of judgement? Central to this question is the ‘Antinomy of taste’ and the process of reflective judgement. An antinomy (or paradox) is that which allows both a proposition and its negation to be put forward from the same starting point, perhaps because both propositions are false. The antinomy of taste shows aesthetic judgement to be a state of conflict between the subjective judgement of taste, and the demand for an objective aesthetic judgement; these two are put together despite the fact that the two are not simultaneously possible and therefore exist in conflict.64 Aesthetic judgement is based on the feelings aroused by an individual’s aesthetic experience and as such it must be ‘free from concepts’, indeterminate and open to dispute: ‘. . . the judging subject feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he accords the object’.65 It is this freedom from determinate concepts that characterizes aesthetic judgement as radically different from the power of judgement

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found in either the realm of practical or of theoretical understanding. Because aesthetic judgement is not found in these other realms there is no outside authority to which it can turn; it must judge itself through a process of reflective judgement – approaching an object in a disinterested manner, prepared to judge according to the feeling received from the object, which is then argued for, based on the belief that others must share such a feeling. This argument demonstrates for Lyotard the undoing of Kant’s attempts to resolve a philosophical system, and represents a ‘weakness’ closer to Lyotard’s own philosophical approach: to resolve this antinomy, the critique must acknowledge some logical monsters: a finality with no representation of the final cause, a universality with no concept, a necessity that is only exemplary, and above all, a pleasure devoid of interest.66 Because the power of aesthetic judgement operates according to this reflective judgement it is, Lyotard argues, fundamentally incompatible with the faculties of either reason or concepts. By attempting to reconcile the failure of the imagination in the sublime by recourse to reason, Kant is, therefore, attempting to translate the genre of reflective judgement – proper only to art and the power of the aesthetic – to the faculty of concepts, which operates in accordance with determinate judgement. Hence, the differend that the sublime attests to is the violence done to the mind by the irrevocable meeting of different faculties pressed to their limits. Kant describes the activity of judging the sublime to be one of ‘a mental agitation’, a description which appeals particularly to Lyotard’s discussion of the role of thought.67 This differend is to be found at the heart of sublime feeling: at the encounter of the two ‘absolutes’ equally ‘present’ to thought, the absolute whole when it conceives, the absolutely measured when it presents. ‘Meeting’ conveys very little; it is more of a confrontation.68 This confrontation is one that Lyotard draws from Kant’s own text where the feeling of pleasure, aroused in reflective judgement and initially described in the Introduction as an ‘accord’ of the faculties, is rendered much more complex with respect to the sublime. Despite a desire to present the sublime feeling its very nature defies presentation – it would lose that which makes it sublime were it to be measured, limited and made fit for presentation: ‘It [reason] cannot present the absolute’.69

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What Lyotard urges is for there to be a recognition of the existence of incommensurabilities present in the differend. Lyotard is calling for a system of judging without a priori categories of judgement in order to allow that rules remain indeterminate until the point of judgement. The sublime feeling is present in the pain that the differend presents, together with the pleasure that can arrive when the as yet un-thought links to phrases are found. The differend of the sublime is, therefore, the indeterminacy between an utterance and its realization, a realization which occurs only when the result is a priori unknown – the pain of having no adequate linkage followed by the pleasure in finding a new idiom. This process must be done by feeling – that which remains when the lack of a proper idiom renders the victim silent; it is only through finding the idiom that the victim becomes a plaintiff and the differend becomes litigation. How this occurs is what is at stake: This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.70

The Differend of Art The Differend does not make any specific consideration of art, except for passing references to Cage, Cézanne and a short ‘notice’ on Getrude Stein, a lack which Christine Buci-Glucksmann suggests should prompt us to refer back to Discourse, Figure , where the question of art is central. The link back to Discourse, Figure is made by Lyotard himself in Que peindre? : ‘I would not be able to work through an anamnesis of the visible without doing an anamnesis of Discourse, Figure ’; according to Buci-Glucksman this highlights the change ‘in interpretative paradigm’ between the immanent figure of art as difference put forward in Discourse, Figure and an art that alludes to the differend ‘where art is inhabited by the retreat of the figural’.71 The irreducibility of the figural to the visual order was the key concern of Lyotard in Discourse, Figure , being inscribed into the visual field with Freudian energetics. If we take that which Buci-Glucksman

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terms ‘Le différend de l’art ’ to be the conflict between what cannot be presented and the need to attest to its presence, we can follow her argument that this ‘differend of art’ takes over that force of difference introduced by the figural – exemplified by the shifting syntaxes in Freud’s ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ – where the invisible, which is not the opposition of the visible but its unconscious, is glimpsed – or, rather, felt. According to Kant, that which cannot be presented and exceeds imaginative presentation must be felt, but not in the sensible manner of a subjective feeling. Lyotard reminds us that the sublime for Kant is an ‘intellectual feeling (Geistegefühl )’, because it relates to that which is proper in thought, indifferent to the end and reflective of itself.72 It is in this aspect that Kant ultimately provides a different model for Lyotard, where there is none of the ‘interest’ which governs Burke’s sublime of self-preservation, and as such it also constitutes a rejection of Freudian wish-fulfi lment which is similarly end-driven. The importance of Kant’s Third Critique for Lyotard’s approach to judgement is clear: judging without a priori categories must therefore proceed through feelings, as testimony to that which is unpresentable. Hence the process of alluding to the unpresentable through that which Kant terms ‘negative presentation’ is the characteristic which Lyotard recognizes in the works of those artists and writers which are cited in ‘Answering the Question’. As noted earlier in this chapter Lyotard indicates a difference in approach within the avant-garde, identified as a differend between the two modes of ‘regret and assay’.73 Here the differend concerns the way in which some artists interrogate their media – Joyce questions the genre, but Proust does not; Duchamp does, but De Chirico does not – it is a question of putting forward the unpresentable, not as a nostalgia for some missing content, but in creating a new idiom. It is not their work which is sublime – Duchamp is certainly far from sublime – but it is their ‘manner’ which upsets the expected use of media and provokes a dislocating feeling, the violence done to the mind by the sublime differend. What is lacking is not a lost object but the security of knowing how to proceed. The question is how to continue without knowing either the rules of engagement or the objective, as Andrew Slade puts it: Faced with a differend as in the sublime sentiment, we are faced also with the task of finding a way to phrase the differend. The differend shows us that we do not have at our disposal all that we need, that we are impoverished before the event that demands to be phrased. We are summoned by the event to bring the event into phrases.74

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This response to the event is significantly different from that signalled in Lyotard’s figural or libidinal writing. Here the event is a demand that we bear witness to the existence of a differend without imposing a linkage that would do an injustice to that differend; whereas the figural delights in the event because of its intensities, its disruptive force, and signals the existence of that which cannot be subsumed into any system as a positive, even affirmative, demonstration of desire. Each deals with the inadequacies of systemized means of presentation and the obligation to draw attention to that which escapes presentation, but the consequences are dealt with differently. As we have seen, the differend exposes the extent to which the determinate conditions of discourse render an injustice to that which falls outside established phrase regimens. This is alluded to through the violence done to thought, language and the resulting conflict; but is this violence the same as that which the figural demonstrates? Lyotard’s libidinal language returns to The Differend in the fourth and final ‘Kant Notice’ which viscerally describes the political consequences of the aesthetic sublime in a manner that recalls the debt owed by Kant to Burke. For Burke the strongest passions and physiological effects on the body evoked the terror whose pain preceded the pleasurable relief of the sublime, but the self-interest of such threats discounts them from consideration in Kant’s account, as they inhabit the free play of the imagination and the necessary condition that aesthetic judgement be shared. However, Kant’s most physical descriptions of the mind’s agitated state are given in the sections of the Critique that seek to explain the sublime’s ‘resistance to the interest of the senses’ and which lead Lyotard to focus on the dangerous conclusion of such attempts to create a passage between incommensurables, leading to the ‘enthusiasm’ of the aesthetic sublime.75 The consequences of this unbridled impulse play a part in the next and final chapter of this book but the question is raised here to connect back to Burke and the question of violence.

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Chapter 5

Temporality and the figural

So we have reached Chapter 5. It is the bookend of this text, bringing to a close that which has gone before and echoing the questions and concerns raised at the outset. It is both an opening and a closing but an Odyssean journey – Book V of the Odyssey is a long way from that journey’s end, marking only the first encounter with the (anti-) hero himself. Shored up and bewitched on Calypso’s island, Odysseus presents a pathetic image: crying for home, sitting on the beach he is ‘tormenting himself with tears and sighs and heartache, and looking out across the barren sea with streaming eyes’.1 However, Book V also sees Odysseus’ preparations for his departure; a much more upbeat affair, it is mirrored in the corresponding section of James Joyce’s Ulysses where Part II opens by introducing Leopold Bloom for the first time: not crying but cooking. Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hen-cod’s roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.2 ‘Return upon the Return’ is the title of an essay by Lyotard on James Joyce’s Ulysses, collected in Lectures d’Enfance (1991), in which Lyotard describes the numerous displacements between the Odyssey and Ulysses as being indicative of the nature of any return: ‘It is not the logic of space-time that is at stake in Ulysses, but its paralogisms – paratopisms, parachronisms . . .’3. This final chapter takes aspects of temporality as its theme, with a particular concern for the return – not a return in any sense of the repetition of an original event but the circular coming-back-to which I see as characterizing Lyotard’s ‘late’ writings and through which I also want to return to the main themes of this book: performance art and the figural. The title of the chapter is itself a return to the discussions of Chapter 1 – which

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concerned the ungraspable nature of the figural and the immediacy of event – in order that the potency of that which I am terming the temporality of the figural might be brought into play when considering Lyotard’s later work, writings which foreground not only ‘parachronism’ as quoted above but also the ‘atemporality’ which is characteristic of the figural, and the figure-matrix in particular. The consideration of temporality in Discourse, Figure has often been overlooked in favour of the more obvious focus on space, and even when the art historian Rosalind Krauss makes extensive use of the figure-matrix in her work important aspects of its temporal operations are underplayed or missed. In order to redress this omission the characteristic blocking together of different temporalities will be a conscious feature of this chapter, particularly in relation to the role of documentation in performance art history. Whereas in Chapter 1 the history of performance was approached as a site for speculation drawn from myth – as was the case with Acconci’s Seedbed – here the documentation of a performance by French artist Gina Pane is the focus for a discussion of the affective potential of documentation, one that draws out the specific ‘aesthetic feeling’ that Lyotard highlights in Kant and which preoccupies his own return to the role of feeling in The Differend. Lyotard’s framing of the temporality of these ‘feelings’ – following that of Arrive-t-il? – does not recognize chronology, in the sense of a succession of measured moments, but destabilizes such framings and in this regard Lyotard’s notion of temporality is similar to Derrida’s discussion of Husserl’s Augenblick in Speech and Phenomena (1967). Also like Derrida, Lyotard’s use of repetition is not predicated on the return of the same and emphasizes difference in repetition, echoing the position articulated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1968). The problematic which concerns us in this chapter is not the act as reiteration but a break with the continuity of time posited in Husserlian phenomenology and the affect that destabilizes comprehension. It is with the above caveat in mind that we return to performance art through its documentation, following a feeling that stretches Lyotard’s own returns, brings back the figural and plunges its performance into the spot-light.

Return Upon the Return On 11 August 1972 the French performance artist Gina Pane observed a homely meal from outside the confines of the domestic realm, perched as she was on the window ledge outside the kitchen – looking in. The

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domestic has been rendered a scene of threatening articulation by US artists such as Martha Rosler in her performance to camera Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) or Cuban-born Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scenes (1973). But in Pane’s ‘action’ – her preferred term for performances – the semiotics were less confrontational if no less surprising and the threat was not directly articulated towards the viewer but to the artist – who bore the risks – and only by implication to the audience. How to begin a description of this piece? Joyce’s description of Bloom’s meticulous preparations of the tray to serve his wife breakfast allows us to observe the inner world of a domesticity similar to the internal space of the second floor flat in Place aux Œufs in Bruges, where a family (man, woman, two children) cook and eat their evening meal watched by Pane from without. Joyce’s description exceeds the real time of such actions, accompanied as they are by the now-famous inner monologue of the character’s ruminations on all things from the sensorial delights of the cooking process to the immutable subjectivity of his cat, ‘the pussens’. Pane’s action similarly heightens awareness of differing temporalities through the tense presentness of her uneasy position, which contrasts with, and draws out, the mundane domestic time of the interior. Pane’s piece, titled Je, is presented over two pages in the first issue of arTitudes International in October/November 1972, a partly bilingual re-launched version of the contemporary art magazine arTitudes, edited by François Pluchart, which was an important vehicle for French artists working with performance and the body. On the first page the title Je is given a prominent position above Pane’s short text and overleaf the next page records ‘fragments of the action’ in four photographs taken by Pane’s longterm photographic documenter and collaborator, Françoise Masson. Two photographs show Pane on the ledge: one from outside, one from within, while two others focus on ground level, showing passers-by approaching something on the floor – the identity of which is made distinguishable in the final close-up photograph as a collection of various discarded buttons, grouped above text fi xed to the floor spelling ‘LES AUTRES’ [The Others]. Viewing the photographs together helps to locate the position of these words as directly below Pane’s precipitous placing of herself between inside and out. Pane’s text from the same publication speaks of how ‘Polaroids showing the behaviour of the family’ were distributed to ‘the others [autres]’, dropped by Pane to her assistants in the gathering audience 8 metres below.4 Also distributed in the square are the sounds of the family’s ‘normal’ activities: picked up by microphones in the kitchen this private sound-world is broadcast via loudspeakers in the square. In contrast to this

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largely indistinguishable noise the voice of the artist is heard as she reads aloud five extracts from anthropological texts, including one describing the moment of the discovery by white settlers of the Kwakiutl Indians on Vancouver Island. The sense of difference, observation and discovery is marked by the setup of the whole performance, including the small pile of assorted buttons that mimic the offerings of coins to beggars and street artists, the marginal figures for whom the majority show either pity or (in)tolerance. In her book Gina Pane: Actions, Anne Tronche chooses to quote the first text read by Pane, a series of self-identifying statements read both in first and third person. Looking at the photograph in arTitudes, I can imagine the awkward physical stance adopted to make this reading: standing precariously on the window ledge, clutching the window frame – one hand reaching inside to grasp the horizontal strut of the window frame from above, the other hand reaching under in a more awkward grasp. Pane reads: Je m’appelle je suis né je mesure j’ai le teint j’ai les cheveux j’ai les yeux

ils s’appellent ils sont nés ils mesurent ils ont le teint ils ont les cheveux ils ont les yeux. 5

These are the individual characterizing statements learnt by children in school to give names to their identities within given categories: name, birthday, height, colour of skin, hair and eyes. These utterances – which simultaneously announce and affirm identity through difference – are used here to draw attention to the gap between the first person Je of the narrator and the ‘they’ of ‘ils’. It is this shift of pronoun that prompts Tronche to reflect on the sociological implication of Pane’s work as that which not only explores the divisions between models of human activity but also the inability to recognize a partnership or pairing with ‘the other’. In Pane’s statement on the work she describes how the placing of her body between two zones gave her ‘a power of transposition that broke the limits of individuality so that “JE” shared with “L’AUTRE”’. Such an unself-consciously serious belief in the power and role of the artist as transmitter would seem to echo Lyotard’s privileging of art as a space of provocation and ‘transformation’. There is also a common interest in the de-individuated subject personified by Freud’s pre-egoist infant which contrasts with readings of performance as primarily narcissistic or, more dismissively, an amplified demonstration of the artist’s own ego.

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Pane worked closely with photographer Françoise Masson to ensure that the resulting photographs of her ‘actions’ could be assembled to form a series of images referred to as ‘constats’, which were considered not as documents of actions but part of the work itself. These multi-part constats sometimes include drawings and text in addition to photographs taken during and after the performance. The control of composition and lighting was of great importance and the camera was given priority over any audience witnessing the ‘actions’ in terms of an unimpeded view.6 Yet despite meticulous planning there was space for unanticipated and uncontrollable occurrences in the work, an acknowledgement that the artist would relinquish control, sometimes to her physical body or to the reaction of the audience.7 The term constat connotes objective verifiability – ‘proof’ – and has been discussed by curator and art historian Jennifer Blessing in terms of a modernist belief in authenticity on the part of the artist, but it also highlights the importance of the actions as the accumulation of many parts. The multiple parts of the constats enact a delay that limits, or at least alters, the potential to react only to a single, immediate visual sensation. As Blessing writes: ‘Looking at the constats is always a process that unfolds across time, it is never one momentary absorption, characteristic of a single image’.8 The multiplicity of images and imagery at play in Pane’s work is clearly evident in both Pane’s account and the constat of what is perhaps her most famous action: Azione Sentimentale (1973). My body as a conducting substance in a motion of ‘going to the return’, coming back to its starting point through a de-construction of the prime image (mental puzzle): the red rose, mystic flower, erotic flower, transformed into a vagina by a reconstitution in its most present state: the painful one.9 Here it is the sequence and the process of transformation that is emphasized, echoed also in the constat , a framed square of seven colour photographic images in which the variety of format and focus jostle with the recurrence of similar images: arms, thorns and flowers. In the 2010 exhibition elles@pompidou in Paris the work was shown in a different format, consisting of two hand-written texts and 16 separately framed black and white photographs hung in a horizontal line. Given the length of the resulting work it was necessary to walk alongside the images in order to see the whole, but given the complex sequence of events which constituted the action the photographs do not easily recreate any sense of an unfolding chronology.

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There are, however, elements of chronology apparent in the image of Pane’s upturned forearm studded with rose thorns where the deliberate insertion of the thorns over time has to be acknowledged and the hiatus between each insertion imagined. Knowledge of the intimacy of the performed ‘actions’ – which sometimes took place in a domestic setting and in the case of Azione Sentimentale in a gallery to a female-only audience – heighten the extent to which the residual images are received as moments of intensification and which, I suggest, provoke an affective response because of their placing within a sequence of events across moments in time that are shared between artist and viewer. It is, then, a relationship that is strikingly different from that experienced by Pane in her action Je, where she approaches the domestic setting as an outsider.10 Je is also unusual in her oeuvre because it takes place before an audience that is neither invited, selected, nor under conspicuous surveillance: Je takes place in the city centre, at night. Many of the usual layers of protection have been removed, her action is open to the public and to the press and therefore unprotected from their reduction of its duration to a single image. I first encountered the action Je through a single image, one that grabbed my attention and intrigued me sufficiently to want to write about the piece and the experience that it gives to me. The source is a survey of contemporary French art by Catherine Millet, former editor of the French art magazine Art Press. It was originally published in 1987 then repackaged with a new chapter on recent events by another author and translated into English in 2006. Turning to pages 176–7 we can see a double-page spread of an unattributed photograph with a caption to the side that reads ‘Gina Pane, Je, Performance given in Bruges, 1972’ and on the facing page a brief introduction and this comment: During the performance of Je, Gina Pane was lit by a theatre spotlight, and she ended the action when, as the tension came to a head, people in the crowd that had gathered below began to call for her to jump.11 She’s up there on the window ledge, picked out by a spot light and then the crowd below, the others, start shouting – calling – baying for her to Jump! The photograph and the brief description given by Catherine Millet are sufficient to return me to a state of agitation, despite the unauthorized singularity of the image and despite its being harmlessly embedded between the pages of a hardback history. Although Pane later wrote that the piece ‘brought simultaneously the double vision of private space and public space’ and directed Françoise Masson to photograph the piece ‘both from

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the outside and then from inside . . . a view not accessible to the audience’, my initial reaction was ignorant of this doubling yet still initiated a state of unease that is related to the unstable feeling which I am terming the temporality of the figural.12 My anxiety is a response to the threat of the mob, linked to what Lyotard refers to as the agitated feeling of the sublime. In the next section of this chapter I will outline first how Lyotard locates this feeling in Kant and then discuss the extent to which such a feeling might be conveyed or ignited through a seemingly innocuous photograph.

A Sign without Sense In one of Lyotard’s most important political essays, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, he writes of the ‘sign of history’ felt by the crowds participating in the French Revolution and in contemporary revolutionary events such as the 1968 événements.13 This sign is felt when an unpresentable Idea (such as human progress) is conflated with its attempted presentation ‘as if’ it were a politically achievable reality. According to Kant it is the struggle of the imagination to present an Idea of reason that – in failing to present the object – presents instead a feeling ‘for the Idea of humanity in our subject’, which Kant refers to as ‘respect’.14 According to Lyotard this ‘sign’ does not signify according to the conventions of structuralist communication: the sublime has no meaning, therefore there is nothing to be decoded. The ‘sign’ of the sublime, paradoxically, refers only through feeling to the impossibility of a passage between absolute differences. For Lyotard such absolute difference is exemplified by Kant’s division between epistemology and ethics: the incapacity of the abstract Kantian Idea to be presented as a concept in the realm of experience is signed through the sublime feeling. Because it fails in its attempts to present an Idea, this ‘enthusiasm’ results in a tension that: ‘inverts itself in order to supply a supremely paradoxical presentation, which Kant calls “a mere negative presentation,” a kind of “abstraction,” and which he boldly characterises as a “presentation of the Infinite”’.15 Such negative presentations, including the example of the Mosaic law forbidding the making of ‘graven images’, require that the imagination be ‘unbounded’. This effect on the mind is central to Lyotard’s interest in Kant’s account of the sublime feeling; the ‘unbounding’ described in relation to ‘enthusiasm’ is ‘an Affekt , a strong affection, and as such is blind and cannot therefore, according to Kant, “deserve the approval of reason”’.16 Here Lyotard makes a distinction between ethics and aesthetics. While political enthusiasm is ethically ‘condemnable as

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pathological’ – because it seeks totality through the presentation of an Idea where neither totality nor presentation is possible, leading inevitably to terror – ‘aesthetically, enthusiasm is sublime’.17 Hence the enthusiasm felt by those watching the spectacle of great change leads to a sublime feeling but, Lyotard qualifies, it does not signify any moral right. It is, rather, the illusion of revolutionary politics which – like the transcendental illusion – acts ‘as if’ there were no divide between political Ideas and their presentation. Both art and politics are connected to the sublime feeling, though in different ways, as Lyotard explains in Peregrinations : The stakes of politics are definitely not to know something but to change something, and the stakes of art are to make something that has been given to one’s sensibility and is transferable to others. I am merely arguing that both art and politics are excepted, though in different ways, from that hegemony of the genre of discourse called cognitive.18 The consequence of being exempted from the cognitive genre, according to Kant, is that the aesthetic cannot rely on any determinant a priori judgement and must forgo universality. But, rather than reduce the aesthetic feeling to the merely subjective, Kant reverts to the ‘public sense’ which, while not actual a priori , is possible and can be put forward ‘as if’ it constituted a basis for universal judgement, thereby establishing a ‘common human understanding’ or common sense (sensus communis).19 In order to argue for such a proposition Kant requires that feelings be put to one side, as Lyotard writes in his detailed discussion in Lessons : There is a kind of skimming off of everything that might be ‘matter’ in the representation or the subjective state it produces . . . The ‘matter’ of sensation must be eliminated from aesthetic pleasure because it exercises a ‘charm’ over thought.20 Emotions arising from matter must be purged if there is to be an accord between the faculties of knowledge that allows for the possibility of a common sense. The sublime, however, is an emotion which arises not from matter but from an absence of form. Therefore the extent to which the sublime feeling can similarly borrow the attributes of commonality as discussed with regard to aesthetic feeling in general (pertaining principally to the beautiful) is contentious. It concerns Lyotard more than Kant, who devotes very little attention to its problematics. What singles out the sublime for particular attention by Kant is its relationship to the realm of

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reason because, unlike the aesthetic pleasure of the beautiful, the sublime necessitates a relationship with morality and instigates the ‘other feeling’ which was mentioned above: ‘respect’. ‘Respect’ is the only feeling we can know a priori , it is ‘the ‘presence’ of the law regarded subjectively, its ‘sign’, which consequentially acts as ‘the disposition and the sign of the disposition of thought’.21 This is the point where Lyotard makes his most explicit break with Kant, in his rejection of Kant’s attempts to provide any grounds for a communicability of the sublime. The sublime is at the heart of Lyotard’s aesthetic but it is a sublime of dissensus, not a nihilistic dissensus – the necessity of linking phrases (enchaînement) is never under question – but what remains paramount is that the judgement that constitutes the link remains contingent.22 Returning now to the image of Pane in Millet’s book, it is the residual affect of the scene of the mob confronting the isolated figure on the window ledge that provokes in me a state of agitation. It is not a rational fear – I know the story ends without dramatic incident – and yet the combination of image and situation dislocates because I am rendered powerless and the spotlight calls me back. It is, as Lyotard describes in his account of perspectival vision in Discourse, Figure , the clarity of its presentation which belies what it obscures: ‘Accurate seeing [la vue ‘exacte’ ] is immediate, but is recaptured from indistinct, turbid vision. The shifty, the squinting, the cloudy and the phantasmagorical, these constitute the infancy of mental inspection.’23 This ‘shifty’, ‘squinting’ infancy is what Lyotard reminds us to bring to research: he reminds us that the figural is not opposed to discourse but is within and central to it, thereby leading me to locate the figural force in his reading of Kant as a reading of the mental agitation that cannot be reconciled in the passage between the two incommensurable realms of the presentable and unpresentable, the same attention that Lyotard gives to the workings of desire in Freud’s accounts of the primary processes and which now leads me to squint once more at the surfaces that hold past performances.24

The figural Dislocation of Arrive-t-il? Art Historian Kathy O’ Dell describes the history of performance art as ‘one that flickers, one that causes the historian to shuttle back and forth between that which is seen and that which has to be imagined – between the visible and the invisible’.25 The search makes the imagination work ‘vigorously’ to piece together a past performance. However, these pieces are

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fragments that evade wholeness, working neither as nostalgic signifiers for the past nor for the elusive ‘result’ of completion to come. The flickering that O’Dell describes is caused by the instability of these fragments, which refuse to coalesce because their materiality is shot through by an immateriality, entwined like discourse and figure. One example of this immateriality that is central to O’Dell’s work is the ‘haptic’ potential of the performance photograph, whereby ‘touch’ acts as a bond between the viewer of a photograph now – and the touch of the photographer whose action captured the image at the time of the performance. O’Dell describes the literal handling of performance photographs as a ‘contracted partnership’ where the viewer is participating in a narrative, not necessarily one that is fully anticipated by the narrative of documentary style but one that she describes as ‘narrative-in-reverse’.26 The unconscious chain of experience is described as working backwards in time through touch, back to the touch of the finger on the camera’s ‘trigger’ and the touch of the performer’s own body: it is not a direct semiology and does not work through any recognizable codified system but rather through a sensory evocation: ‘This chain of experiences, working backward in time, subtly locks the viewer into a metaphoric complicity with the photographer / viewer, as well as with the performer.’27 Aspects of immaterial matter are important to both O’Dell and Lyotard in bringing about a communality, not necessarily of persons, but of matter: a communality evinced through feeling. The feeling that is initiated through the haptic for O’Dell, however, is linked to the era with which her study is primarily concerned, that of the early 1970s. At this time the involvement of artists in the production and distribution of documents was much closer than in subsequent periods; this facilitates her argument that documentary photographs carry connotations of family snapshots and thereby evoke the psychic space of the home. Consequently, I would suggest that the connection that O’Dell highlights is not only to the artist and the performance but also to the sense of initial community that was shared by artists and followers. In drawing such an inference I want to question whether this is where the fetishization of documentation begins, ‘touched’ in a manner that later reproductions are not. O’Dell evokes the grainy black and white images and small- circulation magazines in a manner similar to that evoked by Marina Abramović when referring to documentation as the only link to performances that were physically inaccessible due to geographic, political and economic constraints.28 The sensory touch of documents with a historic association to the time of the event has an undeniable appeal – the thrill of handling copies of Avalanche, for example, especially when unbound and found loose

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in a manila archive box – but it is not this experience in itself which forms the bond or contract of which O’Dell writes. What is more important, I suggest, is a mode of being open and receptive to that which binds you in contract, an openness that is easier to evade when flicking through an art anthology or being fed images in a lecture. I take this openness to be that which Lyotard calls ‘passibility’, an openness which has a particular temporal and ethical importance when understood in relation to the work of Emmanuel Lévinas.

Passibility According to Lyotard passibility is a ‘state’ in which ‘something is happening to us’, an unanticipated occurrence in which ‘the feeling is the immediate welcoming of what is given’.29 The description of passibility as ‘welcoming’ may seem to sit uneasily with the theological meaning of the term as a capacity to feel suffering, yet this ‘welcoming’ of suffering relates to both the pain and pleasure combination of the sublime and the pulsation of the death-drive operating on the edge of privation. It is a state where the egoist individuality of the self is challenged by a force of desire that comes not from the primary processes of the individual but from ‘something fundamental, originary which we can not conceptualise’.30 The suffering is the effect of this un-cognizable ‘something’ that destabilizes thought and provokes the ‘agitation’ that Kant describes, but without the triumphal return to the power of reason with which Kant claims human superiority over nature. The un-bounding of both mind and self is made clear when Lyotard’s ‘passibility’ is approached as an adaptation of that which Emmanuel Lévinas terms ‘passivity’, as in the following quotation from Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence (1974): ‘The self is characterized by a passivity that cannot be taken up [. . .] The subjectivity of subjection of the self is the suffering, the ultimate offering oneself, or suffering in the offering of oneself.’31 This suffering ‘in the offering of oneself’ is key both to the actions of Gina Pane and to the temporality of the situation that Lyotard considers in relation to art through the terms ‘passible’, ‘gesture’ and ‘instant’. We need to consider the work of Lévinas further, to trace his presence in Lyotard’s writings and to re-position reactions to Pane’s work. This will also lay the ground for my claims that it is only through a consideration of Lyotard’s response to Lévinas that his essays on Barnett Newman can be considered away from the overtones of modernist formalism or Heideggerian ontology suggested by some commentators.

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Lévinas has a position within French philosophy that is difficult to place. Born into a religiously observant Jewish family in Lithuania, he studied in Strasbourg and attended lectures by Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in 1928–9 before returning to France, where he published his thesis on Husserl and a translation of Cartesian Meditations. The importance of Lévinas in bringing the thought of Husserl and Heidegger to France is widely recognized, although the reception of his own philosophical work in France is out of synch with traditional understandings of post-war French philosophy, such as that put forward by Vincent Descombes in 1978.32 In his introduction to Lévinas, Colin Davies notes that Descombes’ account omits Lévinas because: ‘he fits so uncomfortably within the narrative which Descombes elaborates’.33 This narrative is one which sees the dominance of the three ‘H’s’, Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, being undermined by a turn to the ‘masters of suspicion’ Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which leaves no room for Lévinas’ continued concern with phenomenology. The scant reference to Lévinas in Descombes’ account highlights the extent to which recognition of his importance as a philosopher dates from after the time of Descombes’ book and with the turn to ethical concerns in French philosophy identifiable in the 1980 collection Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas and the Colloque de Cérisy on his work in 1986. Lyotard contributed to this growing public regard for Lévinas’ work and in doing so was continuing an earlier recourse to his writings in the wake of accusations that his own libidinal rhetoricity was devoid of any ethical position. The dialogues with JeanLoup Thébaud from 1977–8, published as Au Juste [Just Gaming], show this affinity with Lévinas: This is what, for me, makes the thought of a Lévinas so important: it shows that the relation with the other, what he calls ‘the Other’ of ‘the absolutely Other,’ is such that the request that is made of me by the other, by the simple fact that he speaks to me, is a request that can never be justified. [. . .] It is not servitude at all, because this is prior to the question of freedom. It is what Lévinas calls passivity (a theme I have a particular liking for, with its value of provocation), and of which he says that it is obviously prior to what may pass for passivity once free choices must be made.34 This stress on the priority of passivity removes the connotations of its everyday usage as a mode that is the result of an individual’s choice, rather it happens to a being and is neither chosen nor discovered. This distinction can also be identified in Lyotard’s references to Lévinas in the first few pages

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of Discourse, Figure where his work is invoked to counter the overtly religious claims of Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel who describes visible space as an opening onto that of the creator. Lyotard references Lévinas to argue that the other is not of the sensible realm and cannot be categorized as the other side of that present to me: The face is the presence of speech. It is not the thickness of the sensible that is spread out between it and me listening to it, but the opening of the absolute, absolute disequilibrium, true irreversibility which comprises not only the things and my look, as Claudel believed, but the infinite and the finite.35 Despite Lyotard’s reverential account of Lévinas’ ethical concerns and his allusion here to key aspects of Lévinas’ thought – the face to face of the other and the infinite – he quickly declares that they have no place in Discourse, Figure : they are seen as belonging to a tradition that demonizes the eye as ‘passion, perversion’ – in opposition to which Lyotard is rallied to full rhetorical power and proclaims that ‘This book is a defence of the eye . . .’ and by implication also a defence of passion and the sensible that had been demonized through the legacy of Plato in Western thought.36 Yet despite this rhetorical defence of retinal and sensible visuality we know that such claims will be undermined as the book progresses and the limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology are exposed. Lévinas is sited on the edge of Lyotard’s thought – maintained like the figural on the edge of discourse but central to it, relating to the position of Jewish thought as the inassimilable other of Western philosophy.37 As such it is not insignificant that Lévinas remains important to Lyotard as a thinker who has sought to question the transcendence of Western philosophy, rejecting its universalizing project and turning rather to rupture in order to open up discourse to the other.38 It is in his 1961 Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority that Lévinas makes a critique of philosophical systems, Husserl and Heidegger included, that consider the other in relation to (as interior to) their own philosophical systems and which result, inevitably, in the reduction of the other to the same: a totality. In contrast, Lévinas postulates the search for infinity that will not interiorize the other but recognize that it brings an exteriority which necessitates a fundamental obligation to the other. Prior to this encounter with the other Lévinas recognizes the relationship of a life of interiority to external objects as one that ‘lives from’ [vivre de] the things in the world, in order to satisfy needs both materially and for their own sake

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through the act of possession.39 One example given by Lévinas is that of eating food for pleasure [jouissance] which involves taking in and literally consuming the object in an act of enjoyment: The need for food does not have existence as its goal, but food. [. . .] In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not ‘as for me . . .’ – but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate – without ears, like a hungry stomach.40 This quotation highlights the extent to which the relationship that Lévinas describes differs from that of Heidegger’s Dasein in Being and Time , where the relationship to objects and being-in-the-world is one of care [Sorge] and seems unmotivated by desire. Lévinas highlights the absence in Heidegger of any consideration of happiness, enjoyment or pain: ‘Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry’, writes Lévinas.41 Consequently, Heidegger’s Being neglects privation, the significance of which is made clear by Lévinas as follows: ‘For the privation of need is not just a privation, but is privation in a being that knows the surplus of happiness, privation in a being gratified’.42 Lévinas is arguing that privation, like suffering and distress, is part of the broader experience of happiness and enjoyment [jouissance] which become ‘the nourishment and content of that life’ in contrast to the ‘bare fact of existing’ of Heidegger’s ‘naked will to be, the ontological Sorge for this life’.43 The interiority that Lévinas describes is motivated by an egoist drive for Jouissance as a singular psychological state: ‘the very pulsation of the I. In enjoyment we maintain ourselves always at the second power, which, however, is not yet the level of reflection’.44 This drive for jouissance through the literal consumption of objects demonstrates a deliberate contrast to the utilitarian ends of Heidegger’s tools: it is enjoying living through an intimacy with objects. Returning to Gina Pane and her relation to objects performed in her actions, there is also a careful meditation on the relationship of the I to objects but one that ‘disarranges certain familiar mechanisms’ as François Pluchart describes: . . . like swallowing half a pound of rotten minced meat while watching television news in an intentionally uncomfortable position; alternately wounding herself with a razor blade and playing with a tennis

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ball; gargling endlessly with milk until blood mixes with the spit liquid; crushing glass with her mouth, or breaking a sheet of glass with her body.45 This is an excessive, parodic reiteration of the conventional ‘living from’ objects and it works to emphasize those aspects of jouissance that relate to distress and suffering in addition to the conventions of pleasure and satisfaction. It reminds us that the enjoyment of interiority that Lévinas describes, which presumes a certain freedom to take from the world, is free only because of the exteriority of the other. The other, being exterior to me, is not available for my enjoyment and it is in its exteriority that my sense of self as free becomes ‘invested’. But unlike the Hegelian master / slave model of the encounter with the other which necessitates a relationship of dominance and subjugation, Lévinas’ encounter with the other is premised on one of welcoming and hospitality. It is not a dependence on the other but an obligation to the other. The implications of Lévinas’ thought are particularly significant for the discussions of art that have given priority to the model of an incomplete, displaced subjectivity emanating from discussions of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’.46 Whereas the (false) sense of the self as a whole is reliant on and derived from the gaze of the other – according to the well-known summary of Lacan which was briefly rehearsed in Chapter 3 in reference to Kate Linker’s use in relation to Acconci – Lévinas states that: ‘The interiority that ensures separation must produce a being absolutely closed over upon itself, not deriving its isolation dialectically from its opposition to the Other.’47 This passage is quoted by Lyotard in The Differend at the opening of the ‘Lévinas Notice’ in the section titled ‘Obligation’ where Lyotard begins to filter the implications of Lévinas’ ethical approach to ontology through his ‘philosophy of phrases’ and draws attention to the encounter with the other as event. It is through Lyotard’s discussion of Lévinas that I want now to turn to Lyotard’s essay on the abstract painter Barnett Newman. For the sake of clarity, however, I intend to leave behind the Lacanian notion of alterity – suffice to note that the reliance of the imago on the other in Lacan does not configure with the notion of the other as absolute otherness in the sense that Lévinas asserts and that interested Lyotard.48 I am also making the deliberate decision to consider this essay on Newman outside its usual context for consideration – which would be the sublime of the previous chapter – in order to open it up to the temporality of Levinas’ obligation. If it is possible to speak here of a link between temporality and ethics it is

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one of atemporality: the ethical call has no moral code, it must respond to that which occurs – quod – before knowledge of what it is – quid – or its implications.

Advent Lyotard’s essay ‘Newman: The Instant’ is dated December 1983 and was first published in the catalogue for an exhibition titled ‘Le temps: regards sur la quatrième dimension’ [‘Time: Looking at the fourth dimension’], held in Brussels and subsequently touring to other European cities including London. It was an exhibition of diverse artefacts and art works including examples by Duchamp and Newman, the two artists on whose work Lyotard’s essay is focused. In his essay Lyotard sets up the temporality in Newman’s work as being radically different to that of Duchamp. Lyotard writes of the ‘delay’ in Duchamp’s Large Glass, where the bachelors are caught in a state of perpetual unfulfilment; separated from the bride both by the physical division of the horizontal bar between the two parts of the glass and through their representation in a different perspectival system: their ‘love gazoline’ is destined never to arrive. The bride is forever fi xed in the mode of the ‘not yet’, which Lyotard describes as a ‘parody of looking into the future’ like that of Beckett’s Godot. In contrast Duchamp’s posthumously unveiled peepshow Etant donnés [The Given] is posited as ‘too late’, where the unveiling has already occurred; both demonstrate the ‘too much’ of the male gaze whose ‘virility’ fails to take account of the occurrence itself. Duchamp’s time is that of infinite consumption, contrived as an excess of documentation, puzzle-writing and myth-spinning; his work is never an occurrence because it is caught between the too soon and the too late. Although Duchamp plays with the typical structures of communication on which classic modernity is founded – the triadic system of message sent from an addressor to a receiver – the system is still maintained. Newman’s paintings, however, constitute a rupture with this system, putting forward a radically different approach, according to Lyotard, one that is not spatial but essentially temporal: it is what Lyotard terms ‘the instant’ of Newman’s paintings. The instant has a clear philosophical tradition pertaining to discussions of time both in St Augustine and Pascal in classical French philosophy and in the phenomenological tradition of the twentieth century, one whose German origins are further acknowledged when Lyotard’s essay is translated as ‘Der Augenblick: Newman’, reiterating Derrida’s emphasis that ‘instant’ translates Husserl’s term Augenblick , literally the ‘blink of the eye’.

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In contrast to Duchamp’s puzzling, diagrammatic, multi-part works the large abstract paintings of Barnett Newman are simple, usually consisting of a single field of flat colour broken only by one or more vertical stripes – referred to as zips – whose parallel edges bleed slightly through the masking tape used to contain it during the painting process, thereby giving the zips a visual tremulance. This process of working began in the late 1940s and continued throughout the next two decades of Newman’s life in differing formats including series of paintings and free-standing sculptures which echo the paintings’ zips. According to Newman the turning point was marked by Onement I in 1948 which he called a ‘conversion’, describing the experience of making the work in terms of a revelation or as Lyotard remarks, ‘an epiphany’. Newman was an important writer and theorist of the changes taking place in painting in the United States at the time and his own theoretical reflections on this ‘conversion’ are clearly articulated in his essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ published in December 1948 in the review Tiger’s Eye, of which he was associate editor. The importance of this connection between abstract painting in the United States and the European aesthetic tradition of the Sublime has often been seen within the wider context of the emerging cultural power of the United States in the post-war period and the consequent demise of French, particularly Parisian, influence.49 Newman’s manifesto – for that is how it reads – explicitly critiques the failure of European artists, such as Mondrian, to achieve the sublime: having become caught in a realm of sensations and without a ‘sublime context’. Towards the end of his essay Newman writes: ‘if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?’50 Unsurprisingly, it is in this context of a call to arms, of ‘exaltation’, that Lyotard’s essay on Newman has been considered in the Anglophone context, seeming to add continental weight to Newman’s American revival of the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. Writing in the journal Parallax , Diarmuid Costello uses such an argument to bolster his interpretation of Lyotard’s writings on art as being surprisingly similar to the modernist formalism of Clement Greenberg.51 Costello deliberately positions himself against the dominant reading of Lyotard’s association with the postmodern, citing John Rajchman’s 1998 October article as an example of the orthodox (American) view. Costello usefully highlights the extent to which Lyotard is involved in ‘rewriting’ modernism and thereby reiterates Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern as ‘modernism in its nascent state’, but the link to Greenberg via their shared interest in Kantian aesthetics is highly problematic and overlooks the extent to which Lyotard’s use of Kant is radically different from that of modernist formalism.52 A

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different approach to Lyotard’s writings on Newman is one that considers the two essays ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’ and ‘Newman: The Instant’ together, with the consequence, in the work of Simon Malpas, that references made to Heidegger’s Ereignis in the first form the basis for a Heideggerian reading of the latter. 53 Although Malpas’ account does force a little considered reflection on the importance of Heidegger’s thought for Lyotard, the assumed connotations implied by his use of Ereignis rely to a large extent on work which was not published at the time Lyotard was writing and, I would argue, place an unhelpful emphasis on Newman’s own belief in art as that which reveals the mystery of being. The role of Heidegger in Lyotard’s thought is as yet little explored in Lyotard scholarship and its enormity puts it outside the scope of this present study. It is worth noting, however, that there is another differend between Anglophone and Francophone scholarship on this matter which can be illustrated through two studies: Dominique Janicaud’s two-volume study Heidegger en France (2001) makes little reference to Lyotard but complains that in his 1954 La Phénoménologie Lyotard condemns Heidegger as racist; Tom Rockmore, however, writes that: ‘Lyotard is an original thinker, whose position is more than a pale copy, a simple restatement, an echo however distant on Heidegger’s thought, but which takes shape in the horizon formed by Heidegger’s study of being’. 54 Rockmore is clearly attuned to a Heideggerian sensibility in Lyotard which Janicaud chooses to overlook, perhaps because of the plethora of French thinkers who declare themselves to be working in the wake of Heidegger’s legacy, as illustrated by the accompanying volume of interviews with Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others. In both cases the piecemeal translation of Heidegger into French is important to consider, as is the important role of Jean Beaufort as the main interlocutor. It was Beaufort who arranged and led the first international training course for French and German students in Freiburg in 1947, taking a group which included Lyotard to meet Heidegger in Todtnauberg. In Lyotard’s recollections of this event, given as a lecture in Vienna in 1989, he recalls that he determined never to become a Heideggerian but adds ‘I continued to read his work’.55 Given this distance it is unlikely that Lyotard would have had access to the unpublished manuscripts of Beiträge zur Philosophie which gives the fullest account of Ereignis. Composed in the years 1936–8 the Beiträge was published in 1989 and is the main source for Malpas’ discussion of the meaning of Ereignis. Other important references to Ereignis occur in the 1956 addendum to Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes [The Origin of the Work of Art]; although only the first version of this text (1935–6) has been

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translated into French (published in 1987) the German text was well known in French philosophical circles following Derrida’s commentary in La Vérité en Peinture , 1978 [The Truth in Painting] which responded to the essay by Meyer Schapiro ‘La nature morte comme objet personnel ’; both the essay by Schapiro and Derrida were published in the French journal Macula . In the account of Lyotard’s essay ‘Newman: The Instant’ which follows, my focus is less on the Heideggerian conception of art as the unconcealment of being but rather on that which Heidegger forgets, his ‘deafness to a problematic of justice’ which Lyotard sees signalled in texts from the 1930s. It is not Heidegger whose voice is heard in ‘Newman: The Instant’ but Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethical call to obligation: ‘the forgotten is not (only) Being, but the Law’.56 The essay opens with the subtitle L’ange [The Angel] and makes an extraordinary claim for Newman’s paintings: ‘A painting by Newman is an Angel. It announces nothing; it is in itself the annunciation.’57 Lyotard claims that, unlike Duchamp, Newman’s paintings do not operate within the traditional triadic system of communication: it is not a message about an occurrence, it is the occurrence itself. As such Newman’s paintings present a problem for traditional commentary which seeks to devine meaning and partake in a princely view: the carefully composed vedute whose powerful construction has trained the eye to adhere only to the theatre of discourse.58 In this case ‘No one, and especially not Newman, makes me see [. . .] I (the viewer) am no more than an ear open to the sound which comes to it from out of the silence; the painting is that sound, an accord’. 59 The instant of Newman’s paintings works, according to Lyotard, through an ethical obligation to listen. Lévinas is not referred to by name in this essay but his presence is a constant echo, made evident through the choice of vocabulary, not least the subheading ‘Obligation’ which repeats the title given to the section of The Differend which discusses Levinas’ call to the other, including the following discussion of ‘annunciation’: The ego is tempted to explain it as a formation within its domain of constitution and experience. It is tempted to know it and is tempted by knowledge. But the other, as an exteriority whose reason does not lie within the ego, announces the insufficiency of knowledge. The other announces no sense, it is the announcement, the non-sense. ‘The messenger is the message’.60 This quotation goes beyond the discussion of interiority outlined earlier in this chapter and refers to the point at which the ‘closed over’ interiority

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is called to respond to the other, ‘as an exteriority’. Unlike the Hegelian tradition, the other for Lévinas is not dialectically constituted in relation to the self but requires an unquestioning obligation to the other without prior knowledge of the situation or consideration for the consequences of one’s response. The classic biblical example of this unquestioned response to the call of the other, referred to by Lévinas and repeated by Lyotard, is God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. The moment of address by the other is that of occurrence, where all that is known is that there is an address and an obligation. In Chapter 1 of this book the temporal constraints of event were discussed in relation to ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ – where ‘event’ is bound to a temporality that cannot be either anticipated or maintained within a conceptual framework of measured moments in time but is obliged to honour the particularity of its occurrence. The call of the other, ‘the annunciation’, must similarly honour the ‘genre’ of the phrase to which it belongs. As a prescriptive phrase, however, the only linkage that will do justice to the demand (and respect the genre of the phrase) is one that precludes reflection on the meaning, situation or consequence of the demand (as this would entail the deposition of the first phrase and necessitate a change of genres from the ethical to the cognitive genre). Therefore the ‘scandal of the obligation’, as Lyotard names it, constitutes a demand from which there can be no denotative (descriptive) commentary. In consequence, the self cannot regard the other as dialectically related to itself: in order to constitute itself as such it would position itself in relation to the other through a self-constituting commentary, a commentary which the other, in Lévinas’ conception, cannot adhere to. According to Lyotard’s translation, Lévinas’ ‘the other befalls the ego’ is a phrase to which we are obligated; it is a prescriptive address which demands that the addressee respond without sense (knowledge) because it ‘announces the insuffi ciency of knowledge’.61 Similarly, Lyotard describes the impotency of traditional concepts of referent and sense in the face of Newman’s canvases: ‘The message is the presentation, but it presents nothing; it is, that is, presence.’62 In this ‘nothing’ the surprise is that there is anything: in the absence of subject matter, except for the poverty of the materials themselves – the colours on the canvas and their respective arrangement – the event is that something exists. It is the immediacy of this, here – now, something, not over there, not later but in the instant – that is the painting itself. Thus, there is no message to interpret, only an event to listen to, for listen we must if it is an ethical calling to the presence of painting.

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We have become familiar with Lyotard’s use of several voices in his writings in both The Inhuman and Que peindre? as a device that makes the reader become involved in the dialogic process. ‘Newman: The Instant’ does not adopt this strategy but there is an undeniable polyphony of voices apparent, the most explicit being those of Newman himself and the foremost commentator on his work Thomas. B. Hess. In a postscript to the catalogue version of Lyotard’s essay, Hess’ work is acknowledged as his main source on Newman, referring to the catalogue produced to accompany the retrospective of Newman’s work at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1972. This is significant because Hess emphasizes the connection of Newman’s work to Jewish traditions, referring to Newman’s own reading of the Talmud and Torah, one that makes the unspoken connection to Lévinas more potent. However, the dominance of Hess and Newman (as quoted by Hess) sometimes makes ‘Newman: The Instant’ difficult to read; if the intention is to divine Lyotard’s own voice and to highlight where Lyotard parts company with the claims of Hess and Newman, care needs to be taken. The manuscript for this essay held at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet shows that the section of the essay with the greatest number of additions, corrections and general re-workings is that which deals with Newman’s own response to being, subtitled ‘Le ’.63 This section considers the claims of Hess that the subject of Newman’s paintings is that of creation, not only of the work of art but also the biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis: the paradoxical creation of something out of nothing, where the light of fiat lux is the creation not only of light but of its situation, its place: ‘The flash (like the instant) is always there, and never there. The world never stops beginning.’64 It is the performative immediacy of the sublime which elsewhere Lyotard likens to the capitalist ideal of production without waste: . . . it is its dream, not its project – its dream would be in effect to say let there be automobile and there is automobile, let there be petrol and there is petrol. It is this idea that is called creation, I think.65 I include this quotation to add a note of bathos and as a reminder that Lyotard’s concern for the sublime is never one of metaphysical transcendence, a misinterpretation of which ‘Newman: The Instant’ is sometimes the victim. When Lyotard writes ‘The picture presents, being offers itself up in the here and now’ it does sound similar to Heidegger’s disclosing of being in art, as he writes in The Origin of the Work of Art : ‘it came to light what is at work in the work: the disclosure of the particular being in its

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Being, the happening of truth’.66 But Heidegger’s claim that truth is what happens – or arrives – links the occurrence to the same a priori morality which Lyotard unreservedly disputes in Kant’s claims about respect . This difference is articulated by David. C. Wood in his essay ‘Art as Event’ where he makes it clear that Heidegger and Lyotard do not agree on what is at stake: For Heidegger, the event aspect of a work of art is its opening up a world, setting into play a certain regime of truth, changing the way we live and move and have our being. For Lyotard (certainly in his analysis of Newman), what is at stake seems to be a certain bearing witness to the creative becoming of time as such, the presencing of what appears.67 In 2009 the Tate Modern hung Newman’s Adam (1951–2) opposite a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, in such a way that one had to view the painting at close proximity – to come face to face with the canvas – and as such it becomes a physical confrontation; but there is also a time-based awareness of the chromatic sensations that are not the instant of the zip, but rather a creeping optical revealing of the broadening base of the wide, lighter-red section that comes to meet the beholder in a physical manner.68 The physicality of the experience parallels Newman’s recollections of a visit to the mounds built by Miami Indians in Ohio: Looking at the site you feel, Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there (beyond the limits of the site) there is chaos, nature, river, landscapes . . . but here you get a sense of your own presence . . . I became involved with the idea of making the viewer present: the idea that ‘Man is present’.69 As Lyotard points out, this passage is compared by Hess to a later statement by Newman, written to introduce a maquette for a synagogue, in which he describes the Makom , the place in a synagogue where the Torah is read and where ‘he [the reader] can experience a total sense of his own personality before the Torah and his name’. In his subsequent commentary Lyotard seems to permit Newman’s sense of the mystical, concerned as it is with the mystery of being, but he takes issue with Newman’s claims that in the instant being ‘procures “personality” a “total meaning” by revealing itself instantaneously’ and rejects the presumptions with regard to signification, totality and personality, none of which can occur in the instant.70 It is important to highlight this point – where Lyotard parts company with Newman and Hess – for the essay is so suffused with other voices that it is

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easy to overlook the extent to which Lyotard is making a statement that is radically different. Lyotard writes of the artist’s responsibility ‘to respond to the order to be’, to assert the question mark of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’, which is more than following Kant’s attempt to allude to what cannot be shown, but is rather ‘an allusion to Burke’s terror, to the terror that surrounds the event, the relief that there is’.71 It is not easy to read ‘Newman: The Instant’ without being distracted, both by the usual art historical positioning of Newman’s paintings and the clamour of the artist’s own statements, intentions and beliefs. Newman’s claims for his work were bombastic and the currently popular dismissal of his hyperbolic hubris – ‘Such utterances are the very definition of bullshit: empty depth’ as Robert Hughes subtly suggests – can be seen as the consequence of the pendulum swing of fashion.72 Newman’s rhetoric and the now unfashionable seriousness of his concerns were matched and encouraged by formalist critics, including Greenberg, for whom he figured as an archetypal example of the new modern (American) approach to painting after the Second World War, particularly in his insistence on the medium of painting itself without exterior subject matter.73 Newman’s meditations on the act of painting and the mythic narrative of his own epochal turning point with the creation of Onement 1 in 1948, also suited the criticism of Harold Rosenberg whose evocation of struggle tapped into the existential readings which accompanied the introduction of Abstract Expressionism to Paris.74 It is perhaps understandable, then, that Diarmuid Costello should suggest that Lyotard’s choice of modern paintings fails to live up to the Kantian ambitions to ‘exceed imagination’ or relate to the ‘unbounded’ state of the ‘formless’.75 What Costello does not recognize, however, is the extent to which Lyotard’s analysis of Newman is concerned not with the Kantian definitions of the sublime as formless but with the temporal implications of that which exceeds meaning.76 It is this concern with a particular temporality that is a recurrent preoccupation in Lyotard’s later work and which adds an important inflection to a reconsideration of the figural, one that reiterates the disruption of discourse by that which it refuses to welcome but which also acknowledges the inevitable failure to capture its moment of disarticulation. By reiterating the myth that Abstract art was Lyotard’s main concern Costello obscures the breadth of Lyotard’s interests and the wider implications of the attention he paid to Newman. However Costello does acknowledge, albeit in a footnote, that Lyotard’s writings on Jacques Monory fall outside the category of modernist abstraction but then Costello fails to highlight the fact that it was in an essay on Monory, dated 1981, that Lyotard

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first discusses the sublime in relation to art, an art in this case culled from popular imagery of skies, stars and television. This is the sublime dream of capitalism, an instant in abeyance where our suffering is a deficiency: For the abyss aroused by sublime feeling is substituted the concrete mass of materials and hardware in self-regulating set-ups. What remains of ‘us’, with our capacity for desiring and suffering, is that ‘we’ have to serve these set-ups. It is in this respect that ‘we’ are either survivors (but we can only know this from the outside) or experimenters.77 In Monory’s paintings it is the effacing of the sublime by technoscience that preoccupies Lyotard. His essay on Monory: ‘The “Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer” is a breathless essay, far removed from the slow, measured pace of “Newman: The Instant”; it owes its speed and impatience to the intensities of Lyotard’s libidinal writing and cares nothing for the other, whose voice is silenced with a bullet. The instant for Monory is the moment of the bullet’s impact and the “angel” its imagined addressee: “Well! Dear angel, I’m imagining it’s you .”’78

Spasm79 As the satirical shot-gun of Lyotard’s ‘virile’ ‘écriture mâle ’ writing threatens to explode we are pulled back sharply from the Levinasian ‘modality of time’, whose ‘organ is the ear rather than the eye’, and forced to consider the gaps left by ‘Newman: The Instant’.80 Drawing on the links to Lyotard’s use of Lévinas in The Differend has helped to identify the instant as belonging to that which evades traditional forms of representative communication, but questions remain regarding the function and operation of such an occurrence and how this impact is felt. I want to return to this feeling as an agitation of the mind related to that which Lyotard terms the ‘affect-phrase’. In his essay of the same name Lyotard discusses affect-phrase in relation to that which communicates pleasure and pain without articulated language but through the ‘confused voices’ that Aristotle defines as distinct from articulated human discourse (logos). The agitation rests in the temporality of the affect-phrase as ‘at once an affective state (pleasure or pain) and the sign of this state’ which necessitates a blocking together of incommensurate temporalities – that of signification, which relies on a subsequent linkage to give its reference meaning, and simultaneously the immediacy and completeness of ‘immediate affective value’, which ‘awaits nothing’.81

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Gina Pane seems to express a similar conflictual duality in relation to the images which form the constats of her actions. Through her refusal to repeat actions she validates their singularity and upholds the claim made by performance writer Peggy Phelan who claims that ‘Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive’.82 However, Pane simultaneously makes a considerable investment in the importance of the constats, not as a record but as part of the ongoing work. In so doing I suggest that Pane refutes, or at least questions, the logical conception of a temporality that denies the possibility of a return to the moment of an affective presence – which is implied by Phelan’s privileging of presence and her provocation that performance ‘becomes something other than performance’ once it enters the ‘circulation of representations of representation’.83 If we remove the suggestion here that there exists a privileged ‘original’ moment and consider rather the evocation to be one of affect, the role of the constats operates for Pane in a no less privileged manner than the performed action. Pane’s own short essay titled ‘The body and its supportimage for non-linguistic communication’ discusses the role of images and objects used in her actions and suggests that ‘. . . they can retain their original context or that of a return to their reality by the pictured support’.84 While Lyotard would qualify such a ‘return’ with an acknowledgement of the impossibility of knowing whether what had returned was the same, the broader implication is that what is retained has an affective potential which is aligned to non-linguistic communication, that which Lyotard terms the affect-phrase. Geoffrey Bennington notes that late essays, such as ‘The Affect-Phrase’, indicate a surprising return to a physiological language which is closer to Libidinal Economy than The Differend and in so doing he finds his own attempts to understand the trajectory of Lyotard’s oeuvre is overturned.85 The current text has the benefit of hindsight, however, and is attuned to such turns as possible indicators of the connection to a canonical visceral performance. Lyotard’s extension of the affect-phrase to gesture, for example, re-establishes a connection to Burke and his use of a physiological language, one that Aris Sarafinos describes as a ‘contractility’ that ‘disrupts a neo-classicist emphasis on physical rest and balance’, where the violent response of the body is an innate reaction of ‘the fibres themselves’.86 It is important that it is the physical body and not the conscious mind of the logos that provokes this reaction, particularly in relation to Lyotard’s particular understanding of the body as un-individuated. In fact it is when Lyotard is describing the eruption of the pictorial work to the pre-constituted subject that he uses the term ‘spasm’ and suggests that it comes not from the ‘sensate, moving body’, but rather from that which

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he to begins to call the soul [âme]: ‘For the viewer (or reader), this spasm awakens a soul’.87 The involuntary, uncontrollable and unanticipated spasm prompts us to return to the figural in order to develop the link made by Lyotard between Newman’s instant and Burke’s delight, something outside the triadic form of communication which Lyotard uneasily refers to as a ‘prehistory’ or ‘an a-history’.88 This ‘a-history’ parallels the deepest form of the figural, the figure-matrix, which is approached by Lyotard through his analysis of the Freudian phantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter in relation to the tension of the beat working on the edge of a Burkean threat of nothing further happening. Lyotard’s reading of the phantasy – explored in detail over 20 pages of Discourse, Figure – demonstrates how incompossible phrases coexist in the same phantasy; the matrix blocks together what are not compossible while retaining heterogeneity. The difference between the pulse of the rhythm (+ followed by –) and that of the unreliable beat of the figure-matrix (+ and the possibility of 0), becomes confused, however, when Rosalind Krauss gives an account of the figure-matrix in her work. In her book The Optical Unconscious Krauss gives a detailed account of Lyotard’s example of the figure-matrix and his analysis of ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, but seems to miss the importance of this blocking together of different temporalities. This is made apparent in Krauss’ first presentation of her use of the figure-matrix at the Dia Centre, New York, where she suggests that Lyotard deliberately avoids the temporal conditions of rhythm in his discussion of the matrix: ‘He doesn’t want this idea to leak out into the temporal and once again set up a modernist condition of separate domains.’89 This is a curious observation for Krauss to make because it is clear that the temporality of the figural, and most explicitly the figure-matrix, is one of simultaneity or atemporality operating not as separate to space but equally ignorant of concepts of both space and time. As Lyotard writes: ‘The space occupied by the formations of desire is not merely topological. What makes it impossible to represent is that it stands for the atemporality or omnitemporality of the primary process, in space.’90 The ‘beat’ does not have a predictable rhythm: the figural is too unstable to maintain such a form and as Krauss indicates the affects which coexist in the matrix are pleasure and anxiety which arise: ‘. . . precisely from the force of rupture that is recurrent in the rhythm of the figure, a rupture which is not experienced as the onset of yet another contact, but as an absolute break, that discontinuity without end that is death.’91 Krauss recognizes the affect resulting from the discontinuity but not the temporality that is indicated here, an atemporality that prefigures,

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I suggest, Lyotard’s consideration of the instant. Krauss argues that the pulse can be identified as a resource for artistic practice in early modernist works such as Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball and Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, thereby transgressing the attempts by modernist formalists to represent the visual as an autonomous realm. Whereas the pulse has a regular on / off rhythm which does indeed disturb notions of a static visuality, the unpredictable beat of the matrix is that which provokes the suspension of Burke’s sublime and the question of ‘Is it happening?’. Perhaps the atemporality of Lyotard’s figure-matrix is forgotten by Krauss because of her desire to avoid associations with his later temporal meditations on the work of Newman (who would be categorized as a high or formalist modernist by Krauss). In contrast to the refined immediacy of high art vision, Krauss points to the adoption and adaptation of mechanisms designed to produce the effect of a moving image such as the zoetrope collaged by Max Ernst in his 1930 collage novel ‘A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil’ and, more provocatively, the animation-stand technique used by Pablo Picasso in his late sketchbooks. In this example the impression carried from one drawing onto the sheet below provides the continuity of slightly altered compositions from page to page: ‘the mechanism of the serial animation of the flipbook’s beat’.92 Potentially exciting though it may be to have the (now) dominant voice of American art criticism paying such close attention to Lyotard’s writings, I struggle to find her employment either radical or exciting. Krauss’ optical unconscious is no spasm. I like the image of a spasm, a shaking down of expected, controllable actions which might at least unsettle presuppositions concerning narrative, particularly necessary when fighting attempts to limit Lyotard’s considerations of art to abstract modernism as mentioned above, a tendency that is further exacerbated by the interest Lyotard shows in his late work to questions traditionally associated with theology.93 In Lyotard’s last decade there appeared books whose form and subject were a surprise: two biographical volumes on André Malraux, the posthumously published fragments of a work on the Confessions of fi fth-century Christian theologian St Augustine of Hippo and important essays relating to a renewed, but more philosophical, interest in psychoanalysis. Some of the latter relate to anamnesis as mentioned in Chapter 3 above and respond to issues provoked by The Differend , many of which were posthumously collected as Misère de la philosophie , part of a step towards the ‘Supplement to the Differend’ which his widow, Dolorès Lyotard, discusses in her foreword to the collection. Throughout the last decade the relationship to art is maintained – if anything the imbrications are intensified – with anamnesis being worked

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through in relation to the work of Bracha-Lichtenberg Ettinger, colour and gesture considered as a phrase in the work of Sam Francis, Karel Appel and the Danish painter Stig Brøgger, and new figures raised, including that of Lazarus, crossing over from Malraux to the painter Albert Ayme.94 This list is not exhaustive, neither of the artists nor of the crossings with Lyotard’s late ideas. In fact there is a sense of despair that he cannot keep up with the requests from artists to write, not due to lack of time or desire to pen ‘the three words, or perhaps 300 pages, which would transcribe the absolute insignificance of the gesture that is the work of art’, but because the expected transcription of gesture [gestus] displaces the thought of the philosopher.95 It is this displacement of thought and affect which will preoccupy the final pages of this book; the commentary is performed without curtain or curtain-call but with a little bit of fort and da , and its agony.

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In Conclusion

In the writing of this book I have taken from Lyotard both the need for hesitation and the need to question presuppositions. The effect is a tension: both with academic conventions and with the expectations of the reader. Consequently there must be some hesitation at the point of conclusion and at least an acknowledgement of the paradoxical position presented by the premise of a conclusion, which traditionally would claim to impart a sense of finality to the proceedings, and therefore suggest a totality which is the antithesis of that which drives Lyotard’s approach to art, writing and philosophy. Conclusion has a sense of finality: the variants of its definition in English all arrive at the same end, which is one of closure and enclosure, judgement and assumption. It is only the Shakespearean usage that allows the definition some play: closest to my purpose here is the phrase uttered by Cleopatra, in Anthony and Cleopatra (IV, 13:28) ‘Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes and still conclusion, shall acquire no honour demuring upon me.’ Yet even this ‘still conclusion’ maintains a sense that there is a conclusion, albeit one that Octavia is careful to hide. But the broader context of this statement – as uttered while Anthony lies dying – highlights the otherness which Cleopatra represents and whose transgressive conduct contrasts with Octavia’s staid, barren composure. There is, then, a tone of mockery in Cleopatra’s words and she herself will refuse expected conclusions, deferring her own death for the duration of another act. Feasting on this ambiguity, I understand a ‘still conclusion’ to be one that tarries judgement or at least holds it in silence, a silence that can attest to much more than a bold enclosure of assumptions. I want to write such a still conclusion here in order that the completion of the tasks set in the introduction to this study might be judged demurely. It is not a self-indulgent side-stepping of the rigours of conventional scholarship but a necessary part of the task that was set – to ascertain the usefulness of Lyotard’s ideas for thinking about performance. So by way of conclusion I offer a series of five questions to draw together this study. A term that is central to the title of this book is the ‘figural’: what is it and how does it work?

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The figural is an operation, a means by which something is worked over and transformed. Lyotard’s example of Freud’s analysis of the fantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ is concerned with this process of transformation whereby the operation is a figural shifting of subject and position, drawing attention to the ‘beat’ at the heart of the fantasy, as Freud describes it, one that language initially fails to render. Or earlier in Discourse, Figure , the figural is the working over of Saussurian linguistics which highlights elements that the system is unable to account for such as the implications of depth which phenomenology brings to discourse. Perhaps more important than these individual examples given by Lyotard is the extent to which the figural is itself worked over throughout Discourse, Figure and later: no single instance of Lyotard’s usage can be identified as a model on which to base a defi nition because – as with Derrida’s différance – it is the ‘unfi xity’ of its method which is key. What I have found useful in emphasizing this term is the extent to which it must be rethought because of its inherent refusal of stability. Consequently, and this is important to draw out, when I link the term ‘figural’ from Lyotard’s actual usage to instances when he uses different terms – be it sublime, event, inhuman – I am not claiming an equivalence but recognize rather that their ‘manner’ might be described as figural. As Lyotard writes of his own approach to Kant in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , it is the manner not the method to which he is drawn; similarly it is persistently a figural ‘manner’ that I have sought out in Lyotard’s writings and in the work of those artists I have chosen for study, not a method. There is then a difficulty with definition in the conventional sense and this preoccupied me in the initial discussion of the figural in Chapter 1, but there is also a usefulness in this flexibility: it is not a case of applying the figural as a theory, not even a concept, but as a mode of operating whose task is to unsettle presumptions with regard to that which is presented as fi xed or as a totality. Of course, the similarities here to the work of others who are termed post-structuralist are clear and my claim for the importance of the figural is not in terms of its uniqueness, although it has been noted that initial similarities, for example with Kristeva’s semiotic, begin to blur on closer consideration; the role of the body for Lyotard as dealt with in Chapter 3 is much less the privileged site implied by Kristeva. What Lyotard’s figural brings to post-structuralist thought is a concern for visuality and a particular feeling for that which is not visible. Consequently the terms ‘feeling’ and Arrive-t-il? from the Differend and the ‘affect-phrase’ from the later writings have become of central importance in this book and its aim to extend Lyotard’s thought to considerations of performance

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art, a task which is facilitated by the concern in performance art for aspects of inarticulate communication and the temporal implications of this hiatus in understanding. The related uncertainty which surrounds the role of performance art documentation has also been an important site for discussion in relation to three differing attitudes: Abramović’s confident belief in re-performance, Pane’s investment in the constats which continue the work of the live performance, and the slippery duplicity of Acconci’s irreverent attitude to both performance and documentation. The act of writing about performance and its documentation is itself a continuation of that performance and its documentation; it is a task which demands the maintenance of uncertainty and ambivalence: a sense of the figural. I have outlined the figural as a neglected aspect of Lyotard’s work, particularly within the English-speaking academic community. In refocusing the study of Lyotard round this particular aspect of his work it can be seen anew, but the question may still be asked: why should we be looking at Lyotard again now? As I explain in the preceding chapters, Lyotard’s importance in the Anglophone world was largely centred on the postmodern which was tied to a particular period and set of debates and by extension a set of artistic practices, all of which had the effect that Lyotard has become fixed in time and therefore reduced to a figure of fashion; so rather than being regarded as an important thinker (and here I am giving a crude survey of his position in relation to the art world) he was a fashionable thinker who is no longer fashionable. What is lost in this process is a sense of the depth and richness of his work for the arts, beyond that historical period associated with the postmodern, and consequently his best-known writings are but a fragment of a complex web which remains largely unexplored. As a result, unlike Derrida and Deleuze, Lyotard’s wider work has not been brought to bear on questions which preoccupy both artists and those writing about art. In this respect Lyotard’s position is closer to that of Baudrillard and Kristeva, both of whom suffered the overexposure of a single key concept to the (largely American) art world – namely Baudrillard’s ‘simulacrum’ and Kristeva’s ‘abject’. Baudrillard fought back by decrying the art world’s misinterpretation of his ideas and continued a critical engagement with the art world as a theme while Kristeva’s legacy in relation to art extends beyond the abject, and writings such as ‘Giotto’s Joy’ and ‘Motherhood According to Bellini’ have become respected for their poetry and psychoanalytic insights. On the one hand this shows that Lyotard is not alone in his partial reception and is part of a generation of French thinkers who had an active engagement with the visual arts, yet, given the centrality of aesthetic considerations in his work as a whole, a greater part of his work

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has been more obviously overlooked. The fact that interest in Lyotard’s writings has come often from literature departments, rather than visual art or art history, has also led to a tendency to see him as similar to Derrida and the differences – which pertain to Lyotard’s predominant interest in the visual – have not been fully explored. Even Bennington, who would be in an ideal position to make this distinction (being a scholar and translator of both Derrida and Lyotard) emphasizes the similarities between the two rather than the distinctiveness that Lyotard brings; it is the literary, not the visual, that is Bennington’s area of academic specialism. The present text is dominated by Lyotard because of the premise that he is significant and how he is significant should have become apparent in the content of the book itself. The feeling I experience when reading Lyotard’s writings – initially his writings on art but soon these flow over into the more specifically philosophical works – is one of respectful engagement whereby Lyotard’s position as a layman in relation to art and art history does not manifest itself as an arrogant philosopher bursting onto a minor field but rather through an approach of reverence and solicitude: Lyotard wants to respond to works in a manner that does them justice by not applying tired and tested formulae. For Lyotard, an arrogant silencing of that which is outside present understanding would not be a just response. Lyotard’s attitude is transferred to the reader of his writings not through any sense of reverential awe – as the sublime is often represented in an ironically pedestrian manner – but as a painful dithering from a position of weakness. Indecision is painful as is unknowing and hesitation – the experience of first conversing with someone who stammers is deeply unsettling and the knowledge that one should not interrupt nor complete the sound uttered, which must be momentarily left hanging, is a lesson in temporality. It is this hesitation before the visual that is Lyotard’s persistent appeal. The argument here has been from the perspective of art history, but more specifically performance art. What is it that Lyotard can bring to performance when it is a subject about which he wrote very little? What does Lyotard offer that others can not? In an attempt to clarify the breadth of what is implied when I say that Lyotard pays considerable attention to the visual and the feeling of that which is not visible, I will draw out the most important aspect of Lyotard’s work for thinking about performance art. It is useful to go back to Discourse, Figure for a moment, to the point where the figural – which at fi rst seems to be congruent with the visual – is described as hidden in the workings of desire in what Lyotard names the figure-matrix and which I discuss in Chapter 2 in relation to the libidinal. This is important as it reiterates the figural as an operation, only the effects of which we can

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witness, and that Lyotard describes as bending and transgressing form, transforming situations and creating affects that are without recognizable meaning. These affects are unknowable in the sense of communicating a decodable message but they indicate the effect of the figural at work and, in the terms used in the Differend , the existence of something that cannot be phrased. The connection between the hidden workings of the figural – that Lyotard aligns with desire in the libidinal writings – and that which is termed ‘feeling’ in The Differend and his writings on Kant, indicates Lyotard’s interest in that which established forms of language (in its broadest sense) cannot convey. Lyotard’s essay on the affect-phrase has had an influence on my thinking which far outweighs its short length, perhaps because it usefully summarizes this concern in drawing attention to those inarticulate phrases that are fundamental to aspects of performance art. Again, I would stress that it is not simply a concern for gesture, sound, scenography or ambient effects which are often used in theatre, dance, spectacle or performance art within a codified system of meanings (and therefore like a language) but rather that which gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty; an affect that is unplaceable, unrecognizable and which in its inability to fit determined formulations causes pain – in the sense that Lyotard describes the ‘agitation’ of Kant’s sublime – and because of this pain runs the risks of being ignored or mistakenly forced into a category that belies its complexity, thereby neutralizing its power. This latter effect is central, I believe, to the paradoxical proposition of the possibility of a performance art history. For instance, Lyotard’s writings are most useful in continually foregrounding what is happening when Abramović re-performs canonical works, when art critics and historians spin a mythologizing web round Acconci’s Seedbed or when Gina Pane’s constats are charged with continuing her actions. His work does not provide answers, nor a method by which to tackle these problems of performance and art history, but provokes an incessant questioning through the ‘Is it happening?’, the Arrive-t-il?, forcing a continual reconsideration of determined categories, necessary in particular for performance art which has always been produced between disciplines and has sought to avoid categorization. It is this mode of inquiry that is important for reconsidering the approach of the critic, the writer and the art historian. As for Lyotard’s not writing on performance art, this allows a certain freedom in that there is no model to follow but only a manner to emulate. I soon found that a search for the potentially pivotal encounters – when Lyotard shared a panel on Duchamp with Allan Kaprow at the conference on postmodern performance in 1976 or when Carolee Schneemann

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presented her work at the same event – was chasing rainbows: tantalizing though it may be to ruminate on such happenings, the evidence from Lyotard’s scarce references to performance art (thinking in particular of his paper on Buren presented in Montréal in 1980) suggests that what is already there in his writing gives sufficient stimulus to respond in kind to the task. There is something very seductive about the way in which Lyotard writes: one key example I use in the book is the essay on Adami ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ in which the whole process of the work’s interrelation to matter, subject, place, space and both the artist’s and writer’s contemplation of and musings on these relations are explored as the premise for the piece becoming a chain of seduction; both artist then writer are seduced by the line which is then presented to the reader in a manner that attempts to maintain this line’s singularity. It is this response in kind that is significant in Lyotard’s approach, one that maintains the singularity of each piece while also reaching out to his own philosophical thinking, thereby creating a nexus of references that could not be duplicated were his approach taken as a method to mimic, which would result in a pale copy or parody. Therefore we must find our own nexus in order to respond in kind, a search which has driven the research of this book in my own attempt to make a correspondence between Lyotard and performance. The choice of the work about which Lyotard wrote is not the most significant aspect but rather the relationship he forges with the work, allowing the writing to respond to that which drove him to write. It is a response to the affect of the work, the inarticulate phrases which defy presentation yet demand that there be a response, a linkage which will be inadequate to the task but to which we are obliged, nevertheless, to respond. It is this distinct sense of affect which drove me to write about the photographs of Gina Pane’s Je and the performance of Yingmei Duan, not the same affect and not one that can be empirically tested, but one which resonates with the physiological language that Lyotard is drawn to in the writings of Burke and the terminology of Aristotle’s phônè . Relating to this is what can be seen as Lyotard’s own performativity. Is there a case to be made for regarding Lyotard as a performative writer? The variety of approaches taken by Lyotard to the writing of his ideas – or indeed their presentation as with the exhibition Les Immatériaux – has been a significant prompt to my thinking through the connection between Lyotard and performance. While I have just tried to explain away the lack of writing on performance art by Lyotard as inconsequential, I would follow this by emphasizing the extent to which the performative manner of

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his approach to writing – not only on art but also in the philosophical works – has been a significant prompt during both the research for this book and its writing. There does need to be some care taken, however, over terminology given that Lyotard’s usage of ‘performativity’ in The Postmodern Condition is very different to the sense in which we are using it here. Far from considerations of optimum gain and maximum efficiency which characterize the capitalist drive to technoscience of the postmodern condition, the sense of performativity evident in Lyotard’s writing is one which ties in well with the account of the figural given earlier – as one of acting out, working through; Lyotard’s performative writing is an operation that belabours its working and as such is antithetical to the postmodern notion of performance as the instantaneous achievement of power, communication and knowledge. There is a sense that whatever the mode of address, style or linguistic configuration chosen by Lyotard, it is being used as part of this working through, of thought-in-process. As a result the experience of reading some Lyotard texts induces an alternation between the pleasure of the language and the pain of the unfixable nature of what is being written or conveyed: the figural is an example but so too is the sublime, which always pushes against the presuppositions of what might be being said, and also the extravagant rhetoric of the libidinal writings. To this end both the breathless rhetoricity and the respectful observance of silence, gesture and the inarticulate have a connection to performance in their desire to remain alert to that which escapes the strictures of language. The manner in which I have chosen to write this book is not altogether within traditional academic conventions. Why is this? The book has been written in a more conventional manner than I would ideally have wished and that is partly due to my own reticence: for example the various quotations describing Acconci’s Seedbed in Chapter 1 should be spoken sound files which address the reader as the page is turned. What remains in the present format is part of a cautious attempt to respond to aspects of Lyotard’s writings and thought rather than just to write about them; but it cannot attempt to ‘ape’ Lyotard’s style which is tied to the philosophical nexus within which his writings operate. Acknowledging the need to respond sympathetically but without mimicry has led to a heightened self-awareness with regard to the project in which I am engaged – an attempt to further research into Lyotard while also demonstrating the potential of his work for investigations into art, writing and performance beyond the terrain with which Lyotard engaged directly. If I have attained moments in the book where the norms of academic conventions are undermined and the reader destabilized in a productive fashion (as opposed to

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simply getting lost) then that is in keeping with my aims. It is, however, counterproductive to anticipate or predict where such moments might occur, particularly if we are to follow Lyotard’s insistence that the indeterminacy of judgement must be maintained. This is the paradoxical premise on which much of Lyotard’s thought is predicated and which makes following Lyotard, however indirectly, tortuous – but equally necessary to avoid the risks of resorting to stylistic gimmicks, which lay traps for the reader rather than opening up that which discourse is unable to signify. In an early chapter I included an initial investigation into Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces in order to foreground the double-bind I saw being played out in this respect, both in terms of the productive unfulfilment of expectations in the audience at the Guggenheim and in any consideration of Lyotard’s work and his conception of event. The inability of event to maintain its specificity when touched by understanding is the temporal paradox which recurs throughout Lyotard’s writing and has become a leitmotif for this book – how to respond to the demand to remain open to this contingency. ‘Are you prejudging the Arrive-t-il? ’ is the confrontational question with which Lyotard ends the Differend . This is the challenge which must be maintained in considering writing in relation to art and performance and to which this book has sought to respond with a manner that can provoke hesitation.

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This book draws its final breath from Lyotard’s reflections on the etymology of mu(te) at the end of his essay ‘The Affect-phrase’, and returns to the performance Naked. Childhood, like Adam, does not know that it is naked. And inasmuch as the logos conceals the phônè (covers or dresses it) rather than either suppressing it or domesticating it, this shameless innocence can always arise in the course of articulated phrases, in an impromptu manner.1 In the staged darkness Yingmei Duan’s eyes perform blindness and her lips do not part, closed in the mu of a mute sound, murmuring. Her nakedness is not shameless but vibrates on the edge of knowing. It is not an expulsion but an unveiling of our own boundaries and our pretence to understanding, a prompt to open up to that which is not cognizable, the figural.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11

Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, trans. Iain McLeod (Venice CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 31. Lyotard, ‘La performance et la Phrase chez Daniel Buren’, in Performance, Text(e), Documents, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Parachute: Montréal, 1981), 66. International Symposium on Post-Modern Performance, 17–20 November 1976, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Multidisciplinary Aspects of Performance, Postmodernism, 9–11 October 1980, University of Quebec, Montréal. Lyotard’s writings on the sublime were popularized by two articles published in the art journal Artforum in 1982 and 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge was published in French in 1979 and translated into English in 1984. The full title of the exhibition at the V & A museum was Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), the English translation by Antony Hudek, incorporating existing translations by Mary Lydon, was published in 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press titled Discourse, Figure . To date three of the Leuven series of parallel texts have been published: Karel Appel: A Gesture of Colour (2009); Duchamp’s TRANS/formers (2010) and Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness (2010), under the editorship of Herman Parret. Le Postmoderne: un paradigme pertinent dans le champ artistique? Conference held at the auditorium de L’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 30–31 May 2008. Ilona Blazwick, ‘Undoing the Aesthetic Image’, Art Monthly, 335 (2009), 37. Ibid., 38. This belief was made apparent repeatedly during Abramović’s introduction to performance art during her ‘Drill’ for the performance exhibition Marina Abramović Presents . . . at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 3–19 July 2009. I worked as an intern to Marina Abramović for the duration of the exhibition. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979); Lea Vergine, Il Corpo Come Linguaggio (La ‘Body-art’ e storie simili) (Milan: Giampolo Prearo Editore, 1974); Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas, Perform (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). For Amelia Jones’ discussion of ‘Body Art versus Performance’ see: Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12–14. This comment was made at the symposium on ‘NOTES on a return’ organized by Sophia Hao at the Laing Gallery, Newcastle, United Kingdom, 4–5 September 2009. At the same event the artist Bruce McLean objected to the term ‘performance artist’, declaring that he was a sculptor, itself a repetition of an assertion made in 1985 in Performance Magazine , 37, 28.

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Notes 12

13

14

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17 18

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22

23

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25 26

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For an overview see: Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2004). Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994). Evidence of scholarly interest from a range of disciplines was in evidence at the International conference Rewriting Lyotard held at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada in February 2011. The programme and selected papers from which are available online at www.lyotardproject.org. David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987). In his Preface Carroll explains his use of the term ‘paraesthetic’ to identify ‘its relations with the extra-aesthetic in general’ which include the ‘philosophical, historical, and political issues’ raised by the questions usually associated with the aesthetic (xiv). Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992; 2nd edition, 2000). This key reference book has sold 100,000 copies world wide, thanks in part to its association with the Open University. The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 2000), does not have the same volume of sales but is typical of Lyotard’s representation in the field of the theory and philosophy of art. Carroll, Paraesthetics, 132. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 56. Mary Lydon, ‘Translator’s Preface to “It’s as if a line . . .”’, Contemporary Literature , 24(3), 455. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), 205–6. David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998). Sarah Wilson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory (London: Black Dog, 1998), 13. Extracts from Discours, figure were published in English translation in the following journals and collections: Theatre Journal , 35(3), 1983, 333–57; The Oxford Literary Review, 6 (1), 1983 (reprinted in The Lyotard Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 19–55); Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984, 57–68); The MerleauPonty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 315–22); Lyotard Reader and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, 34–48). Margaret Grebowicz, Gender after Lyotard, ed. Grebowicz (Albany: State University Press, 2007). Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 3. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), xxi. François Cusset, French Theory: How Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. J. Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xiv. Keith Crome and James Williams, The Lyotard Reader & Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 283.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16 17

18 19

20

21

Lea Vergine, Il Corpo Come Linguaggio (La ‘Body-art’ e storie simili) (Milan: Giampolo Prearo Editore, 1974), 1. Judith Butler, Undoing Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 2004), 198. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Foreword’, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), vi. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xiv. Yingmei Duan’s performance Naked was performed on 17 consecutive days, each performance lasting between 3 and 4 hours, as part of the performance art event ‘Marina Abramović Presents . . .’, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 3–19 July 2009. I misremembered the title as Intimate Distance , which is in fact the title of a book on women, painting and the body by Rosemary Betterton. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3. David N. Rodowick, Reading the figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Despite an initially detailed overview of Lyotard’s figural as presented in Discourse, Figure, Rodowick explains his preference for Deleuze’s use of the term and proceeds to adopt this for the main arguments in his book. Deleuze’s adoption of the ‘figural’ is discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 4. Ibid., 13. The further compromises made in the layout of the English translation are discussed in Antony Hudek’s ‘Seeing through Discourse, Figure ’, Parrhesia [online], 12, 2011, www.parrhesiajournal.org. Ibid., 51. Merleau-Ponty quoted by Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 53. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 206, translation modified. I am referring here to the section of Discourse, Figure ‘The line and the letter’ (205–32) which includes an extensive discussion of the line in the work of Paul Klee. Donald Preziosi, ‘Coda: Plato’s Dilemma and the Task of the Art Historian Today’, The Art of Art History, ed. Donald Preziozi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2008), 509. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 380. Ibid., 202. See Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990) on the introduction of Greenberg to a French audience. Fried’s essay was not published in French until 1987. The 1987 edition included a volume of 132 plates; the 2008 edition includes only 13 plates and therefore removes the marginal cross-references. Bruno Cany, ‘Préface ’, Que peindre? (Paris: Hermann, 2008), 5. Que peindre? is due to be issued in its first full English translation as a parallel French / English text by the University of Leuven Press in 2012. Lyotard, ‘Presence’, trans. Marian Hobson and Tom Cochran, in Salim Kema and Iva Gaskell, eds, The Language of Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Notes 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

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Ibid., 11. Ibid., 14. Buren’s signature stripes have taken a wide variety of formats including industrially printed paper, transparent plastic, formica, mirrors, concrete and marble and also the removal of stripes of plaster from the walls of the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1986. See Guy Lelong, Daniel Buren (Paris: Flammarion, 2002); Daniel Buren, Les Écrits (1965–1990), volumes 1–3 (Bordeaux: Museé d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, 1991). Lyotard, ‘Presence’, 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 20. Lyotard, The Differend , 71. Ibid., 70. Marina Abramović, 7 Easy Pieces (Milan: Charta, 2005), 9–10. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 11. Vito Acconci: Self/Sound/City, FACT, Liverpool, 22 April–12 June 2005. Exhibition developed with Acconci and his Architectural team Acconci Studio. The part of the show titled ‘The self ’ (1969–73) included documents from the Acconci archives from this period including Seedbed . Facsimiles of many of these documents have since been published in: Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969–1973 (Milan: Charta, 2006). Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), 218; Gloria Moure, Vito Acconci (Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2001), 154; Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 44. Amnon Barzel et al., Vito Acconci (Prato: Museo d’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 1992), 7. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Vito Acconci at Sonnabend’, Art in America , March / April 1972, 119. Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance’, Artforum , April 1972, 47. April Kingsley, ‘Reviews and Previews: Vito Acconci’, Art News, March 1972, 8. John Howell, ‘The Singer or the Song’, Performance, Text(e), Documents, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Montréal: Parachute, 1981), 89. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since the 1960s (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 102. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 156. Lyotard, The Differend , 70. Lyotard, ‘The Works and Writings of Daniel Buren: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Contemporary Art’, trans. Lisa Libemann, Artforum , 19(6), February 1981, 56. This text, first published in English translation in Artforum , corresponds almost directly to the chapter ‘Le Site ’ in Que peindre? Lyotard, ‘Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art’, trans. Susan Hanson, Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 72. Lyotard, ‘Presence’, 14.

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Ibid., 23. Ibid., 28. See ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Jacques Derrida, ed., Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978). Writing and Difference , 353. ‘Presence’, 24. Ibid., 23. The text was published in English translation in Studio International , 177 (907), January 1969 and is reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 850. Quoted in Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 175. Quoted in Catherine Millet, Contemporary Art in France, trans. Charles Penwarden (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 29. Originally published as L’Art Contemporain en France (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), ‘Comme happening frustrant, on ne fait pas mieux .’ Godfrey, Conceptual Art , 175. Robert Lebel’s monograph was published simultaneously in London, Paris and New York in both French and English, translated by George Heard Hamilton. Duchamp’s collected writings are dated 1958 but were published in 1959. See ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel Interviewed by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux’, trans. Elizabeth Manchester, in The Artist’s Body, ed. Amelia Jones and Tracey Warr (London: Phaidon, 2006). Lebel’s interest in the political potential of erotic and expressive liberation led to an association with the American ‘Beat’ poets and the philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. An exhibition of his collection and work was shown under the title Soulèvements at the Maison Rouge, Paris: 25 October 2009–17 January 2010. Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 199. Marcel Duchamp, rétrospective , 2 February–2 May 1977, curated by Pontus Hulten and Jean Clair. Rauschenberg was awarded the main prize for painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, which symbolized for many the cultural and economic challenge presented by the United States to the Parisian art world. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). La Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain was held at Galerie Creuze in September 1965. See Jill Carrick, ‘The Assassination of Marcel Duchamp: Collectivism and Contestation in 1960s France’, Oxford Art Journal , 31(1), 2008, 1–25. Also the special Duchamp edition of Opus International , 49, 1974, in which Gerald GassiotTalbot contextualizes the affair: ‘persistent et signent’. Also published in this edition is ‘Comment s’en débarrasser ’: a reflection written by the three artists a year after the scandal of Live and Let Die . Daniel Buren, ‘Beware’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 856. Judd quoted in Guy Lelong, Daniel Buren , 42. Quote by Buren in Brandon Taylor, The Art of Today (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995), 11.

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See for example the inclusion of the essay in: Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968) and Hal Foster’s evaluation of Fried’s position in ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, in Hal Foster, ed., Return of the Real (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996). Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum , Summer 1967, 16. These short quotations are from the final section: Ibid., 23. Serious considerations of Fried’s essay are included in Jonathan P. Harris, Writing Back to Modern Art after Greenberg, Fried & Clark (New York: Routledge, 2005) also Stephen Melville and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolf, Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (New York: Routledge, 1996). Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 22. Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 78, 81. Hugh Silverman, ‘Lyotard and the Events of the Postmodern Sublime’, Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime, ed. Hugh Silverman (New York: Routledge, 2001), 227. The original French was published in Critique , 419, April 1982, 366. The alternative English translation comes from: Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children , trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 24. This translation more accurately represents the title as it first appeared in French: ‘Answer to the question: what is the Postmodern?’, thereby avoiding the term ‘postmodernism’. Willem van Reijen and Dick Veermann, ‘An Interview with J-F Lyotard’, Theory, Culture, Society, 5(2), 1988, 284. The rejected title continues to live on in collections which unfortunately choose to reprint the Artforum version, such as Sublime: Documents in Contemporary Art , ed. Simon Morley (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery and Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010). Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (London: Polity, 1991), 107. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 275. Lyotard, ‘La performance et la Phrase chez Daniel Buren’, Performance, Text(e), Documents, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Montréal: Parachute, 1981), 69. My translation. See Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 384–7.

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Alberto Gualandi, Lyotard (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 7. Gualandi refers to Socialisme ou Barbarie as a ‘heretical’ Marxist review because it was both anti-Stalinist and anti-PCF (French Communist Party). Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 171. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 6. The term ‘Libidinal’ is used by Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts in their Lyotard collection, published in the United States in 1993, and is in general use to identify writings by Lyotard from 1968–74.

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Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 44; Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 79. See James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (London: Polity, 1998); and Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000); also Claire Nouvet et al., Minima Memoria: In the Wake of J-F Lyotard, ed. Nouvet et al. (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Lyotard, Peregrinations, 13 (my italics). The context of these remarks is worth noting – delivered in English as part of the Welleck Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine in May 1986 and subsequently published in book form under the title Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event . Lyotard, ‘Libidinal Economy of the Dandy’, trans. Rachel Bowlby, in The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory (London: Black Dog, 1998), 114. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , trans. Anthony Hudeck and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 124. Lyotard, ‘On a Figure of Discourse’, Toward the Postmodern: J-F Lyotard, trans. and ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 13. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 327–55. Lyotard, ‘Energumen Capitalism’, trans. James Leigh, Deleuze & Guattari: Critical Assessment of Leading Philosophers vol II, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 599. Jean Clair, Art en France: Une nouvelle generation (Paris: Chêne, 1972), 40. Lyotard, ‘Libidinal Economy of the Dandy’, 112. Ibid., 109. Anthony Elliot, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 154. See Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘Glossary’, in Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004), xi. Lyotard, ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’, trans. Keith Crome and Mark Sinclair, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. James Williams and Keith Crome (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press: 2006), 305–6. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 328. François Pluchart, L’art corporel (Paris: Limage, 1983), 4. Vito Acconci, ‘Entretien avec F. Pluchart’, Artitudes, 2, 1971 (reprinted in Pluchart, L’art corporel : 74–5). My translation. Pluchart, L’art corporel , 5. Philippe du Vignal, ‘Spectacle? Non Spectacle?’, Art Press, 2, 1973, 4. The internal quote is from: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . trans. Hurley, Seem and Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 28. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 114. Lyotard, ‘On Theory: An Interview’, ed. and trans. Roger McKeon, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 27. Lyotard, ‘Notes on the Critical Function of a Work of Art’, trans. Susan Hanson, Driftworks, 79.

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Lyotard, ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’, 304. Ibid., 328, 329. Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, 27. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Anti-Oedipus’, Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 244. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 262. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 243. Ibid. Lyotard, ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’, 304. See Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy, 130. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 26. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature , trans. D. Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987). See the ‘General Introduction’, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. Mandy Merck (London: Routledge, 1992). Peter Dews, ‘The Letter and the Line: Discourse and its Other in Lyotard’, Diacritics, Fall 1984, 48. Lyotard, Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings, ed. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geigman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 68–9. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 196. My translation. While the distinction between Deleuze and Deleuze’s works with Guattari is a source of frequent debate it is not specifically relevant to this present argument. However, when specific works are referred to care has been taken to indicate authorship as being either by Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), xvi. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2005), 2. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Ibid., 27–8. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), 112. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 19. Ibid., 8–9; 275, 456: n 20. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 40. In Paul Klee The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, ed. Félix Klee (Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1964), 226. See Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 226. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 72. David N. Rodowick, Reading the figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 17. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, trans. Mary Lydon, Contemporary Literature , 24(3), 458–9.

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Ibid., 462. Ibid., 480. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 164. Ibid., 212. See Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 205. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 215. Deleuze, ‘What is Desire?’, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 136. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 29. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 11, ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ on the role of rhythm and vibration, which is similar to Deleuze’s use of Henri Maldiney’s systolic and diastolic in Francis Bacon. Stephen Zepke, Seminar for Cultural Theory Institute, University of Manchester 12 November 2008. Mary Lydon ‘Translator’s Preface to ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, Contemporary Literature, 29(3) (1988), 456. Deleuze, Francis Bacon , 20. Ibid., 16. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 479. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 8. In Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 56. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 462. Lyotard, ‘Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art’, 78. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 244. Ibid., 204. Quoting Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 82. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 18. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 115–28. Lyotard includes his own translation of Freud’s text in the main body of Discours, figure , the reason for which is explained in the translator’s note to the English edition on pages 391–2 of Discourse, Figure , which reprints Lyotard’s translation as an appendix. Sigmund Freud (1925), ‘Negation’, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (Vintage: London, 1989), 667. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 121. Freud, ‘Negation’, 669. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 122. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 148. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 123. Ibid., 118. Translation modified. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 43. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

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Ibid., 50. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 462. Ibid., 458. The centrality of this figure to the work of Maurice Blanchot is acknowledged by Lyotard in ‘The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression’, first published in 1969 and collected in anonymous translation in Toward the Postmodern: J-F Lyotard , ed. Harvey and Roberts. The Freud quotation is from ‘Negation’, 667; the extended quotation from: Jean Hyppolite (1954) ‘A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung”’, Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 883. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 459–60. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 462; Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: Polity, 1991), 7. Lyotard, ‘The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression’, 5–6. Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 5th edition, 2002), 125. My translation. Internal quote: Freud, ‘Negation’, 669. Alternative translation: Discourse, Figure , 124. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 126. Translation modified. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 480; Lyotard, Discours, figure, 127. My translation. Alternative translation: Discourse, Figure , 124. Lyotard, ‘It’s as if a line . . .’, 459. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 50.

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Lyotard describes the exhibition as a ‘dramaturgie ’ in the interview with Alain Arnaud in the ‘Album’ part of the catalogue. See Lyotard, Les Immatériaux: Album et Inventaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985), u.p. See Lyotard, ‘Introduction: About the Human’, in Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (London: Polity, 1991). Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 123. Ibid., 22; Maurice Blanchot [1973], The Step Not Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1885], trans. Walter Kaufman 1954, in The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin, 1982), 271–2. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum, 2004), 1–2. Pierre Restany, ‘Immateriaux’, Domus, 662, June 1985, 60–1. The film Octave au pays des Immatériaux was shown at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris on 28 February 2008 as part of the series of Thursday events, titled ‘Rapport sur L’Immateriel’ [On the Immaterial], which accompanied an installation by Loris Gréaud, Cellar Door, for which the exhibition Les Immatériaux was cited as an influence. In 2005 the twentieth anniversary of the exhibition was marked by events at both the Pompidou and University of Paris 8.

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John Rajchman, ‘Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics’, October, 86, Fall 1998, 15, 17. Bernard Blistène, ‘A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard’, Flash Art , 212, March 1985, 35. The resurgence of interest in Les Immateriaux was apparent at the symposium: Landmark Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Shows since 1968 , Tate Modern, 2008, and the related issue of Tate Papers, Autumn 2009. A text by Lyotard on the exhibition is included in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996). More recently, the exhibition comes to prominence in Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after the New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010). Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 5–6. Lyotard, ‘Les Immatériaux’ [1984], in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996), 167. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 167–8. ‘Notes on 12 Pictures, May 28 1969’, in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969–1973 (Milan: Charta, 2006), 41. Lyotard and Baudrillard quoted in John Rajchman, ‘The Postmodern Museum’, Art in America , October 1985, 113–14. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 136. Ibid.; Austin’s speech act theory is outlined in How to do Things with Words (1955) which was further developed by John Searle and critiqued by Kristeva (1974) and Derrida (see ‘Signature, Event, Context’ first delivered as a lecture in 1971 and collected in Margins of Philosophy, 1982; see also the subsequent dialogue with Searle collected in Limited Inc., 1988) among others during this period. Lyotard, The Differend, 136. Ibid., 13. Lyotard, ‘The Affect-Phrase (from a supplement to The Differend )’, trans. Keith Crome, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 104. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 109–10. A useful overview of the ‘turn to affect’ is Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies , 19(5), 2005, which discusses contributions by Brian Massumi, whose use of affect follows that of Deleuze, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick whose adaptation of affect as used by Silvan Tomkins has brought currency to the term in queer theory. Acconci transcript from audio tape: Vertical Bed (Entrance), Anchors, Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, November 1972 in Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 312. Acconci transcript from audio tape (Far end) Horizontal bed Anchors, Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, November 1972 in Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 312. Gregory Volk, ‘Introduction’, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 10. Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 310. Ibid., 315.

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This last section is my own peregrination away from the recorded dialogue. Vito Acconci, ‘May 1977’, Artists Talk 1969–77, ed. Peggy Gale (Halifax NS: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005). Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 52–3. Lyotard, ‘Humour in Semiotheology’ [1975], Toward the Postmodern: J-F Lyotard, ed. and trans. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 79. Ibid., 79. It is not my intention to make a particular critique of Linker’s assessment here. Anchors is not discussed alone and Lacan’s is not the only model she refers to, but I am using this specific example in order to ask what other questions are raised by Anchors. Linker, Vito Acconci , 53. Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 310. Lyotard, ‘Les Immatériaux’ [1984], in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al., 165. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edition, 1999), 102. Lyotard, ‘Les Immatériaux ’, 171. Ibid., 164–5. Lyotard, The Differend , 13. Rajchman, ‘The Postmodern Museum’, 116. Restany, ‘Immatériaux’, 61. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 109–10. Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers [1977], trans. Iain McLeod (Venice CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 19. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Anti-Oedipus’ [1972], in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti -Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Hurley, Seem and Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii. Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, 22. The site ‘Infra-Mince’ included work by Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Giovanni Anselmo and a video installation by Thierry Kuntzel. On the catalogue sheet Lyotard writes ‘The visual work bears witness to the invisible in the visible’. Lyotard, Les Immatériaux: Album et Inventaire , u.p. In a personal conversation Sepp Gumbrecht recalled the smell emanating from the catalogue and described it as ‘perfumed’. The designer Luc Maillot clarified that it was by presenting the catalogue in a metallic, hermetically sealed packet (as used for dried mashed potatoes) that the odour of the inks was retained, emitting its ‘perfume’ on opening. Rajchman, ‘The Postmodern Museum’, 112. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception , trans. and ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3: ‘The perceiving mind is an incarnated body’. Jean-Louis Déotte, Les Immatériaux de Lyotard (1985): un programme figural, Revue Appareil [online], http:/revues.mshparisnord.org/appareil/index. php?id=797, 2008. §8 & 11. My translation. Ibid., §12.

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Judith Butler (1997), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 393. Here Butler is referring particularly to The Phenomenology of Perception . See Élie Théofilakis, Modernes et après: Les Immatériaux, ed. Élie Théofilakis (Paris: Autrement, 1985), 16. Jean-Louis Boisser, ‘Les Immatériaux et la question des nouveaux medias numériques’, in Bernadette Dufrêne, ed., Centre Pompidou: 30 ans d’histoire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007). Théofilakis, Modernes et après: Les Immatériaux , 16. Ibid., 4–12. Ibid., 100 and 204. Déotte, ‘Les Immatériaux de Lyotard’, §7. My translation. Gayle Ormiston, ‘Foreword’, in Lyotard, Phenomenology [1954], trans. Bill Beakley (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations [1950], trans. Cairns, Doroin, in Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman (London: Blackwell, 1998), §11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 138. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 65. Translation modified. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Lyotard, ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’ (from Discours, figure), trans. Mark Sinclair in The Lyotard Reader and Guide , ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 46. Alternative translation: Discourse, Figure , 18. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (London: Polity, 1991), 7. See Geoffrey Bennington, Late Lyotard (Lexington KY: e-books, 2005), 71, n. 60. Keith Crome, ‘Bibliographical Note’, in the Lyotard special edition of Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 32(3), 2001, 231. Lyotard, Phenomenology, 68. Boissier in Centre Pompidou: 30 ans d’histoire ; Lyotard, ‘Les Immatériaux ’, 164. Lyotard, Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren [1987] (Paris: Hermann, 2008), 96. My translation. Ibid., 97. My translation. Ibid., 99. My translation. Freud’s account of the story of Emma is in Project for a Scientific Psychology [1895]; Lyotard’s essay Emma is collected in Lyotard, Misère de la Philosophie (Paris: Galiée, 2000) an English translation is included in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh Silverman (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).

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Claire Nouvet, ‘The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony’, Minima Memoria: Essays in the Wake of J-F Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet et al. (California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 111, 109. Lyotard, The Differend , 121. Ibid., 62. Charmaine Coyle, ‘Lyotard’s Writing the Body: A Feminist Approach?’, in Gender after Lyotard, ed. Margaret Grebowicz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 108 and 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., vii. Ibid., 24 and 111. Lyotard, The Inhuman , 20. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 11. In addition to the criticisms of Merleau-Ponty, uttered by ‘He’ but clearly echoing Lyotard’s own voice, ‘She’ similarly makes a personal comment to Sepp Gumbrecht, whose invitation and proposed question initiated the seminar. Ibid., 20. Butler, Gender Trouble , 10. Karl Marx quoted in Discours, Figure , 139 [this translation: R. Livingstone and G. Benton, Marx: Early Writings, London: Penguin, 134]. Lyotard quotation, Discourse, Figure , 133. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 135. Translation modified. Ibid., 424, n. 12. Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’ [1988], trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 20; Lyotard, Discourse, Figure , 136. Translation modified. Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 19. Lyotard, The Inhuman , 17. Lyotard, ‘One of the things at stake in women’s struggles’ [1976], trans. Deborah J. Clarke et al. in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 111 and 116. Ibid., 120; Speculum was submitted to the University of Paris VIII – Vincennes as a thesis for Irigaray’s second doctorate (in Philosophy); the negative response to its publication resulted in an end to her teaching and eviction from Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris. This was the same year that Lacan’s dominant position within the psychoanalysis faculty prompted Lyotard and Deleuze’s letter to Les Temps Modernes, as noted in the previous chapter. See Seyla Benhabib in Feminism / Postmodernism , ed. Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990). Also Caroline Ramazanoglu ‘Saying Goodbye to Emancipation?’, in The Politics of J-F Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1998). Lyotard and Gary. A. Olson, ‘Resisting a Discourse of Mastery: A Conversation with Jean-François’, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 15, 1995, 409. Ibid., 408.

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Grebowicz, Gender after Lyotard , 8 and 219. See in particular Acconci’s Line up, performed in Paris in 1973, also filmed actions such as Openings (1970), in which Acconci plucked out the hair round his navel to render it feminine in appearance. Acconci’s questioning of the male body is discussed by Amelia Jones in ‘The Body in Action: Vito Acconci and the “Coherent” Male Artistic Subject’ chapter 3 of Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Keith Crome, Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 103; Lyotard quotation from ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, in Toward the Postmodern: J-F Lyotard , 68. Meagan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism Reading Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), 214.

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See for example: Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Joanna Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007). The work of Clement Greenberg and his association with a Kantian legacy was not widely known in France at this time. See the previous discussion in this book on page 42. I have chosen to keep the disowned title ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ when referring directly to the article as printed in Artforum . Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, trans. Lisa Liebmann, Artforum , April 1982, 20(8), 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ [1982], trans. Régis Durand, in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 80. Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, 69. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (London: Polity, 1991), 127–8. Ibid., 126. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 168. The enthusiasm for a ‘return to painting’ was notable at both the 1980 Venice Biennale and Documenta 7 (1982). For Lyotard’s dismissal of ‘neo-expressionism’ see Bernard Blistène, ‘A conversation with Jean-François Lyotard’, Flash Art , 212, March 1985, 35: ‘. . . they’ve lost all sense of what is at stake in painting’. Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, 68. Ibid., 69. Lyotard, ‘The Works and Writings of Daniel Buren: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Contemporary Art’ [1981], trans. Lisa Libemann, Artforum , February 1981, 19(6), 56–64.

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Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful [2nd edition, 1759], trans. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 2008), Pt 2, §7. Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, 66; Lyotard, The Inhuman, 105. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘about October’, October, 1, 1976, 3. Krauss and Michelson et al.,‘Editorial’, October, 10, 1979, 3. Essays by Krauss appeared in French in Macula 2, 1977 and Communications, 34, 1981. See Peter Muir, ‘October: La Glace sans tain’, Journal for Cultural Research , 6(4), 2002, 419–41. Ingrid Sischy and Germano Celant, ‘Editorial’, Artforum , February 1982, 35. Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, 66. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 123. Jean-Luc Nancy in Jean-François Courtine, ed., Du Sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988), 37. James T. Boulton, ‘Editors Introduction’ [1958] in Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Routledge, 2008), xli–xlii. Lyotard in Lisa Appignanesi, Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4/5, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: ICA Books, 1986), 24. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful , Pt 1, §13. Ibid., Pt 1,§7. Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference , 27. Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’, 69; Lyotard, The Inhuman, 127. Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, trans. Lisa Liebmann, Artforum , April 1984, 22(8), 37. Lyotard, The Inhuman , 99. The corresponding section on page 40 of the Artforum version is thoroughly misleading and has been superseded by the revised version in collections such as The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful . Pt 2, §1. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 99. Ibid., 99–100. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 337. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 352. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 99. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 96 and 99. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful . Pt 5, §§6 and 7. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 101. Ibid. Note that the end of this sentence differs from the French version in L’inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988) which ends simply with ‘elle est un artefact, un simulacre ’ suggesting that the phrase ‘but is, in Burke, the actualisation of a figure potentially there in language’ was an alteration made by Lyotard when the lecture was given in Cambridge in March 1984, incorporated into the English translation – see note on p. vii of The Inhuman . Longinus quoted in Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Reading in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 36.

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Lyotard, The Inhuman, vii. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful . Pt 5, §6. W. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 145. Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming [1979], trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1985), 8. Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988), 13. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 352; Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful . Pt 1, §7. Lyotard, ‘La performance et la Phrase chez Daniel Buren’ [1980], in Performance, Text(e), Documents, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Montréal: Parachute, 1981). Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), 123. The article was published in French as ‘Réponse à la question: qu’est-ce que le postmoderne ’, in Critique , 419, April 1982, with a note explaining that this very personal ‘texte de combat’ first appeared in Italian in the journal Alfabeta and subsequently reprinted, also in Italian, in La pittura del segretto nell’eta postmoderna, Baruchello. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982. This note is not included in the English edition of The Postmodern Condition . Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, 71. Ibid., 77 and 81. Kant describes the overall project of the third critique in part 2 of the introduction and the specific interactions of the faculties operating in the sublime in §27 of the Analytic of the Sublime. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. James C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 76 / §23. References are to this translation unless stated otherwise. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime [1991], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 239. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting [1978], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Iain McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul de Man, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in Hugh. J. Silverman and Gary Aylesworth, eds, The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), also Werner S. Pluhar ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Kant, Critique of Judgement , for an overview of different interpretations of Kant’s attempts to create a complete ‘critical system’. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute [1983], trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 8. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 6. Ibid., 6. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §56. Ibid., §6. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables [1993], trans. Van Den Abbeele, Georges (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 240. Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790] trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), §24; this translation by Pluhar better conveys Lyotard’s usage. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 123.

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Ibid., 123. Lyotard, The Differend, 13. Lyotard, Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren [1987] (Paris: Hermann 2008), 96. Christine Buci-Glucksman (2001) ‘Le différend de l’art’, 158. My translation. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 184. Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, 80. Andrew Slade, Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. James C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), §27 and ‘General Remark upon the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements’.

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Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), 89. James Joyce, Ulysses [1922], ed. Danis Rose (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1997), 53. Lyotard, ‘Return Upon the Return’ [1991], in Toward the Postmodern: J-F Lyotard , ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 194. Gina Pane, ‘Je ’, artTitudes International , 1, 1972, 15. My translation. Quoted in Anne Tronche, Gina Pane: Actions (Paris: Fall Édition, 1997), 118. See Jennifer Blessing, ‘Gina Pane’s Witnesses: The Audience and Photography’, Performance Research , 7(4), 2002. See Alice Maude-Roxby and Françoise Masson, On Record: Advertising, Architecture and the Actions of Gina Pane (London: Artwords Press, 2004), in particular Masson’s comments on p. 36. Blessing, ‘Gina Pane’s Witnesses’, 18. Gina Pane, ‘Sentimental Action’, in Il Corpo Come Linguaggio (La ‘Body-art’ e storie simili), ed. Lea Vergine (Milan: Giampolo Prearo Editore, 1974), unpaginated. Retrospectively we can consider Pane’s position as an outsider to have been exacerbated by her identity as a gay woman, one that Sarah Wilson describes as ‘doubly stigmatised in a male-dominated Paris’. See ‘Haute Surveillance, Haute Couture’, in Sarah Wilson et al., Franko B: Oh Lover Boy (London: Black Dog, 2001), unpaginated; this is an unusual reference to Pane’s sexuality and Blessing makes the point that ‘Pane did not describe herself as either feminist or lesbian’ Jennifer Blessing, ‘Some Notes on Gina Pane’s Wounds’, 37. Catherine Millet, Contemporary Art in France, trans. Charles Penwarden (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 176. Pane in Catherine Lawless, ‘Entretien avec Gina Pane’, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne , 29, 1989, 102. Second quotation is by Masson in Alice Maude-Roxby and Françoise Masson, On Record: Advertising, Architecture and the Actions of Gina Pane (London: Artwords Press, 2004), 44. Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History [1986], trans. Georges Van den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Originating as a paper read in 1981, Enthusiasm was first published in France in 1986, where it is frequently cited, even though much of the material recurs elsewhere: in the Kant Notices of The Differend and Lessons on the Analytic of The Sublime.

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Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute [1983], trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 165 quoting Kant, Critique of Judgement, §27. The phrase ‘Sign of History’, as Lyotard explains, comes from §5 of Kant’s Conflict of the Philosophical Faculty with the Faculty of Law [1795]. Lyotard, The Differend , 166. The corresponding pages in Enthusiasm, 30–1. The internal quotations are from Kant’s Critique of Judgement , ‘General Remark Upon the Exposition of the Aesthetical Reflective Judgement’. Lyotard, The Differend, 166. Lyotard, Enthusiasm, 32. Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. James C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), §40. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime [1991], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 221. Lyotard, Lessons, 227–8. The famous disagreement with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas revolved predominantly round the possibilities and limitations for communication, especially that which Habermas terms ‘communicative action’; see Plinio Walder Prado, Jr., ‘Argumentation and Aesthetics: Reflections on Communication and The Differend’, Philosophy Today, 36(4), 1992. Key interlocutors in these debates included Richard Rorty and Manfred Frank. Lyotard, Discours, Figure [1971] (Paris: Klinsieck, 2002), 183. This translation by Mary Lydon appears as a quotation in her article ‘Veduta on “Discours, figure ”’ (Yale French Studies, 99, 2001, 15) and is freer than that of Antony Hudek, though his is closer to Lyotard’s original: ‘“Accurate” sight is never unmediated, but reclaimed from blurred vision. The mind’s enquiry has a childhood which is the murky and the phantasmagorical’, Discourse, Figure , 178. As with the whole ‘Veduta’ section this is printed entirely in italics. One of the few commentators to make use of Lyotard’s work in relation to performance art is Andrew Quick whose essay ‘Time and Event’ discusses the work of Station House Opera in relation to Lyotard’s discussion of the event and makes a similar connection to the figural: ‘Events act “figurally” in that they are the Other to the rule of representation, necessary to it but working against its drive toward homogeneity’, in Time and Value, ed. Scott Lash, Andrew Quick and Richard Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 78. Kathy O’Dell, ‘Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s’, Performance Research , 2(1), 1997, 74. Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 13. Ibid., 14. O’Dell makes her reservations about implied universalities clear at the end of the first chapter, explaining that the psychic stages to which the performances ‘propel the visitor’ are ‘brief but intense’ moments. The suggestion of communality is mine but is similarly tempered with reservations concerning the potential for a common or universal experience, informed by Lyotard’s own serious reservations with regard to Kant’s sensus communis. See Chapter 1, page 29 in this book.

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Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (London: Polity, 1991), 111. This quotation comes from Lyotard’s essay, titled ‘Something like: “Communication . . . without Communication”’ which was first presented as a lecture in October 1985, the same year as the exhibition Les Immatériaux . Lyotard, The Inhuman, 111. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence [1974], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1991), 55. Vincent Descombes, Le Même et L’Autre (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978) translated as Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Colin Davies, Lévinas: An Introduction (London: Polity, 1996), 122. Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming [1979], trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 22, 37. Lyotard, ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’ (from Discours, figure), trans. Mark Sinclair in The Lyotard Reader and Guide , ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 35–6. Alternative translation: Discourse, Figure , 5. The French phrase ‘la passion, le dévoiement ’ also suggests a revealing or unveiling which corresponds to a subsequent attack on the veil that a Platonic understanding of representation has cast on Western thought and from which the sensible element has been exiled. Lyotard’s reflections on the role of Jewish thought are complex and provocative and while most evident in works published in the last decade of his life – in particular the articles and correspondence published as The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity with Eberhard Gruber – his concern is apparent in ‘Jewish Oedipus’ published in 1970 and ‘Figure Foreclosed’ which was written in 1968 but not published until 1984 due to anxieties over its argument being perceived as anti-Semitic. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 575, n. 123. Lévinas held a chair in philosophy at Nanterre (1967–73) during the period that Lyotard was preparing Discourse, Figure for his Doctorat d’État and teaching in the Philosophy department (1967–72). Gary Gutting translates ‘vivre de’ as ‘lives off of’ which, while somewhat clumsy, indicates the interactivity involved in this means of being: see Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 357. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity [1961], trans. Adolph Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 134. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 134 quoted in John Llewelyn, The Genealogy of Ethics: Emmanuel Lévinas (London: Routledge, 1995), 71. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 115. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 113. François Pluchart, ‘Risk as the Practice of Thought’ [1978] in The Art of Performance , ed. Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 130.

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This is the model used by Jennifer Blessing, ‘Some Notes on Gina Pane’s Wounds’, in Gina Pane (Exhibition Catalogue, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2002). Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 148, quoted in Lyotard, The Differend, 110. The interrelation between Lévinas and Lacan has been explored by some academics despite the seemingly irreconcilable difference between their two notions of otherness and their lack of contact or reference to one another’s work. See the collection edited by Sarah Harasym, Lévinas and Lacan: the Missed Encounter (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), in particular ‘The Subject and the Other in Lévinas and Lacan’ by Paul-Laurent Assoun who notes that while Lacan was a careful reader of Merleau-Ponty he made no reference to the work of Lévinas. The rising cultural power of the United States and its attending political implications and motivations during the Cold war are most famously explored in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). Barnett Newman (1948) ‘The Sublime is Now’, in Art in Theory 1900–1990, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 574. Diarmuid Costello, ‘Lyotard’s Modernism’, Parallax , 6(4), 2000, 76–87. Costello rightly emphasizes Lyotard’s privileging of the art of the avant-garde but fails to acknowledge that such a belief extends only to the avant-gardist act of disruption in and of itself, as Lyotard states at the end of ‘Newman, The Instant’: ‘Art is not a genre defined in terms of an end (the pleasure of an addressee), and still less is it a game whose rules have to be discovered. It accomplishes an ontological task, that is a “chronological task”. It accomplishes it without completing it’ (Lyotard, Inhuman, 88). In contrast, Clement Greenberg ends his spoken address ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961) with a statement of belief in the continuity of tradition: ‘Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is – among other things – continuity, and unthinkable without it’, in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds (London: Phaidon, 1992), 314. Simon Malpas, ‘Sublime Ascesis: Lyotard, Art and the Event’, Angelaki , 7(1), 2002, 199–212. Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), 135. Lyotard, Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings, ed. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geigman (London: University of Minnesota Press and UCL Press, 1993), 137. Lyotard, Political Writings, 146. Lyotard makes it explicit in this essay that the deafness to justice (and extermination) is perpetuated in Hediegger’s writings on shelter and ‘listening to Being in the work of art’, 147. Lyotard ‘Newman: The Instant’ [1983], in Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988] (London: Polity, 1991), 79. All subsequent page references are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. Lyotard uses the term ‘devine ’ with reference to Duchamp in the French version L’inhumain (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 92. The term ‘vedute ’ (The Inhuman , 80) recalls the section of Discourse, Figure titled ‘Veduta sur un fragment de < > du désir’ which considers the implications of the construction of vision’s ‘accurate seeing’, see n. 23 above.

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Lyotard, The Inhuman, 83. Lyotard, The Differend, 110, including a quote from Lévinas’ Four Talmudic Lectures. Ibid., 110. Lyotard describes ‘two kernel phrases’ from Lévinas’ Totality and Infinity: ‘The ego does not proceed from the other, the other befalls the ego’; the logic of these phrases is further explored in Lyotard’s earlier essay ‘Lévinas’ logic’ which formed part of the preparatory workings for The Differend and is collected in translation in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). The most significant shift in emphasis between the earlier essay and the discussion of Lévinas in The Differend is the attention given to the change of genre from prescriptive to cognitive (denotative in ‘Lévinas’ Logic’); the translation of genres is dealt with elsewhere in The Differend (for example see §§80–83) but the consequence, which is given emphasis in the Lévinas notice 1, is that a linkage ‘cannot annul the event’. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 81. Manuscript, JFL 65 in the Lyotard archive, Doucet Library, Paris. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 82. Unpublished typescript, a 52-page document with annotations (possibly transcript of a spoken presentation) reporting on the planning for the exhibition Les Immatériaux , one year before its opening. Titled ‘Les Immatériaux “Rapport de synthèse” mars, 1984’, JFL 42 in the Lyotard archive, Doucet Library, Paris. My translation. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 83; Basic Writings: Heidegger, trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 164. David. C. Wood, Time after Time (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 200. Newman’s own intention that the large paintings should be viewed ‘at a short distance’ is quoted by Yve-Alain Bois in ‘Perceiving Newman’, Painting as Model (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990) 312 (n. 34). This essay works as an interesting counterpart to Lyotard, emphasizing the role of Newman’s ‘conversion’ in 1948 and giving an account of the paintings themselves through an analysis of their predominantly bilateral composition. Bois does draw on Newman and Hess’ commentary but leaves a discussion of the sublime aside, referring instead to Lyotard’s essay in a footnote. Newman quoted in Lyotard, The Inhuman, 86. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 88. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (London: Harvill Press, 1997), 494. The import reciprocal role of Greenberg to Newman and vice versa in the late 1950s is neatly summarized by Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), 60–2. Gay R. McDonald, ‘The Launching of American Art in Post-war France’, American Art , 13(1), 1999, 41–61. Costello, ‘Lyotard’s Modernism’, 78. Costello neglects to consider the role of Burke in Lyotard’s conception of the sublime – the importance of which I argued for in the previous chapter – and

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consequently Costello leads to a particularly jaundiced conclusion. It is, however, a good example of the tendency to take a synecdochal approach to Lyotard’s work and the mire that results: the complexity of his many voices never represents the wider ‘whole’. Lyotard, ‘Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer’ [1984], The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory, trans. Rachel Bowlby (London: Black Dog, 1998), 227–8. Another early essay by Lyotard linking non-abstract art to the sublime is his essay on the Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello, La pittura del segretto nell’eta postmoderna, Baruchello (1982). Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory, 196. ‘Spasm’ is one of several physiological terms used in Lyotard’s late writings; others include ‘grip’ [mainmise] and supine [supin]. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 81. Lyotard uses the phrase ‘écriture mâle ’ as the opening subheading to ‘Fémininité dans la métalanguage ’ collected in Lyotard, Rudiments Païens (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions 10/18, 1977); the phrase is lost in the English translation ‘One of the things at stake in women’s struggles’ in The Lyotard Reader. Lyotard, ‘The Affect-Phrase (from a supplement to The Differend )’ [1990], trans. Keith Crome, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 105, 108, 107. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148. Ibid., 146. Pane, ‘The Body and its Support-image for a Non-linguistic Communication’, arTitudes International, 3, 1973, 10. See ‘The Same, Even, Itself . . .’ in Geoffrey Bennington, Late Lyotard (Lexington KY: e-books, 2005). See Aris Sarafinos, ‘The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(1), 2008. Lyotard, ‘Anamnesis of the Visible’ [1997], trans. C. Venn and R. Boyne, Theory, Culture and Society, 21(1), 2004, 115. Note that the French âme doesn’t necessarily carry the immediate religious connotations of the English word ‘soul’ and that in a philosophical context âme invokes the French translation of Aristotle’s Anima [L’âme], which is referred to directly in Lyotard’s ‘Affect-phrase’. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 82. Rosalind Krauss, ‘The im/pulse to see’, Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 77. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 337 Krauss, ‘The im/pulse to see’, 67. This essay was also published in French in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’art Moderne , 29, Automne 1989. The argument is expanded in Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), chapter 5 and in the entry on ‘Isotrope’ in the exhibition catalogue for the 1997 exhibition at the Pompidou, L’Informe: Mode d’emploi . See Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain-Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books 1999). Krauss, ‘The im/pulse to see’, 70. See, for example, references to Lyotard in Mark Godfrey Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), which makes entirely

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95

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appropriate use of Lyotard’s work on witnessing, the unpresentable and the figure of Auschwitz in The Differend , but in doing so maintains the assumption that his approach to art is limited to that which takes a minimal approach. The works by Lyotard mentioned in this section are as follows: Signed, Malraux [1996], trans. Robert Harvey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics [1998], trans. Robert Harvey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); The Confession of Augustine [1998], trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), this collection includes a version of ‘Anamnesis of the Visible’, as cited above, it was first presented at an exhibition of the work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Works on artists include: Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness (Venice CA: Lapis Press, 1995); ‘Nécessité de Lazare’ dans Les Nuicts, Albert Ayme (Paris: Travèrsiere, 1995); Flora Danica: La secession du geste dans la peinture de Stig Brøgger (Paris: Galilée, 1997); Karel Appel: A Gesture of Colour [1998], trans. Vlad Ionescu and Peter W. Milne (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009). Lyotard, ‘Gesture and Commentary’ [1993], trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz, in Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundary, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 74.

In Conclusion 1

Lyotard, ‘The Affect-Phrase (from a supplement to The Differend )’ [1990], trans. Keith Crome, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 110.

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Index

Abramović, Marina 17, 146, 167, 169 Marina Abramović presents . . . 16, 174n. 9 Rhythm 10, 29 Seven Easy Pieces 3, 8, 28–33, 172 Acconci, Vito 50–2, 78, 151, 167 Anchors 76, 81–7, 108 Seedbed 8, 30–2, 81, 138, 169, 171, 177n. 34 Adami, Valerio 6–7, 9, 13, 25–6, 37, 45–6, 48, 54–5, 58, 62–3, 66–7, 71–2, 74, 83, 86, 100, 170 affect 5, 10, 24, 33, 60, 63, 65, 75, 81, 90, 101–2, 105–7, 124, 138, 145, 161–2, 164 affect theory 81 affect-phrase 5, 10, 14, 21, 80, 101, 108, 160–1 in cultural studies and social theory 101 ‘inarticulate affect’ 10, 100, 108–9 anamnesis 26, 94, 99–100, 134, 163 après-coup 99, 102 see Freud, Sigmund: Nachträglichkeit Arakawa, Shūsaku 25–6 arrive-t-il ? [Is it happening?] 8, 10, 27–31, 34, 42–4, 48, 54, 80, 110, 123, 126, 131, 138, 146, 156 159, 166, 169, 172 Artforum 6, 10, 40, 42, 110–11, 123, 129 Bacon, Francis 9, 46, 58–62, 66 Bennington, Geoffrey 11–12, 45, 54, 98, 119, 161, 168 Blessing, Jennifer 141, 191n. 10, 194n. 46 BMPT 35–6, 38 the body Burke’s attitude 121–2, 124, 126, 136

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libidinal body 46, 50, 66, 68, 70–1, 76–7, 129 Lyotard’s attitude 75–108 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 13, 134 Buren, Daniel 1, 24–6 , 33–9, 43, 48, 50, 52, 114, 117, 129, 170, 177n. 24 Burke, Edmund 10, 110, 115, 119–30, 132, 135–6, 159, 161–3, 170 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful 109, 119–30 delight 121–2, 124–5, 162 privations 122–4 Butler, Judith 15, 22, 64–5, 88, 92, 102–4, 106 capitalism 49, 53, 64, 77, 90, 98, 119, 160 Carroll, David 5, 7, 12, 175n. 15 Cézanne, Paul 25, 43, 49, 59, 96, 134 Chaput, Thierry 93–4 Claudel, Paul 17, 43, 149 Crome, Keith 13, 99, 108 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 9, 52, 57, 58, 64–5, 138, 167 Anti-Oedipus 9, 46, 48, 51, 54–6, 58, 64, 67, 68 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 9, 46, 58–62, 66 and Guattari, Félix 47, 54–6, 64, 68, 74 A Thousand Plateaus 65–6, 182n. 71 What is Philosophy? 63–5 Déotte, Jean-Louis 13, 92, 94, 97 Derrida, Jacques 6–7, 11, 35, 47, 62, 78, 131, 138, 152, 154–5, 166–8, 184n. 19 Descombes, Vincent 44, 148 desire

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in Deleuze and Guattari 47, 49, 54, 56, 58, 64–7 in Lyotard 26, 43–9, 53–5, 57, 60, 63, 67–74, 97, 101, 104–5, 136 see also figure-matrix Diderot, Denis 41, 58, 63, 72, 78 differend 42, 75, 80, 89, 104, 106, 110, 112, 115, 119, 123, 129–36 Du Vignal, Philipe 51–3 Duan, Yingmei 15–17, 23–4, 170, 173, 176n. 5 Duchamp, Marcel 1, 5, 7, 36–9, 43, 90–1, 112, 135, 152–5, 163 Ereignis 24, 154 see also event event 5–6, 10, 24, 26–34, 41–3, 54, 60, 68, 81, 96–7, 135–8, 151, 156, 159, 166, 172 feeling 5, 10, 29, 33, 80, 101–2, 111, 115, 118, 121–2, 133–5, 138, 143–4, 146–7, 160, 166, 169 sublime feeling 120, 122, 124–7, 131, 133–5, 143–4, 160 figural in Deleuze and Lyotard 58–62 difficulty of definition 17–24 uses in this book 1, 5, 8–10, 165–7 figure-matrix 7, 10, 22, 43, 125, 138, 162–3, 168 Freud, Sigmund 20–2, 43–8, 50, 55–7, 60, 67, 69–73, 75, 139, 145, 148, 166 ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ 22, 47, 125, 135, 162, 166 Nachträglichkeit 99, 100–1, 105–6 ‘Negation’ 68–73, 124 Fried, Michael 10, 24, 39–41, 43, 116 Greenberg, Clement 10, 24, 39–40, 112, 116–17, 153, 159 Grosz, Elizabeth 58, 102–3 haptic 146 Hegel, Georg. W. F. 64–5, 74–5, 105, 148, 151, 156 Heidegger, Martin 24, 95, 147–50, 154–5, 157–8

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inhuman 46, 76, 81, 98, 102, 105–6, 166 International Surrealist Exhibition 91 Irigaray, Luce 103, 107, 187n. 102 Jones, Amelia 4–5, 7, 174n. 10 Kant, Immanuel and Burke 121, 123–4, 126–7, 136 Critique of Judgement (Third Critique) 109, 119–20, 130, 132–3, 135–6, 144 Lyotard’s reading of 138, 143–5, 147, 153, 158–9, 166 Lyotard’s ‘turn’ to 45, 110–11 Klee, Paul 61, 67, 96, 176n. 13 Klein, Yves 36–7, 50, 76 Krauss, Rosalind 7, 116–7, 138, 162–3 Kristeva, Julia 9, 70–1, 76, 86, 88, 166–7 Lacan, Jacques 20, 47, 56–7, 71–2, 76, 84–7, 99, 101, 103, 107, 151, 187n. 102 Lack 9, 54–6, 64, 67, 70–1, 74, 98, 124 Lévinas, Emmanuel 10, 147–51, 155–7, 160 Linker, Kate 31, 84–7, 151, 185n. 36 Lyotard, Jean-François ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ 6, 41, 112, 119, 123, 127, 129–30, 135 Differend, The 8, 10–11, 13, 17, 27, 33, 48, 79–80, 88, 102, 110, 131–2, 136, 138, 151, 155, 160–1, 163, 166, 169, 172 Discourse, Figure 2, 7–8, 10–12, 17, 19–22, 24–7, 35, 43–7, 55, 59–60, 62, 66–9, 73, 91, 94, 96–8, 100–1, 103, 105–6, 118, 124–5, 127, 134, 138, 145, 149, 162, 166, 168 L’inhumaine 13, 110, 112, 119, 189n. 45, 194n. 58 see also Inhuman, The Inhuman, The 11, 42, 72, 103, 109, 112, 119, 122–3, 157 ‘It’s as if a line . . .’ 58, 62, 66, 72, 78, 86, 100, 106, 170

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Index Les Immatériaux 9, 21, 75–9, 81, 85, 87–8, 90–4, 97–100, 102, 106, 113–15, 126, 131, 170 Les Transformateurs Duchamp 5, 38, 73, 90 Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime 132, 144, 166 Libidinal Economy 44–6, 49, 55, 71, 76–7, 89, 127–9 ‘Newman: The Instant’ 10, 123, 152, 154–60 ‘Painting as a Libidinal Set-up’ 49, 53, 55 Peregrinations 45, 144 Postmodern Condition, The 1, 6, 11, 17, 41, 79, 93, 110, 119, 129, 171 ‘Presence’ 24–8, 33–5, 42, 44 ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ 42, 110, 113, 119, 127 Que peindre? 13–14, 25, 62, 92, 94, 100–1, 134, 157 ‘Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ 6, 122–3, 125–7, 154 ‘The Affect-phrase’ 80, 160–1, 169, 173 Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 96 Marx, Karl 44, 46, 105, 148 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 20–1, 35, 60, 74, 91–2, 94–6, 98, 102–4, 149 Monory, Jacques 8, 37, 46–9, 54, 92, 159–60 Nachträglichkeit 99, 100–1, 105–6 Newman, Barnett 10, 123, 147, 151–9, 162–3

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Nietzche, Friedrich 12, 45, 47, 64–5, 76, 148 October 10, 76, 115–7, 153 O’Dell, Kathy 146–7 Pane, Gina 28, 50, 138–42, 145, 147, 150, 161, 167, 169–70, 191n. 10 passibility 147 Phelan, Peggy 78, 161 phenomenology 20, 60, 69, 75, 77, 91–2, 94–101, 103–4, 138, 148–9, 166 Pluchart, François 4, 50–1, 139, 150 postmodern 1–2, 5–7, 9–10, 24, 41–2, 76, 97, 107, 110, 112–3, 115, 117–8, 129, 153, 167, 171 Rajchman, John 76, 79, 89, 91, 153 Readings, Bill 12, 45, 53–4 Saussure, Ferdinand de 20, 68, 71 sensation 35, 59–61, 64–6, 94, 98, 107, 126, 129, 141, 144, 153, 156 sexual difference 10, 75, 78, 99, 101–6 Socialisme ou Barbarie 44, 179n. 1 sublime 1, 5–7, 9–10, 24, 42–3, 72, 109–37, 143–5, 147, 151, 153, 157–60, 163, 169, 171 transformation (in art) 1, 22, 43, 49, 90, 140–1, 166 Vergine, Lea 4, 16, 19 Williams, James 13, 45, 56

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