File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9810, message 43


Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 22:58:21 EST
Subject: Re: PMC:  What is Postmodernism:  A Demand


Donald Turner wrote:
>> What does Lyotard's "war on totality" (p.82) and rejection of the whole
>> mean for ethics?  Are traditional grounding ethical systems also rejected?
>Bayard G. Bell responded:
>In this regard, I think you will have to deal with Lyotard's
>relationship to the ethics of Emmanual Levinas 

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with you here, Bayard.  I also have thought for
some time now that Lyotard philosophy parallels in many respects the pattern
used in the book "Totality and Infinity."  The chief difference being that
Lyotard avoids the piety, religiousity and humanism of Levinas, using the same
structure in a more profane context.

My nutshell version of Levinas would be this. (It is a lie. Please do not
accept it. You really have no real choice except to read T&I yourself).  

Totality is essentially what the Self (chez soi) does when left to its own
devices.  It wants to absorb everything that is other into the circuit of
itself and reduce it to the same. (Narcissus as the arch-philosopher: Ulysses
always seeking home.)  

It is the basis of both Hegel and Heidegger with their totalizing schemes of
the Absolute and Being.  It is also the thrust of Lyotard's criticism of
Habermas and metanarratives.

The Infinite is met in the Other; the alterity of the face that can no longer
be subsumed into ourself.  Rather, like Abraham, it is an encounter that leads
us into a new country.  The face reveals the Infinite because it contains
depths that cannot be reduced to mere presentation.  The self is confronted
with a Transcendence and the face demands from us a response.  This is the
basis of ethics. It is grounded in our response to a face - be it widow,
orphan or stranger. It meets us before we know what to do.

This ethical relationship is prior to the totalizing schemes of ontology. It
is not grounded in logical systems. It is instead the relevation of the
Infinite.  This is what Lyotard himself terms the sublime. (also, in other
respects, the differend)

This leads us back to the question of what art should "look like."  Obviously,
as Lyotard states, he is committed to a art based not on beauty, but rather on
the sublime. What does this statement really mean, however?

Rather than ask what such an art would look like (which throws us immediately
into the categories of taste and reflective judgement), perhaps it would be
more fruitful to ask what happens to us when we experience such art. 

In his introduction to The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard makes the claim that
he is a philosopher, not an expert. He goes on to say: "the latter knows what
he knows and what he does not know: the former does not.  One concludes, the
other questions - two very different language games."

What I personally have come to value in Lyotard is not what he says about the
postmodern, the differend, the sublime or judgement, important as these things
may be. Instead, he time and again invites us into a space where we must place
to one side our thoughts, representations, generalizations and assumptions so
that we can experience the event, what is happening, in a way which brackets
our own pre-judgements and allows a response to occur which is different from
the one previously thought out by us in advance of the event.

This seems to me to be Lyotard's religion, to the very limited extent we can
use that particular word is speaking of him, a postmodern pagan.  It is
something, however, I hope we can discuss further. I believe it lies at the
heart of his postmodern conceptions.

It is when he stops my thoughts and arrests my expectations that he seems very
profound to me.  At that moment he becomes a philosopher.  This is also what I
expect from art: an encounter that takes our expectations and blows them to
smithereens.

Unless we recognize this capacity in Lyotard we risk reducing his thought to
being merely idle cocktail chatter. To speak of the postmodern today is merely
banal unless it can become for us an event.

   

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