Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 20:32:28 -0500
From: "Bayard G. Bell" <bbell01-AT-emory.edu>
Subject: Re: PMC:  What is Postmodernism?  A Demand.


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

hugh bone wrote:
> 
> EricMurph-AT-aol.com wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> -AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-
> 
> REPLY:
> 
> I don't think of Lyotard as religious; I agree he takes us to a
> different space
> and would like to hear more about it.  Artists sometimes do this, but
> rarely, and
> it it happened more often it wouldn't be that different.
> 
> Today I read a quote of from Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, which
> he wrote 9 months before his suicide.  "I have a terrible need for -- I
> will use the word religion -- so I go outside at night to paint the
> stars."

In this particular matter, I have always found a great confusion of
metaphors and that thing called metaphysics of which I have so little
understanding.  I think here the use of metaphors is absolutely
critical.  Perhaps the most explosive treatment of this that I have
encountered is Helene Cixous's first novel, _Inside_.  (Damn, I love
being a university employee.  Between sentences I was able to run over
to the library and pick up a copy of the book in both English and
French, even though it's 12:30 at night.  I am cackling right now.)  
(Anyway, Cixous came to me particularly vividly the other night as I was
watching a rendition of _King Lear_ on PBS and realized that the last
paragraph of her novel alludes very strongly to the beginning of the
last scene of act V of the play--"Come, let's away to prison, we two
alone...".)  Cixous's book wreaks havoc on the metaphors of
exterior/interior and of contact.  To give you a taste, the books
closing words are: "You will be up above and down below and I shall be
inside.  Outside, the mystery of things will dry up, under the sun the
generations will wash up world over words, but inside we will have
stopped dying."
	Although I might agree with much of what Eric wrote, I don't believe
the experience with Lyotard takes place in "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."  I think the radicality of the philosophy of Lyotard and
Levinas, amongst others, is precisely that it is much more painful to us
than Eric's metaphors allow and that there are certainly questions as to
how we might share a space with them.  I think Cixous's citation in
_Three Steps on the Ladder Of Writing_ of a 1904 letter from Kafka to
his friend Pollack provides a more accurate metaphor (please forgive me
as I am citing from memory):

	"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab
us.  If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the
head, what are we reading it for?  So that it will make us happy, as you
write?  Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and
the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write
ourselves if we had to.  But we need the books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more
than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone,
like a suicide.  A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us. 
This is my belief."

This quote most often appears simply as "A book must be an axe for the
frozen sea inside us."  This particular rendition removes what is most
potent in this quote.  The axe doesn't simply strip away something cold
inside us; it truly hews at us, at who were are.
	I don't wish to put a stain on the characters of two wonderful men (I
am tempted to ask, following Cixous) , but neither Levinas nor Lyotard
can be described as cordial hosts without qualification.  That is why I
love them, and that is why they ruin me.  I think the writing of both
men exposes us to a radicality far beyond placing ourselves to one side,
more in the spirit of eminently quotable Beckett: "I can't go on, I must
go on" than anything else.  It has been said (by Jameson, at least, in
the _Postmodernism_ book--probably echoing somebody else) that
postmodernism calls into question the metaphors of position in such a
way that critical positions in the sense Lyotard uses the word critical
in the first chapter of _PMC_ (pp. 11-13, esp. 13, i.e. privileged
through exposure to subjection leading to, say, revolutionary
consciousness) do not seem possible.  (In terms of the identitarian
critical modes prevalent contemporary theory, it seems that a scattering
of French theorists, many inspired by Foucault's _History of Sexuality_
vol. I [esp. pp. 95-96], [e.g. Etienne Balibar; many others are cited to
enormous effect by Tom Keenan in his _Fables of Responsibility) and
post-colonialists critics [particularly some of the Indian theorists,
also cited by Keenan], have been fruitfully working on the intersections
of multiple "critical" identities demonstrating the shortcomings for
questions of agency and particularly deterministic consciousness
advocated in the work of more than a few tedious purists.  This also
recalls Spivak's re-examination of the subaltern.  This issue though is
whether the identity of the subject can be made so determinate as to
define clearly the responsibilities incumbent upon the subject by virtue
of such identity.  The work of the theorists mentioned above does not
deny responsibility [as some claimed against deconstruction in the wake
of the "de Man affair"] but that it highlights that the structure of the
subject and of identity allow that the responsible thing may not be done
or may not even be possible.  In short that these things cannot be
achieved programmatically.)
	To return to Lyotard and Levinas, I generally find Levinas a more
difficult read, but there are times when I'm reading Lyotard that I find
myself just out of my skin.  It isn't necessarily fun to work through
the absurd clarity of the essays in _Postmoden Fables_.  Indeed,
Lyotard's lucidity seems to me to have moments of paralyzing insight and
even violence.  Reading Levinas sometimes gives me a very acute idea of
what being hostage for the Other might be because, however right Lyotard
may be, however ridiculously lucid he may be, that might not be
"acceptable" to me, I may refuse him in a vain attempt to prevent him
from broaching me, from disturbing me as a subject.  Lyotard doesn't
always invite us in: at times I feel he hijacks me for his version of
_Natural Born Killers_ or starts throwing the tea service at me when I
drop by for what I thought would be a quiet cup (other times I think
he's sneaking some gin into that tea before the real talking starts). 
To add one more tortured metaphor, there are times when I feel he has me
hanging off a cliff and is gleefully stomping on my fingers, laughing at
the abyss into which I will shortly drop.  But let me very clear about
this: if one wishes to talk about Lyotard in terms of practice, one can
find this practise in his writing, which I find to be sublime in the
acute sense of being at once pleasurable and painful.  It is very much
as Derrida put it in his "Circumfession":

	"... from the invisible inside, where I could neither see nor want the
very thing that I have always been scared to have revealed on the
scanner, by analysis - radiology, echography, endocrinology, hematology
- a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once
stored in that bottle under a label that I doubted could avoid confusion
or misappropriation of the vintage, leaving me nothing more to do, the
inside of my life exhibiting itself outside, expressing itself before my
eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the
pen to a syringe, and I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a
suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must
inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the
inscribable, playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the
vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad
taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives
itself up and you can do as you like with it, it's me but I'm no longer
there, for nothing, for nobody, diagnoses the worst... "

	I really want to focus on this.  "Answer to the Question: What is
Postmodernism" is difficult to characterize as Lyotard's work alone. 
Lyotard is, after all, a member of a generation of philosophers whose
work is made incredibly powerful by a fellowship seen perhaps twice in a
century (the Frankfurt School, the Saint Petersburg Circle, the Vienna
Circle, the Jena Romantics; please excuse the sloppy historical gestures
I make here: the point is that this doesn't happen very often). 
Certainly there were violent ruptures (Foucault and Derrida, Foucault
and Baudrillard), but, as I have said before, the intersection of so
many philosopher so explicitly interested in the ethical implications of
what it might mean to *read* a book of philosophy, particularly when the
proper name on the cover belonged to a living person.  These are
philosophers whose "projects" are almost constantly impacted by the
works of their fellows, who are willing to radically alter their
projects because of their encounters with one another.  They are a
network of philosophers.  Both Derrida and Lyotard are relentless in
their critiques of Habermas because he reads their work sloppily in
order to de-radicalize it, in order to avoid the complexity and the
sheer difficulty their work creates for his attempts at systematic
thought (or as Derrida puts it, in order not to read their work at all).
 The work of both philosophers *should* be painful to him, it *should*
afflict him.  It might even be impossible for him to read it.  That, of
course, would mean the invalidation of his work.  Which is absolutely no
excuse.  And that should not preclude condemnation of his work.  It all
depends on how exacting one is in so doing.  The great injury is that
Habermas assaults their writing styles.  I will return to this in
relation to Kant.
	But to try to stay on target with one tangent before returning to the
previously promised characterization: Lyotard very clearly states that
the sublime is a mixture of pleasure and pain.  That is precisely what
it is to read him.  As Eric correctly states, reading Lyotard is an
event.  In terms of pagan ritual, it's like showing up for JFL's
bonfire, only to realize that you must be burned if the thing is going
to go off at all.  (Perhaps this is a ridiculous way of putting it, but
it's giving me a lot of laughs at 3:45 AM.)  This is why I say that "how
would an aesthetics of the sublime look?" is not an entirely well-formed
question.  It is perhaps a passage, but this should immediately recall
Lyotard's definition of the philosopher as one who is always passing on
to questions, as Eric reminds us.  (Very notably, passing on from
knowledge to statements, always moving to the paralogic, demands a
methodology of rigor rather than obscurantism, despite the suspicions
and faint imitations of no small number of graduate students and
[American] colleagues, on whom Lyotard has busted with an abandon that I
laugh at as I watch my ass even more closely.)  Epistemology, the
obtaining of certainty, and clear, cognitive phrases are tasks that have
been demanded of philosophy in the spirit of our time.  I shudder every
time I hear yet another vulgar undergraduate scorn a philosophy or a
literature class in favor of political science or economics because they
imagine it will get them a job.
	To take an example from the last place Professor Lyotard taught: last
year Emory had a little over two dozen literature majors in an
undergraduate student body of around 5,000.  Given the quality of the
faculty members involved in the Literature Program at Emory (Lyotard
himself was a member of the graduate faculty), one could expect to get
an absolutely first-rate education if one was willing to work for it,
knowing that failure was an eminent possibility.  In the spirit of the
time, students dismiss such an opportunity as excessive--for $100k, they
don't want to read philosophy; they want return on their investment.  In
the English Department, you will be hard put to find an undergraduate
who is not reading for a literal statement of *the* moral in a novel. 
The sublime eludes the vulgar mass of anxiously upper-middle-class
students.  In this regard, one can read _PMC_ as prescient but also as a
rallying cry of sorts for the teaching profession.
	To return to Lyotard's intertextuality, what is Lyotard putting at
stake by giving this appendix (I doubt that that word was chosen
loosely) a title lifted from Kant's essay on Enlightenment?  What of
these gestures in so many directions (_Milles Plateaux_,
adlinguisticity, analytic philosophy, Benjamin)?  Kant's essay certainly
had something of rallying cry at its core: "audere sapere [dare to
know]".  And Kant's reason is not easy: it is quite clearly identified
as something painful to a subject.  On the other hand, there is a
de-radicalization in Kant's rally, perhaps a fear that the task of
critical thought might be a too revolutionary, too excessive for the
tastes of the Prussian monarchy or Kant himself.  (There is an interview
with Foucault from the early 80s, shortly after the election of the
Socialist government, which has its parallels.  It happened at a moment
when the Socialists were hoping that some of the French "intellectuals,"
despite their protestations of their own death and burial, might lend
the new Government some legitimacy through kind words.  In true
Foucauldian style, Paul-Michel kicks them in the teeth, calling instead
for relentless critique and explicitly refusing to throw in his hat with
Mitterand [there are rumors that this cost him a plum position in the
French national libraries he so loved].  What is key in Foucault is the
gesture towards the relentless task of thought, the exultation towards
books exalted as "travailles.")  Kant introduces a distinction between
public and private reason to set limits on the exercise of critical
powers (e.g. a minister is free to speak out against the doctrines of
his church but not from the pulpit it gives him).  In fact, thought is
already burdened by an instrumentalism in Kant's account, a dedication
not so much to relentless critique as to pursuit of an overdetermined
agenda ("Es ist also fuer jeden einzelnen Menschen, sich aus der ihm
beinahe zur Natur gewordenen Unmuendigkeit herauszuarbeiten. . .  Daher
gibt es nur wenige, denen er gelungen ist, durch eigene Bearbeitung
ihres Geistes sich aus der Unmuendigkeit herauszuwickeln und dennoch
einen sicheren Gang zu tun.  Dass aber ein Publikum sich selbst
erklaere, ist eher moeglich; ja ist es, wenn man ihm Freiheit laesst,
beinahe unausbleiblich. . .  *Zu dieser Aufklaerung aber wird nichts
erfordet als #Freiheit;# und zwar die unschaedlichste unter allem, was
nur Freiheit heissen mag, naemlich die: von seiner Vernunft in allen
Stuecken #oeffentlichen Gebrauch# zu machen.*").
	In short, Kant has a certain resistance to the radicality of thought, a
need to justify it in terms other than itself.  Critical thought seems
substitutable for Marxism in the words of the first chapter
("Everywhere, the Critique of political economy... and its correlate,
the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as
aids in programming the system," [p. 13], a point Lyotard returns to in
_Postmodern Fables_: "Emancipation is no longer situated as an
alternative to reality, as an ideal to be conquered despite reality and
to be imposed from the outside. . .   The task of criticism is precisely
to pinpoint and denounce every failure of the system with regard to
emancipation.  But what is remarkable is that the presupposition behind
this task is that emancipation is from now on the charge of the system
itself, and critique of whatever nature they may be are demanded by the
system in order to carry out this charge more efficiently.  I would say
that criticism thus contributes to transforming differends, if any still
remain, into litigations." [pp. 69, 70]  This is one of the reasons why
Habermas tries to brand more than a few "French" theorists young
conservatives, rather than acknowledging that they admit to the state of
affairs more honestly than he.)  It should be no surprise, then, that
Oeffentlichkeit, the appeal to the public, is so scornfully rejected
(the rather casual reference to Baudrillard's _In The Shadow of the
Silent Majority_ [p. 55] belies the extent to which Lyotard and
Baudrillard share an assessment of the state of the public: what I would
call mute with malice, but massive, complacent, and able to absorb all
energies directed at them in the name of justice and all calls
addressing them as the proletariat, vaguely like the giant of the
Hercules myth who had limitless strength as long as he touched the ground).
	I would say, then, that everything that is at stake in this appendix is
at play in Lyotard's writing.  Lyotard does not polemicize against the
enlightened subject simply by making statements about its failings, he
wages war against it as a totality in his writing.  What is
postmodernism?  It is a demand upon us, to which we may not be equal. 
In Lyotard's case, we are struck by his text as an act of violence
against the notion of ourselves as subjects in the tradition of Kant. 
Young Germans did not simply kill themselves to imitate Goethe's
_Werther_.  They killed themselves because it affected them that deeply,
because it gave them a glimpse of their subjectivity in all its
fractures, and they could not bear to go on.  We may follow Habermas,
refusing to read him, even as our eyes pass over the pages.  There is no
guarantee that we will be able to read Lyotard.  If we can read _PMC_,
we will see that it is indeed a work, that it performs something that
Kant's text is unable to do; this takes place at the level of style (I
regret that I am unable to write more about the stylistics of Kant's
essay here).  In asking that Lyotard to make "sense," but then we are
[at least] the incompetent addressees of _The Differend_, we are asking
him to give us a shelter he cannot provide.  The event that occurs at
the heart of _PMC_ is a disaster we may not survive.  If we do, we will
not be intact.
	What is there to do "apres Lyotard"?  I write "apres" after not simply
to leave a monument to his death, to attempt to periodize him; I do not
write this simply to mark the changes that will doubtlessly occur in us
after reading him.  Nor do I write this to mark his influence of him in
the meaning of "apres" as "in the style of" or "following".  We are
heirs to all to the shock of _PMC_, we are its survivors.  To follow
_The Differend_, we do not testify simply by providing the narrative of
our testimony; we bear witness to him through a certain repetition, a
passage to further paralogism.  By going through the rigorous journey
from question to scrupulous and again to question.  We must not be weak
imitators; we must be radicals.  There is something utterly inhuman in
the midst of our existence, which Lyotard at times refers to as a
blankness.  We will not avoid being engulfed by this blankness by taking
recourse to all that we have thought to be true ("to supply reality," p.
81).  What is left, then, is to defy determinative judgment in the sense
Kant gave this term as recognition something as a case of an identified,
existing universal (Kant, _Critique of Judgment_, 179).  In short, to
write, to paint, to philosophize so as to "put forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself."  I am not sure if I was able to do this here,
but I hope that I have laid out the demand of Lyotard's text.

-Bayard
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