File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 89


Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 23:05:32 -0600
Subject: Re: Ludens is the Father of All Things


Ariosto Raggo wrote:

On pg. 61 of PMC, Lyotard says clearly that paralogy is not
innovation,does not bring into play the next/new 

>This is not exactly what Lyotard is saying in this section, in my opinion.  True, he distinguishes between innovation and paralogy, but he also points out that there is an ambiguous relationship between the two. Paralogy can easily become innovation, although this is not necessarily the case. Paralogy is involved with making moves in the pragmatics of knowledge. These moves are clearly spoken of in the other places within the text as making new moves and new games.  See the bottom of p. 53 for one example of this.  Therefore, the crucial difference between paralogy and innovation cannot be centered upon the element of the new.  Rather, paralogy becomes innovation if it leads to more efficient functioning of the system. (To speak crudely, paralogy is innovation when it makes money.)
  
which is why it is not an aesthetic sort of gaming stimulating our need
for the latest hit from the spectacle which we all love to consume.

>Given our disagreement on the initial premise, I am not sure that we can discount the aesthetic dimension of gaming and the social bond so easily.  I agree with you that Lyotard does not discuss the aesthetic in PMC explicitly.  However, if you examine his work in general, it is clear that the question of the aesthetic is always lurking in the background of his thought, even though it tends to be very different from what usually passes under that banner.  I certainly will agree with you that Lyotard resists the society of the spectacle and the conventional reception of art as commodity.

 As dissensus it throws into confusion the capicity for explanation. A
process he likens to Thom'smorphogenesis, localised catastrophes working
through 'blind spots'. A blind spot, for instance, at that point, where
water cooling down, is no longer fluid and yet is not solid ice. As I
see it then, an Event which displaces the aesthetic concept of the new,
pulls in two different directions at once. Communication, the exchange
of posts, is then as paralogical dissension, a construction of paradoxes
that interrupt, shake up the tendency of thought to settle down, without
contradiction, in subtantives and adjectives. 

Ø I like the way you describe things here.  This is certainly very close
to the way Lyotard describes the aesthetic in terms of anammesis, or
working through. "The being prepared to receive what thought is not
prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking."  The blind
spot where pleasure and pain co-mingle in the Event, the "is it
happening?"  

Ø I believe the dissensus between us is really connected with how we
define the aesthetic.  Personally, I believe that to define the
aesthetic merely as the shock of the new (innovation) is too limiting. 
When Beckett tells us: "fail better" is he really only talking about
planned obsolescence?

This seems to be, the exigency of communicative responsibility, its
agonic and festive potentiality where as in the medieval carnival
everything goes topsyturvy and becomes matter for monkey business, the
work of idiotic,radical empiricist, closer to Job than Socrates, write
D&G in _What isPhilosphy?_. Deleuze talks about the Greek Agon, in many
places, and first of all, it displaces the notion of consensus, or the
idea of western democratic conversation. The Agon is a struggle with ri
concept'sfriend; he is potentiality of the concept." There is nothing
here to do with discourse as a propositional conversation dealing in the
subject-predicate order but unpredictable, pure events.

>I agree.  Art is not about communication.  It is paralogy, invention, experimentation where the addressee is always unknown.  Each poem recreates the world.  Such intensity is not conversation.

The Rhizome twins in 1000 plateaus also discuss the territorial
imperative, based on Lorenz's notion of aggression.  They write: "The T
factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought elsewhere: precisely
in the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in other words, in the
emergence of proper qualities (color,odor, sound, silhouette….)  Can
this becoming, this emergence, be called Art?"  (p. 316)

Why can't war exist within the ludic as the play of intensities: the
aesthetic of the sublime where pleasure and pain comingle? Why can't
these agonistic language be seen as desiring war machines? Beauty will
be paralogical or it will not be at all.

   

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