Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 07:02:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Roger Taylor <trodtaylor-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: Source of line of thinking


Eric and all,  
 
I think you have laid out the most right on points in this discussion so far. Postmodern is not a period in clock time. For Lyotard it seems to be more of a stylistic question, which of course, does not involve a systematic cycling a-la Hegel or Vico. He abhorred a global view of history-- "the sign of history" and other texts on Kant seem to paint such a view as the bedrock of terror (the word being used here in his sense, rather than in the recent journalistic and political lingua franca). I personally found Sim's books book disappointing on several counts, and this is one of them. 
 
On the stylistic point: if not in his theoretical writings, then in his literary and artistic readings Lyotard seems quite clear in the double assertion that someone could be figured 'postmodern' before the fact. Kant (from the Sensus Communis essay in Misere) and De Quincey (from The Assassination of Experience by Painting) are cases in point. Although both figures would seem operate dialectically, they will not allow an end ascertainable in advance for their thought. But in the same token they are not simply anti-dialectical: they allow for a nebulous trajectory (as in Kant's Perpetual Peace). Such an attitude, however, differs radically from the attitude of complexification and 'developement'. It is precisely, as you wrote, an aesthetic attitude. Perhaps aesthetic in the Kantian sense, that is, inclusive of all judgements of feeling that have a sense of trajectory, but no hard and fast concept to stand on. As a sidebar, I would note that such judgements that are in the Kantian
 sense in principle universally communicable (we all feel or should feel) but at the same time singular in each instantiation (no feeling matches with any other like an argument from design will always structurally parallel any other argument from design)-- that such an "aesthetic" position is the only justification and explanation for what we would call "human rights" (neither human, nor grounded in a theory of right, but that's another story). 
 
You had mentioned the re-introduction of psychoanalytic theory. Finishing his piece on Valery from his Reading Infancy book, Lyotard writes (waxing poetic): "That determination should never exhaust birth". This is a more intense engagement with the aesthetic. It is neither historic (say in the Vico sense of the term) nor is it ahistoric. We all have reference to, carry with us, a previous state of in-fans-- that which cannot speak. A proto-subjectivity immersed only in feeling. Freud called polymorphous perversity in the 3 essays. I think the question Lyotard is struggling with (and I am not sure that he answered it or that it could have an answer) might be formulated something like this: isn't it the case that aesthetic judgements in the Kantian sense (again judgements of feeling without recourse to solid concepts which are further not frivolous judgements given that despite their ungroundedness they hold to nebulous trajectory) lay open certain other possibilities of the human (the
 other inhuman which development could never appropriate, the in-fans in all of us, affectivity)? 
 
In my view the term "postmodern" refers to persons and institutions who give their primary teleological attention  to remaining in affectivity, or to quote The Differend, to have as their addressors the "Is it happening?" This is certainly by no means a systematic or cyclical dissolution of ends. It cannot be predicted. Otherwise we would be sitting in the abandoned throne of Jung. Or worse: Hegel. I really think the key to linking Lyotard's more philosophical-historical side to his more psychoanalytic and aesthetical side resides in Kants notion of the aesthetic being universal in principle but singular in each of its appearances. Lyotard, like Kant, takes this, strangely enough, as a non-contradiction. Similarly, with Freud, we grow out of infancy (a sense pre-mirror stage identification which we all share but could never know in the sense of concepts) into language, the social, history, but without ever finally being done with infancy. Our infancy will be, then, the great
 monkeywrench to any universal theory of history. There are those who allow their infancies to seize and disturb their universal notions (even republicans allow for this on occasion) and their are those who refuse feeling for the sake of "a grand plan" or "the big idea". Lyotard doesn't seem to be manifestly against "the big idea", only cautionary insofar as "the big idea" holds in its presentation a high potential to elide what we might call sentiment which (unlike the historical, political, etc. that can be phrased)  can only be given to a singular quasi-phrases (La phrase-affect). 
 
Perhaps I have Uber-Kanted Lyotard, but your comments on the postmodern and the stakes inspired me to run my mouth (or my fingers as it were). I really think that you hit on the central problem. So I wanted to expand it a bit and then became polemical despite myself. To wind things down I would say: on my reading, Lyotard seemed to think that becoming involved aesthetically (as I have detailed above-- the extended definition, mind you) is itself political, the trigger and sign that motivates an engagement with history now (Lyotard reminds us that we can never ever know enough about right now). One can either be involved in the now as an utilitarian unit along a time line with some definite endpoint (modern) or one can place oneself in the uncertain arms of the "is it happening?" (which we could call postmodern). Thus proto-renaissance Montaigne in his theory of limitless interpretation was postmodern.  And Bush, jr, putatively postmodern in the sense of period, is terribly (and
 terrifyingly) modern in the sense of having a global plan of freedom and democracy. When will people finally understand Kant (a Lyotardian question)? One cannot find examples of or empirically realize the object of an Idea. You can't make freedom happen as the object of a hard and fast outline of actions without becoming a tyrant. Which is not an excuse to abandon the notion. Kant, being practical, thought of such Ideas as rules of thumb. But he was careful not to mix the trajectory toward an Idea with pragmatics. Lyotard knew well that the latter could only lead to a social dynamic of domination. To be in history while respecting its indeterminacy and the ripple effect of one's own gestures? Well that's my best guess for now. 
 
Roger Taylor
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 
 
This has been long and rambling. 

Eric <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> wrote:
I tend to agree with those who are arguing that this is more Sim's own
interpretation than anything that Lyotard ever said directly. If you
look on page 207 in the chapter entitled 'Aesthetics of the Modern' in
Sim's book "Irony and Crisis - A Critical History of Postmodern Culture"
he repeats the comment, arguing:

"There is something of a nod here towards the Lyotardian notion of
postmodernism and modernism as cyclical phenomena alternating with each
other over time, with another episode of modernity being forecast for
the new century (although it has to be said that Lyotard refuses to
periodise postmodernism."

At this point, Sim inserts a footnote referring the reader to the
following quote from Lyotard's "Just Gaming": 

"Postmodernism is not to be taken in a periodizing sense."

While I agree with Sim that Lyotard resists interpreting postmodernism
in epochal or periodizing terms, I think this whole idea of alternating
cyclical phenomena sounds more like something taken from Vico than
anything found in Lyotard.

It would be an interesting question to discuss why the concept of the
postmodern tends to be displaced in Lyotard's later writings by other
considerations. I would make two brief comments:

1. As his essay "Rewriting Modernity" shows Lyotard moves towards a more
psychoanalytical approach that combines the Freud concept of
working-through with the Kantian concept of formlessness and sublime to
arrive at a conception of the postmodern as one that testifies to an
infans or Lacanian Thing that has been covered over by history and time.
Thus the postmodern is no longer simply an epoch, but a different mode
of temporality; one that is without ends. 

2. The previous concept of the postmodern as the crisis in the
legitimacy of knowledge under the advance of information technologies
during late capitalism becomes superceded by a theory of
complexification which sees the development of the system becoming an
end in itself, oblivious to any sense or need of human emancipation.

In my reading, Lyotard appears to be groping towards a way of contesting
this complexification of development politically through a resistance
that is based on a kind of psychoanalytical aesthetics as well as the
more conventional forms of contestation. I don't know if that makes him
neomodern or not. I don't really understand yet what that concept
entails politically.

eric 




		
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