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87 Philosophy of Photography Volume 4 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.87_1 POP 4 (1) pp. 87–102 Intellect Limited 2013 Nigel Mapp University of Westminster lyotard, art, seeing abstract This araticle examines elements of Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical negotiations with aesthetic experiences in order to characterize his critical involvement with discursivized forms of knowing and explanation. These elements are offered as salient and salutary correctives to the symmetrical dogmas of disenchanting naturalisms and culturalisms currently programming typical misprisions of the aesthetic. Lyotard’s 1971 Discourse, Figure, as well as some of his later writings on visual art and artists, are not interpretatively integrated here but instead explored in terms of an anti-discursive logic that actually animates what appear to be their own anti- aesthetic commitments and conclusions. The article tracks the ambivalent, but persistent, role that perception, art-medium and sensate experience play in Lyotard’s efforts to see beyond them. This result impacts not only on the kinds of ‘demystification’ his work should be seen to espouse, but on that pervasive pseudo-category itself. Rei Terada has noted how the kind of ‘seeing’ that theory involves is no mere etymological matter. It is a paradoxical resource in theory’s tracing of the conditions of perception, a tracing that cannot mean some iconoclastic purging of seeing from reading, perception from cognition: The word ‘seeing,’ in all its ambiguity, encompasses both perceptual and cognitive, literal and figurative, meanings, and only our own interpretive decision to collapse its inner difference can Keywords Lyotard discourse seeing reading representation aesthetics Butor Adorno

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87

Philosophy of Photography

Volume 4 Number 1

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.87_1

POP 4 (1) pp. 87–102 Intellect Limited 2013

Nigel MappUniversity of Westminster

lyotard, art, seeing

abstract

This araticle examines elements of Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical negotiations with aesthetic experiences in order to characterize his critical involvement with discursivized forms of knowing and explanation. These elements are offered as salient and salutary correctives to the symmetrical dogmas of disenchanting naturalisms and culturalisms currently programming typical misprisions of the aesthetic. Lyotard’s 1971 Discourse, Figure, as well as some of his later writings on visual art and artists, are not interpretatively integrated here but instead explored in terms of an anti-discursive logic that actually animates what appear to be their own anti-aesthetic commitments and conclusions. The article tracks the ambivalent, but persistent, role that perception, art-medium and sensate experience play in Lyotard’s efforts to see beyond them. This result impacts not only on the kinds of ‘demystification’ his work should be seen to espouse, but on that pervasive pseudo-category itself.

Rei Terada has noted how the kind of ‘seeing’ that theory involves is no mere etymological matter. It is a paradoxical resource in theory’s tracing of the conditions of perception, a tracing that cannot mean some iconoclastic purging of seeing from reading, perception from cognition:

The word ‘seeing,’ in all its ambiguity, encompasses both perceptual and cognitive, literal and figurative, meanings, and only our own interpretive decision to collapse its inner difference can

Keywords

LyotarddiscourseseeingreadingrepresentationaestheticsButorAdorno

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unify, and hence aestheticize, it. In itself […] it represents what we know – and don’t know – of perception and cognition more accurately than the terms ‘perception’ and ‘cognition’ do.

(Terada 2007: 163–64)

The claim wants to suspend all the contemporary efforts to naturalize or discursivize knowing and perception, at least as standardizing, general ways of separating one from the other. Their difference is instead here taken to be internal to ‘seeing’, an experience or activity that inhabits or opens a zone in which both knowing and perception are ambiguously, perhaps resistantly, involved. ‘Aestheticizing’ the difference would be the stabilizing of their relation into a knowing, not necessarily into a unity (as an inert separation or clarifying autonomization of domains would achieve a cognate obscurity). ‘Seeing’ is a name that captures or evidences the unseen, scarcely known, role of perception in cognition, and vice versa. It intensifies the critical questions of what is known, and how, in such cognition-perception, as well as of how it can be opposed to, or different from, any factitiously coherent ‘seeing’. The questions concern how knowledge may be threatened or promised in each condition, and how aesthetic illusion is both liability and clue.

These are among the problems that give critical aesthetics its equivocal authority – its broaching of a space of contestation – rather than rendering that authority constitutively suspect. Aesthetics attends to those experiences, with their normative pull, that do not painlessly or convincingly trans-late into conceptual knowing, ideological investment, or subjective predilection. These experiences refuse to their objects or the senses in which they are ‘given’ the position of exemplary data, the externality to meanings and interests that would make of them indifferent raw materials. It is art, after Kant, that becomes the site of the problematic, especially as artworks are taken to manifest a compelling material specificity, which is to say an authority of the medium, as of the phenomeno-logical or somatic nuances and intensities that such works may occasion. Such experiences demand explication but elude it, along with any reproduction in discursive terms. Thus, aesthetics meets or remarks modern deficits in the authority of experience, its passions and motives, as of its objects. It thinks the penalties of rationalization, abstract equivalences of exchange and concept, and of the disembodied subject as it is stripped down to, then enthroned as, the principle of articulation of indeterminate external givenness.

Space, representation

Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy has many centres and interests, but it has much to say, in other terms, about the cognitive claim of art in relation to its medium, and about sensate experience as engaging, or critical. More than twenty years ago, Bill Readings commented on the belated introduction of Lyotard to the Anglo-American academy, and hoped that the by-then depleting animus over

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theory might allow for Lyotard’s thought to be put to work effectively, beyond the slogans (Readings 1991: xii). With the publishing of more English translations of Lyotard in the last decades (see the effective reader edited by Crome and Williams [2006]), the hope has slowly been realizing, with this author now more fully challenging some important current debates. A complete English translation of Discours, Figure – published in French in 1971 – has at last arrived (Lyotard 2011). Hudek’s and Lydon’s translation makes available a major text, which, decades ago, was very effectively expounded in English, notably by Geoffrey Bennington (1988) and Readings (1991). It is a major work not only in terms of the theoretical ferment of structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism and deconstruction that characterized its creative hour, but also in its elaboration of issues central to aesthetics and its contemporary re-functioning and critique. We also have Leuven’s six, copious French-English volumes, under the editorship of Herman Parret, which are devoted to Lyotard’s ‘Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists’ – mainly painters, although music is discussed along with a range of visual and graphic artworks.1 All these works testify to the seriousness of Lyotard’s engagements with art and to his sustaining relationships with many artists. And they encourage an entanglement with a corpus of comprehensive heterogeneity – and still some provisionality of organization.

The following is not concerned to rescue, ramify or re-emphasize this thinker, as such or in the main, or even really to elaborate on the deeper engagements that have recently appeared (see Bamford 2012). The aim is to configure a very selective set of Lyotardian reflections in order to dramatize an apparently anti-aesthetic practice in terms of its treatment, perhaps its fixing or empty-ing, of the heterogeneity and singularity that captivate its attention, and then to suggest the valua-ble, if ambivalently recruited, aesthetics of experience on which this practice appears to rest.

Discourse, Figure first represents a critical encounter with the structuralist tendencies of its time, in which diacritical systems are the transcendental fabric of all experience. Against significa-tion is posed the depth and inexplicitness of perception, an argument informed by Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic intrication of world and flesh, seeing and seen. Saussure is the principal target, and in the early sections of Discourse, Figure his systematicity is confronted with the indicative and referential functions of language, with deixis and expression, with the situated acts of speech and writing, with the shape or weight of the so-called ‘signifier’ – confronted, that is, with differences that no diacritical system of oppositions can signify or clarify, or free itself from. The analysis of language seeks what ‘figure’ names, in an early definition, ‘a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification’ (Lyotard 2011: 7 original emphasis). Indication, for example, implies a motivated, graduated envi-ronment, not an oppositional space. ‘Figure’ expresses, too, the insistences of desire, and the book moves from a phenomenology to a psychoanalysis, and to a breakdown of perception into a figural form that instances libidinal processes. So the inter-irreducibility of domains, of seeing and

1. For instance, the fourth volume of this latter series (in two parts) and the fifth are men-tioned in what follows: Lyotard (2012a, 2012b, 2012c).

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reading, mooted at first, changes to an understanding of each domain as a compaction of hetero-geneous spaces.

Although this is not how Lyotard develops his account, Saussureanism might be termed, follow-ing Paul Ricoeur, a Kantian transcendentalism without a subject, and we might add, taking it as a general type of cognitive machine, that it is one without a transcendental deduction, too: rather than systemic demands guaranteeing objectivity, the (merely) indispensable conceptual or constructive forces organize an undifferentiated given that has no powers of constraint over what gets imposed on it. The given will always and infinitely be, in itself, that which falls outside the cognitive or repre-sentational apparatus. Instead of questioning the model or exploring its aporias, any appeals to what lies outside such reason are actually capitulations to its embrace, in principle, of all possible salient contents. For resistance to count for anything, it must appear as and to something. The more ‘radi-cal’ appeal is so only because it is empty moralism. Lyotard’s evident hostility to Hegel, and occa-sional invocation of Levinas, is part of the impression his work makes of some such rigidification of reason and radicalizing of its others – allowing a servile ‘ethics’ of alterity to be sometimes detected (Jay 1993; Rancière 2009).

But this book is not entitled Discourse versus Perception, and the model elaborated above is not left undisturbed by it. Distance seems to be taken from Levinas in the early pages, underlining an interest in the passionate thickness of the half-lit visual environment, not some abrupt opening to and abasement before the infinite Word. Yet an odd fate characterizes the book that appears to wish to establish the claims of seeing: a decline throughout its pages of the ‘importance granted percep-tion’ (Lyotard 2011: 14). The decline owes not, in intention, to any concession to the discursive, but to the figure and the ‘siting’ (Lyotard 2011: 5) of the eye, including the necessary libidinal investment of a sensed topography. The opposition of seeing to reading is to be undermined, gone behind. This is what the word ‘figure’ wants to capture and indicate; it is a kind of reinscribed term (cf. Derrida 1976: 11).

Discourse, Figure supplies a fragmentary genealogy of the representational regime in pictorial art in a long italicized sequence. It is an analogue for the significative realm, and also solidary with it. A distinct theatrical space of representation is denounced as restrictedly discursivized – a frozen amal-gam of systematic cognizing. The theory and geometry of vision, perfected by Descartes, fixes the eye, from whose experience (the mobile spherical zone and its peripheral qualities, for instance) it abstracts, while the domain of objects is standardized and de-authorized as the projective image on a grid. We are thus on the way to writing, for Lyotard, and to a system that self-sufficiently and without mimesis or ‘analogy’ signifies its objects (2011: 183). Objects are made ‘legible’, ‘obvious, seen to exhaustion’. While the mediating forms of sense and sign are local and flexible in medieval manuscript illumina-tion, in representation the mediating form is totalizing and exclusive. What interrupts or confuses a discourse’s self-conformity is what blocks this obviousness, then; thus, art receives its modern task.

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But Lyotard also finds moments in the birth of representation where the passion and phantasy that opened it up, as another kind of space or ‘mobile expanse’, can be identified:

A scene devoid of backdrop is an open space for desire and anxiety to represent their progeny endlessly and lawlessly. […] For Masaccio, it is […] the discovery of the absence of a world, of a space where the phantasmatic, hitherto harnessed and sublimated in the Christian tale of Redemption, asserts itself in it, promising to shatter it: the discovery, in other words, of a space no longer sacred (textual) and not yet geometrical (textual), but imaginary.

(2011: 190)

In the Carmine Frescoes, painting frees itself from coded signification; colour is released from linear subordination and becomes plastic, while the work incites reverie, not reading. Lyotard thinks this space destructive of a world – and such a rejection of Martin Heidegger, if this is what this unworld-ing implies, seems to echo in many of these analyses – perhaps in the name of the sensory specificity that occupies its own space that will not disappear into another. But an equivocality of representa-tion persists or insists in the pictorial function of ‘showing the figural as unsignified’:

The window Massacio traces on the wall does not open onto the discovery of the world, but onto its loss, or, rather, its discovery as lost. The window is not open, there is the pane of representation that separates by making visible, that makes that space over there oscillate, neither here (like that of a trompe l’oeil), nor elsewhere (like Duccio’s). […] The world, from the Renaissance onward, withdraws into the silence of the foreclosed. Yet great artworks still manage to show this silence, which is that of the figural itself, through the same reversal the Greek tragic authors taught us: the payment of the debt depicted on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel is steeped in a somber light, demonstrating – negatively – that this settle-ment is nothing more than a fulfillment of desire[.]

(2011: 194)

This squashes a lot together, quite impressively, and seems to regard proto-representation as an invention without rule that expresses a lawless desire, the betrayal of God no less. This is not quite a secular thought, but it is a release of the plastic signifier, one aligned with a sort of icono-clasm. Lyotard reads Massacio’s equivocal spaces of desire as a kind of genealogy for Cézanne’s experiments in a seeing ‘prior’ to any looking-at (cf. 2011: 197), in which the opening-up of space, or its heterogeneity, occurs. But a compromise between textual and figural spaces ‘estab-lishes the representational position in its universality’ and, even if all representation can testify to what is absent, the compromise is one in which Masaccio’s negation or instability is neutralized.

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The screen must be transparent and opaque, both a window on the object and the reading of an object that must be elsewhere; but the elsewhere is now fully coded by perspectival laws (Lyotard 2011: 195–96). Such closing-down establishes an enduring ethic of art for Lyotard: to expand experience to register, or make patent, the invisible, to fight the image that ‘captures’ the gaze (Lyotard 2011: 12).

Thus, the seen, more generally now, is no ‘screen of appearances’, some provisional projective medium for a meaning from elsewhere (Lyotard 2011: 6–7). For Lyotard, that is Hegel’s view: he hears the silence of the seen – by which seems to be meant that Hegel just translates into philoso-phy what he can and discards the exhausted medium as a husk, as exhausted (the ‘end of art’ hypothesis, for hearing silence is to eliminate it). It does not look quite metaphoric to think of cognizing as hearing; it is important to the effort to reflect on the seen as a silence appealed to, rather than ignored as mere phenomenon of hearing, a meaning-nothing that is both harvested and disowned. Lyotard continually tangles with the problem of establishing the pertinence of silences and blanks, the intricated deafness of the faculties and senses to one another. This can give the impression of an artificial restriction of artistic purpose or experience (as Art & Language have recently argued [2012]). Sometimes Lyotard will consider this problem in terms of artistic materials, which take on a Janus-face: both meaning-potential and utterly disenchanted exteriority. His ‘stretching of sensibility’ (cf. Lyotard 2012c: 375) can thus appear to refuse the expansion of cogni-tion it promises. It is not clear that Lyotard could ever say this in contemplation of a Barnett Newman: ‘I know things differently when in this state; indeed, I recognize that I know things that in other states are not accessible to me as knowledge’ (de Bolla 2001: 53).

Seeing and abstraction

Language is explored in order to adumbrate the figure that is inside and outside it:

[Figure] holds the secret of connaturality [of discourse and object-world], but at the same time reveals this connaturality to be an illusion. Language is not a homogeneous environ-ment: it is divisive because it exteriorizes the sensory into a vis-à-vis, into an object, and divided because it interiorizes the figural in the articulated.

(Lyotard 2011: 7–8)

To signify is to kill, as Hegel knew, but such a death, Lyotard maintains, is expressed in the reversal by which objects become signs, discourse a thing – what he refrains from calling a second nature. Signification rips apart, and expression is engendered as the work of deforming energy ‘that folds and crumples the text and makes an artwork out of it’. It at least manages this insofar as unreadability

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prods us to an acknowledgement of, a visibility for, ‘seeing itself’ (cf. 2011: 9). Compare Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno:

With the clean separation of science and poetry, the division of labor it had already helped to effect was extended to language. For science the word is a sign: as sound, image, and word proper it is distributed among the different arts, and is not permitted to reconstitute itself […]. As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature, and must discard the claim to be like her. As image, it is required to resign itself to copying in order to be nature entire, and must discard the claim to know her. With the progress of enlightenment, only authentic works of art were able to avoid the mere imitation of that which already is.

(2002: 17–18)

Here knowing is split from imaging; knowing is discursive, the conventionality of signification. Image is the given or its inert reflection. Horkheimer and Adorno are talking about split functions of language, but the split also falls between language and imaging, concept and intuition. The split is a disaster, and the passage names a predicament, a history of damage, albeit one not yet complete, indeed uncompletable while there is still language or knowing at all. Thus, language promises a reconciliation, which means, first, an acknowledgement of the brokenness and falsity of these parts. The expression of the deathly counterparts, meaningless nature and meaningless meaning, is a mimesis that holds them together, negatively, as suffering, and allows language and images to be thought in resistance to this historical carve-up – to assess or miss the knowing that occurs in the imaging and sensory potentials of language (e.g.) and in the language-like potential of image and medium.

Gérald Sfez rightly points out, in an expert epilogue, that Lyotard’s emphatic concern with modes of presence and withholding opposes the techno-scientific ‘destruction of intimate existence by the despotism of communication’ (in Lyotard 2012c: 478). Several later pieces of Lyotard address the problem in terms of Adorno himself (cf. 1991: 63–4; 2012a: 170ff.). A lecture from 1988, ‘On Two Kinds of Abstraction’, notes, and updates the Adornian characterization of, the sort of technological abstraction to be skewered. This abstraction is the domination of form, ‘defining and determining the most subtle parameters (menus) of the matter itself (of the material in the signifier) of the work. This is already the case in photography, even more in video film, and more in the image of synthesis’ (Lyotard 2012a: 197). Total restorability of ‘elementary data of visual sensibility’ reinforces a false immediacy through technique. This abstraction pretends to offer the formal and immediate condi-tions of sensation. Lyotard’s sublime alternative, however, offers something equally conditioning, as he says – ‘the feeling of a presence that is not sensible (visible) in the sensible (the visual). It is a way

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for receptivity to be touched by what it cannot receive’ (2011: 199). The very forms of sensibility are felt as ‘impossible’, ‘torn apart’ by this abstraction, the ‘indeterminable material presence hidden in the presentation of data’. So this sublime is the trace, it appears, of expression, a mimesis of evacu-ation itself. But what can be said of this indeterminacy? Is its abstraction the problem, or some betrayal of this ‘material’?

Sfez suggests that Lyotard seeks something outside language in Discourse, Figure, whereas later, in the writings of the 1980s, it is a kind of opening in language that presents the ‘successful secession of art’ (in Lyotard 2012c: 450–51). This secession is from discursivized perception, too, if we wish to talk that way. Compare Lyotard: ‘But Newman is not representing a non-representational annun-ciation; he allows it to present itself’ (2012b: 427). Again, this ‘success’ concerns difference, albeit one occurring in terms of a division that threatens to fix and empty the terms of the divided (‘the invisible’). Representation is gone around, as presencing is somehow presented. The issue or phenom-enon demands and refuses commentary (Lyotard 2012c: 185). In some pages on Daniel Buren, however, the characterization of presentation is very interestingly nuanced. Linguistic and plastic, phonemic and graphic units, are again distinguished in terms of the distinct operations of seeing and reading (Lyotard 2012c: 328ff.). Buren’s installations-plus-text could be given a (Danto-Duchampian) meaning, taken as untethered from their sensory environment and materials in order to make a point about the ‘rules of painting’s exposure’, an institutional regime, for instance (cf. Lyotard 2012c: 375). But this is not how Lyotard arrives at that reflection on the rules. There is again a conflict of spaces, for while the experience of these works ‘never leaves the plane of the sensory’ in which the body is involved and seduced, the visual in some manner outstrips or displaces the visible precisely by making this process of exposure one that can be seen (cf. Lyotard 2012c: 325, 331, 375). There is a sort of noticeable unnoticeableness thematized here. Buren’s cloth or paper stripes, unex-pectedly seen, elude and help indicate two other types of vision, one instrumental, the undetected ‘quick detection’ that cues up practical behaviour, the other contemplative or immersive – (because, despite the context-specificity of these installations, ‘one could think about [these works] without one being there’ [Lyotard 2012c: 409–11]). They come stealthily in and out of sight and mind, which do not notice them:

Hence the stake of DB work [sic] is […] a non-subjective and non-objective experience where the places and moments are on […] anonymous operators locating the seen and the seer as complementary points of reference.

By fighting against the ‘limits’ imposed on vision by the art institution, DB work targets the presumption, constitutive of this institution, that a gaze could remain un-seen, that an organisation of the visible and the seer could be achieved from an invisible point of reference,

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in short, that there could be a non-site and a non-moment. […] DB work is the situation of the piece or ‘sentence’ in space-time. This situated ‘sentence’ marks the institutional space-time (that of the museum-gallery, for example) as resulting from restrictive exclusive choices. It does this by resorting to the (ontological) visual sensory space-time in its infinite specular power.

(Lyotard 2012c: 332–27)

All that seems to be a function of the local, site- and movement-specific experience of the appear-ance, the event of the presence, of these works, rather than their signification – they are easy to overlook and forget, enjoying only a minimal beauty, a minimal but critical irreducibility of aesthetic presence – their colour indexes ‘presence’, as it is an infinitely variable quality, not a diacritical signi-fier (Lyotard 2012c: 173). Thus, the works’ temporariness, minimal ‘motivation’ of material means and non-portability can provoke or sustain a strange perdurance in involuntary recall, just as quietly as they slip from the instrumental gaze. The space-time of the work connects to that of its ‘context’ and of its seer, but disturbs it, indicating the ‘pre-suppositions’ of art’s exposure, the ‘operators of art-vision’ (Lyotard 2012c:321, 345) in which this kind of porosity is shut down. It is an experience of sharing space, when one thinks one is free of that space. This reflexivity is what commentary eluci-dates: how the work refers to or shows this condition in or by its simple manner of appearing and disappearing (Lyotard 2012c:341). The analysis seems to refuse the schematic sundering of appear-ance and appearances, presence and perception.

Demystification as figure

An in-folded microcosm of some of Discourse, Figure’s subtle developments of such a paradoxical aesthetics can be extracted from the analyses of two of Michel Butor’s texts: a ‘commentary’ on four photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, titled ‘L’appel des Rocheuses’, first published in Réalités magazine in 1962; and ‘Les Montagnes Rocheuses’, in Butor’s first book of Illustrations of two years later, which eliminates the photographs but re-deploys some of the text as a kind of ‘fabric’ or ‘arrangement’ (Lyotard 2011: 361–77). There seems to be a relation of demystification set down between the works, the idea of making patent conditions of representation, as opposed to occluding them. First, Lyotard attends to layouts in the Réalités piece as ‘units of sight and reading’ (2011: 362). The units include, with the photographs, different types of text:

[Text] A […] connot[es] a standard tourist document, printed in small roman type, laid out according to standard conventions of reading […] B [has] lyrical connotations, printed in ital-ics, laid out vertically on the side of the image, with a margin of its own […]. The image in

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question plays the role of reference (Bedeutung) for text A, and of representation (Vorstellung, reinforcing a figure that is already in the text) for text B.

(2011: 362)

The effect seems to be, for Lyotard, a sense of quoting (of types of discourse). The discourses are seen as overlooking the image, as the analysis also seems to do, with ‘A’ interested in what the photograph is of, and the ‘poetic’ B recruiting it to programme a response. Butor’s construction is ambivalently iconoclastic, we could say, as it allows for the seeing-through of the image itself to be seen in the array of positionings it is subjected to, all of which just respond to what the photograph is of, or seem to (cf. Lyotard 2011:369). One spread, the first, has a different layout and includes a further different type of text, C, ‘in heavier roman type than text A’:

At the level of the signified, we observe the use of figures heavily connoted by two features: the signifier’s repetitive scansion [anaphora?] and the ‘diegetic’ connotation alluding to a narrative unfolding in the temporality of the national legend. […] C [is] a kind of epic tale, whose relation to the image is no longer that of representation nor reference, but under which the images of the Rockies play the part of scenery […].

(Lyotard 2011: 362, 368)

Text A takes the figure-image as ‘reality’; B, as ‘phantasy’; and C, as ‘mythical backdrop’, comments Lyotard. In the subsequent development represented by Butor’s Illustrations piece, the figure or figural potentials that are here smoothed over find presentation. We see that the texts of the earlier piece do not lay bare the positioning of the image, but borrow its stabilization or naturali-zation of an environment, the mountains themselves grounding any derangement of reading or figuration presented by the texts’ graphic obtrusion. The distinctions of the merely plural texts, it is implied, may be related to properties or qualities of the image, even help bring these out, but they are subordinated to their centring principle, the photographic index. That is what the discourses have in common, or is what coordinates them despite their plastic-perceptual differ-ences. And yet the discourses, according to Lyotard, can and do bring out, as a prize, something enmeshed or rooted in the image, its own positioning and framing of its subject. So they do seem to connect with or illuminate, rather than simply project, what is already scenic, referential and phantasmal in the photograph and its subject. And that seemed to have something to do, we recall, with the connotations of size and font. But this is not yet, or ever, Lyotard’s emphasis. Anyway, all this was involved in this work being relatively easy to read. But Lyotard will want to stress that the work hides its operations, or does not stage its own operations in setting out the image-figure.

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The later text will repeat the earlier one, only now as if it were illustrating its own illustrative operation. This time, something is acknowledged rather than concealed. When his analysis of the second text is done, we will see that the critical-disintegrative, dream-desire processes of Illustrations

were already at work in the figure images provided in the Adams and Weston photographs: the condensation on a single image of perfectly focused close-ups and extreme long-dis-tance shots; the lowering of the point of view to ground level, distorting the object’s silhou-ettes ([Freud’s] Entstellung); the use of filters, as well as the film’s over- or underexposure (displacement of values or colors). But in these photographs, such processes occurred as if in a phantasmatic scene, overlooked in favour of what they make visible, of the ‘subject.’ They themselves were not staged, rather they helped stage and represent the Rockies. They belonged to the scene’s underground, occupying the forbidden space between the latent and the manifest. Their role was to be forgotten.

(Lyotard 2011: 376)

Of course, these things could be divined without the second text. Photographs are always menaced by questions of ‘objectivity’, as Lyotard notes elsewhere in discussing Corinne Fillipi (‘Reason has the right to know what objects the photographs represent and what distortions they undergo’ [Lyotard 2012b: 623]). The natural scene, or the optical experience it apparently struc-tures, is cognitively downgraded in this analysis, which suspects its idolatrous coherency. That is just why the pictures were chosen: to supplant their presenting apparatus or processes – one possible ‘libidinal set up’ for photography (cf. Lyotard 2012a: 91). The idea, I think, is neverthe-less that the processes cannot be attended to without a turn to the textual. The second text shows what is assumed or at stake in such ‘demystification’. The following quotation serves as the acme or distillation of theoreticist anti-aesthetic discourse, as well as the sensing or presentation of its limits:

taken back from the space of the imaginary and transposed in that of the book, which is linguistic, these operations can no longer go unnoticed, shaking the textual expanse that in turn begins to vibrate and creak. The expanse testifies. Butor’s book does not signify these operations […] rather it allows one to sense the traces they leave on the position of the constituents of discourse and on the intervals between them. It is, therefore, no longer a case of desire finding fulfillment in a phantasmatics played out on the photographic stage, as in Réalités. In Illustrations, desire can only unfulfill itself, having been deprived of its aims of reverie: in the end, all it has at its disposal are the means by which it dreams, the operations.

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That is what accounts for the book’s strictness. The eye seeking temptation, enamored only with its own rapture, must here give up, or become strong and cold enough to desire seeing desire at work, or at least traces of its work. Polar opposites of the photographic window, the aquatic expanses – upholding written passages here and there – can only refer desire back to itself. For not only can desire no longer lose itself in plastic images, but the effects of the mobility of the lettering and blanks on the signifier further prevent it from phantasizing from the signified, as was at least particularly the case in the Réalités layouts.

(Lyotard 2011: 377)

This sounds like remorseless disenchantment of the image, of a vision in narcissistic love. There seems a decisive asymmetry between phantasy and mechanics, a mechanics revealed in the textual. The question that fixates this article arises again: how can any such conclusion relate to the experi-ences of the artworks that the analyses live off? I have placed this quotation before reporting on the analysis it extrapolates from, not to repeat lamely the kind of cut-and-paste work it discusses, but specifically to make its disenchanting cast reveal what it depends on, and thus to become equivocal. Already, it can be read that the ascetic (unfulfilling) presentation in and of Butor’s second text, which is indeed ‘critical’ or a ‘critical poem’ (Lyotard 2011: 367), is not one that can be reported in some realized signification. For the discursive elements still ‘float’ in another element; it is again the difference between two spaces, neither opposed nor continuous (which are modes of aesthetic phan-tasy), projected into one space, that secure this critical status (cf. Lyotard 2011: 367). The criticism is not so asymmetrical after all. But the seductions of the visual remain emphatically circumscribed, and the plasticity of the ‘signifier’ is now the enemy, rather than the token (perhaps Lyotard means ‘synecdoche’?), of the invested signified, from which it is unchained. The vision is some sort of reversal of desire, precisely because it reveals formal processes, and any seeing apart from the seeing of seeing sounds like illusion. That is why we are oriented to a species of text. But how is it analysed?

The ‘text’ of Illuminations is organized according to ‘plastic requirements’ such as drastic altera-tions and cut-ups of the texts B and C (A being dropped, like the photographs, perhaps because of its referential dependence or exhaustion) (2011: 368). Texts B and C inter-involve and interfere, with B being transcribed or ‘reproduced’ in a variety of blocks and styles and C ‘unfurling in horizontal bands’. Lyotard even offers schematic figures, eliminating the ‘text’ and just re-presenting the sheets in terms of diagrammatic shaded blocks of varying density, responding to heaviness and size of type, and the intervals and spaces in which they are organized. What follows, if this is one of read-ing-cum-seeing’s broken components? A certain derangement of reading, obviously, although it is not mysterious or incoherent, notes Lyotard, despite its linguistic malformation, and indeed offers, as text, possibilities for new meanings and concepts (Lyotard 2011: 369–70).

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I think Lyotard is attempting to expand on two aspects of experience, and he is clearly relating them to the dream-work, the mechanisms by which the unrepresentable movements of desire find and distort expression. First, he offers a rapid remark about just how signification persists in ‘subter-ranean’ manner in the cut-ups of Illustrations: the sense of a journey west, and through history, remains partly intact (text C), ‘produc[ing] an effect of vague recognition, a suspicion of déjà vu grounded in the experience of the book’s sensory space-time’ (2011: 371). This reports on an effect internal to the impact of the second work, yet one apparently activated by relation to the former one. Not quite an ‘actual’ déjà vu, the suspicion is wrought by the plastic disposition of the vestig-ial narrative. An element of this effect is the role of blanks in the work, which are not (only) systemic intervals, oppositional absence, but plastic regions. So, and this is the second aspect of the experience being explored, ‘we enter the discourse of Illustrations as the mime or the diver would “enter” a volume to be activated through gesture’ (Lyotard 2011: 373). Lyotard thinks, then, that the processes working in the text are to be integrally entered into by the ‘reader’, who is quasi-physically challenged to invent and re-invent, acknowledging the character of that invention. These experiences must be borne in mind when we encounter those comments that make this later text sound merely, or mainly, a kind of textualist demystification of the former. The critical relationship depends on an inextricability of sensing and understanding, or a deformation of each, which presents, as this deformation or intrication, the staging protocols or operations that are usually overlooked.

That thought-gesture runs throughout the examples addressed in this article. It deflects from the aesthetic claim of embodiment or material specificity in paradoxical manner, refusing it sensory specification or authority, yet drawing on it. The experience issues in general insights, at least in the commentary, about types of space: ‘the transformation of a mutually exclusive rela-tion between two heterogeneous spaces into a relation where they commingle to form an unsta-ble volume, hesitating between the two original spaces […] forc[es] the eye to interact with the page in a new way’ (Lyotard 2011: 374–75). The later Butor work brings the spaces, previously held apart, together. The blanks, which leave the groups of letters relatively undisturbed – Lyotard figures these disparately as floating logs, echo-chambers or amplifiers – manifest censor-ship processes in this apartness. This is how we move, not from a unit of sight to a unit of reading, reconstituting the malformed text, but to the ‘latent text’ the seen revealingly ‘conceals’ (Lyotard 2011: 370).

Lyotard is claiming, it seems, that the plastic disposition of the text asks for decoding in terms of a ‘unity’ that is not discursive but a kind of ‘image acting as mythical frame to the epic character of some of the texts (C) and as echo and plastic harmonics to the lyricism of others (B)’. Are such images the photographs that have been omitted? Not only, and not quite. If, as Lyotard says, this figure is hidden as much as lost, we must try to fathom how the figural disposition of the text feels

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out what is hidden, missing, and also what was missing, or concealed, in the prior text (2011: 374). We are to

dare to discover (or invent) in the form – that is, in the figure-form of the units of sight of Illustrations – an equivalent to the figure-image of Réalités. A rough equivalent, a lawless analogue.

(Lyotard 2011: 370)

The lawlessness echoes Lyotard’s (impeccably modernist) stress on the Kantian notion of genius, the faculty of finding a new law (see Costello 2000), as well as adverting to the force of desire. So the passage does not just say: This image is a congeries of significations that can be read. Return and demys-tify the prior image. The dependency, the déjà vu, remains. We are, desiringly, to make the rebus, not resolve an existing one into its nuts and bolts. The second artwork is ‘just’ the machinery of the first, presented. But commentary connects them on its basis, and involves concrete, imaginative construc-tion, which is something like the philosopher’s mimesis of the artist.

Experience and invariance

There is, then, a strong tendency in Lyotard to abstract down to conditions of presentation. But his encounters with art indicate the sensate contribution, often despite themselves (a paradox he routinely lays out, and thus formalizes), of the modern, historically specific, melancholia of expression.

‘Shafts’ (Lyotard 2012c: 408–17) is Lyotard’s text on Buren’s ‘Les deux Plateaux’, an installation in the forecourt at the Palais-Royal in 1985–1986. It reflects on the truncated columns, which connote ruin, in a manner that brings out the thought of a persistent invisibility that emerges as the event of appearance. The work looks a ‘chronic spasm’, or a putting of one space-time in another, that is, the ruin of the palais into the here and now (2012c: 415). The columns’ own ageing and ruin is also built in. A message, then:

Appearances, if nothing more than themselves, reduced to being seen, are destined to the night, and bemoan this fate. But when appearances will have been ruined, appearance will still remain. Appearance arises as the ruin of appearances. It ruins at once the visible and the time that ruins it.

(2012c: 415–17)

A whole mournful mimesis seems to be laid out. Envisaged ruination of appearances exposes the eter-nal event of appearance. The relation is structured by the paradoxical involvement of times, of the imagined and perceived. Lyotard is insisting that seeing ‘does not see that it does not see [the shafts].

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The columns are not where they are’ (Lyotard 2012c: 417). They escape the present in two specific ways, he claims. They have an ‘aura’ of memory (even the memory of aura, we could think, although this is as much the endless ruin of Heidegger’s famous temple [Heidegger 2002: 20–21]). They are, second, missed as ‘the utopia of these memories, to which no objects yet correspond’ (Lyotard 2012c: 417). Why ‘yet’? If Lyotard’s work is to irrigate contemporary aesthetic concerns – and the very possibility of philos-ophizing sense without liquidating it that writers as diverse as Derrida, Nancy and Deleuze explore – then these moments must be what matters.2 Does Lyotard here simply report the congealed temporality of the appearances, and lock the work into a permanent self-displacement? Would that be the obliteration of an object by an idea? Yet the experience, which he may actually be reporting care-fully, misses the columns by misperceiving them, he says, in this aura’s utopia. But what can the columns be, outside this? It is perhaps asked. We could bear in mind a clarification elsewhere, via Freud, of utopia as the site of truth’s happening, always out of place, yet indexed to hope (Lyotard 2011: 12).

References

Art & Language (2012), ‘Juddering: On Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure’, Radical Philosophy, 176, pp. 29–37.

Bamford, Kiff (2012), Lyotard and the Figural in Performance, Art and Writing, London and New York: Continuum.

Bennington, Geoffrey (1988), Lyotard: Writing the Event, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Colebrook, Claire (2009), ‘Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic aesthetics’, Derrida Today, 2: 1 pp. 22–43.

Costello, Diarmuid (2000), ‘Lyotard’s modernism’, Parallax, 6: 4, pp. 76–87.

Crome, Keith and Williams, James (2006), The Lyotard Reader and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

de Bolla, Peter. (2001), Art Matters, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Heidegger, Martin (2002), ‘The origin of the work of art’ (ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes), Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–56.

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. Edmund Jephcott), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jay, Martin (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François (1991), The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby), Cambridge and Oxford: Polity.

2. For the re-confrontation of these thinkers’ differences over ‘haptics’, and in terms cognate to some of my exposition here, see Claire Colebrook (2009).

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—— (2011), Discourse, Figure (trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

—— (2012a), Textes dispersés I: esthétique et théorie de l’art/Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art (ed. Herman Parret, trans. Vlad Ionescu, Erica Harris and Peter W. Milne), Leuven: Leuven University Press.

—— (2012b), Textes dispersés II: artistes contemporains/Miscellaneous Texts II: Contemporary Artists (ed. Herman Parret, trans. Vlad Ionescu, Erica Harris and Peter W. Milne), Leuven: Leuven University Press.

—— (2012c), Que Peindre?/What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren (ed. Herman Parret, trans. Antony Hudek, Vlad Ionescu and Peter W. Milne), Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Rancière, Jacques (2009), Aesthetics and Its Discontents (trans. Steven Corcoran), Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity.

Readings, Bill (1991), Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, London and New York: Routledge.

Terada, Rei (2007), ‘Seeing is reading’, in Marc Redfield (ed.), Legacies of Paul de Man, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 162–178.

Suggested citation

Mapp, N. (2013), ‘Lyotard, art, seeing’, Philosophy of Photography 4: 1, pp. 87–102, doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.87_1

Contributor details

Nigel Mapp teaches English literature at the University of Westminster. His interests are in early modern English literature and continental philosophy, particularly German idealism and contempo-rary aesthetics. He is completing a book on the topic of early modern disenchantments. He is an editor of William Empson: the Critical Achievement (Cambridge UP, 1993), Adorno and Literature (Continuum, 2006), and the author of Paul de Man: A Critical Introduction (Polity, forthcoming).

E-mail: [email protected]

Nigel Mapp has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi-fied as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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