Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Explained

The Postmodern Explained collects a series of letters that do indeed offer a relatively straightforward explanation of various aspects of Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern. Though drawing from the ideas of his later work such as The Differend, Lyotard returns to and clearly discusses many of the points of The Postmodern Condition, including the modern/postmodern distinction, the collapse of the West’s grand narratives, and the problem the multiplicity of language games causes for the act of legitimation. One of the first letters notes the widespread contemporary interest in “liquidating the legacy of the avant-gardes.” But in a society where authority takes the name of capital, avant-gardes no longer have to be replaced by mediocre realism. What Lyotard calls “transavantgardism” dominates not by rejecting the avant-garde but by neutralizing it through eclecticism: “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you east McDonald’s at mid-day and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows.” But, Lyotard argues, “this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible and useful to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realize. This realism accommodates every tendency just as capitalism accommodates every ‘need’ – so long as these tendencies and needs have buying power.” In contrast to this “realism of money,” Lyotard offers his well known theory of art and the sublime. Drawing quite heavily on Kant, specifically The Critique of Judgment, Lyotard argues that the mind is capable of having an Idea of something that can never be concretely experienced. That is, it is possible to have an Idea of the “unpresentable.” The sublime occurs “when the imagination in fact fails to present any object that could accord with a concept.” Modern art, according to Lyotard, devoted itself “to presenting the existence of something unpresentable,” and accomplished this task largely through the use of “formlessness, the absence of form, [as] a possible index to the unpresentable,” and through “empty abstraction” that is “itself like a presentation of the infinite, its negative presentation.” What distinguished modern from postmodern art is the modality of the approach to “the sublime relationship of the presentable with the conceivable.” Modern art exhibits a “nostalgia for presence“ whereas postmodern art places emphasis “on the power of the faculty to conceive.” “So this is the differend [the irresolvable difference of opinion]: the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator materials for consolation and pleasure.” But the sublime involves pleasure and pain. So “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.” The postmodern therefore must be understood in the future anterior, since the artist will “work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made.” Many of the letters in the middle of the volume take up the collapse of the West’s “grand narratives.” Lyotard almost salvages this over-used and over-extended argument by using Kant to identify a specific set of important grand narratives of modernity, which include, “The progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience.” These grand narratives stand above others because “they look for legitimacy . . . in a future to be accomplished, that is, in an Idea [in the Kantian sense] to be realized. This Idea (of freedom, ‘enlightenment,’ socialism, etc.) has legitimating value because it is universal. It guides every human reality. It gives modernity its characteristic mode: the project.” Needless to say, although technoscience still keeps rushing forward and further destabilizing humanity, for Lyotard “the project of modernity” has been “liquidated.” The French title of Lyotard’s book translates as “postmodernism explained to children,” and the letters are addressed to the children of his friends and colleagues. But it is hard to imagine many children fully comprehending Lyotard’s references to Adorno’s negative dialectics, Habermas’ appraisal of the project of modernity, and Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Some of the later letters in the volume reveal how the title might be disingenuous. Lyotard explicitly turns to the topic of childhood when he brings up Adorno’s idea of “micrologies,” such as the tales of childhood in Benjamin’s One Way Street, which register an event that is an initiation, that “cut[s] open a wound in the sensibility,” a wound that “has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality.” And later, when speaking of the difficulty of teaching philosophy, which requires a kind of autodidacticism, to a young generation already indoctrinated into a world of exchange, narcissism, and competition, Lyotard singles out for praise Vincennes (University of Paris-VIII) and its non-traditional students: “Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood.”