Lyotard, J.F., "Answer to the question: what is the Postmodern?", in
_The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985_
(London: Turnaround 1992, p. 22):
"If it is true that modernity unfolds in the retreat of the real and
according to the sublime relationship of the presentable with the
conceivable, we can...distinguish tow essential modes of this
relationship. The accent can fall on the inadequacy of the faculty of
presentation, on the nostalgia for presence experienced by the human
subject and the obscure and futile will which animates it in spite of
everything. Or else the accent can fall on the power of the faculty to
conceive, on what one might call its 'inhumanity'...and on the
extension of being and jubilation which comes from inventing new rules
of the game..."
That is a fairly specific formulation, and worth unpacking. First of
all, the premise: "that modernity unfolds in the retreat of the real",
that it consists of a succession of challenges to accepted and
established frames of reference:
"Everything that is received must be suspected, even if it is only a
day old (*modo, modo*, wrote Petronius). What space does Cezanne
challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque
challenge? Cezanne's." (ibid, p. 21)
This "vertiginous work of questioning" depends in turn on the "sublime
relationship of the presentable with the conceivable", a relationship
which Lyotard discusses in terms of a conflict between Kantian
faculties (I admit I struggled helplessly with Lyotard's _Lessons in
the Analytic of the Sublime_, and cannot give a reliable account of
the fidelity or pertinence of his engagement with Kant - about whom I
also know next to nothing).
The "faculty of presentation" cannot present, through representation,
everything that the "faculty to conceive" can conceive, which is why
each order of representation can be broken by new conceptions. The
"sublime" Lyotard is talking about is what you get when an
unpresentable conception enters (without becoming part of) the scene -
when the work of art gestures towards something beyond its own
immediate powers of presentation.
Considered in relation to a specific modernist work - Eliot's _The
Waste Land_ - I would say this has some explanatory power. Eliot's
*reactionary modernism* is demonstrated by the accent the poem places
on the broken, fragmentary, ruined and incomplete: its nostalgia for a
unified field of reference underpinned by a unifying presence. At the
same time, the poem delights in its own powers of conception: it
presents something new, that is not simply a loss of coherence or a
state of degradation in the old order of things. Something other than
"mere anarchy" is loosed upon the world.
_The Waste Land_ is in some ways an exemplary modernist work because
it combines both of the "modes" identified by Lyotard. Readers who
wish to find Eliot reactionary and neurasthenic will find ample
evidence in the poem to support that prejudice, although in truth
Eliot did his worst elsewhere. But the poem is also what it was
perceived to be by some of its first admirers: a remaking of verse, a
scandalous and joyous experiment in the possibilities of poetic order.
For Lyotard, then, "the Postmodern" is a question of accent, and is
not antithetical to the "modern" but rather a specific modality of it.
In another formulation, Lyotard describes the *tense* of the
Postmodern as "future anterior": it presents what *will have been*
presentable, what is now conceivable but unpresentable: something that
will only "make sense" after the fact. That is the spirit in which
experimentation proceeds: it marks a departure from sense, but not a
permanent abdication. In this sense, it is to be distinguished from
irrationalism or anti-rationalism, which are as opposed to
experimentation as they are to acceptance of the given order of
things. Experimentation is the work of reason - more specifically, of
"the faculty to conceive" - and is anathema to all enemies of the
sublime.
Dominic
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