Lyotard's Anti-Aesthetics - Voice and Immateriality in Postmodern Art

11/26/13 Lyotard's Anti-Aesthetics: Voice and Immateriality in Postmodern Art
muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v014/14.3pierce.html 1/10
Lyotard's Anti-Aesthetics: Voice and Immateriality
in Postmodern Art
Gillian Pierce
2004
PMC 14.3
Review of:
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux's Anti-
Aesthetics. Trans. David Harvey. Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 2001. (Originally published in French under the title
Chambre Sourde: L'Antiesthtique de Malraux. Paris:
Editions Galile, 1998.)
1. Soundproof Room, the final completed work by
the cultural philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard, reads
like a crystallization of the essential elements of his
1996 biography of Andr Malraux, entitled Signed,
Malraux (and also translated into English by David
Harvey). Soundproof Room is rich in references to
that text, but abandons the "junkyard writing" of the
earlier work--a style that purportedly "apes"
Malraux's own writing--to return to the dense, poetic
style more familiar to Lyotard's readers.
1
Although
Signed, Malraux is a narrative of Malraux's work and
the life that is indistinguishable from it (and this from
one who famously declared himself suspicious of
"grand narratives"), Lyotard creates a new genre he
calls "hypobiography," declaring in effect that
postmodern biography will be scenic, much as
Malraux's own work has often been called cinematic
for its syncopated rhythms evocative of physical
sensations. In Soundproof Room, subtitled
"Malraux's Anti-Aesthetics," Lyotard clearly strives
to elucidate the relationships between Malraux,
politics, aesthetics, and Lyotard's own body of work.
The biographical concerns of Signed, Malraux are
further condensed into moments or scenes of
ontological questioning that beautifully, if stridently,
illustrate the central concerns of periodization in art
and the fragile status of the individual political or
aesthetic gesture that have animated all of Lyotard's
work.
2. Robert Harvey's facing-page translation makes it
convenient to consult the original French, which is
useful for a text that rests so heavily on Lyotard's
previous work on Malraux, and on his own prior
writings on aesthetics, notably in The Inhuman. For
in positing the work of art as a soundproof room, as
an "empty trachea [...] in which silence might stir,"
Lyotard further develops his fascination for the
inhuman in art, for the way in which the work of art
bears witness to the unpresentable, the "it happens"
of the sublime developed throughout his oeuvre.
Malraux as historical individual is subsumed; voice
and ego are eclipsed, having gone over to the side of
the third person, and out of this death comes an
account of the renewal of the rise of the work of art.
As Lyotard writes, "man is only that which exceeds
the inhuman of artwork" (38).
3. Malraux is not the first thinker Lyotard has
adopted from an earlier period in the service of
postmodernism: He is indebted to Kant (in The
Differend and Lessons in the Analytic of the
Sublime), Freud (in The Libidinal Economy),
Diderot, Newmann, Duchamp, and even Rabelais--
and yet it would be wrong to accuse him, as some
have, of "modernist" tendencies. Postmodernism is a
non-periodizing concept for Lyotard, one that arises
out of a differend or irreducible heterogeneity, and
must be viewed as a critical stance. Language is
insufficient to convey an incommunicable content,
and the postmodern arises out of this
incommensurability. Malraux, in his life and work,
repeatedly comes up against precisely this kind of a
differend in which death (Lyotard's La Redite, which
Harvey renders as "the Redundant One") appears as
the only possible outlet. Lyotard has always
interpreted postmodern politics and thought in terms
of this sort of aesthetic formulation, and in
Soundproof Room he reduces the biography of
Malraux to its aesthetic heart: the quest for the limits
of experience and the eclipse of the first person of
biography by the annihilating, redundant force of
death.
4. Why should one talk about "anti-aesthetics" in
Malraux? Aesthetics refers to the analysis of things
perceived by the senses, to material forms, and has
further come to connote a response to the beautiful in
art or in nature, "taste" deriving from the Kantian
sensus communis. But for Lyotard, as for Malraux,
art evokes the sublime. There is no community of
feeling or of like-minded connoisseurs, no recourse
to reassuring forms. In The Inhuman, Lyotard writes,
"we find sublime those spectacles which exceed any
real presentation of a form" and "these works appear
to the public of taste to be 'monsters, 'formless'
objects, purely 'negative' entities," deliberately using
the Kantian terms for the occasions that provoke the
sublime sentiment (113, 125). An anti-aesthetics,
then, would refer to the negative presentation of the
sublime; that is, one can present merely that there is
an immaterial absolute that can be thought beyond
material representation. Throughout Soundproof
Room, Lyotard will use the term "stridency" to refer
to this monstrous apparition beyond the harmony of
accepted forms, and he sees throughout Malraux's
life and work (as the two become indistinguishable,
one "signing" the other) the attempt to bear witness
to this unpresentable content.
5. Soundproof Room follows no linear argument and
develops instead according to the elaboration of a
concept or theme in each chapter--for example, "Lost
Voice," "Scene," "War," "Stridency," and "Throat"-
-just as Malraux himself rejected chronology in favor
of the development of "scenes" in his writing. The
first chapter, "To End, To Begin," addresses
precisely this question of linear development. Ending
for Lyotard always implies continuation; the "break"
of the end always presupposes the thinking of an
"after," a "post" (leading him to state that "modernity
is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its
postmodernity" [Inhuman 25]). In this proposition of
the "post" Lyotard sees two heterogeneous levels:
"the one on which things take place, and the one on
which they are recounted" (4). In the words of
Malraux's Lazarus, "one has no biography except for
others" (42). The modern, with its impulsion to
exceed itself, upsets the principle of this gap to
privilege the present, and for this precarious present
moment Lyotard introduces the idea of "voice,"
thereby summarizing the history of twentieth-century
politics:
The voice is incarnated and
promises ultimate fulfillment
through redemption from the pain
of enduring. Such is the
Christic mystery elaborated by
Saul of Tarsus and Augustine and
propagated by the West across
two millennia of Western thought
and practice. The diverse
modernities that follow this
initial move repeat the
incredible gesture: Here is my
body, says the voice, here and
now. [...] In the American and
French Declarations, the same
ostentation: Here we are, free
peoples. And in the Bolshevik
Revolution: Power to the
Worker's Councils (Soviets),
right away and here. (6)
Against the immediacy of the voice, Lyotard (with
Malraux) locates the redundant and inexorable
motion of history that dooms each of these narratives
(or meta-narratives) to the pourrisoir or "rotting pit"
of history. The voice is extinguished repeatedly and
becomes inaudible, as "the West is condemned to
this obscenity of repeating the gesture of beginning"
(10).
6. Lyotard situates Malraux's work within the
tradition of "writing at the limit of writing" (10) that
includes Cline, Bataille, Artaud, and Camus:
To append Malraux's oeuvre to
this group is what I intend to
do here. Despite some
compositional shortcomings, a
tendency toward the epic, a
public speaker's eloquence--all
of which caused it to be
underrated--his work plunged no
less than the others into the
ontological nausea, was no less
anxious to understand and to
show how the miracle of artworks
can arise. (10-12)
In Signed, Malraux Lyotard fully demonstrates the
theme of decay in Malraux's life and work, in which
death is not an end, but an endless recurrence of the
same (l'ternelle redite). For in that work Lyotard
concludes that the relationship between the living
body (the bios) and the writing (the graph) are
intertwined in such a way that Malraux's life is
"written" for his oeuvre, an oeuvre that draws so
much from it. And life has no meaning for Malraux
other than constant contact with death, which he
defines in turn as a moment of life which can be
metamorphosed into an artwork. This moment of
creation is privileged by both Lyotard and Malraux.
7. In a lengthy passage from Malraux's The Royal
Way, Lyotard demonstrates the continuity of the
cycle of decay and regeneration in the oneness of the
Khmer forest:
Claude [...] had given up trying
to distinguish living beings
from their setting, life that
moves from life that oozes; some
unknown power assimilated the
trees with the fungoid growths
upon them, and quickened the
restless movements of all the
rudimentary creatures darting to
and fro upon the soil like
march-scum amid the steaming
vegetation of a planet in the
making. Here what act of man had
any meaning, what human will
could conserve its staying
power? Here everything frayed
out, grew soft and flabby,
assimilated itself with its
surroundings [...]. (14)
This moment of ontological doubt in fact has its
analogue in Lyotard's thinking on the sublime, and
his debt to Kant becomes clear. For out of the
dissolution of the self and its assimilation into the
surrounding landscape comes the reassertion of being
through language. As Lyotard writes, "in the
ostensibly mute swamp where everything gets
engulfed, larvae stagnate by the billions, fomenting
renewal. Plants, animals, humans, cultures:
everything will begin again. Plots resume" (12).
8. A central question of Lyotard's book, then,
concerns the state of first-person subjectivity in the
face of death and so many "isms," both political and
artistic, doomed to decline, sameness, and
assimilation. "What 'I' would still dare to introduce
itself as master of narrative when the promise of final
freedom that it proffers instantly runs aground on the
inextricable and restrictive perversity of the language
in which it is formulated?" (32) Malraux is acutely
aware of the precariousness of the subjective voice,
as evidenced by his interest in Jewish history and the
"recounting of the forgotten voice" (26). Further,
Lyotard sees a correspondence between Malraux's
psychology of art and the validity bestowed upon
artworks and "this unforgetting of forgetting and
listening to the inaudible whose is paradox is
sustained in the Jewish tradition" (28). Malraux's
theory of art, his "anti-aesthetic," may therefore be
summed up by his realization that the artwork simply
is without reference to a voice, an author, a reader, or
a hero. It is authorized by no voice, and aims at no
end.
9. Art, for Malraux as for Lyotard, takes on the
status of event, a birth outside of narrative in the face
of the disappearance of the ego, at the very moment
when it is no longer capable of "hearing its own
voice" (36). The subjective element (ego) dissipates,
making way for an absolute writing. At this moment
"a 'there, now' oblivious to history slices the
interminable ebb and flow with the thinnest of wires"
(38). In this sense, the artwork means nothing, but is
rather a singular arrangement of its constituent
elements. It does not serve as self-expression or
expose the subjectivity of its author, hence its
"inhuman" stature. As Lyotard writes, "the artwork
breaks with convention, with the commonplace, with
the flow. It is obtained through a conscious and
conscientious labor that relentlessly endeavors to lay
bare the ego. Through art the human bends its will to
strive toward this inhuman that sometimes forces it
wide open" (50).
10. What Lyotard admires in Malraux is his repeated
gesture to transform the "staged idleness" of Europe
in the 1920's into an artwork, to take the raw material
of life and impose on it a style. For it is the act of
metamorphosis or rebellion that is valuable for
Lyotard/Malraux more than the result of any such
act. Human endeavors are doomed to redundancy at
the hands of history, but something in the artwork
resists this motion; the artist "plants his claw right
into the event, and signs it" (64). The artwork thus
produced is "reality gashed, short-circuited at a given
moment on itself, a wounded mouth gaping over the
void" (64). Following the logic of simulation, by
substituting another world for the paucity of reality
the work of art in fact forces the real world to confess
that it is an illusion, an idea that Lyotard elaborates
with respect to Diderot's Salons in an earlier essay.
For Lyotard, the act of metamorphosis (or the act of
rebellion on the political plane) is essential as an
assertion of being, whether or not it is doomed to
failure. The gesture is born of nothing ("idleness," or
"the void," to use two other of Lyotard's
formulations), and makes war with this nothingness;
as such it is an indispensable affirmation of being or
presence.
11. The metaphor of war is central to Malraux's life as
well as to his art. Not only is life a continual war
with death, but artistic creation is a war with
nothingness. Lyotard contends that wars and
revolutions are opportunities for Malraux to come to
terms with the limits of experience and to
demonstrate that "we die and write for nothing" (66).
And writing does entail a kind of death, that is to say
the eclipse of the ego in favor of a different "I": the
monstrous "I without a self." For this reason, Lyotard
contends that "war is not the confrontation one thinks
it is" and the battlefield is not a place so much as an
internal struggle between ego (le moi) and the "I" of
writing (le je d'criture) (68). The image recalls
Baudelaire's image of the artist as escrimeur in "The
Painter of Modern Life," his essay on Constantin
Guys: "c'est un moi insatiable du non-moi" (552).
This same impulse causes Lyotard to ask, in his
introduction to The Inhuman, "what if human beings
[...] were constrained into, becoming inhuman?" (2).
War, indeed, is a differend.
12. The thesis of the "I-without a self" in Malraux
and throughout Soundproof Room refers to the
dimension of a self that is not within life--one might
say the inhuman. According to Lyotard, "it evokes a
closure, a deafness, but also the insistence of an
anguish that biographical time, which resists it, does
not sweep away in its flow" (86). Having written
extensively about visual artists and art throughout his
lifetime (Duchamp, Monory, Adami, Newmann),
Lyotard nonetheless introduces an aural metaphor to
describe this anguish: "painting is not for seeing,"
writes Lyotard; "it demands this listening: the eye
listens to something beyond the harmonious music of
the visible" (100). This "something" is what Lyotard
calls stridency, a sound lacking bearing and restraint
through which "the unheard-of is exhibited, in a
flash, at the threshold of the audible." (76).
13. We don't hear ourselves through our ears,
according to Malraux, but rather through the throat.
The figure of "hearing through the throat" also leads
Malraux to a figure for communion, since "one hears
that other whom one loves, if one loves him like a
brother, with one's throat" (86). For Lyotard, this is
the central intuition of Malraux's theory of aesthetic
creation as elaborated in his numerous essays on the
psychology of art. This is the essence of Malraux's
anti-aesthetics, in which what is left of subjects
communes through what cannot be shared--
something like the return to the ineffable in art, a
response to the work of art as event or happening in
all its singularity. Art is thus an expression of
stridency, the unheard-of, a violent act of giving form
to the formless, with all of its parallels in the Kantian
sublime.
14. The Kantian sublime resists the sensus communis
and the "good taste" of the beautiful, but Lyotard's
formulation of the "it happens" of aesthetic
experience seems to offer the hope of communion,
albeit of a limited sort: "just as we are lovers or
brothers through fusion of airtight throats, the
artwork places absolute solitudes in communion with
each other and with the stridulation of the cosmos"
(102). And yet there is no hope for mediation or
dialogue between or among these solitary entities.
"Singularities fuse only to the extent that they cannot
exchange or hear each other" (102). The outer form
of the work, its facies is a mere simulation, or
dissimulation; the "soundproof room" of its empty
inside "allows the mask to pick up the truth--
nothingness--in the form of strident apparitions"
(104).
15. In the final chapter of Signed, Malraux Lyotard
evokes Malraux's concept of a museum without
walls, a "place of the mind" impossible to visit that
rather inhabits us (304). For Lyotard, as for Malraux,
great works of art are sublime epiphanies, "brush
strokes of the absolute" (303). A precarious museum
that lives within, apart from the corrupting narrative
of art history, Malraux's gallery exists in limbo, in
this zone of the ineffable. The museum without walls
represents what Lyotard calls "a perpetual
disturbance"; no institution can be established based
upon it. Art offers the promise of escape (rather than
escape itself), and an intimation of truth as stridency.
16. The question of biography and the dynamic by
which a body of work can "sign" a life and vice
versa surface at the end of the philosopher's life in
Signed, Malraux and Soundproof Room. The idea of
an inhuman art that regenerates beyond the grave is
therefore all the more pressing. Lyotard's works have
asked the most provocative questions of postmodern
theory: From "What is the Postmodern?" to "Can
Thought Go on Without a Body?," Lyotard
persistently returns to questions of presence and the
status of the human, often expressed in terms of an
irreconcilable differend. Soundproof Room is an
important culmination of this body of writing and
necessary reading for theorists of the postmodern in
art and politics.
Department of Foreign Languages
Ashland University
gpierce@ashland.edu
Copyright 2004 Gillian B.
Pierce NOTE: Readers may use portions of
this work in accordance with the Fair Use
provisions of U.S. copyright law. In addition,
subscribers and members of subscribed
institutions may use the entire work for any
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author or the Johns Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.
Notes
1. Robert Harvey has commented on the
heterogeneity of Lyotard's writing, and thus
characterized the style of Signed, Malraux, following
Lyotard's own characterization of Malraux; see
Harvey 99.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. "Peintre de la vie moderne."
Oeuvre completes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968.
Harvey, Robert. "Telltale at the Passages." Yale
French Studies 99 (2001): 102-16.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Inhuman: Reflections on
Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
---. Signed, Malraux. Trans. Robert Harvey.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
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